At the meeting, Wang became trapped between the demands of his superiors and the reality of the troops and resources at his disposal. Commander Wang knew clearly that to defeat the Mongols, he needed an army of 150,000—at least three and possibly four times the size of the one that he had. Yet it would be difficult to supply such a large army in an inhospitable and infertile frontier zone.
Wang devised a new strategy. He lacked the soldiers to defend the border he had, and he lacked the soldiers to pursue the Mongols, defeat them, and expel them from the Great Loop. It was his tactical ability, however, that his superiors had counted on when they placed him in charge. He could find a way when they had not.
His chance came in the autumn of 1473, when Beg-Arslan launched the surprise attack on Ningxia to the south. Commander Wang knew he could not catch up with the Mongols, since by the time he arrived at one ravaged city, the invaders would already be looting another. However, he had decided that if he could not defeat them on the battlefield, he would strike at their civilian camp, where the raiding warriors had left their families and animals in presumed security. If he could not force the Mongol army out of China, he knew how to make them want to leave.
Commander Wang sent out reconnaissance missions into the deserts of the Great Loop. In October he received word that his spies had located Beg-Arslan’s Mongol base camp where the army had left their families near the Red Salt Lake.
From their perceived safety by the lake, the families could wait out the winter while their men raided one settlement after another and sent back the looted goods to the encampment. Late in the winter, while the Yellow River remained firmly frozen, the army would return across the ice into safe territory, where they could graze their animals and tend their flocks during the spring and summer before returning the following fall to resume the cycle of winter raids.
Knowing that the Mongols did not expect him to mount more than a token defense, Commander Wang abandoned the prior policy of waiting passively; he set out after the civilian camp. Wang Yue headed out with ten units of 1,000 cavalrymen in each. They marched some sixty miles in two days and nights, and when they neared the camp, the ten military units divided into two large pincers, surrounding the civilians. An effective strategy used by Ming forces in earlier fights with the Mongols involved trapping them along a river or lake that prevented their fleeing. Unable to swim, the Mongols could either die by drowning or by slaughter at the hands of the attackers.
The camp probably had the protection of a small guard, but Mongols depended less on military strength in such cases than on the ability of women, children, and animals to flee quickly. Normally, the Mongol guard set up stations some distance from the camp, and from this advance position they could see the dust of the approaching army, hear it, or simply feel the vibrations in the ground long before it came into the range of ears or eyes. Once alarmed, one of the sentries took responsibility to race back toward the camp and sound the warning to flee, while the remaining guard then attacked the invaders in a delaying ploy to give the others more time to escape. This October attack by Wang Yue’s army, however, came during one of the windiest times of the year. The autumn winds sometimes whip across northern Asia, and as they cross the Gobi, they pick up huge quantities of sand and dust.
Just such a storm formed as the Chinese crossed the desert toward the Red Salt Lake. Initially, the Chinese warriors became distressed and nervous with the bad luck of the storm in a hostile and alien environment they already feared. One of them, however, suggested that they could use the storm as a cover while they continued their advance. Wang Yue rewarded the man for his ingenuity and bravery, and he ordered his army forward.
They struck the Mongol camp without warning from both sides. According to Wang Yue’s account, his men killed or captured 350 Mongols, mostly women and children. They looted the camp, herded up the animals, and torched the gers. Invigorated by their victory over the civilians, the soldiers sought another opportunity to attack. Wang Yue suspected that the Mongol army would soon receive word of the massacre and race back to find whoever in the camp might have escaped or, if possible, to rescue the captives. He set up an ambush and waited. As suspected, the Mongol soldiers came in pursuit of the Chinese attackers, and Wang Yue’s army fell on them, managing to retake much of their loot but with few casualties on either side. Although it was not an important strategic battle, the Mongols suffered a profound emotional loss.
At least in the short term, attacking the civilian camp produced the desired impact on the Mongols. As Wang proudly reported, “When the unfortunate Mongols learned of the massacre of their wives and children they fled with tears in their eyes and for a long time afterwards did not show up in Ho-t’ao.”
The few Mongols who managed to escape fled the area, and Beg-Arslan was forced to retreat with his Mongol warriors from the Great Loop; they crossed back across the Yellow River and temporarily disappeared back into the unknown wastes from whence they came. The defeat of the Mongols and the massacre in the Ordos achieved the Ming court’s short-term goal of driving the Mongols back north of the Yellow River, but it did not extinguish the Mongol desire and determination to take and reoccupy their former territory. The retaking of the pasturelands south of Gobi became the primary objective of the Mongols under Beg-Arslan, and control of the Ordos ranked as the most important objective toward that goal. Like a wolf retreating into the brush or finding a cave to lick its wounds, the Mongols had left, but they certainly would return.
In the meantime, Commander Wang had become a hero, and a triumphant excitement surged through the court in the Forbidden City. He had achieved the first Chinese rout of the Mongols since Esen’s military capture of the emperor in 1449. Rather than detracting from the conquest, the clever ruse by which Wang had won the victory only added to his credit, since it cost so little money and was accomplished with so few troops. Commander Wang had fulfilled his superiors’ hopes for him when they had counted on his tactical cleverness to drive out the Mongols.
The Chinese military reports categorized the Mongol casualties together according to age and sex but gave no names or individual information. By contrast, the Mongol chronicles, as they almost always did with a horrendous or shameful loss, ignored the massacre with no mention at all. The Mongols never record the names of the fallen in cases such as these.
The Ming court lacked the will or the means to follow up on the victory in the desert. The Mongols withdrew, and the Chinese army could have retaken and occupied the entire Ordos. They could have crossed the Yellow River and driven the Mongols back up onto the Mongolian Plateau and north of the Gobi. Instead, the Ming forces abandoned offensive strategies and turned to the older defensive mode of rebuilding the wall.
For Manduhai Khatun, the encouraging news of the Chinese victory offered only limited grounds for optimism. The Ming commander had stopped the advance of Beg-Arslan and Ismayil, but he had not killed them. The civilian massacre at Red Salt Lake forced the Mongol army farther back, but Beg-Arslan had lost few soldiers. In some ways he now posed a greater threat to Manduhai than before the defeat.
Despite the Chinese victory, the Ming court recognized that the expulsion of the Mongols from the Ordos would offer no more than a temporary abatement of the struggle. Knowing the reprieve would probably be brief, the Ming officials needed to make a long-term decision.
Lacking an alternative plan of action for a permanent solution, the central government finally acquiesced to Yu’s request to build a wall. Rather than wait for the autumn, both Wang and Yu were ordered to begin building different parts of it simultaneously. Yu began immediately in the spring of 1474 with a building corps of forty thousand men. Despite the uncertainty about the stability of structures erected along the highest ridges, Yu built the wall precisely as he had proposed it, stretching out approximately 600 miles or 1,770 li. The total cost exceeded a million taels of silver, more than 1.7 million ounces. The final wall consisted of approximately eight hundred connected units of forts and beacon or sentry towers. It had a tower or other fortification about every three-quarters of a mile along the connecting wall.