Ancient Chinese Warfare (10 page)

The population in the fifteen-square-kilometer area of Ch’eng-tu has been estimated at a robust 280,000, making it another powerhouse capable of fielding a massive army and therefore likely to have been totally independent of, if not actively opposed to, the Shang.
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However, Ch’eng-tu clearly enjoyed some sort of commercial relationship with the Shang, because Shang bronze vessels have been recovered for which the city lacked production facilities. Moreover, unlike many fortified settlements in the central plains that evolved into political centers before becoming commercial centers, Ch’eng-tu and San-hsing-tui seem to
have been economically robust from the outset and only subsequently developed the requisite political and military apparatus.
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Finally, an early Bronze Age site about four kilometers square has been discovered at Chin-sha, some thirty-eight kilometers west of San-hsing-tui.
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Although the numerous artifacts and divinatory practices indicate strong Shang influence, Chin-sha has been interpreted as the center of another independent, peripheral people sufficiently powerful to challenge the Shang. Just as at Ch’eng-tu, the large site lacks defensive walls. However, the Mo-ti River flowed through its midst, and the city was situated between two rivers that flowed to the north and south that would have significantly impeded aggressors. Evidence for a considerable level of martial strife is seen in a small statue of a kneeling figure who displays a contorted facial expression expressive of fear or horror and has his hands tied behind his back. Archaeologists have tended to interpret this figurine as evidence of class distinctions and internal conflict, but he seems more likely to have been a doomed prisoner of war, especially because sacrifices of this type were already prevalent in the Shang at this time.

Most historians believe that the erection of expansive walls became possible only with material prosperity, the emergence of class differentiation, and the rise of political power. Without doubt, raiding and pillaging would not have been worthwhile until people and places began accumulating goods and wealth or, as the
Tao Te Ching
notes, “When gold and silver fill the hall, robbers and thieves will come.” While counterarguments need not be raised, tribal societies apparently clashed for reasons other than plunder, including hatred, revenge (the most often mentioned), threat reduction, domain expansion and resource control, and seizing prisoners for enslavement. Nevertheless, even in early agricultural settlements or villages where hunting remained primary, theft and forceful seizure may still have represented a comparatively efficient expenditure of time, threatening the undefended.
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Whenever troops were inadequate or slaves unavailable, the requisite labor had to be co-opted from the local settlement or within the greater
sphere of political dominance. Diverting numerous workers from the crucial tasks of farming, hunting, and fishing implies that a minimal surplus in foodstuffs such as millet had been achieved, some sort of need perceived, and a basic plan formulated. A chieftain or village council with sufficient power to coerce the inhabitants into undertaking the project also had to exist. If successful, the effort would certainly enhance the chieftain’s authority and contribute to consolidating the ruling clan’s power.

Because great strength was not necessary, merely determined effort on a vast scale, nearly anyone could perform at least some of the tedious labor required for excavating ditches and constructing walls. Warring States writings indicate that people were expected to participate in accord with their physical abilities, women as well as men, a practice that probably dated back to antiquity. For example, the
Mo-tzu
states that those who can build should do so and that those who can carry earth or measure should also be appropriately employed.
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The
Huai-nan-tzu
, although composed fifteen hundred years after the event, notes that, “in employing the people to construct earthworks, Yi Yin had the lanky dig, those with strong backs carry earth, those with discriminating eyes determine level, and the bent-over work on plastering.”
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Brief statements in theoretical military writings such as the
Wei Liao-tzu
indicate that women participated in Warring States siege defense by constructing and repairing the walls.

Although constructing earthen walls might seem to be simplicity itself—merely pile up immense amounts of soil and rely on gravity to keep it in place—reality proves otherwise. Massive mounds constitute formidable obstacles, but if basic engineering and construction principles are not observed, the work will lack integrity and may collapse under its own weight. Moreover, to function effectively a wall must have sufficient height to preclude jumping over it, be nearly vertical to make climbing it difficult, and have well-compacted soil so as to provide a solid footing for any soldiers engaged in mounting an active defense atop the ramparts.

Comprehensive planning and thoroughgoing organization are therefore required to construct conjoined walls and moats. General dimensions have to be determined, topographical features analyzed, and the
terrain’s load-bearing capability estimated. The construction has to proceed in sequential steps; the laborers must be organized; and the diverse tasks of excavating the soil at designated sites, transporting it in reed baskets, depositing it in appropriate locations, watering as necessary, and then pounding for the lengthy period required to attain concretelike hardness within prepositioned wooden forms must be systematically assigned.

An entry in the
Tso Chuan
for 510 BCE, five centuries after the demise of the Shang but timeless in its essentials, describes the process of wall building:
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Apart from the earliest walls created by simply piling up dirt and loosely packing it down without the use of retaining forms, multiple discrete layers were always employed that sometimes interspersed dry sand, pebbles, organic materials, pottery shards, and even straw, twigs, and branches in arid areas. After the wooden components were fabricated, the forms had to be correctly positioned and temporarily secured at each stage before being repeatedly shifted upward or sideways as the filling and pounding proceeded layer by layer and section by section. As the walls became more massive over the centuries, experience taught that a solid foundation that penetrated well below the surface and was capable of sustaining the immense weight had to be rigorously prepared. Deep trenches were therefore excavated and the foundation systematically built up with layers of well-pounded soil in a process identical to erecting the wall itself.

Although later practices suggest that workers were probably responsible for furnishing their own provisions and perhaps finding local
shelter, whether numbering just a few hundred or soaring to thousands, they had to be fed and sometimes temporarily housed. Compelled to exert themselves from dawn to dusk irrespective of the weather, to endure dusty and muddy conditions, the conscripts must have found the work exhausting. Some sense of their misery may be gleaned from an ode preserved in the
Book of Odes
, a compilation that includes authentic material from the early Chou dynasty as well as compositions no doubt dating to the end of the Western Chou period. Despite having been composed long after the Neolithic ended, the depiction retains its validity because the basic techniques had remained unchanged:
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Of particular interest is that the work effort involved in building the Chou capital was not only supervised, but also controlled by the beat of a drum.

Anyone who has labored with a shovel or pick, whether digging foxholes or landscaping a backyard, can easily envision the physical stress involved in constructing the simplest tamped earthen walls. Even when they were exploiting naturally occurring veins of loose soil or digging along riverbeds, ancient workers wielding cumbersome bone and stone shovels with less than ideal shapes and minimum cubic capacity must have found the effort extremely taxing. Highly compressed soil, clay, intermixed pebbles and stones, even surface vegetation and entangling roots that had to be cut and cleared away, would have immeasurably lengthened the process.

Although most walls were built with soil excavated from adjoining ditches, technological acumen early on mandated the interspersed employment of different types of soil, some of which had to be sought out, excavated, and then transported back over considerable distances and
possibly difficult terrain. The simplest encirclement would have required thousands of worker-days, evidence of the magnitude of their dedication, as the population base in the average Neolithic settlement would rarely have exceeded several hundred to perhaps a few thousand. (In comparison with the work’s requirements, such low numbers immediately suggest that slaves, prisoners, or nominally subjugated peoples were coercively employed on larger projects, prima facie evidence that localized warfare was already proliferating.)

Defensive fortifications require regular maintenance and occasionally extensive repairs to prevent deterioration. The exposed surfaces seem to have frequently been finished with an exterior coating of sticky clay that congealed in the sun or was occasionally directly fired, as well as normally rendered as smooth as possible to prevent the enemy from ascending.
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Nevertheless, earthen walls unenclosed by brick or stone were always susceptible to weathering. Rain wreaked the greatest havoc from direct impact and runoff, but the drying effects of wind and the sun, coupled with repeated cycles of heat and cold, expansion and contraction, could rapidly degrade the integrity of exterior portions. Minor cracks might rapidly expand, causing the wall to quickly erode under unrelenting seasonal moisture or the occasional torrents unleashed by typhoons in coastal regions.

Vegetation (other than slippery grass) that might have provided a measure of surface protection had to be removed due to the invasive nature of roots and because bushes and shrubs might conceal stealthy assailants or provide a hand grasp for midnight enemies. Moats had to be similarly cleared of rapidly spreading vegetation and ditches of newly sprouting shrubs that might momentarily shelter enemy troops from archers shooting down upon them. Keeping the requisite angle of fire clear and preventing blind spots created by vertical precipices certainly account for the gradual slope that marks most ditch walls that abut fortifications. In contrast, the walls on the far side were normally rendered as perpendicular as possible to impede enemy descent, and most early ditches were characterized by wide mouths and narrow bases. Debris from the ever-eroding walls and accumulating leaves that could reduce a ditch’s effectiveness over time also had to be periodically cleared.

A number of historians have pondered the amount of time required to construct Neolithic and later fortifications in China. Although the
relatively small site of Pao-tun Ku-ch’eng required moving 250,000 cubic meters of dirt, the walls at Cheng-chou are estimated as having required somewhere between 870,000 and 1,439,000 cubic meters of soil, depending on assumptions about the wall’s average width.
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However, the size of the city’s interior space allows some crude population and labor estimates to be conjured that coincidentally suggest the site’s immensity and the Shang’s astonishing power.

In an early experiment it was found that the surprisingly meager amount of 0.03 cubic meter of soil per hour—roughly a cubic foot—could be excavated from the surrounding terrain using bronze tools appropriate to the early Shang and only 0.02 cubic meter per hour with stone implements, drastically less than anyone experienced in digging with modern, relatively sharp shovels might have expected.
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Assuming that 10,000 laborers working 330 ten-hour days annually were impressed for the task and organized into 3,000 assigned to digging, 3,000 to transporting, and 4,000 to pounding, roughly eighteen years would have been required.
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One of the questions besetting this estimate is whether the tasks are properly apportioned, whether the number assigned to the pounding work is too low or high. Thinness being the secret to compacting the layers and realizing the extraordinary hardness required, very small-diameter branches or dowels, often bundled, were employed. Moreover, modern reconstructions have repeatedly shown that each layer requires many hours of consistent work rather than quick tamping with heavy stone weights to achieve true, virtually sedimentary solidity.
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A larger labor force would naturally accomplish the task more quickly, while fewer men and more women would take correspondingly longer. Whether slaves, prisoners of war, soldiers, lower-class members of the Shang or its subordinate proto-states, or all of these were impressed for the task, they must have required a large number of support personnel to provide the food, water, and clothing necessary for the builders and themselves, suggesting that up to 13,000 people might have been engaged in the project.