Chinese Empire

Chinese Military and Warfare: From the Warring States to the Qing

For more than two thousand years, the Chinese empire was held together — and torn apart — by force of arms. The Qin state that unified China in 221 BCE did so by fielding the most efficient killing machine of its age, an army of massed crossbowmen, iron-armed infantry, and disciplined charioteers forged in the fires of the Warring States. The Han that succeeded it conquered an empire stretching into Central Asia, defeating the Xiongnu nomads with a combination of cavalry, diplomacy, and (according to one persistent tradition) the first deliberate attempt to deprive an enemy of pasture. The Tang ruled East Asia for three centuries on the strength of professional soldiers stationed in frontier garrisons. The Song invented gunpowder weapons and lost the north to them. The Mongols built the largest land empire in history, the Ming eventually pushed them back behind the Great Wall, and the Manchu Qing finished the job by allying Manchu cavalry with Chinese artillery. Every major transformation in Chinese political life was also, at bottom, a military story.

This article surveys the military history of imperial China, from the late Zhou to the eve of the twentieth century, examining the institution of the army itself: the emperor as supreme commander, the central guards and regional forces, the methods of recruiting soldiers, the evolution of weapons from bronze to gunpowder, the philosophy of defence expressed in the Great Wall, the place of the navy in Chinese power, and the long arc of tactics and strategy across more than two millennia. Pair this article with the history of imperial China, the Chinese dynasties survey, and the pieces on Chinese government and Chinese emperors for the political context.

Three themes run through the whole story. First, the Chinese military was never a single institution but a shifting compromise between central control and regional autonomy. The fubing militias of the Tang, the standing professional army of the Song, the hereditary guard battalions of the Ming, and the banner system of the Qing were four very different answers to the same recurring problem: how does a centralised empire raise, equip, and pay for the soldiers it needs without being destroyed by them? Second, technology mattered enormously, but never in a simple way. The crossbow, the stirrup, the horse harness, the gunpowder bomb, the matchlock musket, and the cannon each changed the balance between offence and defence, and each was sometimes decisive and sometimes irrelevant. Third, the Chinese were the great defensive innovators of the pre-modern world. The Great Wall, the garrison town, the beacon-fire network, and the strategic retreat were refined over two thousand years into a sophisticated art of holding space against nomadic cavalry. None of it, in the end, could keep the empire from being conquered three times — by the Mongols in 1279, by the Manchus in 1644, and (politically) by the Western powers in the nineteenth century — but the fact that the Chinese cultural world survived all three conquests is itself a testimony to the durability of the military and political structures examined here.

The rest of this section is organised into three clusters. The first, on the imperial Chinese army, examines organisation, weapons, fortifications, and the soldier class. The second, on famous wars and conquests, walks through the great set-piece conflicts: the Chu–Han Contention, the Han–Xiongnu wars, the An Lushan Rebellion, the Song–Jin wars, the Mongol conquest of the Song, the Ming campaigns against the Mongols, and the Qing conquest of the Ming. The third, on naval power and exploration, traces China’s long engagement with the sea, from Han maritime trade to the Ming treasure voyages of Admiral Zheng He. For the individual campaigns, see army organisation, the Great Wall as a military structure, the An Lushan Rebellion, the Mongol conquest of the Song, and Admiral Zheng He.

The Emperor as Supreme Commander

In theory, the Chinese emperor was the commander-in-chief of the entire armed forces of the realm. The character 君 (jūn), meaning “ruler,” is the same character used for the principal figure in the game of weiqi (go), and Confucian political philosophy treated the monarch as the strategist who directed but did not usually fight. Almost no Chinese emperor after the Warring States period personally led troops in the field. Exceptions stand out for that reason: the founding Emperor Wu of Han came close; the Emperor Taizong of Tang did lead forces, most famously at the siege of Luoyang against Wang Shichong in 621; the Emperor Yongle of Ming personally led five northern expeditions against the Mongols between 1410 and 1424, dying at the start of the fifth. Most emperors, however, ruled through commanders they appointed, watched over, and frequently replaced.

The institutional framework reflected this. The emperor received daily reports from his ministers, including detailed military dispatches. The Six Ministries (六部) of the central government, established in their mature form under the Tang and preserved through the Ming and Qing, included a Ministry of War (兵部, bīngbù) responsible for troop levels, military payrolls, promotions, equipment, and maps. Beneath the Ministry of War, a series of offices handled personnel, logistics, signals, and the imperial stud. The emperor’s inner palace housed the Shumiyuan (樞密院), the Bureau of Military Affairs, which from the late Tang onward became a powerful secretariat controlling strategy and appointments. Under the Song, the Shumiyuan was the most powerful military organ in the empire, deliberately balanced against the civilian prime minister to prevent any one minister from controlling the army.

Imperial military power was not absolute, and emperors who were not personally competent often found themselves overruled by their generals. The classic examples are the early Ming Hongwu Emperor (r. 1368–1398), who personally vetted the dossiers of every general officer, and the Qianlong Emperor (r. 1735–1796), who took ten “Ten Great Campaigns” as personal credits. By contrast, the late Qianlong, the Daoguang Emperor who presided over the First Opium War, and the Tongzhi Emperor who survived the burning of the Yuanmingyuan in 1860 were military figures in name only. The institution of military command in China was always a contract between the throne and the men who actually did the fighting, and that contract was renegotiated in every dynasty.

The Central Army and the Regional Commanders

The defining problem of Chinese military organisation, repeated in dynasty after dynasty, was how to keep the army loyal to the centre without making it useless. A strong central army could crush rebellion; a strong regional army could rebel. The history of imperial China is in large part a history of attempts to balance the two.

The Guards of the Capital

Every dynasty maintained an elite palace guard (禁軍, jìnjūn) charged with the personal protection of the emperor. The Qin had its imperial bodyguard, the Han its Langzhong (郎中) and Yulin (羽林, “Feathered Forest”) cavalry, the Tang its Beimen (北門) northern garrison of professional soldiers recruited from the descendants of the founding officers. The Song, with a particularly acute fear of military usurpation, maintained a huge central guard of around 100,000 men in three armies, of which only a small fraction saw real fighting. The Ming inherited and expanded this tradition, building a system of weisuo (衛所, “guard battalions”) that combined garrison duty with hereditary military households (the topic of our army organisation). The Qing palace was guarded by the Imperial Bodyguard (侍衛), four battalions of Manchu and Mongol bannermen under the direct command of the emperor’s household department.

The quality of these guards varied enormously. The Yulin cavalry of the Han, recruited from the sons and grandsons of low-ranking officials, were among the best light cavalry in Asia. The Tang northern garrison was, for a century and a half, the backbone of imperial defence. The Song central army, recruited from vagabonds and criminals and kept deliberately under-strength, was a paper tiger. The Ming weisuo system decayed by the sixteenth century into hereditary sinecures. The Qing banners, after the eighteenth century, became hereditary stipendiaries incapable of serious campaigning. In every case, the imperial centre guarded itself by replacing the active army with a privileged but dependent one, and in every case the dependent army eventually failed.

Regional Armies and the Problem of Warlordism

The opposite danger was that the regional armies would become too strong. The Han solution was the commanderies and kingdoms (郡國) system, which deliberately divided the empire into small units of roughly 50,000 to 150,000 households each, governed by separate officials, with the king or marquis required to live in the capital. The system produced the Rebellion of the Seven States in 154 BCE, which Emperor Wu crushed, after which kingdoms were stripped of almost all independent power. The Tang solution was the jiedushi (節度使, “regional military commissioner”), governors of frontier provinces who commanded their own armies, raised their own taxes, and inherited their positions. The jiedushi system worked brilliantly as long as the founders were alive, and produced the An Lushan Rebellion (755–763) when it stopped working — the most devastating civil war in Chinese history before the nineteenth century, treated in detail in our An Lushan Rebellion.

The Song, having inherited the jiedushi nightmare, abolished the office outright. Instead, the army was divided into circuit armies (路, lù) under civilian governors, with troop movements and major decisions reserved to the centre. The system prevented warlordism but crippled offensive operations: Song generals could not win a decisive campaign because no one in the field was allowed to make a permanent decision. The Ming, learning the opposite lesson, concentrated military power in the hands of the central government through the weisuo system, and in the hands of the emperor through the baoju (報) transmission network. The system worked well for two reigns and then atrophied. The Qing inherited the Ming’s centralisation but added a new layer: the Eight Banners, a hereditary caste of Manchu and Mongol military households commanded by banner princes, and a separate Green Standard Army of Han Chinese soldiers under Chinese generals. The system lasted until the Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s, when regional Han armies (the Hunan Army of Zeng Guofan, the Anhui Army of Li Hongzhang) reappeared and turned the late Qing into a federation of military strongmen — a pattern that continued into the warlord era of the 1910s and 1920s.

Conscription, Mercenaries, and the Soldier Class

Conscription

For most of Chinese history, the basic method of raising troops was conscription (徵, zhēng), in which male householders were called up for fixed terms of service, often rotating so that only a fraction of the population was under arms at any one time. The Qin, following the reforms of Shang Yang in the fourth century BCE, instituted a system of universal male service in which the entire population was registered, taxed, and liable for military duty. The Han inherited this system: at its peak in the reign of Emperor Wu, the Han empire fielded armies of well over 100,000 men on the northern frontier, drawn from a registered population of perhaps 50 million. The Tang fubing system, examined in detail below, required each military household to serve a fraction of its adult males in the standing army. The Ming weisuo, in theory, gave every military household a hereditary soldier whose descendants inherited his post.

Conscription in imperial China was never fully universal. Wealthy families could buy exemptions, substitute bondsmen, or have their sons entered into the civil service examination track. Frontier peoples, prisoners of war, and convicted criminals were drafted at higher rates than Han Chinese in the interior. The system was always resented as a heavy burden on the peasantry, and in periods of crisis it broke down: in the late Han, in the late Tang, in the late Song, in the late Ming, and in the late Qing, the state could not raise enough conscripts at a price the peasantry would pay, and turned to mercenaries.

Mercenaries and Professional Soldiers

The use of mercenaries grew steadily from the Tang onward, as the central government found it could not maintain the discipline or quality of a true militia. The Song, with the richest economy in the world, paid for a fully professional standing army of nearly a million men by the eleventh century, supported by taxes and state monopolies on salt, tea, and (under the late Northern Song) the “government merchant” commerce in goods from Southeast Asia. The Song army was, by contemporary standards, well paid and well equipped, but it suffered from a rigid caste system in which soldiers were treated as hereditary outcasts and their children could not take the civil service examinations. By the Southern Song, the army was supplemented by Huaizhong and other regional semi-mercenary forces, and the Yue (“Yao”) and other non-Han auxiliaries in the south.

The Ming turned to mercenaries in a different way. As the weisuo system decayed, the court hired yinjun (引軍) and bingshi (兵士), often by contracting with military entrepreneurs to raise regiments on commission. The Ming-Great Wall garrison armies of the sixteenth century, which we discuss in our Great Wall as a military structure, included both hereditary weisuo soldiers and contracted mengbing (募兵) and yinyong (因) units. The Qing system of the Green Standard Army was, in effect, a permanent mercenary establishment of Han Chinese soldiers, paid in cash and grain, with their families supported as hereditary military households. By the nineteenth century, regional armies (xibing, 鄉兵) of mercenaries raised by provincial gentry had largely replaced the central state army in actual fighting.

The Soldier Class

The status of the soldier in Chinese society was always ambiguous. Confucian ideology ranked the scholar-official at the top, the farmer next, and the artisan and merchant below; the soldier was not on the list at all, a sign of how marginal war was supposed to be in an ideal Confucian state. The famous late-Tang couplet “Good iron is not used to make nails; good men are not used to make soldiers” (好鐵不打釘，好人不當兵) expressed this perfectly. In practice, soldiers were drawn from the lower orders — peasants, convicts, hostages, foreigners, refugees — and were treated accordingly. They were paid late, fed badly, housed in barracks that were little better than prisons, and punished brutally for the smallest infractions.

Dynasties tried to elevate the status of the soldier in different ways. The early Tang maintained a genuine militia, in which soldiers were also farmers, with property and standing. The early Ming made military service nominally hereditary and provided for military households in land grants. The Qing treated the banner soldier as a privileged caste with stipends and exemption from civilian labour. None of these arrangements survived intact. By the late Qing, the army was one of the least prestigious occupations in China, and the xibing militia armies of the Taiping era recruited from poor peasants and dispossessed gentry who had little alternative.

Weapons and the Technology of War

Chinese armies fought, in their long history, with an extraordinarily wide range of weapons, and a great deal of the technical innovation in pre-modern warfare happened in China. The most important of these inventions are surveyed here; the section on the imperial Chinese army covers the rest of the story.

The Crossbow

The crossbow (弩, nǔ) is the most distinctive Chinese weapon of the pre-imperial period. Mechanical crossbows appear in Chinese graves from at least the fifth century BCE, and the Warring States period saw the weapon developed to a level of refinement not matched in Europe until the Renaissance. A Han-era repeating crossbow, the zhuge nu (諸葛弩), could fire ten bolts in fifteen seconds by means of a magazine and a lever action. A late Warring States bronze trigger mechanism excavated in Qin territory is so refined that modern engineers have had to build replicas to understand how it worked. The crossbow’s killing range of 300 metres, its ease of training (a crossbowman could be effective in months, against the years needed for a longbowman), and its lethality against armoured cavalry made it the infantry weapon of choice for Chinese armies from the Warring States through the Tang.

The Sword, the Halberd, and the Spear

Chinese swords, especially the jian (劍, a straight, double-edged thrusting sword) and the later dao (刀, a single-edged chopping sabre), were status symbols as well as weapons. Bronze jian have been excavated from Zhou tombs. The jian of the Warring States period, often given names and buried with their owners, were the work of master smiths. Iron and steel jian of the Han were already remarkably good weapons. The dao became dominant in the Tang and after, as cavalry warfare favoured a chopping weapon. The famous Tang dao were said to be able to cleave an armoured rider and his horse with a single blow.

The halberd (戟, jǐ) combined a spear point with a side blade or hook; the Warring States period had a peculiar variant, the ge (戈), a cross-bladed weapon used in chariot warfare. The spear (矛, máo) was, as in most pre-modern armies, the basic infantry weapon, and the halberd-and-shield infantry of the Han and Tang were the backbone of the line. Cavalry typically carried a lance or a sword, and after the Tang increasingly a long-handled mace or a single-edged zhanmadao (斬馬刀, “horse-slaughtering sabre”).

Gunpowder Weapons

China invented gunpowder in the ninth century, in the workshops of Taoist alchemists searching for an elixir of immortality. By the late Tang, the fire lance (火槍, huǒqiāng), a bamboo tube of gunpowder and shrapnel, was in use. By the Song, true gunpowder bombs (火藥砲, huǒyàopào) were being thrown by trebuchet, and fire arrows (火箭, huǒjiàn) with gunpowder propellant were a standard weapon. The Song navy used gunpowder bombs and fire lances against the Jin, and may have deployed early bombs and rockets at the siege of Xiangyang in the 1260s and 1270s (the campaign that ultimately broke the Song, and the topic of our piece on the Mongol conquest of the Song).

The Yuan and early Ming developed hand cannons (火銃, huǒchòng) and bombards. The Ming army fielded a wide range of gunpowder weapons, including the famous shenjiying (神機營) “Divine Engine Battalion” of the Yongle Emperor, which operated as an elite firearm corps. By the late Ming, the army was equipped with matchlock muskets (鳥銃, niǎochòng) imported from Portuguese and Japanese sources, cannon, and rocket carts. The Qing inherited and expanded Ming arsenals, and in the eighteenth century manufactured cast-iron cannon of European design in large numbers. The Opium Wars of 1839–1860 and the Sino-Japanese War of 1894–1895 exposed how badly the Chinese arsenal had fallen behind: by then European industrialised armies had rifled breech-loading artillery, machine guns, and ironclad warships, against which the Qing equivalents were obsolete. The fall of the Qing, treated in the section on the fall of imperial China, had military causes that went back half a century.

Fortifications and the Great Wall

City Walls and Garrison Towns

China was, and is, a country of walled cities. The earliest urban walls date to the Neolithic, and by the Warring States period almost every significant city was surrounded by a circuit of pounded earth or stone, with gates, towers, moats, and outworks. The Chinese art of fortification reached a high point in the Tang, when cities like Chang’an were laid out on a rectangular plan with massive rammed-earth walls, gate towers, and a system of inner and outer enclosures. The later Chinese fortified manor (堡壘, bǎolěi) of the north, with thick earth and stone walls, a single gate, and a tall watchtower, was a characteristic feature of the Ming military landscape.

The garrison town (鎮, zhèn) was the basic unit of frontier defence. A typical Tang frontier garrison was a fortified town of several thousand households, with surrounding farmland, a small standing army, and a wall and moat. The garrison was connected to the next by a road, a courier system, and a chain of beacon towers (烽火台, fēnghuǒtái). When a garrison was attacked, signals would flash along the beacon chain to the next garrison, and so on, often reaching the capital in a single day. The beacon system, refined under the Han and perfected under the Ming, was one of the great logistical innovations of pre-modern Chinese warfare, and see Great Wall as a military structure.

The Great Wall

The Great Wall is the most famous military structure in the world, and the most misunderstood. It was not built all at once, it was not a single continuous wall, and it was not always effective. The first version was put together in the late Warring States period by the states of Qin, Zhao, and Yan to keep out the nomadic horsemen of the northern steppe; these early walls were of pounded earth and have largely eroded. The Qin emperor connected and extended these walls after 221 BCE, again in pounded earth. The Han rebuilt and extended the wall deep into the Gansu corridor, also in pounded earth, and pushed it into the Tarim Basin as a chain of garrison outposts that controlled the Silk Road. The Ming Great Wall, the one that survives today in its iconic form, was rebuilt in brick and dressed stone from the late fourteenth century onward, with watchtowers, garrison forts, beacon platforms, and elaborate gate complexes.

The Great Wall was at once a real military structure and a symbolic one. As a military structure, it channeled the movements of nomad raiders toward well-defended passes, gave the defenders a height advantage, and provided a logistical framework for the deployment of troops. As a symbolic structure, it was a permanent declaration of the empire’s claim to a frontier, and an architectural statement of the legitimacy of the dynasty that built it. It was, however, repeatedly outflanked: the Xiongnu simply rode around it, the Xianbei and Khitan penetrated the line in many places, the Jurchen Jin and the Mongols simply marched through it, and the Manchus were invited in through the Shanhai Pass by the Ming general Wu Sangui in 1644. The story of the wall as a defensive system see our Great Wall as a military structure.

China has always had a coastline, and always had seagoing vessels. The earliest Chinese ships were dugout canoes; by the Han, junks of fifty tonnes or more were sailing the South China Sea. By the Tang, Chinese merchants dominated the maritime trade of Southeast Asia. By the Song, China had the largest, most sophisticated navy in the world, with multi-masted ocean-going junks, watertight bulkhead compartments, the magnetic compass, stern-post rudders, and a sophisticated system of trade routes stretching to the Persian Gulf. Song naval power defeated the Jurchen Jin on the Yangzi, and the Mongol invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281 were repulsed in part by the kamikaze typhoon and in part by the Japanese coastal defence fleet, but the Mongol plan required sea transport on a scale that even the Song could not have matched.

The Ming inherited a long maritime tradition and made the most spectacular use of it. The treasure voyages of Admiral Zheng He (1405–1433) sent fleets of several hundred ships, including massive “treasure ships” of perhaps 130 metres in length, to Southeast Asia, India, the Persian Gulf, and the East African coast. The voyages were stopped in 1433 for reasons that are still debated, and the Ming turned inward, eventually imposing a strict maritime ban (海禁, hǎijìn) that crippled Chinese seafaring for four centuries. The Qing inherited the ban and went further: the haijian policy of 1655–1684 and the later restrictions on Chinese shipping left the south China coast almost devoid of large merchant vessels, while European and Japanese ships filled the vacuum. By the time of the First Opium War in 1839, the Qing navy consisted of antiquated junks easily destroyed by British steam frigates, and the pattern of nineteenth-century Chinese humiliation by sea was set. The whole story is told in our naval power and exploration, and the Zheng He voyages specifically in our Admiral Zheng He.

The Evolution of Warfare Across the Dynasties

Warring States to Qin: The Industrialisation of War

The Warring States period (475–221 BCE) was the first great age of mass warfare in Chinese history. Where the earlier Spring and Autumn period had been fought by aristocratic charioteers in set-piece battles, the Warring States period saw the rise of mass infantry, often organised into units of 10,000, 50,000, or 100,000 men, supplied by state taxation and equipped with standardised bronze and iron weapons. The famous Battle of Changping in 260 BCE, in which the Qin general Bai Qi allegedly annihilated a Zhao army of 400,000, was the climactic engagement of this period. The Qin victory of 221 BCE was the result of fifty years of systematic state-building aimed at producing a single decisive army, and the dynasty’s conquest of the other six warring states was the founding military event of the imperial Chinese state.

Han to Tang: Cavalry and the Northern Frontier

The Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) inherited the Qin’s mass infantry but soon discovered that the Xiongnu nomads of the northern steppe could not be defeated by infantry alone. Emperor Wu (r. 141–87 BCE) built a cavalry arm of perhaps 100,000 horses, including the famous Wuhuan auxiliary cavalry, and fought the Xiongnu for several decades to a standstill, eventually forcing them to withdraw from the Ordos region. The Han–Xiongnu wars, treated in famous wars and conquests, are the prototype of all subsequent Chinese engagements with the steppe. The Tang carried this further, with a heavily professional frontier army, large cavalry units, and allies among the Tujue (Turks) and other steppe peoples. Tang cavalry were among the best in Asia, and Tang frontier commanders like Li Jing and Su Dingfang were able to project force deep into Central Asia.

Song to Yuan: Gunpowder and the Steppe Triumph

The Song dynasty (960–1279) was the most economically advanced society in the world, and its army was the most heavily armed. Yet the Song never controlled all of the Chinese world: the Liao (Khitan), Western Xia (Tangut), and Jin (Jurchen) controlled much of the north, and the Song–Jin wars of the early twelfth century culminated in the loss of the northern capital Kaifeng in 1127 and the flight of the court to Hangzhou. The Song compensated for its military weakness with technology: gunpowder bombs, fire lances, paddle-wheel warships, trebuchets of unprecedented size. None of it could stop the Mongols, who conquered the Jin in 1234 and the Southern Song in 1279. The Mongol conquest, see Mongol conquest of the Song, was the most complete conquest in Chinese history.

Ming to Qing: The Return of the Wall and the Last Conquest

The Ming (1368–1644) was founded by a rebel who had himself been a soldier. Zhu Yuanzhang (the Hongwu Emperor) built the dynasty on a centralised military system, the weisuo, in which hereditary military households provided soldiers for a permanent standing army. The early Ming pushed the Mongols back beyond the Great Wall, rebuilt it in brick and stone, and reached naval supremacy in the Western Pacific through the Zheng He voyages. The late Ming suffered fiscal crisis, the decay of the weisuo, and a series of devastating military disasters, ending in the Manchu conquest of 1644. The Qing (1644–1912), as a conquest dynasty, depended on the Manchu banners, supplemented by the Green Standard Army of Han Chinese. The Qing empire was vast — at its height in the eighteenth century it included China, Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, Tibet, and large parts of Central Asia — but its army was a hybrid, increasingly outdated by the standards of European industrialised warfare, and ultimately helpless against the combination of internal rebellion, foreign pressure, and technological backwardness that destroyed it. The final fall of the imperial system, in the Xinhai Revolution of 1911, is the subject of the section on the fall of imperial China.

Strategy, Doctrine, and the Chinese Military Classics

The Chinese produced an unusually rich body of military thought. The Seven Military Classics (武經七書, Wǔjīng Qīshū), canonised by the Song dynasty in 1080 CE, included the Six Secret Teachings (六韜, attributed to the Zhou general Jiang Ziya), the Three Strategies of Huang Shigong (黃石公三略), the Questions and Replies of Tang Taizong with Li Weigong (唐太宗李衛公問對), the Methods of the Sima (司馬法), the Wuzi (吳子, attributed to the Warring States general Wu Qi), the Wei Liaozi (尉繚子, attributed to a Qin-era strategist), and the Art of War (孫子兵法) of Sunzi (Sun Tzu). The Art of War, the most famous of the seven, is the earliest surviving systematic treatise on warfare in any civilisation, and remains a staple of military education worldwide.

Chinese military thought was shaped by the same basic ideas as Chinese philosophy more generally: balance, restraint, deception, and economy of force. Sunzi’s central doctrine was that the supreme art of war was to subdue the enemy without fighting, by manoeuvre, deception, diplomacy, and the careful exploitation of terrain. The famous dictum “know your enemy and know yourself, and in a hundred battles you will never be in peril” captures the Confucian preference for prudence and information over brute force. Sun Bin, the Warring States strategist and reputed descendant of Sunzi, developed a doctrine of feigned weakness and the strategic use of reserves. The Three Kingdoms strategist Zhuge Liang was famed for his use of psychological warfare and logistical preparation, and the long Chu–Han Contention (206–202 BCE) is sometimes read as a textbook of strategy, with Liu Bang winning by superior logistics and Xiang Yu losing through over-confidence.

The Chinese tradition was not purely defensive. The Han–Xiongnu wars showed that the Chinese could mount large-scale offensive operations against nomadic enemies, and the Tang maintained an active military frontier across Central Asia. The Mongols of the Yuan were the supreme offensive strategists of the medieval world, and the Ming campaigns against the Mongols in the early fifteenth century were aggressive in design. The doctrine of defence, however, was the dominant one, and the Great Wall was its architectural expression. For the wall as a defensive system, see our Great Wall as a military structure; for strategic thought, see the [Chinese philosophy] section (../../../pillar-chinese-philosophy/) section.

Logistics, Supply, and the Movement of Armies

The story of Chinese military history is, in the end, a story of logistics. China is a vast country: a march from the Han frontier at Dunhuang to the southern port of Guangzhou is some 3,500 kilometres, longer than the distance from London to Baghdad. Armies of the sizes the Chinese fielded could not move, fight, or survive without an elaborate logistical infrastructure, and the dynasties that succeeded in war were usually the dynasties that succeeded in supply. The Qin built a national road system with standardised gauge, anchored on the Straight Road (直道) from the capital Xianyang to the northern frontier. The Han maintained a system of post stations (驛站, yìzhàn) along the main routes, with horse relays capable of carrying messages at more than 200 kilometres a day.

The Tang inherited the Han system and extended it. The Tang capital Chang’an was the hub of a national road system that connected the empire to Central Asia, and the dynasty’s ability to project force into the Tarim Basin and beyond depended on the Hexi Corridor (河西走廊), a narrow strip of oasis-and-steppe running along the northern edge of the Tibetan plateau. The An Lushan Rebellion of 755–763, the most devastating civil war of medieval China, was at root a logistical crisis: the regional jiedushi, who had been left to manage their own logistics, used that autonomy to build up independent power bases that the central government could no longer control. The Ming inherited the same lesson and tried to prevent it by building the weisuo system, in which soldiers were also farmers and military colonies produced much of the food for the garrisons. The Ming system decayed, and the late Ming had to rely on hired mercenaries and ad hoc logistics, which the dynasty could not pay for. See the [Chinese economy] section (../../../pillar-chinese-economy/) for the fiscal dimension and the [../../../pillar-chinese-economy/] section (Chinese government) for the administrative dimension.

The Martial Arts and the Cult of the Warrior

Chinese military history had a cultural dimension that the standard sources rarely treat. The martial arts (武術, wǔshù) were, for most of Chinese history, a form of military training as well as a cultural practice. The archery of the Zhou, the swordsmanship of the Warring States, the cavalry tactics of the Tang, and the guandao (關刀, “guandao broadsword”) of the late imperial period were all developed as military techniques before they became civilian pastimes. The famous Shaolin monks, who legendarily learned the martial arts from the Indian monk Bodhidharma in the sixth century, were in fact a paramilitary force that fought in the wars of the late Tang, and the Wudang tradition of internal martial arts was a later development that incorporated Taoist meditation and breath control.

The cult of the warrior in China is, however, a complicated one. The Confucian tradition, dominant from the Han onward, ranked the scholar above the soldier, and the literary tradition tended to portray the soldier as either a hero (in times of crisis) or a brute (in times of peace). The Three Kingdoms general Guan Yu (關羽) was deified as a god of war, his image appearing in temples across China. The Tang poet Li Bai (李白) wrote romantic verses about swordplay and frontier life. The Ming novels “Romance of the Three Kingdoms” (三國演義) and “Water Margin” (水滸傳) are full of warrior heroes who fight for righteousness, although they also illustrate the dangers of an out-of-control military caste. See the [Chinese culture] section (../../../pillar-chinese-culture/) for the cultural dimension of Chinese military history.

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