Introduction: In the north of the Eastern Han Empire, there was Dou Xian defeating the Xiongnu Le Shi Yanran, in the west there was Ban Chao running the western region to make a name for himself, and in the northeast there were sacrifices to Wei Zhen Wuhuan and Xianbei for thirty years, but the seemingly scattered and powerless Western Qiang became the graveyard of the powerful Eastern Han Empire. The strength of the Western Qiang enough to attack Han China is definitely inferior to that of the Xiongnu and Eastern Hu, but it has formed a situation of centers everywhere because it has no center, and the tribes have suddenly rebelled and surrendered, one after the other, rebelling and descending, descending and rebelling... It was a rehearsal of the imperial cemetery that would later be Afghanistan.
Red part Of the Original Xiqiang Civilization Area
Three centuries before the third century BC, the descendants of the nomadic world of northern China still stand and reproduce today, which is the Western Qiang race that is far away from the East and West of the Eastern Hu Family. The Tibetans, who live on the Qinghai, Kham, and Tibetan plateaus and the surrounding contiguous areas, belong to this lineage. The beginning of the relationship between the Qiang people and the Han people, earlier than any other ethnic group in history, today's Qiang people are the Tibetan language, and the World Language System has also formed a unique Sino-Tibetan language system together with the Chinese language system, which is different from the Mongolian, Tungusic, and Turkic Altaic language families. Therefore, back in antiquity, the Qiang people may have long used the Yellow River Basin as a settlement, and some of them became one of the predecessors of the Han composition.
When the Qiang people were ostracized by the Han chinese and moved to the edge of the Han environment in da, the upper basin of the Yellow River and its west, the climate was dry and cold, the rainfall was small, and the geographical background was similar to that of Mongolia, so they eventually followed the Hu and Donghu routes, and their lives tended to be Huhua. The Qiang people are widely distributed, and the whole area of the Qinghai, Kang, and Tibetan plateaus is desolate and dry, suitable for grazing and not suitable for farming, so it has been abandoned by the Han people, but it has become a world of Qiang activities. Some of the Western Qiang were subordinate to the Han in the territory of the Han Dynasty, while the other part was not under the sovereign jurisdiction of the Han Dynasty, and by the late Han Dynasty, it eventually formed a chronic disease of Han Dynasty politics.
When the Han Dynasty was opposed to the Xiongnu, the Qinghai and Gansu Qiang joined the Xiongnu Alliance, which was a serious threat to the Chinese side of the Han Nationality, so the Han Dynasty had the strategic decision to attack the Hexi Corridor and cut off the Qiang and Hu links in the second half of the second century BC. During the former Han Xuan Emperor period, after the famous general Zhao Chongguo formulated the policy of controlling the Western Qiang, until about a hundred years in the time of Wang Mang, the relationship between the Han and Qiang could coexist peacefully for most of the time, and the situation of the Western Qiang living in Han China and being under the control of the Han Dynasty was also determined.
The Huangzhong or Huangshui River Basin was the only agricultural area in the Qinghai-Tibet region, and it was also the focus of contention between the Han and Qiang dynasties
After Wang Mang's usurpation and the establishment of the Later Han regime, among the foreign nationalities that moved into Han China, the migration of the Qiang people to their position and their endless trend of migration can be noted. The civil strife at the turn of the former and later Han Dynasties, the most damaged was in Guanzhong, where the capital Chang'an was located, and the continuous war between The Beginning and Chimei made this region of the essence of the country, with Chang'an as the core of Jingzhao, Zuo Fengyi, and Right Fufeng "Three Auxiliaries", dilapidated, dead and lost, and the population figure of this area fell sharply to less than one-fifth of the former Han Taiping Dynasty, so that the later Han Kingdom had to be rebuilt to Luoyang, Henan. The situation is particularly serious, and the western side of Sanfu and the upper reaches of the Jingshui and Weishui rivers, the important strategic areas on the western border of the Han Chinese, that is, the counties of Liangzhou in the Hexi area that the former Han Dynasty had only fully grasped, have become more and more desolate.
The Qiang people located outside Liangzhou, since the ninth year of Emperor Jianwu of Guangwu (33 AD) in Di Dao restored the setting up of Qiang Lieutenants, and in the third year, the northwestern affairs expert Ma Yuan's great attack on the border rebels and Qiang ended, and the surrenderees were placed in the three counties of Tianshui, Longxi, and Fufeng, so the Tangtang Sanfu "Imperial Capital" was easily classified as a foreign inhabited area because the imperial court ignored Guanzhong after the capital was moved. Since then, the Qiang people who migrated from Qinghai and Xikang to the three provinces of Shaanxi, Gansu, and Sichuan have been continuous, and at the end of the first century, there has been an amazing record of "the sixth year of Emperor Yongyuan (94 A.D.), the Shu County's Outer Muyi Qianghao and other people who led more than 500,000 people to subordinate them, worship the head of the Yi Jun, and give the seal silk" (Book of Later Han, Western Qiang Biography).
In addition to the "internal subordinates", the Qiang people who stand on the outer part of Han China are also called "Fenggong", such as the Yongping of the Ming Emperor in the second half of the first century, west of Wenshan County, Xikang Province, "White Wolf, Panmu, Tang Min and other hundred countries, more than 1.3 million households, more than 6 million mouths, and the tribute is called a servant" (Book of Later Han) is. The rest were beyond the control of the Han government.
Map of the situation in the Eastern Han Dynasty
Therefore, within the borders of the Han Dynasty were Qiang, outside the borders were also Qiang, and there were Qiang who obeyed outside the country, and there were also Qiangs who did not obey. Under the circumstance that the Later Han government took the fact that foreign nationalities supplemented the Han people as the only border county policy, and the foreign Qiang people demanded internal subordinates for a long time, after the beginning of the second century, the struggle between foreign relatives and eunuchs and the decline of political power in the imperial court were caused by local evil forces. The local officials and the Hao clan treated them psychologically with contempt and oppression in attitude, and the problem of the Qiang people in the northwest was full of crises. The induction of Qiang change and Chaos is inevitable.
Therefore, the Qiang people's rebellion was, first, at the time of complications of the dissolution of the imperial forces of the later Han Dynasty, and second, the rebellion provoked by the Han "officials" and "Hao Right". And since then, it has been out of control, the time has lasted for half a century, the scope of the chaos is wide, from the southern part of Ningxia, Qinghai Dongjun, northern Sichuan, extending to the western part of Henan, almost all over the western half of the Yellow River Basin, so-called: "Lu Liang yu Sanfu, the establishment of the system, arbitrarily in the north, the east of Zhao, Wei suburbs, the south into the Han Shu despise, Sai Huangzhong, broken Long Dao... "Qiang rebellion entered the middle period, Shun Emperor Yonghe years, war and broke through the northwest and Liang Erzhou boundaries, including Hebei Province, from the west to the east of the Han Chinese northern China as a whole and cool , You, Ji four states.
The strength of the Western Qiang enough to attack Han China was definitely inferior to that of the Xiongnu and Donghu, and the Xiongnu and Eastern Hu did not cause great trouble to Han China in the Later Han Dynasty, while the Western Qiang, which could not constitute the pressure of the Xiongnu, caused a great storm. The Western Qiang issue also constituted the most serious and difficult problem for the Later Han government, and the reasons for this, the development and handling of the Qiang change, could not be the same as that of ordinary rebellions.
Qiang cultural motifs
The Qiang people are diverse, their actions are individual, although the Qiang plague is like the spread of infectious diseases, from local events to comprehensive, but there is no central leadership and systematic organization, each scattered tribe has its own free will, can be united with each other for a while, immediately and easily disintegrated, any tribal leader's rebellion or obedience, are out of a momentary emotional impulse, but also only represent their own tribe. Therefore, the Later Han government must distinguish between their rebellion and obedience, and the rebellious Qiang people must break through each one. Suppressing or appeasing a tribe and only getting the effect of one tribe is not only laborious, but also half the effort. More seriously, sudden rebellion and sudden surrender, one after another, rebellion and surrender, surrender and rebellion, even the conquering effects that have been obtained are not easy to stabilize, one of them.
Second, in the post-Han era, the nature of the wars between the various foreign nationalities and the Han nationality in the internal han dynasty has been transformed into internal turmoil in the Han Dynasty, and only the Qiang chaos is more special. They had racial hatred under the pressure of Han officials and the Hao, and therefore also had the appearance of a national movement, although they never had a political awareness of why the war was fought and inspired a unanimous understanding. However, the fact that the Qiang people inside and outside the Han Dynasty communicated with each other in peacetime, instigated and colluded with each other during the war, and when the Qiang people defected from abroad, the Qiang people abroad reversed and demanded their internal subordinates at the same time, and the situation became more and more complicated. In other words, internal strife can be expanded into external troubles, and external troubles will turn into internal troubles, which are external troubles, and external troubles are implicated in internal troubles, and the nature of war is not easy to distinguish.
The causes, nature, and development of the Qiang chaos are different from ordinary rebellions, and they have caused great trouble to the government. How the Later Han government was overwhelmed by the Qiang rebellions that had been raging wildfires for more than half a century was not difficult to know from the figures of huge military expenditures cast in the three extinguishing climaxes recorded in the Western Qiang biography of the Book of Later Han:
—— In the first year of The Reign of Emperor An (107 A.D.), in the first ten years of the Qiang Rebellion, it was 24 billion.
—— In the 1st century, In the 1st century, Emperor Shunyonghe and the following years, more than 8 billion.
—— In the second half of the 1950s, The Huan Emperor built and in the next ten years, 4.4 billion.
Ancient Qiang City, China
These military expenditure statistics, if compared with the Later Han government's annual routine subsidies of more than 190 million to the Southern Xiongnu and the 74 million perennial funds in the Western Regions, will be surprised by the extent to which the financial resources are consumed. The loss of manpower lost to conscripts and the people of the theater to the blades or to starvation or panic is incalculable. The long-term rebellion eventually angered the Han Dynasty generals, who specialized in brutal massacres, especially Duan Jiao, who had an extreme dislike for the Qiang people.
The Book of Later Han is equivalent to a bloody account, and since the second year of Emperor Huan's reign (159 CE), he succeeded him as a lieutenant of the Qiang Dynasty, and in the few years after leaving his post and then serving as a general of the Broken Qiang, the number of Qiang people who died under his butcher's knife reached 100,000. In the meantime, a record of 4,000 people rebelling and killing 3,000 people at a time was set, on the grounds that the Qiang people were "inexhaustible" and "the heavens were angry, and the false hands were cursed". It was not until the second year of the Ling Emperor Jianning (169 AD) that the so-called Qiang Disaster was brought to an end by the executioner's horrific means.
The Western Qiang were never regarded as a powerful enemy by the Han Dynasty, and the devastation of the Qiang Disaster was far more serious than any rebellion by the Han themselves or other foreign nationalities. The Book of Later Han records the ending of the Western Qiang tradition that "the capital is empty, extending to the inner counties, the border people are dead, innumerable, and the two states are cool, and then they are wasted", which can be described as concise and concise. As a result of this impoverished end, the Han magistrates were absolutely responsible for their antecedents and consequences, and in the initial stage of the uprising, the Han Dynasty decision-makers also made mistakes.
Even if the whole territory of Liangzhou is abandoned, some people argue that although this opinion has not been realized, the entire territory of Shaanxi and Gansu provinces, and the Han residents of Longxi, Shangjun, Beidi, and Anding Counties, have not hesitated to use the destruction of their industries that they have worked hard in their original places of residence for several generations and forcibly moved to the interior. This kind of retreatism that escapes from reality, as well as the western region problems in the same period, represents the doomed doom of the decline of the Han Dynasty. The measures are not only useless, but also obviously harm the interests of the Han residents, and they have aroused the antipathy of their own Han people.
Although the Qiang dynasty was flat, even the drought and locust famine after the chaos of the soldiers and horses came one after another, and the social unrest and the suffering of the people were no longer regional and spread to the whole country, and when the price of the Later Han Valley was at its lowest, it was only thirty yuan per hu, and because of the Qiang chaos, emperor An had soared to "more than 10,000 gushi". The trend continued to develop to the first year of emperor Zhongping (184 AD), when the Yellow Turban Rebellion of the large-scale Han peasant revolt finally broke out in the Qiang Rebellion, during which the large and small warlords who rose up to extinguish the Yellow Turban rose with the Hao clans everywhere who adopted armed self-defense.
The dislocation of social order and the formation of economic collapse are still the most serious in the northwest region, where the Qiang disaster is the most severe, and the last generation of the Han Dynasty dedicated emperor Xingping in the first year (194 A.D.), Sanfu and reached the frightening point of "Gu Yihu half a million, bean wheat 100,000, cannibalism, and white bones" ("Book of Later Han" Dedicated Emperor Ji), and the disintegration of the end of the Later Han in the decline is inevitable. Therefore, the fatal terminal illness of the Later Han regime was caused by the Qiang disaster, which was really unexpected. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Later Han regime was dragged down by the long-term Qiang disaster of the second century.