The Mongols

Given the fact that it was the Ming who ousted the Mongol Yuan (1279-1368) dynasty from China, it is perhaps only natural that the Mongols assumed the role of public enemy number one for most of the dynasty.

The Ming adopted a variety of strategies to deal with the Mongol threat, ranging from formal alliance building and alliance subversion to static defence mixed with occasional punitive operations to the aforementioned application of large-scale military force resulting in occupation or incorporation of Mongol lands into the Ming Empire. The Great Wall is of course the most famous symbol of Ming defence against the Mongols, but it should be noted that the wall was never designed to be a final solution, nor was it merely defensive in nature. Additionally, it was by no means as ineffective as its critics might maintain. It is perhaps best viewed in the light of general Ming strategies to overawe the empire's steppe foes by impressing upon them the power and resources of the Ming state. As enormous as the costs of building the Great Wall were, it was still considered cheaper than mounting campaigns into central Asia and it served the purpose of highlighting the state's willingness to use violence, given that the wall was a staging area for destabilising ‘surgical strikes' into Mongol lands whereby livestock and weapons were captured and encampments were scattered so as to reduce their military viability.

The Mongols were the foremost threat to dynastic security until 1571 when the Ming concluded a peace treaty with the most powerful Mongol leader, Altan Khan (1507-82), granting him investiture as a tributary prince and opening up regular trade fairs along the frontiers.^[200] The peace treaty was eventually facilitated by the defection of Altan's grandson to the Ming and the shrewd negotiations of several able Chinese commanders and advisers to the emperor. The arrangement was more or less successful as large-scale clashes between the two sides became far less frequent, but it would be erroneous to suggest that relations between the Ming and the Mongols were cordial from 1571 on. In fact, neither side kept to the terms of the original agreement, and right up until the very end of the dynasty the Ming were launching quick strikes into Mongol territory with the aim of capturing livestock to destabilise certain tribal leaders even as the Mongols raided Chinese border towns and garrisons in hopes of exacting further concessions. Nonetheless, after 1571 the Mongols ceased to be the major threat to Ming security as they tended to be politically divided and the Ming was in the process of a general military revival that would last until the second decade of the seventeenth century.

Mongols would return as the primary challengers to the Qing in the late seventeenth century under the leader Galdan, who subjugated various Mongol tribes in the 1670s, controlling most of East Turkestan by 1679. He then extended his sway of the Eastern Khalka Mongols in the 1680s and clashed with the expanding Qing in Tibet in the 1690s. His machinations earned the ire of the Qing court and the Kangxi Emperor (r. 1662-1722) himself eventually took the field against his rival. Galdan would die in 1697, but the Qing continued to battle the Zunghar tribe of Mongols in Tibet for the next two decades.

After the Qing concluded the Treaty of Kiakhta with Russia in 1727 they again turned their attention towards a rejuvenated Zunghar confederation, which was now powerful enough to be considered an empire in its own right. After a series of battles and negotiations during the reign of the Yongzheng Emperor (r. 1723-35), the Qing ruler Qianlong (r. 1736-95) resolved to destroy the Zunghars once and for all, using a succession dispute as a pretext for invading the steppe in force. Building upon decades of military experience in pacifying China and incorporating the frontier lands of Sichuan and Tibet into the burgeoning Qing Empire, the Manchus successfully established supply depots across the south-west, allowing them to penetrate deeper into the steppe than any preceding China-based state. Combined with superior eight­eenth-century firearms (which the Mongols likewise possessed, but in fewer numbers), the Qing managed to achieve what no dynasty had done before in ending the nomadic challenge to a sedentary state based in China. In the process they perpetrated what Peter Perdue has dubbed a ‘genocide' in crush­ing the Zunghar Empire.^[201] While this meant using violence on an unprecedented scale to bring peace, modern Chinese historians have tended to gloss over the messiness of these operations in favour of narratives emphasising the supposedly natural progression of the Chinese state across central Asia.