Battle of Mobei (119 BC): Han Armies Strike the Xiongnu

The Battle of Mobei was the climax of Han China’s wars against the Xiongnu, the nomadic confederation that dominated the eastern steppe. In 119 BC Emperor Wu of Han sent two great cavalry armies under Wei Qing and Huo Qubing across the Gobi Desert to seek out the Xiongnu ruler in his homeland. The campaign broke Xiongnu power south of the Gobi for a generation, but at a cost in men and horses that even the Han state struggled to bear.

Background: the Han and the Xiongnu

Since the founding of the Han dynasty, the Xiongnu had been the most dangerous neighbour of the Chinese empire. After the Han founder was surrounded at the Battle of Baideng in 200 BC, the Han adopted the heqin policy: regular gifts of silk, grain and wine, and marriages between Han princesses and Xiongnu rulers. Raids continued nonetheless.

Emperor Wu of Han, who came to the throne in 141 BC, abandoned this approach. After a failed ambush at Mayi in 133 BC, he launched a series of offensives. In 127 BC Wei Qing recovered the Ordos region inside the Yellow River bend. In 121 BC the young Huo Qubing led two campaigns into the Hexi Corridor, after which the Xiongnu Hunye king surrendered with tens of thousands of followers, opening the way to the west.

The Xiongnu chanyu (supreme ruler) Yizhixie, who reigned from 126 to 114 BC, responded on the advice of Zhao Xin, a former Xiongnu noble who had served Han and then defected back. Zhao Xin urged him to withdraw north of the Gobi, believing that Han armies would be exhausted by the crossing and could then be destroyed.

Preparations

Emperor Wu decided to strike at the Xiongnu where they felt safe. According to the Shiji of Sima Qian, he gave Wei Qing and Huo Qubing 50,000 cavalry each, followed by several hundred thousand infantry and transport troops. Around 140,000 horses, including privately supplied mounts, set out with the armies.

The original plan was for Huo Qubing, the emperor’s favourite, to take on the chanyu himself. When captured Xiongnu reported that the chanyu was in the east, Huo Qubing was sent from Dai commandery instead, while Wei Qing marched from Dingxiang, further west. Wei Qing’s subordinate generals included Li Guang, the most famous frontier soldier of his day, then in his sixties.

What happened

Wei Qing against the chanyu

Wei Qing crossed more than a thousand li (several hundred kilometres) of desert and found the chanyu’s army drawn up waiting for him. He arranged his armoured wagons in a ring as a fortified camp and sent out 5,000 horsemen, against which the Xiongnu committed around 10,000 cavalry. The fighting lasted until dusk.

At sunset a violent wind rose, blowing sand and gravel into the faces of both armies. Wei Qing used the confusion to send wings of cavalry around the Xiongnu flanks. Seeing that the Han force was large and still strong, the chanyu broke away in his chariot with a few hundred riders and fled north-west. The Han pursued through the night but could not catch him.

Wei Qing’s army pushed on to Zhao Xin’s fortified town near Mount Tianyan, where it seized and burned the stored grain before turning back. The Shiji credits his army with about 19,000 enemy killed or captured.

Huo Qubing in the east

Huo Qubing’s army had the greater success. Marching more than 2,000 li, it defeated the forces of the Xiongnu Wise King of the Left, the commander of the eastern wing. The Shiji records 70,443 enemy killed or captured, a precise figure that probably reflects official claims rather than a reliable count.

Huo Qubing then performed sacrifices to Heaven at Mount Langjuxu and to Earth at Mount Guyan, a ritual statement that the land had been reached and claimed in the emperor’s name. He advanced as far as a body of water called the Hanhai. Its identification is uncertain: suggestions range from lakes in eastern Mongolia to Lake Baikal.

Li Guang’s last campaign

Li Guang and Zhao Yiji had been sent by an eastern route without proper guides. They lost their way and arrived after the battle was over. When officials came to question him, Li Guang, who had fought the Xiongnu for some forty years, took his own life rather than face trial.

Key people

• Wei Qing (died 106 BC) rose from a humble household to become commander-in-chief; his sister Wei Zifu was Emperor Wu’s empress.
• Huo Qubing (c. 140–117 BC), Wei Qing’s nephew, was famous for fast, deep cavalry raids. He died two years after Mobei, aged about 24.
• Yizhixie was chanyu from 126 to 114 BC. During the battle his men lost contact with him, and for some days another noble claimed the title before he reappeared.
• Li Guang (died 119 BC) was celebrated by Sima Qian as a model of courage and bad luck.

Consequences

After Mobei, the Shiji says, there was no Xiongnu royal court south of the desert. The Xiongnu centre of power moved to what is now northern Mongolia, and large-scale raids into the Han frontier stopped for some years. Han garrisons and farming colonies spread into the Ordos and the northern frontier zone.

The price was very high. Of the roughly 140,000 horses that set out, fewer than 30,000 returned. Without horses, the Han could not mount another major steppe offensive for years, and Emperor Wu’s later campaigns turned towards Korea, the south and Central Asia. Both Wei Qing and Huo Qubing were made Grand Marshal, although Huo Qubing’s influence now exceeded his uncle’s.

The war also did not settle the frontier question. Fighting with the Xiongnu resumed in the 100s and 90s BC, often with poor results for Han, and the Xiongnu remained a major power until their split into rival groups in the mid-1st century BC.

Legacy

Huo Qubing’s tomb near Emperor Wu’s mausoleum at Maoling, outside modern Xi’an, is decorated with large stone sculptures. The best known shows a horse standing over a fallen Xiongnu warrior and is widely read as a memorial to his victories. These carvings are among the earliest monumental stone sculptures in China.

Huo Qubing’s reported words when the emperor offered him a mansion, that he could not think of a home while the Xiongnu were not destroyed, became a lasting expression of patriotic duty in Chinese literature, though the phrasing comes from the Shiji’s account rather than any document from the battlefield.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 133 BC: A Han ambush of the Xiongnu at Mayi fails, ending the peace policy.
• 127 BC: Wei Qing recovers the Ordos region.
• 121 BC: Huo Qubing’s campaigns in the Hexi Corridor; the Hunye king surrenders.
• 119 BC, spring: Wei Qing and Huo Qubing set out across the Gobi.
• 119 BC: Wei Qing defeats the chanyu; Huo Qubing defeats the Wise King of the Left; Li Guang takes his own life.
• 117 BC: Huo Qubing dies, aged about 24.
• 106 BC: Wei Qing dies.

Why it matters

The Battle of Mobei marked the furthest reach of Han power into the steppe and showed that a settled agrarian empire could strike nomads in their own homeland. It also exposed the limits of that strategy: the cost in horses and supplies was enormous, and the Xiongnu survived. The campaign helped secure the Hexi Corridor and the routes that became the Silk Road.