Su Wu

In 100 BC, the Han envoy Su Wu went to the Xiongnu with gifts for the chanyu. He did not come back for nineteen years.^[1] The Xiongnu court wanted him to change sides. He tried to kill himself. When that failed, he refused every offer. The chanyu shut him in a cellar and then sent him to herd rams by the North Sea. He returned in the reign of the emperor Zhao with white hair and nine of his men.^[1] The Han Shu tells the story in the chapter it gives to Li Guang and Su Jian. The story of Wu’s friend Li Ling stands next to it.^[1]

The embassy

Wu was the middle one of three sons of Su Jian. Su Jian had served under Wei Qing against the Xiongnu. He was made marquis of Pingling. As a general, he built the fortress of Shuofang.^[1] Through his father’s rank, Wu entered the palace as a gentleman together with his brothers. He rose to be superintendent of the stables at Yizhong.^[1]

At that time, the Han and the Xiongnu were fighting the wars between them. They still sent envoys to observe each other. The Xiongnu held Guo Ji, Lu Chongguo and others, more than ten parties in all. In return, the Han held the Xiongnu envoys who came to it.^[1] When Qiedihou came to the throne, he feared a Han attack. He sent the Han envoys home. He called himself a son who would not presume to match the Han emperor. He called the Han emperor a man of his father’s generation.^[2]^[3]

Wudi approved of the gesture. He sent Su Wu with the rank of colonel and the tally of an envoy, to take back the Xiongnu envoys still held in the Han. Wu also carried rich gifts for the chanyu.^[1] Wu took with him Zhang Sheng as deputy, an acting officer named Chang Hui and some hundred recruited men.^[1]^[4] The mission went out in the year before Li Ling’s surrender, which is 100 BC.^[1] At the chanyu’s court, the gifts were laid out. The chanyu grew prouder. This was not what the Han had hoped for.^[5]

The plot of Yu Chang

The chanyu was about to send the Han party home when a plot broke out at his own court. The Gou king was a nephew of the Hunye King. He had gone over to the Han with his uncle. Later he had followed the marquis of Zhuoye, Zhao Ponu, into captivity among the Xiongnu.^[6] With some of the Han deserters under Wei Lü, he planned to seize the chanyu’s mother, the Yanzhi, and carry her off to the Han.^[1]^[7]

One of the party, Yu Chang, had known Zhang Sheng in the Han. He told Sheng in private that the Han emperor was said to hate Wei Lü bitterly and that he could shoot Wei Lü from ambush for the Han. His own mother and brother were in the Han and might be rewarded. Sheng agreed. He gave Yu Chang goods.^[1] A month later, the chanyu went hunting. Only the sons and brothers of the Yanzhi were left at the court. Yu Chang and more than seventy men were ready to strike. One of them slipped away in the night and gave warning. The chanyu’s sons and brothers called out troops and fought. The Gou king and the others died. Yu Chang was taken alive.^[1]

The chanyu ordered Wei Lü to try the case. Zhang Sheng heard of it. He feared that his words would come out, and he told Wu. Wu said that the matter would surely reach him. To die only when he was accused, he said, would fail his country twice. He wanted to kill himself. Sheng and Hui held him back.^[1] Yu Chang named Zhang Sheng. The chanyu was angry. He called his nobles to ask whether the Han envoys should be killed. The Left Yizhizi King answered that the envoys had plotted against the chanyu himself. He said it was better to make all of them surrender.^[1]

Wei Lü sent for Wu to take his statement. Wu said to Hui that bending the tally and shaming the commission would leave him no face to go back to the Han, even alive. He drew the knife at his belt and stabbed himself. Wei Lü took him in his arms and sent for a physician at a gallop. They dug a pit and set a smouldering fire in it. They laid Wu over it and trod on his back to let the blood out. His breath stopped for half a day and then returned. Hui and the others wept. They carried him back to the camp in a cart.^[1]^[8] The chanyu admired his firmness. He sent men morning and evening to ask after him. He had Zhang Sheng put in chains.^[1]

Wei Lü

When Wu was recovering, the chanyu wanted to use the judgement of Yu Chang to win him over. Wei Lü cut Yu Chang down with a sword. He then said that Zhang Sheng, the Han envoy who had plotted to kill a close attendant of the chanyu, deserved death. He added that the chanyu pardoned those who surrendered. He raised the sword. Sheng asked to surrender. Lü turned to Wu and said that the deputy was guilty and the principal was liable with him. Wu answered that he had made no plot and was no relative. He asked why he should be liable. Lü raised the sword again and held it at him. Wu did not move.^[1]

Lü spoke again. He had turned his back on the Han, he said, and had been received with great favour. He had been given the title of king and tens of thousands of men. The horses and cattle of his herds covered the mountains. If Wu surrendered today, he would be the same tomorrow. Otherwise he would feed the grass of the steppe with his body, and nobody would know of it. Wu did not answer. Lü offered to be his brother if he would follow his advice. If he refused, Lü said, Wu would never see him again.^[1]

Wu cursed him. A man who was the son and subject of the Han, he said, and who forgot duty and kindness, betrayed his lord and left his parents to become a captive among barbarians was not a man he wished to see. The chanyu trusted Lü to decide who lived and who died. Lü did not judge with an even mind. He wanted to set two rulers against each other and watch the disaster. Nanyue had killed a Han envoy and had been cut up into nine commanderies. The king of Dayuan had killed one, and his head hung at the north gate. Chaoxian had killed one and been destroyed on the spot. Only the Xiongnu had not yet done so. If Lü knew that Wu would not surrender and wanted the two countries to attack each other, then the disaster of the Xiongnu would begin with Wu.^[1]

The cellar and the North Sea

Lü saw that Wu could not be forced. He told the chanyu. The chanyu wanted all the more to win him over. He had Wu shut in a large cellar with nothing to eat or drink. It snowed. Wu lay and gnawed the snow and swallowed it with the felt of the floor. After several days he was still alive. The Xiongnu thought him a spirit. They moved him to the North Sea, to a place with no people, and told him to herd rams. When the rams gave milk, he might go home. Chang Hui and the other men of his party were sent to other places.^[1]

The chapter calls the place the North Sea, Beihai, and says that nobody lived there. It states neither direction nor distance.^[1] The North Sea has been identified with Lake Baikal in modern scholarship.^[9]

By the sea, the supply of grain did not come. Wu dug up the grass seeds that the wild rats had stored and ate them. He leaned on the Han tally as he herded the sheep. He slept and rose with it in his hands, and the tassels fell off it. After five or six years, the chanyu’s younger brother, the king of Wujian (於靬王), came hunting with the bow on the sea. Wu could make nets, spin arrow cords and trim bows and crossbows. The king liked him and gave him clothing and food. After three years and more, the king fell ill. He gave Wu horses and cattle, vessels and a tent. When the king died, his people moved away. That winter, the Dingling stole Wu’s cattle and sheep. He was destitute again.^[1]^[10] The Dingling are then placed around Lake Baikal.^[11]

Li Ling at the shore

Wu and Li Ling had both been palace attendants. In the year after Wu left for the north, Ling surrendered. He did not dare to look for Wu. Some time later, the chanyu sent Ling to the shore. Ling set out wine and music for Wu. He said that the chanyu had heard of their old friendship and wished to receive Wu in good faith.^[1]

Ling then told Wu what had happened at home. Wu’s elder brother Su Jia, he said, had followed the emperor to the palace at Yong. He had knocked against a pillar and broken the shaft of the carriage. He was charged with great disrespect and fell on his sword. Wu’s younger brother Su Xian had been ordered to arrest a palace horseman who had pushed a son-in-law of the emperor into the river to drown. Xian could not find him. He was afraid and took poison. Wu’s mother had died. Ling had gone to her burial at Yangling. Wu’s wife was young and was said to have married again. Wu had two sisters, two daughters and a son. More than ten years had passed. Life, Ling said, was like the morning dew. The emperor was old and his laws were arbitrary, so that dozens of families of ministers had been wiped out without a crime. He asked for whose sake Wu still held out.^[1]

Wu answered that his family owed everything to the emperor. A subject served his lord, he said, as a son served his father, and a son who died for his father had nothing to regret. Ling drank with him for several days and pressed him again. Wu said that he had counted himself dead long ago. If Ling insisted on his surrender, Wu would die in front of him at the end of the day’s feast. Ling saw how true he was. He sighed that a man of such righteousness made his own and Wei Lü’s guilt reach to heaven. He wept until his collar was wet. Then he took his leave.^[1] Ling did not want to give the gift himself. He sent his wife to give Wu several tens of cattle and sheep.^[1]

Later, Ling came to the shore again. Men on the border posts had taken captives in Yunzhong. The captives said that the prefect and all the officials and people had put on white because the emperor had died. Wu faced south. He wept aloud and spat blood. For several months he mourned morning and evening.^[1]

The return

A few years into the reign of Zhaodi, the Xiongnu and the Han made peace. The Han asked for Wu and the others. The Xiongnu falsely said that Wu was dead. When a Han envoy next came, Chang Hui persuaded his guards to let him see the envoy by night. He told the envoy everything. He taught the envoy what to say to the chanyu. The Son of Heaven, the envoy was to say, had been shooting in the Shanglin park and had brought down a wild goose. A letter on silk was tied to its foot, saying that Wu and the others were in a marsh. The envoy did as he was told and rebuked the chanyu. The chanyu looked at his attendants in alarm. He apologised to the Han envoy and said that Wu and the others were alive.^[1]

Li Ling gave a feast to wish Wu well. He told him that his name would be known among the Xiongnu and his merit in the Han house. Nothing in the old records, he said, surpassed it. Ling himself had once hoped to act on the resolve that his great disgrace had stored up, if the Han forgave his guilt and spared his old mother. His family, however, had been wiped out, and he had nothing left to look to. Then he rose, danced and sang. He had gone ten thousand li across the sands, he sang, and led an army for his lord against the Xiongnu. The road had ended. The arrows and blades had broken. The army had perished and his name was ruined. His old mother was dead, and he had nowhere to go to repay her. His tears ran. He parted from Wu.^[1] The chanyu called Wu’s officers together. Some had surrendered earlier, and some had died. The men who returned with Wu numbered nine.^[1]

The Xiongnu chapter of the Han Shu gives a different account of the release. In the third year of the chanyu Huyandi, Wei Lü planned to send back the Han envoys who had not surrendered, Su Wu and Ma Hong. The Xiongnu returned the two to show good will.^[12] The Han Shu keeps both accounts: the ruse of Chang Hui in one chapter and the wish of the Xiongnu in the other.

Wu reached the capital in the spring. He had spent nineteen years among the Xiongnu. He had left as a strong man and came back with his beard and hair all white.^[1]^[9] Counted from 100 BC, that is 81 BC. The emperor had him offer a sacrifice at the park temple of Wudi. He made him Director of Dependent States, at the salary of full two thousand shi. He gave him two million cash, two qing of public land and a house. Chang Hui, Xu Sheng and Zhao Zhonggen were made gentlemen and given two hundred bolts of silk each. The other six were old. They were sent home with a hundred thousand cash each and exemption from service for life.^[1]

Afterwards

In the year after Wu’s return, Shangguan Jie, his son An, Sang Hongyang, the king of Yan and Princess Gai plotted a rising. Wu’s son Yuan had joined An’s plan and was put to death. Wu had long been a friend of Jie and Hongyang. The king of Yan had accused him several times. The judge asked for his arrest. Huo Guang, however, laid the request aside and only removed him from office.^[1]

Some years later, Zhaodi died. As a former official of the two-thousand-shi rank, Wu took part in the council that set up Xuandi. He was made a marquis within the passes with three hundred households.^[1] Zhang Anshi recommended him as a man who knew precedent and had carried out his mission without disgrace. Xuandi called him to the court and made him Director of Dependent States of the Right. He was told to attend the court on the first and fifteenth of the month. He was given the honorary title of Libationer.^[1] He gave the gifts he received to his brothers and old friends. He kept nothing for his house.^[1]

His son had died. The emperor, hearing that Wu had been long in the north, asked whether he had a child there. Wu answered that when he left the Xiongnu, a Hu woman he had married had just borne him a son, Tongguo. The Han called the steppe peoples Hu. Wu asked leave to send gold and silk with an envoy to buy the son out. The emperor agreed. Tongguo came with the envoy. He was made a gentleman.^[1] Wu died of illness at over eighty.^[1]

When the chanyu first came to court, the emperor had the portraits of eleven ministers painted in the Qilin Pavilion, with their offices and names. Su Wu came last, as Director of Dependent States.^[1] The audience was that of Huhanye in 51 BC.^[12]

The Han Shu as the source

Ban Gu closes the chapter with a judgement on the two families it treats. Of the Li generals, he says that from Guang to Ling they lost their house. Of Wu, he quotes the saying of Confucius that one sent to the four quarters should not disgrace the commands of his lord. He says that Wu had this.^[1]

The Shiji records the embassy and the gifts. It says nothing of what followed.^[13] The nineteen years rest on the Han Shu alone. The chapter does not say whose report Ban Gu followed. The speeches in the cellar and by the sea had no witness but Wu himself. Only nine of his party came back.