Xiongnu Agriculture

The Chinese histories describe the Xiongnu as herders who tilled no fields. The same histories record Xiongnu grain crops, a granary town and farmers at one oasis, and the excavations of the Selenga basin have yielded wheat, barley and millet. The evidence is therefore uneven. Some Xiongnu groups grew grain, and others did not.

The statement of the Shiji

The Shiji says that the Xiongnu followed water and grass. They had no walled towns, no fixed dwellings and no work of tilling fields, yet each had his own allotted ground.^[1] The Han Shu repeats it.^[2] In the same chapter the Han renegade Zhonghang Yue contrasts the two ways of living. The Chinese, he told a Han envoy, toiled at farming and silk-raising to feed and clothe themselves and built walls for their defence. The Xiongnu lived on their herds.^[3]

Grain from the Han

The Han sent grain to the Xiongnu from the first peace. After the treaty of Gaozu it undertook to send the chanyu floss, silk, wine, rice and food each year in fixed amounts.^[1] Zhonghang Yue warned the Han envoys that the quantity and quality of the rice and malt had to be right. If the gifts were poor, he said, the Xiongnu would wait for the harvest and ride their horses through the Han crops.^[3] The chanyu Hulugu asked for ten thousand shi of malt liquor, five thousand hu of millet and ten thousand bolts of silk each year.^[2] After Huhanye came to court in 51 BC the Han carried 34,000 hu of grain north to feed his people. It later sent 20,000 hu more from Yunzhong and Wuyuan.^[2] The grain itself is described under millet.

Fields of their own

Several notices show Xiongnu grain. After the Han general Li Guangli had been killed at a Xiongnu sacrifice, it rained and snowed for months. The herds died and the people fell sick. The grain crops did not ripen.^[2] The Han Shu thus records grain crops among the Xiongnu in the years after 90 BC.

When the chanyu Huyandi came to the throne, Wei Lü, a Han renegade, proposed a plan. The Xiongnu were to dig wells, build a town and raise towers to store grain, and men of Qin, that is Chinese, were to hold them. Several hundred wells were dug and several thousand timbers cut. Then it was objected that the Hu could not hold a walled town, and that the grain would only go to the Han. Wei Lü gave up the plan.^[2]

At Zhao Xin City north of the Gobi the Han army of 119 BC found Xiongnu stores of grain.^[4] The Xiongnu also farmed beyond the steppe. In the years of the emperor Zhao they sent 4,000 horsemen to farm at Cheshi, and the Han drove the farmers off. Defectors later reported that the ministers of the chanyu called Cheshi’s land fertile and near them, and said that the Han must not be allowed to farm and store grain there.^[5] The Xiongnu also taxed the farming oases of the Tarim Basin through the Commandant of Slaves.^[5]

Archaeological finds

The fortified settlement of Ivolga in Buryatia was occupied about 2,100 years ago, by the date of its bronze mirrors. Its finds include barley and wheat, and also millet, together with sickles and grinding stones.^[6]^[7] The excavator took it for the base of a mixed farming and herding economy.^[6]

At Egiin Gol in northern Mongolia a charred wheat grain from a hearth was dated by radiocarbon to between about 2330 and 2150 years before the present. A second Xiongnu site there yielded wheat and barley.^[8] The survey found far more evidence of herding than of tilling. Its authors conclude, on preliminary evidence, that the valley’s Xiongnu lived by a mixture of herding, farming, hunting and fishing.^[9]

In the Khanui valley, further south in Mongolia, no evidence for farming turned up in the Xiongnu settlements, though the excavators screened the soil and floated samples for seeds.^[10] The Xiongnu of that valley lived in open seasonal camps and herded sheep, goats, horses and cattle.^[10]

The question

The excavators of Egiin Gol point out that the Han histories themselves mention agricultural production and storage, specialised crafts and large settlements among the Xiongnu. The picture of pure nomads, they say, rests on the Shiji’s sentence and on the excavation of graves.^[11] Some Turkish scholars go a step further. They hold that Xiongnu wheat and millet were an old native practice and not only a gift from settled neighbours, and they carry the same practice to the Göktürks.^[12] Others set the oases of Eastern Turkestan, taxed by the Xiongnu, as the granary of their empire.^[13]

The sources do not say how much grain the Xiongnu grew, or how much of their food it supplied.^[3]

References

^ a b Shiji, juan 110
^ a b c d e Han Shu, juan 94
^ a b c Shiji, juan 110; Han Shu, juan 94
^ Shiji, juan 111; Han Shu, juan 55
^ a b Han Shu, juan 96
^ a b Wright 2009, p. 375
^ Houle 2011, p. 138
^ Wright 2009, p. 378, 381
^ Wright 2009, p. 384–385
^ a b Houle 2011, p. 152
^ Wright 2009, p. 372–373
^ Ögel 2000, p. 159
^ Ögel 2000, p. 160

Sources

Shiji, juan 110, 111
Han Shu, juan 55, 94, 96 (after Shiji)

Literature

Joshua Wright; William Honeychurch; Chunag Amartuvshin, The Xiongnu Settlements of Egiin Gol, Mongolia (2009)
Jean-Luc Houle; Lee G. Broderick, Settlement Patterns and Domestic Economy of the Xiongnu in Khanui Valley, Mongolia (2011)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Türk Kültür Tarihine Giriş II: Türklerde ziraat kültürü (2000)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Büyük Hun İmparatorluğu Tarihi II (2015)