Hulugu Chanyu

Hulugu was chanyu of the Xiongnu from 96 to 85 BC.^[1] In 90 BC the Han general Li Guangli led seventy thousand men against him. A night attack on the Han camp ended with the general’s surrender.^[1] Hulugu gave him his daughter and a place of honour above Wei Lü. A little over a year later, he let him be killed as a sacrifice.^[1] The Han Shu follows the reign to its end, which brought a succession that went against the chanyu’s own word.^[1]

Accession

Qiedihou had two sons, the elder Left Worthy King and the younger Left Great General.^[1] The dying chanyu named the elder to follow him.^[1] The Left Worthy King had not arrived at the court. The nobles thought him ill and set up the younger son.^[1] The Left Worthy King heard of it and did not dare to come forward.^[1] The new chanyu sent to call him. He yielded the throne.^[1] The Left Worthy King pleaded illness and refused. His brother would not accept the refusal. If he should die unluckily, he said, the throne should pass to the Left Worthy King.^[1] The Left Worthy King agreed. He was set up as Hulugu.^[1]^[2] The Han Shu dates this to the first year of the Taishi era, 96 BC.^[1]

Hulugu made his brother, the Left Great General, Left Worthy King. According to the Han Shu, the Xiongnu ordinarily gave this office to the heir.^[1] The brother died of illness after some years.^[1] His son Xianxiandan could not take his place. Hulugu made him Rizhu King, a lower rank. He gave the Left Worthy King’s office to his own son.^[1] The Han Shu adds that Xianxiandan’s father had yielded the throne to Hulugu. It says that Hulugu had promised to set the brother up in his turn. It also says that for this reason many Xiongnu said afterwards that the Rizhu King ought to be chanyu.^[1] Some scholars take the whole story as evidence for how far the will of a dying chanyu outweighed the choice of the nobles.^[3]

Xianxiandan was the Rizhu King who, under a later chanyu, led several tens of thousands of horse over to the Han. The Han made him a marquis.^[1]

The raids and the Han armies of 90 BC

In the sixth year of his reign, the Xiongnu rode into Shanggu and Wuyuan and killed Han officers and people. In the same year they rode into Wuyuan and Jiuquan, where they killed two commandants.^[4] The Han answered in 90 BC with three armies.^[4] Li Guangli went out from Wuyuan with seventy thousand men.^[4] The Censor-in-Chief Shang Qiucheng went out from Xihe with more than thirty thousand men. The Annals of Wudi put the figure at twenty thousand.^[4] Mang Tong, the Marquis of Chonghe, went out from Jiuquan with forty thousand horse. The Annals of Wudi call him Ma Tong.^[4]

Hulugu heard that the Han had come out in force.^[1] He sent all his baggage away. He moved north of Zhao Xin’s city to the Zhiju River.^[1] The Left Worthy King drove the people across the Yuwu River, six or seven hundred li, to Doujian Mountain.^[1] The chanyu crossed the Guqie River with picked troops.^[1]

Shang Qiucheng reached the Zhuixie road. He saw nothing and turned back.^[1] The Xiongnu sent a great general after him, together with Li Ling and more than thirty thousand horse.^[1] They caught the Han army at Junji Mountain. They fought for nine days while it retreated.^[1] The Han soldiers broke the Xiongnu line and killed many. At the Punu River, the Xiongnu gave up and went back.^[1] Li Ling was the Han general who had surrendered to Qiedihou. He now rode against a Han army.^[1] Mang Tong came to the Heavenly Mountains. There the Xiongnu great general Yanqu and the Left and Right Huzhi kings had come to meet him with twenty thousand horse. They saw that the Han were strong and drew off.^[1] Neither side gained or lost.^[1]

Li Guangli

Li Guangli’s column first met resistance at the gorge of Fuyangju. There the Xiongnu Right Great Commandant and Wei Lü tried to stop it with five thousand horse.^[1] Li Guangli sent two thousand horse of the dependent peoples. The Xiongnu scattered, with some hundreds killed or wounded. The Han pressed on to the city of Lady Fan.^[1] There the news reached him that his wife and children had been arrested for sorcery.^[1] His clerk Hu Yafu was himself in the army to escape punishment. He asked Li Guangli whether he would ever see the country north of the Zhiju again if he went home and fell short.^[1] Li Guangli hesitated. He wanted to win merit by going deeper, and he marched on to the Zhiju.^[1] He sent a protector with twenty thousand horse across the river. They met the Left Worthy King and the Left Great General, who came with twenty thousand horse, and fought for a day.^[1] The Han killed the Left Great General.^[1]

Then his own officers turned against him.^[1] His chief secretary and a commandant, the Marquis of Huiqu, agreed that the general had a different purpose and wished to endanger the army in order to win merit. They planned to seize him.^[1] Li Guangli heard of it and put the chief secretary to death. He withdrew to Mount Yanran.^[1] Hulugu knew the Han army was worn out.^[1] He came himself with fifty thousand horse. By night he dug a ditch several feet deep across the front of the Han line. Then he struck from behind.^[1] The army broke. Li Guangli surrendered.^[1] The Annals of Wudi record the same defeat.^[5] The chapter on Li Guangli says only that he was killed by the chanyu. It refers the reader to the Xiongnu chapter.^[6]

Hulugu had known him as a great Han general. He gave him his daughter in marriage.^[1] He set him above Wei Lü in honour.^[1]

The letter of 89 BC and the end of Li Guangli

The next year the chanyu wrote to the Han court.^[1] In the south there was the great Han, he said, and in the north the strong Hu. The Hu were the proud sons of Heaven, who did not trouble themselves with small ceremony.^[1]^[7] This pride is not seen even in the time of Bagatur, it has been said.^[8] He wanted to open the great pass and to take a Han woman as wife.^[1]^[9] The letter has been taken to show that what the Xiongnu wanted was trade.^[9] Every year the Han should give him ten thousand shi of malt liquor, five thousand hu of millet and ten thousand bolts of mixed silk. The rest should stand as in the old treaty.^[1] Then the frontier would be free of theft.^[1] His father Qiedihou had called himself the Han emperor’s child.^[1] Hulugu spoke as the equal of the Han. The terms he named were those of the first heqin: a Han bride and yearly goods.^[1]

The Han sent an envoy back with the chanyu’s envoy.^[1] Hulugu’s attendants pressed the Han envoy.^[1] The Han, they said, was a land of ritual and righteousness. They therefore asked why Li Guangli had reported that the former crown prince raised troops in revolt.^[1] The envoy answered that the quarrel had been a private one between the chancellor and the prince.^[1] The chancellor had slandered the prince. He had been put to death.^[1] The prince had misused his father’s troops. This was a small fault that deserved a beating.^[1] Then the envoy asked how that compared with Bagatur, who killed his own father to take the throne and regularly took his stepmother as wife. He called this the conduct of beasts.^[1]^[10] The chanyu kept the envoy for three years.^[1]

Li Guangli had been with the Xiongnu a little over a year. Then Wei Lü, who resented the favour shown to him, found his chance.^[1] The chanyu’s mother fell ill. Wei Lü told a Hu wu, the Chinese word for a ritual specialist, to say that the former chanyu was angry.^[1] When the Xiongnu went to war, the wu was to say, they had always promised at the sacrifice for the army to take Li Guangli for the altar of the soil. The promise had not been kept.^[1] Li Guangli was seized.^[1]^[11] ‘When I die,’ he said, ‘I will destroy the Xiongnu.’ He was killed in sacrifice.^[1] Then rain and snow fell for months. The herds died, the people sickened and the grain did not ripen.^[1] The chanyu was afraid. He built a shrine for Li Guangli.^[1] The wu names the anger of an earlier chanyu, one of the ancestors, as the cause of the illness.^[1] The Han Shu joins the weather to the killing only through the chanyu’s fear.^[1]

The Han Shu has the Han send no more armies after the loss of Li Guangli. The Han had lost a great general and several tens of thousands of soldiers.^[1] Three years after Li Guangli’s death, Wudi died.^[1] The Han Shu says that Han troops had pressed deep into the steppe in pursuit for more than twenty years. It adds that from the chanyu down, the Xiongnu often thought of a heqin.^[1]

The house in the last years

The Han Shu records a killing inside his family.^[1] The chanyu had a half-brother, the Left Great Commandant, who was able and well liked.^[1] The chanyu’s mother feared that her son would pass over his own son and make the commandant heir. She had the commandant secretly killed.^[1] The dead man’s full brother never came to the chanyu’s court again.^[1]

Wuchanmu ruled a small country between the Wusun and Kangju that had been attacked again and again. In Hulugu’s reign he came over to the Xiongnu with several thousand of his people.^[1] Hulugu married him to a sister of the Rizhu King. He set him over his people in the right land.^[1] Wuchanmu’s son-in-law was a son of the chanyu Xulüquanqu. He had fled to Wuchanmu after his father’s death.^[1]

Death and succession

Hulugu wished to seek a heqin. He was struck by an illness that killed him.^[1] When he was dying, he told the great men that his son was young and could not rule. He told them to set up his brother, the Right Guli King.^[1] When he died, Wei Lü and the Zhuanqu Yanzhi, the consort, hid his death. They forged his order. They drank the covenant with the nobles. They set up his son, the Left Guli King, as Huyandi.^[1] The Han Shu dates this to the second year of the Shiyuan era, 85 BC.^[1]^[12]

Assessment

One count gives seven chanyus between 114 and 60 BC. It finds that only Hulugu and Huyandi held the throne for more than ten years.^[13] Under Hulugu the Han lost a great general and several tens of thousands of soldiers. They sent out no more armies before Wudi died.^[1] At home, the throne he had gained by a promise passed after his death to a son he had not named.^[1] The Right Guli King, whom he had named, and the Rizhu King, whom he had put aside, trouble the reigns that follow.^[1]

References

^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa ab ac ad ae af ag ah ai aj ak al am an ao ap aq ar as at au av aw ax ay az ba bb bc bd be bf bg bh bi bj bk bl bm bn bo bp bq br bs bt bu bv bw bx by bz ca cb cc cd ce cf cg ch ci cj Han Shu, juan 94
^ Ögel 2015, p. 102–103
^ Sinor 1990, p. 137
^ a b c d e Han Shu, juan 94; Han Shu, juan 6
^ Han Shu, juan 6
^ Han Shu, juan 61
^ Ögel 2015, p. 100, 107
^ Ögel 2015, p. 100
^ a b Jagchid 1989, p. 30
^ Ögel 2015, p. 108
^ Ögel 2015, p. 108–109
^ Ögel 2015, p. 110
^ Sinor 1990, p. 136

Sources

Han Shu, juan 6, 54, 61, 94 (after Shiji)

Literature

Denis Sinor (ed.), The Cambridge History of Early Inner Asia (1990)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Büyük Hun İmparatorluğu Tarihi II (2015)
Sechin Jagchid; Van Jay Symons, Peace, War, and Trade Along the Great Wall. Nomadic-Chinese Interaction through Two Millennia (1989)