Wei Lü

Wei Lü grew up in the Han empire, the son of a man of the Changshui Hu. He went over to the Xiongnu when the household of his patron was seized.^[1] At the court of the chanyu he became king of the Dingling. The Han Shu shows him in four scenes. He questions the Han envoy Su Wu. He arranges the sacrifice of the general Li Guangli. In 85 BC he helps place Huyandi on the throne. He also advises Huyandi on walls and on peace with the Han.^[2]

Origin and flight

The Han Shu says that Wei Lü’s father was by origin a Hu of Changshui (長水胡). It says that Wei Lü was born and raised in the Han empire.^[1] Wei Lü bore a Chinese name. Some scholars take his father’s origin to show at least partial Hu descent.^[3] A second account calls him a man of nomad extraction who served first the Chinese and then the Xiongnu.^[4] Wei Lü was a friend of Li Yannian, the Han commandant of musical harmony (協律都尉). Li Yannian recommended him as an envoy to the Xiongnu.^[1]

When Wei Lü came back from the mission, Li Yannian’s household was arrested. Wei Lü feared that he would be put to death with it. He fled back north and surrendered to the Xiongnu.^[1] According to the Han Shu, the Xiongnu took to him, and he was always at the chanyu’s side.^[1] The text gives no year for the flight.^[1]

Wei Lü was not the only one who crossed the frontier. In the debate of 33 BC, the Han Shu quotes the sighing of the bondmen on the frontier: “We hear that life is pleasant among the Xiongnu, but what can we do when the watch is so strict?” Even so, it says, some ran beyond the frontier from time to time.^[5] According to one account, the Xiongnu built part of their crafts and farming with Chinese prisoners and deserters.^[6]

King of the Dingling

The Dingling were a people on the northern edge of the Xiongnu realm. Bagatur had subdued them in his northern campaigns.^[7] The chanyu made Wei Lü their king.^[1] The text places the title beside that of Li Ling. After his surrender in 99 BC, the chanyu made Li Ling Right Xiao King (右校王). Both men, it says, were honoured and had a hand in affairs.^[1]

Wei Lü held the title before Li Ling came over. In 100 BC, the year before Li Ling’s surrender, he told the Han envoy Su Wu that he had been given the title of king.^[1] Some scholars take the appointment as a means of controlling a subject people through an outsider who owed everything to the chanyu.^[8]

Su Wu

Qiedihou had just been installed as chanyu. He had sent back the Han envoys he held. The Han emperor praised the gesture. He sent Su Wu with the Xiongnu envoys who were detained at the Han court and with rich gifts for the chanyu.^[2] As the embassy was about to leave, a plot formed among the Xiongnu. The Gou King, a son of the Hunye king’s sister, had gone over to the Han with his uncle. Afterwards he had fallen into Xiongnu hands with the marquis of Zhuoye. With Yu Chang of Changshui and some seventy others, he planned to seize the chanyu’s mother and carry her to the Han. The men who had surrendered under Wei Lü’s command joined them.^[1] Yu Chang knew Su Wu’s deputy Zhang Sheng from his years in the Han. He told Zhang Sheng that the Han emperor hated Wei Lü bitterly. He added that he could shoot Wei Lü from ambush with a crossbow.^[1]

One of the conspirators ran off in the night and gave them away. The chanyu’s men took the field against the plotters. They killed the Gou King and his companions. They took Yu Chang alive.^[1] The chanyu gave the case to Wei Lü.^[1]^[9] Zhang Sheng was afraid that his earlier words would come out. He told Su Wu what he had said to Yu Chang.^[1] Wei Lü summoned Su Wu to take his statement. Su Wu drew his sword and stabbed himself. Startled, Wei Lü held him in his arms and sent at once for a physician. A pit was dug in the ground, and a smouldering fire was put in it. Su Wu was laid over it, and his back was trodden to let the blood out. He stopped breathing for half a day and then revived.^[1]^[10]

When Su Wu had recovered, the chanyu wished to use the trial of Yu Chang to make him submit. After Yu Chang had been cut down with a sword, Wei Lü declared that the Han envoy Zhang Sheng, who had plotted to kill a close minister of the chanyu, deserved death. He added that the chanyu pardoned those who surrendered. He raised the sword against Zhang Sheng, who asked to surrender. Wei Lü then told Su Wu that a deputy’s crime is shared by his chief. Su Wu answered that he had planned nothing and was no kinsman. Wei Lü lifted the sword at him. Su Wu did not move.^[1]

Wei Lü then tried persuasion. He said that he had turned his back on the Han. By great good fortune, he said, he had been given the title of king, a following of tens of thousands and livestock that covered the hills. If Su Wu submitted that day, he would do the same the next. Otherwise Su Wu’s body would only fatten the grass, and nobody would know of it.^[1] Su Wu cursed him. In his words, a subject who abandons his lord and kin to become a captive among the barbarians was not worth seeing. The chanyu had trusted Wei Lü to decide who lived and died. Instead of judging fairly, Wei Lü wanted to set two rulers against each other and watch the disaster. Nanyue, Dayuan and Korea had killed Han envoys and been destroyed. Only the Xiongnu had not yet suffered this. Wei Lü knew that Su Wu would never submit and wished the two countries to fight. The Xiongnu’s disaster, Su Wu said, would begin with him.^[1]

Wei Lü saw that Su Wu would not bend and reported it to the chanyu. The chanyu shut Su Wu in a great cellar without food. Su Wu lay in the snow and swallowed it with scraps of felt. He did not die for days, and the Xiongnu took him for a spirit. They then sent him to the North Sea to herd rams. They allowed him to return when the rams gave milk.^[1] Li Ling later spoke with Su Wu there and said that the guilt of Li Ling and Wei Lü reached up to Heaven.^[1]

The attempt to bring Li Ling home

After Zhao became emperor, Huo Guang and Shangguan Jie ruled for him. They sent Ren Lizheng and two others to the Xiongnu to call Li Ling back. The chanyu gave a banquet for the Han envoys. Li Ling and Wei Lü sat in attendance. Afterwards the two men brought beef and wine to the envoys. They drank and played with them. Both wore Hu dress and the mallet-shaped hair knot.^[1]

Ren Lizheng told Li Ling aloud that the Han had proclaimed a great amnesty. Li Ling stroked his hair and answered, “I have already put on Hu dress.” Wei Lü went out to change his clothes. Ren Lizheng then pressed Li Ling to return. Li Ling replied that return was easy but that he feared a second disgrace. Wei Lü came back and heard the end of the talk. He said that Li Shaoqing was a worthy man who need not stay in one country. Fan Li, he said, had travelled all under Heaven, and You Yu had left the Rong for Qin. He asked why they spoke so closely. With that, Wei Lü broke up the meeting.^[1]

Li Guangli

In 90 BC the Han general Li Guangli surrendered to Hulugu Chanyu. The chanyu had come against him with fifty thousand horse. His men had dug a trench several feet deep across the Han front by night and struck from behind. The Han army broke.^[5] Earlier in the same campaign the chanyu had sent Wei Lü with the Right Great Duwei and five thousand horse to intercept the Han army in a defile at Fuyangju mountain. Li Guangli sent two thousand Hu cavalry of the dependent states against them. The Xiongnu force broke and lost several hundred men.^[5]^[11]

The chanyu knew that Li Guangli was a high Han general. He gave him his daughter and honoured him above Wei Lü.^[5] Li Guangli had been among the Xiongnu a little over a year. Wei Lü resented the favour shown to him and found his chance in the illness of the chanyu’s mother. He told a Hu shaman (胡巫) what to say. The shaman declared that the former chanyu was angry because before an attack the Xiongnu used to promise to sacrifice Li Guangli at the altar of the soil, and now they did not. Li Guangli was seized and said, “When I die, I will destroy the Xiongnu.” He was killed in the sacrifice. Then rain and snow fell for months. The herds died, plague struck and the grain did not ripen. The chanyu was afraid and built a shrine for Li Guangli.^[5]

The succession of 85 BC

Hulugu was dying. He told the nobles that his son was too young to rule the country and that his brother, the Right Guli king, should be installed. When he died, Wei Lü and Zhuanqu, the chanyu’s consort, kept the death secret. They forged an order in the chanyu’s name and had the nobles drink an oath. They installed the son, the Left Guli king, as Huyandi Chanyu. The Han Shu dates the year as the second of the Shiyuan period, 85 BC.^[5]^[12]

Under Huyandi

In the autumn of the second year after the accession, the Xiongnu raided Dai and killed a commandant. The chanyu was young, his mother improper and the country divided. He constantly feared a Han attack. Wei Lü proposed that the Xiongnu dig wells and build walls and towers to store grain, and that they hold these with “men of Qin” (秦人). When the Han army came, he said, it could do nothing. Hundreds of wells were dug and thousands of trees felled. Someone objected that the Hu cannot defend walls and that the grain would only feed the Han army. Wei Lü stopped the work.^[5]^[13] Some scholars see the Xiongnu refusal to hold walled towns, in this counsel and in Zhizhi’s failed defence, as the same rule that Tonyukuk later urged on the Göktürks.^[14]

Wei Lü then planned the return of the Han envoys who had refused to submit, Su Wu and Ma Hong among them. The Xiongnu sent these two home to open a way to goodwill. By then the chanyu had been on the throne three years.^[5]

The Han Shu mentions Wei Lü’s death in a single clause, in the account of events some two years after the envoys left. It gives no year.^[5] One modern account dates the death to 79 BC.^[15] The text adds that, while he lived, he often spoke of the benefits of peace with the Han, and the Xiongnu did not believe him. After his death the army was repeatedly hard pressed, and the country grew poorer. The chanyu’s brother, the Left Guli king, remembered his words and wished for a treaty. He feared, however, that the Han would refuse. He therefore never spoke first and had his entourage hint at it to Han envoys.^[5]

The title in the Tang histories

The Xin Tang Shu mentions Wei Lü in its account of the Kirghiz. It says that the Xiongnu made the surrendered Han general Li Ling Right Worthy King and Wei Lü king of the Dingling.^[16] The Han Shu, by contrast, gives Li Ling’s title as Right Xiao King, not Right Worthy King.^[1] The passage is one of the sources of the claim that the Kirghiz descend from Li Ling.

References

^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w Han Shu, juan 54
^ a b Han Shu, juan 54; Han Shu, juan 94
^ Miller 2014, p. 18
^ Lattimore 1951, p. 485
^ a b c d e f g h i j Han Shu, juan 94
^ Khazanov 1994, p. 226, 254
^ Shiji, juan 110
^ Miller 2014, p. 17
^ Ögel 2015, p. 86–88
^ Ögel 2015, p. 88
^ Ögel 2015, p. 102–106
^ Ögel 2015, p. 113
^ Ögel 2015, p. 114–115
^ Ögel 2015, p. 114, 160–161, 163
^ Ögel 2015, p. 116
^ Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217

Sources

Han Shu, juan 54, 94 (after Shiji)
Shiji, juan 110
Xin Tangshu (New Book of Tang), juan 217 (after Jiu Tangshu)

Literature

Bryan K. Miller, Xiongnu “Kings” and the Political Order of the Steppe Empire (2014)
Bahaeddin Ögel, Büyük Hun İmparatorluğu Tarihi II (2015)
Owen Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers of China (1951)
Anatoly M. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World (1994)