Ancient Migration: Wars and Walls
Today, we’ll explain how mass migrations have impacted the nation throughout its history. Unlike today, ancient Chinese people didn’t move away from home in large numbers looking for work or education. If they moved at all, more often than not, they were forced to leave.
Northeast China, which encompasses Heilongjiang, Liaoning, and Jilin provinces, commonly referred to as the rust zone of the country, experienced a population decline of 11 million over the past decade, primarily attributed to low birth rates and population outflow, as reported by recent official statistics.
This sounds a bit odd when it’s compared to the Chinese tradition of emotionally being attached to one’s homeland where one is born and lives on the land that you farm. Indeed, it is the fading of this tradition that has underwritten China’s industrialization and the economic boom that has persisted virtually unabated for the past 40 years.
Throughout world history, mass migration, whether it be via peaceful or violent means, has factored largely as the root cause of fundamental social change. Some examples include the Western Roman Empire that fell due to incursions by Germanic tribes. Then later, after the fall of Byzantium in the mid-15th century, displaced European intellectuals focused on classical Hellenic culture moved to Western Europe, thus contributing to the Renaissance between the 14th and 16th centuries. And the Age of Discovery starting in the early 15th century brought Europeans to nearly every corner of the world in the following centuries, fundamentally changing the geopolitical balance around the world.
So, what about the ancient Chinese? Did they move en masse, and if so, why? And how did their migration change society at the time?
Similar to those instances in Europe, mass migrations of ancient Chinese happened in times of historical changes and in turn changed history.
“My brother you are venturing to Xikou, and as your little sister I cannot stop you,” are lines from famous Chinese folk love song Venture to Xikou. In Chinese folk love songs, a brother and a little sister refer to a pair of lovers. Xikou, literally “the west gates,” refers to a route across the Great Wall to Mongolia from neighboring Shanxi, Shannxi, or Hebei. Since the middle of the Ming Dynasty, which lasted from 1368 to 1644, poor farmers in Shanxi, Shaanxi, and Hebei went to the mid-west of today’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region to find work as the area was rich with land but lacking in manpower. Like most of China’s migrant workers today, they migrated in hopes for better opportunities and for a better life.
After the fall of the Ming in 1644, China’s final dynasty, the Qing, lasted till 1911. The ruling Manchus originated from the northeast of China in an area known as Guandong, which is north of the Great Wall. A lot of land was left idle there after many Manchu people moved south of the Great Wall. Han people from south of the Great Wall were forbidden to work the idle land in Guandong. But after enough time had passed, some poor people from Shandong and Hebei provinces risked their lives to go there for the vast fertile land and valuable specialties like ginseng and pilose antler of young stags. Over time, Guandong became a popular destination for poor people seeking a better life. Many more went there after the ban was lifted in the late 19th century. By the early 20th century, which witnessed the end of the Qing and the end of the imperial system of government in China, those immigrants constituted the majority of Guandong’s population of 18 million.
Businessmen were the group that traveled most frequently in ancient China, and they commonly went much farther than other migrant groups. During the Ming and Qing dynasties since the late 14th century, overseas trade was banned. In the Qing dynasty, only officially licensed traders were allowed to conduct overseas trade in Guangzhou. Some businessmen in the southeast coastal areas took the risky sea voyage, thereby breaking the official ban, to seek their fortune around the Southeast Asian region. Their descendants still live there, constituting a large population in Southeast Asian countries like Malaysia and Singapore.
But ancient Chinese people moved not just for a better life or business opportunities. Very often they were forced to leave their homes.
A very famous Chinese legend says that Meng Jiangnü, a woman during the Qin dynasty in the early 3rd century BCE, ventured on a long journey to look for her husband Wan Xiliang, one of the hundreds of thousands of workers building the Great Wall. But when she arrived, she was told that her husband had died from hunger and overwork, and was buried in the foundations of the Great Wall. She cried for 49 days, till the wall suddenly collapsed and her husband’s body was found.
Emperor Qin Shihuang was notorious for his cruelty. He forced 10 to 15 percent of the 20 million total population to leave their homes for his mega projects, including building the Great Wall and his mausoleum near today’s Xi’an, and developing southern parts of China that are Guangdong and Guangxi today. Most never returned. Many, like Meng Jiangnü’s husband, died from the tough and dangerous labor.
In 214 BCE, Guangdong and Guangxi became part of the Qin empire. Some 500,000 people from the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River were moved there to develop agriculture. They, along with the Qin soldiers that conquered the area, remained.
Five years later, the Qin was toppled by another migrant group. About 900 men were assigned to today’s Beijing to guard the border. But they were delayed by heavy rainfall, and would be liable to be executed according to the law. Even if they arrived on time, most would never be able to return home as the military service along the border was hard and dangerous. So, two of them, Chen Sheng and Wu Guang, launched the first large-scale peasant rebellion in China’s history. Other rebellion forces followed, and the one that was led by Xiang Yu and Liu Bang toppled the Qin. Liu Bang beat Xiang Yu later and founded the Han dynasty in 206 BCE that would last more than 400 years until it was ended in the year 220.
Later the Han Dynasty saw wars and conflicts among competing powers, particularly the Wei, Shu and Wu kingdoms in different parts of the country. The Wei controlled the north and the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River. People fled their homes and left their land idle in years of chaos. As a solution to the shortage of food, fiscal revenue and soldiers, the Wei attracted landless peasants to farm on land controlled by the government. The peasants could keep half the harvest. This stimulated social and economic development. Ethnic groups in the north and the northeast, such as Huns and Wuhuan, were welcome to live and farm on the land.
The Wei kingdom was replaced by the Jin （晋）in a coup in the late 3rd century. The Jin united China quickly. But the peace did not last long. The Jin was mired in internal struggle among its royal family just a few years after it united China. In the meantime, it faced invasion from various ethnic groups in the north. Since then, three large scale migrations from the north to the south driven by wars took place in China. It resulted in the rise of the south and ethnic integration.
The first was the movement of intellectuals and skilled craftsmen of the Jin moving from north to south to escape the wars. This process lasted more than 200 years. The north was occupied by dozens of tribes. The Northern Wei established by the Xianbei, an ancient tribe, in 386 is the first strong ethnic regime in China’s history and brought with it a robust Confucian belief system. Within 50 years of the founding of the Northern Wei, more than one million Han people moved to the capital, today’s Datong, in northern Shanxi Province, where they lived with other ethnic groups.
The second large-scale migration took place after the eight-year rebellion of An Lushan and Shi Siming greatly weakened the Tang dynasty in the late 8th century. Many people moved to the south as the north was devastated by the rebellion. This caused China’s political and economic center to shift further to the south. Again, regimes set up by Han and various ethnic groups fought against each other for years. People were driven to move by wars.
The third war-driven large-scale migration was in the early 12th century. In 1127, the Song Dynasty was forced to move to the south by the northern Jin （金） kingdom which was set up by ancestors of the Manchu ethnic group. Again, Song people and elite groups escaped to the south where one of the Song imperial family set up a new regime known as the Southern Song in Hangzhou in today’s Zhejiang Province.
Mass migration was also used as a solution to balance regional populations in the aftermath of long years of unrest. Till today, many Han people in the north believe the roots of their family tree reach under the locust tree in Hongdong County, Shanxi province in the northwest of China. After the Ming defeated the Mongolian Yuan dynasty in the late 14th century, a lot of land was left idle as the population in the north had sharply dwindled in the war. The Ming government wanted to move people from other places to the north, and it chose the populous and prosperous Shanxi. Authorities set up a migration agency under a locust tree in Hongdong County. From that site, it was arranged for some Shanxi people to migrate to other places, particularly to Hebei, Henan, and Shandong, which had been devastated by wars and floods.
A similar case happened during the Qing dynasty, the successor of the Ming. Too many people had been killed in Sichuan Province in the southwest of China during rebellions in the last years of the Ming. The Qing government then moved millions from the neighboring Hunan and Hubei areas to Sichuan. This is why many Sichuan people say they come from those areas.
Even now, as people migrate around the world, whether it be individually for educational opportunities or en mass to escape war-torn regions, they still feel a heartfelt attachment to their ancestral lands.
Well, that’s the end of our podcast. Our theme music is by the famous film score composer Roc Chen. We want to thank our writer Song Yimin, translator Li Jia, and copy editor Kathleen Naday. And thank you for listening. We hope you enjoyed it, and if you did, please tell a friend so they, too, can understand The Context.