QuoteReplyTopic: Did Ancient China have a good Army Posted: 10-Jul-2006 at 09:10
i don't think u know much about china
1 the war china(han) vs hun:
who was the loser in the war?of curse,hun lost their land near to Huang river,but china lost half of its population at all!when both han and and hun were exhausted in the stupid war,another nomadic power arose--sabir people.it was sabir drove hun westward,and conquered north china for nearly 200 years.sabir was a turk/mongolian group.
2 the war china(tang) vs turk
do u think tang is a pure chinese dynasty? absolutely wrong. the ruler of tang dynasty had more turk/mongolian blood than chinese.for instance,the ruler of the peak time of tang was Tangxuanzong,he at the most had 1/8 chinese blood. china ruled turk 50 yeas,but before that tang china had to tribte millions of silk rolls to turk(turk sent'em to roma for profit).and after that 50 years,when turk reestablished their empire,china was forced to tribute more.once,tang dynasty even sent all the female chinese in its capital Changan ,today;s Xian,to turk to ask their support.
3 in history,north china was conquered by nomadic people many times ,such sabir,hun,sato turk,kitay,jugen, mongolian and mancu.chinese army was not only defeated by arab and mongolian,even korea and negal beated chinese army,not to mention those strong nomdic tribes.when mongolians ruled china,chinese were regarded as the lowest ethnic group compared with arabs,persians,turks,koreans and europeans.during the mancu's rule,all chinese were forced to keep pig-tail,which was a big insult in chinese culture,for 300 years.
Qin,Han,Tang were strong, they had the numbers, the technology and great commanders however they eventually weakened.
Then again so did Persians, Greeks, Romans, Abbasids...most didn't last as long as great Chinese dynasties and most didn't have a second "risings" like China as they didn't build as a long lasting empire foundations.
The nomad empires were also strong back in ancient times however they were all one off thing, they were strong once then many simply ceased to exist.
1 the war china(han) vs hun: who was the loser in the war?of curse,hun lost their land near to Huang river,but china lost half of its population at all!when both han and and hun were exhausted in the stupid war,another nomadic power arose--sabir people.it was sabir drove hun westward,and conquered north china for nearly 200 years.sabir was a turk/mongolian group.
2 the war china(tang) vs turk do u think tang is a pure chinese dynasty? absolutely wrong. the ruler of tang dynasty had more turk/mongolian blood than chinese.for instance,the ruler of the peak time of tang was Tangxuanzong,he at the most had 1/8 chinese blood. china ruled turk 50 yeas,but before that tang china had to tribte millions of silk rolls to turk(turk sent'em to roma for profit).and after that 50 years,when turk reestablished their empire,china was forced to tribute more.once,tang dynasty even sent all the female chinese in its capital Changan ,today;s Xian,to turk to ask their support.
3 in history,north china was conquered by nomadic people many times ,such sabir,hun,sato turk,kitay,jugen, mongolian and mancu.chinese army was not only defeated by arab and mongolian,even korea and negal beated chinese army,not to mention those strong nomdic tribes.when mongolians ruled china,chinese were regarded as the lowest ethnic group compared with arabs,persians,turks,koreans and europeans.during the mancu's rule,all chinese were forced to keep pig-tail,which was a big insult in chinese culture,for 300 years.
If you want to BS your information, find a troll site. The Han never lost even close to half of its population, and the wars they conducted were not just against the Xiongnu, but also the Nan Yue, Chosun, Qiang, Ming Yue and the Nan Man.
Tang Xuan Zong's father is Ren Zong Li Dan, and his grand mother is Wu Ze Tian, who came from a Han family of no status and has no evidence of Xian Bei blood whatsoever. Xuan Zong's mother is lady Dou, again a person of purely Han origin. So where on earth did you create your nonsense of 1/8 from? Stop fabricating lies.
If the pigtail was such a big insult, why were there so many people that refuse to cut it off during the ROC? Why did Zhang Xun retain his pigtail, and even restored Puyi to the throne?
1 the war china(han) vs hun: who was the loser in the war?of curse,hun lost their land near to Huang river,but china lost half of its population at all!when both han and and hun were exhausted in the stupid war,another nomadic power arose--sabir people.it was sabir drove hun westward,and conquered north china for nearly 200 years.sabir was a turk/mongolian group.
2 the war china(tang) vs turk do u think tang is a pure chinese dynasty? absolutely wrong. the ruler of tang dynasty had more turk/mongolian blood than chinese.for instance,the ruler of the peak time of tang was Tangxuanzong,he at the most had 1/8 chinese blood. china ruled turk 50 yeas,but before that tang china had to tribte millions of silk rolls to turk(turk sent'em to roma for profit).and after that 50 years,when turk reestablished their empire,china was forced to tribute more.once,tang dynasty even sent all the female chinese in its capital Changan ,today;s Xian,to turk to ask their support.
3 in history,north china was conquered by nomadic people many times ,such sabir,hun,sato turk,kitay,jugen, mongolian and mancu.chinese army was not only defeated by arab and mongolian,even korea and negal beated chinese army,not to mention those strong nomdic tribes.when mongolians ruled china,chinese were regarded as the lowest ethnic group compared with arabs,persians,turks,koreans and europeans.during the mancu's rule,all chinese were forced to keep pig-tail,which was a big insult in chinese culture,for 300 years.
just to correct you on something that you've made mistake is that, although tang wasn't a pure han ethnic ruler but the ruler namely Tang Tai Zong is actually half xian-bei and han ethnic not turk/mongolian ethnic. You are correct for saying that xian-bei people is half turk and mongolian, but in this case Tang Tai Zong is han/xian-bei ethnicity.
1)The ShiJi said that the Han lost 30,000 troops, not half their population!
2) Ethnicity means nationality? Bogus.
3) Chinese armies were defeated and in turn also won against every enemy they fought, be they the arabs, the turks, the Mongols, or the Koreans or Europeans. When your strong, you win, and when you're weak, you lose. Vivicum just makes it seem that the Chinese lost every war they came across, which doesn't make any sense considering China's size and territory.
The Battle of Talas in CE 751 was a conflict between the ArabAbbasidCaliphate and the ChineseTang Dynasty over the control of Central Asia. The Chinese troops were led by Gao Xianzhi, who had been successful in battles in Gilgit and in the Farghana region. But his success did not carry over, as the Muslim armies were victorious. The Muslims chose not to pursue the Chinese into central Asia. Chinese infantry were routed by Arab cavalry near the bank of the River Talas after Qarluq mercenaries supporting the Chinese defected to the Abbasids and cut off the infantry from the rest of the Chinese troops. The commander of the Tang forces, Gao Xianzhi, noticed that he is in a disadvantage and escaped with his few Tang regulars, and abandoned the mercenaries. Gao personally ordered the Tang to slay any mercenaries that blockade their retreat. Gao was able to rebuild his forces within months, however, he never again gained the confidence of many tribes residing in the area.
The exact location of the battle has not been confirmed but is believed to be in Kyrgyzstan, southeast of Taraz (once named Zhambyl) in present day Kazakhstan.
The battle of Talas stopped chinese expansion westwards. __________________________________
First Western Campaign
Gao became famous by fighting the combined forces of Tibetans and MuslimUmayyad Caliphate. Defeating a combined attack from Tibet and Saracen in 747, he led his army on a massive counterattack, pursuing the foes across the Hindu Kush and Pamir Mountains, submitting local Hindu and Persian kingdoms of present-day Afghanistan. As the result of Gao's first campaign, Tang Dynasty started to have a hostile relatiohship with Umayyad Caliphate and Tibet; however about 72 local Indian and Sogdian kingdoms became Chinese subject. For a few years he was the Tang's counsler of Central Asia, controlling Tokmak, Kucha, Kashmir, and even having an outpost at Kabul, Afghanistan. Many other generals hated him for the superior record.
Second Campaign and Battle of Talas
In 750, Gao led another campaign against Sogdian kingdoms, conquering Tashkent and sent surrendered king to Tang capital Chang'an. However, when ignorant Chinese civilian officials executed the king of Tashkent, outraged Sogdians and Turks of Central Asia largely defected to newly-established Abbasid Caliphate. Arabs, supported by local Persian kingdoms, attacked Chinese territories with almost 200,000 men. Gao led his forces of 70,000 men to Talas, in order to confront Arab advance.
But of course ancient China had a good army, but specify which time period, because their relative strength fluctuated from time to time, dynasty to dynasty. In fact, during nearly the entire span of the Roman Empire, the Han Empire easily rivaled their military prowess and extension of influence over neighboring regions (Vietnam, Manchuria, Northern Korea, Central Asia, etc.)
Like very rare examples in times of antiquity and the middle ages, since China had such a large population to boast (although only about 10% of the ancient Chinese population were true urban dwellers, while 90% were more rural or definitely in the rural category), then China was able to muster gigantic armies. Although many records from many different societies boast and brag about military sizes and provide inaccurate figures for later historians to ponder over, there is pure and undeniable evidence that Chinese emperors (and warlords in times of division and civil war) were able to muster enormous armies, ranging from tens to hundreds of thousands of different troops.
By the time of the Song Dynasty (960 - 1279 AD), while Europe was struggling to crawl out of its subsequent Dark Age (although Europe was aided by such things as the Carolingian Renaissance or the Scholastic Age spurred by such Arab writers like Ibn Rushd), the Chinese were in control of a massive empire (although not in the scope and size of the earlier Tang Dynasty spread into Central Asia), and in China there was actually a proto-Industrial-Revolution occuring, where each year the Chinese economy, industry, and military were so strong that roughly a hundred thousand tons of iron and steel products a year were being produced, satisfying the general populace in rural or sprawling urban markets for every general commodity under the sun in the Chinese empire, as well as providing the standing military of over a million soldiers (including naval marines) with the steel and iron armor and weaponry they required to defend China's massive borders, worrying over such threats as pirates across the eastern coasts, or their Khitan (Liao Dynasty) and Tangut (Xi-xia Dynasty) neighbors to the north (of course, the Song's greatest enemies would prove not to be these two, but the Jurchens and Mongols who later invaded China from Manchuria and Mongolia).
Long before the naval exploits of Zheng He that seem to be so popular these days with Western interest, the Chinese at the time of the Song Dynasty had massive trade interests as far as Persia, Arabia, and East Africa, and most notably with the expansive naval superpower from southern India, the Tamil-ethnicity Chola Dynasty, which conquered Sri Lanka, the Malaysian/Indonesian Kingdom of Srivijaya, and sent naval raids and expeditions into modern Thailand and Cambodia, threatening the Khmer Empire which was undergoing all sorts of inner political strife and conflicts with neighbors (like the Champa from southern Vietnam) during the 11th century AD. As for the Chinese, with all of these overseas contacts, they required a gigantic aggregate naval fleet to act as entourage to their trading vessels (as well as to constantly guard the various lakes and rivers of southern and central China). These ships were also quite impressive for their day, as seen through the 1974 excavation of the Quanzhou shipwreck from the Song era, or the one found soon after off the shores of Korea (ironically, 1974 being the same year that Chinese discovered the Qin Dynasty's enormous Terracotta Army dedicated to the tomb of Emperor Qin Shihuangdi, who lived in the 3rd century BC).
Hope this gives a sliver of an idea of how powerful China was before this era of time we like to call the modern era (although future peoples will sorely disagree! They'll call it, the Era of George Bush. Lol)
I way say that when we exclude all comparisons of power except that of the individual soldier, then to me the Age of Fragmentation would be China's military height. The stirrup at this time is a new technology that havn't spread across the world as of yet. Thus, this technology is limited only to China and its neighboring countries. It is the stirrup that caused infantry formations to become less fluid and more tightened(stirrup introduced heavy calvary in China), while the crossbow, although lessening in importance for a time due to the onslaught of stirrup technology, jumped back to one of amazing importance once new designs/strategies were made to counter these new heavy cavalry(sadly this only started by the Song though). Thus, we can rightly assume that by the Age of Fragmentation, China was the only nation with a stirrup based heavy cavalry, while previously heavy cavalrymen could only settle for being tied to the horse with ropes, and horse archers would have an even harder time trying to shoot backwards while riding at full speed(which is nxt to impossible without stirrups, though the nomads were able to do this feat; how they did this without the stirrup is beyond me).
Im not sure if these new tactics were made in the song dynasty to vounter heavy cavalry.
Ran min ,famous Han warlord of age of fragmentation used infantry to beat the heavy cavalry time and time again.Eastern Wei also never lost a battle in the south of Yangze as cavalry wasnt suited to such warfare , just like Yue fei was able to beat the Jin with infantry.
It is unfair because chinese civilisation was built on a bigger area of land. but it is obvious that the chinese were powerful. whats the use of talking about barbaric tribes when China now has control over Manchuria, Tibet, and Inner Mongolia?? btw mongolians and manchurians and tibetans are regarded as chinese...
Correct me if I am wrong.
The Han based dynasties had good generals and in the case of
1. Qin
2. Later Han under Wudi
3. Tang
Had good armies , in case of Tang complemented with
Turkish cavalry.
However, they lack leaders with the foresight of
Chinggis
Ogodei
Khubilai
Huangtaiji
KangXi
QianLong
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