← Back to the front page

The Old World’s Medieval Untouchables and Other Random Historical Facts

Khalid Elhassan March 17, 2020 33 min

Pancho Villa - Mexican Revolution — General Pancho Villa before a firing squad in 1912. Wikimedia

31. Extorting China

Modu Chanyu’s Xiongnu Empire, circa 200 BC. Wikimedia

When Modu Chanyu trapped and surrounded China’s Emperor Gaozu, the latter bought his life with an appeasement treaty known as the Heqin. Modu and his Xiongnu Empire were recognized as China’s equals, and The Great Wall was accepted as the mutual border. China’s rulers sent the Xiongnu leaders Chinese princesses as brides and sought to buy them off with regular tribute payments, face-savingly referred to as “gifts”.

After Gaozu’s death, Modu sent a rude and mocking marriage proposal to his widow, the dowager empress. Incensed, the empress and court were all for declaring war, with generals urging the extermination of the Xiongnu. Eventually, calmer voices reminded everybody of Modu’s victory just a few years earlier, and that the Xiongnu army was more powerful than the Chinese. Reconsidering, the empress wrote back, humbly declining, and sent a gift of imperial carriages and horses.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.