Six people carried 200 BCE. Two of them were arguing about whether the empire could pay for its own frontier, one was a woman the court never consulted, and the sixth was the steppe itself.
The Ming romances of the Han dynasties, the stage plays drawn from them and the serials drawn from those are entertainment — and not a source. Where their famous scenes depart from the histories, we leave them out of the story and put them here.
A Han bride for the Chanyu was chosen from a portrait, and lost her face — and her marriage — because she would not bribe the painter.
That story is in the Xijing zaji, a Jin-dynasty anecdote collection, where the painter Mao Yanshou and his colleagues are executed for it. It belongs to 33 BCE, not to this bargain, and the Hanshu's own sentence has no painter in it: the emperor gave a palace lady of good family, Wang Qiang, courtesy name Zhaojun, to the Chanyu who asked for a Han marriage. And in 200 BCE nobody of the emperor's blood went at all.
Chen Ping broke the encirclement with a marvel — a painter's picture of Han beauty, sent to make the Chanyu's wife jealous.
The Shiji credits him with a marvellous device and then says the plan was kept so secret that the age never heard of it; the Hanshu's annal has the same thing as a secret plan. The jealous-beauty version is a guess made four centuries later by Huan Tan, in a lost essay collection quoted by commentators. What the records will actually show is a bribe carried through the lines, a rendezvous the Han defectors failed to keep, a fog, and a march-order: crossbows strung, two arrows nocked outward, walk.
The heqin marriage made the Xiongnu subordinate to Han, and the annual deliveries were tribute paid by a subject people.
The two courts were written as equals in the same documents. The pact is a sworn brotherhood, and the Xiongnu chancery answered in its own style: the great Chanyu of the Xiongnu, set up by Heaven, respectfully inquires after the Emperor's welfare. When the court debated whether to fight after the Xiongnu had destroyed the Yuezhi, its ministers conceded the same premise from the other side: the land is salt marsh, it cannot be lived on, and the marriage is the cheaper option.
An emperor's own daughter was sacrificed to the steppe to save the dynasty.
The record says the opposite, twice, and blames no one grandly. Liu Jing had warned that a substitute would not be honoured; the emperor agreed, the empress dowager wept, and the book's sentence is blunt — the emperor could not send the Eldest Princess. A girl of the palace households was named in her place; the Hanshu calls her a daughter of the imperial clan of the second rank. She is unnamed in every one of these books.
After Baideng the Han abandoned the north and hid behind its wall.
The settlements of the period are the opposite of a withdrawal. The same adviser who wrote the marriage pact had the old royal houses and the powerful families of the east moved into the Wei valley — the record gives over a hundred thousand people — on the stated ground that the Ordos peoples were seven hundred li from the capital; the frontier markets stayed open under the treaty; and a later memorial against dismantling the outposts quotes border elders saying that the Xiongnu, since losing the Yin mountains, had never passed them without weeping.
Every caption and quotation in this episode traces to one of these. Where scholars disagree, the panel says so.
The frontier was bought rather than won, and the men who had been given kingdoms to govern were next: Episode 3 · Cut Back the Fiefs (Wu, Liang and Chang'an, 154 BCE). The vassal kingdoms were the other half of the bill. Or back to the Han line, or meet the cast.