Modu Chanyu

Modu was the son of Touman and the founder of the empire of the Xiongnu. He came to power by ordering his men to kill his father in 209 BCE.

The eastern border stretched as far as the Liao River, the western borders of the empire reached the Pamir Mountains, whilst the northern border reached Lake Baikal. Modu's raids into China resulted in the dynasty agreeing to pay an annual tribute alongside other goods such as silk, grain and rice. Modu was succeeded by his son Laoshang.

Name

His name is reconstructed as * in Later Han Chinese and in Middle Chinese. The name's Old Chinese pronunciation might have represented the pronunciation of the foreign word *baɣtur, a relative of the later attested Central Eurasian culture word baɣatur "hero".

Ancient commentaries indicate that the characters of his name should be pronounced using special readings reserved for characters when converted to a different part-of-speech, used with an unusual meaning, or used in place names or personal names (a practice known as 破讀 (pòdú, 'broken reading')). Different commentaries give slightly different versions: his name was given as MC (; following Sima Zhen's commentary on Shiji) and MC (; following Song Qi's commentary on Hanshu), the latter of which, according to Pulleyblank (1999), "does not make sense" phonologically.

Origins and rise to power According to Sima Qian (Chapter 110, "Biographies of the Xiongnu" of the Shiji), Modu was a gifted child but his father Touman wanted the son of another of his wives to succeed him. To eliminate Modu as a competitor to his chosen heir, Touman sent the young Modu to the Yuezhi as a hostage; then he attacked the Yuezhi in the hope that they would kill Modu as retribution. He invented a signaling arrow that made a whistling sound in flight and trained his men to shoot in the direction of the sound in synchrony. To be sure of his men's loyalty, Modu commanded the warriors to shoot his favourite horse; any who refused to do so were summarily executed. The Han dynasty sent commoner women falsely labeled as "princesses" and members of the Han imperial family multiple times when they were practicing heqin marriage alliances with the Xiongnu in order to avoid sending the emperor's daughters.

After his Chinese campaign, Modu forced the Yuezhi and the Wusun to become vassals of the Xiongnu.

Lü Zhi was infuriated at the rude proposition, and in a heated court session, her generals advised her to rally an army and exterminate the Xiongnu immediately. As she was about to declare war, an outspoken attendant named Ji Bu pointed out that the Xiongnu army was much more powerful than the Chinese. At Ji Bu's words, the court immediately fell into a fearful silence. Rethinking her plans, Lü Zhi rejected Modu's proposition humbly, as follows:

Your Lordship does not forget our land and writes a letter to us, we fear. I retreat to preserve myself. I'm old and frail, I'm losing hair and teeth, and I struggle to maintain balance when I move. Your Lordship has heard wrongly, you shouldn't defile yourself. Our people did not offend you, and should be pardoned. We've two imperial carriages and eight fine steeds, which we graciously offer to Your Lordship.

However she continued implementing the heqin policy of marrying so called "princesses" to Xiongnu chieftains and paying tribute to the Xiongnu in exchange for peace between both sides.

Analysis of the Xiongnu's rise As Nicola Di Cosmo summarizes the sequence of events, the Qin invasion of the Ordos Plateau (the area within the bend of the Yellow River) came at the same time as a leadership crisis within the loose Xiongnu confederation. Modu took advantage of the Xiongnu militarization process that came in response to the Qin invasion, and ably created a newly centralized political structure that made his empire possible. He was aided by the rapid fall of Qin and the fact that the Han initially set up independent "kingdoms", whose leaders, like Xin, King of Han, were as likely to ally with Xiongnu and attack Han as the other way around. Han weakness meant that it supplied Modu and his successors with a steady flow of luxury and staple tribute they could pass down to the aristocracy supporting them. Without that tribute, the Xiongnu might not have been able to expand and maintain control.

Later legends Christopher I. Beckwith has pointed out that the story of the young Modu resembles a widespread class of folk tales in which a young hero is abandoned, goes on a quest, proves his worth, gains a group of trusted companions, returns to his home country, slays a powerful figure and becomes a king.

The name Modu has been associated with Oghuz Khagan, a legendary ancestor of Oghuz Turks. The reason for that is a striking similarity of the Oghuz Khagan biography in the Turco-Persian tradition (Rashid-al-Din Hamadani, Husayni Isfahani, Abu al-Ghazi Bahadur) with the Modu biography in the Chinese sources (feud between the father and son and murder of the former, the direction and sequence of conquests, etc.), which was first noticed by Hyacinth (Compilation of reports, pp. 56–57).

Another suggestion connects it with the name of the Magyar royal tribe of the Hungarians and with their distant relatives the Mators, now extinct. Modu has been linked with the name вихтунь mentioned in the Nominalia of the Bulgarian Khans, corresponding to the Old Chinese pronunciation of his name 冒頓 (*mək-tuən), and his clan Dulo with the Xiongnu ruling house 屠各 Tuge (in Old Chinese d'o-klâk). It has been suggested that his name, as Beztur, appears in the genealogy as the ancestor of Attila, in the Chronica Hungarorum of Johannes de Thurocz.

Legacy Modu Chanyu is also known as Mete Khan (particularly, Mete Han in Turkish) across a number of Turkic languages.

The Turkish Land Forces claims the beginning of his reign in 209 BCE as its symbolic founding date.

Some historians argue that Modu Chanyu (Mete Khan) was the first ruler to establish a fully developed decimal military organization, based on descriptions in early Chinese sources.

Sculptures