[Market Economy Guide] Genghis Khan’s Last Wish

“He Who Builds Walls Will Perish, He Who Takes to the Road Will Prosper”

Openness and trade, where risk and opportunity coexist, are important.

Genghis Khan, who built the largest empire in human history, is said to have left behind this remarkable final injunction: “He who builds walls will perish, he who takes to the road will prosper.” There is some debate over whether this was really Genghis Khan’s exact wording. At the time, the Mongols had no writing system, so they did not even have the idea of leaving written records, which makes it impossible to know for certain whether these were truly his words. Still, there must be a reason this saying has been repeated for generations as his.

“Do Not Build Walls”

The successive emperors of the Yuan dynasty faithfully followed this final injunction of Genghis Khan and achieved great success. However, in trying not to absorb the Han Chinese culture of living by building and defending walled cities and farming the land, they sometimes went too far and brought disaster upon themselves. In order to distinguish Mongols from Han Chinese, the Yuan introduced a rigid class hierarchy in the order of Mongols, Semuren, people of North China, and people of the Southern Song. They also looked down on the people of the Southern Song, who had resisted to the very end.

Senior officials were either Mongols or Semuren, while people from North China or the Southern Song were only exceptionally appointed if they were extraordinarily talented. This discriminatory rule eventually provoked resistance, and the empire did not survive even 100 years.

Even the descendants who faithfully followed Genghis Khan’s final injunction in fact embraced only the shell of the spirit he had left behind. Building roads means moving outward toward an open world, yet the emperors of the Yuan, while pursuing roads, lived within a closed worldview that discriminated between themselves and the Han Chinese.

Rome, Which Built Roads

The Roman Empire first built roads in newly conquered territories. These were the famous Roman roads. The Romans placed great importance on transportation and supply, to the point of confidently saying, “War is won through logistics.” For that reason, road construction was indispensable for the stable defense of conquered lands as well. Roads built by the Romans were famous even in ancient times, and because they were made so solidly, some of them are still in use today. By contrast, they were not enthusiastic about building walls. Rome’s first emperor, Caesar, is said to have torn them down, declaring, “Rome will never be invaded, so it has no need of walls.” The walls of Rome that exist today were built in the late 2nd century by Emperor Marcus Aurelius to defend the city, as Rome began to decline.

In Joseon, there were no roads truly worth using anywhere. The reason seems astonishing from today’s perspective: in the event of war, roads could become routes of enemy invasion.

Because the roads were in such poor condition, carts, which were essential for transporting goods, could not be used, and naturally commerce failed to develop. The transport system in Joseon relied on itinerant peddlers carrying goods themselves. It is not as though there were no voices in the Joseon period calling for road construction on the grounds of the difficulty of transporting goods. In Yŏrha Ilgi, written by the late-Joseon Silhak scholar Pak Jiwon, the following passage appears.

Roads Are Logistics

“Vehicles for riding and vehicles for carrying goods are among the most important things for the people, so they must be studied without delay. In our country, carts have not been properly introduced, making transport difficult. As a result, people on the seacoast spread shrimp and sardines—found everywhere in abundance—on their fields as fertilizer, while in Seoul one must pay one pun for a mere handful of them, and children in the Yeongnam region do not even know what salted shrimp is. The reason the country is poor is that carts cannot travel within it. Yet the scholar-officials do not study the techniques for making carts or the methods for operating them; they merely read books.”

If walls represent safety but a closed world, roads represent danger but an open world. Roads offer humanity two contradictory possibilities: risk and opportunity. Roads facilitate transport and supply, promote commerce, and enrich a country, but just as Joseon’s rulers feared, in wartime they can also become routes for enemy invasion.

Venturing out into the world and engaging in unlimited competition may be difficult, and one may experience failure in the process. But when we consider the different destinies that awaited Mongolia, Rome, and Joseon, each of which took a different attitude toward roads, it is hard to deny that the direction we should pursue is openness toward an open society.

■ Please remember

Genghis Khan is said to have stressed that one should not build walls but instead pioneer new frontiers. The idea was that a nation prospers not by remaining in a closed world but by advancing into an open one. Rome, too, first built roads into the lands it conquered. Free trade is a kind of open road. The Republic of Korea, having left behind Joseon, where there were no proper roads, has achieved its current prosperity because it set out on roads open to the world.

Sung-no Choi, President, Center for Free Enterprise (CFE)

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Original title: [시장경제 길라잡이] 칭기즈 칸의 유언

Author: Sung-no Choi

Date: 2019-02-18

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=14&idx=11440