The Heqin Peace between the Huns and the Han (198 BC)

In 200 BC Modu Chanyu kept the Han emperor Gaozu (Liu Bang) surrounded at Baideng for seven days. The emperor barely escaped and saw how costly war with the Huns had become for China. The court official Liu Jing proposed a new course: to become kin of the Huns and send them gifts every year.

In 198 BC the proposal was formalised in a treaty. The Han court gave a girl of the imperial clan to Modu as a "princess" and undertook to send fixed amounts of silk, silk cloth, rice and wine every year. The line of the Great Wall was taken as the border between the two states. Sima Qian writes that the two sides agreed "to be brothers": for the first time the Han recognised a steppe state as its equal.

The heqin peace lasted about sixty years and later Han emperors renewed it several times. In 133 BC Emperor Wu broke it and began a long war against the Huns. The word "heqin" later became the name for every peace China made with steppe states through marriage ties.