22

Kublai Khan and the Unification of China

Kublai Khan was the most able and perceptive ruler among all of the descendants of Genghis Khan. He is remembered for his opulent summer palace at Shangdu, described by Marco Polo, and the Xanadu of Western literature and pop culture.1 The Chinese to this day loathe and fear his memory because, alone of all the steppe conquerors, he invaded and ruled their Middle Kingdom. The Mongols do not particularly revere him as their national hero, either; this honor belongs to his grandfather, Genghis Khan. It is thanks to Marco Polo that the memory of Kublai Khan endures to this day, but for the wrong reason. Marco Polo cast Kublai Khan as an omnipotent, generous sovereign ruling the fabulously rich kingdom of Cathay, which was the destination of envious European travelers, merchants, and discoverers for centuries.2 Kublai Khan instead should be remembered as the unifier of China and the architect of the political and cultural order of East Asia today. Marco Polo, among his many anecdotes about Kublai Khan, recalls Mongol banknotes printed on paper.3 Foreign merchants arriving in Kublai’s domains had to exchange their gold and silver coins for paper money. Marco Polo was amazed that these banknotes were accepted throughout Chinese markets. Polo’s description matches the surviving notes. In 1260, Kublai Khan issued two different series of the banknotes. The first, backed by silk, failed, but the second, in two separate issues and backed by silver, succeeded. Kublai Khan devised a fiduciary currency to finance his conquest of Song China, the construction of his two capitals, Shangdu and Dadu, and innumerable projects to win his acceptance as the Son of Heaven by his Chinese subjects. He displayed a talent unique among nomadic conquerors in adapting Chinese fiscal and administrative instruments to rule and exploit his Chinese domains.4 Even though Kublai Khan spoke at most a rough colloquial Chinese and never mastered Chinese characters, he still took to heart the warning of his uncle Ögedei’s Confucian minister Yelü Chucai, namely that China could be won on horseback, but it could not be ruled from horseback.5

The Mongol conquest of Song China was the most important event on the globe during the thirteenth century. Kublai Khan united China for the first time in over four centuries, and without the unification by the Mongols, China most likely would have remained a divided land of warring realms, and so would never have emerged as the world power it is today. In his own day, Kublai Khan, as Great Khan and Emperor Shizu of China, must be credited with two extraordinary achievements. First, he forged a new imperial army, recruiting Chinese infantry, expanding the corps of engineers, and launching a fleet on the Yangtze and its tributaries that was vital for the rapid supply and movement of his army. Mongol cavalry alone, even if accompanied by a corps of Chinese engineers, could never have won the strategic war of sieges to break through Song fortifications. In contrast, Batu and Hulagu, for all their successes, waged the nomadic way of war with the imperial army forged by their grandfather Genghis Khan. Second, and even more important, Kublai Khan also departed from his grandfather’s vision of world conquest. Kublai Khan strove to win over the Chinese of the Song Empire, who numbered perhaps fifty million inhabitants. He forbade massacres to terrorize his foes into surrender, and instead courted Song mandarins, generals, and soldiers to defect to his service.6 Kublai Khan, declaring himself the emperor Shizu, postured as the Son of Heaven come to restore the empire of the Tang. Kublai Khan aimed for a single orderly world empire entrenched in China and ruled justly by the military caste of Mongols. To implement such a bold vision, Kublai Khan had to change the attitudes and institutions of both Mongols and Chinese.7 Ultimately, he failed to transmit his vision either to the Mongols or to the Chinese, but his aim was daring, even noble, so much so that Marco Polo grasped the essence of Kublai’s vision and cast the Mongol khan as the benevolent lord of Cathay.

At the kurultai summoned in 1252 to determine strategic priorities, the new Great Khan Möngke turned to his younger brother Kublai, then thirty-seven years old, to command the army that would be sent against Song China, the most formidable foe of the Mongol Empire.8 At the same time, Hulagu was to march with the other half of the national levy against the other major foe, the caliph of Baghdad. Möngke delegated well. Kublai not only could win the war but also could win the hearts of the Chinese population. Kublai, who had never served on the western expeditions, gained his military experience in the Chinese and Korean campaigns of Ögedei. Kublai long admired Chinese political institutions and cultural achievements. For over two decades, he successfully governed a subordinate realm (best characterized as an appanage) of the northern China prefectures by employing mandarin officials.9 He secured his realm by settling Chinese soldiers as farmers, who suppressed brigands and would-be rebels, and contributed to the restoration of prosperity. To his Chinese subjects, Kublai ruled in accordance with the Confucian virtues, the Mandate of Heaven, and the divine mission to promote the peace and welfare of his subjects.10

In 1253, Kublai was instructed to wage a major campaign against the Dali kingdom, which comprised the modern Chinese province of Yunnan. Since the tenth century, the monarchs of the Duan family ruled over the Bai people of Yunnan, who spoke a distinct Tibeto-Chinese tongue, but had long come under strong Chinese cultural influence.11 The Duan monarchs acknowledged as their overlord the Song emperor, who, in turn, conferred on Duan dynasts imperial titles, silk, and Chinese princesses as brides. The Duan monarchs also sponsored as the state religion tantric Buddhism since the tenth century so that they had important ties with the great Buddhist monasteries of Tibet. If Möngke were to conquer Song China, he had to control the kingdom’s capital, Dali, and highways, which offered access to the upper reaches of the Yangtze River.12 For this expedition, Kublai was assigned the best tumenler in the Mongol army, as well as numerous Chinese infantry regiments and the corps of engineers.13 Kublai also had superb generals in Bayan, from a distinguished Mongol clan that had long served the family of Genghis Khan, and Uriyangkhadai, the son of Sübetei.14 The logistics of this expedition were daunting because Kublai had to march his army of perhaps one hundred thousand men over seven hundred miles south across the rugged terrain to reach Dali on the Yunnan plateau. Kublai’s officers, however, perfected the logistics to sustain Mongol cavalry operating far from the Eurasian steppes, thereby overcoming the logistical barriers that had checked Mongol armies in Central Europe and the Middle East. In 1253, three Mongol columns converged on the capital, Dali, which surrendered immediately. Kublai appointed as vassal king Duan Xingzhi.15 Uriyangkhadai was then detached with a force to complete the pacification of the Yunnan plateau and to secure the southern frontiers as far as Tufan and Annam (North Vietnam) over the next three years.16 In 1257, Möngke was ready to move against the Song.

In October 1257, the Great Khan Möngke opened his first campaign against Song China.17 Many must have viewed the Great Khan as foolhardy, because the Mongols would invade the most densely populated region on the globe, where rice paddies, canals, and cities impeded the mobility of the Mongol cavalry. Yet he fielded ninety thousand veteran Mongol horsemen and excellent generals, foremost his brother Kublai. Möngke restricted plundering and massacres to win over the Chinese. Even so, over the next two years, Möngke and Kublai together waged a series of desultory sieges that exacted a high death toll on the Mongol armies. On August 11, 1259, Möngke died of cholera while besieging Diaoyu, a supporting fort just east of Hochwan.18 His sudden death plunged the empire into its fourth succession crisis, and the first Mongol civil war. The Mongol army was stalled north of the Yangtze River when Kublai Khan learned of the death of Möngke on September 1. He assumed that a kurultai would soon convene to elect him Great Khan, so he continued to press the war. He crossed the Yangtze in force, against the advice of his generals, and laid siege to the fortress of Ochou.19 The Song court offered a treaty, along with annual payments of silk and silver, if Kublai would withdraw north of the Yangtze, but Kublai, confident of victory, rejected the terms.20 Weeks later, in October, Kublai was surprised to learn that his younger brother Arigh Böke had rigged a hastily summoned kurultai at Karakorum to elect himself as Great Khan.21 Thereupon, Kublai broke off the campaign in China and withdrew north of the Yangtze. On May 5, 1260, Kublai concentrated his army at Kaiping (destined to be his summer palace, Shangdu), and presided over his own kurultai that proclaimed him the Great Khan.22 Arigh Böke claimed the legitimacy of a kurultai at Karakorum; Kublai, however, commanded the majority of the Mongol nation then fighting in China, even though he held the first kurultai outside the homeland.

Arigh Böke enjoyed the support of princes of the houses of Ögedei and Chagatai long resentful of their Toluid cousins with their haughty bearing and Chinese ways.23 Hulagu, however, stood by Kublai and deployed his great army to Azerbaijan to check Berke, Khan of the Golden Horde, lest he declare for Arigh Böke.24 Kublai possessed the decisive advantages of the wealth and resources of China. Kublai immediately ended trade to Karakorum so that the Mongol capital, facing starvation, welcomed Kublai as their Great Khan. In November 1261, Kublai decisively defeated Arigh Böke at Shimultai on the Chinese-Mongolian border, and he followed up with another victory ten days later on the western slopes of the Khingan Mountains.25 By these victories, followed by a severe winter, Kublai convinced most of the princes and tribes to accept him as Great Khan. Arigh Böke fled west to his ally Alghu, the Chagataid khan whose realm on the central Eurasian steppes was known as the Blue Horde, but Alghu switched his allegiance to Kublai.26 In 1263, Arigh Böke, deserted by his allies, surrendered himself to Kublai Khan at Kaiping. In a tearful exchange, Kublai forgave his brother, who retired into a gilded captivity and died three years later among rumors of poison.27 In the same year, both Khan Berke and Alghu Khan passed away. The ever-loyal Hulagu had died the year before, and his body was accorded a spectacular Mongol funeral, complete with human sacrifices, on Shahi Island in Lake Urmia (today in Azerbaijan).28 In 1266, Kublai had outlived all his brothers and cousins, and so he reigned as the Great Khan of all the Mongol domains for the next twenty-eight years. Yet Kublai Khan compromised the unity of the empire, because he conceded independence to his younger kinsmen in their domains in exchange for acknowledging him as Great Khan. But Kublai Khan was now free to pursue his strategic priority: the conquest of Song China.

With the surrender of Arigh Böke, Kublai Khan opened negotiations with the Song court in the hopes of gaining by diplomacy a formal submission and the promise of annual tribute in silk and rice.29 Kublai Khan wished to spare the imperial army from the arduous fighting in southern China. During the civil war, the Song army had recaptured the fortresses that the Mongols had taken in 1257–1259, but otherwise had accomplished little. It behooved the Song court to come to terms with Kublai Khan as had their predecessors with the Khitans and Jurchens. Song China, for all its prosperity, suffered from political weakness that greatly aided Kublai Khan. Confucian ministers controlled a vast bureaucracy and directed policy.30 They also monopolized access to the emperor, who was hard-pressed to obtain accurate information about the state of the empire. Song emperors after Xiaozong (1162–1189), proved an unimpressive lot, who lacked the will and ability to govern. Furthermore, the mandarins subordinated, distrusted, and despised the military elite because they had not mastered the canon and so could never be gentlemen of virtue. It is no surprise that many Song officers defected to Kublai Khan.31 Finally, the mandarins shared the dream of reuniting the Middle Kingdom so that they refused to come to terms with Kublai Khan. But the Song army, for all its technological advantages, was not up to the task of defeating the Mongol imperial army.

When Kublai Khan opened negotiations, a new emperor reigned in Hangzhou: the youthful Duzong, nephew and adopted son of Lizong.32 A dissipated young man, who seldom roused himself from the pleasures of his harem, Duzong entrusted governance to his senior mandarin officials, foremost Jia Sidao, a master of patronage and intrigue and the younger brother of the emperor Lizong’s favorite concubine.33 Jia Sidao as chancellor was an expert in finances, reforming land tenure, taxation, and the paper currency. He commanded widespread support among the mandarin elite and landed classes, and he refused any terms that implied the subordination of the Song emperor to a barbarian monarch. He entrusted the defense of the realm to professional officers who assured him the northern frontier was impenetrable by the northern barbarian horsemen. In 1268, Kublai Khan reluctantly resumed the war against the Song after a hiatus of seven years.

In 1268, the Song army was perhaps the most formidable ever faced by the Mongols, for it comprised thirty thousand cavalry, perhaps six hundred thousand infantry, and large river flotillas and coastal fleets.34 The Song army, while lacking experience in large-scale military operations, was more than capable of defending the long line of frontier fortresses north of the Yangtze. Although the Song court had repeatedly slashed the military budgets and neglected dredging the Grand Canal, Song garrisons were well provisioned with stores of rice and salted fish that could last for years. River flotillas could run any blockade and bring reinforcements and supplies to beleaguered garrisons. Jia Sidao thus opted for a strategy of attrition and stalemate, followed by negotiations and a treaty similar to those granted to the Khitan and Jurchen foes.35 Based on centuries of dealings with nomads of the steppes, Jia Sidao calculated that there was no reason to risk the imperial army in a decisive battle. The Mongol threat might well disappear in the usual kaleidoscopic civil wars among brothers and cousins.

Kublai Khan, however, could ill afford a war of sieges, because he needed to deploy many of his Mongol horse archers against Kaidu Khan, who contested the mastery of the Eurasian steppes.36 Therefore, Kublai Khan expanded and reformed the imperial army, recruiting tens of thousands of Chinese infantry and launching river fleets manned by his Chinese subjects and commanded by former Song officers. Finally, Kublai Khan recruited ever more engineers, notably Persians and Arabs, who constructed superior mangonels and torsion trebuchets, which could hurl the Chinese explosive shells at a far greater range and with deadly accuracy.37 Kublai Khan thus embarked on this war as the unifier rather than the invader of the Middle Kingdom, and the composition of his imperial army matched his pretensions. Kublai Khan conquered southern China with a largely Chinese army, fighting a war very different from those waged by previous conquerors of the steppes.

In 1268, Kublai Khan reopened the war by laying siege to the twin fortress cities of Fengcheng and Xianyang on the Han River, a northern tributary of the Yangtze.38 The cities were the keystone of a line of fortifications along the Yangtze that shielded the Song capital of Linan (modern Hangzhou). The well-provisioned fortresses defied Mongol assaults for over five years. So long as these fortresses held, the Song court refused to negotiate with Kublai Khan. Kublai entrusted operations to his best generals, Bayan, a veteran of the Dali and earlier Chinese campaigns, and the Song deserter Liu Cheng.39 Liu Cheng proved indispensable because of his knowledge of Song military doctrines and his own expertise in naval warfare. At his direction, the Mongol army raised fortifications to blockade the twin fortress cities, and then Liu Cheng launched a massive fleet of paddle-driven ships on the Yangtze River to intercept supplies.40 In early 1269, Kublai Khan’s flotilla repelled a Chinese relief expedition in the first Mongol naval victory.41 In the next year, Kublai Khan ordered the construction of another seven thousand ships, and this navy defeated repeated relief fleets sent by the Song court over the next three years. In December 1272, Kublai Khan finally broke the stalemate when the Persian engineers Ismail and Ala al-Din arrived, compliments of his nephew the Ilkhan Abaqa. The Muslim engineers constructed state-of-the-art mangonels and trebuchets. After a relentless bombardment of several days, the artillery breached the walls of Fengcheng.42 The Mongols stormed into the city and, out of frustration and fear (and almost certainly in violation of Kublai Khan’s orders), massacred the garrison and population. In January 1273, Bayan concentrated on the fortress Xianyang next. The Song general Lü Wenhuan held out for two months in the hopes of reinforcements that never arrived. He surrendered Xianyang on terms on March 2, 1273, and so avoided a massacre of the population.43 With the fall of Xianyang, Kublai Khan entrusted the war to Bayan, and returned to his capital, Dadu, to order his new realm. The war was all but won. Jia Sidao desperately tried to negotiate, but Kublai Khan refused any terms except unconditional surrender.44 The Mongol cavalry under Bayan, once through the network of fortresses, regained strategic mobility. In 1274–1275, the Mongol armies under Bayan overran southern China, secured the Grand Canal, and occupied the ports, thereby cutting off the Song capital, Linan.45 Numerous mandarin officials and generals surrendered and entered the service of the Great Khan. On August 12, 1274, the premature death of the emperor Duzong, a victim of his own excesses, plunged the dynasty into a succession crisis. The grand empress dowager Xie immediately put on the throne her four-year-old grandson, Gong. Jia Sidao was blamed for the defeat; he had alienated many at court for his failure to negotiate a truce or to defeat the Mongol army on the battlefield. He was arrested, stripped of office, banished, and finally quietly executed.46 Although Jia Sidao proved incompetent as a general, he had conducted bold fiscal and land reforms that had financed the cost of defense. On January 18, 1276, the grand empress dowager Xie and her grandson the emperor Gong entered the camp of Bayan outside Linan and surrendered.47 Kublai Khan generously received the young emperor at Dadu and pensioned him off as the Duke of Ying.48 Song loyalists under the chief minister Lu Xiufu fled south and organized resistance. On March 19, 1279, Lu Xiufu and the last of the Song loyalists were defeated at the naval Battle of Yamen.49 Lu Xiufu, realizing the battle was lost, took up the last Song boy emperor, Huizong, and leaped into the sea at the mouth of the Xi River in Guangdong. Kublai Khan was now the undisputed emperor of China.

Yet Kublai Khan was not satisfied with ruling the Middle Kingdom. In the later years of his reign, Kublai Khan suffered a number of humiliating defeats that shattered the aura of Mongol invincibility, because he imbibed too deeply the heady brew of Tang imperial claims. He aimed to extend his Mandate of Heaven over all the neighboring peoples who dwelled across the East China Sea on the islands of Japan and in Southeast Asia. He must have also had confidence that, if he could create an imperial army capable of conquering southern China, he should be able to launch fleets that could land Mongol armies in Japan or Java. In this endeavor, Kublai Khan failed, because his Korean and southern Chinese subjects could not construct seaworthy transports and warships.50 They were ungainly, too long, and prone to capsize in the slightest of rough weather. In contrast, the cities of the Hanseatic League in the thirteenth century launched cogs that regularly sailed the stormy North Atlantic to Iceland or Greenland.51

In 1273, Kublai Khan imposed his control over Korea, and dispatched Chinese officials to conduct a census and to assess taxes.52 Kublai Khan secured Korea as the base for constructing a fleet for an invasion of Japan. He seized as a pretext for war the murder of Mongol envoys who had demanded submission and tribute from the Shogun Hojo Tokimune.53 Kublai Khan also wished to assert the pretenses of Tang emperors as overlords of Japan long perceived as a wealthy prize. Since the seventh century, Japanese craftsmen forged the finest steel weapons of Asia, and the islands were renowned for their bounty of silk, rice, and fish.54 In 1274, the Koreans duly launched a fleet of eight hundred vessels, including numerous horse transports, which were barely seaworthy for the crossing of 110 miles to the Japanese home island of Kyushu. The expedition numbered fifteen thousand Mongol, Jurchen, and Chinese soldiers, along with eight thousand Korean auxiliaries and seven thousand Korean sailors.55 In November 1274, the expedition sailed from Korean ports to the islands of Tsushima and Iki and then landed at Hakata, the main port of the bay of the same name on the eastern shore of Kyushu.56 The Mongol cavalry, supported by artillery, easily repelled the Samurai warriors who fought as individual swordsmen on foot on November 19, 1274. In the evening, a violent storm arose, and the Koreans persuaded the Mongols to embark on the ships to ride out the storm, but the fleet failed to reach the open waters in time. Several hundred vessels were smashed against the rocky shores of Hakata Bay, and at least thirteen thousand soldiers and sailors drowned.57 Perhaps nearly 45 percent of the expedition did not return. When the surviving ships reached Korea, the dismayed Kublai Khan was determined to avenge his first defeat ever. But he was too preoccupied with his war against the Song to commit the money, manpower, and matériel for a second naval expedition.

As soon as the dowager empress Xie and her five-year-old grandson, the emperor Gong, submitted, Kublai Khan ordered the construction of a fleet in the Korean and southern ports of China. Seven years after the first expedition, in 1281, Kublai Khan launched another naval expedition totaling one hundred forty thousand men in a two-pronged invasion of Kyushu.58

A smaller fleet set sail from Korean ports; this expedition totaled forty thousand sailors and soldiers. The second expedition, reported as comprising one hundred thousand Chinese soldiers and sailors under the Song general Fan Wenhu, was scheduled to depart from the Chinese ports of Quanzhou and Suzhou and to rendezvous with the smaller expedition at Hakata on the island of Kyushu. Unknown to Kublai Khan, the Shogun Hojo Tokimune had strengthened the defenses of Hakata by constructing a wall around the entire bay.59 The expedition from the Korean ports set sail first, and landed at Munakata, just to the north of the bay of Hakata, on June 24, 1281. The larger expedition under Fan Wenhu, which had suffered repeated delays due to logistical problems, arrived weeks later at the southern end of Hakata Bay.60 The Japanese samurai held the fortifications between the two Mongol camps, and Fan Wenhu failed to fight his way to Munakata. Once again, the Mongols embarked upon their ships but failed to reach open waters to ride out a typhoon on the evening of April 15–16, 1281.61 The Divine Wind, Kamikaze, dashed the invaders’ ships against the shores. The losses in ships and men were staggering; one-third of the northern force and one-half of the southern force were lost at sea. Overall Mongol losses were light, because Koreans, Jurchens, and Chinese comprised the overwhelming majority of soldiers and sailors. Kublai Khan, however, could ill afford the setback, for he had lost face in the eyes of his Korean and Chinese subjects, who had paid the heavy costs of defeat in money and blood. Undeterred, Kublai Khan ordered a third expedition, but his ministers convinced him to abort the operation.62 Kublai Khan had simply overreached the logistical, fiscal, and military capacity of his empire. The two defeats ended hopes of Mongol sea power. For the Japanese, the gods had sent the Kamikaze, the divine wind that promised to protect Japan as inviolate forever—a conviction held by the Japanese down to 1945.

In Southeast Asia, Kublai Khan again aimed to extend his sway over lands that Han and Tang emperors had once claimed as tributary provinces. In part, Kublai Khan was lured by the Tang imperial pretenses to pursue these ill-advised wars, but also, Kublai Khan declined markedly in his health and mental faculties after the death of his beloved principal wife and empress, Chabi, in 1281.63 She had exercised a much-needed restraint on her husband, whose impulsive actions and outbursts of anger led to poor decisions. Kublai, who always enjoyed feasting, indulged himself in drink and food. He gained so much weight that he could no longer ride, but he was conveyed on a dais atop a team of elephants.64 He was afflicted by gout and rheumatism, and seldom held audiences, preferring to communicate his decisions through his wife Nambui, a distant relative of Chabi who succeeded to the role of first consort.65 He suffered yet more grievous blows with the death of his son and heir Zhenjin in 1285, and the passing of many of his senior ministers.66 For the thirteenth century, Kublai Khan at age seventy-eight had simply lived far too long, and he overreached his own capacity and that of his empire by waging wars in Southeast Asia.

Furthermore, Kublai Khan’s army was not up to the task of hacking through and fighting in the humid jungles of Burma, Annam (today northern Vietnam), Champa (southern Vietnam), or Java. Roads were few and constantly in need of repair. Foremost, Southeast Asia lacked the network of canals so vital for Mongol logistics in China. The dense jungles negated the use of cavalry, and the Mongol composite bows, because the bowstrings lost tension due to the perpetual humidity. Campaigning during the monsoons was impossible, but even during the rest of the year, soldiers were plagued by diseases, lack of potable water, and the relentless, sweltering humidity. Mongols and Chinese alike must have been unnerved by the sudden and complete darkness of the jungle with the onset of night.67 Finally, they confronted war elephants. Marco Polo, while on his first fact-finding mission for Kublai Khan, questioned participants in the ferocious frontier battle between Kublai Khan’s soldiers and the Burmese under King Narathihapate of Pagan in 1277. He reports how the Mongol horses were terrified by the scent of two thousand war elephants.68 The Mongols withdrew to the line of the jungle, dismounted, and halted the attacking elephants by releasing a hail of arrows along with missiles launched by the field artillery. In three costly wars waged over the decade of 1277–1287, Mongol armies toppled the kingdom of Pagan, but failed to impose control over northern Burma.69 Farther east during the same period, Kublai Khan waged three unsuccessful campaigns to subject Annam and Champa.70 Perhaps the most costly fiasco was the naval expedition Kublai Khan ordered in 1292–1293 against King Kertanegara of Singhasari on the island of Java.71 Kertanegara had refused to render tribute to Kublai Khan, and he had allegedly mutilated Mongol envoys. The Mongol expedition suffered from a divided command and the lack of a clear strategic objective. Upon their return to the Mongol court at Dadu, two of the three commanders, Shi-bi and Ike Mese, suffered the lash or public reprimand, respectively, along with the loss of one-third of their property. The third, Gaoxing, who had urged caution throughout the campaign, was spared and rewarded for saving the survivors.72 Yet the ailing Kublai Khan knew that he alone was ultimately at fault for the ill-advised expedition, so he later restored his disgraced generals to favor. Raden Wijaya, a Javanese prince of Singhasari, had simply outwitted and outfought the Mongols.73 He initially allied with the Mongols to dispose of his rival, and then he turned on his allies and overran the Mongol camp in a surprise attack. The survivors escaped to their ships and set sail for the port of Quanzhou in southern China. The Mongol fleet suffered further losses at sea due to Javanese attacks and storms, but it reached Quanzhou in June 1293, from which it had departed seven months earlier.74 Out of an expedition of thirty thousand men and one thousand ships, nearly two-thirds were lost. Fortunately, Kublai Khan died before he could launch a second Javanese expedition. The defeats in Southeast Asia, just like those in Japan, marked not only the limits of Kublai Khan’s rule, but also those of China down to this day.75

In 1274, Marco Polo was presented by his own father and uncle to the Mongol court when Kublai was at the pinnacle of his career. By then, Kublai Khan ruled in two capacities as both Great Khan of the Mongols and Chinese emperor under the throne name Shizu, first of the Yuan dynasty. During a reign of nearly thirty-five years, Kublai Khan juggled these two roles. His successes and failures as Great Khan and Chinese emperor mark him as the leading world figure of the thirteenth century who forever changed the course of history. In each capacity, Kublai Khan faced stiff opposition.

Although Kublai Khan won the Mongol civil war, he only ruled effectively the Mongolian homeland and China, because his younger kinsmen reigned in their domains as independent rulers in all but name. Each of the other khans pledged an ill-defined loyalty to Kublai as Great Khan, who, in return, invested them with titles, gifts, and sovereignty over their ulus. Over the course of the fourteenth century, the later rulers of these Mongol realms would inevitably part ways with the heirs of Kublai Khan. Mengu-Timur, the grandson of Batu, had supported Arigh Böke, but upon his accession as Khan of the Golden Horde in 1266, he renewed his loyalty to Kublai Khan. Mengu-Timur thereafter was free to wage campaigns in Central Europe on his own initiative and to tax the lucrative slave trade bound for Kaffa and Tana, at the ports of the Genoese and Venetians, respectively.76 Abaqa, Ilkhan of Iran and son of Hulagu, always stayed on excellent terms with his uncle Kublai Khan.77 The courts of Dadu and Tabriz exchanged polite embassies of goodwill and shared breakthroughs in military technology, medicine, astronomy, and geography, as well as spices and improvements in daily life and diet.78 Abaqa’s heirs maintained these close ties down to the end of the dynasty in the mid-fourteenth century. On the central Eurasian steppes, Kublai Khan faced a resolute foe who contested Kublai’s lordship over the Mongol nation: Kaidu Khan, the grandson of Ögedei, and his legendary daughter, the warrior princess Khutulun.79 Kaidu refused to journey to Karakorum to bow in obedience to Kublai Khan. Kaidu aimed to restore the house of Ögedei to its rightful place as the senior one among the descendants of Genghis Khan. He waged a traditional war of raids across the Eurasian steppes and northern Transoxiana against any who supported Kublai Khan. At one point, he even threatened to capture Karakorum and the sacred heartland of Mongolia. Father and daughter were warriors who sought loot, captives, or tribute to exalt their fame and to enrich their followers. Therefore, they championed the nomadic way of life and opposed the autocratic khan in Dadu, who ruled in the manner of a Chinese emperor. Kaidu never relented, and he died in 1301, seven years after Kublai’s death. His daughter Khutulun, who would have pressed her father’s cause, was denied the khanate by her jealous, less valorous brothers.80 They made their peace with Temür Khan, the grandson and heir of Kublai. Yet throughout his reign, Kublai was compelled to defend the Mongolian homeland, and he had to devise imperial policies carefully lest he alienate his Mongol subjects suspicious of their khan who favored Chinese ways.

As emperor of China, Kublai Khan learned invaluable lessons on how to turn his personal rule into a hereditary monarchy backed by an imperial army and bureaucracy that could assure an orderly transfer of power from one generation to the next. Kublai had witnessed the fundamental weakness that plagued the Mongol Empire with repeated succession crises and a civil war. Simply put, only the kurultai of the Mongol nation could elect the Great Khan. But any elections risked a civil war among brothers or cousins, each basing his claim to the throne on the principles of lateral succession. Such had been the fate of every nomadic confederacy since the Xiongnu. Kublai Khan wanted to impose hereditary succession, but he had to move cautiously lest he be perceived by the Mongols as an aspiring Chinese autocrat who had deserted the traditional mores of the steppes.81 Throughout his long reign, Kublai always paid homage to this Mongol heritage whenever he was adapting Chinese institutions or courting his Chinese subjects. He ultimately aimed to transform the Mongols into an imperial military caste, committed to maintaining and governing the empire and his rule over sixty million Chinese subjects.82

Kublai Khan needed legitimacy in the eyes of his Chinese subjects, but Chinese accounts prefer to give undue credit to the Daoist recluse and sage Liu Bingzhong for advising Kublai on what policies to pursue.83 Yet in many cases, Liu Bingzhong easily convinced a Mongol ruler who had already made up his mind. Hence, Liu Bingzhong is credited with suggesting to Kublai that he adopt the name Da Yuan, “the Great Originators,” for his new imperial family.84 The name referred to the crucial Confucian text Yijing (The Book of Changes), specifically the passage da zai qian yuan, “Great is the heavenly and primal.” Kublai Khan coupled the words Da (great) with Yuan (primal or origin) to coin the name in Chinese “The Great Originators.” This name linked the foreign emperors of the Yuan to the qian (Heaven) of that passage, making them literally “the Sons of Heaven.” Hence, the name was impeccably Chinese so that the Mongol khan appeared to be accepting Chinese values and culture even though he did so on his own terms. Henceforth, Kublai Khan reigned under the Chinese throne Shizu, and he groomed his heir, Zhenjin, the son of his principal wife and confidante, Chabi, as the next emperor of China. Zhenjin was entrusted to mandarin tutors, who inculcated in him the Confucian virtues expected of the Son of Heaven.85 The Mongol prince, while trained in the art of war, also had to master Chinese characters and the canon of Confucian classics so that he could converse and socialize with his mandarin ministers and bureaucrats. Kublai was heartbroken when Zhenjin predeceased his father by eight years. Kublai declared his son the posthumous Chinese emperor Wenhui Mingxiao, and he ordered the appropriate memorial temple tablets for his son to be commissioned in the Chinese fashion.86 Kublai then hastily promoted his grandson Temür Khan, then a young man of twenty-one, to succeed as the next Chinese emperor Chengzong.87 In each case, Kublai dictated his choice of heir to the kurultai to establish a precedent of strict hereditary succession to the khanate.

Kublai also appreciated his need for Chinese-style capitals if he were to govern the Han peoples as their emperor. Kublai never ruled from a single capital, for he, like all previous Mongol khans, toured his empire in a series of royal progresses. Instead of moving among Mongol encampments, he traveled between great Chinese-style cities. In 1252, while prince of the northern Chinese prefectures, Kublai, reportedly on the advice of Liu Bingzhong, transformed Kaiping, located in Inner Mongolia, into his summer residence, Shangdu, the Xanadu of Western poets and novelists.88 Marco Polo, who visited the city in 1275, marveled at the lake, woodlands, and pastures stocked with exotic game and fish. The inner, or “forbidden,” city of Shangdu was a paradise in the original sense of the Greek because it is comparable to similar complexes of palaces and hunting grounds of the Great King of Persia.89 Behind the walls of the inner city of Shangdu, members of the imperial family lived as a yurt, surrounded by the wagon homes (gers), where males learned the bow and the horse, and females the domestic skills necessary to survive on the steppes. Even within the Chinese-style city of Shangdu, the Mongol imperial family learned the ways of their steppe homeland. In 1266, two years after winning the civil war, Kublai Khan ordered the construction of a second, even more impressive, Chinese-style capital, called Khanbaliq (“Khan’s capital”) by the Mongols and Dadu (“Great City”) by the Chinese.90 Dadu was constructed on the site of Zhongdu, the former central capital of the Jin Empire that Genghis Khan had razed to the ground nearly twenty years earlier. At the center of its “forbidden city” was the enchanting Lake Taiye, the grandiose imperial palace and many lesser ones, and sprawling parks and hunting grounds. Dadu, although its buildings possessed many decorative elements from Eastern Iranian art, was laid out according to a Confucian grid plan, but with unusually wide avenues for grandiose parades of horsemen. Kublai Khan symbolized the move of his court from Karakorum by transferring the monumental fountain and silver tree of Möngke to Dadu.91 Marco Polo was dazzled by the city’s diverse inhabitants from every corner of Eurasia, and he enthusiastically assured his readers that golden-clad palaces were on every street corner.92 The exaggerations of Marco Polo aside, Dadu was unlike any imperial capital in Chinese history. The cosmopolitan population and architecture had no precedent. Dadu also lay far north of the traditional capitals of the Yellow River and, more important, the great cities on the Yangtze River, the heartland of Han civilization since the fifth century. Kublai Khan later ordered an extension of the Grand Canal constructed across Shandong from Jingning north to Linjing, from whence luxuries, silk, and rice from southern China could be conveyed by river transport to the vicinity of Dadu.93 The project took five years to complete and employed tens of thousands of peasant laborers. Its upkeep was a major item on future imperial budgets.

Dadu provided Kublai Khan with the palace and administrative offices where he could hold court and confer with his mandarin ministers in the guise of the Yuan emperor of China. Kublai Khan built eight temples near his palaces in Dadu, where the rites of ancestor worship were performed in the Confucian way. Within each ancestral temple, memorial tablets in Chinese ideograms were commissioned for either an ancestor or predecessors: Hoelun and Yesügei (honored together in a single temple), and Genghis Khan, Jochi, Chagatai, Ögedei, Tolui, Güyük, and Möngke.94 Significantly, his uncle Jochi and his father, Tolui, were both retroactively elevated to Great Khans, and Tolui was accorded even the Chinese temple name of Ruizong. Kublai Khan commissioned the painting of portraits of his predecessors from Genghis Khan on depicted as both Chinese sage and Yuan emperor.95 Even the most hostile of Confucian mandarins would have grudgingly acknowledged Kublai Khan’s piety. Kublai patronized the performers of Chinese theater and dance and the authors of novels, but Confucians would have dismissed these activities as beneath the higher arts of calligraphy, painting, and composing of philosophical treatises.96 Kublai Khan courted rather than exalted the Confucian mandarins, and so he could never gain their loyalty.

Kublai Khan employed Chinese officials, but he dispensed with the Song examination system. Kublai Khan based appointments on loyalty and merit, and he preferred Uyghur, Persian, and Arab officials, as well as European adventurers such as Marco Polo.97 Foremost among these ministers was his Muslim chancellor Ahmad Fanakati, who hailed from the town Fanakat in Transoxiana. Devoted to Kublai Khan, Ahmad administered the census and taxes of southern China, expanded imperial revenues from state monopolies, and cracked down on tax evasion by the landed classes.98 The Confucian mandarins despised him as the epitome of the agents of Mongol oppression, accusing him of ruthless punishments and corruption.99 Ahmad, however, was envied and hated for his success in implementing his master’s will. The revenues raised by Ahmad were largely expended on projects that promoted the welfare of Kublai Khan’s Chinese subjects. Ultimately, Ahmad ran afoul of rivals in the lurid intrigues at court, and fell victim to an assassin.100 Kublai Khan confiscated Ahmad’s vast fortune, and had charges of corruption and witchcraft retroactively lodged against the dead minister. An equally efficient, and hated, chancellor Sanga, a Uyghur by birth, succeeded.101 Yet the documentary sources record that Kublai Khan granted remission of taxes to villages suffering from the ravages of war or natural disasters. He lessened the harsh penalties meted out to peasants under Chinese law, and he sponsored numerous public projects to promote trade and agriculture.102 The Neo-Confucians, especially of southern China, resented the loss of their primacy. Many refused service under Kublai Khan, and preferred to retire to private life, where they pursued painting, calligraphy, and the writing of philosophical and moral treatises. Mandarins who found their way to the Mongol court would have been scandalized by the gargantuan feasting and heavy drinking. Marco Polo delights in reporting these ostentatious feasts hosted by Kublai Khan, with generous plates of meat and freely flowing qumis, rice wine, mead, and even imported grape wine.103 Guests dined to the sound of the heavy rhythm of Mongol music, repetitive to Chinese ears, followed by acrobats and dancers rather than a refined Chinese opera. To mandarins of Song China, Kublai Khan, for all of his veneer as Chinese emperor, behaved as an uncouth barbarian in his personal habits. Those mandarins who did take service with Kublai Khan had to compete for the Yuan emperor’s favor with barbarians who spoke no Chinese. They resented the fact that their mastery of the Confucian canon, possession of the jinshi decree, and political connections at court no longer assured them and their families the high office and privilege that they saw as their birthright. Many must have served Kublai Khan out of a sense of resignation, for they had no other option once the Song were gone.

Although Kublai Khan respected Confucianism and Daoism, he tolerated all the faiths of his empire. He particularly protected the legal status of Muslim medresses and mosques since so many of his top ministers were Muslims.104 Nestorian Christians believed that he would embrace Christ. Marco Polo too clung to high hopes that the Great Khan was on the verge of converting to Catholic Christianity.105 Kublai Khan was at heart an eclectic monotheist in his beliefs. He revered Tengri of the eternal blue sky, and, significantly, he preferred to be laid to rest with the traditional rites of his ancestors and in the sacred land beneath the sacred mountain Burkhan Khaldun.106 He also leaned toward Buddhism, because he could easily reconcile his animist faith with the teachings of the Buddha. In 1260, Kublai Khan appointed the ascetic monk Drogön Chögyal Phagpa as guoshi or minister over the Buddhist monasteries of Tibet, Mongolia, and the northern Chinese prefectures.107 Five years later, Kublai Khan expanded the competence of Drogön Chögyal Phagpa to include the imperial administration of Tibet. Under the direction of Drogön Chögyal Phagpa, the hierarchy of the Sakya School ruled Tibet in the interests of the Yuan dynasty, and forged close links with many Mongol princes, who embraced Buddhism and generously showered their patronage on Tibetan monasteries. Kublai Khan’s policies favorable to Buddhism would ultimately align Mongolia spiritually and culturally with Tibet. Finally, Kublai Khan turned to his spiritual mentor Drogön Chögyal Phagpa to devise a phonetic alphabet known today as the “Square Script” for writing Mongolian. Kublai Khan aimed to bestow literacy upon the Mongols, who in time would create their own literature written in their own distinct alphabet.108 The new alphabet of forty-one letters was intended to replace the Uyghur one, which was ultimately derived from the Aramaic script, and the Chinese ideograms that had previously been used to render Mongolian. Kublai Khan learned from his Chinese officials the power of literacy in keeping records. Kublai Khan, however, deliberately chose not to use Han characters, in contrast to previous Liao, Jin, and Xi Xia emperors who employed scripts based on Chinese characters. Kublai Khan wanted future Mongols to create their own literary culture rather than be assimilated into the Chinese one. Therefore, Kublai Khan ordered that his decrees and laws be promulgated in Mongolian, and translations into Mongolian be made of many Chinese works, especially manuals on practical subjects. He erected monumental inscriptions of his edicts in Mongolian followed by a Chinese translation, to the horror of the Confucian mandarins.109


Throughout his reign, Kublai Khan feared assimilation. He depended on one hundred fifty thousand Mongols and foreigners in his service to govern a Chinese population of sixty million, of whom fifty million resided in the former Song Empire. From the start, Mongol rule bred resentment among mandarins and Chinese peasants alike. Despite all of Kublai Khan’s efforts to promote the peace and prosperity of Chinese merchants, craftsmen, and peasants, he never won their loyalty, but rather a tacit resignation because there was no other option to his orderly rule. Chinese secret societies plotting to overthrow Yuan rule proliferated with the death of Kublai Khan.110 Zhu Yuanzhang, a Buddhist monk of one such secret society, raised a great rebellion and expelled the Mongols in 1368.111 Under the throne name Hongwu, he proclaimed a new Ming dynasty, razed the palace at Dadu, and built over its ruins the new Chinese capital, Beijing. The Mongols fled back to their homeland and would never again challenge China. The Ming emperors made sure of this by rebuilding the Great Wall with brick and stone, not so much as a barrier but as a monument to fear and loathing of the Mongols, the only nomads who had ever dared to rule China.112