Kublai Khan proclaimed the Yuan Dynasty in 1271, and set about completing his conquest of the Sung Dynasty of southern China, which would eventually unite north and south China for the first time since the Sung Dynasty had split off from the Jin Dynasty almost 150 years previously. China has traditionally flourished during periods when the north and south have been united. Unification would always prove difficult over such a vast region, although the people occupying this region are, and have been throughout history, for the most part homogenous Han Chinese.20
Any consideration of Chinese history must be seen from the perspective of its long past, as well as the effect this may well have upon its future, and thus the future of world history. Effects and influences can take centuries to be understood. According to the story, when China’s twentieth-century communist ruler, Chairman Mao, was asked in the 1960s about the impact of the French Revolution, he is said to have replied, It is too early to tell.’
Subsequent sources, hampered by a similar lack of hard facts, claim that this remark was really made by his prime minister, Zhou Enlai, who was said to have been referring to the Paris 1968 Student Revolution. The Chairman Mao version better illustrates the Chinese attitude towards historical effect. Even in Chinese communism, it is possible to detect age-old Buddhist influences which coloured attitudes back through the dynasties to the Yuan period and beyond.
Unlike the previous empires we have discussed, which had their own origin myths, the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) was born out of a succession of previous dynasties. By the time of its birth, Dynastic China was already a mature culture, with a recognisable quasi-continuous history. As previously mentioned, Chinese Han civilisation evolved independently in the Yellow River basin of central China around 2,000 BC, i.e. a millennium or so after the Mesopotamian and Nilotic civilisations. Out of this Han civilisation, the legendary first Xia dynasty is said to have developed. Han rule gradually spread by ‘migration and assimilation’, which included the process of ‘sinicisation’, the adoption of the same diet, writing, language, lifestyle and general culture of the Han.
The original dynasty of a united Imperial China was the Qin Dynasty, which began in 221 BC. This covered a territory recognisable as China, stretching from the borders of modern Manchuria as far south as modern Vietnam, and west towards Sichuan. Qin (pronounced ‘Chin’) is generally recognised as the origin of the name China. This dynasty is today remembered for its founding emperor, Qin Shi Huang, who died in 210 BC leaving behind him a terracotta army, whose purpose was to protect him in the afterlife. Surprisingly, this was only discovered by accident in 1974 by some local farmers digging a well, which penetrated a vast hollow underground mausoleum.
The making of Qin Shi Huang’s mausoleum is a feat in many ways comparable to the construction of the sphinx and the pyramids. His ‘army’ consisted of over 8,000 soldiers (all with individualised features), 130 chariots and 670 horses. Its construction, along with the mausoleum itself, hidden beneath a hill-sized mound, is thought to have involved 700,000 men, drawn from all over the empire. According to Sima Qian, the father of Chinese history, writing in the ensuing century:
The First Emperor was buried with palaces, towers, officials, valuable artefacts and wondrous objects . . . 100 flowing rivers were simulated using mercury, and above them the ceiling was decorated with heavenly bodies below which were the features of the land.
For more than two millennia this was regarded as fantasy, or at best legend. And even after the discovery of Qin Shi Huang’s mausoleum, certain features of Sima Qian’s description were taken as fanciful embellishments. However, consequent archaeological investigations have revealed high levels of mercury in the soil that once obscured the mausoleum, raising all manner of questions regarding any ‘palaces, towers . . . valuable artefacts and wondrous objects’ yet to be discovered. Curiously, Qian’s original manuscript makes no reference to any terracotta army, suggesting that possibly the very existence of this unprecedented collection remained a secret from the outset, with its creators being put to death.
This too is not so far-fetched as it sounds. The other great construction dating from Emperor Qin’s reign was an early crude version of the Great Wall of China, made of locally gathered stones and compacted earth. The precise length of this wall remains unknown, as most of it has either been eroded away over the centuries or become incorporated into the present structure. Even so, it is known to have covered more than 3,000 miles.21
This certainly gives an indication of how the Chinese viewed the threat from the nomadic tribesmen who occupied the vast plateau to the north. (The Mongols would not emerge as the dominant tribe for almost another one and a half millennia.) Even more suggestive of this Chinese fear is the sheer cost of Qin’s wall. This was no great work of art, such as his intricate and wondrous mausoleum – yet where human life was concerned, the cost was if anything even greater. According to some modern historians: ‘it has , been estimated . . . that hundreds of thousands, if not up to a million, workers died building the Qin wall.’
Yet this vast expenditure of human life would be followed by the laying of the foundations of a civilisation that would, in the centuries to come, grow to equal and then excel any other civilisation on earth. It is no exaggeration to say that the Qin Dynasty created the social blueprint for most of the great dynasties to come over the ensuing two millennia (or longer, as we shall see some now argue). And how did the Qin Dynasty achieve this feat – which would in time produce an empire, in the form of the Yuan Dynasty, that was greater and more civilised than that of Rome, more artistically and technologically creative than the Caliphates?
It was the Qin Dynasty that instigated a centralised government and employed a vast civil service of scholar-officials who administered throughout the empire.This latter fact is, and remains, vital to the understanding of Chinese culture. Such a far-flung administration involved government by individual officials, rather than rule according to an established legal code. What could be termed criminal or rebellious behaviour was dealt with by penal sanctions. Yet without a universal code of law, what guided these scholar-officials in their administration of justice?
It is here that we see the pervasive influence of Confucius. Not for nothing have his teachings been characterised as the ‘philosophy of civil servants’. Confucius had died some three centuries previously, but by now his teachings had become much more than a philosophy or a religion. The Analects of Confucius, a collection of his sayings painstakingly assembled after his death by his followers, was by now widely circulated. Indeed, they had become a spiritual-ethical guidance that embodied an entire way of life.
Membership of the civil service was dependent upon a deep and rigorous knowledge of Confucian teachings. Entrance exams were particularly gruelling, with candidates locked in tiny cells containing just a writing board and a bucket, for anything up to three days. This was designed to weed out members of well-connected families, relatives of previous civil servants, and such. It ensured that entry was entirely a matter of merit. The Qin Dynasty would last for only fifteen years, making it by far the shortest of the great Chinese dynasties, yet it ‘inaugurated an imperial system that lasted, with interruption and adaption, until 1912’; the year when the last emperor abdicated and the Republic of China was established.22
So what are the teachings of Confucius, which so moulded the Chinese character? His ultimate aim was the achievement of harmony, in both the personal and civil spheres. On the personal level: ‘When one cultivates to the utmost the principles of his nature, and exercises them on the principle of reciprocity, he is not far from the path.’ Adding, in evidence of his understanding of how we actually behave, the all too recognisable: ‘What you do not like when done to yourself, do not to others.’
Yet, as with so many, he found himself forced to disregard such sentiment when it came to the practical business of administration, which is of course the imposition of power, wanted or unwanted, no matter how it is disguised. The pious Confucius commends: ‘He who exercises government by means of his virtue remains as steadfast as the north star in the sky.’ The more practical Confucius commends: ‘Pay strict attention to business, be true to your word, be economical in expenditure, and love your people.’
Buddhism, with its message of compassion and lack of attachment to this world, would arrive in China in the century following the Qin Dynasty. Initially, Confucianism abhorred its nihilistic approach, but Buddhism would eventually strike a deep chord in the Chinese national character. By the advent of the Yuan Dynasty, it had become the official religion. The reason for Buddhism’s deep accord with the Chinese is not difficult to discern. The almost casual mass destruction of human life, as noted in the Qin Dynasty for instance, would invariably be followed by a cultural resurgence, which even so contained the seeds of its own destruction. This ever-revolving wheel of fortune led to widespread uncertainties, which naturally fostered the withdrawal from worldly ambitions advocated by Buddhism.
Such cycles have been a recurrent feature of Chinese history. The two most recent examples are perhaps the most instructive. The fighting before, during and after the Second World War, lasted from 1937 to 1949 in this part of Asia. During this period China was ravaged by Japanese invasion and then civil war, both involving mass slaughter amongst the civilian population, as well as the military participants. Such was the brutality and chaos that estimates of over fifteen million Chinese deaths are usually accepted.
Yet within decades, under the communist dictatorship of the charismatic Chairman Mao Zedong, this ravaged land embarked upon the ‘Great Leap Forward’. This would ‘transform agricultural production, using people’s communes to walk the road from socialism to communism, from poverty to abundance’. In the process China would become a world superpower, capable of resisting the combined force of the Western Powers in the Korean War, even vying with the Soviet Union for the leadership of world communism.
The fact that all this contained the seeds of its own destruction came to be seen in Chairman Mao’s decision to launch the Cultural Revolution in 1966, intended to mobilise the people once more and return to the basics of ‘ideological purity’. Mao’s Little Red Book of quotations took on the role of Confucius’s Analects, and a wave of destruction was launched throughout the land. How many died during these upheavals? ‘Nobody knows, because nobody counted.’ Consequent estimates suggest that over three million people died, and 100 million people (a ninth of the population) were uprooted and displaced during this agony of self-destruction and famine, which would plague China for a decade.
Yet within forty years this devastated country had made the greatest ‘leap forward’ ever witnessed in human history, building the architectural wonder of the world in the form of the Shanghai waterfront, sending a rocket to the moon, and becoming the world’s second largest economy. All this, without the liberal social democracy and free market that was deemed essential to rapid economic growth. Whether this too contains the seeds of its own destruction – as authoritarianism of dynastic proportions coexists uneasily with a release of social mobility, energy and creativity never previously witnessed on such a scale – remains to be seen.
All of which places us in a suitable context to begin examining in detail the Yuan Dynasty, otherwise known as the Great Yuan. And why is this so? Perhaps most pertinently, the Yuan Dynasty stands in a pivotal mid-way position between the founding Qin Dynasty, and what for want of a better name might be called the Post-Mao Dynasty. At a certain point in all three of these dynasties, it could be claimed that China stood poised to lead the world. Only during the Yuan Dynasty has it actually achieved this feat.
When Kublai Khan finally completed his conquest of the Sung Dynasty in 1279, he did not follow the example of his grandfather, Genghis Khan. During the long and arduous campaign that preceded this victory, the Mongol army was not unleashed in its traditional orgy of destruction, with populations put to the sword, cities left in smoking ruins and pyramids of skulls. Kublai Khan set about sinicising himself and his rule. The capital was established in Khanbaliq (Beijing), and he graciously invited the Song Empress Dowager and her eight-year-old grandson, Emperor Gong of Song, to take up residence in the city under his protection.
At the same time, Kublai Khan embarked upon a policy of further expansion, now reaching beyond China in pursuit of a pan-Asiatic empire. Korea and Manchuria soon fell. Invasions were launched against North Vietnam and the southern Vietnamese kingdom of Champa, as well as Thai territory and Burma. To the north, his navy attacked the large island territory of Sakhalin off the east coast of Siberia. None of these territories was completely conquered, but most were forced to concede vassal status to Yuan China.
However, despite repeated attempts to invade Japan – one with a fleet of almost 1,000 ships – weather, faulty ship construction, and fierce Samurai resistance, along with inaccurate maps, all combined to thwart Kublai Khan’s ambitions. Another invasion of far-flung Java proved similarly unsuccessful, once again frustrated by bad maps.
Other cartographic enterprises proved more successful. The countries along the Silk Road were accurately mapped, with the aid of expert Islamic geographers. Similarly, the renowned Kangnido ‘map of the world’, which dates from before Admiral Zheng He set out on his great voyages, indicates that Yuan Dynasty geographers were well aware of the existence of India, Arabia and Africa – if a little uncertain about their actual shape and size.
The Mongols and their emperor, Kublai Khan, may have conquered China, but the extensive territory of which they took possession and ruled contained a far more advanced civilisation than that of the Mongols. Indeed, Kublai Khan’s first great contribution to this civilisation was simply not destroying it. Inevitably, the years of war against the Song Dynasty had resulted in widespread destruction. Indeed, the city on the site of what would become Khanbaliq had been reduced to ruins. But as part of his sinicisation process, Kublai Khan ordered a new capital to be built in the Chinese style. Initially, he and his Mongol commanders for the most part presided over their new possession, but as the years passed, the new Yuan emperor would make his own distinct contribution.
When Marco Polo arrived at Kublai Khan’s palace in Khanbaliq around 1275, several years into the new emperor’s reign, he found ‘the greatest palace that ever was . . . The hall of the palace is so large that it can easily accommodate 6,000 people.’The city itself was enclosed by walls six miles long by six miles wide. This was one of the termini of the Silk Road, and the city had separate quarters for foreign merchants of different religions. These included Nestorians (Christians of a heretical sect long since banished from Europe), Jews, ‘Saracans’ (Muslims) and even Manicheans (a Persian dualistic religion that briefly rivalled Christianity during Roman times, which the Chinese classified as ‘Vegetarian demon-worshippers’).
As this indicates, the Silk Road was responsible for the dissemination of ideas as well as trade, and it was around this period that the ideas of the Islamic philosopher-scientists began arriving in China, promulgating Aristotelian philosophy and Greek medicine. Chinese Muslim physicians became responsible for the establishment of hospitals, and Khanbaliq became known as ‘the Department for Extensive Mercy’.
Kublai Khan’s greatest domestic contribution was the dredging and reopening of China’s ancient Grand Canal, which led to a resurgence of the Chinese economy. Parts of this canal dated back as far as 500 BC, but it had not become linked up along its entire 1,000-mile length until a millennium later, before falling into disrepair during the ensuing centuries. This amazing feat of engineering remains to this day the oldest and longest artificial inland waterway in the world. When Kublai Khan reopened the canal, it stretched from Khanbaliq through the Eastern Chinese hinterland all the way to the city of Hangzhou, which 300 years earlier had been the capital of China.
When Marco Polo arrived at Hangzhou, ‘the city of heaven’, he could hardly believe his eyes. This was:
The finest and most splendid city in all the world, filled with wide and spacious waterways. On one side of the city is a lake of crystal-clear fresh water. Its shores are thirty miles long and filled with stately palaces and mansions of such splendour that it is impossible to imagine anything more beautiful. These are the abodes of nobles and magnates. At the same time there are also cathedrals and monasteries. The surface of the lake is covered with all manner of barges filled with pleasure-seekers . . .
No such city existed in Europe, or anywhere else in the world. Even Venice appeared but a pale miniature imitation. Once again, we come to the concept of sideways history, with separate regions simultaneously at different stages of historical development. In the remnant of the caliphates, Al-Andalus, the mixture of religions and learning had provided a ferment of ideas, with superb architecture such as the Grand Mosque in Cordoba and the Alhambra Gardens in Granada; but all this stood in peril from the southward advance of the Christian armies through the Iberian peninsula.
Meanwhile in the heart of Europe, the Dark Ages had long since given way to a revival of education, with great centres of learning such as the Sorbonne in Paris attracting students from far and wide, as well as a resurgence of architecture with teams of skilled artisans and stonemasons erecting gothic cathedrals in the heart of cities throughout the continent. Yet none of this compared with the splendours of Hangzhou.23
In Roman times, Europe had led the world; during the caliphates the Middle East had seen the most advanced civilisation; and now China was beginning to emerge as the world leader. But here was something utterly new. Europe and the Middle East had cross-fertilised ideas and technologies, borrowing from each other as their ships traded across the Mediterranean. China, on the other hand, was largely sui generis, developing its own ideas in isolation and retaining its secrets. Illustrative of this is the Silk Road, which was already well developed by the time it was described by Herodotus in the fifth century BC.
The raison d’être of this network of interlinked trade routes lies in its name. China had discovered how to produce silk, which became a valued luxury in the West. The manufacture of this product, which was spun by the silkworm in its chrysalis, remained a closely guarded secret. Not until the tenth century did two Nestorian monks manage to smuggle out silkworm eggs, concealed in the hollowed-out tops of their walking canes, enabling the secret to reach the West.
China was to come up with several fundamental discoveries that would remain secret, until knowledge of their manufacture seeped out to the West. In many, though not all cases, this would result in their further development, which would often change the face of world history. Paper was discovered, and the making of it developed in China, during the first and second centuries AD. It would be almost a millennium before this technique reached Europe. Similarly, gunpowder was discovered by the Chinese sometime around the turn of the first millennium AD. Its military use would soon be exploited in such weapons as ‘fire arrows’, the ‘mother of a hundred bullets gun’, and ‘thunderclap bombs’ (similar to stone grenades), whose shrapnel could inflict lethal wounds over a wide area.
Ironically, gunpowder had been discovered by Chinese alchemists searching for the elixir of life: the mythical substance that promised to preserve the life, and youth, of any who drank it. This was a persistent favourite of Chinese emperors. The first Qin emperor, Qin Shi Huang, is known to have died of ‘elixir poisoning’ in 210 BC. Elixir ingredients prepared by later imperial alchemists included ground pearl, gold leaf and other precious substances known for their incorruptibility. More ambitious alchemists introduced mercury and salts of arsenic, which had the opposite of the desired effect. Chinese alchemists’ search for an elixir of life would continue to lead the world until the eighteenth-century Qing Dynasty.
This knowledge too would spread to Europe, gaining credence amongst accomplished and susceptible physicians alike. Lorenzo the Magnificent, lying on his deathbed in fifteenth-century Florence, was administered an elixir containing ground pearl, which would later become a favourite of English Victorian physicians who catered for the wealthy. The dream of eternal life is a persistent fairy tale, which has occupied a permanent place in every great empire throughout all human history. It persists to this day in the form of cryogenics, in which a gullible plutocrat pays for his cadaver to be frozen to below -130°C, in the expectation that one day he will return to amaze his ancestors.
But back to the unfortunately more realistic infliction of death. It would be several centuries before the formula for gunpowder reached Europe, where its potential was little realised, and it would be used mainly in the production of spectacular firework displays. It was the Mongol invasion of the Middle East and eastern Europe, and the widespread use of explosive fire arrows by their horsemen, which altered this perception. Witnessing this new weapon, some unremembered inventor made a simple connection of genius, and invented the cannon.
According to the twentieth-century Arab historian, Ahmad al-Hassan, the victorious Mamlukes used ‘the first cannon in history’ at the vital Battle of Ain Jalut, which halted the Mongols in 1260. This claim remains disputed, but what cannot be disputed is the transformative effect of the cannon on military history. From that time on, the days of castles, arrows, armour, cavalry even, and all manner of military hardware, were effectively numbered. With the advent of artillery, warfare would never be the same again.24
Not surprisingly, the Chinese also invented the cannon for themselves. In 1341, the historian Xian Zhang recorded that a cannonball fired from an ‘eruptor [could] pierce the heart or belly when it strikes a man or horse, and can transfix several persons at once’. The list of cultural firsts invented, and fully developed, by the Yuan Dynasty continues to astonish. Most of these would trickle through to Europe, more or less slowly, usually by way of the Silk Road. Others would remain uniquely Chinese.
The most influential Yuan discoveries would transform Western civilisation, when they at last reached the outer world. As we have seen, paper had been invented some time previously, and the Song Dynasty had even experimented with paper money. However, it was the skilled administrators of the Yuan court who took this idea to its limit, with the introduction of a centralised system of paper currency. This could not only be printed by special wooden blocks at the Imperial Mint, but could also be used to control the economy. Never before had paper been used as the prevalent form of currency throughout the land.
Not only did these early Chinese financiers invent this form of money, but they also understood how to use it. As we have seen, previous Chinese administrations had introduced various attempts at paper money backed by silver. But the Yuan paper currency – known as Chao – was a fiat currency. That is, it was backed by nothing but government regulation, which simply said that it was worth what it was. As such, it was what is now known as fiduciary money: reliant solely upon the confidence of those who used it.25 This was no mean feat. The first attempt to introduce similar banknotes in Europe would come some 500 years later. In 1720, the Scots financier John Law would be placed in charge of the French treasury, and begin issuing paper money, an experiment that would end in disaster. (France would not accept paper currency for almost another century.)
The other great Yuan achievement was the establishment of the modern printing press. Various methods of printing had been known for some centuries previously in China, but it was a civil servant named Wang Zhen who definitively re-invented printing in 1298, with moveable wooden type containing the many characters of the Chinese alphabet. This enabled the establishment of printing presses that could mass produce entire books. Not until the following century would this method be established in Europe by Johannes Gutenberg. Precisely how much he knew about Chinese methods that had spread to the Middle East remains unclear.
Either way, this invention would revolutionise China, and then Europe, where it would be a catalyst for the Renaissance, spreading images, learning and new ideas. In Yuan China, it would bring about a transformation of culture and the arts that was uniquely oriental. Most notably this would include the development of a distinctive Chinese form of drama, the invention of the novel as a literary form, and the evolution of landscape painting as a form of poetic expression. A high point was the creation of ‘The Three Perfections’, a characteristically Chinese art form, which combined poetry, calligraphy and painting in a single work. However, the Yuan Dynasty’s most exquisite creation was the development of a blue and white porcelain, which would never be surpassed.26
A Yuan Dynasty example of the Three Great Perfections: poetry, calligraphy and painting.
But it is perhaps in science that the Yuan dynasty excelled. It would be three centuries before Galileo crystalised the scientific revolution in Europe with his realisation that ‘the universe is written in the language of mathematics’. Yet by this time Chinese scientists and mathematicians were already making discoveries that would have amazed their European contemporaries as much as Harun al-Rashid’s ornate clock had astonished the court of Charlemagne in the Dark Ages. By 1290, the Yuan astronomer Guo Shoujing had completed a calendar that calculated the terrestrial year as 365.2425 days, i.e. within 26 seconds of its present measurement. He also solved a major hydrological difficulty in the completion of the Grand Canal, and invented a host of astronomical measuring devices, which would not be superseded until the invention of the telescope.
In the light of such achievements, it comes as little surprise that the thirteenth-century Yuan mathematician, Zhu Shijie, ‘raised Chinese algebra to the highest level’. In particular, he devised a method for solving simultaneous equations with four unknowns, introduced matrix methods, as well as what we now know as Pascal triangles. Here again is a classic example of sideways history. These algebraic concepts would remain unknown in Europe until they were discovered independently some three centuries later. Chinese and European mathematics would continue to develop in parallel, yet unevenly and without contact, for many years to come.
Similar parallelism, of a more synchronous kind, can be seen in the development of the magnetic compass. The compass had been known in China since the Qin Dynasty, when it had been used for occult divination practices. Its elevation from quackery to maritime navigational use was a direct result of the Yuan scientific outlook. Meanwhile identical developments were taking place quite independently in Europe, enabling medieval sailors to venture directly across the Bay of Biscay, rather than hugging the coast. This was, of course, nothing compared to the truly astounding navigational journeys of Zheng He during the ensuing Ming Dynasty.
By the fourteenth century, the Yuan Dynasty was beginning to fall apart. In the end, its success in so many fields proved incompatible. Recall Marco Polo’s description of the lakeside shore at Hangzhou, which was lined by no less than thirty miles of stately palaces and splendid mansions. Rapid economic progress had, as ever, led to excessive benefit for the upper strata of society, meanwhile the masses remained crippled by taxes. Class conflict became inevitable. Such troubles were exacerbated by a series of natural disasters. Three times the Yellow River burst its banks, leading to catastrophic floods, famine and loss of life.
The end came with a peasant uprising, which rapidly spread from province to province.The military too revolted, and in 1368 the capital fell and a new Han emperor was installed in place of the previous Mongol incumbent. The Ming Dynasty had begun.
This too would be one of the great dynasties, though not quite as formative as the Yuan Dynasty. And it too contained the seeds of its own disaster, which would transform China for centuries to come. The Confucian scholar-officials who had been so instrumental in creating such an efficient and coordinated imperial administration had now become hidebound with rigid traditions and creeping corruption. Such an institution did not take easily to the new challenges posed by scientific inventions and pioneering exploration by the likes of Admiral Zheng He. Such things did nothing but upset the personal and civil harmony required by Confucian teachings.
By the early decades of the fifteenth century, the administration had begun to prevail upon the emperor. China isolated itself from the outside world and the scientific revolution ground to a halt. The progressive society that had led the world began to ossify. Ming vases, exquisite poetry, art and opera reached perfection. Harmony had become absolute. And static.
Sequence
By now individual civilisations had begun to evolve at several new locations across the globe. These ranged from the Songhai Empire in West Africa to the Moghul Empire in India, as well as the Rus of Ivan the Terrible, which had emerged in the Duchy of Moscow after the expulsion of the Golden Horde. Such empires developed their own characteristics, which often incorporated outside influences left behind by conquerors or imported by traders – such as the trans-Saharan caravaners, or Persian sailors navigating the southern sea lanes of the Silk Route. Other civilisations continued to exist in fragmented isolation, such as the Aborigines of Australia and the native tribes of North America.
Like the economist Friedman’s San Francisco, all stages of human development existed on the same horizontal timeline. Each of these contained their own kernel of uniqueness, yet none more so than the next empire we will consider. This would evolve its own version of sophistication, untouched by developments elsewhere. Indeed, its very existence leads us to question the inevitability, or otherwise, of human evolution.
Were we bound to become what we are? Is it in our genes, something foretold in our social interaction, something intrinsic to the very nature of society itself? What does far-flung humanity retain in common? Such questions are necessarily raised by the very existence of the Aztec Empire. The culture, mores and entire social structure of this empire, which evolved in the isolation of Mesoamerica, prompts all manner of undermining inquiry.
20 The present-day population of China is classified as over 90 per cent Han Chinese, with minorities such as the Uighur, a Turkic Muslim people, Mongols and others, making up the remainder. However, such is the populousness of China that the Uighur population consists of more than 11 million people.
21 i.e. considerably more than the distance between Los Angeles and Miami, or the length of the Roman Empire.
22 Only Judaism can claim a longer continuity; only the intermittent tradition of democracy matches its philosophical longevity.
23 It is worth emphasising here that modern sideways history is far from being confined to Milton Friedman’s San Francisco. It can be experienced by anyone who ventures beyond the confines of a twenty-first-century tropical beach resort into the previous centuries of its developing world surroundings.
Furthermore, some years ago I witnessed on TV one of the most extreme and poignant examples of sideways history. An astronomer, of Native American lineage, was working at an observatory in New Mexico. After demonstrating his telescope and its ability to detect stars billions of light-years away, he went outside onto the open-air platform. Away in the night he pointed out the fires of a Native American reservation, where they were still enacting their prehistoric rituals. ‘That is where I come from.’
24 The military mind being such as it is, this fact would take centuries to sink in. It is no surprise that Napoleon learned his trade as a lowly artillery officer, and even half a century later, many would fail to recognise the Charge of the Light Brigade as a celebration of futility.
25 All the world’s currencies are now fiduciary money. Regular over-production of banknotes, resulting in inflation and spectacular collapses in value, remind us of the precariousness of such currency. It also shows the expertise with which these pioneer Yuan Dynasty financiers handled this new form of money that they had invented.
26 Nowadays fine examples of Yuan blue and white porcelain can fetch in excess of £3 million, more even than the better-known Ming porcelain.