The Mongol Empire: Genghis Khan, his heirs and the founding of modern China

by John Man

  And there was so much more to be conquered. It was time to look south again, for without the rest of China there would be no world rule.

  fn1 Golden because Genghis’s family was the ‘Golden Clan’, and Horde because the Mongolian ord (or ordon, in an alternative form) meant a palace, which back then was a tent used as a palace. Originally, the Golden Horde was the gold-decorated palace-tent at the heart of Batu’s (Berke’s brother’s) camp.

  fn2 Stephen Karcher, Total I Ching: Myths for Change.

  15

  A NEW CAPITAL

  BEIJING WAS NO one’s first choice as a capital – too far North, no good rivers – until the Mongols’ predecessors, the Jin, invaded from Manchuria in 1122. With the Song ruling southern China from Hangzhou, it was the northerners from outside the Chinese heartland who made Beijing a capital, and drew Genghis’s attention.

  The city that the Mongols seized and devastated in 1215 was small by modern standards, a square of 3.5 kilometres per side standing south-west of today’s Tiananmen Square. In 1260, it had still not recovered from the destruction meted out by Genghis’s army. No doubt the sights and sounds of medieval Beijing would have returned to its alleyways: travelling barbers twanging their tuning forks to signal their arrival, soft-drink sellers clanging their copper bowls, the day- and night-watchmen sounding their bells, street vendors yelling everywhere. But the walls and the burned-out palaces were still in ruins.

  Kublai had several options. He might have ignored Beijing and ruled from Xanadu. But if he did that he would declare himself forever an outsider. Seeing the benefits of governing from a Chinese base, he might have chosen to revive an ancient seat of government, like Kaifeng or Xian. But Beijing had a major advantage: of the many possibilities for a Chinese capital in the north, it was the closest to Xanadu and to Mongolia. In 1264, only eight years after building Xanadu, Kublai decided to make Beijing his main capital. He would abandon Karakorum and commute between his two bases, spending summers in Xanadu and winters in Beijing, which was his way of straddling his two worlds. That’s why Beijing is China’s capital today. Mongol traditionalists never forgave him, and some today still regard him as a traitor.

  How best to handle this dilapidated piece of real estate? Incoming dynasties have often made their mark by total demolition and reconstruction (as the Ming would do to Mongol Beijing). But the ancient alleyways, as Kublai’s advisers pointed out, were seething with resentment. Kublai decided on an entirely new capital.

  Just north and east of the Jin capital was a perfect site, where runoff from the Western Hills fed Beihai (the North Lake), which for thirty years before the Mongols arrived had been a playground for the wealthy. The 35-hectare lake had been created by the Song 300 years before, and then in the twelfth century chosen by the Jin emperor as the site of his summer palace, with a second retreat on top of today’s Jade Island, the city’s highest point (now crowned by the seventeenth-century White Dagoba, Beijing’s equivalent of the Eiffel Tower). The imperial buildings had been ransacked when Genghis assaulted Beijing, but the lake was still at the centre of the abandoned and overgrown park. This would be the heart of the new city.

  It would be thoroughly Chinese, starting virtually from scratch. After fifty years of neglect, imagine the lake choked with silt and plants, summerhouses decaying around its edges, and here and there smallholdings where farmers had dared colonize the once-royal parkland. With saplings and bushes cleared, an imperial camp sprang up: a royal area of several grand gers, lesser establishments for princes and officials, hundreds more for contingents of guards, grooms, wagoners, armourers, metalworkers, carpenters and other workers by the thousand, including, of course, architects.

  Overall authority for the design was borne by Liu Bingzhong, the architect of Xanadu. But among his team of architects was one of particular significance, who is not mentioned in the official Chinese sources, for he was an Arab named something like Ikhtiyar or Igder al-Din (a rough re-transliteration from the Chinese version of his name). That we know of him at all is due to a Chinese scholar, Chen Yuan, who in the 1930s came across a copy of an inscription dedicated to Ikhtiyar’s son, Mohammad-shah. Ikhtiyar had, presumably, proved his worth in Persia after the Mongol conquest a generation before, for he was summoned to head a department in the Ministry of Works and become an expert in town planning. In his old age, he was selected to mastermind Kublai’s grand new scheme. As the inscription says, ‘The services of Ikhtiyar al-Din were highly appreciated, but he was beginning to feel the weight of his advancing years.’

  Yet in the official Yuan history, Ikhtiyar’s name is omitted, his three Chinese junior colleagues alone being mentioned. Possibly this was deliberate racism. Kublai, like his grandfather, was happy to engage talent wherever he found it, but his Chinese officials might not have been. An Arab employed by Mongols showing Chinese how to build a Chinese city! It looks as if the official historians simply wrote Ikhtiyar out of the story, until Chen Yuan rediscovered him.

  Kublai founded his new capital with a temple honouring his ancestors in Confucian traditions, thus showing himself to be both a good Mongol and a good Chinese. The temple’s eight chambers commemorated great-grandparents; Genghis himself; and Genghis’s sons. Genghis also acquired a Chinese ‘temple name’: Taizu (Grand or Highest or Earliest Ancestor), a title for dynastic founders. It was Kublai, therefore, who gave Genghis his Chinese credentials and thus founded the widespread belief amongst Chinese today that Genghis was ‘really’ Chinese.

  All of which explains why Beihai Park, once a playground for emperors and princes outside the old walls, is today a playground for everyone, right at the heart of the city. For this, Beijingers, pick-nicking on its banks and paddling its rowing boats, owe Kublai some gratitude. It was he who turned it into an Arcadia that is now a tourist pleasureground, he who first built a bridge across to Jade Island and landscaped its slopes with rare trees, winding staircases, temples and pavilions.

  The city would have the three-in-one form of previous Chinese capitals, notably Changan (today’s Xian), the Tang capital in the seventh to tenth centuries – palace, inner city and outer city nestling inside each other. In its day, Changan/Xian had been the greatest city in the world. This was the mantle of power and glory to which Kublai now laid claim, creating the city known as Da-du (Great Capital), or informally by its Mongol-Turkic name, Khan-balikh, the Khan’s City (or Cambaluc, as Marco Polo spelled it).

  In August 1267, several thousand workers started to build ramparts over the hills and along the three winding rivers. They used earth, not stone, digging out a moat for the raw material. The 382 smallholders who had moved into the area were thrown out, with compensation. After a year, rammed-earth walls 10 metres thick at the bottom rose for 10 metres, tapering to a 3-metre walkway at the top, making a rectangle measuring 28 kilometres all the way around, punctuated by eleven gates. Inside, a second wall rose to conceal the Imperial City, and inside that a third wall, within which in due course would lie the palace and its attendant buildings.

  From March 1271, 28,000 workers began to build the Imperial City’s infrastructure, setting out a network of right-angled roads, Manhattan-style, each block the property of a top family, complete with its grand house. At the heart, off-centre, just to the right of Beihai Lake, was the palace, which was ready enough in 1274 for Kublai to have his first audience in the main hall, though work continued for the rest of his reign. The palace and its gardens were surrounded by 10-metre walls that linked eight fortresses. Beneath the trees – rarities carried in from distant parts by elephants – grazed deer and gazelle, overlooked by walkways, which were gently slanted so that the rain drained away before it could soak aristocratic feet. The palace, with a roof of red, yellow, green and blue tiles, was a single storey, with a vast central hall where 6,000 dinner guests dined beneath animal frescoes set off by gold and silver decorations.

  Eventually, when all China fell to the Mongols, this would become the capital of the whole united nation, a
nd so it has remained. The heart of today’s Beijing, the Forbidden City, was built right over Kublai’s creation – destroyed after the end of Mongol rule – its entrance facing south, like the door of any Mongolian tent. The 800 palaces and halls, the 9,000 rooms, the entrance from Tiananmen Square – all these are where they are because Kublai chose to place his palace there.

  Kublai now had a theatre in which to stage epic displays of power. Autocrats have always known that power and display go together. Underneath the different rites lie fundamental similarities, asserting the stability of the state, its power over the individual, the importance of the power structure, the legitimacy of the ruler, and the ruler’s superhuman qualities, connecting him (or occasionally her) with the divine. One piece of theatre that crops up in several societies is the ceremonial hunt, which symbolized the benefits of collective action.

  Kublai, smart enough to see the advantages of ritual but with no experience in their form, had teams of advisers to guide him. There were precedents galore, notably an immense three-volume corpus of imperial rituals recorded half a millennium before during the Tang dynasty (618–906), when China was unified, rich and stable.fn1 Tang scholars believed these rituals originated in remote antiquity, some 2,000 years BC, and were then modified by the introduction of Confucian, Buddhist and Daoist practices. The 150 rituals, the symbolic essence of government, combined cosmology and ethics in rules for sacrifices to the gods of heaven and earth, of the five directions, of the harvest, sun, moon, stars, sacred peaks, seas and great rivers; to ancestors; to Confucius. There were rites for the sovereign for receiving and entertaining envoys, for victories, for the marriage of dignitaries, for investitures, for coming-of-age ceremonies, for bad harvests, for illness and for mourning, and variations of all these, depending on whether they were conducted by the emperor or a proxy, and for every rank of official from the emperor down to those of the Ninth Grade.fn2 Rules specified the tents, the musical instruments, the position of participants, and the words of prayers for any and every occasion. The rituals had their own huge and complex bureaucracy, with four departments – for sacrifices, imperial banquets, the imperial family and ceremonies for foreigners – and a Board of Rites within the Department of Affairs of State. These demanded hundreds of specialists; but all the 17,000 scholar-officials of all the other departments were expected to have intimate knowledge of particular rituals in their own areas of expertise. This immense, vastly expensive and horribly cumbersome apparatus was considered absolutely vital to the workings of the state. If Kublai wanted to be taken seriously as a Chinese ruler, this was what he had to take on board.

  So, in late middle age, Kublai displayed and regimented for all he was worth, which was more than any ruler on earth at the time and, by Heaven, he knew how to use his wealth to raise himself from man to monarch, from monarch to demi-god.

  His power base at court, through which his influence spread over China and beyond, was his keshig – his 12,000-strong court of family, officials and officers, all of whom had at least three different sets of clothing, each a less lavish match for Kublai’s own costumes, one for each of the three main state occasions: the khan’s birthday at the end of September, New Year’s Day and the annual spring hunt.fn3

  Take New Year’s Day. This was a festival designed to emphasize both Chinese and Mongol credentials. Kublai’s court ceremony mixed simple old private rituals with Chinese court festivities to create a celebration of gargantuan proportions. Marco Polo describes it. Thousands dressed in white, all in due order behind the royal family, overflow from the Great Hall into surrounding areas, 40,000 of them, though we must always remember his habit of tossing out suspiciously large round numbers. A high official of some kind – top shaman, Buddhist priest or senior chamberlain, Marco is not sure – calls out ‘Bow and adore!’ and the whole assembly touches forehead to floor, four times, in a mass kowtow. A song follows, then a prayer from the minister: ‘Great Heaven that extends over all! Earth which is under Heaven’s guidance! We invoke you and beseech you to heap blessings on the Emperor and the Empress! Grant that they may live ten thousand, a hundred thousand years!’ Then each minister goes to the altar and swings a censer over a tablet inscribed with Kublai’s name. Officials offer presents of gold, silver and jewellery, many of them in eighty-one examples, being the doubly auspicious number of nine times nine. Treasures are displayed in coffers mounted on richly adorned elephants and camels.

  Then comes the feast. Kublai, with his chief wife, Chabui, on his left, sits at the high table, which is literally high, placed on a platform. On his right, on a level about half a metre lower, are the princes and their wives. To one side is a huge buffet table, decorated with animal carvings. The centrepiece is a golden wine-bowl the size of a barrel with four dispensers, from which servants draw wine into golden jugs. Down the hall range ranks of small tables, several hundred of them, flanked by carpets on which sit the guards and their officers. To one side of the dais is an orchestra, its leader keeping a close eye on the emperor.

  Polo mentions an odd element in this scene, something that recalls Kublai’s nomad roots. Even today, when entering a ger, you must take care to step right over the threshold, the bottom bit of the door-frame, without touching it. If you kick the threshold by mistake, it is a bad omen; on purpose, it’s an insult. So at each door stand two immense guards armed with staves, who watch for infringements, with orders to humiliate those who infringe, stripping them of their finery or giving them some nominal blows with a stave. Once everyone is seated, the banquet begins, with those at tables being served by butlers. The khan’s butlers ‘have the mouth and nose muffled with fine napkins of silk and gold, so that no breath or odour from their persons should taint the dish or the goblet presented to the Lord.’

  The Lord graciously receives a cup from a butler. The orchestra proclaims the significance of the moment. The cupbearers and the foodbearers kneel. The Lord drinks. When he deigns to accept food, same thing. These observances punctuate the feast, until the end, when the dishes are removed and it’s time for entertainment, a cabaret provided by actors, jugglers, acrobats and conjurors.

  Kublai’s new Beijing was the centre of hunting on an industrial scale, the countryside out to 500 kilometres – forty days’ journey, as Marco says – in every direction being dedicated to the business of supplying the court and controlled by a 14,000-strong army of huntsmen. All large game was the emperor’s: boar, deer, bear, elk, wild asses, wildcats of various species. For his own hunt, Kublai had a zoo of hunting cats, cheetahs and tigers specially trained to catch and kill larger prey. Eagles, too, were trained and deployed by Kazakhs to hunt not just hare and foxes, but deer, wild goats, boar, even wolves.

  Marco Polo tells us all about the spring hunt, which was of such staggering size and opulence that it is easy to forget its underlying purpose. Hidden beneath Chinese wealth lie Mongol roots, the old idea of disparate clans united under one leader. The palaces and much of Beijing empty into wagons by the hundred, on to horses by the thousand. For Kublai himself, four elephants are harnessed together, carrying an enormous howdah, a room made of wood, lined on the inside with gold leaf and dressed outside with lion-skins. A dozen senior aides ride beside him in attendance. There are 2,000 dog-handlers and 10,000 falconers, so Marco says, each with his bird (though the figures are to impress rather than to be exact).

  The emperor makes stately progress on his elephants, say 20 kilometres a day, arriving every evening at a campsite that is a tent-city. Along the way, birds of many species scatter and soar from their new nests. ‘Sire! Look out for cranes!’ exclaims a high official, and the emperor releases a gerfalcon. Sometimes dogs are used, huge mastiff-like creatures trained by handlers known as ‘wolf-men’. And, in Marco’s words, ‘as the Lord rides a-fowling over the plains, you will see these big hounds coming tearing up, one pack after a bear, another pack after a stag, or some other beast.’

  A nineteenth-century illustration of Kublai’s howdah. Originally, thi
s seems to have been a travelling HQ in war. This version acted as a hunting lodge. In Marco’s words, ‘The Emperor himself is carried upon four elephants in a fine chamber made of timber, lined inside with plates of gold, and outside with lions’ skins.

  After a week, Kublai’s elephants bear him into the camp that will be the court’s HQ for the next three months. It is a traditional spot, chosen for its broad expanses and wealth of game. Falconers and hawkers, with their hooded birds on their wrists and bird-whistles at the ready, scatter for several kilometres in all directions. His three tents are ready – a huge one which can hold a whole court of 1,000 people, sleeping quarters and a smaller audience chamber. All are weather-proofed with tiger-skins and lined with ermine and sable, the most valuable of Siberian furs. Spread out all around are the tents of the royal family, Kublai’s senior wife, Chabui, the three subsidiary wives, the princes, the girls from the Ongirat (the Mongolian clan that traditionally supplied Genghis’s family with mates) brought in for the harem, and the tents of the senior ministers, the attendants, the falconers, grooms, cooks, dog-handlers, household staff, secretaries, all with their families, and all of course protected by contingents of soldiers.

  Meanwhile, the business of the court continues, with conferences and audiences and messengers coming and going and ambassadors from abroad. So it continues until mid-May, when the immense operation reverses itself, bringing emperor and entourage back to the capital, where, as the summer begins to build, preparations start for the three-week haul to Xanadu.

  This was another equally immense operation. It involved scores of carriages and hundreds of retainers shepherding the emperor on his elephants like some travelling hive tending a queen bee. The 400 kilometres were divided up by twenty walled and gated towns, each staffed year round, ready for the 24 hours in spring and autumn when the imperial train came through. Most of these way-stations have vanished, but four are still visible, in the form of low ridges and faint squares. One of them, Huanzhou, is clear enough on Google Earth (42.15 N, 115.58 E). It’s a smaller version of Xanadu, which lies 20 kilometres away – living evidence of the distance covered in a day by Kublai’s entourage and of the cost involved. Twenty small towns, each in use for just two days a year. All because the emperor needed to commute between his two worlds, Mongolia and China, the Old and the New.