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

by John Man

  fn1 David McMullen, Bureaucrats and Cosmology: The Ritual Code of T’ang China, in Cannadine and Price (see Bibliography).

  fn2 The Central Secretariat (civil service) had nine ranks or grades, each divided into Senior and Junior, making eighteen levels that assigned status and determined preference, deference, salary and other perquisites.

  fn3 The number of these occasions rose in the sources with the passage of time, often to four, sometimes to twelve or thirteen (trois and treize/tres being easily interchanged in versions of Marco Polo’s Travels.

  16

  EMBRACING TIBET, AND BUDDHISM

  UNHAPPILY FOR THOSE who wish it were not so, Tibet is part of China: threatened, dominated, invaded, colonized, occupied and developed out of any possibility of regaining its independence. Or gaining it, as China officially says, arguing that Tibet was part of China since China became China. When was that exactly? It depends how far back you wish to go and what you mean by ‘China’. But one answer lies 750 years ago, when the Mongols took control of Tibet and made it part of their empire.

  Up until the early thirteenth century, China had no claims on Tibet. The opposite: Tibet had at one time ruled half of present-day China. Many accounts say that Chinese, or rather Mongolian, involvement with Tibet started with Genghis’s coronation in 1206, which was enough to inspire Tibet to tender voluntary submission. Not so, as Luciano Petech states in the most authoritative recent analysis.fn1

  To understand the development of the link between Tibet and Kublai’s China demands backtracking some twenty years.

  The first step was taken in 1239, by Ogedei’s second son, Köten, who, after campaigning in Sichuan, settled on the Tibetan borderlands not far from present-day Wuwei. He invaded the next year, damaged a monastery and killed 500 men. A Mongol general, a Tangut named Dorta, was keen to proclaim Mongol authority by carrying the abbot away with him, but the abbot pointed him towards his superior, the sixty-two-year-old head of the Saskya monastery (Sakya, as it is today), the other side of Lhasa, not far from the Nepalese border. The death of Ogedei briefly delayed things, but in 1244, a rather pressing invitation arrived for Saskya Panditafn2 from Köten. ‘I need to have a master to tell me which path I should take. I have decided to have you. Please come in total disregard of road hardships.’ If he made excuses, troops would be sent to fetch him. With little choice in the matter, the lama started a journey of 1,700 kilometres from Saskya to Wuwei, across some of the toughest landscapes on earth, accompanied by two nephews, aged nine and seven. He arrived at Köten’s base in 1246, only to find the Mongol absent, attending the election of Guyuk as the new emperor. On Köten’s return, the two agreed that the lama would act as the Mongol agent in Tibet. The lama wrote to various Tibetan leaders suggesting they cooperate: ‘There is only one way out, which is to submit to the Mongols.’ To seal the pact, the lama’s seven-year-old nephew was married to Köten’s daughter. As Petech says, by this agreement ‘Köten laid the foundations of Mongol influence in Tibet’, the influence that one day China would inherit.

  Now three deaths occurred in quick succession: the new emperor Guyuk, Köten and the senior lama. The next emperor, Mönkhe, eager to assert his rights in the area, sent troops into Tibet, with attendant destruction. He and several princes assumed the patronage of a number of Tibetan sects. One of the princes was Kublai, who thus found himself competing for influence in Tibet with, among others, his brothers Mönkhe, Hulegu and Ariq.

  Kublai now made a small gesture of immense significance. He was still a prince, still under the thumb of his brother Mönkhe, but with ambitions to extend his rule in north China. Kublai had already realized that he needed to balance his Chinese Confucian and Daoist advisers with a strong Buddhist one, and by happy chance one of the late Saskya lama’s two nephews was at a loose end in Köten’s HQ. His name was something that looks totally unpronounceable to Westerners, Blo-gros rGyal-mtshan, but he would shortly acquire a title, Phags-pafn3 (Noble Guru), which is how he is known. The boy was a genius, and even as a teenager became hugely influential. Kublai invited the eighteen-year-old Phags-pa to court. It suited them both. The boy was grateful to have a sponsor in a chaotic world; for Kublai, this young priest could be the key to Tibet and to a religion that could offer many political advantages.

  In 1258, Kublai, about to declare himself emperor, found in his new faith a rather better justification for conquest than he had inherited from his grandfather. Genghis’s heirs believed that the world had been given to them by Heaven. Genghis himself had moved beyond conquest to government, with a script, laws and a bureaucracy. Kublai, inheriting an empire that he planned to expand to infinity, needed much more: he had to legitimize his rule not only to Mongols and Chinese, but also to any other culture that would become part of the empire in years to come. Phags-pa revealed that Buddhism could give him what he wanted, offering something that did not exist in Chinese religions, or Islam, or Christianity. It was the concept of the ‘universal emperor’, the chakravartin-raja, who ruled over all and ‘turned the wheel of the Law’. Here was an ideology that justified world conquest and world rule.

  Phags-pa sealed his position when, in 1258, he took part in the debate in Xanadu set up by Kublai between Buddhists and Daoists, coming down, of course, firmly on the Buddhist side. This left him in a strong position when Kublai had himself declared khan in 1260. In 1261, Kublai gave Phags-pa – at the age of just twenty-six – the title of State Preceptor and made him the supreme head of the Buddhist clergy in his Chinese domains.

  Kublai set out his new policy in a decree known as the Pearl Document. ‘Although it is necessary to act in accord with the Law of Genghis Khan, which embodies all the best qualities of this world,’ he had ‘perceived that the path of Buddha Shakya Muni is the true one’. Therefore he appointed Phags-pa head of the ‘entire confraternity of clerics’, who were exempted from military service, taxes and postal-relay services.

  This was revolutionary, since it specified the union of church and state, of secular and ecclesiastical. From now on, Mongol rule would be based on these so-called Two Principles, embodied in the Teacher (Phags-pa and his successors) and the Khan (Kublai and his heirs). This new ideology was re-expressed in a document known as The White History. ‘If there is no spiritual power,’ it said, ‘then creatures will fall into hell, and if there is no royal power, then the state is ruined.’ Kublai, with the support of his ‘sagacious friend’, would become head of both church (Buddhist, of course) and state, the fount of worldly welfare and spiritual salvation.

  There was a problem: who was the true head of state – the Buddhist emperor of China or his Tibetan mentor? The question provoked a long discussion in Xanadu. Phags-pa made his precocious case: ‘You ought to pray to the lama in person, and heed what the lama says.’ No, said Kublai, that was not suitable. It was Kublai’s wife who found a middle way, at the same time in effect granting Tibet autonomy within the growing empire. In a small assembly, the lama could sit ‘in the middle’ – that is, exercise authority. In a large assembly, ‘to avoid disobedience, let the Khan sit in the middle. Let him act in affairs of Tibet according to what the lama blesses. Let the Khan issue no orders without having declared them to the lama. But in other affairs, large and small, let him not conform to the lama’s words.’ Both agreed, and Phags-pa initiated Kublai into the rites of the highest deity of Lamaism, Hevajra, whose cult centred on Phags-pa’s own Saskya monastery.

  And that opened the way to a world of spirits, in particular to a terrifying, black-faced, six-armed, skull-covered guardian-deity named Mahakala, revered by millions across Asia as the ‘Great Black One’. He is sometimes a manifestation of Shiva, the Destroyer, sometimes one of Shiva’s attendants. Like most Buddhist gods, he varies from culture to culture. In any event, it’s better to have him onside. Kublai adopted him as a ‘tutelary deity’, in the words of the eminent Mongolian historian Shagdaryn Bira. Kublai could ‘pretend to have acquired all his mysterious powers in the cause of ruling
his empire. Thus the Mongolian khan could enjoy not only the favour of Tengri, but also the favour of the powerful Tantric god.’ You can see him today portrayed in a shrine in the only Yuan-dynasty building left in Beijing, the White Pagoda (built by a Nepalese architect, Aniga, in the 1270s to commemorate Kublai’s commitment to Buddhism).

  Did Kublai really believe the religion he had taken on? I don’t think so. It was too neat, too carefully considered, too political. He displayed none of the fire of the new convert, no fundamentalist drive to impose his beliefs on his people or on foreigners. There was too much of his mother’s shrewdness in him for that. What he needed was a strengthened Buddhist church to balance the demands of Daoists, Nestorian Christians and Confucians. Later, when two European merchants, the Polo brothers, turned up in Xanadu, the same agenda would lead him to suggest that they should go home, contact the Pope, and bring him some Catholic priests. Instead they brought him one of their sons, the young Marco Polo, with totally unforeseen consequences which will emerge later.

  Soon after his ‘conversion’, Kublai sent Phags-pa home as abbot of the Saskya monastery, along with his younger brother. Most of Tibet being far beyond Mongol reach, they were supposed to establish Kublai’s sway over the whole country – ‘control without conquest’, as Igor de Rachewiltz puts it in his biography of Phags-pa.fn4

  This was not so easy. Locals objected, apparently seeing in Phags-pa not so much a brilliant young mind as a turncoat who had adopted Mongol clothes and manners. The whole project almost foundered when his brother died in 1267, aged twenty-nine. Kublai sent an army from Qinghai, which cowed the opposition and established a Pacification Bureau that would run the country as a secular authority. Politically, Phags-pa was sidelined, spending the next few years engaged on a task which we shall get to in a moment. By 1269, Tibet was an integral part of Kublai’s empire, where it remained for the next eighty years, until the Mongol empire fell apart.

  Meanwhile, Kublai had had a startling cultural insight. He had identified a problem that sprang from the nature of Mongol achievements, and from his own ambition; and he wanted Phags-pa to provide the solution.

  As we’ve seen, Kublai grew up in two worlds, Mongol and Chinese. He spoke Mongol, but struggled with Chinese. His problem was this: how to make written records that spanned these two worlds, and others yet to come?

  Mongolian had a fine vertical script introduced on Genghis’s orders from his new vassals, the Uighurs. It was an alphabetical script, which means it could represent most sounds in most languages fairly well. Chinese script, though beautiful and expressive, is infinitely more complex, and has tremendous cultural momentum after over 3,000 years of use. For Kublai to try to impose Uighur script on China would have been impossible; it was equally impossible to use Chinese script to write Mongolian. Kublai’s officials had to rely on translations. It was a tedious and cumbersome business.

  As his reign went on, problems multiplied. Genghis had conquered the Tanguts, who had their own Chinese-like script. Then there was the script of the Khitan, the Manchurian people who had been the Mongols’ predecessor dynasty in north China. And Sanskrit, the language towards which his new subjects in Tibet looked as the fount and origin of their religion. And Tibetan itself, of course, already some 600 years old. Not to forget Korea, which the Mongols had already attacked once in 1216, and to which Kublai would soon return. And what of those languages of people under the control of Kublai’s brother Hulegu, principally Persian? And if things went as he hoped, if all south China fell to the Mongols, they would be in contact with Burmese, Vietnamese, Japanese, and who knew what other cultures, all with their own languages and scripts. A bureaucratic nightmare loomed.

  Once Kublai saw the problem, he saw a solution. China was in a sense unified by its script, which linked diverse dialects; Kublai wanted a script that would unify the world. The thought occurred to him when Xanadu was ready and Ariq’s rebellion had been crushed; Kublai was already thinking about a new capital in what is now Beijing and planning the long-delayed invasion of southern China. He needed to consolidate, to ensure the most efficient management possible as a basis for expansion. It was here that young Phags-pa came into his own. In 1267, Kublai told him to invent a new script, a script in which any language under Heaven could be written.

  Phags-pa, fluent in Tibetan, Mongolian and Chinese, and probably with a good knowledge of Uighur and Sanskrit as well, analysed their phonetical demands and modified his own Tibetan script into a sort of International Phonetic Alphabet of some sixty signs, most representing individual vowels and consonants, but including some common syllables. Tibetan reads from left to right, but Phags-pa designed his script to be read vertically, in deference to the Uighur system introduced by the great Genghis. The letters are mostly made of straight lines and right angles, hence its name in Mongolian: square script. For representing Mongolian and other languages, it is certainly a big advance on Chinese: Genghis in Chinese transliterates as chéng jí sī;fn5 in Phags-pa’s script it is jing gis.

  After two years of work, it was done. Kublai was delighted, and raised Phags-pa from State Preceptor to Imperial Preceptor, with income to match. He ordered that all official documentation be recorded in the new ‘State Script’ and set up schools to teach it. It was used on seals and the paiza, which gave authority to high officials to demand goods and service from civilians. ‘By the power of Eternal Heaven, by the protection of the Great Blessedness [of Genghis]’, ran the text on one of them. ‘Whoever has no reverence [for this] shall be guilty and die.’

  That was the high point of Phags-pa’s international influence. He returned again to Tibet shortly afterwards as head of the Saskya monastery and sect, which exercised an uneasy sway over the other Buddhist sects. Suddenly, in 1280, he died. He was only forty-five, and there were suspicions he had been poisoned. The Tibetan civil administrator was suspected. There was no proof, but Kublai had the man executed anyway.

  The script looked good on seals, stone slabs, coins, even porcelain. You still see it today on Mongolian banknotes and the occasional statue. If you visit China’s prime tourist attraction, the Great Wall at Juyong (just short of Badaling), you will see an ancient arch, Cloud Terrace (Yun Tai), built in 1342 as a gateway through the pass. Its flagstone floor, now glassed in, is scarred with parallel tracks from an infinity of wagon wheels, making it look like an abandoned railway tunnel. Under the arch are five flat surfaces carved with intertwining bas-reliefs of warrior kings, buddhas, elephants, dragons, snakes and plants, all framing a Buddhist text in six languages: Sanskrit, Tibetan, Mongol, Tangut, Chinese – and Kublai’s answer to this Babel, Mongol and Sanskrit versions in Phags-pa’s script.

  But for routine records it never really took hold. Despite a special academy set up to study and teach the script, Kublai’s officials stonewalled as bureaucrats always do with orders they don’t like: they said yes, and did nothing. Their resistance had nothing to do with the quality of Phags-pa’s script. The problem lay in human nature. Learning a script, however easy, is a demanding business, and traditional scripts are incredibly tenacious. Trying to overcome the cultural inertia of his Chinese officials was like trying to row an iceberg. It just wasn’t going to happen.

  In a sense it didn’t matter. Kublai’s involvement in Tibet had already done more for his empire than a new script would ever achieve. By bringing Phags-pa on board, he added a vast new territory to his domains, and established a precedent for Sino-Tibetan relations from then on. In the late sixteenth century, when the Mongol tribes were constantly vying for supremacy, a Buddhist cleric being cultivated by the dominant khan of the day, Altan, declared Altan to be the reincarnation of Kublai; in return, Altan granted him the title Dalai Lama (dalai being Mongolian for ‘sea’, a traditional symbol of power). Thereafter, it was the Dalai Lama who ruled in Tibet, and remained ruling until 1959, when Mao invaded, ten years after his Communists had seized power. Initially he had promised minorities their own governments, but soon reversed that posit
ion. He sent troops into Tibet on the grounds that its independence was an illusion based on China’s weakness, and that the Communists were merely restoring the status quo as established by Kublai.

  The two scripts used in Kublai’s empire:

  The Uighur script introduced by Genghis Khan on a paiza (paizi in pinyin), or safe-conduct pass (right), and on an imperial seal (below). Both begin with the words ‘By the power of Eternal Heaven . . .’ The script is still in use today in Inner Mongolia.

  On a Yuan coin (right), the script devised by the Tibetan monk Phags-pa records four words: tay (1), wen (2), thung (3), baw (4). They record the Chinese of Kublai’s time. In today’s pinyin, they transliterate as dà yuán tōng băo, literally ‘Great Yuan authorized treasure’, i.e. ‘currency of the Great Yuan’.

  As far as Mongols were concerned, it was Mongolia that conquered China, Mongolia that occupied Tibet, Mongolia that established a Mongol empire. Fortunately for China, Kublai decided to establish a Chinese dynasty, making his grandfather its posthumous founder, thus turning history upside down.