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

by John Man

  Victory would come. But, as Kublai had seen in the Yunnan campaign, military victory had to be matched by victory of another sort, over the hearts and minds of ordinary people. If the conquest of Song was to last, it would take good government; and that meant minimizing the suffering of civilians.

  Bayan’s first task in the autumn of 1274 was to get his army down the Han River to the Yangtze, a distance of about 250 kilometres. But the Han was blocked by 100,000 men camped around two fortresses which were linked by a cross-river chain. To avoid another siege, Bayan ordered his troops to bypass this section of river, carrying the boats overland on bamboo poles. By spring 1275, Bayan and Aju had led their force out of the Han Valley into the flood plains of the Yangtze, approaching the three cities that form today’s Wuhan and the great fortress of Yang-lo downstream.

  Avoiding a frontal assault, Bayan sent Aju to establish a bridgehead across the river, which somehow – we have no details – became a key to breaking through the Song fleet. Yang-lo’s commander fled, the shattered Song fleet sailed away downriver, and the fortress surrendered. Progress was much aided by the ex-commander of Xiangyang, Lü Wenhuan, who had also been the boss of many downriver garrisons. A word from him and commanders surrendered, allowing the Mongol army to advance steadily.

  In Hangzhou, Bayan’s reputation grew with every victory. They called him ‘Hundred Eyes’, because that’s what his name sounds like in Chinese (băi yăn). Jia’s reputation, by contrast, sank daily as the court officials and ordinary people reviled him for his love of luxury, his accumulated treasures, his wasteful parties. In an attempt to regain his authority, he decided to take command of the army himself. That February, he led a force over 100,000-strong out of the city, a vast throng 40 kilometres long heading westwards to intercept Bayan’s progress down the Yangtze. Suddenly, the capital was bare of troops, and more were needed.

  At this point, the emperor’s widow, the formidable Dowager Xie, became her people’s inspiration. With an odd-looking dark skin and a cataract in one eye, she had been a reassuring force for years, generous, restrained, never ambitious to extend her authority beyond the palace. Now she spoke out, urging ordinary people to join the war effort. It worked. By March 1275, all over the country, men streamed to arms, as many as 200,000 of them.

  A month and 250 kilometres later, Jia was in today’s Anhui province, deploying his army near Tongling, aiming to block the river. Easier said than done: the river is 2.6 kilometres wide here. Still, at Tongling, a midstream island could act as a keystone. Joined by 2,500 warships, many from the bruising defeat at Yang-lo fortress, others from Hangzhou, Jia awaited Bayan’s arrival.

  Bayan’s navy, though, carried well-tried contingents of every armed service – the Mongol cavalry (also scouting sideways and ahead), the Chinese infantry, a good supply of turncoat Song commanders, and terrific artillerymen, including Ismail’s ‘Xiangyang catapult’, shepherded by barges. No details of the battle survive, only the results. Artillerymen set up the giant trebuchet. Stones rained on to boats, cavalry attacked on shore, infantry were landed on the island, and Jia’s demoralized forces scattered, leaving 2,000 boats in Mongol hands. Jia fled, humiliated and doomed. Dowager Xie stripped him of office and banished him to Zhangzhou, on the coast 800 kilometres south. But there was no escape. When approaching their destination, his guards killed him.

  Bayan, meanwhile, continued his victorious progress downriver. Wuwei, Hexian and Nanjing all surrendered, inspiring half a dozen other leaders to bring their towns into the Mongol camp, and in two cases to commit suicide (the first of many, as we shall see). In Nanjing, Bayan recalled Kublai’s long-term agenda: to govern for ever. For four months he paused, setting up a local government for his thirty city conquests and his 2 million new subjects. From here, he opened negotiations with the Song court, only to have three of his envoys murdered by locals before they entered Hangzhou.

  Now it was summer. The Mongol and northern Chinese wilted in the sticky heat. Bayan was all for pressing on, but was forced to delay because Kublai was faced with another rebellion at home – the subject of Chapter 19 – and wanted the benefit of Bayan’s advice. The delay left Aju to fight off a renewed challenge from the Song and mop up other cities, notably Yangzhou and its nearby river port Zhenjiang. Here, in another great battle, the Song blocked the river with unwieldy seagoing warships all chained together, which, when the little Mongol ships set a few ablaze, acted as a giant fuse that destroyed the lot: another military catastrophe, 10,000 dead, another 10,000 captives. Now the Mongol forces were within 225 kilometres of the Yangtze’s mouth, with Hangzhou lying round the nose of the Shanghai peninsula. Overland, it was also 225 kilometres. One last push would do it.

  Back in the field in September, Bayan planned his final assault, a three-pronged attack by sea and by land. He would lead the central prong, following the Grand Canal. The main naval and land forces made fast progress. But Bayan’s corps hit a problem, in the form of unexpected and dogged resistance from the ancient and prosperous town of Changzhou, newly reinforced by 5,000 Song soldiers. Bayan gave them a chance to surrender, firing a message wrapped around arrows, warning of the dire consequences of resistance: ‘You should reconsider your position promptly, so as not to regret things later.’ They did not reconsider, and once again the Mongols committed urbicide. Some 10,000 people died, many of them gathered up to form a vast mound of earth-covered bodies.

  The capital gave way to panic and paranoia. Soldiers mutinied, deserters fled. The Empress Dowager tried to delay the inevitable, with a self-deprecating plea for mass support. The impending peril ‘is entirely, I regret, due to the insubstantiality of Our moral virtue’. People should recall over 300 years of moral and charitable rule, and come to engage the enemy. They did, by the ten thousand, but there was no leadership, and the motley militias merely added to the confusion and panic.

  For six weeks, Dowager Xie sent out envoy after envoy, seeking some sort of settlement, offering tribute and a share of the country. Bayan, settling in around Hangzhou, demanded total capitulation, offering his assurance that surrender would buy peace for the people and security for the royal family. Some in court advised fighting to the last man, others wanted to abandon the capital altogether, but Dowager Xie saw there was no choice. Hangzhou was all but surrounded, and weakening daily as soldiers and civilians fled south.

  The end, at least in this area, came quickly. The prime minister, Chen Yizhong, scuttled for safety. On 26 January 1276 the Empress Dowager sent a note to Bayan in his HQ 20 kilometres north of the city, acknowledging Kublai’s overlordship: ‘I respectfully bow a hundred times to Your Majesty, the Benevolent, Brilliant, Spiritual and Martial Emperor of the Great Yuan.’ A week later, the city’s prefect, representing the court, handed over the Song dynastic seal and a memorandum stating the boy-emperor’s willingness to give up his title to Kublai and hand over all his territories. Bayan made a triumphal entry into the city, with his commanders and contingents in full array. Hundreds of pretty courtesans trembled at the thought of what might happen to them, and 100 of them drowned themselves to avoid finding out. Finally, on 21 February, came the formal ceremony of submission, when the five-year-old Emperor Xianfn4 himself led his officials into Bayan’s presence and bowed in obeisance towards the north, the direction in which Kublai resided.

  Bayan was as good as his word, and Kublai’s. In Beijing in 1215, the Mongols had gone on an orgy of destruction and killing. This time, there was a peaceful handover, a strict ban on unauthorized troops entering the city, the safety of the royal family guaranteed, the royal mausoleum protected, no attempt made to upset the currency, or even the style of dress. Mongol–Chinese officers made inventories before removing the treasures for transport northwards. Militias were disbanded, regulars incorporated into Bayan’s armies. Officials, of course, were all replaced with Mongols, northern Chinese and several Song turncoats, but in other respects, as Bayan reported proudly to Kublai, ‘the market places of the nine thorough
fares were not moved and the splendours of a whole era remained as of old’. An edict from Kublai told everyone to continue their lives as normal; officials would not be punished; famous sites would be protected; widows, orphans and the poor would be assisted from public funds.

  On 26 February, the first of two great entourages left Hangzhou for Beijing – 300 officials, 3,000 wagons of booty. A month later, Bayan handed Hangzhou over to subordinates and headed north with a second entourage, the royal family: the boy ex-emperor, his mother, the princesses, the concubines, the relatives, with the ailing Dowager Xie following when she was fit enough to travel.

  Three months later, in June, this immense throng arrived in Xanadu, to be welcomed by Kublai, whose joy was such that he had no praise high enough for Bayan. He conferred upon him twenty sets of ‘garments of a single colour’ – to receive just one being a high honour – and reconfirmed him as co-director of the Ministry of Military Affairs. ‘Hundred Eyes’ was the empire’s hero.

  The Empress Dowager and her grandson, ex-emperor Xian, were then settled in Beijing, where they were given tax-free property. Kublai’s wife Chabui took a personal interest in their well-being. The old lady lived out her life with a small official stipend and attendants, and died six years later. Her grandson was sent off to Tibet, where he became a Buddhist monk. In 1323, the Yuan dynasty’s ninth emperor ordered him to commit suicide, perhaps – according to rumour – as an example of ‘literary inquisition’ imposed because the emperor took offence at something in Xian’s poetry.

  And so, officially, the Song dynasty ended not in a bang of destruction, but in an extended whimper.

  But there was another end, of despair and suffering and heartbreak. In the words of Richard Davis, it made ‘a drama of unthinkable intensity’.fn5 Its prologue came just before the final capitulation, when the Song court sent southwards the two remaining young princes, Shi (aged four) and Bing (three), brothers of the young ex-emperor Xian. With them went a spirit very different from that which marked the ceremonies of capitulation – a spirit of outraged resistance to alien domination.

  As the princes fled, the Mongols advanced and death filled the air – not just imposed death to crush outposts of resistance, but self-selected death, whether in action or by suicide. Richard Davis, in his evocation of this terrible time, lists 110 named, prominent male suicides – prominent, certainly, but not of the highest rank. There were many hundreds of others at lower levels of government, and many thousands of ordinary people of both sexes and all classes. To take one extreme example: in January 1276, Ariq Khaya met stiff resistance from Changsha (then Tanzhou), 750 kilometres inland in Hunan province. Resistance was, of course, useless. The town’s leader, Li Fu, made careful arrangements for the mass suicide of his family and household. All made themselves drunk; all were put to the sword by Lu Fu’s assistant, who then killed his wife and slit his own throat. Others died in similar ways. All around the town, so the official history of the Song dynasty says, people ‘annihilated their entire family. No wells in the city were empty of human corpses, while strangled bodies hung in dense clusters from trees.’ The Xiang River became thick with the dead. Was this an exaggeration? Possibly; but when the town fell Ariq Khaya saw there was no need for further punishment, because the city had in effect committed suicide.

  Meanwhile, the two small princes and their entourage had been taken south, picking up recruits to the loyalist cause, for they had with them immense amounts of cash. They had then taken to ships, hopping from port to port down the coast, heading for Vietnam – an army of 200,000 carried by a navy of 1,000 ships. There was a terrible storm. One of the princes, Shi, died on an island not far from Vietnam. By now, the Mongols had overtaken them on land. With the remaining prince, Bing, the fleet slowly backtracked along the coast to the bay where the Pearl River broadens out west of Hong Kong. Here a dense cluster of islands offered protection.

  You cannot get much further south than this. But all was not lost. They found a good island base from which to stage a comeback. To the north were shallows that seemed to exclude enemy warships. At the southern end hills fell sharply into the sea, from which the island took its name: Yaishan, Cliff Hill. It was here, in the summer of 1278, that the six-year-old Bing and his loyal followers – including his stepmother the Dowager Consort, his real mother, and chief counsellor Lu Xiufu – made their stand, with many of their followers in warships, many others ashore, racing to throw together simple houses and fortifications.

  The Mongol forces were 80 kilometres upriver, in the city that used to be called Canton and is now Guangzhou. In late February 1279 the Song navy’s 1,000 ships prepared for battle, the sides of their vessels covered with mud-encrusted matting against flaming arrows and incendiary bombs, protected with staves to ward off fire-ships and well stocked with food and water. With the young prince on the flagship, the fleet was, according to one account, chained together in preparation for an imminent onslaught.

  The Mongols, with only some 300 ships, approached from downriver and round the coast. With their inferior numbers, they were in no hurry to attack. Their commander sent a message giving the Song a chance to surrender. No deal. Now the Mongols discovered they had the advantage of mobility over their chained and anchored enemy. They set a blockade between the Song vessels and the shore, cutting off their water supply, and settled down to wait for the moment to strike. For two weeks they sat there, while the Song ran out of water.

  Then, on the rainy morning of 9 March, one half of the fleet rode the outgoing tide into the flanks of the demoralized and weakened Song; and six hours later the other half struck from the other direction with the rising tide.

  The result was a catastrophe for the Song. Accounts speak of the sea turned red by blood, and of 100,000 dead. Scholars say the real figure was horrific enough – perhaps 30,000–40,000. The only witness who recorded the details was the loyalist Wen Tianxiang, who was a hostage in one of the Mongol ships. He later captured in verse the horrors he had seen:

  Human corpses are scattered like fibres of hemp.

  Foul smelling waves pound my heart to bits.

  When they saw what was happening, many – hundreds, perhaps thousands – committed suicide by leaping into the water with weights attached to them. One among them was Li Xiufu, the adviser to the boy emperor. On his back when he jumped he bore the little prince, the last of his line, the thirteenth generation of Song rulers, still in his gown of royal yellow, with the imperial golden seals strapped around his waist.

  fn1 Xiangyang has been through all sorts of different versions and spellings – Saianfu in Marco Polo, Sayan-fu in Rashid, Hsiang-yang in more recent but pre-pinyin times.

  fn2 Details from a military handbook, The Essentials of Military Preparedness [Wu-pei ji-yao], dated about 1830, but the practices it quotes are ancient ones.

  fn3 This was one of the most famous sieges in Chinese history, so famous that Marco Polo heard its story and loved to tell it. The trouble was that by the time he came to dictate his adventures, he had apparently told the story so many times he had written major roles for himself, his father and his uncle, who, he says, supervised the construction of the trebuchet. If you wish to be generous, this is a flagrant bit of self-promotion. Let’s be frank: it’s a lie, because Marco did not reach Kublai Khan’s court until 1275, two years after the great siege was over.

  fn4 All the Song emperors had the family name Zhao. They also had temple names, which confuses non-specialists. Xian was his given name.

  fn5 Richard Davis, Wind Against the Mountain (see Bibliography).

  18

  BURNED BY THE RISING SUN

  HUNTING THE SONG loyalists taught Kublai and his commanders something new: seafaring. In 1274, having seen his warships sail down the Yangtze and then fight at sea, Kublai looked outwards across the ocean, to Japan.

  Officially, Japan had had remarkably little to do with China for 400 years, despite the fact that long before it had taken from China the roots of much o
f its culture. The two had no running disputes, no cause for war; indeed the opposite, because there were long-established private trading contacts. Gold, lacquerware, swords and timber flowed in from Japan, in exchange for silk, porcelain, perfumes and copper coins. None of this reflected official policy. But it was happening under Song rule. Strategists in Xanadu foresaw the Japanese sending aid to Song. Better take them out, the sooner the better.

  It seemed perfectly possible. Japan’s emperor was a figurehead ruling rival warlords and samurai warriors more interested in chivalry than national defence. There was no large field army and no navy at all. Kublai had well-tried armies, commanders with unrivalled experience, a powerful new navy, and a springboard in the form of his vassal, Korea, whose southern coast is a mere 200 kilometres from Japan.

  The Mongols had first invaded Korea in 1231 as part of Ogedei’s drive to expand Mongol rule. At that time, Korea had proved a tough nut, in the hands of generals who had kept the Mongols at bay, much helped by their naval skills, which allowed them to hole up on an offshore island and in effect thumb their noses at the Mongol cavalry. In response, the Mongols turned to arson, slaughter and theft, all on a vast scale. In their 1254 invasion, they had taken some 200,000 captives and devastated much of the country. In 1258, the king and his officials staged a counter-coup and sued for peace, the crown prince himself travelling to China to submit – directly to Kublai, as it happened, because Mönkhe was campaigning far away to the west. It all worked out nicely: both the Korean king and Mönkhe died, and Kublai was left with a new vassal. In 1259, a joint Korean–Mongol force re-established the king, Wonjong, in the old capital, Kaesong, and blotted up what remained of the military opposition. Kublai gave a daughter to Wonjong’s son in marriage, so that eventually his grandson would inherit the throne. Kublai was not loved, but he was the power behind the throne. Now he needed ships; and ships rolled from Korea’s shipyards, first for the conquest of Song, and then to transport a Mongol–Chinese army across to Japan.