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

by John Man

  But economic revival did not last long, and dreams of wider empire were soon shattered. The same year as Khaidu’s coronation, Kublai tried to bring him to heel. He sent a delegation of six princes led by his fourth son, Nomukhan, to Almalikh, well inside Khaidu’s territory, with the aim of persuading him to come to court in Xanadu or Beijing. Khaidu took no notice, keeping his army out of harm’s way, securing his western borders. Nomukhan did not have enough horses or troops to mount an offensive. Time passed. Nomukhan built up a court and turned himself into yet another independent warlord, until captured by one of the many restive cousins and sent off to the Golden Horde, where he languished for ten years until his release. Kublai, totally involved in the war against Song, simply gave up trying to control Khaidu’s distant realm.

  All this was good news for Khaidu. After re-occupying Almalikh, he was free to deal with constant cross-border raids from Persia and several uprisings from disenchanted members of Chaghadai’s family. Sitting squarely over the old Silk Routes, he presided over a shaky revival, building an arc of allies all around the fringes of the empire, reaching out southwards into Tibet and eastwards to Manchuria. For forty years – until the final showdown, as we will see in Chapter 22 – his ambition was to be the true heir of his grandfather Ogedei, Genghis’s appointed successor. In the end he failed, but he had a lasting impact: he kept Kublai roughly within the borders that define China’s north-western limits today.

  fn1 Marco calls her Aijaruc, Ay Yoruk in Uighur, meaning Moonlight. Perhaps it was her nickname.

  fn2 Actually, there were three and a half powers: there was also a White Horde, who were Golden Horde relatives often acting semi-independently. Just to add to the confusion, the White Horde is known as the Blue Horde in Russia.

  20

  WHAT KUBLAI DID FOR CHINA

  KUBLAI HAD INHERITED astonishing managerial skills. He was no intellectual genius, but he had talents that made him one of the greatest CEOs of all time. He was a good judge of character (with one notorious exception) and had the knack of hiring people who were smarter than he was. Like his grandfather, he was happy to employ anyone with talent. His advisers formed an international team. Muslim traders were headhunted to become financial administrators. He employed sixty-six Uighur Turks, twenty-one of whom were resident commissioners or local officials running Chinese districts, while several others tutored princes of the royal family. Also like his grandfather Genghis, he could spot organizational problems, totally unprecedented ones caused by the novelty of unfolding events, and then, out of the blue, devise solutions that actually worked. Genghis had taken tribes, broken their structure and forged a nation, then started to forge an empire. Kublai took the process further. His task was primarily conquest, then government, for which his people were doubly unprepared, firstly because they had had no government before Genghis and secondly because no previous non-Chinese conquerors had taken on all China, north and south. There is no precedent in history of such small numbers successfully taking on so much and so many.

  Kublai’s main fault was that he could not be content. How could he be, if he was to be true to his grandfather’s mission, to set the bounds of empire wider still and wider, until all the world acknowledged Mongol supremacy?

  At home, by comparison, he was a rock. That, too, was a consequence of his mission. Having seen that China was the key to imperial rule, he needed China to be stable and prosperous, for that would be his foundation for world rule ordained by Heaven. From this astonishing ambition came something just as remarkable: not a grim dictatorship, but a revival of much that had vanished from Chinese society during the turmoil of the previous century. For a brief moment, about two decades, all of China underwent something of a renaissance. Kublai, as a foreigner, would never be truly accepted; but he was indisputably the boss, and it is arguable that the changes he brought improved the lot of his new subjects. There is no way of assessing public opinion, but from the lack of uprisings we can assume many felt that unity with peace under the Mongols was better than a nation divided between Jin and Song.

  This judgement conflicts sharply with commonly held opinions about Mongol rule – which is often seen as nothing but a catalogue of abuses – along the following lines.

  Almost all the top positions were held by Mongols. They lorded it over the population as the new landowners, the new elite, the new aristocracy. A new class system brought new humiliations: Mongols at the top; in second place, those from the Muslim lands – Persians, Arabs, Uighurs, Turks – who knew about business and trade; then the 40 million northern Chinese, along with other fringe minorities, like Tatars, Khitans and Koreans; and finally, at the bottom of the heap, the new subjects, the 70 million southern Chinese, who at a stroke turned from a people who were heirs to the richest and most sophisticated culture on earth to subjects and servants. Many were actually enslaved, and a slave trade sprang up. The Chinese were banned from carrying weapons, hunting, military training, raising horses, praying in groups, holding fairs. If a Mongol murdered, he was exiled; a Chinese murderer was executed. The examination system, by which scholar-officials acquired office, was no more. In the ten grades into which Mongols categorized their Chinese subjects, Confucian scholars ranked ninth, below prostitutes, above only the lowest of the low, the beggars.

  All this is true. But it is not the whole truth. The scholars, aristocrats and officials represented only a tiny part of Chinese society. Most people were peasant-farmers and ordinary town-dwellers. With such a vast population, with such teeming cities, with such a thin upper crust of Mongols, no reforms permeated from top to bottom. For ordinary people, the routines of everyday life hardly changed. Or actually improved.

  Stability depended on more than the raw exercise of power. Kublai was the most powerful man of his day, one of the most powerful of all time, yet, as his actions showed, he knew that his authority was only in part top down, flowing from him through the court and his army of officials to the masses. It was also bottom up. Ordinary people had to feel happy and secure, or unrest would fester and spread from below. North China was sick enough as it was, recovering from the half-century of warfare initiated by Genghis back in 1211; the south was seething from his own campaign of conquest; all needed healing.

  The foundation of stability was the vast mass of peasant-farmers, on whom all depended for food. To look after their interests, Kublai set up a new Office for the Stimulation of Agriculture, with eight officials and a team of experts who organized aid, built fifty-eight granaries that could store almost 9,000 tonnes of grain, arranged tax remissions, and banned Mongols from grazing their wandering herds on farmland. Fifty-household local councils helped with production, irrigation, even schools – an idea that proved too revolutionary to work, but which did at least show that the emperor was no mere barbarian nomad. Taxes now flowed not directly to the landowner, who in the north was probably a Mongol, but to the government, which then divided the revenue between itself and the landowner. The peasant-farmer still paid, but at least Kublai tried to curb abuses. He also insisted that forced labour, which remained vital for large-scale public projects like canals and the postal system, was rather less forced than previously.

  Let’s look at how he ruled in more detail. He had a good start, under the aegis of Genghis’s Khitan adviser, the great Yelu Chucai, who successfully set up a decent working bureaucracy, despite opposition from some dyed-in-the-wool factions. But, as we have seen, Kublai faced a much vaster problem: namely how to combine steppe-land with town and farmland, nomadism with settled cultures, the few with the many. He was not ready simply to abandon the one (from which he derived his core values) and adopt the other. Besides, he also had to take into account Muslims, a vital component in that his brother ruled a good chunk of Islam and Muslims were important as governors, tax-gatherers, financial advisers and business partners. His response was to make it up as he went along, sometimes finding solutions in the practices of previous dynasties, sometimes devising his own. Over thirty yea
rs, he created a form of government that owed much to China, but was also uniquely complex and cosmopolitan.

  He had one supreme advantage: he was not bound by precedent. Previous emperors had governed through several executive agencies. Kublai saw that this would be a recipe for disaster. He had just one, the Central Secretariat, with him at the top, ranging down through chief councillors (usually two or three, occasionally up to five), privy councillors, assistants, some 200 officials and hundreds of clerical staff, in eighteen levels, the status of each minutely defined in terms of precedence, title, salary and perks.fn1

  The Secretariat controlled six ministries: Personnel, Revenues, Rites, War, Punishments and Works, each of which had dozens of departments. The Ministry of Works, for instance, had fifty-three of them. Checking up on all ministries and their departments was a Censorate, a sort of National Audit Office, with three national headquarters.

  Entirely separate from the civil administration was the Bureau of Military Affairs. This was established by Kublai in 1263, after Li Tan’s rebellion, as the guarantor of his power. It was hard-core Mongol territory, top secret, staffed by Mongols, with all Chinese excluded to prevent them knowing anything of the army’s strength, dispositions or armaments. It controlled all the armed forces, the appointment of officers, the training of Chinese and Central Asian units, the records, and all its own auditing procedures. This was perhaps Kublai’s greatest stroke of administrative genius – to create a huge and enduring establishment loyal not to him personally, but to the state.

  Then there was the court. Specialized staff took care of the rituals, protocol, kitchens, granaries, warehouses, clothing and special food. Teams of artisans supplied gold, silver, porcelain, gems, textiles. There were departments for the hunting facilities and the stud farms. This was a universe unto itself of servants, managers, entertainment specialists, historians, translators, interpreters, astronomers, doctors, librarians, shrine-keepers, musicians and architects.

  Other institutions were not under the direct control of any of the above. Three academies were devoted to Mongol studies (speaking Mongolian being an asset for ambitious civil servants), and a Muslim Bureau of Western Astronomy – set up by a Syriac Christian named Isa (Jesus) – gave Muslims their own research facilities. The Commission for Tibetan and Buddhist Affairs, Phags-pa’s private empire, acted as a sort of Tibetan government-at-a-distance, supervising the Pacification Bureau in Tibet and the ever-growing Buddhist interests across China: temples, monasteries, properties.

  It was the Bureau of Military Affairs’ job to handle the transition in China from conquest to a permanent military administration. This involved a big change, and would store up trouble for the future. Under Genghis, the Mongol system had drawn every family into its military machine. Families had to be supported, first with booty, then, as territory fell, with land. But few Mongols had the ambition or talent to administer farms. Many were absentee landlords. The system tended to collapse of its own accord, leaving the estates ruined and their people destitute. Mongol landowners sold up and found themselves cast adrift, with no skills, no education, no place back in their homeland, yet still supposedly part of an elite. They were the empire’s equivalent of poor whites in the American South. Later, this would be part of the sickness that ate at the soul of Kublai’s heirs.

  The provinces were another of Kublai’s creations. As the tide of Mongol conquest flowed outwards, newly conquered regions were given their own mini-versions of the Central Secretariat, and these remained as branches of government in China’s eleven provinces, which then acquired branches of all the other departments. They were not provincial governments – Kublai wanted his officials governed from the centre, to avoid local empire-building – but they formed the essence of the provincial system set up in succession by the Qing and then by the Communists in 1949. Today, the provinces of Yunnan, Shaanxi, Sichuan and Gansu all owe their existence to Kublai.

  As in effect CEO of Mongolia Inc., Kublai was committed to keeping the wheels of commerce rolling. Craftsmen were favoured with rations of food, clothing and salt, and were exempted from forced labour. Merchants had previously been seen as parasites; now they were encouraged. Trade, mainly with Muslim lands, boomed.

  In some ways, Kublai was the ideal patron of the arts. He had no pretensions to being an expert in art, but he knew it was tremendously important, and since he wished to appeal to all his subjects, he encouraged artists without worrying about their race or creed. He was thus, almost by default, a force for change. The Nepalese metalworker and architect Aniga, designer of the White Pagoda, became head of all artisans nationwide, ending up with a mansion and rich wife found for him by Kublai’s wife Chabui.

  Take ceramics, for which China had been famous, with ten main kilns in the north and fourteen in the south. The war had largely destroyed ceramic production in the north, but southern kilns continued to fill wagons rolling into the great southern port of Quanzhou, the place Marco Polo calls by its Arabic name, Zaytun, then onwards by ship to South-east Asia, India and the world of Islam, half of which, remember, was ruled by Mongols, who quickly adopted the refined tastes of their subjects. Indeed, Quanzhou, from which most goods were exported, was under the thumb of Persian merchants. With Kublai standing back, the southern kilns could focus on exports, and on experiments to give their customers what they wanted, namely, quality. As a result, Yuan potters developed, as one expert, Margaret Medley, puts it, ‘the fine white porcelains, hard, vitrified and translucent, that we now automatically associate with the name of China’. There was more. In the Middle East cobalt, an extraordinarily rare metallic element, had long been used to give a blue tinge to statuettes and necklace beads. Yuan potters acquired it and made ‘cobalt blue’ ceramics famous, along with the white wares of Fujian and the grey-green celadons of Zhejiang, for any one of which modern collectors pay vast sums. Exports boomed, and taxes – on kilns, craftsmen and production – rolled into Kublai’s coffers.

  Working in groups to make use of their wealth, merchants became bankers, lending at exorbitant rates of interest. They and Kublai’s government were partners: laws forced merchants to convert their metal coins into paper currency on entry, which gave the government a reserve in metals, which was used to support loans at around 10 per cent annual interest back to the merchant groups, who became, in effect, government-sanctioned loan sharks. From trade, everyone profited. Even the peasants? No doubt Kublai, with a financial adviser at his shoulder, would have argued that merchant wealth translated into government wealth, which financed public works and allowed tax relief to the needy. If peasants chose to get into debt with a loan shark, that was their fault.

  Kublai’s big economic success was to extend the use of paper money. Paper money is a great invention, for practical reasons, as the Chinese had discovered almost 300 years before when the Song unified the country and revolutionized it with a booming economy. Unification, wealth and stability opened the way to a single currency based on copper coins – those cumbersome strings of 1,000 coins. Since rich merchants did not like handling such a weight of cash, local governments issued certificates of deposit – so-called ‘flying money’ – that could be redeemed in other cities. The elements had been in place for centuries, principally paper (AD 105 is the traditional date of its invention), which came to be made from the beaten inner bark of mulberry trees, and printing with carved wood blocks (eighth century, from Japan). In 1023, the state printed the first banknotes, introducing two previously unknown problems: inflation and counterfeiting.

  Kublai, with the right advice, had both difficulties under control in an economy of which a modern finance minister would be proud. Four economic pillars – national unity, internal stability, high confidence, good growth – allowed for a far more effective system of paper money than the Song had had. He tried three systems, one backed by reserves of silk, the other two by silver, of different purities, the last of which became universal, to the astonishment and admiration of Marco Polo. It was t
he oddest notion, that a whole society should place value on the solidified slurry made from the under-bark of mulberry trees. Why the system worked was a total mystery to him.

  It worked firstly because stability preserved confidence in the currency; secondly because Kublai allowed a free exchange with silver on demand; thirdly, he did not print too much cash, thereby avoiding significant inflation. It is a neat trick, which later dynasties (and many modern governments) failed to match. Soon after Yuan rule ended in 1368, paper money fell out of use for 400 years.

  Another element in Kublai’s revolution was a new legal system.fn2 Since he had come from Mongolia, all China’s preceding codes, with legal traditions dating back 2,000 years, were suddenly null and void. Genghis’s legal system, a list of statutes recorded by his adopted relative, Shigi, did not have the sophistication for a vast and complex society like China’s. Advisers quickly began afresh, combining elements of the two systems. How they did it exactly is not known, because the texts have survived only in bits. Day-to-day justice depended, as it always had for over 700 years, on the Five Punishments: death by strangulation or decapitation; exile for life to three distances – 1,000, 1,250 or 1,500 kilometres – depending on the seriousness of the crime; penal servitude up to three years; beating with a heavy stick, from 60 to 100 blows; and beating with a light stick, from 10 to 50 blows. For the most serious crime – treachery – Kublai revived a seldom-used precedent: death by slow slicing, from which comes the sadistic notion of ‘death by a thousand cuts’, the punishment meted out to the unfortunate emir of Diyarbakir. Not a thousand, actually, but eight initially – face, hands (2), feet (2), breast, stomach and head – to be increased in stages – 24, 36, 120 – depending on the pain to be inflicted.