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

by John Man

  This sounds grim, but in fact the Yuan code was noted for its leniency. The Song code had listed 293 offences punishable by death. The Yuan had only 135, which, as one scholar notes, ‘contradicts the common notion that the Mongolian rulers employed very harsh punishments against criminal offenders’. Indeed, the successor dynasty, the Ming, pushed the number back up again. Moreover, the actual number of executions was remarkably low. Between 1260 and 1307, 2,743 criminals were executed (though nine years are missing from the dynastic records). An average of seventy-two executions per year out of a population of 100 million is about one fifth of China’s current rate.fn3

  In other respects, too, Kublai favoured leniency. Criminals received the equivalent of control orders. For first-time robbery with violence, a criminal was punished, and in addition tattooed on the right arm with the words ‘robbery or theft once’; he was ordered to register with local authorities wherever he went; and to serve as an auxiliary policeman for five years – a combination of punishment and community service, of discrimination and surveillance that reinforced the bonds of society.

  How come the world’s most powerful man and the head of a regime noted for its iron control ruled an administration of such relative leniency? Partly because Kublai’s dictatorship was not, like modern ones, all-embracing, all-intrusive; and partly because his people did as they were told, and Kublai knew harshness was counter-productive. In 1287, hearing that some 190 people had been condemned to death, Kublai ordered reprieves. ‘Prisoners are not a mere flock of sheep . . . It is proper that they be instead enslaved and assigned to pan gold with a sieve.’fn4 There speaks a man who knew how to get the best from his assets.

  Here’s an odd thing. The Mongols loved the theatre. They loved it mainly because it was a total novelty, and they were seduced by Chinese dramatic traditions. The Chinese had been watching dance-shows, musicals, recitations, story-tellings, pageants and variety shows for centuries, with a boom in drama under the Song. Kublai made sure his people had theatre, lots of it. But he didn’t want just the old stuff. He wanted new writing, designed to appeal to the Mongols and his very international court. That meant it would have to be easy to follow, because Kublai himself did not speak very good Chinese. This caused something of a revolution among the Song literati. Traditionally, they had contradictory attitudes towards the theatre. They loved it for its entertainment value, but plays were written in common language, actors were held in low regard and actresses were considered whores. In brief, from any point of view other than their own, Song literati were appalling snobs. No one thought of plays as literature; no one thought of preserving them. As a result, very little survives from pre-Yuan times.

  All this changed under Kublai. At court, there were two bureaus responsible for music and acting, which performed court rituals and popular performances. The customer called the tune and, by comparison with his subjects, the customer had simple tastes. As one of the first translators of Yuan drama, Henry Hart, put it in slightly non-PC terms in 1936: ‘Nurtured on the windswept deserts, exulting in battle and rapine . . . they preferred drama written and acted in the everyday language of common people.’

  It was this demand that reinvigorated Chinese drama. A new breed of playwrights emerged, many of them scholars frustrated by the ending of the examination system, eager to supplement their meagre incomes, to win recognition and to find an outlet for their literary skills. They created, as one historian of Chinese drama, Chung-wen Shih, has written, a ‘body of works qualitatively and quantitatively unequalled before or after in the Chinese theatre, and making Yuan drama one of the most brilliant genres in Chinese literary history’. This rich field has one disadvantage for the historian. The authors were still embarrassed to have their names associated with their products, so very little is known about them. Fortunately, one playwright, Zhong Su-cheng, gathered biographical notes about Yuan writers in A Register of Ghosts, its very title a comment on the invisibility of its subjects. Of the 152 listed, 111 are dramatists.

  Thousands of plays must have been written, of which some 700 are known by name and 150 have survived. They are of a type known as ‘variety plays’, or ‘mixed entertainment’ – what we would call musicals, except that with the involvement of fine writers they are much more than musicals. They examine contemporary concerns: oppression, injustice, corruption, struggles with authority. They do so in their own terms, of course. The plays do not display the internal agonies and destructive passions common in Western drama from Shakespeare onwards. Some flee the real world, like The Romance of the Western Chamber, which derives from a story first written down around 800. A student rescues a beautiful girl from rebels; he woos her; her fierce mother objects; a clever maid helps them; the mother is won round; happy ending. Rewritten several times, the story has remained popular ever since. Others have more bite. They could not be set in the present, for fear of giving offence to the empire’s officials. They try to do what drama should do, which is to make current concerns timeless and, if possible, seize the literary high ground.

  Let Guan Hanqing (Kuan Han-ch’ing) stand for all, because he was the most prolific of Yuan playwrights. Practically everything about his life is vague. Born around 1240, he died very old in the late 1320s. He wrote sixty-three or sixty-four musical plays (the authorship of one is disputed), of which fourteen or eighteen (another dispute) survive. Heroines were his forte, exemplified in his best play, The Injustice to Dou E. She’s a simple village girl, a young widow of eighteen. A coarse suitor wrongly accuses her of murder. She is dragged into court and beaten by a corrupt magistrate. When she refuses to confess, he threatens to beat her mother-in-law. To save her, Dou E makes a false confession and is condemned to death. On the eve of her execution, she makes three wishes, one of which is that the area should suffer three years of drought. After her death, all her wishes come true, proving that Heaven has heard her prayers. The drought attracts the attention of her father, a high official, who reopens the case. Dou E reappears as a ghost to accuse her accusers. Justice is done, the universe re-balanced. But it’s more than a good story, in ways that escaped Kublai’s court. Dou E is a symbol of the suffering nation. When she is abused – as the Mongols abused China – the laws of Heaven are overturned, corruption and stupidity rule. But virtue cannot for ever be despised. Her death spurs Heaven to action, returning justice to an unjust world – great themes that ensured the play’s survival in several later versions, including one performed by the Peking Opera today.

  fn1 This section is mostly based on Mote, Imperial China 900–1800 (see Bibliography).

  fn2 This section is based on Paul Heng-chao Ch’en, Chinese Legal Tradition under the Mongols (see Bibliography).

  fn3 In 2009, the Dui Hua Foundation, a San Francisco-based non-profit humanitarian organization, estimated that 5,000 people were executed in China, ‘far more than all other nations combined’, though the precise number of executions is a state secret.

  fn4 Paul Heng-chao Ch’en, p. 46; quoted by Rossabi, Khubilai Khan, p. 130 (see Bibliography).

  21

  KAMIKAZE

  AFTER THE CONQUEST of the South, Kublai could turn again on Japan. He was now sixty-five, and time was snapping at his heels. But it was more than his age that drove him. He acted like a man obsessed, with the need to fulfil his grandfather’s ambitions for world conquest and the need to punish this ‘little country’ for its temerity in resisting him.

  Accounts of this campaign have, until recently, been dominated by the Japanese point of view, because they were the victors and history belongs more to winners than losers. The story has been often told: how the mighty Mongol–Chinese fleet was about to crush the hapless, outmoded Japanese samurai when the Heavens themselves came to the aid of the Japanese by unleashing a typhoon that swept Kublai’s fleet to oblivion. Soon thereafter, the Japanese called the storm the Divine Wind, the kamikaze (kami also having the sense of god, spirit and superior), referring to it as proof that Japan was under the protection of H
eaven. This suited the ruling elite, whose power depended in part on faith in their ability to perform the correct religious rituals. It was to evoke the idea of heavenly protection that the suicide pilots of the Second World War were called kamikazes: they were a new divine wind that would ensure protection against foreign invasion. It was a comforting idea. Yet research since 2001 has revealed the notion of the storm-as-rescuer to be a myth. After almost 800 years, it turns out that the Japanese were far more capable than they themselves believed. It was not the Divine Wind that saved them, but Mongol incompetence and Japanese fighting strength.

  There was a bad smell about this operation from the beginning. Kublai was out of touch with reality. He seemed to believe that the mere decision to attack would inevitably lead to victory, as if will alone decided military matters. He made impossible demands, ignored logistical problems, and – crucially – took no account of the weather.

  To guarantee success, Kublai needed a bigger fleet than before to carry more land forces; for that he needed the compliance of Korea, his unwilling vassal. But Korea had borne the brunt of the 1274 debacle. Her grain had been commandeered, her young men drafted as shipbuilders and warriors, leaving only the old and very young to till the fields. There was no harvest, and no manpower to rebuild the fleet. For five years, Kublai had to send food aid to keep Korea alive. Still it would not be enough. Ships would also have to come from the south, the former Song empire, and its reluctant inhabitants.

  It would be simple, of course, if only Japan would acknowledge Kublai’s overlordship. In 1279 yet another embassy arrived in Japan, with instructions to be extremely polite, to avoid the fate of their predecessors. Unfortunately, they arrived just at the moment rumours were spreading fear across the land. A local beauty had vanished in mysterious circumstances, supposedly abducted by a band of Mongol spies who had made a base on an uninhabited rocky islet. A Japanese force had invaded to rescue her. The Mongol chief had dragged her to a cliff top and threatened to kill her, but she had cast herself into the sea and swum to shore, while all the Japanese were murdered by the Mongol spies. She alone survived to tell this dramatic tale, so the story went. True or not, the Kamakura government believed that the three-man delegation from Kublai was part of the same plot. The three were beheaded, and resolve strengthened. Foot-soldiers and cavalry massed on Kyushu. The barrier around Hakata Bay grew longer and higher. Japan braced itself for an assault that was now seen as inevitable.

  And Kublai ordered that the fleet should be ready to invade in little more than a year. It would be the biggest fleet ever to set sail, and would remain the biggest for over 700 years, until exceeded by the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day, 6 June 1944. It would have a Korean as admiral of the fleet and a turncoat Chinese, Fan Wenhu, as commander of land forces. Their force numbered about 140,000. The plan was for two fleets, 900 ships from Korea and 3,500 from Quanzhou in Fujian, to link up at the island of Iki, 30 kilometres off the Japanese coast, and then invade the mainland together.

  That was the plan. It was highly optimistic: 4,400 ships is a vast fleet, especially if they were warships, as accounts usually suggest. In fact, a little long division shows that this invasion was very unlike the Spanish Armada, which consisted of 130 massive warships carrying 27,000 men, about 200 per ship. Kublai’s fleet was more comparable to the D-Day force: some 5,000 vessels, 156,000 men, 31 per vessel, most of which were landing craft. So except for a few massive warships, mainly from Korea, what we are dealing with here is a fleet of small ships. Portsmouth to Normandy is a mere 170 kilometres, a six-hour crossing by engine-driven ships. Kublai would be relying on wind power and oars to cover for the 900-strong Korean fleet 200 kilometres and for the 3,500 much smaller vessels from the south a forbidding 1,400 kilometres. Even with a good wind in the right direction, it would take them six days to reach the rendezvous.

  Obviously, Kublai and his commanders aimed to get the conquest over before the typhoon season started in August. But any experienced sailor would have known that it was crazy to rely on a tight schedule. Kublai, the supreme commander, knew a lot about warfare in large, open spaces on land, but he had never been to sea, let alone seen what a typhoon could do. Blinded by desperation and isolated by power, he was taking a fearful risk, and there was no one to tell him the truth.

  Things went wrong from the start. The Korean fleet reached Iki, as planned, around the end of May, and waited, and waited. The southern fleet in Quanzhou could not even leave on time. A commander fell ill and had to be replaced. Food rotted in the heat. Epidemics spread. After departure, contrary winds drove many ships into ports along the coast.

  Eventually, on 10 June, the commander of the Korean fleet occupied Iki anyway, then, after waiting another two weeks, crossed the small gap to an island in the middle of the bay.

  Meanwhile, the southern fleet, now a month behind schedule, went straight for the mainland, anchoring off the low-lying little island of Takashima in Imari Bay, 50 kilometres south of Hakata, intending to march north to meet the others on land.

  But the assault never gained momentum. Both fleets found it hard to make landings. Every likely site for 20 kilometres round the bay of Hakata was blocked by the new wall. The Japanese also took the fight out from the shore, rowing nimble little skiffs out at night to cut cables, sneak aboard, cut throats and start fires. True, from the larger ships siege bows acted like artillery, firing massive arrows that could splinter a Japanese dinghy. But the traction trebuchets which might have been effective inshore against land forces were useless when trying to hit moving targets from moving decks. Kublai’s generals bickered in three languages and most of their troops – the Chinese and Koreans – had no heart to fight for their new Mongol masters. The Japanese, with a unified command, years of preparation and on home territory, had well-fortified positions from which to stave off assaults and mount counterattacks.

  From the Mongol point of view, the Japanese were everywhere, in huge numbers, galloping back and forth wherever a landing was threatened. One Yuan source later claimed there were 102,000 of them. But Mongol and Chinese officials were recording a catastrophic defeat and had every reason to exaggerate the strength of the opposition. Current estimates suggest a force in the order of 20,000 – enough to hold back the Mongols, Chinese and Koreans, whose huge superiority in numbers was negated by the difficulty of mounting a joint sea-and-land operation so far from home and by being hopelessly scattered. For almost two months, 23 June to 14 August, the two sides skirmished, with no conclusion.

  On 15 August, nature intervened. The first typhoon of the season approached, earlier than usual. There’s no telling just how ferocious this particular one was. To sailors in small boats, it wouldn’t have made much difference.

  The warships would have been built for storms, but not the 3,500 twenty- or thirty-man landing craft that came from the south. The Korean sailors knew what was coming. To avoid their being dashed on the rocks, their admiral ordered his fleet out to sea. Those who could boarded in order not to be stranded ashore. Many were still clambering aboard or struggling through the shallows when the storm struck. No one recorded the details – the waves, the shredded sails, the broken oars, the smashed ships, the armoured men tossed to their deaths – but some 15,000 of the northern force and 50,000 of the southerners died at sea, while hundreds of others perished at Japanese hands, or were overwhelmed in the small boats that had remained near the rocky shore.

  It was a catastrophe never matched in scale on a single day at sea before or since, and never on land either until the atom bomb destroyed Hiroshima, killing 75,000 at a single blow, in 1945.

  The flagship, bearing the admiral, Fan Wenhu, and a general, Chang Xi, was wrecked on one of the many offshore islands, Taka. The two mustered other survivors, a couple of thousand strong, who raided locals for food and repaired one of the wrecks, in which the admiral limped home. He lived to fight another day, though he was reduced in rank. The other survivors were mopped up by Japanese. Three were allowe
d to return, to tell Kublai of the fate of his great armada and its all-conquering army. As for the rest, thousands were killed on the beaches, thousands drowned, thousands were enslaved, while the ships turned to driftwood or vanished into the belly of the ocean. A Korean account of the scene on one rocky foreshore gives a sense of the disaster: ‘The bodies of men and broken timbers of the vessels were heaped together in a solid mass so that a person could walk across from one point to another.’fn1

  No wonder the Japanese soon saw it as an intervention by the gods even greater than that in 1274, and the idea of divine protection was entrenched from then on. Both court and military authorities prayed assiduously to keep foreigners at bay. Temples and shrines flourished. Not that prayer was the only defence, for the wall was maintained and manned constantly for the next thirty years, as a result of which some of it has lasted pretty well to the present day. The idea of divine intervention became rooted in Japanese culture. Few questioned the conclusion: that Japan had been saved by a divinely ordained typhoon.