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

by John Man

  Yet there is growing evidence that this was not so, that the real salvation was down to the Japanese themselves. It is there in Suenaga’s story, as recorded in the Invasion Scrolls, for he fought on both occasions. He talks his way on to a small boat to carry the fight to the enemy. He boards a Mongol ship and takes two heads. He’s brave, eager to take a risk, but well in control of himself. He’s one among many. There’s a terrific sense of common purpose. And it works. Amidst the usual chaos of war, all these uncoordinated actions by individuals are enough to hold back the enemy and keep them out in the bay. Crucially, there is no mention of the typhoon at all. Success is all down to the Japanese. Suenaga shows respect to the gods with prayers, but there is no hint in the account or the pictures that Heaven actually intervenes during or after the action. As Thomas Conlan puts it in his fine study of the invasion, ‘The warriors of Japan were capable of fighting the Mongols to a standstill.’ Suenaga and his fellow-fighters were, in the words of Conlan’s title, ‘In little need of divine intervention’.

  Further support for this argument comes from marine archaeologists. Their inspiration was a remarkable man named Torao Mozai, who is worth a brief diversion. He was named Torao (meaning ‘male tiger’) after the day on which he was born in 1914. He joined the navy, but contracted TB in 1939, which probably saved his life, because he spent the war convalescing. Later he got a doctorate in engineering and taught at Tokyo University until 1979. After his retirement at the age of sixty-four, ‘Tiger’ Mozai started a new career researching Kublai’s lost fleet. In Hakata Bay, fishermen had found a few stone anchor-stocks, but these might have come from one of any number of uncounted wrecks. In 1980, he decided to focus on Takashima, the pretty, pine-covered island where the southern fleet had anchored. Mozai was interested in the bay. He adapted a sonar probe used for finding fish, learned to dive (at sixty-five!), built up a small team of divers and began to find interesting objects on the seabed: spearheads, nails, pots, but no ‘smoking gun’ proving that they came from the Mongol fleet. Then, in 1981, a farmer called Kuniichi Mukae brought him the proof. Seven years before, Mukae had been digging for clams when his spade struck something hard – a little square of solid bronze with writing engraved on it in the script devised by Kublai’s Tibetan mentor, Phags-pa. An archaeologist, Takashi Okazaki of Kyushu University, told Mozai what it said: ‘Commander of 1,000’. It was the official seal of one of Kublai’s senior officers.

  Inspired, Mozai established a research institute, the Kyushu and Okinawa Society for Underwater Archaeology, and continued work. From layers of mud and sand, he and his team dug up swords, spearheads, stone hand-mills for grinding rice, more anchor-stocks, and round explosive catapult balls, proof that the Mongols had catapults on board, indirect proof that Suenaga and his friends had indeed been bombarded with thunder-crash bombs in 1274. In 1984, the ageing Mozai handed over to one of Japan’s very few marine archaeologists, Kenzo Hayashida, who in 1994 discovered three massive wood-and-stone anchors in one of the island’s bays. Carbon-dating showed the trees from which the anchors were made had been cut in 1224, plus or minus 90 years, which nicely covered the time when the fleet was built and sailed.

  Other finds led his team out 150 metres into 15 metres of water, where, in October 2001, feeling their way into a metre of sea-floor gloop, they found 168 objects – bits of pottery, oven bricks, a bronze mirror, belt-fittings and at last, in July 2002, the remains of a large vessel, a scattering of ship’s timbers, all swirled together as if by a blender. The pots were Chinese, and they came from the long-established kilns at Yixing in Jiangsu – enough to convince Hayashida that these were the remnants of Kublai’s southern force.

  Work continues, but – as he explained to me when he showed me round his laboratory in 2005 – some conclusions are clear. The ship was about 70 metres long, dwarfing anything else in the world at the time. European sailing ships would not approach anything of this size until the nineteenth century. Only as the age of steam approached did the last Western sailing ships exceed Chinese and Korean men-o’-war.fn2

  But size is not everything. What really matters in ocean-going vessels is construction. And here, it seems, Kublai’s naval architects were so rushed that they cut corners. Randall Sasaki, of Texas A&M University, College Station, who has made a study of the 500 or so timber fragments, was surprised to see that the nail holes were very close together, many of them grouped as if the builders were following an old design with old materials. ‘This suggests the timbers were recycled,’ he says. ‘Also, some of the timbers were of poor quality.’

  There’s more, from Hayashida: ‘So far, we have found no evidence of sea-going, V-shaped keels.’

  These two pieces of evidence, combined with the catastrophic loss of even large vessels that should have been able to ride out a typhoon, suggest a startling but logical conclusion: in response to Kublai’s demands for mass building at high speed, his naval craftsmen improvised. They took any ships available, seaworthy or not. The good ones they put into service, the poor ones they refashioned with the same material. Except for the new ones built by the Koreans – none of which has yet been found at Takashima – the vast proportion of Kublai’s fleet were keel-less river boats, utterly unsuited to the high seas. Kublai’s ambitions led inexorably to a massive failure of quality control. Overseers may have said that orders had been fulfilled, that the boats were all ready. No one told Kublai that if things got rough, these boats would be death-traps. With his insane ambitions and his lack of naval knowledge, he had in effect scuppered his own fleet before it set out.

  fn1 From Delgado, Khubilai Khan’s Lost Fleet (see Bibliography).

  fn2 Kublai’s ships were dwarfed by the 145-metre leviathans built by the Ming emperor Zhu Di to sail the world in the early fifteenth century.

  22

  A MURDER, AND A SECRET GRAVE

  THERE’S NOTHING LIKE a murder to reveal hidden emotions. There’s nothing like an assassination to reveal a government’s faults.

  This story shows the failing heart of Kublai’s administration. He had created a monster with a prodigious appetite for men, materials and money, and it had to be kept fed. One man seemed to have the secret, and for Kublai that was a good enough reason to ignore the hatred that spread like a plague around his power-obsessed and deeply repellent minister. For twenty years he allowed disaster to brew, until it cooked up a melodrama more sensational than fiction, involving a suicidal fanatic, a mad monk, a farcical plot and the murder of the man himself. Marco Polo jumped on the story. But he didn’t know the half of it.

  The villain of the piece was Ahmad, an Uzbek, as we would now call him, from Banakat, near Tashkent. The town was taken by Genghis in 1220. Ahmad’s mother seems to have been captured, because as a boy Ahmad was in the entourage of Chabui when she married Kublai, then a prince of twenty-four. He graduated to Kublai’s household, helping with finances and military expenditures, a background from which arose, in the words of his biographer, Herbert Franke, a ‘relentless craving for total control over government finances’.

  When Kublai was enthroned in 1261, Ahmad became responsible for requisitioning provisions for the court. He rose fast. The next year he had two jobs, a senior position in the Secretariat and a role as a transport commissioner. He hated to be supervised, always a bad sign in an administrator, and asked to be made directly answerable to Kublai himself. His bid failed, and Kublai gave his son and heir, Jingim (Zhenjin in another spelling), jurisdiction over the Secretariat. It was the start of Ahmad’s long-running feud with Jingim.

  Ahmad’s job was to increase government income, and he was never short of ever more ingenious ideas for taxation. In 1266, he struck gold as head of a new Office for Regulating State Expenditure. By improving records, he managed to enrol some 600,000 new tax-paying households, increasing the empire’s tax base from 1.4 million households to almost 2 million.

  Kublai loved the result, and Ahmad prospered with a portfolio of jobs. His growing power was match
ed by his arrogance, and his arrogance by his unpopularity. But he didn’t care. Most foreign officials were unpopular, as Marco Polo recorded: ‘All Cathayans [northern Chinese] detested the Great Kaan’s rule because he set over them governors who were Tartars, Saracens, or Christians who were attached to his household and devoted to his service.’

  Disputes continued, over Ahmad’s attempt to establish another council to outflank the Secretariat, and about his objections to the new auditing office, the Censorate. ‘Why should we have a Censorate?’ he said. ‘There’s no reason as long as the money and grain come in!’ In 1270 he got his council – the Department of State Affairs – the fourth of the great pillars of government, along with the Secretariat, Military Affairs and the Censorate. And in addition he became director of Political Affairs. In Kublai’s eyes he had the magic touch and could do no wrong. By 1272, he was Kublai’s top financial official. All complaints – there were several attempts to impeach him – were sidelined by Kublai, because nothing was allowed to get in the way of mobilizing resources to fight the Song.

  A 1287 banknote is headed ‘High Yuan Trade Office Treasury Note’ in Chinese (running right to left), with a similar statement (immediately below, left) in Phags-pa script, running vertically. Two oval ‘strings’ of ‘cash’ show the number of coins represented by the note, in this case 2,000. Since each ‘string’ weighed about five kilograms, this so-called ‘flying money’ had great practical advantages. The bottom panel, in Chinese, Tangut and Manchu, warns that ‘counterfeiters will be executed’. Mongol is not represented, either in language or in Uighur script, which suggests that traditional Mongol lands were of little importance to Kublai’s economy.

  When victory seemed assured, Ahmad was part of the team summoned to advise on how best to exploit the new conquest. One point at issue was whether Song paper currency should be replaced by the Yuan currency. Bayan, the much-lionized commander of southern forces, had promised Kublai’s newly acquired Song subjects there would be no change. Half Kublai’s advisers agreed, arguing that such a change would undermine credibility. The others disagreed, probably on the say-so of Ahmad, who saw profit in making the exchange. Kublai’s casting vote went with Ahmad. The unfortunate southerners were offered a derisory exchange rate: one Yuan note for 50 Song ones.

  Now Ahmad was almost supreme, having raised himself above the government’s checks and balances and made himself into a Middle Eastern vizier. He declared state monopolies on salt, medicinal herbs, copper tools and the sale of iron, which enabled him to manipulate their prices, to his own advantage. He made a son governor of the southern capital, Hangzhou. He set up transport bureaus in each of the eleven provinces, nominating Muslims to head five of them, a slap in the face for his Chinese colleagues. He had rivals demoted, exiled or imprisoned. Many died or were executed, or simply vanished. One senior military officer named Zui Pin, a distinguished veteran of the Song campaign and now a senior provincial official, complained that Ahmad had set up 200 unnecessary government offices and appointed some 700 friends and relatives to posts across the empire. Ahmad had his revenge, accusing Zui Pin and two colleagues of stealing grain and making unauthorized bronze seals. All three were executed in 1280.

  Ahmad might have got away with ruthlessness, even brutality. Corruption was another matter. He was eternally, fatally acquisitive, proposing through his associates that a property here, a jewel there, or a beautiful horse for his stud would oil the way to this or that appointment. He had a particular eye for women. All told, according to the Persian historian Rashid al-Din, he acquired 40 wives, 400 concubines and 3,758 horses, camels, oxen, sheep and donkeys.

  Still Kublai remained in thrall to Ahmad’s financial acumen, drive, self-confidence and plausibility. In the spring of 1282, the emperor promoted him to the rank of Left Chancellor, leaving only the Right Chancellor above him in the official government hierarchy. The dreadful possibility arose that if he was not stopped he and Kublai would end up running the empire together.

  Ahmad had one enemy who was not so easy to handle. Kublai’s son and heir, Jingim, absolutely loathed him, one reason being that the prince had been an admirer of Zui Pin and sent officers to save him from execution, only to be told they had arrived too late. In Ahmad’s presence Jingim tended to lose his temper. Once he punched Ahmad in the mouth. When Kublai asked what the matter was, Ahmad muttered through clenched teeth that he had fallen off his horse. Ahmad tried to gain control by proposing a high court of justice that would have authority over all the princes. This was too much even for Kublai. He issued a mild rebuke, saying that he had never heard of anyone trying to censure the imperial clan.

  Now, at last, a plot was hatched. There were two conspirators, both highly unstable characters. The driving force was Wang Zhu, a hard military man who had acquired a big brass club as a murder weapon. His accomplice was a shady Buddhist monk named Gao, who claimed to be a magician. The two had met on a campaign, when Gao cast spells that hadn’t worked, then killed a man and used the corpse to fake his own suicide. He was now on the run.

  Kublai was in Xanadu, as usual in spring. Beijing was left to Ahmad. The plotters seized their chance, as the official history relates, though in four different and often contradictory versions, which conflict again with Rashid al-Din and Marco Polo. This is my attempt to make sense of the story.

  The two plotters hatched a lunatic scheme, involving a crowd of 100 or so, who would turn up at the city gates purporting to be the entourage accompanying Jingim, the heir apparent, who had suddenly decided to return to Beijing for a religious ceremony. It would be night-time, too dark for a quick check of who these people were. The idea was that Ahmad, galvanized by the approach of the one man he feared other than the emperor himself, would lead the way out to greet them, and that would be the moment to strike.

  On 26 April, the two put their complicated scheme into effect. They sent two Tibetan monks to the city council to announce the ‘news’ and give orders to buy the right equipment for the ceremony. The council members were puzzled. They checked with the guards: no, no orders had been received. So where exactly was the heir apparent? The monks looked embarrassed and could not answer. Suspecting foul play, the commander of the guard arrested the monks and set out guards.

  Next Wang Zhu put his back-up plan into action, sending a forged letter as if from the heir apparent to the vice-commissioner of the Department of Military Affairs, Bolod, telling him, in effect, to go ‘to my residence for further orders’. That worked. With the main guards out of the way at Jingim’s palace, Wang Zhu hurried off to Ahmad, urging him to get all his Secretariat colleagues together to greet the ‘prince’. That worked too, but only just. Ahmad sent out a small advance guard to meet the mock-prince and Wang’s rent-a-crowd of horsemen, a meeting that took place some 5 kilometres out of town. The guards, of course, saw at once that the whole thing was a scam. The rebels had no alternative: they killed the guards and proceeded.

  At about 10 p.m. they gained entry to one of the city’s north gates and made their way to the west door of the prince’s palace.

  Here they struck a problem. The guards were ready, and highly suspicious. Where were the prince’s usual outriders, they asked. ‘We beg first to see these two men, then we will open the gates.’

  A pause.

  The rebels backed off, worked their way around the palace in the darkness, and tried again, this time at the south door. There had been no time to rush a message across town to warn the guards. The gates opened. Guards arrived minutes afterwards, but were preempted by another forged note from the ‘prince’ demanding troops as an escort, which, astonishingly, were supplied.

  Now Ahmad and his entourage came out. All the new strangers dismounted, leaving the lone shadowy figure of the mock-prince on his horse. The figure called out to Ahmad. Ahmad stepped forward. Wang and a few followers were right behind him. They led him further forward, then away into the shadows, out of sight. Wang drew from his sleeve his brass club, with which he st
ruck Ahmad a single fatal blow.

  Ahmad’s No. 2 was called next, and was killed in the same way.

  Now Ahmad’s retainers realized something was amiss and yelled for help. All was sudden chaos, with guards and rebels mixed up in the dark. Gao, the counterfeit prince, galloped off into the night, arrows flew, and the crowd scattered, leaving Wang begging to be arrested, certain that his noble act would be recognized.

  No such luck. The monk Gao was found two days later. On 1 May, both were condemned to death, along with the commander of the city guard.

  Before the axe fell, Wang cried out ‘I, Wang Zhu, now die for having rid the world of a pest! Another day someone will certainly write my story!’ The three were beheaded and quartered, while Ahmad was given an official burial.

  It was the new commander of the Beijing guard who brought the news personally to Kublai, covering some 500 kilometres in a nonstop gallop, changing horses along the post-road. It took him two days to reach the emperor. Kublai at once ordered his vice-commissioner for Military Affairs, Bolod, to investigate.

  Ten days later, Bolod was back with the truth about Ahmad’s corruption. Kublai, appalled at his own role in Ahmad’s rise, flew into a rage and turned everything upside down: ‘Wang Zhu was perfectly right to kill him!’ He ordered the arrest of all Ahmad’s clan members and associates, right across the empire. Everything he had done was undone, everything he owned was seized. His harem was disbanded, his stolen property returned, his slaves freed, his herds broken up, his remaining appointees – 581 of them – dismissed. That autumn, his four sons were executed. Kublai ordered his tomb to be opened, his corpse to be beheaded in full public view and then his remains to be thrown outside Beijing’s main north gate to be consumed by dogs.