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

by John Man

  Kublai was old and failing. His empire had reached its limits, yet he was desperate to extend it further. He even planned to re-invade Japan, until other disastrous foreign adventures – Burma (Myanmar as it now is), Vietnam and Java – showed the idea to be impossible.

  After his conquest of Yunnan, Burma became a neighbour, and a target. The Burmese king, Narathihipate, ruled a once-prosperous Buddhist realm, whose capital, Pagan, gloried in 5,000 temples. When Kublai demanded submission, the king – arbitrary, brutal, known as King Dog’s Dung to his unhappy people – executed the envoys, which of course invited invasion. Marco Polo reported what happened when, in 1273, Mongol archers turned 200 Burmese war-elephants into pincushions: ‘They plunged into the wood and rushed this way and that, dashing their castles against the trees . . . destroying everything that was on them.’ The Mongols captured twelve of them and marched them home as gifts for Kublai. Victory was not followed up by conquest. That would have to wait. But when it came, in 1286, shattering a kingdom already half shattered by regicide, conquest imposed nothing more than occasional tribute, never enough to repay the cost of imposing it.

  The two states that comprised today’s Vietnam – Annam in the north, Champa in the south – also owed allegiance, in Kublai’s view. A seaborne invasion against Champa ended in humiliation, for the Vietnamese proved very good at guerrilla war. Kublai’s response was a joint land and sea assault on the north, intending to seize the south. That inspired outraged resistance, with peasants tattooing their arms ‘Death to the Mongols!’, under a charismatic leader, Tran Hung Dao. He ordered scorched-earth withdrawals inland and used a tactic that had beaten the Chinese 300 years before. In March 1288, his army allowed Mongol ships up the Bach Dang river to Haiphong, then placed sharpened stakes just beneath the surface, pointing upstream. The Mongol ships, retreating downriver, were impaled, torn open and sunk. A catastrophe for Kublai, and one of Vietnam’s greatest victories, still recalled today, because the remains of the stakes were found in 1988 and are now a tourist attraction, the Bach Dang Stake Yard.

  Java was no near neighbour, but it – or rather its eastern end, Singhasari – was a light of wealth and stability that drew Kublai like a moth to a flame. In 1289, an envoy arrived demanding submission. His answer was humiliating expulsion. Kublai, as Heaven ordained, prepared a 1,000-strong fleet, and invaded in 1292. The young king, Vijaya, tempted the Mongols inland with promises of tribute, then turned on them and chased them into a hasty retreat, with many losses and no gains – except to Vijaya’s kingdom, which, as Majapahit, grew to include most of Indonesia.

  The world’s most powerful man seemed unwilling to acknowledge that dreams must die, ambitions fade, the body age, and that the best he could hope for was an empire within the borders he had set for it. His demons were depression, drink and food. In 1281, his favourite wife, Chabui, his chief companion and adviser for forty-one years, died. Then there came the scandal of Ahmad’s murder, bringing with it the sudden proof of his declining abilities and poor judgement. Still, at least his succession was secured, in the form of Jingim, now in the prime of life at thirty-eight. He had been the intended heir since the death of an elder brother in childhood. After Ahmad’s murder, he came into his own, and Kublai rallied enough to take another wife, Nambui, a distant cousin of Chabui’s. He was still fit enough to face life: at the age of almost seventy, he managed to make her pregnant. Having borne a son, she began to act as his go-between, protecting him from overwork. Then tragedy struck again. In 1285, Jingim fell ill from some unspecified disease and died.

  There was still a remnant of the old Kublai left, enough for one last effort. All this time, Khaidu had been active, often almost forgotten amidst the business of administration and foreign adventuring. But he had been busy building support all around the fringes of the empire, reaching out southwards into Tibet and eastwards to Manchuria.

  Kublai was faced with the grim prospect that all the northern reaches of his empire, a great arc of steppe-land from Xinjiang, across his original Mongolian homeland and into Manchuria, would fall away to become the pastoral-nomadic empire to which the rebels aspired. Kublai sent Bayan – general, Grand Councillor, conqueror of the Song campaign – to occupy Karakorum, while he himself led another army to reclaim Manchuria.

  Marco describes Kublai directing impossibly large forces from his miniature fortress borne by four elephants. Kettle-drums boom, arrows fall like rain, the battle sounds like thunder, Kublai wins, the rebel commander is captured and executed. Khaidu pulled back westwards, remaining de facto khan of Inner Asia for three more years, until, after several more battles, he died, after forty-five years of campaigning.

  Personal losses, rebellion, defeat abroad: it was all too much. Kublai turned to food and drink. At court banquets, he gorged on boiled mutton, breast of lamb, eggs, saffron-seasoned vegetables in pancakes, sugary tea and of course airag, the Mongolian drink of choice. It was the drink in particular that undermined him. As activity declined, as his powers waned, he put on weight, ballooning year by year into extreme obesity. He must have known it would kill him, but he didn’t care. Now well into his eightieth year, he was hardly able to function except through his wife Nambui.

  He knew where he wanted to be buried: back in the land of his birth, in the heartland of the Mongol people, where the last of the Siberian mountain ranges, the Khentii, begin to give way to grasslands. This was where his grandfather, who had started it all, was born, and this was where he was buried.

  On 28 January 1294, New Year’s Day by the lunar calendar, Kublai was too ill to attend the usual ceremonies. No dressing in white, no great reception to receive tributes and praise from visiting vassals, no reviewing the parade of richly caparisoned elephants and white horses, no presiding over the banquet in the Great Hall. Everyone must have known the end was near. A messenger was sent galloping off to the only man who might be able to lift the emperor’s spirits: Bayan, awaiting his next assignment in Datong, 300 kilometres away. But there was nothing Bayan could do, except promise eternal loyalty. Kublai knew his end was approaching and asked that Bayan be one of the three executors of his will. He weakened steadily, and on 18 February he died.

  A few days later, the funeral cortège was ready. Considering Kublai’s wealth and the money he had been spending on his campaigns, it would have seemed quite austere. Still, there would have been hundreds: members of the family and government who were fit enough for the journey, plus guards, drovers, grooms, cooks, household servants, spare horses, carts for the women, carts for the tents, camels carrying all the paraphernalia suitable for a royal procession that would be on the road for three weeks and 1,000 kilometres. Somewhere quite near the front, behind a guard, would have come Kublai’s hearse, a wagon bearing a tent concealing a large coffin, well sealed and packed with spices and other preservatives. Covering perhaps 50 kilometres a day, the line would have wound over ridges and valleys up on to the Mongolian plateau, then out over the Gobi’s dusty wastes, until at last the gravel gave way to grassy hills and the forested foothills of the Khentii.

  Imagine: a line of fur-clad men, led by a masked shaman with a drum and rattle, pass through a cordon of guards. Several in the procession shoulder poles that carry a simple coffin draped in blue and yellow silk. They wind up through slender firs, emerging on to open ground, with a view over a snow-covered valley, a frozen river and hills marching away into the distance. A second group has been up here for some time, tending fires to melt the iron-hard earth. Others have dug with iron spades to make a grave. There is a reverent deposition, prayers, an invocation by the shaman. The earth is replaced, horses led back and forth to disguise the work, guards set in place to keep away all but family members.

  No one knows where this scene, or something like it, took place, because the burial was as secret as Genghis’s had been. Kublai was beside his father, Tolui, his brother Mönkhe and his grandfather Genghis, all of them part of the landscape from which they and their empire had sprung. />
  PART IV

  AFTERMATH

  23

  THE OUTER REACHES OF EMPIRE

  ON HIS DEATH, Genghis ruled an empire four times the size of Alexander’s, twice the size of Rome’s, larger than any nation today except Russia. And it was only half complete. By 1300, the Mongols had doubled Genghis’s conquests, adding what is now the rest of China, Korea, Tibet, Pakistan, Iran, most of Turkey, the Caucasus (Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan), most of habitable Russia, Ukraine and half of Poland. They had probed western Europe, the borders of Egypt, India, Vietnam, Indonesia and Japan. One sixth of the world’s land area was theirs; and all this in the space of three generations. The fact that one man, Genghis’s grandson Kublai, was nominal master of this vast estate is one of history’s most astonishing facts.

  But family squabbles turned a unity into a patchwork. Then, as generation succeeded generation, each local ruler had ever more tenuous connections with the past. They adapted to their new subjects, spoke their languages, converted to their religions, developed their own agendas, never went to Mongolia, and were soon no more Mongolians than white Americans remained English after 1776. Their history, though technically the tail end of the Mongol empire, is really a collection of local histories: China, Persia, Central Asia, Russia, all looking back to Genghis to buttress their claims, all with the vaguest of borders, all seeking alliances with each other, yet ready to fight. A detailed history of them all would be like describing three-dimensional chess. Such a huge and varied entity could never hold together.

  In China, Kublai had done what the Romans did for northern Europe: roads, canals, trade, efficient taxation, a postal-relay system unrivalled for efficiency until the coming of the telegraph. Paper money underpinned the economy. Yelu Chucai would have been gratified.

  But the Mongols never truly belonged. Though some of Kublai’s successors could speak Chinese, not one of them learned to write it well. They despised and feared their subjects, forbade them to bear arms, excluded them from their own government and employed foreigners to administer them. Mongol rule depended on power, upheld with ever stricter laws and ever fiercer punishments, which inspired ever more resistance. Generals rivalled each other, and demoralized troops defected to rebels. Many top Mongolians fawned on courtly fashion, took the royal coin, and forgot the simplicity and toughness of their nation’s founder. Others back on the grasslands remembered; and mutual suspicions grew.

  Rot spread from both top and bottom. Kublai’s heir, the peaceable, cautious Temur Oljeitu, died without an heir, and factions formed. Royal clan rivalled clan for influence, for the tensions between the steppe-loving Mongolian elite and those dominated by the Chinese bureaucracy were never resolved. There were intrigues and assassinations, including one emperor, the twenty-year-old Yingzong (his Chinese temple name). In 1328, a two-month civil war ended in executions. In 1331, plague ravaged parts of China, perhaps the beginning of the Black Death that would soon spread to Europe. Famine followed. People fled their villages. The Yellow River broke its banks, drowning uncounted thousands and setting a new course to the sea. The economy collapsed into hyperinflation.

  Quite possibly, no government could have survived such terrible afflictions. But the fact was that the Mongol emperors and their administrators were not up to the job. As Genghis had said, if ever the Mongols forgot their tough, nomad roots, they would no longer deserve to govern. To summarize the great French historian of Asia, René Grousset: softened by a bloated court, cut off from the real world by favourites and mistresses, these descendants of the most redoubtable and terrible conqueror known to history dwindled away into feebleness, ineptitude and tearful vacillation. They died young, killed by alcohol and soft living. Of Kublai’s eleven heirs – if you count Yingzong, who lasted just two months before being murdered – the average age at death was thirty.

  From the 1340s, society began to divide against itself. Gangs turned to banditry, local leaders organized self-protection forces. Secret societies spoke of dire omens and coming catastrophes. In the plague-ravaged, flood-torn lowlands, rebels known as Red Turbans ripped at the empire’s decaying flanks, eventually merging with another seditious group, the White Lotus Society. Two rival Red Turban leaders proclaimed their own dynasties. A White Lotus leader, who called himself the Prince of Radiance, promised a Buddhist uprising and the resurrection of the Song, hoping to recruit some 200,000 who were being forced to re-route 160 kilometres of the Yellow River. His scheme was discovered, and he was executed. His chief of staff kept the dream alive, with his own capital, coinage and bureaucracy; but his warlord generals were more eager to pillage their own estates than to cooperate in campaigns. One rebel group actually sacked Xanadu.fn1

  It seemed obvious that Heaven was withdrawing its mandate to rule. The prophecies of doom were self-fulfilling. Looting drove people to flee, creating refugees who, for protection, followed bandit leaders, took up arms and became looters themselves. Attempts by central government to send in troops failed, and rebels gained in confidence. By the 1350s, the whole fabric of society was unravelling, with a dozen areas of rebellion spreading turmoil across much of eastern China. Three main Red Turban groups, all controlling sections of the Yangtze, rivalled each other for the crown.

  One of these was led by Zhu Yuanzhang, the Yuan’s nemesis and the most extraordinary man of the age, whose odd, craggy features – large nose, big ears, bushy eyebrows and a prominent bulge on his skull – compelled attention and made him seem ‘awesome and profound’.fn2 He was a child of his times. His grandfather had been with the Song forces when they were shattered by the Mongol fleet in 1279. As a boy, he was given to a temple and became a monk, begging his way around, seeing the grim conditions, understanding the people and their ways. He had lived through the famine of 1344, when the ground cracked, ‘the farming people were like ants frantically twirling in a hot pan’, and he survived on grass and tree bark. Then came the plague. In his part of Anhui province, ten villages died, ‘a scene of chilling desolation’.

  In 1351, the rebellion started, as ‘poor farming folk . . . in their short coats and straw sandals, wearing their red headbands and carrying red banners, shouldering their bamboo staves and their hoes, with long spears and axes, killed the officials, occupied the cities, opened granaries to distribute the stored grain, battered down jails and freed prisoners, set up their own names and titles – they sounded the death knell of the Yuan dynasty’. The following year, Zhu, aged twenty-four, joined in and quickly rose through the ranks. Then he set out on his own, gathering an army of 20,000–30,000. He built a team of scholarly advisers, winning a reputation for brilliance, idealism, discipline and vision. From destitute villager to monk, to field captain and successful general – his rise was almost as astonishing as Genghis’s. Towns fell to him, among them Nanjing, a bastion of Yuan power. That gave him control of the Yangtze Valley, the heart of the old Song empire, thus in effect reversing much of Kublai’s conquest. Victories and his growing military skills won talented followers. In Mote’s words, ‘a motley array of amateur commanders had become professional generals equal to any in Chinese history’. Zhu began to see himself as an emperor-in-waiting. After disposing of his greatest Red Turban rival in 1363, he astutely spun his image away from the rebel group, with their reputation as warlords, and chose a new dynastic title: Ming (‘radiance’).

  Now he turned to his main task, which was to throw out the Mongols without alienating those who might defect to him. He issued a proclamation, which in summary ran:

  True, Mongol rule was legitimate. Within the four seas and beyond there are none who have not submitted to it. How could this be the consequence of human powers? It was in truth bestowed by Heaven. When they took over, their ruler was enlightened and their officials good. But thereafter, the officials abandoned and destroyed the norms of conduct. The people’s hearts turned against them. Now Heaven despises them. The time has come for change.

  Intelligence, high ideals and good management paid off. O
n 9 September 1368, Zhu’s general, Xu Da, arrived at Beijing. The last Mongol emperor, Toghon Temur, saw the game was up and fled with his family, household and a few guards. Five days later, Xu Da took the city, with very little resistance. The Yuan dynasty ended, and the Ming started, with Zhu as its Taizu, or Grand Progenitor.

  With Toghun went some 60,000 of the Mongol elite, leaving up to 400,000 Mongols to fall into the vengeful arms of the Ming. The survivors settled briefly in Xanadu, before being chased out by the Ming and retreating on northwards. In a lonely outpost in today’s Inner Mongolia, Toghun died, of shock and despair at the enormity of his loss.fn3

  Back on the grasslands, the survivors never accepted their expulsion. For almost 200 years, khans of the so-called Northern Yuan went on claiming they were the ‘true’ rulers of China, because they ‘knew’ the truth: that the Ming emperor had captured Toghun’s queen, who was pregnant. Since her son would be killed if his paternity were known, she prayed for a miracle. Marvellous to relate, Heaven extended her pregnancy to twelve months and the boy was accepted by the new Ming emperor as his own. So the ‘truth’ was that the Ming emperors were really Mongols. It was all nonsense, but for centuries, as Mongolia sank back into civil war and anarchy, petty khans called themselves ‘Emperors of the Great Yuan’ until the last one surrendered to the up-and-coming Manchus in 1635.