by John Keay
Succession crises occurring on and off through the 1240s brought a lull in Mongol operations in China. They ended with the elevation of Möngke, a grandson of Chinggis, as Great Khan in 1251. Like Ögödei, Möngke apportioned responsibilities for the wider Mongol empire among his kin. A cousin headed the Kipchak khanate in Russia, otherwise the Golden Horde (‘horde’ being derived from the Mongol ordos or ordu, meaning an ‘encampment’, like ‘Urdu’, the ‘language of the camp’, as spoken by those Mongols, or ‘Mughals’, who would one day set their sights on India). A brother of Möngke, Hülegu, was dispatched to Iran, where he would found the Persian Il-khanate, capture Baghdad and overthrow the Abbasid caliphate. And another brother, Khubilai, was given responsibility for operations in China.
Khubilai resumed Ögödei’s offensive in Sichuan and continued south through its steep ravines into still-little-known Yunnan. There in 1253 he defeated the proud kingdom of Dali, which had succeeded that of Nanzhao in the tenth century. ‘Thus it was the Mongols who first made Yunnan a directly administered province of China.’16 In the course of these operations, contact was established with Tibet, or rather with its dominant lama-hood. Mongol–Tibetan relations were thereafter close, though their nature is obscure and controversial. Chinese sources imply a conventional subordination with military and administrative arrangements that provoked much Tibetan ‘banditry’ and necessitated several punitive invasions. Tibetan sources take little account of political relations and stress the influence of Tibetan Buddhism within the Mongol court. In neither case is it clear which of Tibet’s several peoples was involved or what part of the Tibetan region was affected. After careful research, Herbert Franke has concluded that no Mongol incursion reached central Tibet, that ‘most of Tibet proper remained outside the direct control of the Sino-Mongol bureaucracy and that even the border regions were throughout the [Mongol] Yuan dynasty an unruly and troubled region’.17
Since he had hitherto been supposed the least martial of Mongol princes, Khubilai’s success in Yunnan caused some surprise, while his willingness to spare lives and reinstate the king of Dali looked like a repeat of Chinggis’s mistake in dealing with Xia. From Yunnan an expeditionary force descended the Red River into Vietnam, whose Tran dynasty took fright and formally recognised Mongol suzerainty. The landward encirclement of the Southern Song was now complete. It remained only to cut off any seaborne assistance from the Korean kingdom, an objective that was attained, after numerous bloody incursions, when the Koreans submitted in 1259.
Meanwhile Möngke had come south in person in order to deliver the coup de grâce to the Southern Song. In time-honoured fashion a many-pronged attack was planned with the main thrust coming from Sichuan in the west. Möngke advanced there in 1258, Khubilai pushed down to the Yangzi through Hubei in 1259, and in the same year another Mongol prong prodded into Anhui. Southern Song resistance proved unexpectedly resolute; yet it was already crumbling when another Mongol succession crisis brought an unexpected reprieve. For in 1259, either from dysentery or a direct hit from a Song missile, Möngke died. Operations were immediately suspended. Khubilai, who was poised to cross the Yangzi to Wuchang, did so, but then reluctantly headed north to contest the succession. Before he got there, one of his brothers mobilised against him, whereupon Khubilai declared himself Great Khan. There then ensued a many-sided war fought largely in Mongolia between the contending Mongol princes (1260–64).
The war effectively ended Mongol unity. Khubilai emerged as the Great Khan with direct control of the Mongolian homeland, northern China, Manchuria and Korea, plus nominal authority over the entire empire as successor to Chinggis; but his khanate was just one of four, all vast Eurasian powers that now acted more like fraternal states than constituent parts of a single empire. The so-called pax Mongolica was deceptive. Travellers with information to share, merchandise to sell or expertise for hire passed freely through the Mongol lands; in what would prove to be the swansong of the Silk Road, east and west engaged in a fruitful exchange of technologies and ideas as well as luxury goods. But familial ties among the khanates were no longer sustained by a common purpose, and the overarching claims of the Great Khan provoked more dissension than collaboration. Thus Khubilai and his successors in China, though the one celestial dynasty to rule something approximating ‘All-under-Heaven’, would do so only in theory.
Nearly fifty when in 1264 he emerged triumphant from the Mongol war of succession, Khubilai Khan is traditionally portrayed by Chinese historians as an example of a ‘barbarian’ ruler who responded well to Chinese acculturation. He had already located his capital south of the steppe within what had been Jin territory at a place called Shangdu, about 300 kilometres (185 miles) north-west of Beijing near the Hebei/Inner Mongolia border. Marco Polo would wax lyrical about Shangdu’s palace and hunting park; and Samuel Taylor Coleridge would make it sound even more exotic, not least by spelling Shangdu as ‘Xanadu’. In Yunnan and then in Mongolia, Khubilai’s success had owed much to the manpower, revenue and advice available from his Chinese subjects. His fellow Mongols despised such indulgence of a conquered people, decried his adoption of a settled lifestyle and ridiculed him for preferring Chinese forms of sovereignty over the cut-and-thrust charisma of traditional steppe dominion. Indeed, the war of succession between the Mongol princes had been seen as a conflict between opposing styles of rulership as much as contending personalities. But whether willing convert or wily statesman, Khubilai seemed enthralled by his Chinese dominion at the expense of his Mongol heritage.
Traditionally his imperial reign is dated 1279–94, so prolonging to the maximum the Song’s exclusive claim on the Mandate and foreshortening the duration of Mongol rule. In reality Khubilai had been active in China from the early 1250s and supreme throughout all but the south from 1260. In that year he adopted a Chinese reign-name and calendar; it was evidence of imperial intent. In 1264, victorious over his Mongol rivals and acknowledged as Great Khan, he moved his capital still farther south into core China. Shangdu was retained as a summer capital, but for most of the year court and government would now operate from what had been the Khitan Liao and Jurchen Jin capital in the heart of Hebei. Renamed Dadu (‘Great Capital’), and later incorporated into the Ming city known as Beijing, its construction began in 1266/67 and took eight years. The layout was painstakingly Chinese. Based on an idealised city as outlined in that repository of ultra-traditionalism, the Zhouli (‘Rites of Zhou’), it advertised Khubilai’s assumption of the Mandate. Within high rectangular walls aligned with the compass points and pierced with towered gateways, the grid of Dadu’s wide thoroughfares radiated from an inner walled city wherein stood the south-facing palace. Though commissioned by a Mongol emperor and then realised by a Muslim architect, its remains constitute the earliest surviving example of a quintessentially Chinese imperial capital. As emperor, Khubilai would be the first to rule all China from the future Beijing; and as Great Khan he was the first to preside over Mongol Eurasia from China.
In 1272, while the Southern Song yet reigned in the south, Khubilai clearly signified acceptance of the Mandate. He did so in a formal announcement declaring that his dynasty was to be known by the unusual title of (Da) Yuan, ‘(Great) Originator’. Historians ought to be eternally grateful. The tiresomely confusing habit of recycling old dynastic names had finally been broken. As he proudly explained, ‘Yuan’ derived neither from his state of origin, like Qin and Han, nor from some feudal dukedom, like Sui and Tang. ‘In all these cases, they [the dynasties] fell prey to the ingrained habits of common people . . . [and] adopted momentary measures of expediency for the sake of control,’ he declared.18 Clearly they were doomed. Khubilai, successor to the ‘sage-like’ Chinggis Khan and now ruler of the largest empire Heaven had ever seen, was above such parochialism. On the best possible advice, he had sourced his dynastic title in the ‘Book of Changes’ (Yi-jing, I-Ching), perhaps the most venerable of all the ancient classics. This transcended previous practice; and such was the exalted provenance
of the new title that there could be no question of sharing the Mandate with someone else or conceding its duplication. The Southern Song were, by implication, delegitimised and must bow in submission.
To that end, military, and more especially naval, operations were again under way. Abandoning the idea of an advance from Sichuan, Khubilai had resolved on a frontal attack across the Yangzi. The prerequisite for this was gaining control of the great river’s Han tributary, on which the twin cities of Xiangyang and Fancheng (now amalgamated as Xiangfan) constituted Song’s formidable northern bastion. Facing one another across the Han River, both were heavily fortified and well supplied with the shipping with which to intercept any Mongol armada or bring in reinforcements and provisions if besieged.
They were indeed besieged. Invested in 1267/68, the twin cities held out until 1273. In one of the most protracted and celebrated actions in China’s history, the Mongols soon discovered that cavalry were useless against ships and unhappy under firebomb attack. Summoning shipwrights and sailors from Korea and Shandong, experts in siege engines and ballistics from the Muslim west, engineers experienced in the use of gunpowder from the north, and vast contingents of Han infantry, the Mongols pressed the blockade in most un-Mongol fashion.
Heroic endeavours are recorded on both sides, none being more desperate than that of two Song colonels, both called Chang. When in 1272 Fancheng’s outer defences were breached, the Changs assembled a supply convoy of a hundred giant paddle-boats and, churning their way to the relief, tried to run the Mongol blockade. They succeeded, though at a heavy cost in men, ships and supplies. One of the Colonels Chang was lost on the approach, the other while trying to escape downriver under cover of darkness. Later in the same year, Song engineers built a pontoon bridge of timbers across the river to connect the two cities. The Mongol commander reportedly met this challenge with craft equipped to cut through the bridge with specially designed ‘mechanical saws’. Needham interprets this to mean that the boats were again paddle-powered and that the, presumably, circular saws were so mounted as to be run by the river’s current turning the paddle-wheels, and so the saws, when the boats were stationary against the bridge.19 More prosaically the pedalling crew could have been linked directly to the saws in an arrangement like that of a treadle grindstone.
In Marco Polo’s ‘Description of the World’, it is claimed that Polo himself was present towards the end of the Xiangfan siege. In fact, he supposedly introduced the Mongol command to the two catapult experts – ‘a German and a Nestorian Christian’ – who devised the trebuchets, each capable of launching rocks weighing over 100 kilograms (220 pounds) that eventually battered the defenders into surrender. This is almost certainly a fabrication. Other sources say the experts were Muslims, and modern scholars doubt whether Polo had yet reached China. But whether Polo himself was responsible for making the claim is uncertain. It could just as well have been inserted by others, either by the far from reliable writer who allegedly wrote down Polo’s word-of-mouth narration or by one of the many who further elaborated on his story over the following centuries.
So problematic is the provenance of the various versions of this celebrated text, and so apparently minimal Polo’s authorial control, that revisionists have had a field day. Some question whether Polo ever got to China at all. The fact that he never notices the Great Wall is offered as evidence that he didn’t, though since ‘long walls’ are little mentioned after the Sui, and since the Great Wall, as we now know it, was a creation of the Ming, this could be taken as evidence that he did. Other omissions – tea-drinking, foot-binding and the Chinese system of writing – deserve consideration. Yet, while in travel-writing the commonplace is notoriously easy to forget, incidental description is hard to invent. It has been suggested that he could have plagiarised some now lost, possibly Persian, source. The process of transcription must then have been one of elaborate collusion, a feat that its slapdash composition argues strongly against. In the end, trying to disprove his narrative proves as inconclusive as trying to substantiate his itinerary. And whatever Polo did, or wherever he went, the text itself retains an immediacy that it would be perverse to ignore.
When at last the twin cities fell in 1273, there was a year’s delay before the Mongol advance to the Yangzi, and on down that river towards Hangzhou, could begin in earnest. Again it met stiff resistance. A seasoned official called Bayan was given command of the Mongol armies; Polo calls him ‘Hundred Eyes’. Khubilai himself took no part in the campaign other than to urge clemency wherever possible. Bayan did just that, enticing defections, conciliating opponents, massacring the population of only one or two major cities, and winning a series of great battles. In Hangzhou, the weak young Southern Song emperor (Song Duzong, r. 1265–74) chose this moment to die. It was no great loss. His place was taken by a five-year-old and his powers by a dowager empress. Meanwhile Jia Sidao, the last in a long line of disposable Song ministers, took the blame. For the widespread disaffection and the military defeats, he also paid the price and was quietly murdered. Though savaged by later commentators, Jia Sidao was probably no more culpable than Cai Jing or Han Tuozhou. Not even a correct understanding of the Supreme Ultimate could by now have saved the Song. In late 1275 ‘Hundred Eyes’ Bayan was approaching Hangzhou.
Happily the surrender and occupation of the great city early in the following year belied the Mongols’ fearsome reputation. The city was spared, the imperial tombs protected (though later plundered), officials pardoned, and the dowager empress treated with respect. Taken north to Dadu, she would be befriended by Khubilai’s empress, while the last Song emperor would opt for a monastic life and was eventually exiled to Tibet. Even the discovery that courtiers had smuggled two of his brothers out of Hangzhou and down the coast by sea brought no reprisals.
It did, though, prolong resistance. Leapfrogging from port to port ahead of the Mongol advance, the young Song princes and their court-in-exile remained on the run for three years. Each prince in turn was acknowledged as emperor, one succeeding when the other died. From the Leizhou peninsula in the extreme south (near Hainan island), an escape was contemplated to Champa (in southern Vietnam), then abandoned in favour of a return to the offshore islands at the mouth of the Pearl River. There, somewhere in the archipelago that includes Hong Kong island, the Song flotilla was finally surrounded and the young emperor’s ship sunk. It is said that a loyal follower took the seven-year-old emperor in his arms and leapt overboard as the vessel went down. The year was 1279.
With the incorporation of the south into Yuan China, four centuries of division came to an end. Not since the disintegration of the Tang empire had all China been united under one ruler. The conquest of the Southern Song was Khubilai’s supreme achievement, ‘and it was indeed a mighty conquest’, says Polo, ‘for in all the world there was no kingdom worth half as much’.20 The population of southern China, no less than its wealth, was probably double the north’s and may have exceeded that of all the rest of the Mongols’ domains put together. With such assets the Yuan dynasty might well have asserted its authority over the other Mongol khanates and so added a reunited Mongol empire to that of China. World dominion beckoned, and Khubilai seems to have been tempted. Yet within less than a century the Mongols would be bundled out of China back to the windswept steppe from which they had come. For the Yuan, as for the Qin and the Sui, assembling an empire was one thing, consolidating it quite another.
MONGOL MISADVENTURES
If traditionally 1279 marks the beginning of Mongol rule in China, realistically it marks the end of Mongol achievement there. The story of the Yuan dynasty reads as one of protracted decline, and since Khubilai occupied the throne for another fifteen years – longer than any of his nine dynastic successors bar the last – he must bear much of the responsibility. He failed to override the chaotic system of succession that threw up all these quickfire emperors. His administrative arrangements, far from centralising authority, seem to have dispersed it. His attempts to improve ag
ricultural production did little to improve revenue receipts and nothing to reverse the decline in population, itself the result of plague and famine as well as incessant war. And his foreign adventures brought still less in the way of returns and were seldom short of catastrophic. All these failures could be attributed to advancing years and declining health. In his mid-sixties and, as of 1281, deprived by death of the wise counsel of his empress, Khubilai was already succumbing to overindulgence. By the time of his own death aged nearly eighty in 1294, he was crippled with gout, often insensate from alcohol and quite grotesquely obese. His consequent neglect of business, punctuated by whimsical obsessions, was not congenial to effective government.
On the other hand these shortcomings could equally well be attributed to his Mongol heritage. Informal succession procedures, for instance, were as typical of the steppe-lands as the imperial addiction to greasy meat and fermented mares’ milk. Among the Mongolian clans, leadership had always depended more on peer approval than primogeniture, seniority or prior nomination. A contender for the throne was expected to secure the approbation of rivals by demonstrating his fitness to rule; and this meant either worsting them or placating them, usually with gifts and subordinate appanages. Khubilai did in fact designate one of his sons as his successor and prepared him accordingly. But when in 1285 the son died, leaving three sons of his own, Khubilai prevaricated and the succession was thrown wide open. Winning support from the Mongol elite, the third of these grandsons succeeded; but it was descendants of the other two sons who soon followed him on to the throne. The pool of Yuan princes quickly grew and thereafter guaranteed fraught and often bloody successions interspersed by short reigns and marked by erratic swings of policy in which Mongolia-based military leaders and China-based bureaucrats often found themselves at loggerheads. The one exception to this staccato tale was Toghon Temur or Yuan Shundi (r. 1333–68). Possibly illegitimate and much maligned as a typically ‘bad last emperor’, he would cut a sorry figure while what remained of the empire disintegrated around him. Yet he was no monster, and in his youth, when enjoying the services of some excellent ministers, might just have reversed the situation.