Yuan Dynasty (1271 - 1368)

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Kublai Khan (1260-1294), the grandson of Genghis Khan, first defeated the Jin Dynasty in Northern part of China and decleared himself Chinas emperor in 1271 when he founded the Yuan dynasty. But it wasn’t before 1279 he overthrew the last Song ruler. Surprisingly the last battle between the Mongols and the Song rulers was not on the horseback but with warships.

 

Kublai Khan, the founder of Yuan Dynasty

The end of the Mongol-Song war occurred on 19 March 1279, when 1000 Chinese warships faced a fleet of 300 to 700 Yuan Mongol warships at Yamen, and were defeats after tactical failures. The Song dynasty elite were unwilling to submit to Mongol rule, and opted for death by suicide. The Song councilor, who had been tasked with holding the infant child-emperor of the Song in his arms during the battle, also elected to join the Song leaders in death. It is uncertain whether he or others decided that the infant Emperor should die as well.

The councilor therefore jumped into the sea, still holding the child in his arms. Tens of thousands of Song officials and women threw themselves into the sea and drowned. The last Song emperor died with his entourage, held in the arms of his councilor. With his death, the final remnants of the Song resistance were eliminated. The victory of this naval campaign marked the completion of Kublai's conquest of China, and the onset of the consolidated Mongol Yuan dynasty.

China had for centuries been divided, but Kublai was now absorbing whole China into the great Mongol empire, which was then the largest empire in the world. China was a great labor source and gave agrarian wealth and tax revenues to the nomadic Mongols.

It was the first foreign dynasty to rule all of China.

Kublai’s decision to choose a Chinese tradition rather than a Mongol one is a potent reminder of what would become a lifelong dilemma. Kublai was driven by the unrealized dream of his grandfather, the fearsome conqueror Genghis Khan, who desired to unite the whole of China under Mongol rule. Kublai knew that subduing China was one thing, but ruling it would be another. It would require a delicate balancing act of appealing to his new

 

Chinese subjects while maintaining the Mongol loyalty.

Kublai was brought up by his mother Sorghaghtani and was taught Mongol traditions. But she encouraged toleration of other faiths, including Islam, and employed Chinese tutors so that Kublai could learn the local traditions and the foundations of Buddhism and Taoism. This multicultural education later helped him understand the importance of tolerating a conquered region’s traditions and faiths.

As a warrior, Kublai showed himself a grandson of Genghis Khan and participated in his grandfather’s territorial expansion, a process driven by the tried-and-tested Mongol methods of extreme brutality.

Kublai had captured the most modern part of the world at that time; the Song dynasty had around 50 Million people. A flourishing economy boosted the growth of its cities, some of whose populations peaked at more than one million people.

The Chinese had invented gunpowder, paper money, printing techniques and a booming cultural variety from poetry, to ceramics and calligraphy.

The Yuan hierarchy was rigid: Mongols occupied the top of the heap, followed by Central Asians and then the Chinese. Despite Kublai’s reliance on some Chinese as close advisers, Chinese nobles resented how they were shut out of the top positions in the Yuan government, and how the Yuan abolition of the civil service exams essentially cut off the chance of employment and social ascent for the brightest and best in Chinese society.

Mongols, meanwhile, resented the increasingly China-centered nature of Kublai’s imperial power structure.

 

By the time of Polo’s visit, in the mid-1270s, Shangdu (Xanadu) was already being relegated to the role of summer palace. To center the empire more in Chinese territory, the capital shifted southeast to Dadu (today the site of Beijing), also on the advice of Liu. Marco Polo became famous for having served in the court of Kublai, an event that demonstrates the khagan’s openness to foreign customs.

 

The conquest of China, where Kublai forged the Yuan dynasty, would stand as his greatest achievement. Yet he could not have done so without adopting Chinese customs, thus alienating Mongol aristocrats who regarded the Chinese as inferior. This tension between the Mongol elite and its subject peoples, especially the Chinese, played a major role in destabilizing Mongol rule. Although at his death Kublai would leave an empire that was relatively stable and prosperous, it would survive him by less than a century.