Kublai Khan and the Founding of the Yuan Dynasty (1271)

Kublai Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan, proclaimed the Yuan dynasty in December 1271, declaring that the Mongol state he ruled from China was a legitimate Chinese dynasty. Over the next eight years his armies conquered the Southern Song, and by 1279 he was the first non-Chinese ruler of the whole of China. The Yuan dynasty, which lasted until 1368, joined China to a Eurasian world empire and left a lasting mark on its capital, its borders and its culture.

Background: a Mongol prince in China

Kublai was born on 23 September 1215, the son of Tolui, youngest son of Genghis Khan, and Sorghaghtani Beki, a capable Christian Kereit princess. His mother encouraged her sons to learn about the settled peoples they ruled, and from a young age Kublai gathered Chinese advisers, among them the Buddhist monk Haiyun and the scholar-official Liu Bingzhong.

In 1251 his elder brother Möngke became Great Khan and gave Kublai responsibility for northern China. Kublai had already learned a lesson about government. In 1236 he received an appanage of farming households in northern China, and his agents taxed it so harshly that many families fled. When Kublai restored order with the help of Chinese officials, he saw that a prosperous population produced more revenue than a ruined one.

Kublai led the conquest of the Dali kingdom in Yunnan in 1253-1254 and in 1256 began building a city at Kaiping, later called Shangdu or Xanadu.

When Möngke died in 1259 during a campaign against the Song, Kublai was proclaimed Great Khan in May 1260. His younger brother Ariq Böke was proclaimed by a rival assembly, and the Toluid civil war followed. Kublai’s victory in 1264 left him master of Mongolia and northern China, but the western khanates no longer obeyed the Great Khan.

The proclamation of 1271

From the start Kublai presented himself as a Chinese emperor as well as a Mongol khan. He adopted Chinese reign titles, Zhongtong in 1260 and Zhiyuan from 1264, built ancestral temples and in 1267 began a new capital at Beijing, named Dadu (“Great Capital”) in 1272.

In December 1271 Kublai issued an edict adopting the dynastic name Da Yuan, “Great Yuan”. The name came from a phrase in the Book of Changes, a Confucian classic, praising the originating power of Heaven. Earlier dynasties had usually taken their names from places or fiefs, so this was a deliberate claim to universal, cosmic legitimacy that could appeal to Chinese scholars.

The proclamation did not make Kublai lord of the whole country. The Southern Song still ruled tens of millions of people south of the Huai River and the Yangtze, the richest lands in China. Conquering them was the great project of the next decade.

The conquest of the Song

The key Song fortress of Xiangyang on the Han River fell in 1273 after a siege of about five years (see Battle of Xiangyang). In 1274 Kublai appointed Bayan of the Baarin to command a vast army that descended the Yangtze. Bayan was disciplined and, by Mongol standards, restrained, and many Song commanders went over to him.

Bayan’s forces crossed the Yangtze in early 1275, and the Song chief minister Jia Sidao, leading a large army in person, was routed at Dingjiazhou in March 1275. Jia was dismissed and murdered in exile later that year.

Bayan then advanced on the capital, and in early 1276 the regent, Grand Empress Dowager Xie, surrendered the capital Lin’an (Hangzhou) and the young Emperor Gong.

Kublai treated the captive Song family with relative leniency. The young emperor was taken north, given a title and later sent to Tibet to become a Buddhist monk. Loyalists, however, crowned two other boy emperors and fought on in the south. The last Song fleet was destroyed at the Battle of Yamen near Guangzhou in March 1279, where the minister Lu Xiufu is said to have leapt into the sea holding the child emperor.

Governing China

Kublai built a government on Chinese lines, with a Central Secretariat for civil affairs, a Bureau of Military Affairs and a Censorate to watch officials. China was divided into large provinces, a system that is the ancestor of the provinces of modern China.

Yet power was kept in Mongol hands. Society was sorted into a hierarchy, often described as four classes: Mongols at the top, then “various peoples” (semu) such as Central Asians and Persians, then northern Chinese and, at the bottom, the southern Chinese of the former Song. Historians debate how rigidly this was applied, but the highest offices went mostly to Mongols and semu. The civil service examinations, the traditional path into office for Chinese scholars, were not held until 1315.

The empire was held together by a network of relay stations, the jam, where official messengers could change horses, and by Mongol and allied garrisons placed at strategic points. A new legal code and registers of households underpinned taxation.

Kublai relied on Muslim financial experts such as Ahmad Fanakati, who raised revenue efficiently but was hated for corruption and was assassinated in 1282. The government issued paper money as the main currency, which amazed European visitors such as Marco Polo.

Religion, culture and science

Kublai patronised many faiths. He made the Tibetan lama Phagpa his imperial preceptor and asked him to create a new script for all the languages of the empire. The Phagpa script was introduced in 1269, though it never replaced Chinese characters or the Uyghur-based Mongol script.

The court supported Daoists, Confucians, Muslims and Christians as well, though not without limits: after Buddhist complaints, Kublai ordered most Daoist scriptures except the Daodejing to be burned in 1281. Islamic science came east with the Persian astronomer Jamal al-Din, who presented astronomical instruments to Kublai in 1267, and a Muslim astronomical bureau was founded alongside the Chinese one. Kublai’s engineers extended the Grand Canal north towards Dadu, and the astronomer Guo Shoujing produced the Shoushi calendar of 1281, one of the most accurate of its time. Excluded from office, many Chinese scholars turned to painting, drama and literature, and Yuan drama became one of the high points of Chinese theatre.

Wars and setbacks

Kublai’s later wars were less successful. Two invasions of Japan, in 1274 and 1281, ended in disaster (see Mongol invasions of Japan). Expeditions against Dai Viet in northern Vietnam, Champa and Java failed or brought only nominal submission, though campaigns against the kingdom of Pagan in Burma had more success. In Vietnam the Yuan armies were defeated, most famously at the Bach Dang River in 1288, and the expedition sent to Java in 1292-1293 was drawn into local wars and withdrew after its former ally, Raden Wijaya, turned against it. Raden Wijaya went on to found the Majapahit kingdom. In Central Asia his cousin Kaidu remained an enemy for the rest of his life.

At home the costs of war, inflation of the paper currency and rebellions such as that of the prince Nayan in Manchuria in 1287 weakened the regime. Kublai’s favourite wife Chabi died in 1281 and his chosen heir Zhenjin in 1285. Kublai grew obese and suffered from gout, and he died at Dadu on 18 February 1294.

Legacy

Kublai’s grandson Temür succeeded him, but later Yuan emperors reigned only briefly, amid court struggles and growing economic troubles. Floods, famine and the Red Turban rebellion of the 1350s broke Yuan control, and in 1368 the Ming founder Zhu Yuanzhang drove the last Yuan emperor back to Mongolia.

The Yuan dynasty reunited China after more than three centuries of division and set its capital at Beijing. It brought Yunnan under direct rule, formed a close patron-priest relationship with the Sakya lamas of Tibet, and its connections with the Ilkhanate and Europe made the 13th century an age of exceptional contact across Eurasia. In Chinese tradition Kublai is counted among the emperors of China, known by his temple name Shizu. In Europe his image was shaped above all by Marco Polo’s book, which portrayed him as the richest and most powerful ruler in the world, while in Mongolia he is remembered as one of the great khans descended from Genghis.

By the numbers

Timeline

• 1215, 23 September: Kublai is born.
• 1251: Möngke makes Kublai responsible for northern China.
• 1260, May: Kublai is proclaimed Great Khan at Kaiping.
• 1264: Ariq Böke surrenders; the civil war ends.
• 1271, December: Kublai proclaims the Yuan dynasty.
• 1273: Xiangyang surrenders after a five-year siege.
• 1276: The Song capital Lin’an surrenders to Bayan.
• 1279, March: The last Song forces are destroyed at Yamen.
• 1294, 18 February: Kublai dies at Dadu.
• 1368: Ming forces take Dadu and the Yuan court flees north.

Why it matters

The founding of the Yuan dynasty turned a Mongol conquest into a Chinese imperial dynasty. Kublai’s attempt to rule as both khan and emperor shaped China’s borders, made Beijing its capital and opened China to an unprecedented flow of people, goods and ideas across Eurasia.