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

by John Man

  In July 1260, a force of some 15,000–20,000 men, about equal to or a little less than that of the Mongols (no one knows the numbers for sure), left Egypt for Palestine. This was a very different type of army than that of the Mongols. With Egypt’s limited pasture, the average Mamluk had just one horse, well cared for, bigger and stronger than the little Mongol horses. The Mamluks depended on weaponry, not manoeuvrability: top-quality bows, arrows by the million, lances, javelins, swords, axes, maces and daggers. In addition, the Mamluks were selected for their physical excellence, whereas the Mongols were ordinary citizen-soldiers, superb only as long as they could choose battle on their own terms.

  This time, they could not. The place was called Ain Jalut, the Spring of Goliath, because here, where the Jezreel Valley ends up against the curve of the barren Gilboa Hills, David supposedly slung his fatal stone. No good account of the battle survives, but according to probably the most reliable one,fn4 Qutuz arrived after a 50-kilometre march from Acre early on the morning of 3 September 1260, choosing the site for its wooded ridges and good water supply. Behind him were the Gilboa Hills and the rising sun. He scattered troops into the nearby hills and under trees, and arrayed the rest of them at the bottom of the hills. The Mongols came around the hills from Jordan, to meet the Mamluks as they advanced slowly, making a terrifying noise with their kettle-drums. Too late, the Mongols, blinded by the sun, discovered that they had been outmanoeuvred. With reinforcements streaming from Gilboa’s side-valleys, the Mamluk cavalry, fresh and well-armoured, closed around the depleted and weakened Mongols. Two Mamluk leaders who had joined the Mongols defected, reducing the Mongol forces even more.

  The Mongols died almost to a man. According to one account, Ked-bukha was magnificent to the end, spurring on his men until his horse was brought down, he himself caught and taken before Qutuz. He refused to bow, proclaiming how proud he was to be the khan’s servant. ‘I am not like you, the murderer of my master!’ – his last words before they cut off his head.

  It was here in today’s West Bank that the Mongol war machine finally ran out of steam in the west. They were not invincible after all. The Mongols would mount several later attacks on Syria, but could never hold it because, once away from good pastures, they had no natural advantage. Genghis’s dream of world conquest had reached its limits first in northern India, then in Hungary, and now in the Middle East.

  But in China there were worlds still to conquer.

  fn1 ‘Ayn Jalut: Mamluk Success or Mongol Failure?’, Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 44/2 (December 1984).

  fn2 She had actually been married to Hulegu’s father, Tolui, but the marriage was never consummated, Tolui being ten at the time. So she parted from him – yet ended up marrying an even younger husband, Tolui’s son and in effect her stepson, Hulegu. There were no children, but he very much respected her guidance.

  fn3 It is not an island now, because the lake has shrunk. The grave and its treasure – if they exist – have never been found.

  fn4 An oral report by Sarim al-Din, assessed in Peter Thorau: ‘The Battle of Ayn Jalut: a Re-examination’, in Crusade and Settlement; see Bibliography.

  12

  THE TAKING OF YUNNAN

  AT THE OTHER end of Eurasia, Kublai was front-man for his brother Mönkhe. With his Chinese advisers, he was well qualified when in 1252 he asked his brother for an extension of his responsibilities in north China. There was a good strategic reason for such a request – to ensure supplies for occupation troops. He had his eye on the rich farmlands along the Yellow River and its tributaries, in today’s Shaanxi and Henan provinces, roughly between the ancient capital of Xian and the newer and recently conquered one of Kaifeng. Mönkhe gave him two areas, one on the Wei River, an irregular blob almost half the size of England running from the Wei Valley southwards to the Song border, and another in Henan. Following Yelu Chucai’s advice, his mother’s shrewd practices and Mönkhe’s imperial strategy, he allowed the peasants to work, taxed them fairly and also established ‘military farms’ – colonies dedicated to supplying the troops with food. It worked. He had his power-base, and was now looking south, towards the Song empire of southern China, which was a very much greater challenge than the world of Islam.

  Since its foundation almost 300 years before, Song China had become the world’s greatest power. Though cut almost in half when the Jurchen from Manchuria seized the north in 1126, southern Song was everything that Mongolia wasn’t. Seventy million people in hundreds of cities – fifty-eight of them with over 100,000 inhabitants – crowded into China’s ancient heartland, the fertile plain of the river the Chinese call the Chiang and Europeans know as the Yangtze. Both a blessing and a curse, its waters irrigated and sometimes flooded its paddy fields. It was also the region’s major highway, navigable for 2,700 kilometres, linking a dozen of the biggest cities. What a contrast with Mongolia, which had not a single navigable river, scarcely 1 per cent of Song’s population, and just two little towns.

  Mere numbers give no clue to Song’s real strengths: its cultural depth, economic drive and political unity. Song dominated all its neighbours, Tanguts and Tibetans in the west, Nanzhao (Yunnan as it became) and two Vietnams (as in 1954–75, but with different names) in the south. True, north China was lost to its Jurchen conquerors, but the southern Song preserved the old culture, ruling from their new capital, Hangzhou (Linan as it was then). Song had experienced a renaissance, fuelled by new methods of rice-growing. More and better food, population growth, trade, new industries (like cotton), people on the move in search of self-improvement, the spread of education, more civil servants – all these changes interacted to bring about the boom. The growth of wealth funded the arts, gardening, fashion, ceramics and architecture. Industries flourished – coal-mining, metallurgy, paper-making. Song porcelain became one of China’s glories. For artistry, wealth, inventiveness, venerability, for the quantity and quality of practically any cultural and social trait you care to measure, southern Song was unrivalled. Islam was a novelty in turmoil, Europe a backwater. India? Southeast Asia? Japan? Africa? Nothing comparable.

  With the inland frontiers blocked by ‘barbarian’ kingdoms, Song turned seawards. The Yangtze, its tributaries and their canals formed 50,000 kilometres of river highways, along which merchant ships sailed to a coastline dotted with ports that were bases for ships with refined sail-systems designed to take advantage of the regular monsoon winds. Quanzhou was the greatest, known to foreign merchants by its Arabic name, Zaytun, which means ‘olive tree’ in Arabic but actually derives from its avenues of citong (coral trees). Six-masted seagoing junks, with 1,000 people aboard, were made safe with watertight compartments, a feature not seen in Europe until the nineteenth century. A Song captain set his course with a compass, an invention taken over from geomancers almost two centuries before it came to Europe. Foreign trade spread Song coins from Japan to India. Chinese ceramics were exported to the Philippines, Borneo and beyond.

  The examination system for recruiting civil servants, already well established, was enlarged, giving new power to the 20,000 ‘mandarins’ and their 200,000–300,000 employees. Laws curbed the rich and helped the poor. State officials were paid well enough to limit corruption. The state, its income secured by taxes and by monopolies on salt and mining, looked after its people as never before, building orphanages, hospitals, canals, cemeteries, reserve granaries, even funding village schools. Taxes were reformed to win the cooperation of the peasant-farmers. To the state, the revenues from taxation were immense, and carefully recorded. In the late twelfth century, Song revenues from maritime customs duty alone amounted to 65 billion coins, handled in cumbersome strings of 1,000. Soon after the year 1000, Song had started printing banknotes – an experiment that led to inflation and was abandoned.

  Printing was a defining trait of Chinese society in general and Song in particular. Money and books were printed with woodblocks, from images cut in reverse. It was this technique that underpinned the explosion in re
cords and reading matter that had started in the eighth century in China, Japan and Korea.fn1 The output of printed books was phenomenal. Soon after the Song came to power, the whole Buddhist canon was published – 260,000 pages in two-page blocks. There were vast official text collections and encyclopedias with up to 1,000 chapters. A fashion for collections inspired inventories of anything and everything. Scientific treatises and monographs appeared, some with print runs in the millions. From these intellectual interests sprang many brilliant men and at least one genius, Shen Gua, a sort of eleventh-century precursor to da Vinci and Darwin, who recognized the nature of fossils, theorized that mountains had once been seabeds, improved astronomical instruments, pioneered advances in mathematics, described how compasses worked, wrote on pharmacology, and took a shrewd interest in politics, history and literature.

  Song’s capital, present-day Hangzhou, was the world’s most populous city, with 1.5 million people, more than the whole population of Mongolia. A century of imperial spending had turned it into a boom city and one of the world’s finest ports. Its setting – the Eye of Heaven Mountains, the West Lake – was as beautiful as its palaces.

  How could the Mongols dare to dream of victory over this one city, let alone the fifty-seven other cities of 100,000 inhabitants or more, let alone the 70 million peasants and the rich lands of the Yangtze Basin?

  Well, they had to. It was their destiny, ordained by Heaven.

  Obviously, a frontal assault on Song, across the busy, broad and well-defended Yangtze, would risk failure. The Mongols were not in the business of failure. Mönkhe needed something that would give him an edge. It so happened that to the south-west of Song, outside its borders, was a statelet that could, if taken, act as a base from which to open a second front.

  Kublai was to be in charge, and about time too. He was thirty-six and had never yet been given responsibility for anything but his own estates. A first campaign, an untried leader: Mönkhe was careful to give Kublai the best of help, in the form of one of his most experienced generals, Uriyang-khadai, the fifty-year-old son of the legendary Subedei, conqueror of half Asia and much of Russia.

  Their target was a long way away, and very hard to get to. It was the core of what had, for 250 years until around AD 900, been a great kingdom, Nanzhao, now reduced to a rump centred on its capital, Dali, after which it had become known. Dali, which controlled the road, and thus the trade, between India (through what is now Burma) and Vietnam, was a knot of forested mountains and competing tribes, notoriously difficult to get into, let alone control.

  For a region and a culture few Westerners have ever heard of, this was no mean place. Dali’s Bai people, a Tibetan-Burmese tribe, had emerged as the dominant group in 937, and retained a sturdy independence for three centuries under its royal family, the Duans, who ruled an area about the size of Texas. To the north, Sichuan province is notoriously wet, so the Chinese dubbed Dali and its surrounding area Yun-nan, ‘South of the Clouds’. Dali was a sort of Inner Asian cross between Afghanistan and Switzerland, its tribal rivalries held in check by rulers made rich by trade, and at peace with the Chinese, who had learned enough to leave the place to its tribes, its mountains, its glorious lake and its charming climate. Today, Dali still thrives on its ancient roots: the Bais in their bright, wrap-around shirts and top-heavy headdresses, stone houses decorated with wood carvings lining cobbled streets, artists at work on the local marble.

  Dali itself was not much of a challenge. Three centuries of peace had made it complacent. It had no army to speak of. The main problem was to get there across Song. That would mean gathering in territory newly conquered from the Tanguts, and then slicing southwards for 1,000 kilometres along Song’s western borders.

  Mustering in the semi-desert of the Ordos from the late summer of 1252, Kublai’s force took a year to gather itself. It must have been all cavalry, because it would have to cross many rivers and valleys. In the autumn of 1253, this great force headed south-west for 350 kilometres along the Yellow River to the Tao, then south across the foothills of the Tibetan plateau into what is today northern Sichuan. This was a pretty remote area, even for the Mongols, but it had been invaded (conquered would be too strong a word) by Ogedei’s second son, Köten, in 1239. That autumn, Kublai camped on the high, bleak grasslands of today’s Aba Autonomous Region, with no trouble apparently from the locals, the notoriously wild Golok tribesmen.

  There would be no need for destruction if Dali capitulated. That was the ideal outcome. The Yuan Shi, the official history of the Yuan dynasty, tells of how Kublai’s Chinese advisers had managed to talk sense into his barbarian soul. One evening, Yao Shu told a story of how a Song general, Cao Bin, had captured the great city of Nanjing without killing ‘so much as a single person; the markets did not alter their openings, and it was as if the proper overlord had returned’. Next morning, as Kublai was mounting up, he leaned over to Yao Shu and said: ‘What you told me yesterday about Cao Bin not killing people, that is something I can do.’

  It was not that simple. Following normal practice, Kublai sent three envoys ahead offering Dali the chance to capitulate. Dali’s leading minister, Gao, the power behind the Duan ruler, executed them. This foolish and provocative act guaranteed an all-out assault – the very crime that had led Genghis to invade Muslim lands in 1219.

  Kublai divided his forces into three. One wing rode eastwards, off the high grasslands, down on to the Sichuan Basin, by today’s Chengdu, replenishing supplies in the newly harvested fields of Dujiangyan, where dams and artificial islands dating back some 1,500 years controlled the Min River. Kublai himself headed south over the grasslands, meeting up with the first column, perhaps three days later. Meanwhile, Uriyang-khadai took a difficult route some 150 kilometres further west, deep into the mountains of western Sichuan, cutting across valleys and ridges to the main road between Dali and Tibet. This would give a fast two-day run to Dali when the time came. Gao massed his forces on the Yangtze, whose upper reaches formed a valley a day’s march over a ridge to the east of the city. But the river was no obstacle to the Mongols. They had crossed dozens on their way south. The crossing was made at night, in silence. Led by a general named Bayan, of whom more later, the Mongols appeared at dawn on Gao’s flank, attacked, inflicted terrible damage and forced a rapid retreat back to Dali.

  With Uriyang-khadai galloping in along the lakeside from the north, Dali was now at Kublai’s mercy. At this point, given the opposition, you might think that all-out slaughter would follow. But, as Genghis had shown, urbicide had to have a strategic reason: to encourage other cities to surrender. It saves time and trouble when cities surrender and subjects are grateful for their survival. Here, there were no other cities to be conquered. Kublai, learning from both Cao Bin and his grandfather, ordered restraint.

  Everything fell into place quite easily with the city’s surrender in January 1254. The leading minister and his underlings who had executed the envoys were themselves executed, but that was all. The king, a puppet before, remained a puppet, pampered into subservience. Mongol troops remained, gradually intermarrying with locals.

  Uriyang-khadai went on to ‘pacify’ tribes further south and east, penetrating today’s north Vietnam, taking Hanoi in 1257, then retreating rather hastily in the face of tropical heat, malaria and some spirited resistance. This is easily said, but it was an immense operation. Yunnan to Hanoi is 1,000 kilometres. In four years the Mongols had marched all the way round Song’s western frontiers, meeting hardly any resistance. Kublai now had all the information he needed to plan the next phase of the war against the south.

  Although Yunnan was too remote to be a base for the invasion, Kublai’s campaign changed the course of the region’s history, and China’s. After twenty years of nothing much, in 1273 Yunnan’s first high-level administrator arrived. Sayyid Ajall was a Turkmen who had survived Genghis’s assault on Bukhara in 1220 because his grandfather had surrendered at the head of 1,000 horsemen. The nine-year-old boy, raised in Mongolia a
nd China, went on to make a distinguished career in various government posts, ending in Yunnan. With the help of his sons, it was he who brought Yunnan fully into the empire, which eventually made it part of China today.

  fn1 The immense labour of carving each page in reverse inspired the next logical step – printing with movable type, an idea independently conceived and perfected by Johann Gutenberg in Germany 400 years later. In China (and Korea, where it was actually employed in 1234) it was a dead end, firstly because wood-block printing was cheap and efficient; and secondly because a type setter needed several thousand characters. It was quicker to carve than typeset.

  13

  IN XANADU

  WITH YUNNAN UNDER his control, and wondering how to take on the rest of China, Kublai was poised between two worlds – Mongolia and China, grassland and farmland, steppe and city, nature-worshippers and ancestor-worshippers – and he needed both. The Mongol elite provided his traditional backing and his cavalry; the Chinese elite provided his bureaucracy, his record-keepers, his tax-gatherers, his infantry. He could not keep the Chinese on side from a mobile HQ of tents and wagons; he could not retain the trust of Mongols from a Chinese city. He needed a new sort of base from which to rule this growing part of his brother’s empire, a capital of his own that was both Chinese and Mongol.

  Mönkhe understood the problem and told him to go ahead. In 1256, his Chinese advisers set out to find a suitable site. There was not a huge range of choices if he was to be within reach of Beijing, yet also on grasslands, in traditional Mongol territory.