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11- 3Mongol Conquest, Chinese resurgence, and eurasian Connections

How did China change during the Yuan and Ming dynasties?

From the thirteenth through the nineteenth centuries the Chinese way of life maintained great continuity. Three ruling houses held power between the Song downfall and the imperial system’s demise in the twentieth century, an almost unprecedented record of political stability, perhaps matched only by the ancient Egyptian kingdoms. Disorder occurred chiefly during years of dynastic decline and replacement. Two of the three dynasties were conquest dynasties imposed by non-Chinese nomadic peoples riding in on horseback. The two dynasties that held power between the thirteenth and seventeenth centuries were the Yuan (yu-wenn), established by invading Mongols, and the Ming, which marked a return to Chinese rule.11- 3 aThe mongol Empire and the Conquest of ChinaFor several millennia Chinese feared what they considered “barbarian” Central Asians who killed, looted, and took cap-tives. The strongest rulers controlled these peoples by conquest or divide-and-rule diplomacy. Enduring Central Asian influence on China’s political life resulted from the close proximity of the arid grasslands north and west of China, suit-able only for mobile herding, to China’s lush farmlands, with contrasting environments producing very different societies. Central Asia’s pastoral economy and few resources necessitated seasonal migration and chronic poverty for the tough, self-reliant herders. When China was weak, the Great Wall proved no major barrier to peoples envious of, and anxious to share in, China’s relative afflu-ence. In the thirteenth century China’s worst nightmare occurred when a confederation of warlike peoples, the Mongols, conquered all of China.Before invading China the Mongols conquered much of Eurasia, including parts of eastern Europe and western Asia. Traditionally divided into feuding tribes, the Mongols became united under the ruthless but brilliant Temuchin (ca. 1167–1227), who defeated or co-opted his rivals and then changed his name to Genghis Khan (GENG-iz KAHN) (“Universal Emperor”). Of humble origins, he had simple motives: “A man’s greatest pleasure is to defeat his enemies, . . . drive them before him, . . . take from them that which they possessed, . . . see those whom they cherished in tears, . . . to ride their horses, . . . hold their wives and daughters in his arms.”14 Skilled horse soldiers, more agile than their foes, Mongols proved formidable opponents. Their well-organized fighting units possessed powerful bows lethal at six hundred feet, disc-shaped stirrups giving the rider maneuver-ability, and the world’s most advanced siege weaponry, including catapults. China’s strength made it one of the last Mongol con-quests. Genghis Khan conquered parts of northern China in 1215, and the rest of China fell fifty years after Genghis’s death under his grandson, Khubilai Khan (koo-bluh KAHN) (r. 1260–1294), who created a new dynasty, the Yuan (1279–1368). China then became part of a great hemispheric, contiguous land empire, the largest in world history ever seen before or since and a mixing of many different societies, stretching from eastern Europe and the Black Sea to Korea (see Map 11.2).The Mongols imposed a distinctive government and fostered new cultural forms. Khubilai Khan proved a rather enlightened ruler, less cruel and more pragmatic than most Mongol leaders elsewhere in Eurasia. He patronized Buddhism, built granaries for food storage, operated an efficient postal sys-tem, and improved the transportation network. But Chinese his-torians condemned Khubilai Khan for Mongol sins generally, pleasure is to defeat his enemies, . . . drive them before him, . . . take from them that which they possessed, . . . see those whom they cherished in tears, . . . to ride their horses, . . . hold their wives and daughters in his arms.”14 Skilled horse soldiers, more agile than their foes, Mongols proved formidable opponents. Their well-organized fighting units possessed powerful bows lethal at six hundred feet, disc-shaped stirrups giving the rider maneuver-ability, and the world’s most advanced siege weaponry, including catapults. China’s strength made it one of the last Mongol con-quests. Genghis Khan conquered parts of northern China in 1215, and the rest of China fell fifty years after Genghis’s death under his grandson, Khubilai Khan (koo-bluh KAHN) (r. 1260–1294), who created a new dynasty, the Yuan (1279–1368). China then became part of a great hemispheric, contiguous land empire, the largest in world history ever seen before or since and a mixing of many different societies, stretching from eastern Europe and the Black Sea to Korea (see Map 11.2).The Mongols imposed a distinctive government and fostered new cultural forms. Khubilai Khan proved a rather enlightened ruler, less cruel and more pragmatic than most Mongol leaders elsewhere in Eurasia. He patronized Buddhism, built granaries for food storage, operated an efficient postal sys-tem, and improved the transportation network. But Chinese his-torians condemned Khubilai Khan for Mongol sins generally, such as maintaining Mongol cultural identity and actively resist-ing assimilation into Chinese society. Later Chinese viewed the Yuan as China’s darkest hour, an intolerable rule by aliens who refused to be absorbed. Khubilai Khan moved the capital to Beijing (“Northern Capital”), a provincial city close to the Great Wall and alongside major highways leading north and west. Except for brief periods since, Beijing has remained China’s capi-tal, eclipsing more ancient cities like Chang’an and Hangzhou. Reflecting his nomadic heritage, Khubilai preferred sleeping in tents, including one erected in the imperial palace gardens.The Mongols mistrusted intellectuals but were toler-ant in religion, inviting missionaries from all over Eurasia to come to the court for religious debates, including Christians of various sects (including Catholics). Khubilai Khan’s mother was a Nestorian Christian of Turkish ancestry, but, like many Mongols, he adopted Tibetan Buddhism. Governing a religiously diverse society, Khubilai Khan wanted to avoid con-flict. However, although a few women in the ruling family had some power, Mongols had even more rigid gender expectations and marriage practices than the Chinese, expecting widows to remain chaste and dutifully serve their parents-in-law. Chinese men now demanded that women remain at home and empha-size feminine behavior, including the growing fashion of tightly bound feet.

11- 3 b mongol China and Eurasian networksThe Mongols reopened China’s doors to the world and protected the overland Silk Road, reviving the exchange of goods, ideas, and technologies between East and West. Chinese inventions like gunpowder, printing, the blast furnace for cast iron, silk-making machinery, paper money, and playing cards moved westward. The active maritime trade continued. Many foreigners came to Mongol China by land and sea. Although Khubilai Khan sought Chinese support by modeling his government along Chinese lines and performing Confucian rites, most scholars and bureaucrats refused cooperation. Mongols were forced to rely administratively on foreigners coming to serve in what was effectively an interna-tional civil service, including many Muslims from Central Asia, western Asia, and North Africa. For example, a Persian engi-neer guided the building of Khubilai’s capital, Khanbaliq (now Beijing), and the first governor of Yunnan in southwest China came from the Silk Road city of Bukhara in Central Asia.A few Europeans also found their way to “fabled Cathay,” as they called China. One was the Italian merchant Marco Polo (ca. 1254–1324). Polo initially traveled to China with his father and uncle seeking trade goods but spent seventeen years there, mostly in government service. Eventually Polo returned to Italy and told of the wonders he had encountered or heard about to unbelieving Europeans who knew little about the world east of Palestine. Most dismissed Polo’s account as full of lies, but it was widely read and influential in Europe, and historians confirm its general accuracy. A keen observer, he recorded Chinese resentment toward the Mongols, who once slaughtered a city’s entire population for the killing of one drunk Mongol soldier. Polo wrote of China’s great cities, such as Beijing and Hangzhou (see Discover Historical Voices). Standing along the shores of beautiful West Lake in Hangzhou, he wrote that “the city is beyond dispute the finest and noblest in the world in point of grandeur and beauty as well as in its abundant delights. The natives of this city are of peaceful character, thoroughly honest and truthful and accustomed to dainty living.”15 The city boasted parks, a fire department, garbage collection, a pollution-control agency, and paved streets—all things nonexistent in Polo’s much smaller Venice, a major European city. Indeed, China was far more developed in many fields than the rest of Eurasia, probably enjoying the world’s highest standard of liv-ing. Polo noted, for example, that the Chinese, unlike Europeans, had for a thousand years burned black stones (coal) for heat. According to his account of Hangzhou: “The streets connected with the market-squares are numerous, and in some of them are many cold baths, attended by [people] of both sexes. All [resi-dents] are in the daily practice of washing their persons, and especially before their meals.”16 This information about regular baths probably astonished medieval Europeans, who seldom if ever bathed.Mongol control had enormous consequences for Central Asia, the Middle East, and Europe, and the Mongols dominated regions such as Russia and Turkestan for a long time. But Mongol rule in China, lasting only a century, did not leave a deep imprint. Most Chinese hated the Mongols, whose leadership deteriorated after Khubilai Khan’s death. Furthermore, after years of luxuri-ous living in sophisticated China, Mongols lost their fighting toughness, desiring luxury more than sacrifice. As Mongols in Central Asia and Persia adopted the cultures and religions of the conquered, Mongol unity fragmented and power strug-gles grew rampant. Adding to these troubles, the Yellow River flooded severely, bringing famine, and a terrible plague (prob-ably bubonic) outbreak raged. Historians still debate whether the pandemic, which killed many millions of Chinese, traveled west along the Silk Road to cause the terrible Black Death that greatly reduced the population of the Middle East and Europe in the fourteenth century (see Chapters 10 and 14). Some recent stud-ies suggest that the Black Death plague originated in Turkestan. Soon rebellions broke out all over China. Eventually a Chinese commoner established a new dynasty, the Ming, and Mongol military forces returned to Central Asia. Today Mongols vener-ate Genghis Khan as their greatest leader, building memorials and even a theme park to honor the conqueror. And Chinese are still wary of the Mongols, generating sometimes hostile relations between China and Mongolia ever since then.

Confucian social system. Ming leaders believed profit was evil, and mercantile interests inevitably conflicted with political ones. A later Ming scholar wrote that “one in a hundred [Chinese] is rich, while nine out of ten are impoverished. The poor cannot stand up to the rich. The lord of silver rules heaven and the god of copper cash reigns over the earth.”18 Hence, many mandarins despised merchants and opposed foreign trade. But some merchants, seeking respect and status, emulated the Confucian scholars by, for example, collecting art, engaging in philanthropy, and educating their sons.Military factors also influenced the turn inward. With Mongols regrouping in Central Asia and memories of oppres-sive Mongol rule still fresh, the Ming shifted resources to defend the northern borders and the pirate-infested Pacific coast, rebuilding and extending the Great Wall. The Great Wall sections near Beijing, enjoyed by millions of tourists every year, mostly reflect work done by the Ming. In addition, military operations along the northern border and an ill-fated invasion of Vietnam generated a fiscal crisis that weakened the government.Finally, the catastrophe of Mongol rule made the Chinese more ethnocentric and antiforeign. Always land-based, self-centered, and self-sufficient, the Chinese now believed they needed little from outside. China remained powerful, produc-tive, and mostly prosperous, enjoying generally high living standards, well into the eighteenth century, when profits from overseas colonies and the Industrial Revolution tipped the bal-ance in favor of northwest Europe. By the later Ming, China had entered a period of relative isolation that was ended only by the forceful intrusion of a newly developed Europe in the early 1800s.

11- 4 bChoson and the Yi DynastyWhen the Mongols conquered the peninsula, the Koreans resisted. The Mongols responded by devastating the land, car-rying off hundreds of thousands of captives, and imposing heavy taxes. Yet, during the Mongol era closer links to trade networks brought to Korea more Chinese and western Asian learning and technology. In 1392 a new Korean dynasty, the Yi (yee), whose state was known as Choson (cho-suhn), meaning “Fresh Dawn,” replaced Mongol rule and lasted five hundred and eighteen years, until 1910 (see Map 11.4).

Chapter summary The Intermediate Era was in many respects a golden age for much of East Asia. The Tang and Song dynasties represented perhaps the high point of Chinese history and culture. While the Tang enjoyed great external power, the Song featured dramatic commercial growth. The Chinese continued to develop distinc-tive forms of literature, visual arts, philosophy, and government, as well as new technologies and scientific understandings. The Mongol conquest and brief period of rule weakened China’s dynamism but extended overland trade routes that linked China even more closely to the outside world and promoted the spread of Chinese science and technology to western Eurasia. During the Ming, China briefly reasserted its transregional power and Chapter summaryThe Intermediate Era was in many respects a golden age for much of East Asia. The Tang and Song dynasties represented perhaps the high point of Chinese history and culture. While the Tang enjoyed great external power, the Song featured dramatic commercial growth. The Chinese continued to develop distinc-tive forms of literature, visual arts, philosophy, and government, as well as new technologies and scientific understandings. The Mongol conquest and brief period of rule weakened China’s dynamism but extended overland trade routes that linked China even more closely to the outside world and promoted the spread of Chinese science and technology to western Eurasia. During the Ming, China briefly reasserted its transregional power and maintained an advanced technology. But, in part because of the experience of Mongol rule, Ming China also increasingly turned inward, becoming less involved in world affairs.The Koreans and Japanese synthesized Chinese learning, writing, Confucianism, and Buddhism with their own native tra-ditions to produce highly distinctive societies. Significant change occurred in Japan as it moved from the aristocratic court culture of Heian to a warrior-dominated culture based on large landown-ing families and their military retainers, or samurai. By the end of the 1400s the East Asian societies remained strong but faced new challenges when Europeans began to expand their power in the world.