All background essays Chapter 12 · Lecture 1

HIST 270 · Chinese History · Chapter 12 · Lecture 1

The Mongols Conquered China in Two Stages

Background for the lecture "Mongol Conquest and State-Building": steppe conquest, learning to tax, Khubilai's choice, and the river war · 1206–1279

4,862 wordsabout 22 min read

Act I: The Conquest of the North (Review Question 1)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, Chapter 12, "The Mongol Conquest of the Jin and Xia Dynasties," pp. 198–199, with the chapter summary on p. 209. Reading-guide question: how did Chinggis Khan's military organization and his campaigns against the Xia and Jin shape the first stage of Mongol rule in North China?

From Temüjin to Chinggis Khan

Temüjin's rise is told in the Secret History of the Mongols, the only account of these years written by Mongols themselves (slides D, AF). It is frank, even about the boy Temüjin killing his half-brother over a fish, but it is still a family story written to honor Chinggis's line. Students should read it the way they read Sima Qian on the Han founder: as a court's memory of its own beginnings, full of real detail and shaped by hindsight.1

In 1206 a great assembly (quriltai) on the Onon River proclaimed him Chinggis Khan. Two reforms made his power last beyond the battlefield (slide E). First, he reorganized his followers into decimal units of tens, hundreds, thousands and ten-thousands, and he often placed men from different tribes in the same unit under commanders who owed their rank to him. Second, he built a large personal guard (keshig) recruited from the sons of commanders. It served as his bodyguard, his household staff and, in effect, a school for future generals and governors, and it also kept the commanders' sons as hostages for their fathers' loyalty. Those two reforms turned a confederation of rival lineages into an army that answered to one man.2

Xia and Jin

The Tangut Xia submitted first, in 1209 (Ebrey, p. 199), after a Mongol siege of their capital that ended in a nominal submission in 1210 (CHC 6, p. 208). Xia agreed to help against Jin but kept seeking alliances with Jin and Song. That double game is why Chinggis came back in 1226 (slide G). In 1211 Chinggis turned on the Jurchen Jin (slide F). The textbook's numbers are worth remembering because they make the point clearly. Chinggis led about 50,000 bowmen, and his three sons led a force of similar size, against a Jin army said to number 150,000 cavalry and 300,000 infantry (p. 198). The Mongols won through speed, discipline, a good intelligence service and the Jin court's own divisions. Many Khitan and Chinese commanders in Jin service changed sides early, and they brought infantry, engineers and local knowledge with them.

Zhongdu, the Jin central capital on the site of modern Beijing, fell in 1215 after the Jin court had moved south to Kaifeng. Kaifeng held out until 1233, and the last Jin emperor died at Caizhou in 1234. Xia, which had refused to send troops for Chinggis's western campaign, was destroyed city by city in 1226–1227. Chinggis died during the final siege, and his death was kept secret. When the Xia ruler came out to surrender, he was killed, and the troops did their best to slaughter everyone in the capital (Ebrey, p. 199).

Plunder, and the first signs of government

Ebrey's summary of these years is bleak: "Mongol armies did not try to control territory; they only plundered it" (p. 199). That is true of the raiding years of 1211–1215 and of much of what followed, but it is too strong as a description of the whole period. It is one of the few places where the deck corrects the textbook on a visible slide (slide F). The Cambridge History of China shows that the Mongols began to hold ground in the north well before 1234. The first darughachi, or resident overseer, was posted to Zhongdu in 1214–1215, a Muslim named Jabar Khoja. In 1217 Chinggis gave his general Muqali the title "prince of the realm" (guowang) and command of North China, with headquarters at Zhongdu and Xijing. Muqali spent the rest of his life taking and holding cities with an army that was largely Khitan, Jurchen and Chinese.3 So "plunder, then slowly govern" is a better summary than "only plunder."

The second part of Ebrey's description holds up. The Mongols handed out large blocks of land and people as fiefs to generals, Mongol and allied, who were usually away on campaign. Local strongmen, the "Han generals" (Han jun) who raised their own armies, filled the gap and governed their districts almost as hereditary lords. Farmers suffered from Mongol troops, bandits, rebels and local defense forces alike (p. 199).

The human cost

North China's registered population fell drastically between the late Jin and the first Mongol censuses (slide H). Jin's registration of 1207 counted about 8.4 million households and some 53.5 million people. Ögödei's census of the 1230s found only about 2 million households in roughly the same territory.4 Students should not read the gap as a body count. It combines killing, famine, epidemic disease, flight to the south, enslavement and people who simply vanished from the tax registers because they had become someone's bondservants or had hidden. Ebrey herself warns that population records "are not good enough to be certain" of the size of the decline (p. 209). What is not in doubt is that the conquest of the north was among the most destructive episodes in Chinese history.

Act II: Learning to Tax (Review Question 2)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, p. 199 (Yelü Chucai's service, the pasture proposal, the tax plan, tax farming and Yuan Haowen) and p. 200 (Möngke and Khubilai's government of the north). Reading-guide question: how did Yelü Chucai and the Central Asian tax farmers compete to shape Mongol rule in North China?

The pasture debate

Yelü Chucai (1190–1244) was a Khitan noble educated in Chinese learning who had served the Jin. Chinggis took him into his entourage after Zhongdu fell, and he served the Mongols for the next twenty-five years (Ebrey, p. 199; slide L). Under Ögödei (r. 1229–1241), some Mongol advisers proposed clearing farmers off much of the North China plain and turning it into pasture (slide M). Yelü answered with numbers. Regular taxes on land, commerce, wine, vinegar, salt and mining, he said, could bring in 500,000 ounces of silver, 80,000 bolts of silk and more than 20,000 tons of grain a year (p. 199). His biography in the Yuan shi gives the grain as "more than 400,000 shi." That is the same promise in Chinese units, not a different figure.5

Ögödei let him try. Tax bureaus for ten circuits of the north were set up, staffed by educated men and former Jin clerks (slide N). The biography says that when the first returns were laid out before him in the autumn of 1231, Ögödei laughed and said, "You never leave my side, and yet you can fill the treasury." The story is told by admirers, but the bureaus were real.

Kaifeng, 1233

The siege of Kaifeng tested the argument (slide O). The Mongol custom was to destroy a city that resisted. Yelü's biography claims that he talked Ögödei out of it, saving 1,470,000 people who had taken refuge there. The number is the biography's and is probably inflated, as the slide says.6 The textbook preserves a smaller rescue from the same weeks. The Jin official and poet Yuan Haowen (1190–1257) wrote to Yelü asking that fifty-four men of letters be spared (pp. 199–200). Yuan Haowen himself never served the Mongols. He spent the rest of his life collecting the poetry and history of the fallen Jin, an early example of the loyalist choices that Lecture 3 explores.

Tax farmers and three overlapping systems

The reform did not last in its pure form (slide P). Central Asian merchants, often organized in partnerships called ortogh, offered to pay the court a fixed sum in advance for the right to collect taxes. By 1238 Yelü's bureaus were bringing in about 1.1 million taels of silver. Then the merchant Abd al-Rahman bid 2.2 million, and in 1239 Ögödei gave him the tax farm.7 Tax farming pleased a court that wanted silver quickly, but it rewarded collectors who squeezed hardest. Ebrey notes that Chinese found the tax farmers even more oppressive than the Mongol lords (p. 199). The ortogh also lent money to the very people they taxed, at interest rates that Chinese writers called "lamb's interest," because the debt doubled every year the way a flock does.

By the 1240s three systems overlapped (slide Q). There were Chinese-style bureaus collecting regular taxes. There were merchant tax farmers bidding for revenue. And there were the shares of land and households granted to Mongol princes, princesses and commanders as appanages, which Ögödei enlarged dramatically in 1236 (CHC 6, p. 379). Each served a different Mongol interest, and none was fully in charge. Möngke (r. 1251–1259) tried to bring order with new censuses and a stronger central secretariat, and he sent garrisons and overseers into the north (slide J). Khubilai inherited the problem.

Act III: Khubilai's Choice (Review Question 3)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 200–201 (Möngke and Khubilai, the Dali campaign, the civil war, Dadu, the Yuan name and the province), with the Biography of Hao Jing, p. 204. Reading-guide question: how did Khubilai combine Chinese and Mongol ways of ruling, and why did that choice matter for the conquest of the south?

The advisers

Khubilai (1215–1294), a grandson of Chinggis, was given charge of North China in 1251 under his brother Möngke, and he put in place a much more Chinese style of government there (Ebrey, p. 200; slide S). He gathered advisers of many backgrounds. The monk-official Liu Bingzhong mixed Buddhist, Daoist and Confucian learning and later laid out both of Khubilai's capitals. Yao Shu and Dou Mo taught him Confucian ideas of government, and Hao Jing argued "from morning to night" for several days that virtuous rule worked best (Ebrey, p. 204). The textbook tells how, during the campaign against the kingdom of Dali in Yunnan (1253–1254), advisers quoted Mencius on the ruler who "takes no pleasure in killing" and so can unify the realm (p. 200). The Yuan shi adds Yao Shu's story about the Song general Cao Bin, who took Nanjing in 975 without a massacre. Khubilai is reported to have answered the next morning, "What you said last night about Cao Bin not killing, I can do it."9 Khubilai never learned to read Chinese, but he learned how Chinese political language worked.10

Civil war, 1260–1264

Möngke died in 1259 while campaigning in Sichuan. Khubilai and his younger brother Ariq Böke each called an assembly and claimed the title of Great Khan in 1260 (slide T). Ariq Böke held Karakorum and the support of many steppe princes; Khubilai held the grain, silver and workshops of North China. The war lasted until Ariq Böke surrendered in 1264. In the middle of it, in 1262, the Chinese warlord Li Tan rebelled in Shandong, and Khubilai's Chinese minister Wang Wentong, Li's father-in-law, was executed for complicity.11 The lesson cut two ways. Khubilai needed North China and its Chinese administrators, and he would never fully trust them. That is why he kept Mongols and Central Asians above them.

Dadu, the Yuan name and the province

Khubilai's summer capital, Kaiping, later Shangdu (Coleridge's "Xanadu"), had been sited in 1256 north of the Luan River, on the edge of the grasslands (CHC 6, pp. 418–419). Ebrey writes that "in 1264 Khubilai constructed a new capital" on the site of the old Liao and Jin capitals (pp. 200–201). The capital was designated in 1264, but Khubilai ordered the new city in 1266, and construction began in 1267 (slide U).12 Dadu, "Great Capital," was built on the grid of the classical capital described in the Rites of Zhou, with Mongol touches: parks for tents and game, and the lakes at its center. In 1271 Khubilai adopted the dynastic name Yuan, "origin," from a phrase in the Book of Changes (p. 201). It was the first dynastic name taken from a word's meaning rather than from a place or a fief. The Yuan kept the old counties and prefectures, but it added a new level above them, the province, a branch of the central government that could handle most business on its own. The province survives in China today (pp. 201, 209).

Khubilai also gave the state a new script (slide V). In 1269 he ordered that the alphabet designed by the Tibetan lama Phags-pa be used in all government documents.13 It could spell Mongolian, Chinese and other languages in one set of letters, a practical expression of his claim to rule many peoples.

Emperor and khan

Historians still debate how "Chinese" Khubilai became. Morris Rossabi's biography stresses his use of Chinese forms: the capital, the name, the rituals at the ancestral temple, patronage of Confucian scholars. Others emphasize that he remained a Mongol khan. He kept Mongols and Central Asians above Chinese, held no regular civil service examinations, spent summers in the grasslands and treated Chinese institutions as tools.14 Slide V frames this deliberately as "emperor and khan," because both answers are partly right. To his Chinese subjects Khubilai presented himself as an emperor with the Mandate of Heaven. To the Mongols he was a Great Khan whose title the other khanates, in Iran, Central Asia and the Golden Horde, recognized only loosely after 1260.

Act IV: The River War (Review Question 4)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 201–202 ("Crossing the Yangzi River," the siege of Xiangyang, Bayan, the fall of Hangzhou and Wen Tianxiang). Reading-guide question: what combination of technology, multiethnic forces and naval power allowed the Mongols to conquer the Southern Song?

Why a navy?

Ebrey makes the strategic point well (p. 201). No northern conqueror had held land south of the Yangzi, because cavalry were of little use in a country cut by rivers and canals, and the river itself required a fleet. Earlier conquests of the south, by Jin in the third century and by Sui in the sixth, had begun by building ships. By the 1260s Khubilai had Chinese advisers who knew this history (slide W). He also sent envoys to propose peace, among them Hao Jing, whom the Song court held at a fort near Yangzhou for sixteen years (p. 204).

Xiangyang and Fancheng, 1268–1273

The twin cities of Xiangyang and Fancheng faced each other across the Han River, the main northern route into the middle Yangzi (slide Y). Both sides saw them as the key to the river, so the siege lasted five years, with thousands of boats and tens of thousands of troops on each side (p. 201). The Song defector Liu Zheng, who had gone over to the Mongols in 1261, urged Khubilai to build a navy. The Yuan records claim that he and the Mongol general Aju built 5,000 boats and trained 70,000 men. The Cambridge History gives at least 5,000 boats sent to the front in 1269–1270.15 For years Song fleets still ran the blockade to keep the city fed (p. 201).

The deadlock broke when engineers arrived from the Ilkhanate in Iran (slide Z). Khubilai had asked his relative Abaqa for siege experts, and Ismail and Ala al-Din reached the front late in 1272. They built counterweight trebuchets that threw stones far heavier than the Chinese traction engines could. Ebrey says "up to a hundred pounds each" (p. 201). Ismail's biography gives 150 jin, about 90 kilograms, or roughly 200 pounds.16 Fancheng fell early in 1273, and the bombardment of Xiangyang followed. By March the Song commander Lü Wenhuan had surrendered.17 Marco Polo later claimed that his father and uncle built these engines. That cannot be true, because the siege ended before the Polos reached China (slide AG).

Bayan and Hangzhou, 1274–1276

After Xiangyang, Bayan (1237–1295) took command of an army of 200,000, mainly Chinese (Ebrey, p. 201; slide AA). Victory often came without fighting. Generals who had already gone over were sent ahead to persuade Song commanders to surrender, and Lü Wenhuan himself became one of the most effective. In 1275 the Song chancellor Jia Sidao led an army of 130,000 and a navy of 2,500 ships to block the lower Yangzi (p. 201). The Mongols landed cavalry on both banks and used catapults against the ships. Jia's force broke, and he was dismissed from office and soon killed by angry local officials (p. 201).

The Song court was led by a child emperor and an empress dowager whose advisers quarreled. She called on the people to rise, and some two hundred thousand recruits answered, but they were no match for Bayan's veterans (p. 201). The Mongols also used terror. They slaughtered the people of Changzhou, which had resisted, to frighten Hangzhou into surrender. It worked. Early in 1276 the empress dowager surrendered the capital to spare its people, and she and the boy emperor were taken north (p. 201).

Yashan, 1279

Loyalists held out for three more years in the far south, placing two young princes on the throne in turn (slide AB). The last battle came at Yashan, off the coast of Guangdong, on 19 March 1279. When the Song fleet was destroyed, the minister Lu Xiufu took the boy emperor on his back and leapt into the sea.18 Wen Tianxiang, the loyalist commander captured a few weeks before, refused every offer to serve and was executed in Dadu in January 1283 (Ebrey, p. 202). Lecture 3 returns to him as a model of loyalty.

Historians of warfare use these campaigns as a turning point. Tonio Andrade and Peter Lorge argue that the Song–Yuan wars, with their gunpowder bombs, river fleets and counterweight trebuchets, mark the beginning of a new age of gunpowder warfare across Asia.19 Students are often surprised that the decisive Mongol victory in China came from boats, bombs and imported engineers rather than from cavalry.

Pierian Spring: Sources, Travelers and Overreach

The optional Pierian Spring section (slides AE–AI) takes up four threads. The Secret History (slide AF) shows how the Mongols remembered their own rise. Marco Polo (slide AG) is a test case in using a traveler's book: much of what he says about Yuan China fits Chinese records, but some claims, like the trebuchets, are false. The invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281 (slide AH) show the limits of the same naval strategy that won the Yangzi, since storms and Japanese coastal walls wrecked fleets built in haste. The Phags-pa script (slide AI) shows Khubilai's ambition to write many languages in one alphabet, and how little that changed everyday writing.20

Corrections and Cautions

Quotations from the Yuan shi in the deck were translated for the course from the Chinese text (chapters 7, 146, 158, 161 and 203). Page references are to the scanned course PDF of Ebrey's Chapter 12 and may differ slightly from print editions.

Notes

  1. The standard translation and commentary is Igor de Rachewiltz, trans., The Secret History of the Mongols: A Mongolian Epic Chronicle of the Thirteenth Century, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2004; supplement 2013). On how far it can be trusted, see Ruth W. Dunnell, Chinggis Khan: World Conqueror (Boston: Longman, 2010). ↩

  2. Thomas T. Allsen, "The Rise of the Mongolian Empire and Mongolian Rule in North China," in Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett, eds., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 6, Alien Regimes and Border States, 907–1368 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 321–413, at pp. 343–344 (hereafter CHC 6). ↩

  3. CHC 6, pp. 357–358 (Muqali's appointment in 1217) and p. 373 (the first darughachi at Zhongdu, 1214–1215). The deck's instructor note on slide F records Ebrey's sentence and this source. ↩

  4. F. W. Mote, "Chinese Society under Mongol Rule, 1215–1368," CHC 6, pp. 616–664, at p. 620 (the Jin figures for 1207) and p. 662 (about 2 million households in Ögödei's census). ↩

  5. Yuan shi (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1976), ch. 146, biography of Yelü Chucai. The deck quotes the passage on slide M in a translation made for the course from the Wikisource text. ↩

  6. Yuan shi, ch. 146: 1,470,000 people sheltering in Bian (Kaifeng). Ebrey does not give the figure. ↩

  7. Yuan shi, ch. 146 (1.1 million taels in 1238; the bid of 2.2 million); CHC 6, p. 380 (Allsen: a tax farm of 1239 with a quota of 44,000 ingots, which is 2.2 million taels). ↩

  8. Igor de Rachewiltz, "Yeh-lü Ch'u-ts'ai (1189–1243): Buddhist Idealist and Confucian Statesman," in Arthur F. Wright and Denis Twitchett, eds., Confucian Personalities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1962), pp. 189–216; Allsen, CHC 6, pp. 377–381. De Rachewiltz's dates for Yelü differ by a year from those used in the deck and in Ebrey because of the conversion of the Chinese calendar. ↩

  9. Yuan shi, ch. 158, biography of Yao Shu. On the advisers as a group, see Hok-lam Chan, "Liu Ping-chung (1216–74): A Buddhist-Taoist Statesman at the Court of Khubilai Khan," T'oung Pao 53 (1967): 98–146, and Morris Rossabi, "The Reign of Khubilai Khan," CHC 6, pp. 414–489, at pp. 415–418. ↩

  10. CHC 6, p. 415. ↩

  11. CHC 6, pp. 422–426. ↩

  12. CHC 6, p. 454 (the order of 1266) and p. 458 (construction begun in 1267). Nancy Shatzman Steinhardt, Chinese Imperial City Planning (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1990), describes the plan. ↩

  13. CHC 6, pp. 465 and 605. The script and its fate are covered in Lecture 2, slide k, and in the Pierian Spring, slide AI. ↩

  14. Morris Rossabi, Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Rossabi himself closes his CHC chapter by stressing that Khubilai kept Mongol customs, placed Mongols in key posts and dispensed with the examinations (CHC 6, p. 489). For the wider debate, see John D. Langlois Jr., ed., China under Mongol Rule (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), introduction. ↩

  15. Yuan shi, ch. 161, biography of Liu Zheng; CHC 6, p. 433. ↩

  16. Yuan shi, ch. 203, biography of Ismail; CHC 6, p. 433 (the engineers' arrival late in 1272). The deck's slide says "a hundred pounds or more" and gives both figures in the notes. ↩

  17. CHC 6, p. 433. ↩

  18. CHC 6, p. 435. ↩

  19. Tonio Andrade, The Gunpowder Age: China, Military Innovation, and the Rise of the West in World History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Peter A. Lorge, The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). ↩

  20. On Polo, see Hans Ulrich Vogel, Marco Polo Was in China: New Evidence from Currencies, Salts and Revenues (Leiden: Brill, 2013). On Japan, Thomas D. Conlan, In Little Need of Divine Intervention (Ithaca: Cornell East Asia Program, 2001). ↩

Suggested Reading for Deeper Preparation

Herbert Franke and Denis Twitchett, eds., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 6, Alien Regimes and Border States, 907–1368 (1994). The reference work for Jin, Xia and Yuan dates and institutions. Allsen's chapter on the rise of the empire and Rossabi's on Khubilai cover this lecture.

Morris Rossabi, Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times (1988). The standard biography, readable and balanced on the "how Chinese was he" debate.

David Morgan, The Mongols, 2nd ed. (2007). The best short introduction to the whole empire.

Thomas T. Allsen, Mongol Imperialism (1987) and Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia (2001). How the Mongols counted, taxed and moved people and knowledge across Eurasia.

Ruth W. Dunnell, Chinggis Khan: World Conqueror (2010). A concise life that is careful about sources, by the leading scholar of the Tangut Xia.

Igor de Rachewiltz, trans., The Secret History of the Mongols (2004). The authoritative translation and commentary. See also his In the Service of the Khan (1993), the biographical dictionary Ebrey cites.

Hans Ulrich Vogel, Marco Polo Was in China (2013), with Frances Wood, Did Marco Polo Go to China? (1995). The case for and against Polo, best read together.

Tonio Andrade, The Gunpowder Age (2016), and Peter Lorge, The Asian Military Revolution (2008). Xiangyang and the Song–Yuan wars in the history of gunpowder warfare.

Columbia University, Asia for Educators, "The Mongols in World History." Free primary sources and maps, afe.easia.columbia.edu/mongols.