Scholars, Stages and the Fall of the Yuan

Block 1: Scholars without Careers (Review Question 6)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, "The Chinese Educated Elite During the Mongol Era," pp. 206–208, with the Biography of Hao Jing (p. 204). Reading-guide question: how did the Mongol conquest disrupt the traditional roles and political dominance of the Chinese educated elite, and what alternative paths did these scholars pursue?

One life

The deck opens with Huang Gongwang (1269–1354), because his life holds most of this lecture (slide b). He was born in Changshu, near the Yangzi delta, and educated for office in a world where the road to office had closed. He became a clerk. Biographies report that around 1315 he was jailed when his superior, Zhang Lü, fell in a scandal over a land survey. Afterward he joined the Quanzhen order of Daoism, told fortunes, taught and painted. In his late seventies he painted Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains for a Daoist friend, adding to it over about three years until around 1350. In 1650 a collector ordered it burned at his death; a relative pulled it from the fire, and it survives in two pieces, in Hangzhou and Taipei.¹

The closed door

Ebrey sets out the problem (p. 206; slide d). Government service had long been central to the identity and income of the educated elite, but the Mongols employed Mongols, Tibetans, Uighurs, Persians, Jurchens and others, so there were fewer posts for Chinese scholars than under Jin or Song. Most Chinese who did get posts came from clerk families, not scholar-official ones. The Southern Song held its last examination in 1274, and the Yuan held no regular one until 1315, a gap of forty years in the south. North China had seen only the test of 1238 that registered Confucian households, as Lecture 2 showed. Men at Khubilai's court saw the problem. In 1284 advisers complained that "few in the realm study the Confucian classics, and many who obtain office do so as clerks of the brush." They proposed reviving the examinations, and Khubilai agreed in principle, but nothing happened in his lifetime.²

Keep the picture balanced. Losing office did not mean losing everything. Many southern families stayed rich landowners, and the south's economy did far better than the north's (p. 206). What they lost was the career that gave a classical education its purpose and their families their standing.

Loyalists

Some refused to serve (slide e). Ebrey notes that "the generation that had devoted itself to resisting the Mongols rarely also served them, but that generation's sons ... frequently did" (p. 206). The deck gives three models. Wen Tianxiang, captured in 1278–1279, wrote the Song of the Righteous Spirit in prison in 1281 ("Heaven and Earth have a righteous spirit; mixed and scattered, it takes on many forms") and was executed in 1283. Xie Fangde refused repeated offers, and when he was taken to Dadu in 1289 he starved himself to death. Zheng Sixiao painted orchids without soil, and later writers explained that the land had been stolen by foreigners. That explanation comes from later writers, not from Zheng's own inscription, and students should say so.³ Ebrey adds a quieter kind of loyalty: survivors who secretly searched for the bones of the Song emperors after the Tibetan monk Yang Lianzhenjia (Ebrey's "Yang Lianjianjia") dug up the imperial tombs, and reburied them with honor (p. 206).

New ways to live

Most educated men did not starve themselves; they adapted (slide f). Ebrey lists the choices: some lived off their land, and others worked as physicians, fortunetellers, children's teachers, Daoist priests, publishers, booksellers or playwrights. Many took up local leadership, founding academies, organizing their kin into lineages and promoting charity (p. 208). Teaching mattered most in the long run, because Neo-Confucian teachers in academies and family schools trained the men who would be ready when Zhu Xi's teachings became the examination standard in 1315. Clerical work, long despised, became one of the few routes into government. Medicine rose in prestige as the calling of the "Confucian doctor." Zhu Zhenheng (1281–1358), who studied with a leading Neo-Confucian teacher and then turned to medicine, became one of the most influential physicians in Chinese history. Daoist and Buddhist orders, both favored by the Yuan court, offered a community and an income. Mote's phrase for many of these men is "eremitism," a withdrawal from office that could be principled, practical or both.

Zhao Mengfu and the collaborator debate

Zhao Mengfu (1254–1322) is Ebrey's example of a southern literatus who chose to serve (p. 207; slide g). A descendant of the first Song emperor, he had studied at the imperial academy in Hangzhou but had not held office when the Song fell. When Khubilai sent the southerner Cheng Jufu in 1286 to recruit prominent southern scholars, Zhao accepted. Some friends and relatives refused to speak to him afterward. In the north he used Khubilai's favor for Chinese interests. He argued that officials should be exempt from beatings, proposed currency reforms and worked to bring down the chancellor Sangha, who was executed in 1291. By 1316 he was president of the Hanlin Academy (p. 207). He felt the cost. His poem "My Fault Was Coming Out" puns on the two names of one medicinal herb: "In the mountains it is called 'far ambition'; out of the mountains it is just 'little grass.'"⁴ Later critics, especially in the Qing, argued about whether a Song prince should have served the Mongols at all, and some judged his art by his choice. Students can use him to show that service could be a way to protect Chinese interests and a source of lasting shame at the same time.

Block 2: The Examinations Return (Review Question 7)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, p. 206 (Renzong, the edict of 1313, the examinations of 1315, the quotas and the "2 percent"). Reading-guide question: evaluate the re-institution of the civil service examinations in 1315. How did the quota system reflect the broader political and social hierarchies of the Yuan?

Renzong's edict

Ebrey gives two dates for the revival, and both are right (slide i). Ayurbarwada, Emperor Renzong (r. 1311–1320), issued the edict in the eleventh lunar month of 1313, which set provincial examinations for 1314 and the first metropolitan examination for 1315 (p. 206).⁵ Renzong had been tutored from his early teens by the Confucian scholar Li Meng, and he favored Confucian advisers.⁶ Ebrey calls him "the first Mongol emperor able to both read and speak Chinese" (p. 206). No source checked for this essay tests that "first," so the deck does not repeat it on a slide.

The edict made one school the standard. All candidates had to answer on the Four Books using Zhu Xi's commentaries, and the edict put virtue first: "In selecting men, virtuous conduct should come first; in testing their skills, the classics come first." This was the most lasting decision of the Yuan dynasty. The Ming and Qing kept Zhu Xi's commentaries as the examination standard until the system ended in 1905 (slide y).⁷

Quotas and two lists

Ebrey summarizes the quotas: no more than a quarter of those who passed would be southerners, no more than a quarter Han, and half Mongols and other non-Chinese. There were regional quotas too, which held down the southeast, where education was strongest (p. 206). The deck gives the full arithmetic (slide j). Provincial examinations sent 300 men to the capital, 75 from each of the four groups, and the capital examination was to pass 100, 25 from each group, on two separate lists. The examinations were unequal in content. Mongols and semu sat two sessions with shorter answers, and Hanren and Nanren sat three harder ones. Most important, the groups were unequal in size. The Nanren were the great majority of the population, but they had the same quota as the small Mongol group. An equal share of places gave a Mongol candidate far better odds than a southerner, and that equal share is the point.

The results were small. Only 56 men received the jinshi in 1315, and the full quota of 100 was first reached in 1333.⁸ Ebrey writes that "only about 2 percent of the positions in the bureaucracy were filled through the examination system" (p. 206). Hsiao Ch'i-ch'ing counts 1,139 degrees in sixteen examinations and puts graduates at slightly more than 4 percent of ranked civil officials. The two figures measure different things, and both make the same point: the examinations were a minor route into Yuan government.⁹ The chief minister Bayan halted the examinations in 1335, and they were restored after his fall in 1340 (slide s).¹⁰

Block 3: The Stage (Review Question 9)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, "Drama," pp. 208–209. Reading-guide question: what political and social factors contributed to the flourishing of drama during the Yuan, and how did literati playwrights use the medium?

Zaju

Performing arts had flourished long before the Yuan, passed down orally among hereditary troupes of singers and actors who were treated as a demeaned caste (Ebrey, p. 208). What was new was that educated men began writing scripts for impresarios, and the scripts began to circulate as texts (slide l). Zaju, "variety plays," usually had four acts, with songs set to popular tunes and a single lead singer. Troupes played in city theaters and at temple festivals. Ebrey notes that female roles were often taken by boys or young men (p. 208), but the Yuan stage also had famous actresses. A temple mural of 1324 in Hongtong, Shanxi, announces that the actress Zhongdu Xiu and her troupe "performed here," and shows their costumes, painted faces and musicians. Some playwrights formed writing societies, and in 1330 Zhong Sicheng named well over a hundred writers of plays and songs in his Register of Ghosts.¹¹

About 160 Yuan plays survive, Ebrey says, some of which can be read as covert protest (p. 208). Students should know a caution from Stephen West and Wilt Idema: most of the texts we read come from Ming editions, above all Zang Maoxun's Yuanqu xuan of 1615–1616, and Ming editors revised them heavily. When we quote a Yuan play, we usually quote a Ming version (slide y).

Guan Hanqing and Dou E

Guan Hanqing (c. 1240–c. 1320) is the best known of the playwrights. Ebrey credits him with sixty plays, fifteen surviving complete (p. 208); reference works give somewhat different counts, because attributions are disputed, and the deck says "counts differ." Ebrey notes that his leading characters are mostly forceful, virtuous women (p. 208). The most famous is Dou E, a young widow who confesses to a murder she did not commit to spare her mother-in-law from torture (slide m). Before her execution she curses the cosmos: "Earth, you cannot tell good from bad: how can you be Earth? Heaven, you mistake the wise for fools: you are Heaven in name only!" Snow falls in summer, and a drought follows, as she foretold. Her father, now an official, finally clears her name.¹² The play attacks corrupt local officials, not the Mongols by name. Whether it is covert protest is a matter of interpretation.

The Western Chamber

Wang Shifu's Story of the Western Chamber is the great love comedy of the age (slide m). The student Zhang and Cui Yingying fall in love and, with the help of the maid Hongniang, defy her mother's plans; he must pass the examinations before they can marry. The examination ending is worth noticing in an age when the examinations hardly existed. Ebrey adds a Yuan play that treats writing plays as better than studying the classics: Grandee's Son Takes the Wrong Career, in which a Jurchen official's son gives up his studies to join a troupe, and the actress's father says, "The only man I want for my son-in-law is a writer of play books" (p. 208).

Block 4: The Brush (Review Question 10)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, pp. 207–208 (Zhao Mengfu and the painters). Reading-guide question: how did painting evolve among the southern literati during the Mongol era, and how was it used to cope with political disenfranchisement?

Qian Xuan and Zhao Mengfu

Ebrey explains the change in a sentence. Song scholars like Su Shi had praised paintings by scholars that carried ideas, but court and professional painters stayed at the center of style through the Southern Song. "During the Yuan period, however, men of letters were in the forefront" (p. 208). Qian Xuan (c. 1235–before 1307), a southern scholar who is reported never to have served the Yuan and to have lived partly by selling paintings, and Zhao Mengfu both revived older styles from the Tang and Five Dynasties instead of copying the Southern Song academy (slide o). Literati painters wrote poems on their paintings, joining poetry, calligraphy and painting into one art. Zhao's inscription on Elegant Rocks and Sparse Trees makes the link explicit: "Rocks like 'flying white,' trees like seal script: to paint bamboo, you must master the eight strokes of writing."¹³ A painting became a kind of handwriting, to be read by friends who shared the code.

The Four Masters

Ming critics later named four Yuan painters as the masters of the age. The four men did not see themselves as a group (slides p, q). Huang Gongwang, the clerk turned Daoist, built the hills of the Fuchun scroll from soft, dry, repeated strokes. Wu Zhen (1280–1354) lived quietly near Jiaxing, reportedly by telling fortunes, and painted bamboo and fishermen, long-standing symbols of the upright gentleman and the free recluse. Ni Zan (1301–1374) was a rich landowner who gave away much of his property in the 1350s and spent years on a boat around Lake Tai. His spare riverbanks, with a few trees and an empty pavilion, are the most imitated images in later Chinese painting, and he described his method in a letter to a friend: "What I call painting is no more than a few careless strokes. I do not seek likeness; I paint only to amuse myself."¹⁴ Wang Meng (c. 1308–1385), Zhao Mengfu's grandson, painted dense, restless mountains, and he died in a Ming prison.

Ebrey writes that these painters worked "for a restricted audience of like-minded individuals and often used the allusive side of paintings to make political statements" (p. 208). That is a fair summary, but students should hold political readings loosely. A painting of a recluse's hut celebrates a life away from office. Whether that was protest, necessity or simple preference depended on the painter, and often on the painting. The deck's slide q says this directly.

Block 5: The Fall (Review Question 11)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, p. 206 ("After the death of Khubilai in 1294, Mongol administration began to decline"), with p. 209. The chapter does not narrate the rebellions; that story continues in Chapter 14. Reading-guide question: what combination of economic mismanagement, political instability and environmental crises led to the collapse of Mongol administration in China?

Feuds over the throne

Ebrey frames the political problem as a struggle over China's place in the Mongol empire. Some Mongol nobles wanted to keep steppe expansion central; others saw too much to gain from exploiting China (p. 206). The Mongols had no fixed rule of succession, and after Temür died in 1307 the throne changed hands again and again (slide s). Nine men held it between 1307 and 1333. Renzong's son Shidebala (Yingzong) continued the China-centered policies and was assassinated in 1323. The War of the Two Capitals in 1328 split the court and its armies. Toghon Temür, the last Yuan emperor in China, came to the throne in 1333 at thirteen. Ebrey describes him as "bright and well educated in Chinese but not a strong ruler" (p. 206). Strongmen ruled for him: Bayan, who halted the examinations in 1335 and distrusted Chinese officials, and then Bayan's nephew Toghto, who ousted his uncle in 1340, restored the examinations and tried to rebuild the state. John Dardess reads these struggles as a contest between Mongol groups over how Chinese the government should become.¹⁵

Paper money

Ebrey notes that the Mongols had difficulty regulating paper currency and that inflation was rampant by the fourteenth century (p. 206; slide t). Paper money had worked for decades, as Ibn Battuta's praise shows (Lecture 2, slide p), because the early Yuan limited printing and allowed exchange. Gifts to princes and spending on temples had strained the treasury for years. Toghto's government launched new notes and copper coins in 1350–1351, and it funded the Yellow River project from the new issue.¹⁶ When rebellion cut off taxes, salt revenue and the grain fleets from the south while military costs rose, the court printed in huge quantities. The Yuan shi reports that in the capital ten ingots of notes could not buy a peck of grain, and that people went back to barter.¹⁷

The Yellow River

Ebrey mentions a colder climate and deadly diseases (p. 206). The deck adds the river (slide u). In the fifth month of 1344, after more than twenty days of rain, the Yellow River broke through the Baimao dike, and water stood about two zhang (some six meters) deep on level ground. Floods spread across western Shandong, threatening the Grand Canal and the salt works that paid for the state. In 1351 Toghto put the engineer Jia Lu in charge of 150,000 laborers and 20,000 soldiers, who between spring and winter forced the river back into a channel that reached the sea south of the Shandong peninsula.¹⁸ It was a triumph of engineering. It also gathered huge numbers of hungry, conscripted men in the Huai region, as Toghto's critics had warned.

The Red Turbans and the warlords

In 1351 Han Shantong and Liu Futong launched a rising in the Huai region that preached the coming of Maitreya, the future Buddha, and claimed that Han descended from the Song emperors (slide v). Han was captured and killed early, but the movement spread under red headcloths. Later writers told how rebels buried a one-eyed stone man where the river workers would dig, with a rhyme that promised rebellion once he stirred the Yellow River; treat the story as a report. On 16 March 1355 the rebel leaders enthroned Han's son, Han Lin'er, as emperor of a revived Song.¹⁹

Not every rebel was a Red Turban. Fang Guozhen raided the coast from 1348 and threatened the sea route that fed the capital. Zhang Shicheng, a salt trader, held Gaoyou on the canal by the end of 1353 and later ruled from Suzhou. Chen Youliang built a state on the middle Yangzi. The turning point came at Gaoyou. From 24 November 1354 Toghto besieged Zhang Shicheng there with a huge army. In January 1355, with the city close to falling, court rivals persuaded the emperor to dismiss him. The army scattered, and many soldiers joined the rebels.²⁰ Here all three causes of Review Question 11 meet: a flood and a labor draft, a currency that had lost trust, and a court that removed its own best general.

Zhu Yuanzhang

The deck ends with the man who won (slide w). Zhu Yuanzhang (1328–1398) lost most of his family to famine and disease in 1344 and entered a Buddhist temple as a novice. In 1352 he joined the Red Turban army of Guo Zixing at Haozhou. He took Nanjing in 1356 and made it his base, destroyed Chen Youliang in the great battle on Poyang Lake in 1363 and took Suzhou from Zhang Shicheng in 1367.²¹ In January 1368 he proclaimed the Ming dynasty at Nanjing. That September his general Xu Da took Dadu, and Toghon Temür fled north to the steppe, where he died in 1370. Ebrey's Chapter 14 begins here.

Corrections and Cautions

Quotations from the Yuan shi in the deck were translated for the course from the Chinese text (chapters 66, 81 and 97). Page references are to the scanned course PDF of Ebrey's Chapter 12.

Notes

1. On Huang Gongwang's life and the scroll, see James Cahill, Hills Beyond a River: Chinese Painting of the Yüan Dynasty, 1279–1368 (New York: Weatherhill, 1976), and the National Palace Museum, Taipei, exhibition Mountains Reunited: Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains (2011), which brought the two pieces together. ↩

2. Yuan shi, ch. 81, examination treatise (天下習儒者少，而由刀筆吏得官者多). The deck's translation is on slide d. ↩

3. On the loyalists, see Jennifer W. Jay, A Change in Dynasties: Loyalism in Thirteenth-Century China (Bellingham: Western Washington University, 1991), and Frederick W. Mote, "Confucian Eremitism in the Yüan Period," in Arthur F. Wright, ed., The Confucian Persuasion (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), pp. 202–240. ↩

4. Zhao Mengfu, "Zui chu" (罪出), in Songxue zhai ji; translation made for the deck (slide g). On Zhao's career, see Chu-tsing Li, The Autumn Colors on the Ch'iao and Hua Mountains: A Landscape by Chao Meng-fu (Ascona: Artibus Asiae, 1965), and Shane McCausland, Zhao Mengfu: Calligraphy and Painting for Khubilai's China (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2011). ↩

5. Yuan shi, ch. 81 (edict of the eleventh month of Huangqing 2, that is, late 1313). The deck's instructor note on slide i explains Ebrey's two dates. ↩

6. Hsiao Ch'i-ch'ing, "Mid-Yüan Politics," CHC 6, pp. 490–560, at p. 513. ↩

7. Benjamin A. Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000). ↩

8. Yuan shi, ch. 81. ↩

9. CHC 6, p. 517 (Hsiao); see also Mote, CHC 6, p. 638. The deck's instructor note on slide j gives both figures. ↩

10. John Dardess, "Shun-ti and the End of Yüan Rule in China," CHC 6, pp. 561–586, at p. 569. ↩

11. Stephen H. West, "Text and Ideology: Ming Editors and Northern Drama," in Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn, eds., The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2003); Wilt L. Idema and Stephen H. West, Chinese Theater, 1100–1450: A Source Book (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1982). ↩

12. Guan Hanqing, Dou E yuan, Act 3, in Zang Maoxun, Yuanqu xuan; trans. in Stephen H. West and Wilt L. Idema, Monks, Bandits, Lovers, and Immortals: Eleven Early Chinese Plays (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2010). ↩

13. Palace Museum, Beijing, record of Xiushi shulin tu (秀石疏林圖), inscription 石如飛白木如籀，寫竹還於八法通. On the movement, see Cahill, Hills Beyond a River, and Wen C. Fong, Beyond Representation: Chinese Painting and Calligraphy, 8th–14th Century (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1992). ↩

14. Ni Zan, letter to Zhang Zaozhong (答張藻仲書), in Qingbi ge quanji, juan 10; translation made for the deck (slide q). Ebrey spells the name "Ni Can" (p. 208); the standard form is Ni Zan, as in the National Palace Museum, Taipei, entry for The Rongxi Studio. ↩

15. John W. Dardess, Conquerors and Confucians: Aspects of Political Change in Late Yüan China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1973); Dardess, CHC 6, pp. 561–572. ↩

16. CHC 6, p. 576 (Dardess: two million ingots' worth in the first run of 1351). ↩

17. Yuan shi, ch. 97, treatise on food and money (京師料鈔十錠，易斗粟不可得). Treat the figure as the report of an official history written by the Ming. ↩

18. Yuan shi, ch. 66, river treatise; CHC 6, p. 576 (Dardess); F. W. Mote, "The Rise of the Ming Dynasty, 1330–1367," in Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett, eds., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 7, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 11–57, at p. 39 (hereafter CHC 7). ↩

19. CHC 7, pp. 38–42. On the religious background, see Barend J. ter Haar, The White Lotus Teachings in Chinese Religious History (Leiden: Brill, 1992). ↩

20. CHC 7, pp. 30–31 (Gaoyou held by the end of 1353; the siege from 24 November 1354; Toghto's dismissal in January 1355) and p. 36 (Fang Guozhen from 1348); CHC 6, pp. 576–578 (Dardess). ↩

21. CHC 7, pp. 41–47. Chapter 14 and its first essay take up his story. ↩

Suggested Reading for Deeper Preparation

Frederick W. Mote, "Confucian Eremitism in the Yüan Period," in The Confucian Persuasion (1960). The classic essay on why and how scholars withdrew from office.

Jennifer W. Jay, A Change in Dynasties: Loyalism in Thirteenth-Century China (1991). Wen Tianxiang, Xie Fangde, Zheng Sixiao and the making of loyalist memory.

Benjamin A. Elman, A Cultural History of Civil Examinations in Late Imperial China (2000). Its opening chapters explain how the Yuan made Zhu Xi the standard.

Stephen H. West and Wilt L. Idema, trans., Monks, Bandits, Lovers, and Immortals (2010), and The Story of the Western Wing (1995). Readable translations, with introductions on what the Ming editors changed.

James Cahill, Hills Beyond a River: Chinese Painting of the Yüan Dynasty (1976). Still the best introduction to Yuan painting, painter by painter.

Shane McCausland, Zhao Mengfu: Calligraphy and Painting for Khubilai's China (2011). Zhao as artist and official, and the collaborator question.

John W. Dardess, Conquerors and Confucians (1973). The late Yuan court, Bayan and Toghto.

F. W. Mote, "The Rise of the Ming Dynasty, 1330–1367," in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 7 (1988). The rebellions, the warlords and Zhu Yuanzhang's rise in detail.

Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (2010). Climate, disease and the fall of the Yuan in a readable synthesis.