Yuan dynasty

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The Yuan dynasty began with a name drawn from an ancient Chinese text about the origin of the universe. In 1271, Kublai Khan opened his proclamation by citing a clause from the Commentaries on the I Ching and declared that his empire would be called the Great Yuan. For a conqueror from the Mongolian steppe to root his dynasty's name in China's most revered classical canon was a deliberate act. It announced that this was not merely an occupation but a bid to inherit the full weight of Chinese civilization.

  Kublai was the fifth khagan-emperor of the Mongol Empire, descended from Genghis Khan through the Borjigin clan. His grandfather had united the Mongol tribes and become Great Khan in 1206. By the time Kublai formally proclaimed the Yuan in 1271, the Mongols had already spent decades ruling northern China. Yet he chose that year to make the claim official, and it would take eight more years to finish the job. The Southern Song dynasty fell at the Battle of Yamen in 1279, making the Yuan the first dynasty founded by a non-Han ethnicity to rule all of China proper.

  What emerged over the following century was stranger and more complicated than simple conquest. A Mongol court that worshipped the Eternal Heaven tried to govern through Confucian bureaucracy. A dynasty that classified its subjects into four ranked groups still produced some of the most consequential cultural exchanges in Asian history. And a state that began with extraordinary ambition ended with its last emperor fleeing north to Shangdu in 1368, chased out by a former rebel monk named Zhu Yuanzhang.

  The questions the Yuan raises are still alive. How does a conquering people rule a civilization it did not create? What happens when the tools of governance belong to the conquered? And what does it mean that Kublai placed his own grandfather on the imperial records as the dynasty's founder, even though Genghis Khan never proclaimed a Chinese dynasty at all? The answers run through the lives of astronomers and paper-money printers, through plague years and palace coups, through Marco Polo's account of a capital called Cambaluc that astonished everyone who read it.

• 2. Kublai's Compromise

  ›

  Kublai Khan spent his early years unable to read Chinese, yet surrounded by Han teachers his mother Sorghaghtani had arranged for him since childhood. That tension between Mongol identity and Chinese learning would define his entire reign. He sought counsel from Chinese Buddhist and Confucian advisers, built schools for Confucian scholars, and issued paper money years before he formally claimed the Chinese throne.

  When his brother Ariq Böke challenged him for the position of Great Khan in 1260, Kublai won partly because he had Chinese subjects who could supply his armies. He adopted the Chinese era name Zhongtong and modeled his government on the bureaucracy of traditional Chinese dynasties, moves calculated to secure cooperation from his Han subjects. Ariq Böke, hampered by inadequate supplies, surrendered in 1264. The civil war permanently divided the Mongol Empire, leaving Kublai isolated from the western khanates.

  After a revolt led by Li Tan, the son-in-law of a powerful official, was suppressed in 1262, Kublai grew more cautious. He curbed the influence of Han advisers and refused to revive the Confucian imperial examinations. He divided Yuan society into ranks, with Han Chinese at the lower end until the Song conquest made Southerners a fourth group beneath them. His Chinese advisers still wielded significant power in practice, but their official standing was kept deliberately vague.

  The move of the capital from Karakorum to a new city near modern Beijing was completed in 1266. In 1271 Kublai formally claimed the Mandate of Heaven and named his capital Khanbaliq, later called Daidu. He changed the era name to Zhiyuan to signal a new chapter in Chinese history. His public posture followed Confucian rituals of propriety and ancestor veneration, while his personal identity remained rooted in the steppe. The astronomer Guo Shoujing became one of the dynasty's most important engineers, eventually reforming the lunisolar calendar to an accuracy of 365.2425 days per year, a figure just 26 seconds off the modern Gregorian calendar's measurement.

• 3. Wars and Their Limits

  ›

  Kublai besieged Xiangyang between 1268 and 1273, a campaign targeting the last major obstacle before the wealthy Yangtze River basin. Once that fell, the conquest of the south moved quickly. In 1276 his forces captured Hangzhou, the Song capital and the wealthiest city in China. The last Song emperor drowned at the Battle of Yamen in 1279, and the Yuan general Zhang Hongfan, himself Han Chinese, commanded a navy that was predominantly Han in composition.

  The victory reunited northern and southern China for the first time in three hundred years. But success in the south was not matched at sea or in the tropics. An expedition against Japan in 1274 failed. A second invasion in 1281 was wrecked by a typhoon. Campaigns against Annam, Champa, and Java were blunted by disease, an inhospitable climate, and terrain that made mounted Mongol warfare impossible. The Tran dynasty of Annam defeated the Mongols at the Battle of Bach Dang River in 1288. Annam, Burma, and Champa eventually paid tribute, but they were never fully conquered.

  These military failures drained a treasury already strained by wars and construction projects. Efforts to collect taxes were undermined by corruption and political scandal. Kublai's favorite wife died in 1281 and his chosen heir died in 1285. Growing despondent, Kublai withdrew from active governance. He fell ill in 1293 and died on the 18th of February 1294, leaving successors who would struggle to hold together what he had built.

  The Yuan armies had, for a time, created something they called the Pax Mongolica, a period of Mongol peace that allowed technologies and goods to travel between China and the West along protected routes. Kublai extended the Grand Canal from southern China to Daidu. He had granaries built throughout the empire as a hedge against famine. He supported merchants on the Silk Road through loans, infrastructure, and protection of the postal system. Marco Polo, the Venetian merchant who spent years at the Yuan court, wrote the most influential European account of China from this period; his book appeared around 1299.

• 4. The Struggle for Succession

  ›

  Kublai's eldest son Zhenjin, whom he named crown prince, died before him in 1285. Zhenjin's third son then took the throne with the support of his mother Kokejin and the minister Bayan, ruling as Temur Khan from 1294 to 1307. Temur chose to continue his grandfather's policies and made peace with the western Mongol khanates and with neighboring countries including Vietnam, which recognized his nominal authority and paid tribute. But corruption in the Yuan court began visibly during his reign.

  Kulug Khan, who succeeded Temur, reversed course sharply. He introduced a policy he called New Deals, focused on monetary reform, and during his short reign from 1307 to 1311 drove the government into severe financial difficulty. The fourth Yuan emperor, Buyantu Khan, born Ayurbarwada, was regarded as a competent ruler and was the first to actively embrace mainstream Chinese culture after Kublai. Mentored by the Confucian academic Li Meng, he reintroduced the traditional imperial examinations in 1313 and executed five of the highest-ranking officials when he liquidated the Department of State Affairs.

  His son Gegeen Khan ruled only from 1321 to 1323 and was assassinated in a coup involving five princes from a rival faction. The conspirators placed Yesun Temur on the throne, and when he too was killed, the dynasty entered a cycle of brief reigns and violent transfers of power. The War of the Two Capitals pitted Khanbaliq against Shangdu in 1328. Tugh Temur, installed in Khanbaliq by the Qipchaq commander El Temur, eventually won. He then abdicated in favor of his brother Kusala, who died only four days after dining with him, reportedly poisoned by El Temur. Tugh Temur remounted the throne and spent much of his reign as a puppet of El Temur, who purged rival officials and handed power to warlords.

  Despite being politically weak, Tugh Temur left a cultural mark. He founded the Academy of the Pavilion of the Star of Literature in the spring of 1329, an institution charged with transmitting Confucian high culture to the Mongolian imperial establishment. Its most significant project was the compilation of a vast institutional compendium called the Jingshi Dadian. When Tugh Temur died in 1332, the thirteen-year-old Toghon Temur was summoned back from exile in Koryo to take the throne.

• 5. The Four-Class Order

  ›

  Yuan society was formally divided into four ranked groups, and the ordering was not primarily about ethnicity but about the timing of submission to Mongol rule. Mongols stood at the top. Below them were the Semu, non-Mongol foreigners from the west and Central Asia, including Buddhist Uyghurs, Tibetans, Jews, Nestorian Christians, and Muslims. Third were the Han, a category that included not only Han Chinese from northern China but also Jurchens, Khitans, and Koreans who had lived north of the Huaihe River under the Jin dynasty. At the bottom were the Nan, or Southerners, all former subjects of the Southern Song dynasty, who had held out longest against Mongol conquest.

  The Uighurs and Karluk monarchs ranked above the Korean monarch at court because they had submitted earlier. Northern Chinese ranked above Southern Chinese for the same reason. Ethnic Han Chinese could fall into either the Han or Nan category depending on where they had lived before the conquest. The historian Frederick W. Mote argued that calling this arrangement a class system was misleading, since a person's assigned rank did not guarantee their actual wealth or power. Rich Chinese existed below Mongols living in poverty.

  The Mongols employed people from different regions to administer different parts of their empire deliberately. Central Asian Muslims served as administrators in China while Han people and Khitans from China were sent to administer the Muslim population in Bukhara. The Yuan-appointed Governor of Samarqand was a Khitan named Ahai, who held the title Taishi and was familiar with Chinese culture. Han people were also settled as artisans and farmers in Central Asian cities including Besh Baliq, Almaliq, and Samarqand.

  Toward the end of the dynasty, the position of Muslim Qadi was abolished after its powers had been restricted, tax exemptions for foreign holy men including Muslims were revoked, and all marriages were required to follow Confucian principles. These policies fed anti-Mongol sentiment among Muslims, and some anti-Yuan rebels in the mid-14th century included Muslims in their ranks. The Ispah Rebellion, which began in 1357 and lasted until 1367, saw Persian merchant-led forces fight Yuan loyalists across parts of southern Fujian before being crushed by the Yuan commander Chen Youding.

• 6. Knowledge Across Borders

  ›

  The mathematician Zhu Shijie, who lived from 1249 to 1314, solved simultaneous equations with up to four unknowns using a rectangular array of coefficients equivalent to modern matrices. His method was described in the Jade Mirror of the Four Unknowns, written in 1303. The opening pages contain a diagram of Pascal's triangle. Guo Shoujing, the astronomer who reformed the calendar, was also one of the first Chinese mathematicians to work on spherical trigonometry and derived a cubic interpolation formula for astronomical calculations.

  The physicians of the Yuan court came from diverse traditions. A distinction was made between otachi doctors, who used herbal remedies, and traditional Mongol shamans who offered spiritual cures. Kublai created the Imperial Academy of Medicine to oversee medical education. The physician Wei Yilin, who lived from 1277 to 1347, invented a suspension method for reducing dislocated joints, which he performed using anesthetics. The Nestorian physician Jesus the Interpreter founded the Office of Western Medicine in 1263. Muslim physicians introduced Middle Eastern cartography, astronomy, and medicine to China, while Chinese physicians transmitted acupuncture, moxibustion, and pulse diagnosis westward.

  Printing technology expanded under the Yuan. By 1312, a thousand copies of a Buddhist text commented by Cosgi Odsir were printed in Beijing alone. By 1328, annual sales of printed calendars and almanacs reached over three million across the dynasty. The Yuan government switched from woodblocks to bronze plates for printing paper money in 1275. The Yuan minister Bolad traveled to Iran to explain Yuan paper money to the Ilkhanate court of Gaykhatu; the Ilkhanate issued paper money in 1294, but public distrust caused the experiment to collapse.

  In ceramics, the Yuan period produced one of China's most enduring innovations. In the kilns of Jingdezhen, the technique of underglaze blue and white painting began in the early decades of the 14th century. By the end of the dynasty it was fully established, and exports expanded considerably, especially to the Islamic world. Crops including carrots, turnips, new varieties of lemons, eggplants, and melons were either introduced or successfully popularized during the Yuan period, along with high-quality granulated sugar and cotton. Sorghum, a major food crop, arrived in China through contacts with the West.

• 7. The End of the Yuan

  ›

  From the late 1340s onward, people across the countryside suffered droughts, floods, and famines that the government could not address. In 1351 the Red Turban Rebellion broke out, led by Song loyalists who established a renewed Song dynasty with its capital at Kaifeng. Toghon Temur, the last Yuan emperor, made a fateful decision in 1354 when he dismissed the general Toghtogha as the latter was leading a large army to suppress the rebels. Toghon Temur feared betrayal, but the dismissal shattered the Yuan military response and left the dynasty dependent on local warlords.

  The Ming dynasty, founded by Zhu Yuanzhang in the south, pressed north. Zhu had been a commander in the Red Turban army and took power after the death of the Red Turban Song emperor Han Liner. In 1368 Toghon Temur fled from Khanbaliq to Shangdu as Ming forces approached. Yingchang, located in present-day Inner Mongolia, fell to the Ming shortly after, in 1370. The Yuan remnants retreated to Mongolia and continued under the name Northern Yuan until 1635, when they surrendered to the Later Jin dynasty.

  The Ming emperor Zhu Yuanzhang later expressed admiration for the Mongols' unification of China and adopted their garrison system. His successor, the Yongle Emperor, explicitly cited Mongol discrimination against Chinese as a cause of the Yuan's downfall, noting that the dynasty had employed only Mongols and their allies while discarding northern and southern Chinese.

  By 1387, the last Yuan forces in Manchuria under Naghachu had surrendered to the Ming. The Prince of Liang, Basalawarmi, had maintained a pocket of resistance in Yunnan and Guizhou, but his forces were decisively defeated by the Ming in 1381. What the Yuan left behind was not only territorial succession but a transformed China: blue and white porcelain, a renovated Grand Canal reaching all the way to Beijing, an administrative structure at the provincial level that the Ming and Qing dynasties would inherit and modify, and the first documented overland European contact with China, recorded by a Venetian merchant whose book would later help inspire Christopher Columbus.