History
Dynasty Yuan
The Yuan Dynasty was a Chinese dynasty established by Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, in 1271. It was the first foreign-led dynasty in China, with the Mongols ruling over the Chinese population. The Yuan Dynasty is known for its expansion of trade and cultural exchange, as well as its adoption of paper currency.
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eBook - PDFReadings in Chinese Women's Philosophical and Feminist Thought
From the Late 13th to Early 21st Century
- Ann A. Pang-White(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
Part I The Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) 11 12 The Yuan dynasty (1271–1368) was part of the vast Mongol Empire and the first foreign-led dynasty in Chinese history. It was formally founded by Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, in 1271 after the Mongols defeated the Xixia, the Jin, and the Southern Song dynasties. Although the Mongol Yuan dynasty adopted the Chinese administrative system, it established a strict four-tier social hierarchy: with the Khan clans at the top, other Mongols second, ethnically non-Han foreigners third, and ethnically Han Chinese at the bottom. Han Chinese were not allowed to hold important government positions, which created strong anti-Mongol resentment among the Han population. Among the cultural achievements of the Yuan dynasty was increased trade with foreign countries—it surpassed that of any former Chinese dynasties. Marco Polo (1254–1324), an Italian merchant, traveled along the Silk Road with his father and uncle and reached China in 1275, where he was commissioned by Kublai Khan as a court official on various business ventures. The development of less traditional art forms, including novels and dramatic theater, also took place during the Yuan regime. Since Han Chinese literati were barred from important government positions and many refused to serve the Mongol authorities out of their loyalty to the former Song dynasty, they channeled their energy into new genres of literary output. The entertainment needs of the growing merchant class further propelled unprecedented growth of popular entertainment. These converging factors gave birth to a new performing art, Yuanqu (Yuan drama)—a blend of poetry, narrative, music, singing, acrobatics, and acting—often regarded as the ancestor of the present-day Beijing opera. These plays typically had four or five acts and were mostly written in vernacular Chinese to ensure accessibility to the masses.
eBook - PDF- Conrad Schirokauer, Miranda Brown(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
He displayed an ability to learn and to adjust to new Copyright 201 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. Chapter 7 ■ The Mongol Empire and the Yuan Dynasty 167 circumstances in administrative as well as military matters. What he could not do was to construct a system that would run smoothly in and of itself; and, unfortu-nately for the dynasty, there was not to be another Kublai Khan. The Yuan Continued (1294–1355) Although the Yuan accomplished more than traditionally hostile Chinese historians would later admit, it never achieved the strength and longevity of a major Chinese dynasty. Lacking a tradition of orderly succession, the dynasty was troubled by numerous succession disputes. During the forty years after Kublai’s death, seven emperors came to the throne, often with accompanying bloodshed and murder. After 1328, men from the Mongolian steppe no longer played a major role in these struggles. Earlier, in 1307, the Mongolian homeland had been reduced to a prov-ince under civil administration. But the elimination of the steppe as a power base did not alleviate internal tensions, nor was the dynasty able to devise a lasting for-mula for balancing the diverse elements in government and society. Court politics were dominated by factionalism, which found expression in fluctuating government policies. Personnel policies were a particularly sensitive area. Not until 1313, was an imperial edict issued to revive the civil service exam-inations based on the Confucian classics and the commentaries of Zhu Xi.
eBook - ePubThe Story of China
A portrait of a civilisation and its people
- Michael Wood(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Simon & Schuster UK(Publisher)
HE YUAN : CHINA UNDER THE MONGOL EMPIREIn the thirteenth century, China was conquered by the Mongols and became part of a world empire that extended from the Gobi to the Black Sea. To the Chinese literati and governing class, alien rule was a profound shock. This experience would lead to a deeply conservative and inward-looking reaction in the later fourteenth century, under the Ming dynasty. What then could have been a post-Song early modernity would turn out to be Ming despotism, shaped by the experience of conquest and foreign occupation. This would have long-term consequences, bequeathing a model of governance that would last down to today’s People’s Republic. However, though brief, the Mongol age would be another one of those interstitial periods between great epochs in Chinese history that was extraordinarily creative, laying markers for the future in governance, and in particular seeing a great opening up across the Eurasian world, with the first direct contacts between Western Europe and China.THE PRIMAL FORCE
In 1271 the Mongols announced the new dynasty in the Chinese language as the ‘Great Qian Yuan’. This ancient name meaning ‘Origin’ or ‘Primal Force’ enabled the founder, Kublai Khan, not only to show respect for China’s classical antiquity, but also to set the universalist pretensions of Chinese monarchy within even wider geographical limits. The Yuan ruled the Middle Kingdom through the Confucian officials of the former Southern Song governing class, along with many foreigners in their multi-racial, multi-lingual empire. The young Marco Polo, for example, seems to have served in the Yangzhou local government for two or three years, perhaps with the Italian merchant community in the city. If so, then he was just one of many outsiders making their fortune in the Mongol imperium. Yet the contacts also went the other way. The first Chinese person to go to Western Europe travelled from Beijing to Bordeaux in the 1280s, attempting to negotiate an alliance between the rulers of Christian Europe and the Mongols against the Muslim Caliphate. So the Mongol empire stirred up world history as never before. Whether in Plantagenet England or Yuan Dadu, it was a time of rich new possibilities.
eBook - ePub- Paul Strathern(Author)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Pegasus Books(Publisher)
5 The Yuan DynastyKublai Khan proclaimed the Yuan Dynasty in 1271, and set about completing his conquest of the Sung Dynasty of southern China, which would eventually unite north and south China for the first time since the Sung Dynasty had split off from the Jin Dynasty almost 150 years previously. China has traditionally flourished during periods when the north and south have been united. Unification would always prove difficult over such a vast region, although the people occupying this region are, and have been throughout history, for the most part homogenous Han Chinese.20Any consideration of Chinese history must be seen from the perspective of its long past, as well as the effect this may well have upon its future, and thus the future of world history. Effects and influences can take centuries to be understood. According to the story, when China’s twentieth-century communist ruler, Chairman Mao, was asked in the 1960s about the impact of the French Revolution, he is said to have replied, It is too early to tell.’Subsequent sources, hampered by a similar lack of hard facts, claim that this remark was really made by his prime minister, Zhou Enlai, who was said to have been referring to the Paris 1968 Student Revolution. The Chairman Mao version better illustrates the Chinese attitude towards historical effect. Even in Chinese communism, it is possible to detect age-old Buddhist influences which coloured attitudes back through the dynasties to the Yuan period and beyond.Unlike the previous empires we have discussed, which had their own origin myths, the Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) was born out of a succession of previous dynasties. By the time of its birth, Dynastic China was already a mature culture, with a recognisable quasi-continuous history. As previously mentioned, Chinese Han civilisation evolved independently in the Yellow River basin of central China around 2,000 BC, i.e. a millennium or so after the Mesopotamian and Nilotic civilisations. Out of this Han civilisation, the legendary first Xia dynasty is said to have developed. Han rule gradually spread by ‘migration and assimilation’, which included the process of ‘sinicisation’, the adoption of the same diet, writing, language, lifestyle and general culture of the Han.
eBook - PDFRising China and Its Postmodern Fate
Memories of Empire in a New Global Context
- Charles Horner, Gary Bertsch, Howard Wiarda(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- University of Georgia Press(Publisher)
The historians who carried on this work for the Yuan dynasty knew they 28 Chapter Two were to place Mongol rule in the orthodox line of succession. They did this by issuing official histories of all of the dynasties that the Mongols had defeated on their way to control of China, that is, not only the “Chinese” Song dynasty, but also the “alien” Liao and Jin. All three dynasties, especially the alien ones, now had an independent history of their own and were therefore legitimate. How could it be other-wise? Within the tradition of standard history, already more than a thou-sand years old when the Mongols came to power, the publishing of proper dynastic histories about them under the emperor’s aegis made it so. A helpful perspective on what this set in motion is also provided by Hok-Lam Chan, as he describes the centuries-long ideological struggle that would develop about these interpretations. The new Ming ruling house that appeared in 1368 after the collapse of the Mongols attempted to con-nect itself to “Song loyalism,” that is, to the anti-Mongol resistance of the thirteenth century. Later on during its tenure, the Ming dynasty decided upon a wholesale revision of the still-official Yuan reading of Song dynasty history. It began after the greatest military defeat suffered in the early Ming period. In 1449 the reigning emperor personally led Ming armies into battle against a Mongol force at a place called Tu Mu, northwest of Beijing, be-yond the Great Wall. It was a huge defeat for the Ming; about 250,000 Chinese soldiers were killed, and the emperor was captured.
eBook - PDFMirroring the Past
The Writing and Use of History in Imperial China
- On-cho Ng, Q. Edward Wang(Authors)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- University of Hawaii Press(Publisher)
Chapter 6 The Jin and the Yuan History and Legitimation in the Dynasties of Conquest I n 1115 the partially Sinicized Jurchen people, a very loose conglomera-tion of tribes who had risen to power in northeastern Manchuria, estab-lished the Jin dynasty. They rebelled against and in 1125 overthrew their Khitan overlord, the Liao dynasty (947–1125), the nemesis of the Song dy-nasty. The Liao had never been able to capture substantial Chinese terri-tory, taking only land on the border, but the Jin, from 1127 onward, suc-ceeded in imposing direct control over the northern portion of China proper. The Song withdrew to central and southern China. Before long, however, the Jin themselves faced the recurrent problem that native Chi-nese dynasties had—pressure from the north, exerted this time by the Mongols. Simultaneously the Jin had to contend with military challenges from the Southern Song. In 1234, after decades of dynastic decline, the Jin dynasty was destroyed by the Mongols, who shortly thereafter also gobbled up the south. In 1271 the Mongol Yuan dynasty was established, a conquest dynasty that for the first time achieved direct dominion over all of China (H. Chan 1984, 51–72). How did the enterprise of history fare under the Jurchen Jin and Mon-gol Yuan dynasties? Although both the Jin and the Yuan made deliber-ate efforts to maintain their cultural and political distinction, they had no choice but to employ Chinese institutions and personnel. As a conse-quence, the time-honored dynastic endeavor of compiling history, both a cultural practice and a political ritual, continued. The Yuan, for instance, readily sponsored compilations of the histories of the preceding regimes of the Liao, the Jin, and the Song.
eBook - PDFKorea and the Fall of the Mongol Empire
Alliance, Upheaval, and the Rise of a New East Asian Order
- David M. Robinson(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Xu pointedly contrasted the Han, Tang, Song, and Jin dynasties, which either had uneven and imperfect control over large territories or governed over much reduced lands, with the Yuan polity that truly embodied Great Unified Rule. Xu Youren concludes with enormous optimism: “Superiors and subordinates sup- port each other to uphold unified rule. Our Nation will enjoy blessings without limit. How could it be a mere ten thousand generations! [Our] rule of the realm will endure as long as Heaven.” 41 The Yuan court understood that the empire’ s power and legitimacy relied on outstanding governance and statecraft, but it also appreciated the critical importance of imperial display and ritual glorification. Gifts for the Great Khan On August 19, 1342, Giovanni dei Marignolli (fl. 1338–1353), an envoy dispatched by Pope Benedict XII, “submitted an extraordinary horse” to Toghan-Temür at the Hall of Kindness and Benevolence (cirendian 慈仁 殿) in the imperial palace in the northern capital, Shangdu (near today’ s Zhenglan banner, Inner Mongolia), where the emperor and his court resided each year from April to September. 42 The Pope’ s gift was in response to an embassy that Toghan-Temür had previously sent to Avignon in 1338 with a request for the Pope’ s prayers and for gifts of horses and other rarities. A vital part of the Yuan military, commanders of Alan descent initiated the mission to Pope Benedict, because they wanted a new pastor to care for 40 In 1983–1984, archaeologists discovered eight pages of the work at the Qara-Qoto site. See Li Yiyou, Heicheng chutu wenshu, p. 67. 41 Xu Youren, “Da Yitong zhi xu” 大一統志序, QYW 1178.38.124–25. 42 YS 40.3.864; Jie Xisi, “Tian ma zan” 天馬贊, Jie Xisi quanji 揭傒斯全集, juan 9, p. 425; Fu and Zhu, Yuan Gongci baizhang jianzhu 宮詞百章箋注, item 89, p. 95. Sometime between 1340 and 1344, Yi Gok followed Toghan-Temür to Shangdu, for which he was awarded a position within the Goryeo government. See GS 119.8.3334. 55 Gifts for the Great Khan
- E. N. Anderson(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- University of Pennsylvania Press(Publisher)
Chapter 7 The Mongols and the Yuan Dynasty Here is something about Furthest China, which I mention as I find it and do not guarantee its authenticity. If it is true, I will have achieved my aim; if it is not true you will know what people assert. —Yäqūt ibn‘Abdulläh, Greek-Arab geographer, ca. 1229 CE (quoted in Hopkins 1990: 320) The Mongol Empire and Knowledge Flows Within It For a very short while at the height of Mongol power, one huge global system dominated all Eurasia. If Ferdinand von Richtofen had not blessed the Central Asian trade route complex with the cognomen Silk Road in 1877 (Hill 2009: xii), we could well have called it the Eurasian information superhighway. In particular, in the late 1200s and through the 1300s, it was the Mongol infor-mation superhighway. The Mongols, mythologically descended from a gray wolf and a fallow deer, were a scattered set of forest and forest-steppe peoples speaking variants of the Mongolian language. By 1100, they were taking notice of the rise of steppe empires and conquest dynasties. Yet no one could have predicted the rise of Genghis Khan (Chinggis Qaghan, Chingis Khaan in modern Mongol) and his rapid conquests of most of inner Asia. He never conquered China, but his grandson Qubilai did. At the same time, Hulegu was conquering the Near East, sweeping away the last feeble ‘ Abbāsid caliph and establishing the rule of the Ilkhans in Baghdad. By 1279, most of the core of Eurasia was in Mongol hands. They never bothered with western Europe after an early foray disclosed that there was The Mongols and the Yuan Dynasty 183 little loot to be had. They similarly avoided India after brief forays. They had been stopped at Ain Jalut, in Syria in 1260 by the Mamluks of Egypt. They briefly conquered Vietnam but failed to accomplish much there, and other-wise they did not control Southeast Asia. They also failed to take Japan, but otherwise, they ruled Eurasia.
eBook - ePub- Britannica Educational Publishing, Kenneth Pletcher(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Britannica Educational Publishing(Publisher)
Kublai Khan’s ascendancy in 1260 marked a definite change in Mongol government practice. Kublai moved the seat of Mongol government from Karakorum in Mongolia to Shangdu (“Upper Capital”), near present-day Dolun in Inner Mongolia. In 1267 the official capital was transferred to Zhongdu, where Kublai ordered the construction of a new walled city, replete with grand palaces and official quarters, that was renamed Dadu (“Great Capital”) before its completion. Under its Turkicized name, Cambaluc (Khan-baliq, “The Khan’s Town”), the capital became known throughout Asia and even Europe. But, true to nomad traditions, the Mongol court continued to move between these two residences—Shangdu in summer and Dadu in winter. With the establishment of Dadu as the seat of the central bureaucracy, Mongolia and Karakorum no longer remained the centre of the Mongol empire. Mongolia began to fall back to the status of a northern borderland, where a nomadic way of life continued and where Mongol grandees, dissatisfied with the growing Sinicization of the court, repeatedly engaged in rebellions.Kublai, who even prior to 1260 had surrounded himself with Chinese advisers such as the eminent Buddho-Daoist Liu Bingzhong and several former Jin scholar-officials, was still the nominal overlord of the other Mongol dominions (ulus ) in Asia. By then, however, his Chinese entourage had persuaded him to accept the role of a traditional Chinese emperor. A decisive step was taken in 1271 when the Chinese dominion was given a Chinese dynastic name—Da Yuan, the “Great Origin.” Before this the Chinese name for the Mongol state was Da Chao (“Great Dynasty”), introduced about 1217. It was a translation of the Mongol name Yeke Mongghol Ulus (“Great Mongol Nation”) adopted by Genghis Khan about 1206. The new name, however, was a departure from Chinese traditions. All earlier Chinese dynasties were named for ancient feudal states or geographic terms; even the Khitan and the Juchen had followed this tradition by naming their states Liao (for the Liao River in Manchuria) and Jin (“Gold,” for a river in Manchuria that had a Juchen name with that meaning). Yuan was the first nongeographic name of a Chinese dynasty since Wang Mang established the Xin dynasty (AD 9–25).Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan founded the Yuan (Mongol) dynasty in China . Hulton Archive/Getty ImagesDuring the 1260s the central bureaucracy and the local administration of the Chinese empire were remodeled on Chinese lines, with certain alterations introduced by the Jin state. The Central Secretariat remained the most important civilian authority, with specialized agencies such as the traditional six ministries of finance, war, officials, rites, punishments, and public works. The Shumiyuan (Military Council) was another institution inherited from previous dynasties. A Yushitai (Censorate) was originally created for remonstrations against the emperor and criticism of policies, but increasingly it became an instrument of the court itself and a tool to eliminate other members of the bureaucracy. In the main the territorial divisions followed Chinese models, but the degree of local independence was much smaller than it had been under the Song; the provincial administrations were actually branches of the Central Secretariat. The structures of the various provincial administrations throughout China were smaller replicas of the Central Secretariat. According to Chinese sources, in 1260–61 the lower echelons in the Central Secretariat were mostly Chinese; the high offices, however, even if they had traditional Chinese names, were reserved for non-Chinese. Surprisingly, Kublai Khan had few Mongols in high administrative positions; apparently suspicious of some of his tribal leaders, he preferred absolute foreigners. The military sphere was affected least by the attempts to achieve a synthesis between Chinese and native ways of life; there the Mongol aristocracy remained supreme.
eBook - PDFMarriage and the Law in the Age of Khubilai Khan
Cases from the Yuan dianzhang
- Bettine Birge(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Harvard University Press(Publisher)
Yuan Administration and the Legal System 37 the authority of the ruler was established by charismatic leadership and the per-sonal loyalty of his followers. Authority resided in the person, not in the institu-tion. The Great Khan (later, khaghan or kha’an ) was chosen by a special grand council, called a khuriltai, of imperial relatives (both male and female), nobles, and military leaders. The khan maintained his authority by personally leading troops into battle, directing large royal hunts, which were a form of military training, and rewarding his followers with war booty, including the granting of fiefs. The Yuan emperors continued these practices, which explains the prolifera-tion of appanages granted to relatives and generals. These included both lands and subject peoples and were only partially controlled by the central government. In the early stages of the Mongol state, before the Eurasian conquests, Ching-gis Khan and his successors ruled through their personal followers. These were originally the n ö k ö d, who were later organized into the khan’s personal body-guard, the keshig (Chinese qiexue 怯薛 ). The administration of the state was thus an extension of the khan’s own household and person. Along these lines, the area of north China first conquered by the Mongols was called fuli 腹裏 , liter-ally “within the belly” (or as Farquhar labels it, “the guts”), thereby creating an image of Yuan territory as the embodiment of the emperor himself. 1 I translate the term as “Inner Domain.” It covered the modern provinces of Hebei, Shandong, Shanxi, and eastern Inner Mongolia. The imperial government was dispropor-tionately concerned with administering this area, also called Central Province (Zhongshusheng 中書省 ). Many of the fiefs that Khubilai granted were located within this area as well. In 1260, Khubilai established the Central Secretariat (Zhongshusheng 中書省 ) as the highest organ of his government to implement his rule.
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