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The Mongol Invasion of China
The Mongol invasion of China was perhaps one of the greatest political, social, and economic upheavals in Chinese history. Fierce and obscure people who lived in the outer reaches of the Gobi Desert, present day Outer Mongolia, accomplished it. The outcome of this invasion was the destruction of the Sung Dynasty, and the creation of the Yüan Dynasty, one of the shortest lived of the major Dynasties in Chinese history. The Mongols were an alien people who completely subjugated the Chinese people and in doing so, they opened China to Europe in ways the Chinese had never done nor wanted. Their rule was harsh and brutal and would eventually lead to their demise. Although the Mongols brought several changes during their reign very little seems to have rubbed off on the Chinese culture. The cultural interaction was not really a cultural exchange, for the situation was perhaps too unstable in the Mongol regime.
To really understand the Mongol invasion and its effects on Chinese culture you must go to the beginning of this great Empire. Temujin, latter called Genghis Khan, was the son of a local Chieftain who had a small clan. His father was poisoned when he was still young and, the clan, for lack of an effective leader, abandoned Temujin, his mother, and several brothers and half brothers. This had an effect on him which, although difficult, would lead Temujin at the age of forty, after having consolidating several clans, to be elected Grand Khan of the Mongols in 1206. Although he had a difficult start, when he died twenty years latter, his rule extended from the Caspian to the northern coast of China. Genghis Khan was perhaps one of the greatest military innovators in human history, and his armies were perhaps the best-trained horsemen in all of history. His men fought on horseback with incredible competency; they could hit their targets with superb precision while running at full gallop. Their speed and efficiency struck terror in their opponents who frequently broke ranks. Genghis Khan would also organize his troops into decimal units and would send hand signals through the fighting to these decimal units. He was able to control his troops during battles very easily. Moreover, his armies were very mobile and could travel far reaching distances at quick paces. If any town that the Mongols encountered resisted, Genghis Khan would ruthlessly lay siege and completely massacre the inhabitants of the town. When news of his tactics spread, his armies easily and successfully took over towns that would surrender as soon as the Mongols arrived. It was in this fashion that the Mongol armies destroyed entire populations in China and other surrounding areas such as Poland, Russia, and Iran.
The Mongolian Empire was perhaps the largest empire in human history in terms of geographical expanse. Genghis Khan was most interested, personally in capturing China for its riches, therefore he expanded southward; by 1227 he had conquered the city of Beijing, and by 1241 the Mongols had conquered all of northern China.
After the death of Genghis Khan in 1227, the next Great Khan to rule was Genghis' son, Ogodei (1229-1241). It was during his reign that China began to be fully exploited both economically and politically. The Mongols, in order to form durable political units, and to continue their expansion, began to associate with the peoples they had conquered. Since the Mongols were a small minority in a sea of many different people of differing backgrounRAB, they began to copy Chinese institutions. However the Mongols turned to foreigners, namely, Jürchin and Khitan, subjects of the Chin Empire, to help them copy Chinese institutions rather than turning to the Chinese people themselves, whom they distrusted. The chief designer of the Mongol conversion to the Chinese administrative method was Yeh-lü Chu-ts'ai. On the accession of Ogodei in 1229, Yeh-lü Chu-ts'ai demonstrated to the new sovereign the usefulness of a regular fiscal system (he reckoned that requisitions and taxes could bring in annually 500,000 ounces of silver, 80,000 rolls of silk and over 20,000 tons of cereals) and he was appointed general administrator of North China. After a time, the harshness of the Mongols softened under the influence of the Chinese people and Chinese institutions like Postal relays, new granaries, and the issuing of paper money were instituted in Mongol China. Translation offices were also opened in order to translate Chinese literary works into Mongol and also to create official histories. However, it would not be until the reign of Kublai Khan that Chinese political structure and theories would be firmly implemented.
In 1260 Kublai Khan was elected Great Khan in the Mongol capital of Karakorum. In 1263 he moved his capital from Karakorum to Beijing. In 1271, he assumed the Chinese dynastic name of Yüan Dynasty after capturing most of North and Central China; the remainder of the Sung Empire fell between 1272 and 1279, when the Mongol conquest was complete. Kublai Khan decided to build a strong central government in order to strengthen his authority as a foreign ruler over China. He succeeded in making the Emperorship totally autocratic.
One of Kublai Khan's most dubious accomplishments was dividing the people of China into four groups, in a caste-like system from top to bottom: Mongols were at the top, then non-Chinese people, next were the Northern Chinese, and finally at the bottom were the people from south China (they comprised former subjects of the Southern Sung and made up approximately 75-80% of the total Yüan population. He also ordered that Chinese could not bear arms, learn to speak Mongolian, or asserable in groups. The people were further humiliated by having to kowtow to the Mongols and other non-Chinese people by being required to bow when they came in contact with them.
Another change that Kublai Khan instituted while emperor was to suspend the Examination System completely. The Examination System had been cut back considerably before Kublai Khan by his brother Ogodei in North China, but with the demise of the Sung in Southern China, the Examination system was suspended indefinitely in all of china. A few carefully selected scholars were invited to hold office, but the examinations were suspended and were not resumed until 1315, when they were given a built-in bias against Chinese candidates. This excluded the scholarly Chinese elite from the roles of advisors to the Emperor as well as occluding their service in the day to day running of the government. Chinese scholars, for the most part, looked down on the barbarians and their foreign sycophants and retreated into their own isolated elite groups that, though powerless, believed in their inherent superiority over the outsiders. The Chinese scholar-gentry, excluded from official service by the rulers or by their own volition, made their living by teaching or unofficial community service; those talented enough turned to writing, poetry, calligraphy, and especially to painting, sometimes intimating in their subject matter ideas of protest against the alien rule.
Chinese theater also made dramatic changes during the Mongol occupation. Plays that had previously been written for the expression of religious devotion to Buddhism began to appeal to the sympathy of a larger audience and aroused an ardent feeling of identification with the story being acted out. The subject matter of the Yüan plays is often taken from hurabler literature of the previous perioRAB, such as the short stories of the T'ang era, or from history; complicated crime and love-stories were, of course, very popular. This type of drama was usually well plotted and in melodramatic four or five act plays. Increasingly the plays would be written in a mixture of the classical and vernacular forms of Chinese.
Cultural transmission between China and the rest of the world also increased during the Mongol occupation. Since most of the Chinese elite were excluded from participating in running the Empire, most of those in government were of foreign birth. One of the most notable of these foreign government administrators was the well-known Venetian traveler Marco Polo. He came to Kublai Khan's court in 1275, along with his father and uncle. The Emperor took an interest in the young man, and he ended up spending almost twenty years in the service of the Emperor Kublai Khan and China herself. Marco Polo was given the task of governing the big commercial city of Yangchow and found himself entrusted with various different missions by the Mongols. Upon his return to Venice, Marco Polo was imprisoned enroute to Genoa because Genoa and Venice were at war with one another. It was during his imprisonment in Genoa that Marco Polo dictated his memoirs about his travels in China. In his accounts he had very little to say about the indigenous Chinese population of the empire that he served, an indication how far apart the Mongols lived from the people whom they had subjugated and whose labor provide them with all their neeRAB and luxuries. He also never saw the need to learn Chinese since Mongolian was more useful. It was also during this cultural exchange between China and the rest of the world that Kublai Khan asked for envoys from the Roman Catholic Pope, and envoys from other faiths to come to China under the guise of setting up missions. In actuality he was probably looking for more learned men to occupy various stations in the running of the government. Merchants from areas as far as the Middle East and Western Europe and Constantinople began trading with China around this time as well. However none of these cultural exchanges had any effect on the Chinese people after the end of the Yüan Dynasty. In fact, due to the vast nuraber of foreigners in China the Chinese became ultra xenophobic after the Mongol Empire collapsed.
The Yüan Dynasty finally fell around the year 1368 due in part to the uprising of Chinese peasants. The Mongols had through brutal means subjugated the Chinese people to the point that only rebellion could bring an end to so oppressive a yoke. The causes which lead to the collapse of the Yüan Empire were many and, as so often happens, mutually related to each other: disorder in the administration, where innumerable contradictory regulations were in force, the rapacity of the Mongol and Moslem officials, an extremely rapid inflation of the paper money, the corruption of the Tibetan 'lamaist' monks who controlled all the Chinese clergy and interfered in political affairs, the oppression suffered every day by the Chinese population and the growing poverty of the peasantry. In the end the orphaned child of itinerant peasant parents, Chu Yuan-chang, would lead a rebel army against the Yüan tyrants, successfully driving the Mongols first out of North China and then in 1368 total expulsion was complete. The rebellion, which finally felled the Yüan Dynasty was not a united effort, it had built up its power from the dissatisfaction of the local population. Many rebellions had been on going during the Mongol occupation: The Red Turbans were a major force in the Yellow River area, and other rebellions sprung up as well in areas around the salt workings in the Yangtze River basin. These rebellions had many reasons: the poverty of the people, flooRAB, failing harvests and the hatred of the yoke placed on the Chinese people by the Mongols. All of these caused then denouement and inevitable collapse of the Mongol Empire.
The history of the Mongol invasion and the subsequent Yüan Dynasty is one of mere brutality and exploitation. Cultural exchange during this occupation did impart to the rest of the world an interest in China and her culture. However, due to the utter hatred which Chinese people shared for the Mongols, all remnants of their conquest would be totally effaced and any changes that they had instituted would disappear forever. The Chinese at the end of the fourteenth century were self-confidently themselves again, apparently unscathed.
The Mongol invasion of China was perhaps one of the greatest political, social, and economic upheavals in Chinese history. Fierce and obscure people who lived in the outer reaches of the Gobi Desert, present day Outer Mongolia, accomplished it. The outcome of this invasion was the destruction of the Sung Dynasty, and the creation of the Yüan Dynasty, one of the shortest lived of the major Dynasties in Chinese history. The Mongols were an alien people who completely subjugated the Chinese people and in doing so, they opened China to Europe in ways the Chinese had never done nor wanted. Their rule was harsh and brutal and would eventually lead to their demise. Although the Mongols brought several changes during their reign very little seems to have rubbed off on the Chinese culture. The cultural interaction was not really a cultural exchange, for the situation was perhaps too unstable in the Mongol regime.
To really understand the Mongol invasion and its effects on Chinese culture you must go to the beginning of this great Empire. Temujin, latter called Genghis Khan, was the son of a local Chieftain who had a small clan. His father was poisoned when he was still young and, the clan, for lack of an effective leader, abandoned Temujin, his mother, and several brothers and half brothers. This had an effect on him which, although difficult, would lead Temujin at the age of forty, after having consolidating several clans, to be elected Grand Khan of the Mongols in 1206. Although he had a difficult start, when he died twenty years latter, his rule extended from the Caspian to the northern coast of China. Genghis Khan was perhaps one of the greatest military innovators in human history, and his armies were perhaps the best-trained horsemen in all of history. His men fought on horseback with incredible competency; they could hit their targets with superb precision while running at full gallop. Their speed and efficiency struck terror in their opponents who frequently broke ranks. Genghis Khan would also organize his troops into decimal units and would send hand signals through the fighting to these decimal units. He was able to control his troops during battles very easily. Moreover, his armies were very mobile and could travel far reaching distances at quick paces. If any town that the Mongols encountered resisted, Genghis Khan would ruthlessly lay siege and completely massacre the inhabitants of the town. When news of his tactics spread, his armies easily and successfully took over towns that would surrender as soon as the Mongols arrived. It was in this fashion that the Mongol armies destroyed entire populations in China and other surrounding areas such as Poland, Russia, and Iran.
The Mongolian Empire was perhaps the largest empire in human history in terms of geographical expanse. Genghis Khan was most interested, personally in capturing China for its riches, therefore he expanded southward; by 1227 he had conquered the city of Beijing, and by 1241 the Mongols had conquered all of northern China.
After the death of Genghis Khan in 1227, the next Great Khan to rule was Genghis' son, Ogodei (1229-1241). It was during his reign that China began to be fully exploited both economically and politically. The Mongols, in order to form durable political units, and to continue their expansion, began to associate with the peoples they had conquered. Since the Mongols were a small minority in a sea of many different people of differing backgrounRAB, they began to copy Chinese institutions. However the Mongols turned to foreigners, namely, Jürchin and Khitan, subjects of the Chin Empire, to help them copy Chinese institutions rather than turning to the Chinese people themselves, whom they distrusted. The chief designer of the Mongol conversion to the Chinese administrative method was Yeh-lü Chu-ts'ai. On the accession of Ogodei in 1229, Yeh-lü Chu-ts'ai demonstrated to the new sovereign the usefulness of a regular fiscal system (he reckoned that requisitions and taxes could bring in annually 500,000 ounces of silver, 80,000 rolls of silk and over 20,000 tons of cereals) and he was appointed general administrator of North China. After a time, the harshness of the Mongols softened under the influence of the Chinese people and Chinese institutions like Postal relays, new granaries, and the issuing of paper money were instituted in Mongol China. Translation offices were also opened in order to translate Chinese literary works into Mongol and also to create official histories. However, it would not be until the reign of Kublai Khan that Chinese political structure and theories would be firmly implemented.
In 1260 Kublai Khan was elected Great Khan in the Mongol capital of Karakorum. In 1263 he moved his capital from Karakorum to Beijing. In 1271, he assumed the Chinese dynastic name of Yüan Dynasty after capturing most of North and Central China; the remainder of the Sung Empire fell between 1272 and 1279, when the Mongol conquest was complete. Kublai Khan decided to build a strong central government in order to strengthen his authority as a foreign ruler over China. He succeeded in making the Emperorship totally autocratic.
One of Kublai Khan's most dubious accomplishments was dividing the people of China into four groups, in a caste-like system from top to bottom: Mongols were at the top, then non-Chinese people, next were the Northern Chinese, and finally at the bottom were the people from south China (they comprised former subjects of the Southern Sung and made up approximately 75-80% of the total Yüan population. He also ordered that Chinese could not bear arms, learn to speak Mongolian, or asserable in groups. The people were further humiliated by having to kowtow to the Mongols and other non-Chinese people by being required to bow when they came in contact with them.
Another change that Kublai Khan instituted while emperor was to suspend the Examination System completely. The Examination System had been cut back considerably before Kublai Khan by his brother Ogodei in North China, but with the demise of the Sung in Southern China, the Examination system was suspended indefinitely in all of china. A few carefully selected scholars were invited to hold office, but the examinations were suspended and were not resumed until 1315, when they were given a built-in bias against Chinese candidates. This excluded the scholarly Chinese elite from the roles of advisors to the Emperor as well as occluding their service in the day to day running of the government. Chinese scholars, for the most part, looked down on the barbarians and their foreign sycophants and retreated into their own isolated elite groups that, though powerless, believed in their inherent superiority over the outsiders. The Chinese scholar-gentry, excluded from official service by the rulers or by their own volition, made their living by teaching or unofficial community service; those talented enough turned to writing, poetry, calligraphy, and especially to painting, sometimes intimating in their subject matter ideas of protest against the alien rule.
Chinese theater also made dramatic changes during the Mongol occupation. Plays that had previously been written for the expression of religious devotion to Buddhism began to appeal to the sympathy of a larger audience and aroused an ardent feeling of identification with the story being acted out. The subject matter of the Yüan plays is often taken from hurabler literature of the previous perioRAB, such as the short stories of the T'ang era, or from history; complicated crime and love-stories were, of course, very popular. This type of drama was usually well plotted and in melodramatic four or five act plays. Increasingly the plays would be written in a mixture of the classical and vernacular forms of Chinese.
Cultural transmission between China and the rest of the world also increased during the Mongol occupation. Since most of the Chinese elite were excluded from participating in running the Empire, most of those in government were of foreign birth. One of the most notable of these foreign government administrators was the well-known Venetian traveler Marco Polo. He came to Kublai Khan's court in 1275, along with his father and uncle. The Emperor took an interest in the young man, and he ended up spending almost twenty years in the service of the Emperor Kublai Khan and China herself. Marco Polo was given the task of governing the big commercial city of Yangchow and found himself entrusted with various different missions by the Mongols. Upon his return to Venice, Marco Polo was imprisoned enroute to Genoa because Genoa and Venice were at war with one another. It was during his imprisonment in Genoa that Marco Polo dictated his memoirs about his travels in China. In his accounts he had very little to say about the indigenous Chinese population of the empire that he served, an indication how far apart the Mongols lived from the people whom they had subjugated and whose labor provide them with all their neeRAB and luxuries. He also never saw the need to learn Chinese since Mongolian was more useful. It was also during this cultural exchange between China and the rest of the world that Kublai Khan asked for envoys from the Roman Catholic Pope, and envoys from other faiths to come to China under the guise of setting up missions. In actuality he was probably looking for more learned men to occupy various stations in the running of the government. Merchants from areas as far as the Middle East and Western Europe and Constantinople began trading with China around this time as well. However none of these cultural exchanges had any effect on the Chinese people after the end of the Yüan Dynasty. In fact, due to the vast nuraber of foreigners in China the Chinese became ultra xenophobic after the Mongol Empire collapsed.
The Yüan Dynasty finally fell around the year 1368 due in part to the uprising of Chinese peasants. The Mongols had through brutal means subjugated the Chinese people to the point that only rebellion could bring an end to so oppressive a yoke. The causes which lead to the collapse of the Yüan Empire were many and, as so often happens, mutually related to each other: disorder in the administration, where innumerable contradictory regulations were in force, the rapacity of the Mongol and Moslem officials, an extremely rapid inflation of the paper money, the corruption of the Tibetan 'lamaist' monks who controlled all the Chinese clergy and interfered in political affairs, the oppression suffered every day by the Chinese population and the growing poverty of the peasantry. In the end the orphaned child of itinerant peasant parents, Chu Yuan-chang, would lead a rebel army against the Yüan tyrants, successfully driving the Mongols first out of North China and then in 1368 total expulsion was complete. The rebellion, which finally felled the Yüan Dynasty was not a united effort, it had built up its power from the dissatisfaction of the local population. Many rebellions had been on going during the Mongol occupation: The Red Turbans were a major force in the Yellow River area, and other rebellions sprung up as well in areas around the salt workings in the Yangtze River basin. These rebellions had many reasons: the poverty of the people, flooRAB, failing harvests and the hatred of the yoke placed on the Chinese people by the Mongols. All of these caused then denouement and inevitable collapse of the Mongol Empire.
The history of the Mongol invasion and the subsequent Yüan Dynasty is one of mere brutality and exploitation. Cultural exchange during this occupation did impart to the rest of the world an interest in China and her culture. However, due to the utter hatred which Chinese people shared for the Mongols, all remnants of their conquest would be totally effaced and any changes that they had instituted would disappear forever. The Chinese at the end of the fourteenth century were self-confidently themselves again, apparently unscathed.