Yuan dynasty

The Yuan dynasty (元朝) was a Mongol dynasty. Its story begins with Genghis Khan (成吉思汗, c. 1162–1227), born Temüjin, who spent most of his life uniting the Mongol tribes and took the title Genghis Khan at an assembly of chiefs in 1206. His armies then attacked the neighbours of Song China: the Western Xia from 1209, then the Jin, whose capital, Zhongdu, they took in 1215. His birth year is disputed; 1162 is the one most historians accept.

His grandson Kublai (忽必烈, 1215–1294) became great khan in 1260 and had to defeat his brother Ariq Böke, who contested his rule until 1264. In 1271 he proclaimed a dynasty in the Chinese manner, the Great Yuan (大元). The name comes from the Book of Changes (易经, Yijing): one of the commentaries on its first hexagram, Qian, opens with the words "大哉乾元", "Great is Qian, the Primal". Kublai afterwards entered Genghis Khan in the records as the founder of the dynasty, with the temple name Taizu.

Why two dates? In 1271 southern China still belonged to the Southern Song. Kublai took their capital, Hangzhou, in 1276, but the conquest was completed only in 1279, at the naval battle of Yamen. The Yuan are therefore dated either from 1271, when the dynasty was proclaimed, or from 1279, when it ruled all of China; between those two dates, two dynasties coexisted. The Yuan were the first dynasty founded by a non-Han people to rule the whole of China proper, whose north and south were reunited for the first time in three hundred years.

Kublai moved the Mongol capital from Karakorum, in Mongolia, to northern China. From the late 1260s he had a new city built near Zhongdu, the former Jin capital, planned and supervised by the scholar Liu Bingzhong (刘秉忠). In 1272 it was named Dadu (大都), "the great capital". It also had a Turkic-Mongol name, Khanbaliq, "the city of the khan", which Marco Polo's book spells Cambaluc. Kublai's earlier seat, Shangdu (上都), known in the West as Xanadu, became the summer capital. Kublai also had the Grand Canal extended from southern China to Dadu.

Dadu is the direct ancestor of Beijing. In 1368 the Ming army took it, razed the Yuan palaces and renamed the city Beiping (北平), "the pacified north". In the 15th century the Yongle emperor made it his northern capital, Beijing (北京), the name it still bears today.

The Mongols, far fewer than their Chinese subjects, granted the various groups unequal privileges; historians describe four categories, from most to least favoured:

• the Mongols (蒙古人);

• the Semu (色目人), peoples from the west and Central Asia: Uyghurs, Tanguts, Tibetans, Central Asian Muslims and others;

• the Han (汉人), the people of the north, the former Jin territory;

• the Nanren (南人, "Southerners"), former subjects of the Southern Song.

The order partly reflected when each group had submitted: the north, conquered earlier, ranked above the south, which had held out longer. The highest posts went almost always to Mongols or Semu, and Han officials mostly served as deputies. The civil-service examinations were restored only in 1315, with two separate lists: one for Mongols and Semu, the other for Han and Southerners, who sat harder papers.

Historians now qualify this picture. No Yuan law explicitly dividing the population into four classes has been found, although unequal treatment of the groups shows up in many rules. The historian Frederick Mote called "social classes" a misleading term: these were legal degrees of privilege that said nothing about actual wealth, since there were rich Chinese and poor Mongols. Some Japanese historians even question whether a real four-class system existed at all.

The most influential European account of Yuan China is that of a Venetian merchant, Marco Polo (c. 1254–1324). He left Venice in 1271 with his father and uncle, reached Kublai's court after a journey of some three years (the exact date is unknown) and did not return to Venice until 1295. Taken prisoner by the Genoese, then at war with Venice, he dictated his memories to a cellmate, the writer Rustichello da Pisa. The book, known as the Devisement du monde, the Book of the Marvels of the World or Il Milione, was the first in the West to describe paper money, which the Yuan used so widely that for a time notes entirely replaced coins.

His account has long been debated. It says nothing of the Great Wall, tea, Chinese characters, chopsticks or bound feet, and no Chinese source mentions his name. In 1995 Frances Wood argued in Did Marco Polo Go to China? that at best he had got no farther than Persia, and more probably only as far as Constantinople and the Black Sea.

Other specialists answered her, among them Igor de Rachewiltz. Stephen Haw pointed out that the Great Wall we know today was built under the Ming, two centuries later. The sinologist Hans Ulrich Vogel (University of Tübingen) showed that Polo describes the currencies, salt and revenues of Yuan China accurately, with details that no other European, Arabic or Persian source of the time gives. Finally, the mission he says he accompanied, escorting Princess Kököchin to Persia, is confirmed by Persian and Chinese sources.

Under the Yuan the culture of the scholar class lost ground and an art aimed at a wide public flourished: theatre. Together with the sanqu songs (散曲), zaju (杂剧, "variety plays") make up the qu of the Yuan (元曲). Already performed under the Song and the Jin, zaju reached its high point under the Yuan. It combined recitation, poetry, singing, dance and mime. A play usually had four acts, sometimes with a short "wedge" (楔子) serving as prologue or interlude, and in each act a single character sang all the arias. The leading playwrights included Guan Hanqing, Ma Zhiyuan and Wang Shifu.

Guan Hanqing (关汉卿), who lived mostly in Dadu, was active in the 13th century; his exact dates are unknown. More than sixty plays are attributed to him, of which eighteen survive. The best known, The Injustice to Dou E (窦娥冤), is a courtroom drama. Dou E, a young widow, refuses to marry the thug Zhang Lü'er. He tries to poison her mother-in-law, but his own father drinks the soup and dies. Accused and tortured, Dou E confesses to spare her mother-in-law and is sentenced to death. Before her execution she foretells three signs of her innocence: her blood will fly up onto a white silk banner without touching the ground, snow will cover her body in the height of summer, and the region will suffer three years of drought. All of it comes true; in the last act her ghost appears to her father, now a high official, who has the case reviewed.

Kublai wanted a script shared by all the languages of his empire, able to write Mongolian as well as Chinese. He entrusted the task to the Tibetan monk 'Phags-pa (八思巴, 1235–1280), his State Preceptor, who adapted the Tibetan alphabet and at the end of the 1260s presented a script of square letters written from top to bottom, like classical Chinese. It was then called the "new Mongolian script" (蒙古新字) or "national script" (国字); today it is known as the 'Phags-pa script (八思巴文).

It became the official script of the Yuan and appears on seals and official documents. But it never caught on, even among the Mongol elite, and fell out of use in China when the Ming came to power. Linguists still value it: because it was used to write the sounds of Chinese characters, it gives clues to how Chinese was pronounced at the time.

From the late 1340s drought, floods and famine followed one another, and a court weakened by succession quarrels failed to respond. In 1351, 150,000 workers were conscripted for major works on the Yellow River. Han Shantong (韩山童), head of a sect claiming the White Lotus tradition that preached the coming of the Buddha Maitreya, and his lieutenant Liu Futong (刘福通) raised them in revolt. Their troops wore red scarves, hence the name Red Turbans (红巾军). Han Shantong was captured and executed, but his son Han Lin'er was proclaimed emperor of a restored Song dynasty, and other rebel leaders carved out states of their own.

One of them prevailed: Zhu Yuanzhang (朱元璋), born in 1328 to a poor peasant family in Anhui. At sixteen he lost his parents and an elder brother to an epidemic, became a novice monk and begged to survive, then joined the Red Turbans in 1352. He took Nanjing in 1356, defeated his rival Chen Youliang on Lake Poyang in 1363, then Zhang Shicheng in 1367. In January 1368 he proclaimed himself emperor in Nanjing, founding the Ming dynasty (明朝).

On 14 September 1368 the army of his general Xu Da took Dadu. The last Yuan emperor, Toghon Temür, had fled north to Shangdu; he died in 1370. His successors went on ruling in Mongolia under the name Great Yuan: historians call them the Northern Yuan (北元).