Chinese Empire

The Yuan Dynasty: Kublai Khan, Mongol Administration, and the World the Mongols Made

The Yuan Dynasty (1271–1368) was the dynasty of Kublai Khan (r. 1260–1294), grandson of Genghis Khan, and the first dynasty in Chinese history in which the entire Chinese world was ruled by a non-Han people from the steppe. The Yuan was short, controversial, and transformative. It connected China to a vast Eurasian trading system stretching from Korea to Hungary, opened the empire to foreign merchants, missionaries, and travellers, and produced a body of administrative practice, art, and drama that would shape Chinese and world history for centuries. Marco Polo visited Yuan China in the 1280s and described it as the richest, most populous, and best-governed empire he had ever seen. The Yuan is treated alongside the Qing in Mongol and Manchu rule, the broader history of the imperial dynasties is covered in imperial Chinese dynasties, and the Chinese dynasties section overview places the Yuan in the long arc of three thousand years of dynastic history.

The Mongol Conquest of China

The Mongol Empire was the creation of Genghis Khan (c. 1162–1227), who united the Mongol tribes of the steppe and then turned them outward. The Mongol armies conquered the Jin Dynasty of the Jurchens in 1234, leaving a vast swathe of north China devastated. The Western Xia (Tangut) state in the northwest was destroyed in 1227, and the Khwarazmian Empire in Central Asia fell in 1221. The Mongol armies pushed into eastern Europe, defeating the Rus principalities and reaching the gates of Vienna in 1241.

In the south, however, the Southern Song Dynasty held out. Its capital Lin’an (modern Hangzhou) was the largest and most sophisticated city in the world. The conquest of the Southern Song was carried out by Kublai between 1268 and 1279, in a long and brutal campaign that culminated in the Battle of Yamen in 1279, in which the last Song emperor, Emperor Bing, drowned himself and his attendants in the sea rather than submit. In 1271, Kublai formally proclaimed the Yuan Dynasty, and in 1279, after the final defeat of the Song, he became the ruler of all of China.

Kublai Khan and the Yuan State

Kublai Khan was one of the most remarkable rulers in Chinese history. He was born in 1215, the grandson of Genghis, and spent his youth on the steppe before being named Governor of the Mongol-Chinese borderlands and then Great Khan in 1260. He established his capital at Khanbaliq (汗八里, “city of the khan”), modern Beijing, where he built a new imperial city. He moved his summer court to the Mongolian steppe each year, preserving the traditional Mongol way of life even as he governed China. Kublai was a sophisticated patron of Buddhism, employing the Tibetan monk Phagpa as his imperial preceptor and adopting Tibetan Buddhism as the state religion. He was also a practical administrator, employing Confucian scholars and Muslim astronomers, and a religious tolerationist, allowing Nestorian Christians, Muslim merchants, and Catholic missionaries to operate within his realm.

After Kublai’s death in 1294, the Yuan Dynasty was ruled by a succession of increasingly weak emperors. The last Yuan emperor, Toghon Temür (r. 1333–1368), presided over a slow decline that ended in the Red Turban Rebellion and the rise of the Ming.

The Four-Class System

The Yuan imposed a four-class social hierarchy that divided the population by ethnicity. Mongols and Central Asians held the highest offices, monopolised the military, and were exempt from many taxes. Northerners (the Han Chinese of north China, the Jurchens, the Koreans, and other peoples conquered before the Song) formed a second tier, often employed as officials. Southerners (the Han Chinese of the former Southern Song) were restricted in their access to office and heavily taxed. Southerners at the very bottom were subject to the most onerous taxes and restrictions, and were forbidden to bear arms or gather in large groups. The four-class system was not as rigid as it sounds — Mongols who became culturally Chinese could be treated as Chinese — but it was a constant source of grievance for the southern Chinese.

Yuan Administration

The Yuan inherited a Chinese-style central administration and added a parallel Mongol structure. The central government was organised around the Central Administration (中書省), which issued decrees, and the Privy Council (樞密院), which supervised the army. Beneath these were the Six Ministries — Personnel, Revenue, Rites, War, Justice, and Works — largely inherited from the Tang and Song. The empire was divided into 11 provinces (行省, “branch secretariats”), each a copy of the central administration — a system that would be inherited by the Ming and Qing and survive, in modified form, into the twentieth century.

The most famous Yuan administrative innovation was the postal relay system (驛站), inherited from Genghis Khan, with stations every 25 miles along the main roads, where official travellers could change horses and obtain food and lodging. By the time of Kublai, this system extended from Korea to Poland, and it was the infrastructure that made long-distance travel under Mongol rule both safe and fast.

Yuan Economy and Culture

The Yuan inherited a sophisticated Chinese economy and added to it the benefits of Eurasian integration. The Silk Road flourished, the maritime trade of the South China Sea was opened to foreign merchants, and Chinese silks, porcelains, and paper were exported in unprecedented quantities. The Grand Canal was repaired and extended, and the port of Quanzhou in Fujian became the largest seaport in the world.

Yuan culture is sometimes dismissed as derivative, but it was in fact highly creative. The most distinctive product was Yuan drama (元曲), including famous zaju plays such as Guan Hanqing’s The Injustice to Dou E, Wang Shifu’s The Story of the Western Wing, and Ma Zhiyuan’s Romance of the Western Chamber. The Yuan period also saw the development of Mongol-language historical writing (the Secret History of the Mongols), the rise of Tibetan Buddhist art, and a distinctive Yuan style in painting, exemplified by Zhao Mengfu and Gong Kai. The Yuan was also a period of significant interaction with the wider world: Marco Polo visited in the 1280s, Ibn Battuta in the 1340s, and John of Montecorvino established a Catholic archbishopric at Khanbaliq in 1307.

The Fall of the Yuan

The Yuan collapsed in the mid-fourteenth century under the weight of the Black Death (which reached China in the 1330s, killing perhaps a quarter of the population), the Yellow River floods of 1344, fiscal exhaustion, and the strain of ruling an empire too large to be governed from the steppe. The Red Turban rebellion brought the dynasty down, and in 1368 the rebel leader Zhu Yuanzhang (later the Hongwu Emperor) captured Khanbaliq. The last Yuan emperor, Toghon Temür, fled to the Mongolian steppe, where the descendants of the Yuan continued to rule as the Northern Yuan until the seventeenth century. The rise of the Ming is treated in imperial Chinese dynasties.

The Legacy of the Yuan

The Yuan’s legacy is enormous. It was the first foreign conquest of all of China, and it established a precedent for the later Qing conquest. The Yuan provincial system survived into the twentieth century. The Yuan opened China to the wider world, and the Pax Mongolica set the stage for the global trade of the early modern period. The Yuan drama, the Yuan painting, and the Yuan administrative practice all had a lasting influence on Chinese culture. The Mongol world empire was, in many respects, the first step toward the globalised world of the modern era. The military dimensions of the Mongol conquest are treated in the section on Chinese military history.