Kublai Khan: Mongol emperor of China

Kublai fought few battles in person; among them were the conquest of Dali in 1253 and 1254, the war with his brother Ariq Böke from 1260 to 1264 and the campaign against the rebel prince Nayan in 1287. The great victories of his reign, the siege of Xiangyang, the capture of the Song capital and the sea battle of Yamen, were won by his generals. Kublai had no part in the battle of Ain Jalut, fought in Palestine in 1260, the year he took the throne, where a Mamluk army defeated a Mongol army in the west; how his own record compares is set out in our ranking of the greatest Mongol commanders.¹

How did Kublai Khan become Great Khan?

Kublai was born on 23 September 1215, a son of Tolui, youngest son of Genghis Khan, and of Tolui's chief wife Sorghaghtani, who came from the Kerait people and was a Nestorian Christian. When his elder brother Möngke became Great Khan in 1251, he gave Kublai charge of the conquered lands of northern China, where Kublai gathered Chinese advisers, among them Liu Bingzhong.²

In 1253 Kublai led an army against the kingdom of Dali in Yunnan. He entered its capital at the turn of 1253 and 1254 and left his general Uriyangkhadai to hold the country. In 1256 he had Liu Bingzhong lay out a new city on the edge of the steppe, Kaiping, later called Shangdu, the city the West came to know as Xanadu.³

Möngke died in 1259 while campaigning against the Song. In May 1260 Kublai was enthroned as Great Khan at Kaiping; within weeks his younger brother Ariq Böke had himself proclaimed near Karakorum, the old Mongol capital. Kublai won the war that followed, and in 1264 Ariq Böke surrendered. The struggle broke the unity of the empire: the western khanates went their own way, and Kublai's real power lay in China.⁴

How did Kublai Khan conquer China?

In 1271 Kublai proclaimed a new dynasty, the Yuan, and ruled as a Chinese emperor while remaining Great Khan of the Mongols. He built a new main capital, Dadu, on the site of modern Beijing, and kept Shangdu as his summer capital. The war against the southern Song dynasty, the last independent power in China, was his greatest undertaking; it required the Mongols to build a navy to cross the Yangtze.⁵

The twin cities of Xiangyang and Fancheng on the Han River blocked the way south. Mongol forces under Aju blockaded them from 1268; Fancheng was stormed and Xiangyang surrendered in 1273, after engineers sent from the Ilkhanate in Persia built heavy stone-throwing trebuchets that battered the walls.⁶

Kublai's general Bayan forced the Yangtze at the turn of 1274 and 1275, and early in 1276 the Song court surrendered its capital, Lin'an (modern Hangzhou). Song loyalists fought on in the south until March 1279, when a Yuan fleet destroyed theirs at Yamen (Yaishan), off the coast of Guangdong. With that battle the Song dynasty ended.⁷

What were Kublai Khan's greatest victories?

Among the battles Kublai led himself were the campaign in Dali, the war with Ariq Böke and his last campaign, in 1287. That year Nayan, a Mongol prince with lands in Manchuria, rebelled. Kublai, then 71, set out from Shangdu at the head of the army; Nayan's forces were beaten and Nayan was captured and put to death. Marco Polo, who was at court, gives both armies hundreds of thousands of men, figures his editor Henry Yule calls exaggerated.⁸

The victories that made him emperor of all China were his generals': Aju at Xiangyang, Bayan on the Yangtze and at Lin'an, and the fleet commanders at Yamen. Kublai chose these men, and the Song war was fought with Chinese infantry, a new fleet and engineers from Persia as well as Mongol cavalry.⁹

Why did Kublai Khan's invasions of Japan fail?

Japan's rulers ignored the letters Kublai's envoys brought from 1268 demanding submission. In 1274 a fleet sailed from Korea, by the count in the official Yuan history 900 ships carrying 15,000 soldiers, and landed at Hakata Bay in northern Kyushu in November. It soon withdrew. The Yuan history blames disorder in the army and a shortage of arrows; later tradition, and Columbia University's account, credit the weather.¹⁰

Envoys Kublai sent in 1275 were put to death, and the Japanese built a stone wall about 20 km (12.4 miles) long along the shore of Hakata Bay. The second invasion, in 1281, came in two fleets, one from Korea and a larger southern one from the former Song ports; Chinese records cited by the archaeologist James Delgado give the whole armada 4,400 ships, and the Yuan history speaks of 100,000 men. Delgado reports that the archaeologist Kenzo Hayashida and the historian Thomas Conlan both consider the size of the fleet exaggerated.¹¹

Held off the beaches by the wall, the fleets lay off the coast until, according to the Yuan history, a storm broke the ships on the first day of the eighth lunar month (August 1281). The Japanese called the storms the kamikaze, the divine wind, and believed their islands were protected. Conlan, studying the scrolls the warrior Takezaki Suenaga commissioned about his part in both campaigns, chose a title that sums up his reading: In Little Need of Divine Intervention.¹²

Did Kublai Khan ever lose a war?

Yes, several. Besides the two failures in Japan, his armies invaded Vietnam and, in 1292 and 1293, Java; in both they won early battles but were driven out or withdrew, worn down by heat, disease and local resistance. In 1286 the Yuan history quotes him setting aside a third Japanese expedition because Vietnam was attacking his border.¹³

How big was Kublai Khan's empire?

That depends on what is counted. The political scientist Rein Taagepera estimated the Mongol realm as a whole at about 20 million km² (7.7 million sq mi) in 1260 and about 23.5 million km² (9.1 million sq mi) at Kublai's death in 1294, near its greatest extent. Kublai, though, governed directly only China, Mongolia and their borderlands.¹⁴

Taagepera gives the largest successor state, the Yuan in China and Mongolia, about 11 million km² (4.2 million sq mi) in 1310. The rest answered to cousins: the Golden Horde of Batu's line on the western steppe, the Ilkhanate in Persia and the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia. Kaidu, a grandson of Ögedei, fought Kublai for Central Asia and Mongolia for the rest of his reign. How these figures compare with the realm Genghis Khan left in 1227 is set out in Genghis Khan vs Napoleon.¹⁵

How did Kublai Khan rule China?

Kublai kept the Chinese machinery of government, the Secretariat, the Six Ministries and the provinces, restored the rituals and music of the Confucian court and set up an ancestral temple where he honored his father and grandfather. Power stayed with the conquerors: Mongols headed the offices, the population was ranked in four groups, with Mongols at the top, then Central Asians, then northern Chinese and, at the bottom, southern Chinese, and Muslim officials were prominent in finance.¹⁶

He favored Buddhism, especially in its Tibetan form, while tolerating other faiths, and made the Tibetan monk Phags-pa a close adviser. In 1269 he decreed the use of a new script that Phags-pa had devised for the empire's languages; it was used mainly in official documents. Paper money circulated widely. The Venetian Marco Polo, in China from about 1275 to the early 1290s, described his court and its paper money.¹⁷

The costs mounted. The capitals, the extension of the Grand Canal, the post roads and the failed wars overseas drained the treasury, and late in the reign the government met the costs by inflating the paper currency.¹⁸

How did Kublai Khan die?

Kublai died on 18 February 1294, aged 78. The Yuan history records that he fell ill at the start of the year and died in the Zitan Hall of his palace at Dadu and, counting in the traditional Chinese way, gives his age as 80. It adds that his body was taken north and buried in the Qinian valley with the earlier Great Khans; Marco Polo writes that all the Great Khans were buried in a mountain he calls Altai.¹⁹

His grandson Temür succeeded him. The Yuan dynasty ruled China until 1368, when the Ming drove the Mongols out.²⁰

How is Kublai Khan remembered today?

In China he is remembered by his temple name, Shizu, as the founder of the Yuan dynasty; in the West, through Marco Polo and through Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem “Kubla Khan”, published in 1816. UNESCO inscribed the Site of Xanadu, the ruins of Shangdu in Inner Mongolia, as a World Heritage Site in 2012.²¹

Off the island of Takashima, at the mouth of Imari Bay, Japanese archaeologists have recovered anchors, weapons and Yuan-period objects, and found the remains of at least two ships of the 1281 fleet. Meet the other great commanders of the Mongol Empire.²²