The Mongol Chinese emperor Kublai Khan was immortalised by English poet Samuel Coleridge’s opium-fuelled descriptions of the “pleasure dome” at Xanadu, the imperial summer capital in northern China. But for historians, he was the grandson of nomadic Genghis Khan, whose feared archers on horseback conquered most of Asia and part of Europe in the late 12th and early 13th centuries.
The historical impact of the Mongols is being revised, with examples such as Kenneth Harl’s Empires of the Steppes, reviewed in these pages last year. Anthropologist Jack Weatherford, of Minnesota’s Macalester College, has contributed two earlier books on the subject, both aimed at a general audience but with extensive scholarly backup. His latest, Emperor of the Seas, draws parallels with China’s rising naval strength to reinforce its claims as a global trading superpower through the Belt and Road Initiative.
Until Kublai, the Mongols’ conquests were land-based. At its peak, their empire stretched from Korea to modern-day Turkey but lacked Song China, Asia’s most populous and prosperous region.
Then, as now, China was the world’s largest supplier of valuable ceramics, silks, jewellery and other manufactured goods.
Kublai’s Yuan dynasty finally absorbed Song China in 1279 by overcoming the Mongol fear of water. The large Chinese rivers were natural barriers to armies on horseback. But after several attempts, including a failed effort through today’s Vietnam, Kublai was able to declare himself the Great Khan.
He was one of four sons born to the warrior Tolui and his Christian wife Sorkhokhtani. Unlike his warlike brothers, who ruled the western part of the Mongol empire, Kublai was raised in northern China as a scholar. What he lacked in military prowess was made up for in political intuition.
Song China was ripe for the picking. Weatherford describes Emperor Duzong as a “debauched imbecile” who on his death at 34 was replaced by a four-year-old “toddler” known as Gong. The capital of Hangzhou fell after a surprise attack in a snowstorm without the usual looting and destruction that followed a Mongol victory.
Instead of being satisfied with uniting China, as Weatherford suggests, Kublai fell prey to hubris as well as his sybaritic lifestyle. Attempted naval invasions of Japan and Java failed, but sufficiently neutralised threats from pirates to make sea routes through India and the Middle East much more lucrative and efficient than the land-based Silk Road.
Kublai died in 1294, before he learnt the outcome of his largest display of sea power – a convoy of 13 ships each carrying 200 passengers from his Chinese capital Dadu (now Beijing) to Tabriz, capital of the Mongols’ western stronghold in modern-day Iran.
The seaborne part alone, from Quanzhou to Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, was 10,500km and took two years. The flotilla carried Mongol-born Princess Kökejin, her substantial dowry, including a live tiger, and famed traveller Marco Polo. Her intended husband Argun, grandson of Kublai’s brother Hulegu, died before she arrived. Instead, she married Argun’s son Ghazan, whom he had fathered when only 13. Kökejin went on to be Empress after Ghazan inherited the western Mongol throne.
The Yuan dynasty lasted just another half-century after Kublai’s death. Major floods destroyed China’s neglected canal system, zealous printing of paper money produced rampant inflation, and mercantile trade declined amid rife corruption.
China briefly revived its maritime might under Zheng He in the 15th century, but both the Ming and Qing dynasties rejected sea power. That remained the case until the late 20th century when China again became the world’s workshop.
For readers interested in the era, Weatherford’s book is an excellent accompaniment to Netflix’s 20-episode series Marco Polo.
EMPEROR OF THE SEAS: Kublai Khan and the Making of China, by Jack Weatherford (Bloomsbury, $38.99), is out now.
