Kublai Khan

The limits of this unity were shattered by Möngke’s sudden death in 1259 during a campaign in Sichuan. At the time, Kublai was besieging the Song dynasty stronghold of Wuchang along the Yangtze River. Learning of his brother's demise, and warned by his wife Chabi that his younger brother Ariq Böke was already mobilizing troops in the north, Kublai hastily concluded a secret truce with the Song minister Jia Sidao and raced back to his power base in Inner Mongolia. In the spring of 1260, Kublai summoned his own kurultai—the Mongol great council—and was proclaimed Great Khan. It was a highly irregular election, boycotted by many of the senior Borjigin princes. Simultaneously, Ariq Böke was elected Khagan at the traditional capital of Karakorum, backed by the late Möngke’s family and the western branches of the empire. The resulting Toluid Civil War lasted four brutal years, laying waste to Karakorum and fracturing the Mongol Empire forever. Though Kublai ultimately triumphed in 1264 when a starving Ariq Böke surrendered to him at Xanadu, the victory was hollow. The golden chain of Genghis Khan's lineage had snapped; though Kublai retained nominal suzerainty over the Ilkhanate in Persia and the Golden Horde on the Volga, his actual authority was now permanently restricted to the East.

In the wake of this civil war, Kublai set about anchoring his legitimacy in the soil of his grandest conquest. He abandoned Karakorum and, in 1264, founded a new capital on a vast rectangular plot northeast of the old city of Yenking. Officially named T’ai-tu ("Great Court"), but known to the West as Cambaluc or Kaan-baligh ("City of the Khan"), this grand metropolis was completed in 1267. Today, its ancient outline forms the northern heart of modern Beijing. Having built a Chinese-style capital, Kublai formally claimed the Mandate of Heaven. In 1271, he proclaimed the establishment of the Yuan Dynasty, positioning himself as the rightful successor to the Tang and Song.

Yet the Song dynasty still ruled the wealthy, highly developed regions south of the Yangtze from their magnificent capital at Hangzhou. The war to subdue them was a grueling, fifty-year endeavor that had languished under previous Khagans, but Kublai pursued it with relentless focus. The critical obstacle was the twin besieged cities of Xiangyang and Fancheng, which guarded the approaches to the Yangtze basin. For nearly five years, the cities held out, until Kublai’s forces used massive counterweight trebuchets designed by Muslim engineers from Persia. Once the barrier fell, Kublai’s brilliant general, Bayan, swept south. Hangzhou surrendered in 1276, and the young Song emperor was taken captive to T’ai-tu. Diehard Song loyalists fled further south, carrying two young princes with them to continue the resistance. The struggle finally ended in 1279, when, cornered at the naval Battle of Yamen off the coast of Guangdong, a faithful minister clasped the last young Song prince in his arms and leaped into the sea.

For the first time in history, a non-Han ruler controlled the entirety of China proper. At its height, Kublai’s empire was a dizzying, cosmopolitan tapestry. His court was a magnet for global adventurers: merchants from Venice like Marco Polo, physicians from Byzantium, astronomers from Persia, and administrators from Central Asia. He introduced an extraordinary paper currency, maintained an extensive postal relay system, and patronized the sciences, ordering the construction of magnificent astronomical instruments that stood in Peking for centuries. To govern this sprawling realm, Kublai balanced competing interests with cold pragmatism. Though he admired Chinese culture, a rebellion by the Han governor Li Tan early in his reign had left him deeply suspicious of the ethnic Han elite. He banned Han warlords from holding hereditary titles and barred Chinese officials from the highest echelons of the central administration, preferring to employ Semu—"colored-eye" foreigners from Central Asia and Europe—who owed their status entirely to him.

This pragmatism extended to religion. While his cousins in the west converted to Islam, Kublai looked to Tibetan Buddhism as a unifying force for his empire. He patronized the Sakya school of Tibet, appointing the young, brilliant monk Drogön Chögyal Phagpa as the head of the imperial Buddhist church. Phagpa even devised a new Nagari-based alphabet for the Mongol language, intended to unify the tongues of his diverse subjects, though it never achieved widespread use. Yet Kublai’s patronage of Buddhism was also political; in 1258, he had presided over a massive debate between Buddhist and Taoist scholars, ultimately ruling in favor of the Buddhists and ordering the forced conversion of hundreds of Taoist temples.

The final decades of Kublai’s reign were darkened by the classic hubris of the aging conqueror. Obsessed with expanding his borders to demand the submission of foreign states, he launched a series of disastrous overseas campaigns. His invasions of Japan in 1274 and 1281 were shattered by defensive walls and fortuitous storms—the legendary kamikaze—which destroyed his massive armada and cost tens of thousands of lives. Expeditions into the dense jungles of Vietnam and Java yielded little but high casualties and crippling financial costs. To fund these fruitless enterprises and his own love of imperial splendor, Kublai turned to ruthless financial ministers like Ahmed of Fenaket, whose oppressive taxation sparked deep domestic resentment and eventual rebellion.

When Kublai Khan died in 1294 at the age of seventy-eight, he left behind an empire of unprecedented scale but profound internal tension. He had successfully bridged the gulf between the steppe and the sown, but the bridge was fragile. He was the last of the Mongol rulers to possess the raw, terrifying vitality of the Eurasian grasslands, yet he had wrapped that vitality in the heavy silk robes of Confucian majesty. In the centuries that followed, his successors would lose both the nomadic martial spirit of their ancestors and the political goodwill of their Chinese subjects, leading to the collapse of the Yuan dynasty less than a century after his death. Kublai’s legacy remained etched not in the longevity of his house, but in the physical and conceptual map of China itself, which he had unified, expanded, and anchored at the great northern capital he built from the dust.