Emperor of the Seas: Kublai Khan and the Making of China
368 pages
Prof Geoffrey Till
Whenever you read a book about China’s maritime development, whether this is in a historical or a contemporary context, the same two questions tend to come up. First is whether China is a maritime country or not. Especially with American writers, this question is overlaid with a starting assumption that it isn’t and that Beijing’s development of naval strength is unnatural, illegitimate and probably sinister in intent. The fact that answers to this first question are often unclear, takes us on to the second question: what does maritime mean, anyway?
Professor Jack Wetherford’s latest book offers valuable insights into both issues. As an anthropologist-historian, he holds a chair at the Chingiss Khan (Genghis Khan to you and me) University in Mongolia and wrote an excellent book, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, back in 2004. That truly remarkable book made it on to the New York Times best seller list. This one isn’t quite so easy, but that is not the author’s fault. It’s more a reflection on his subject. Ghengis Kha, was a book with a very clear message. It told the story of a truly majestic figure in world history and definitively showed that cohesive empires can be built on horsepower, rather than seapower. Implicitly, it challenged the Mahanian narrative. Kublai Khan on the other hand is not so well known, his story is more complex and the overall message on land and maritime power is much more nuanced. Professor Weatherford writes well, is reader friendly and the deep scholarship behind it all is not too intrusive. What emerges is a fascinating contribution to those two questions, namely an exploration of the fusion both of land and seapower and of the Mongolian and China identities.
Kublai Khan was one of Genghis Khan’s grandsons. Unlike most of his relatives he was largely brought up in a contested and recently won part of northern China. As such he was the inheritor of both Mongol and Chinese traditions. He presided over most of the Mongol empire, which in the 13th century included much of Russia, Iran and the Middle East. It was next to impossible to govern such a vast and diverse polity, especially for a people shaped by unsettled nomadic traditions. Many of its parts therefore had significant autonomy, were ruled over by wider members of the family who often had differences between them and who also varied in their attitudes to Kublai Khan himself. Accordingly, he spent much of his energy in managing and settling internal disputes outside China.
But paradoxically this was only possible because inside China Kublai Khan had picked up Chinese notions of settled governance, sustainable taxation, the facilitation even encouragement of trade, and an internal order based on effective regulation. The resultant resources gave him military power. Other great figures in the Mongol empire, set in their traditional nomadic ways resented this as a cultural and foreign intrusion, and a potential threat to their autonomy.
Holding all this together was one part of Kublai Khan’s achievement. The other, for which he is much better known is his role in what Weatherford calls the making of China. In brief, the Mongols under Genghis Khan had defeated the Jin dynasty in their Northwest China powerbase; the Jin had earlier defeated their so-called ‘Northern Song’ predecessors. This left the Southern Song as the Mongol’s immediate neighbours. The Southern Song were safely entrenched behind the great ‘waterwall’ of the Yangtse river and had invested in a substantial, if essentially riverine, navy to protect it. Their style of naval warfare was to take the tactics of land warfare to the water and fight it out in close proximity to the shore. This was just what contemporary Europeans were doing at the other end of the Eurasian land-mass. But the Southern Song were doing so on a scale and with a level of sophistication that dwarfed their barbarian contemporaries to the west.
Kublai Khan realised four things. First that the Southern Song were in a state of complacent decay. Second that their riches made them an attractive and realistic target. Third that defeating them required naval power. Fourth that in order to get the required naval and military strength, it was necessary to adopt the Chinese habits of effective state governance. So, Kublai Khan set up a new and rival dynasty, that we know as the Yuan, and established a state capital at Dadu now part of Beijing. He invested in a navy, which in some respects was eventually superior to the now diminished forces of the Southern Song and won control of the Yangtse in a series of pitched battles. The Southern Song collapsed and Kublai Khan took over the whole of a greater China unified for the first time since the Tang dynasty four centuries before. It was also the first time that China had a non-Chinese non-Han ruler. This was an extraordinary achievement and seapower played an important role in it.
But how deep was that acquired naval-ness? Certainly, in aspiration it was substantial. Kublai Khan called himself the Dalai-in Khagan, ‘Emperor of the Sea’. He was well aware of the need to facilitate commerce; control of internal waterways and a coastal navy effective against the vast pirate fleets of the Japanese wakou pirates were therefore essential. He was also aware of and coveted the wealth of some of China’s immediate neighbours, especially Japan, the Champa empire in Vietnam and Java. He knew too that a fleet in the Mediterranean would be needed to settle some of the challenges he faced in the far west.
As to the practicalities, Kublai Khan established a carefully regulated Chinese merchant marine and maintained a sophisticated navy. The Yuan/Mongols were indeed capable of organising what we call a global group deployment. In 1292, for example, Kublai Khan sent a large and impressive fleet of 13 ships (each of which was infinitely superior to anything the Europeans could produce) and a couple of thousand crew and passengers to accompany the Princess Keokejiin to her bridegroom in Iran. Unhelpful monsoon timings and other distractions meant it took them two years to cover those 6,500 miles. By the time the poor girl arrived at Hormuz her young bridegroom had died, and she was quietly married off to someone else. (She ended up as the last Chinese Queen of Persia).
But this was a special effort. The Yuan/Mongols in their disastrous attempted invasions of Japan and Vietnam were much shorter-ranged but relied too much on sub-contracted ex-Song and Korean forces. For his efforts in the far west Kublai Khan tried to enlist the help of the Europeans, but there were no takers. To an extent then, Yuan naval power wasn’t homegrown. While under Kublai Khan’s successors, the Yuan navy did achieve and for a while sustain a level of naval proficiency far beyond the parallel efforts of the Europeans, it slowly decayed when China ‘retreated from the sea’ as Weatherford puts it. The Yuan became inward-looking.
But all was not quite lost for Chinese seapower of course. In due time, the Yuan collapsed but their successors, the Ming, digging into the reserves of China’s earlier maritime and international experience, produced an extraordinary maritime renaissance with the justly famous voyages of Zheng He a century later. That same pattern of decay and recovery continues today.
So, to sum up. This is an important and thought-provoking book. It tells a much more complicated and intricate story than Weatherford’s earlier book on Genghis Khan. You have to concentrate more as the author navigates us through such a host of unfamiliar but busily active rulers, rivals and family members. Nor are there simple conclusions to be found about either the Yuan attitude to the sea, but instead ample inspiring food for thought. Particularly if you are one of those who think that a country is either maritime or it’s not, you should read this book.
