Conquering Song China and founding the Yuan dynasty
Signature
A conqueror who ruled as a Chinese emperor
Legacy
Mongol rule over all of China
Kublai Khan turned conquest into empire. A grandson of Genghis Khan, he finished the long Mongol war on China and made himself its emperor, ruling from a new capital on the site of modern Beijing1 as the founder of a Chinese dynasty.
Great Khan
Kublai was proclaimed Great Khan in 12601, though he secured the title only after a civil war with his brother Ariq Boke2, a struggle that in effect broke the unity of the Mongol Empire into separate khanates. His real power lay in the east, in China.
The Mongol dominions between 1300 and 1405, when Genghis Khan's empire had split into successor states such as the Yuan dynasty in China and the Golden Horde. Map from William R. Shepherd's Historical Atlas, 1923. Public domain
The conquest of China
Building on his predecessors' campaigns, Kublai ground down the southern Song dynasty, the last independent power in China, which fell by 12793. In 1271 he proclaimed the1Yuan dynasty, the first foreign line to rule all of China, and governed as an emperor in the Chinese style2 while remaining Great Khan of the Mongols.
Kublai Khan as emperor Shizu of the Yuan dynasty, a portrait painted around 1294 for the album of Yuan emperor portraits now in the National Palace Museum, Taipei. Public domain
The limits of empire
Not everything bent to him. His two great seaborne invasions of Japan, in 1274 and 1281, were beaten back by fierce defence4 and by storms the Japanese remembered as the divine wind, the kamikaze, and further campaigns in Vietnam and toward Java also failed1. The empire had reached its limits, much as it had far to the west when the Mamluks halted its advance at Ain Jalut in 1260.
The samurai Mitsui Sukenaga shoots at fleeing soldiers of the Mongol army during the invasion of 1274, a scene from the Mongol Invasion Scrolls made around 1293. Public domain
Thomas D. Conlan, In Little Need of Divine Intervention: Takezaki Suenaga's Scrolls of the Mongol Invasions of Japan (Cornell University East Asia Program, 2001). ↩
