Yuan dynasty: A Visual History

The Yuan dynasty was proclaimed by Kublai Khan in 1271 and ruled China from the fall of the Southern Song in 1279 to the Ming rebellion of 1368. Nominally the senior branch of the Mongol Empire, it built Beijing (Dadu), reopened the Silk Roads, promoted paper money and drama, and hosted travellers from Marco Polo to Ibn Battuta. Ethnic hierarchy, financial chaos, plague, floods and the Red Turban rebellions ended it after less than a century.

When it existed: the era ribbon

The bold bar is Yuan dynasty. The lighter bars are empires and wars from the same era and the same part of the world. Click any bar to jump to its page.

Registered population of Yuan China

Registration undercounted; the population may have been higher. The late fall reflects plague, flood and war.

Timeline of the Yuan dynasty

1. 1260
   Kublai proclaimed Great Khan
2. 1271
   Yuan dynasty declared
3. 1274
   First invasion of JapanRepelled and wrecked by storm.
4. 1279
   Battle of YamenThe Southern Song is destroyed; China unified.
5. 1281
   Second invasion of JapanA typhoon destroys the fleet.
6. 1294
   Kublai diesA run of short reigns begins.
7. 1351
   Red Turban rebellion
8. 1368
   Ming take DaduThe Yuan court flees north.

Kublai's China

Kublai, grandson of Genghis Khan, won a civil war for the title of Great Khan in 1264 and, taking the Chinese name Yuan (origin) in 1271, completed the conquest of the Southern Song by 1279. He built a new capital at Dadu on the site of modern Beijing, extended the Grand Canal to feed it and governed through a mix of Mongol, Central Asian and Chinese officials.

His overseas expeditions failed: two invasions of Japan (1274, 1281) were wrecked by storms the Japanese called kamikaze, and campaigns in Vietnam, Burma and Java gained little.

A cosmopolitan empire

The Yuan divided the population into four ranked classes: Mongols, Central and West Asians (semu), northern Chinese, and southern Chinese at the bottom. Yet trade and travel flourished; Persian astronomers, Nepali architects, Muslim financiers and Venetian merchants all worked in Kublai's China. Paper currency was made the sole legal tender, and Chinese drama and the novel developed as scholars barred from office turned to popular literature.

Collapse

After Kublai's death in 1294 the dynasty had nine emperors in 40 years, several murdered. Printing money to cover deficits produced hyperinflation. The Yellow River repeatedly flooded and changed course; forced labour to fix it in 1351 sparked the Red Turban rebellion, and plague swept the country. Zhu Yuanzhang, a former beggar-monk, emerged as the leading rebel, took Nanjing, proclaimed the Ming in 1368 and captured Dadu. The last Yuan emperor fled to Mongolia, where his descendants ruled as the Northern Yuan.

Related empires and wars

Chosen automatically by overlap in time and geography, plus a few hand picked connections.

Empires of the same era and region

• Mongol Empire (1206 to 1368)
• Southern Song dynasty (1127 to 1279)
• Ming dynasty (1368 to 1644)
• Northern Yuan dynasty (1368 to 1635)
• Ilkhanate (1256 to 1335)
• Golden Horde (Jochi Khanate) (1242 to 1502)
• Chagatai Khanate (1226 to 1347)

Wars of the same era and region

• Mongol invasions and conquests (1206 to 1368)
• Conquests of Timur (1370 to 1405)

8 surprising things about the Yuan dynasty

1. Coleridge's Xanadu was real: Shangdu, Kublai's summer capital in Inner Mongolia, described by Marco Polo.
2. The two failed invasions of Japan gave the world the word kamikaze, 'divine wind'.
3. Yuan China was the first state anywhere to make paper money the only legal currency.
4. Marco Polo claimed to have served Kublai for 17 years; some historians doubt he went to China at all.
5. The Yuan built the first observatory in Beijing and hosted the Persian astronomer Jamal al-Din, who brought a terrestrial globe.
6. The Yellow River shifted course in 1344 and again in 1351, catastrophes blamed on the dynasty's loss of the Mandate of Heaven.
7. The Yuan is counted as one of China's dynasties, and Kublai's Beijing is the ancestor of the modern city, but Mongols still consider it part of their empire.
8. The Yuan legal code allowed Mongols to be punished for killing a Chinese person only by a fine and a spell in the army.

Sources

• Yuan dynasty Encyclopaedia Britannica
• Yuan dynasty Wikipedia
• Yuan Dynasty World History Encyclopedia
• Morris Rossabi, Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times (1988) University of California Press

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