Chapter 7 China 275uity on; the well-ordered, ideal society was a society at peace. The military was
so devalued by the Confucian elite that it does not even have a place in the four-
class structure: shi (scholar), nong (farmer), gong (artisan), shang (merchant). The
brightest young men would not dream of going into the military; they studied
for exams to become scholar-officials. Even the great technological invention of
gunpowder, permitting tossing small bombs and fire lances at the nomadic
enemy, was never integrated in a larger military strategy capable of keeping
them out of China. All this meant that China was easy prey to aggressive tribal
societies whose nomadic and hunting lifestyles made them excellent warriors.
China’s Yuan dynasty had its roots in a great gathering of Mongol tribes on
the Kerulan River in Central Asia in 1206. One of the Mongol chiefs, Genghis
Khan, was confirmed as “universal ruler” over all the Mongol tribes, the Mon-
gol equivalent of Qin Shihuang’s great unification in 221 B.C.E. (see chapter 3).
Genghis Khan’s grandson, Kublai Khan, conquered China and established the
Yuan dynasty. Needing a capital more central to his empire, Beijing in the
north of modern China became the seat of Yuan power, laid out in the classic
style of the Chinese imperial capitals at Chang’an and Luoyang, and remains
the capital to this day.
The Mongol Empire was a religiously diverse place; there were Muslims,
Buddhists, Nestorian Christians, Jews, and now Confucians. Kublai Khan
embraced Tibetan Buddhism but was tolerant of other faiths. Confucianism now
came to have a strong ethnic component; it was the “faith” of the Han Chinese.
Given the Confucian paradigm of the civilized state that left warfare and
military might out of the scheme, perhaps it is not surprising that many
scholar-officials went to work with great diligence and loyalty to their Mongol
sovereigns. Yes, they hated them; they were “pockmarked and foul-smelling”;
one did not want to be downwind of them. Yet, as de facto rulers, they had the
Mandate of Heaven. John Langlois (1978) describes the life of one high-rank-
ing official, Yu Ji (Yu Chi), in great detail. He helped the nine Mongol rulers
whom he served understand the Confucian Classics, hoping this would lead to
better administration of the realm. He covered over an ugly struggle among
three brothers for succession to the throne by drafting an edict announcing the
winner, laying “a polished veneer of Chinese civility and brotherly deference
on the surface of the violent power struggle that had taken place.” Ultimately, it
was not the gentry but the peasants who brought down the Mongols; peasant
rebels led the movement that overthrew the Yuan dynasty after only 88 years;
the Ming, a Han Chinese dynasty, would survive 276 years, before again being
severely destabilized by peasant rebellions. Manchus (more barbarians) were
invited from the northeast to Beijing to throw the rebels out, but decided to stay
and found the Qing dynasty.
Scholars analyzing their own history were perplexed: Why did barbarians
so easily conquer China? From the Song through the Qing, situations were
somewhat different and a variety of analyses were put forward, but a major
theme of all of them was “nativist,” a return to the morality and the social struc-