supervised and taxed. By choice of China’s rulers, foreign merchants lived under
their own laws, but they sometimes took Chinese wives and adapted to Chinese
ways. It seems that China influenced the foreigner more than the foreigner influ-
enced China.
The Mongols who built a huge though ephemeral Eurasian state in the
thirteenth century—the largest empire ever conquered by men on horseback—
were the first outsiders to take control of all of China, and even they were able
to stay in power for only eighty-seven years. The Mongols moved the capital of
their Chinese realm back to the inland north, close to their own homeland.
But their continental and nomadic origins put them in touch with diverse groups
of peoples, and they had a broader worldview than the Chinese. By incorporating
the Chinese into their world empire, the Mongols enriched Chinese cultural and
economic contacts across Eurasia.
The Mongols attempted to establish a maritime state alongside their conti-
nental one by mounting far-flung, ill-fated overseas expeditions to occupy Japan
and Java. After six attempts, the Mongols finally brought Korea to heel (1231–
58). The Mongol next dispatched an envoy to Japan with a letter from the Great
Khan announcing that ‘‘we have become masters of the universe,’’ and that the
Koreans ‘‘came to us to become our subjects; their joy resembles that of children
with their father.’’ The implication was of course that the Japanese should also
join the happy family.
Khubilai, the Mongol emperor of China, found the Japanese intolerably
impudent for refusing to reply officially. His response was to send a small army
to invade Japan. Khubilai chose Kyushu, close to the Asian mainland and Korea
but far from Japanese centers of power, as his target. The Mongols co-opted the
Koreans to supply ships and seamen for the enterprise. Like the later nomadic
people, the Turks, the Mongols were conspicuous for their readiness to take to
sea by exploiting the talents of others.They themselves did not build and sail
the ships they used as ferries for their warriors.
The first of two Mongol expeditions against Japan in 1274 employed a fleet of
about eight hundred ships, many of them small. The fleet carried about forty
thousand troops and sailors in total. They landed successfully in Hakata Bay,
where they greatly outnumbered the Japanese defenders. The Mongols deployed
an array of weapons, including crossbows and catapults; the Japanese had never
before seen the like of some of their arms, such as poisoned arrows. How the
battle might have gone, we do not know, because the weather began to turn foul.
On the advice of their Korean pilots, the Mongols withdrew to their ships and
prepared to sail away. But they had waited too long. A great storm ravaged the
fleet; one-third of those who had joined the expedition died, many by drowning.
The Mongols resolved to try again, this time with a much bigger, two-pronged
effort. One thrust was to come from Korea, the second from Fujian province,
using Chinese ships and seamen fromnewly conquered southeast China.26 Asia Looks Seaward