about men they heard of as skilled boxers that they ordered them to court.
On both occasions, the emperors selected strong men to try to defeat them
but the visitors proved able to beat multiple opponents. While wrestling
had regular matches, boxing did not, and it seems that some Yuan emper-
ors did not get much opportunity to see men skilled in the striking arts.
Li Quan
Many of the issues discussed in this chapter played out in the lives of Li
Quan, his wife, Yang Miaozhen, and their son, Li Tan.^17 Li Quan was an
extremely importantfigure at the end of the Song and Jin Dynasties, and the
beginning of the Yuan Dynasty. He has the longest individual biography in
the official Song history, and there is an extensive secondary scholarship
on him as well. He and his wife even appear as comicfigures in a famous
dramatic play. Some have speculated that Yang Miaozhen was the model
for the character inThe Water Margin, Ten Feet of Steel, a femalefighter
who used double swords.
From the Song perspective, Li Quan was an evil official who betrayed
them; from the Jurchen perspective he was a rebellious bandit; and from
the Mongol perspective he was a loyal hereditary lord who diedfighting
for their cause. He was all these things because his main goal was to
establish himself as overlord of Shandong by playing off the three main
powers against each other. When it became clear that the Mongols would
destroy the Jurchen Jin and that loyalty to the Song was less valuable than
loyalty to the Mongols, Li submitted to the Mongols. After Li’s death, his
wife temporarily held his position before she passed it to his son. In 1262 ,
his son, Tan, rebelled against the Mongols in conjunction with a number
of other Chinese warlords who held hereditary regional or local power
under the Yuan Dynasty. When Tan was eventually defeated and cap-
tured, he was executed in the manner of a Mongol aristocrat, wrapped in a
rug and trampled to death by horses.
Li Quan began his life as a farmer and worked for a time as a horse
trader, merchant, and smuggler. He was“nimble and active with bow and
horse, and capable of wielding an iron spear. At the time he was called:‘Iron
Spear Li.’”^18 The iron spear was a formidable weapon requiring great
strength and skill, not the standard military weapon of a soldier. Li’sskills
as a horseman and archer were basic martial arts for a northern Chinese
strongman. He took up banditry in the chaos caused by Mongol raids into
Jin-controlled north China, eventually taking the leadership of another
bandit army controlled by Yang Miaozhen. Yang is described as“crafty
Li Quan 153