Diminished Empire and Nomadic Challengers 81
involved and the natural tensions that arose among the descendants of
Genghis Khan, it is not surprising that the four large khanates soon
broke apart and were never centrally controlled. More surprising than
this failure was the success of one of Genghis’s grandsons, Khubilai
Khan, in conquering and ruling China in the Chinese style.
In 1264, Khubilai moved his capital from Mongolia to Dadu (today’s
Beijing), and in 1271 he declared himself emperor of the Yuan dynasty
and the rightful inheritor of the Mandate of Heaven. As Yuan Emperor
Shizu, Khubilai hired many Chinese advisors and offi cials and quickly set
them to the task of conquering south China by hiring Chinese engineers
adept at the use of catapults and explosives and commandeering Chinese
ships and seamen to defeat the navies of the Southern Song. By the effec-
tive use of Chinese, Khitan, Jurchen, Korean, Uighur, and Persian troops,
the Mongols were able to take most of south China by 1276, and in 1279
the last Song emperor was killed in a naval battle in the far south.
One of the reasons for the Mongols’ military success was their effec-
tive use of terror as a weapon. If a city resisted or refused to surrender, the
Mongols would burn, loot, kill, and rape indiscriminately and enslave the
survivors. If a city surrendered, the inhabitants might survive unharmed
and be allowed to continue their lives in a normal fashion. Governing a
society as complex as China’s was more diffi cult than conquering it. At
most, the Mongol population totaled perhaps two million, ruling over a
Chinese population of perhaps sixty to eighty million, much reduced by
the wars of conquest from a peak in the Song of 115 million.
Khubilai established a government modeled after the Chinese dynas-
tic institutions, with Mongols and their Central Asian allies in the most
important positions but Chinese fi lling most middle and lower positions.
Chinese were forbidden to bear arms, and to punish the Chinese lite-
rati for having resisted the Mongol conquest, there were no civil service
examinations for Chinese until 1315. Because the south had put up a
much greater struggle against the Mongols, strict examination quotas
prevented southerners from passing in large numbers. While Mongols
were generally tolerant of all religions, Khubilai Khan began to patronize
and support Tibetan Lama Buddhism in particular, a form of Buddhism
that includes many rituals and the belief that each priest is a lama, or
reincarnation of the Buddha. Khubilai and his successors gave Tibetan
lamas special privileges and allowed them to convert some Song imperial
palaces into Buddhist temples and even to loot the tombs of the Song
emperors to sell their treasures for money to build more temples.
The Mongol conquest of China took a terrible economic toll. The
Song iron industry was devastated and never fully regained Song levels