Khubilai Khan

(1215–1294), Mongolian ruler. Khubilai Khan (or Qubilai Qan), founder of the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), as the Mongol khanate of China became known, was the last ruler of Mongol China to be born on the steppe. The second of four sons of Tolui (c. 1190–c. 1231), who was the youngest son of Genghis Khan, he began life as just another Mongol prince, until his elder brother, Mongke (d. 1259), came to the throne. Khubilai, then in his mid-thirties, became his brother's viceroy in China, a role he performed very successfully with the help of a variety of advisers savvy in local administrative tradition. Most but not all were Chinese and most went on to be among the founding ministers of Khubilai's new dynasty.

As Khan Mongke turned south to campaign against the Southern Song dynasty (1127–1279), Khubilai went along, in part because Mongke was becoming distrustful of his brother's independent power base. During a campaign lasting several years, much of it in difficult terrain at high altitude, Khubilai advanced as far as Yunnan where he helped establish a Mongol administration under Bukharan Sayyid Adjall (1211–1279).

The sudden death of Mongke in 1259 found Khubilai heavily involved in his campaign. Anxious to assert his own candidacy for the now vacant Mongol imperial throne, Khubilai quickly hurried north and gathered his supporters. His principal rival was his younger brother Arigboke (d. 1266), who enjoyed more support in the Mongolian world as a whole. To forestall Arigboke, Khubilai convened a rump quriltai (assembly) and had himself elected khan. Arigboke quickly did the same and prepared for war.

The civil war lasted more than four years and ended with Khubilai's victory thanks to his superior resources. Khubilai now had unrestricted control in Mongol China and in most of Mongolia, including the old Mongol imperial capital of Karakorum, although his rule was never unchallenged in Inner Asia.

Once free of competitors, at least in the immediate vicinity of China, Khubilai set about building up his new successor khanate of China, initially confined to the north. Although Mongolian-style administration continued to function side by side with Chinese, khanate China increasingly had a Chinese structure, on paper at least. It was also given a Chinese capital, Daidu, founded (c. 1266) by Khubilai. Although Daidu (later modern Beijing) was considered the capital, strictly speaking, the khanate of China had no single capital since the court nomadized between summer pastures in Shangdu, Khubilai's old princely headquarters, and winter pastures near Daidu.

In 1271 Khubilai took a Chinese dynastic designation, Yuan, meaning "origin." The new Yuan dynasty quickly came to rule all China with the conquest of the Southern Song in 1279, reunifying China for the first time since the early twelfth century. But the conquest of Song did not mark the end of Mongol expansion. It continued toward Japan, into Vietnam, Burma, and across the sea to Java. For the first time in its history China became a base for a most aggressive sea power.

Although Khubilai had established a "Chinese" dynasty, his new regime was strongly aware of its Central Asian roots. Not only was the ruling family and much of the military if not civilian leadership Mongolian, but Khubilai continued to employ non-Chinese of every persuasion, not just Mongols, in his government to the extent that Persian and Turkic dialects were important as court languages. He also consciously pursued a cultural policy that sought to provide something for everyone. Nowhere is this clearer than in the official court cuisine, in which Mongol soups and roast wolf were served side by side with Iraqi-Persian, Turkic, Kashmiri, and other dishes. Khubilai also had a universal script created, the aPhags-pa alphabet, to write all the languages of his empire.

Another of the Inner Asian aspects of the Mongol Yuan dynasty was religion. Although Genghis Khan had flirted with Taoists and even a Zen monk, among other religious practitioners, and Christians from the West competed for imperial attention under Mongke, Khubilai and his house became converted to the Buddhist religion—and not to any of its Chinese varieties, but to Tibetan Buddhism, which was rich in shamanic traditions close to Mongol native beliefs. Tibetan Buddhism has remained the religion of the Mongols down to the present, pointing up the importance of this conversion.

Khubilai died in 1294, at a ripe old age. No subsequent ruler of Mongol China ever rose to his stature, and decline set in after his death. But despite this decline, Khubilai remains to this day the very symbol of the Oriental potentate and of China, thanks to Marco Polo. It was the China of Khubilai that the Portuguese and other Europeans went in pursuit of in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, inaugurating the age of Western ascendancy.

Allsen, Thomas T. (1987) Mongol Imperialism. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Buell, Paul D. (1993) "Saiyid Ajall." In In the Service of the Khan, Eminent Personalities of the Early Mongol-Yuan Period (1200–1300), edited by Igor de Rachewiltz, Chan Hok-lam, Hsiao Ch'i-ch'ing and Peter W. Geier. Wiesbaden, Germany: Otto Harrassowitz, 466–479.

Buell, Paul D., and Eugene N. Anderson, appendix by Charles Perry. (2000) A Soup for the Qan: Chinese Dietary Medicine of the Mongol Era as Seen in Hu Szu-hui's Yinshan Cheng-yao. London: Kegan Paul International.

Mote, F. W. (1999) Imperial China, 900–1800, Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press.

Rossabi, Morris. (1988) Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

——. (1992) Voyager from Xanadu, Rabban Sauma and the First Journey from China to the West. New York: Kodansha International.

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