Diane Wolff

Why would a man born to the horse taken to the sea? Why did Mongol warfare turn to the sea? The Mongol Army was the greatest and best-trained and equipped army of the world in the thirteenth century. Why did Khubilai Khan build a fleet of war junks? This was a turning point in history and the story is the story told in the first book in the author's Silk Road Series, the book devoted to Khubilai Khan. This is Taifun: Khubilai Khan Invades Japan by Sea. 

Khubilai Khan was the grandson of Chinggis Khan, and he rose to become Emperor of China through the alliances created by his mother, Queen Sorghagtani, with the Khan of Russia, Batu. His mother saw the Empire was in trouble and her alliance with Batu put her sons on the throne. They were among the greatest rulers of the Empire and they changed the course of global history.

 

Khubilai Khan was born in the steppes beyond the Great Wall of China in 1215,  the year that his grandfather Chinggis Khan (Genghis Khan) conquered North China.

He began his career being appointed as the Khan of China, and it was his job to pacify the country that suffered from the effects of twenty-five years of war. Khubilai took the advice of Chinggis Khan's Chinese chancellor, a statesman recruited into the Mongol government at the fall of the Jin Dynasty. He assembled a coterie of Confucian scholars and learned from them the methods to govern the richest and most advanced state in the civilized world. The government of The Horde was insufficient to govern a state like China. Khubilai soon found himself building a new imperial center, Xanadu, to contain the vast revenues that he collected, by imposing the regular taxes that the Chinese expected to pay. Before he came to office, there was chaos. The peasants were packing up and leaving North China to go to the South, across the Yangzi River, where the Southern Song Emperor ruled. The dynasty was militarily weak but possessed of a brilliant culture.

 

The designated successors of Chinggis Khan were weak rulers and they were spending the Mongol Empire into bankruptcy. Sorghagtani and Batu put her sons on the throne and they were the most talented leaders, after The Conqueror himself. The Mongol conquests were bloody and brief. The conquests that formed the empire took a period of twenty years. After the conquests came trade and this was what the Mongol Empire was all about. The Mongol conquests broke the monopoly of finance and banking that the Muslim world had held since antquity. Trade in precious commodities was monopolized by Muslims. Europeans could only trade from a trading center in Constantinople and a trading city on the Black Sea called Soldaia. They traded in common goods, foodstuffs from the Ukraine. The Muslims held the trade in spices and gems, in fine textiles such as silk, for themselves.

 

Then came the Mongol conquests and the major civilizations of Islam were taken. This was all of Central Asia, and the centers of Shia and Sunni power in the Middle East, Persia and Iraq. After raid came trade. A new power had arisen in Asia. There was one political master, Chinggis Khan, and one Code of Laws, the Yaska. He was a builder of roads and connected his empire with the system known as jam, the pony express. The way across the world opened. It was said that a virgin carrying a sack of gold on her head could walk from one end of the empire to the other and go unharmed. Finally Europeans were allowed into the China trade. Enter the Polo brother, Niccolo and Maffeo. Enter Marco Polo. 

 

From being a minor prince in a minor branch of the imperial family. Khubilai Khan rose to power. China had always been the principal object of Mongol arms. Khubilai Khan continued the campaign against Southern Song begun by his brother. The Yuan Imperial Army rode south and conquered Soouthern Song. Khubilai Khan unified China proper to the borders it enjoys to the present day for the first time in four hundred years. This has affected global history down to the present day.

 

Marco Polo arrived in China with his father and his uncle and was an immediate disappointment to Khubilai Khan. The Emperor had requested the father and the uncle to bring him one hundred learned men from the West. He was eager for knowledge, had an open mind, and wanted to learn about government and law, and of course, warfare in Europe. Instead, a boy of seventeen arrived, but a boy who had learned the languages of the Mongol court and could speak to the Supreme Khan in his own language.

 

There was a connection between these two people, and the relationship that they would develop is the most important cross-cultural relationship in world history, for it linked East and West at a critical moment. One of the effects of the Mongol Conquests was the rebirth of science in Europe. The fortunes that financed the Renaissance were made in the overland trade between China and Europe.

 

Khubilai Khan's court was international, with Chinese, Turkish Uighurs from the oasis towns of the Silk Road in the West, Tibetans and also Europeans from the Russian Khanate, Hungarians and French. He had modelled his court on the court of the Tang Dynasty, China's Golden Age. Marco Polo was different. The senior Polos had decided to convert their holdings into luxury goods, into gems. These were easier to transport and by eliminating the Muslim middlemen, they could realize greater profits. The first idea was to travel deeper into Asia, buy the gems and return to the court of Berke Khan, the Khan of Russia, who loved gems. On this journey, a local war broke out between two rival khans and the Polos were trapped in a caravanserai in the town of Bukhara in Central Asia. They could not travel to return to the court of Khubilai Khan and so they spent their time learning the trading practices of Asia. Meanwhile, Marco learned Turkish and Persian and Mongolian, the languages of the court. This was the singular skill that made him so valuable to Khubilai Khan. Marco Polo could listen and overhear the members of the court. It was an excellent qualification for being a spy and reporting to the Supreme Khan of all the events and people in his vast empire. As a European, Marco was not a member of any faction at court, and was not seeking advantage, nor was he part of any intrigue. He was a keen observer. For Marco's part, he was awed by the splendor and the power of the most powerful man in the world. He became an insider, and he was elevated to a status that he could not have enjoyed at home.

 

The great obsession of Khubilai's life was to rule China in benevolence, according to the teachings of his Confucian advisors. He embarked on vast projects of public works, including granaries to feed the poor, agencies to support the peasants, the building of scientific observatories and the renoveation and repair of the Grand Canal, a 1300 mile waterway to transport rice from the newly conquered south to the north. The southerners at rice. The northerners not so much. It was millet.

 

Khubilai converted to Buddhism, and had a Tibetan Buddhist teacher. He was schooled in the idea of compassion, and this increased his desire to aid the people and rule all of the subjects of his vast empire according to their own forms of government. He understood civiliation and what it took to rule civilization, but the Old Guard, wanted to split the khanates still ruled by the institutions of The Horde. Khubilai did not want to preside over the breakup of the empire, and yet, he had to let Central Asia go. He could not afford to fight wars on two fronts. He couldn not afford to lose the Mongol homeland, or he would be like every other Chinese emperor, fighting off the nomad armies that invaded from beyond the Great Wall. These were hard decision and they took a toll. His principal wife Chabi was devastated when Khubilai sent their third son on campaign against Central Asia and the young man was kidnapped, betrayed by his own troops and held as a prisoner for years.

 

Khubilai was getting on in years, his old support system was dying off, and he became obsessed with the idea that Japan had to submit to him, as they had submitted to the last occupant of the Dragon Throne, the Empero of the glorious Tang Dynasy. Listening to the Confucians, and his principal wife Chabi, he modeled his rule on the sage-kings from the Chinese classics. His greatest model was the most illustrious of Chinese emperors, Taizung of the Tang Dynasty.

 

 

Meanwhile, Khubilai had problems. The Empire threatened to break up. His younger brother fought him for the throne. His cousin wanted to break away, because he thought Khubilai was too focused on China and not enough on the nomad khanates. Khubilai struggled to keep the empire together. In the meantime, his great victory over Southern Song allowed him to ascend the Dragon Throne overe a unified China.  
 

The Tang was China's Golden Age and China was the Central Country, the Middle Kingdom. All  surrounding nations, especially Japan and Korea, submitted to China as vassal states. They came to court once a year with their tribute, and they came, so the Confucians said, to be civilized. Khubilai Khan felt that to be a true Chinese emperor, the states that had submitted to the Tang had to submit to him. 

Japan had refused to submit to him, despite several invitations. Khubilai became obsessed with ruler of Japan, the Shogun, a boy samurai. He decined to submit, to acknowledge Khubilai as the Son of Heaven. Perhaps Khubilai was insecure in that he had come to the throne in what the Old Guard described as an illegal election. He was getting older, his friends and supporters were leaving court and dying off, he was depressed and he was getting fat from his bouts of gluttony and the imbibing of alcohol.

 

Japan was one of the few countries that the Mongol Empire encountered that had a strong military tradition, the samurai-- highly skilled warriors loyal to the shogun who ran the government and the army while the emperor was a figurehead.

 

The boy Shogun Tokimune, a brilliant archer, a practitioner of Zen Buddhism steeped in the art of meditation and also of the refined art of calligraphy, refused to submit. He rebuffed the Mongol embassies and sent back a message addressing Khubilai Khan as "the robber baron of the North." To Tokimune, the Son of Heaven sat on the throne of Southern Song. That is, until Khubilai Khan defeated the Southern Song and took the Dragon Throne. To the shogun, a Mongol cavalryman was posing as a Chinese emperor.

 

The first invasion of Japan by sea took place in 1274, the year Marco arrived in China. The invasion was a complete failure.. The fleet left port and entered Japanese waters. A storm, a taifun blew up and the fleet was lost at sea. When the Mongol fleet went down, the myth of the "kamikaze", the Divine Wind was born. The Japanese believed that their emperor was a direct descendant of the Sun Goddess Amaterasu. The Sun Goddess protected the Land of the Rising Sun from its enemies.

 

Khubilai failed, but that was not the end of it. A few years later, fresh envoys were sent with Orders of Submission and a fresh rebuke came from the Shogun who resided at Kamakura.

  

Marco Polo tried to convince the Supreme Khan that this was a folly. Ahmad, the Minister of the Treasury, a Muslim from Central Asia, tried to persuade Khubilai Khan that the expensive projects of civil engineering, were bankrupting the treasury. They needed revenue. Khubilai wanted to embark on a program of shipbuilding for the invasion of Japan. The shipbuilding project required the building of 2300 war junksin Korea, a vastly expensive undertaking. Khubilai was determined that he would be as great as the Tang Emperor.

This is where obsession begins. Khubilai Khan became the King Lear of Asia. A second invasion was mounted. A second fleet went down in a taifun. Khubilai Khan wanted to send a third invasion, but this time, his Mongol ministers, Marco Polom the finance minister and others dissuaded him.

Khubilai became King Lear, a man undone. It is a study in the greatest of Buddhist teachings, that of impermanence. This was the great lesson. Glory turned to despair. The Supreme Khan drowned himself in alcohol, and grew depressed and obese. At length, Marco Polo returned to Venice. All of Khubilai's old friends died or left court. Soon, he died.

The myth of the Divine Wind endured in the minds of the Japanese, even down to World War II. The suicide pilots who attacked Pearl Harbor were called "kamikaze."

 

This story is told in the histories from the point of view of the battles, but the personal story of Khubilai has been left out. Here, followig the work and the research of Morris Rossabi, the biographer of Khubilai Khan, and the narrative of Marco Polo, for the first time, Diane Wolff reveals the story behind the story.

Khubilai Khan's invasion of Japan has been documented by present-day marine archaeologists who have found the hulls of ships that sailed from Korea in the fourteenth century. They have discovered metal artifacts from these vessels. A museum stands on one of the islands of Japan, in memory of the failed invasions.

This is a story from history, but it resonates with meaning down to the present day. The maritime history, from pirates to invasions, is one that has been explored only at a distance. This is the story, oof the familly and the period. 

 

Advance praise for Taifun: Khubilai Khan Invades Japan by Sea

 

Diane Wolff's work is a powerful reminder that those who want to see the future must first understand the past.  Taifun is the prelude to the modern world.  Although set nearly eight centuries ago, her book reveals how modern Asia developed and in particular how the complicated relationship between China and Japan was shaped.  Her unique analysis of Khubilai Khan reveals him as a skilled strategist and tactician of a kind so rare in the past but sorely missing in the modern world.  

 

Jack Weatherford

 Genghis Khan and The Making of the Modern World