The Khanate of China

The Dowager Empress and the last emperor of the Song Dynasty peacefully surrendered Hangzhou over to Khubilai Khan in 1276. The remnants of Song loyalists continued to resist in the southeastern coast of the Guangdong region, hoping to use their naval experience to their advantage, until their forces were finally defeated in 1279 near what is now Hong Kong.

Given that the Yuan intent was to govern and not simply pillage, the transition was less extreme than in the earlier phases of the Mongol conquests. But it was also not without long-term issues. Khubilai Khan seized the treasures of the former Song palace, but (likely due to the intervention of Empress Chabi) he also prohibited wanton looting (McClausland 2014, 73). Nonetheless, Khubilai's court also allowed the Inner Asian (possibly Tangut or Tibetan) official Yang Liangzhenjia (Rinchenkyap) to loot the Song Dynasty imperial tombs to finance an ambitious temple construction projects. While Rinchenkyap and Tibetan Buddhist officials saw little difference in their work and the Song Dynasty's own practice of confiscating temple property for their own ends, what they considered cold practicality offended the local Chinese elite. Turkic and Persian advisers also occasioned to tax farm Chinese subjects to finance the many expensive military campaigns, despite earlier prohibitions on such practices. Differing interests among the Tibetan, Turkic, Mongolic, Persian, and Chinese advisers created for some contentious policy disputes.

Post-conquest China was in a state of disarray. While Khubilai did stabilize the north and avoided damaging too much of the south, the decades of war had taken its toll. China's total population including both the Jin and Song territories were about 100 million, but the 1393 census in the early Ming Dynasty reported about 60 million (Rossabi 2009, 116). Even if the succeeding Ming Dynasty's counts were inaccurate, many of the war-torn regions did not recover until later in the Ming era.

Early in the Yuan at least, special provisions were made to recover agriculture in the north, restore the export market via corvee exemptions and sale rights for artisans, and encourage commerce with a unified currency. The Yuan also made use of mostly-Turkic ortogh merchant associations, who pooled their finances together to reduce risk from failed caravan trade, to facilitate long-distance commerce.

At the same time, the court enacted a mix of policies that at once favored the upper echelons of the Mongol nobility and Semu associates while also keeping stability in the first half of the Yuan Dynasty. In addition to a four-tier status system that legally put Mongols on top, the military elite was also a semi-caste with the Keshig (guards of the Great Khan) maintained to counter the influence of the mostly-Chinese army; the Yuan court went as far as regulating bamboo out of concern they could be weaponized (128). In the area of law, much of the Jin Dynasty's code was reused. Although laws tended to favor the Mongol nobility, the Yuan courts were more reluctant to exercise the death penalty than other dynasties of imperial China. Mongol nobility were ever-confronted with the reality that they were a tiny ruling class minority in an overwhelmingly Chinese region.

Chinese were ambivalent over rule by the Yuan Dynasty. The north and the south had been divided for centuries under competing dynasties and it was only with the Yuan Dynasty that easier exchange and travel was possible. While northerners were able to directly see the newer cultural products of the former Southern Song Dynasty regions, southerners encountered northern works that were once thought lost or irretrievable. Yuan inventories by Wang Yun suggest that the Yuan court had a strong appreciation for Song Dynasty works and thus maintained them in Dadu (McClausland 2014, 64). On the other hand, many former Southern Song Dynasty stalwarts continued to refuse to serve the Yuan and those that did (such as the famed artist Zhao Mengfu) sometimes risked losing friends. The Yuan social status system further made it difficult for Chinese elite to enter state service, thus prompting many to engage in alternative careers in the arts.

The Mongols may often be associated with pillaging and destruction, but they were also great connoisseurs of art. The steppe lifestyle enabled Mongols to maintain a strong appreciation for fine craftsmanship. Such appreciation was transferred over to the arts in general. Mongol nobility sponsored artists in China, Korea, Central Asia, and Persia and thus spurred production in both the Yuan Dynasty and the Il-Khanate of Persia. The ties between the two khanates allowed for cultural exchanges as artists responded to Mongol tastes as well as the aesthetic sensibilities of peoples on both sides of Eurasia.

The wealth of the Yuan Dynasty and the Mongols' more favorable attitude to commerce brought many merchants and adventurer-travelers across Eurasia to seek out its splendor. Aside from the well-known figures Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, there were many others who made the trip to the great trade cities of the Yuan Dynasty. Ibn Battuta's accounts in his Rihla suggest a thriving Persianate Muslim community in Guangzhou and Hangzhou where there were even local qadi (Muslim jurists). Tamil merchants from South Asia left an inscription in 1281 that hailed Khubilai Khan at the site of a Hindu temple in the southeastern port city of Quanzhou, an important entrepot since the Song Dynasty time (58).

With a high office inaccessible to the Chinese elite, Mongol rule also may have spurred many an artistic creation. Monochrome landscape art was already a pastime among Song Dynasty literati, but Yuan period painters focused more on self-expression rather than abstract philosopical truths. In some cases, paintings may have been subtle admonitions to authority. Regardless of whatever the painters' private opinions of Mongol rule were, the themes of birds and horses, images favored among the Mongol nobility, became frequent in their works.

Zhao Mengfu 趙孟頫 (1254-1322) is perhaps one of the most towering figures of Yuan Dynasty art and calligraphy to the extent that his works continued to inspire later artists despite his choice of working with the Yuan court. A distant relation of the former Song Dynasty royal house, his choice to join the Yuan Dynasty raised eyebrows among the former Southern Song elite and even cost him some friendships. Nevertheless, Zhao along with his wife Guan Daosheng 管道昇 (1262-1319) epitomized the aesthetics of the scholar "amateur" painter using the literati's calligraphic brush strokes for illustrative art.

Broad regional influences are apparent in Yuan Dynasty material culture. Buddhist art likewise took on hybridized forms as the tantric Tibetan influences came into Chinese Buddhist art and Chinese styles were adopted in Tibetan art as well. The floral patterns common in Muslim art (as figural arts were considered forbidden in early Islam) as well as Persian cobalt blue were integrated into Chinese porcelain arts as a market for Chinese porcelain grew in the Middle East and Persia.

Aesthetic changes paralleled that of the Mongol nobility's eclectic attitude toward religion. Khubilai Khan, for example, was initially interested in Chan Buddhism due to his long association with Chan monks but then came to favor the mystical practices of Tibetan Buddhism as he associated with the Lama Phagspa. Empress Chabi followed both the Sakya sect of Tibetan Buddhism and the Nestorian Christianity of her mother-in-law Sorgaghtani Beki. In practice, Khubilai as well as the Mongols in general covered their spiritual bases by being lavish patrons of any and every religion, which also incidentally spurred sometimes-fractious sectarianism.

The following map indicates the locations of some of the major cultural influences and groups in and around the Yuan Dynasty.