Page 67 - All About History - Issue 08-14

Wrath of the Khans

changing horses at each one to keep each end of
this vast realm in constant communication. His
empire was administered by a multinational cast Marco Polo among the Mongols
of functionaries, whose origins he had divided
into four categories of trustworthiness: first, the Though Marco Polo was by no means the first European golden tablet of free passage and a request to bring back
Mongols; second, other Central Asian people; third, traveller to visit China or the court of Kublai Khan – and 100 men to teach Christianity and European customs to
Manchurians and Koreans; and then last, the some modern historians dispute whether his adventures the voracious early adaptors of his multinational court,
Chinese. Meanwhile, ambassadors and travellers even took place and were instead cobbled together from they were the real pioneers and Marco Polo the wide-
from further afield were welcome with open arms the accounts of Arab and Persian traders on the Mongol eyed passenger.
for the knowledge and wealth they could bring – Empire’s south-western fringe – his account was the most Nonetheless, the Great Khan seemed particularly
Christian missionaries even built churches. well known and most widely read for centuries. taken with Marco – who even before the publication of
Setting off from the powerful Italian city state of his sensational proto-Lonely Planet guide in Old French,
While Genghis Khan’s capital was Karakorum, Venice with his father and uncle in 1271, the Polo trio Livres des merveilles du monde (‘Descriptions Of The
deep in his Mongolian heartland, Kublai desired a crossed the Black Sea and journeyed through Central Asia World’ in English), could tell a tale – and refused the
capital worthy of an emperor in the domain where via the Silk Road with a Papal diplomatic mission for the Polo men permission to leave. Instead, Kublai Khan set
he had spent his youth. He installed his court court of Kublai Khan. them up as his roving emissaries, travelling the length
in a newly built ‘winter capital’ – as traditionally Though it’s the 17-year-old Marco who dominates the and breadth of his domain and even further afield to
narrative and looms large in popular imagination, for Southern India as the Khan’s ambassadors, and reporting
nomadic people, the entire Mongol court would father Niccolò and uncle Maffeo Polo this was in fact back, making their incredible 24-year adventure around
travel with the seasons, chasing the light to warmer
a return journey to the Emperor’s court at Khanbaliq. the Far East as much a silk-coated prison sentence as it
climes – in what is now Beijing. Known as Dadu in Having first visited Kublai in 1260 and been gifted a was a working holiday. If it happened at all, that is...
Chinese (meaning ‘grand capital’), in Mongolian it
was called Khanbaliq – the City of the Khan, and
its iconic Drum Tower still stands in the heart of
modern China’s bustling capital.
”The streets are so straight and wide that you
can see right along them from end to end and from
one gate to the other. And up and down the city
there are beautiful places, and many great and fine
hostelries, and fine houses in great numbers,” wrote
Kublai Khan’s most famous foreign visitor, the
Italian traveller and merchant Marco Polo.
At the centre of Khanbaliq was the Khan’s palace,
painted red and white, where, under the watchful
eye of a thousand guards, he kept his four wives
in opulent luxury. In summer, the court would
decamp and return to Mongolia to the walled tent
city of Shangdu – known evocatively as Xanadu.
Polo described two vast palaces, one made of
marble and filled with “rooms of which are all gilt Kublai Khan installed Marco
Polo as one of his emissaries
and painted with figures of men and beasts and
birds, and with a variety of trees and flowers, all
executed with such exquisite art that you regard
them with delight and astonishment” and one of “ Kublai Khan set about building trust
cane – better described as a ‘pavilion’ – which could
be taken down and reassembled as befitting a between the people of his empire and
nomad emperor.
If Shangdu was the embodiment of Kublai Khan’s their ‘barbarian’ overlords”
opulence – the Mongol equivalent of the mother
of all static caravans – his court at Khanbaliq was and dance in the halls of government. He built himself as the latest facet of the Chinese imperial
the physical embodiment of his power, and of temples to his father, Tolui, and his grandfather, tradition, but his image as a merciless warlord
the resentment that began to gnaw away at that Genghis, rehabilitating these former invaders from was in doubt. In the eyes of his detractors, Kublai
power like dry rot. The first non-Chinese emperor the steppe into the Chinese tradition of ancestor Khan had ceased to be the heir to Genghis,
to rule all of China, Kublai Khan was the monarch worship, and gave his second son, Jin Chin, a whose hoofbeats struck terror into the hearts of
of a nation who had believed themselves to be Chinese education, along with an introduction to kings and emperors, and instead he had become
the penultimate civilisation, whose word for both Buddhism and Confucianism. The complex a posturing dandy. In order to appease his
‘foreigner’ shared the same characters as its words Song bureaucracy, the six ministries of central traditional supporters, Kublai Khan ignored his
for ‘beast’. Now they were ruled by a new power government, the ruling Secretariat council Chinese advisers and launched disastrous invasion
that represented everything barbarous and uncouth and the infuriatingly labyrinthine multi-tiered attempts on Japan in 1274 and 1281, and on Java
they believed foreigners to be, no matter that these administration of the provinces, was retained. His in 1293. Poorly planned and poorly executed, even
foreigners had crushed the ruling Song Dynasty. bloodline was wallpapered into the mythology of his successful conquests – Vietnam in 1284 and
Kublai Khan strived to reinvent himself as a China as the Yuan Dynasty, as divinely enshrined 1287, and Burma in 1277 and 1283 – struck the
suitable ruler of China – he restored the elaborate on the throne as the order it had replaced. Mongol Empire a body blow in the wallet and his
Confucian rituals that had been a hallmark of With one foot in the stirrups and another revolutionary paper money had to be replaced by
the Song court, baffling his Mongol generals and wrapped in the fine silks of Chinese courtly life, an entirely new unit in an attempt to reign in the
advisers with the sudden enthusiasm for song Kublai Khan may have successfully reinvented financial anarchy.
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