How Kublai Khan made China the first Maritime Superpower
Two dominant impressions came to mind when I began to write a book on Kublai Khan. One was the opium-inspired poem Kubla by Samuel Taylor Coleridge describing the Mongol emperors summer capital of Xanadu. The other, more serious one, was Kublai’s catastrophic effort to invade Japan by sea and his subsequent defeat, usually attributed to the Kamikaze (the Divine Wind) that destroyed his fleet.
I did not yet have a title for this book, but after publishing three books on the Mongol history, I thought that this would be the final one about the decline and fall of the Mongol Empire. I accepted Kublai’s defeat in Japan as the beginning of the end of the era of conquest by his grandfather Genghis Khan who founded the Mongol Empire in 1206. I assumed that Kublai intended to occupy Japan, but to write a book, I needed to analyse the details of his reasoning behind the tragic misadventure. Slowly, a new picture emerged. I realized that Kublai’s first attempted invasion in 1271 came as a small but important tactic in his obsessive effort to conquer the South Song dynasty which controlled the richest part of China. The Japan trade provided his enemies with material for making explosives, particularly sulphur which had been plentiful when the Song ruled northern China but lacking when confined to the south. By cutting off the trade between Japan and Southern China, Kublai deprived the Southern Song of essential war supplies. He also prevented Japan from becoming a potential escape route for the Song court when he defeated them.
His apparent failure in conquering Japan succeed in his primary goal. He broke its sea connection with South China, thereby further isolating the Southern Song court at Hangzhou.
The Southern Song court seemed unimpressed by Kublai’s failure at sea. Despite being cut off from northern trade and their supply of essential war materiel, the Southern Song court continued its life of wine and debauchery in pleasure boats on West Lake. The officials remained confident that with the world’s largest and strongest navy protecting them, the barbarian horsemen of the north posed an irritation more than a dire threat. If Kublai could not defeat Japan, what chance did it have against the nearly three-hundred-year-old Song empire?
While the Song officials built more pleasure boats, Kublai searched carefully for the weak point in their navy, their boasted Great Water Wall.
After careful study Kublai realized that the Chinese cities built their strongest fortifications on the land side and more fragile walls on the water side where they depended on their ships for protection. The Southern Song navy was solely a defensive force. They often chained their boats together in their Great Wall to prevent invasion across the water. Mongols built nothing for defence. For the Mongols, anything that moved could be a weapon, and they had to find a way to convert the ships from Chinese defence to Mongol offense. Kublai summoned engineers from his brother’s family in Persia to construct trebuchets appropriate for mounting on a moving ship, and he tested novel ways to use gunpower and incendiary devices. His newly armed navy with its innovative mounting of lethal weapons consistently battered down the walls of southern city after city by attacking them from their weakly defended waterside, and in 1276 the wise and uncorrupted Dowager Empress Xie surrendered the capital Hangzhou and the child emperor to the Mongols without a final siege.
For the Mongols, mere victory on the field of battle was never enough until the entire military threat was eliminated. In obedience to Genghis Khan’s dictum “Defeat and destroy, until they are no more,” those who escaped and still professed loyalty to the deposed Song had to be chased down. Over the next three years, the Mongol navy hounded every remnant of the fleeing Song navy and the pirates who assisted them up and down the south China coast. By 1279 Kublai reigned supreme and had conquered all of China.
In 1281, two years after annihilating the Southern Song remnants along the Chinese coast, he sent another, much larger, armada against Japan, but most of the ships were filled not with armed warriors, but with defeated Song soldiers and farming tools instead of weapons. It was obvious that in addition to seeking revenge for his earlier defeat, he had a another, more practical, goal in mind. He was seeking a place to settle the captured Song soldiers and sailors far outside of China where they could pose no threat of rebellion. The islands of Japan would make an excellent prison colony of farms and help supply the persistent food needs of Kublai’s capital at Beijing with its massive bureaucracy and military force.
The naval strategy that had defeated the Southern Song did not work against Japan with its inland cities. Trebuchets and exploding grenades were impressive and frightened men and horses but posed little strategic danger when fired at the beach. Kublai’s defeat and the destruction of the fleet was a military fiasco, but it nevertheless solved the threat of the exiled Song soldiers. They drowned. He then expelled their former emperor to Tibet and other Song loyalists to the Amur River in eastern Siberia.
Subsequent smaller expeditions to Vietnam and Java also failed to increase the territory of the Mongol ruler, but they, perhaps inadvertently, secured control of the maritime trade routes for his navy. Kublai Khan’s Chinese navy had conquered the sea, but he did not to do with it. The turning point for him when he ordered the first naval expedition from China to the Ilkhanate of Persia and Iraq ruled by his nephews. Sea trade had existed for centuries, but good moved slowly from regional port to port with changes of boats and merchants. Kublai wanted to use his newly powerful navy to complete the entire voyage without having to change ships or pay the constantly exorbitant tariffs and fees of local rulers and pirates waiting along the route.
Through trial and error, Kublai had successfully switched his navy from conquest to commerce. The change was rapid and dramatic as illustrated by Marco Polo who had left Venice earlier in 1271, when southern China was still under Song rule, hoping to sail to China from the Persian port of Hormuz. In frustration, he found the boats small, uncaulked, and of one deck tied together with coconut husk ropes and covered with awnings of animal hides. The Polo merchants had to travel instead by land using the Mongol postal and camel caravan system along the Silk Route. At that time Mongols could not even swim, much less manage boats or ships.
In 1294, finally returning home after nearly twenty years of travel after Kublai had united China, an older, more weather-beaten, Marco Polo approached the port of Hormuz for the second and final time in his life. This time he arrived by sea in a grand flotilla, a fleet of sleek and modern Chinese ships. He had sailed on a large floating palace as a guest of Kublai’s court, comfortably ensconced in his private stateroom, the decks packed with Chinese silks, porcelains, musk, and medicines as well as precious spices from India, Ceylon, and Java. In those two short decades, ocean navigation had changed radically under the rule of Kublai Khan, who had sent fleets of Chinese ‘junks’, the largest and most technologically sophisticated ships of their era, halfway around the world, more than double the distance of Christopher Columbus’s three ships from Spain to America two centuries later.
The highest-ranking Mongol on the expedition was Princess Kokejin, accompanied by her tiger and a massive load of trade goods. She was on her way to marry Kublai’s nephew, the Ilkhan of Persia. She arrived safely, but after some difficulty adjusting to the climate, she died a few years later. Nevertheless, her convoy opened a new route of direct trade across the Indian Ocean and South China Sea to the ports of Kublai Khan.
Kublai built the world’s largest navy with which he unified China and expanded a commercial network stretching from the Pacific Arctic to the coast of tropical India and to the islands of the Persian Gulf and Africa. With a mixture of intelligent strategies and some good luck from unanticipated consequences, Kublai had created an entirely new system of global order and world commerce based on maritime power. In moving his Mongol force from horses to ships, Kublai moved history from the land and onto the sea.
In the twenty-first century, some observers have been surprised by the rise of China as a world sea power after a five-hundred-year absence. Asia had hardly figured in the power equation for centuries, other than as a massive area to be conquered, colonized, ruled, and exploited. Now, in the twenty-first century, China has again assembled a massive mercantile fleet, and a its powerful modern navy has sailed out of the rivers and far beyond its coastline to resume its former position as a major maritime power.
The Western response vacillates between the poles of disdained disinterest to alarming anxiety. China’s emergence as a dominant player in global politics has been treated as a discontinuity in world history, as something out of character for the land-focused culture and inward-looking Confucian society. But Kublai Khan clearly showed, China’s seagoing empire is nothing new. China was history’s first Superpower of the Sea.
Jack Weatherford is a bestselling historian and the author of Emperor of the Seas: Kublai Khan and the Making of China.
