The History of China - #172 - S. Song 14: The Tightening Noose

Episode Date: August 24, 2019

Mongolia is gripped in a civil war of its own, meaning the Song Empire has a chance to breathe. But with the immediate threat allayed for now, other problems become apparent. And when the new Great Khan, Khubilai, returns his attention to the land south of the Yangtze, China will find out whether it was a decade well spent in preparation for the coming assault, on one utterly squandered. Time Period Covered: 1259-1275 CE Major Historical Figures: Song Empire: Emperor Lizong (Zhao Yun) [r. 1221-1264] Emperor Duzong (Zhao Qi) [r. 1264 -1274] Grand Empress Dowager Xie [1210-1283] Chancellor Jia Sidao [1213-1275] Mongolia: Möngke [1209-1259] Khubilai [1215-1294] Ariq Böke [1219-1264] General Aju [1227-1287] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Four hundred years ago, a trio of tiny kingdoms were perched on some damp islands off the coast of Europe. Within three short centuries, these islands would become the centre of an empire which ruled a quarter of the globe and on which the sun never set. I'm Samuel Hume, a historian of the British Empire, and my podcast Pax Britannica follows the people and events that built that empire into a global superpower. Learn the History of China. Episode 172, The Tightening Noose. We last left off with the sudden withdrawal of the Mongol forces from the Sichuan region of Song in August of 1259, following the unexpected death of its great Khan, Mongke, outside of

the walls of Chongqing due to illness or injury. Today, then, we'll pick up by taking a closer look at the circumstances facing the southern regime, its leaders, and their attempts to stave off the Mongol attack that would inevitably return. You'll remember that, as of 1260, the emperor of Song was Li Zong, then 55 years old, and that his chancellor and head of government was the newly appointed minister Jia Sidao, longtime friend of the emperor and about nine years his junior. It had been under Chancellor Jia that the Song military had been stiffened and committed to a strategy of not one step back, a policy that they would not really have time to put to the test immediately, owing to the Mongol retreat almost immediately thereafter.

Yet though this retreat did provide the Song yet another chance to reinforce its position and reassess its entire situation, it also allowed enough space for problems not directly of a military nature to reassert themselves over the tottering regime. The government of Lidzong was beset with all sorts of problems, but apart from the imminent threat of foreign conquest, the largest one by far was its economic issue, and specifically the fact that so much of the taxable land within the empire was now held by so few magnates, the so-called Jiangbing Zijia, or Monopolist Kabul. This was not a new problem by any stretch, but did pose a particularly acute

strain on the Song now that it was faced with the rigors of a lengthy defensive war. From Davis, quote, accumulation of land by the wealthy had plagued Song society since the 11th century, a problem frequently mentioned but never resolved. Land accumulation inevitably affected government revenues. For influential landowners, legally or otherwise, could claim exemptions and evade taxation more effectively than could simple peasants. End quote. For centuries now, different Song governments and officials had tried schemes of various means and methods to take into account this ongoing problem and make up for the iron law of economics that the rich will, absent outside intervention, inevitably become even richer, and better at avoiding taxation on that wealth.

This had been most famously, or perhaps infamously, undertaken by the sweeping reforms of Wang Anshu and his new policies in the late 11th century. Wang's reforms had been seen as wildly radical by his contemporaries, but they would pale in comparison to what the government under Jia Zedong would now attempt. Jia is in fact compared by some of the chroniclers to even the likes of Wang Meng, that radical economic reformer who ended the Western Han dynasty with his own usurpation in the first century. The scope and scale of the ongoing war, first against the Jin and now against the Mongols, meant that by 1260, the government felt that it had no option but to pursue radical, coercive action to correct the economic imbalance threatening to strangle off government funds at this, its most critical hour. It would take several years to roll out, but by 1263, following a massive imperial survey of land ownership and

use, and a reassessment of the various tax rates, Jia Sidao's government enacted a massive land redistribution policy known as the Public Fields Measure, or Gong Tian. In short, the government restricted and forcibly bought about one-third of all privately owned land held by a household over 200 mu, or approximately over 30 acres. This initial exemption was shortly cut in half to a mere 100 mu. Such a massive redistribution would, of course, anger the wealthy monopolists, but it might have ingratiated Jia Sidao and his government to the wider peasant population, had those lands then been reapportioned to them. Jia Sidao was no Tiberius or Gaius Gracchus, however, and instead of giving the land over to the people for their use, his Gongtian measures kept the forcibly acquired

land as simple state property, quickly rendering it the single largest landowning entity in the entire empire. The ham-fisted governmental overreach was just getting started, however. Since the Song government was cash-strapped, what with that war on and all, landowners could frequently expect to receive as little as 5% of their requisitioned property's market value. And not only that, but rather than being paid in hard cash specie, the Song had turned ever more toward payment with its new and experimental paper currency, as well as tax remission certificates, or worst of all in the eyes of many staring down the barrel of this dynastic regime's final years, governmental

certificates bestowing official status. The government took my land and all I got was this crappy wall plaque. Even worse, with the practice deficiency engrafted and exceeding their mandate that local officials had spent centuries perfecting. Under pressure from the capital, the regional and local administrators would often outdo even the enmity earned by the policy's own merits. They were reviled for their propensity to confiscate more land than was stipulated while compensating the owners with less than the regulations obliged. Quote, In their misguided enthusiasm, some local% of the arable land across the empire,

now held under centralized administrative control, wasn't particularly well managed by the government. I know, shocker. Quote, when attempting to manage vast state holdings without substantially augmenting its civil service, when it flagrantly undercut the interests of precisely the group responsible for implementing its measures, during a time of military conflict, political disruption of some sort was inevitable. End quote. It would prove, in the end, something of a fiasco for the Song government. Engendering resentment for the government among both the powerful landlord class and the landless peasantry alike, demoralizing the very cause for which they purported to fight, and all while mismanaging the project and then neglecting the results. Zong and Jia Sidao himself were very visibly enjoying themselves with little thought of the

expense or the optics. They were viewed as hypocrites for demanding sacrifice from others while spending lavishly on themselves. For instance, quote, in 1262, a year before the public field's measure, the emperor had built, at state expense, a private home and ancestral temple for Jia Sidao. Costing a million strings of cash, the buildings probably rivaled even imperial structures in their sumptuousness, end quote. Not a great look, guys. The Gongtian public fields policy would last for a long, painful 12 years, which was, on balance, about 12 too many. This is not to say that the Song economy had become unproductive or unprofitable. It was, after all, still the

largest and wealthiest economy in the world, and the government taxation rate bore that truth out. Indeed, even with only half of Northern Song's territorial expanse, the Southern Song regime by the 1260s was still able to roughly meet the highest levels of Northern Song taxation revenues. This was largely due to the fact that the most lucrative of taxes, such as those on salt and wine, were not negatively affected by the loss of the north, and innovations in tax policies in the intervening centuries meant that, quote, Song taxes may well have exceeded those imposed during the Han and Tong dynasties by 10 times, end quote. Such high rates were continually justified, of course, by the ever-present

looming threat from the north and the need for constant vigilance and military preparedness. Still, between the ever-spiraling costs of the war after war after war, as well as the seeming uptick in large-scale natural disasters over the past several decades, with seven major droughts and seven major floods recorded between 1229 and 1259, and the capital itself, Linan, or also known as Hangzhou, suffering from seven city-wide fires between 1231 and 1264, state revenue from taxation had dropped off precipitously. Song revenues had reached their high point under Xiaozong in the 1160s, with as much as 65 million strings of cash per year. Yet by the reign of Lidzong a century later,

they'd almost halved to roughly 35 million strings. It was quickly devolving into an acute fiscal crisis, and one with no clear or easy solution. Quote, The Mongol invasion depopulated and left a wide expanse of border territory agriculturally unproductive, causing a mammoth 45-year drain on revenues. In scale and intensity, the new war easily dwarfed earlier Song conflicts with the Tangut and Jurchen. Sichuan, the center of many Mongol offensives, reportedly sent no new revenues to Linan after 1234. In better days, it had annually

provided as much as 20 to 30 million strings of cash, end quote. Paper currency was increasingly used in an experimental and desperation-driven manner to cope with this cash shortfall. This had begun as early as 1206 to help finance the Kaishi War, but as would befall virtually every national foray into paper currency, overproduction, mass counterfeiting, and general reluctance to accept such currency as legitimate swiftly devalued it on the open market. At the end of the 12th century, approximately 24 million strings worth of paper currency had been put into circulation, but by 1207 that had ballooned to more than 140 million, and it only increased from there. 230 million strings worth in 1224, 320 million in 1234, and by 1247, more than 650 million strings of nominal

value circulated via the song paper currency. Within half a century, the amount of government paper floating through the economy had increased by more than 25 times, and with no sign of slowing down that flood. Davis notes that, while the chaos of the 1250s to 1270s meant that there were no records that survived of that period's paper currency issuances, it's very likely that by 1260, more than a billion strings worth of cash had been issued by the government in the form of increasingly worthless paper. Though it's tempting to scoff at such a disastrous fiscal policy from our vantage point in the 21st century, and with many hundreds of years of economic theory and hindsight about the promises and perils of paper currency, still, it is important that we don't look down our noses too terribly hard at the Southern Song, thinking that they could, you know,

just print their way out of insolvency. They, after all, literally could not have known any better. From Davis, quote, Restraint in the printing of unbacked paper notes would have been more fiscally responsible, but a government in desperation rarely practices such rational restraint. The Song was the first dynasty to experiment with paper currency, and having little experience to draw on, it had scant appreciation of the long-term economic impacts of its politically expedient measures. All the while, the sheer size and scale of the bureaucracy required to oversee the mechanisms

of the government weighed heavily on the already strained budget. More intrusive government policies had to be enforced, and this required more and more officials to supervise each scheme. And the increasing population added to the pressure. The Song government was succumbing to the weight of its own bureaucracy. It was bitterly noted by an imperial censor in the 1250s that during the height of the Northern Song period, its more than 320 counties had required only some 10,000 officials to effectively operate, whereas now, in the late southern Song, a mere 100 counties somehow now required more than 24,000 officials to do the same.

On the diplomatic front, Song policies remained likewise frustratingly and inexplicably self-defeating. Following the Mongol withdrawal back north, for instance, Kublai had decided to test the diplomatic waters of establishing a more permanent peace with Song by sending the envoy, Hao Jing, as an ambassador. Ambassador Hao was allowed to cross the southern border, only to be arrested by an official at Zhenzhou, some 60 miles on, allegedly on the orders from Chancellor Jia himself, without the emperor's knowledge or assent. Hao Jing would then spend the next 15 years as a political prisoner of the Song, providing a constant source of provocation to the Mongols,

who, as ever, held their ambassadors as sacrosanct. Some reports suspect that Hao Jing was arrested on suspicion of being a spy. But even if that's true, Davis points out that it would still make no sense to proceed as the Song government did. Rather than infuriate their northern neighbor by seizing their emissary and then holding him, if the Song did not wish to speak to the Mongol ambassador or suspected him of duplicity, they simply could have, and likely should have, turned him away at the border and denied him entry altogether. Other allegations point to the possibility that Hao Jing may have had some kind of compromising information on Jia Sidao himself, necessitating, at least by Jia's perspective, that he be isolated and removed from the game board, so to speak, so as not to damage the

chancellor's reputation. Yet the evidence for this is not forthcoming, and even if it were true, once again would have demonstrated a remarkable short-sightedness on Jia's part. In fact, there's no version of this in which either Jia or the Song government look anything other than monumentally dumb, yet again, and as a government that fundamentally cannot be negotiated with in good faith, yet again. In the end, the only explanation that seems to hold any water at all is that the Song government did what it did to the Mongol ambassador, just to thumb its nose at the enemy that, in the prevailing view of the era, was illegally occupying lands that were the Song's by right. Again, from Davis, quote, The only feasible explanation for Song intransigence in this case is the weight of revanchist bureaucratic opinion.

For much of the 13th century, the Song bureaucracy had favored arms over negotiation, activism over pacifism, and had taken a dim view of appeasement. End quote. This inbuilt ministerial disinclination toward any resolution but outright military victory, combined with Jia Sidao's own need to remain on the court's good side, as well as the Song once again managing to

fundamentally misunderstand the meaning of Mongol withdrawal, seems to have sealed any such peace proposal's fate from the outset. This was furthered by an unexpected, albeit brief, development in Shandong. The peninsula, you'll remember, had been for about three decades under the jurisdiction of the warlords who had broken away from the Jin state in rebellion. Though most had initially pledged themselves to Song, a subsequent Mongol invasion had seen they either switch loyalties over to the northern regime or die. So it was stunning to both sides when in March of 1262, the most powerful of the Shandong warlords, named Li Tan, renounced his loyalty to the Mongols and re-pledged himself and his territory to the Song. This seemed to have been done with the urging and considerable financial backing of the Song court, who no doubt believed that given the Mongol

withdrawal, a significant destabilization of the regime would bring forth the resumption of Song control over the entire peninsula, as a prelude to some general reconquest of the entire north. It was the wrong horse to back, no two ways about it. With only about 20,000 soldiers to his name, Litan was squashed within a month by the troops Kublai had left behind while he was away in Mongolia. All that time, effort, and money, and the only things that Jaseda managed to do in Shandong, was further inflame tension and call down Mongol vengeance on their heads once again. Even worse, though, was that by provoking the Mongols in Shandong specifically, they managed to put pressure on themselves across yet another,

and until this point largely ignored, warfront, the Northeast. In virtually every prior dynasty, quote, the combination of rampant inflation, bureaucratic corruption, inequitable land ownership, incessant war, and a long succession of natural disasters had brought about widespread domestic unrest. The Southern Song was hardly immune to the consequences of such conditions. Even so, the late Song years are rather notable for their relative lack of any such widespread rebellion or banditry.

Though some did occur, of course, they remained to the very end relatively minor and containable. Moreover, and in spite of the Zhao imperial clan being rather infamous for having few or no viable children, and both themselves and their government being rather incessantly mediocre at best, there was never any significant or dangerous plot to challenge the throne in the form of a palace coup. For all of the ill fortune that fell upon it, and that it brought on itself, the Song dynasty remained remarkably internally stable, even up to the very end. Thus, markedly unlike the later stages of the Han or Tang before it, it would be a largely external pressure that would finally overturn the Song.

At the very top, however, the Song government and its emperor, Li Zong, had slipped into a terminal malaise by the beginning of the 1260s. After several attempts at reviving the sputtering imperial economy had ended in disaster, the government appeared to largely give up the ghost on that front, resigning itself to a regime forever hemorrhaging revenue to endless warfare. Li Zong himself had gotten away from the crushing despair of the times, it seems, by losing himself into hedonism and lechery, with not just his proper palace harem of consorts and concubines providing him with company, which no one would have batted an eye at, but also going so far as to invite common street girls and prostitutes, and even Buddhist nuns, if the stories are true, into the palace for his amusement, which most certainly did result

in no shortage of moralistic pearl-clutching by the Confucian elites. Making matters all the worse was that, like so many of his benighted royal lineage, Li Zong's many and varied sexual liaisons did not produce their usual fruits. Had his indiscretions produced a clutch of sons, even bastard-born sons from street girls, he might have been forgiven for such excesses, for there would have at least been a natural heir to choose from. Yet as per the curse of the House of Zhao, very few children were sired by Li Zong. Fewer still were boys, and none of them lived past early childhood. Even the daughter he sired with consort Jia, Chancellor Sidao's sister, only lived to 20

or 21. It remains a historical mystery as to why or how the Jiaos had such multi-generational problems with reproduction, though circumstantial evidence strongly indicates that an overabundance of lead in regular palace life was a likely cause. In any event, it was such a typical fate of Song emperors by this point that the imperial court had a go-to plan B strategy all laid out and ready to go. As had been done many times before when no natural heir was forthcoming, adoption from within the wider imperial clan was the next most viable and acceptable option. The relative to be adopted was Li Zong's nephew by his brother, a boy named Zhao Qi,

who was about 13 years old at the time of his adoption as the heir apparent in 1253. It would be seven years before his position was formalized and Qi proclaimed the official Taizhe, or crown prince. It was apparently done very much by the urging of Zhao Sidao, the now 20-year-old longtime tutor. Quote, By aggressively supporting the young man's advancement, Zhao Sidao sought to win his lasting favor. End quote. It would prove, at least for now, a wise investment, as on November 14th, 1264, Emperor Lidzong took suddenly ill and died just two days later at 59 years old, after a reign of four decades.

At just 24, Zhao Qi would sit the throne. He would take the throne and be remembered as Duzong, the measured ancestor, which would prove a very curious name for him to receive. Very quickly into his reign, much like his predecessor and adopted father before him, Duzong's behavior took a bad turn soon after he assumed the reins of power. He would be repeatedly accused over the course of his decade of rule of unconscionable extravagance, holding lavish and regular court feasts, all of which were paid increasingly from the public funds than by private imperial budget. So too did he honor his kinsmen with titles and honors far beyond their place or station, alarming those who'd earned their place in the court. Davis writes, quote, Such advancement sometimes involved over a hundred officials at once.

Nuzong held the elaborate Mingtang, Hall of Brilliance, ceremonies at least twice during his ten-year reign. Such extravagance implied irresponsibility, an emperor out of touch with the times, insensitive to the plight of the overtaxed and war-weary people. End quote. Hi everyone, this is Scott. If you want to learn about the world's oldest civilizations, find out how they were rediscovered. Follow the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra's descendants over ten generations, or take a deep dive into the Iron Age or the Hellenistic era, then check out the Ancient World Podcast. Available on all

podcasting platforms, or go to ancientworldpodcast.com. That's the Ancient World Podcast. Another tension point for the imperial courtiers was Duzong's evident reliance, and they would charge over-dependence, on Chancellor Jia Sidao. He was, as ever in their estimation, entirely unqualified to hold such a powerful position, especially as he was now a holdover from the previous regime. What was more, the chancellor seemed to be held by the emperor himself as almost superior to the throne itself. Sidao was almost three decades older than Duzong, and had been his teacher and mentor for the young monarch's entire time at court,

a relationship that he emphasized, much to the chagrin of everyone else present, by repeatedly referring to Jia as teacher rather than servant in open court. As you may well imagine, that would cause something of an uproar, though the emperor would hear nothing of it. Yet both of those failings fairly paled in comparison to Duzong's greatest foible, his overall ambivalence toward the ever-present Mongol threat. He had inherited a period that, in spite of high and rising costs for military preparedness, as well as ongoing, although less severe, natural disasters, was one of relative tranquility. The Mongols were still largely focused on their own internal affairs, and the treasuries, though strained, were still capable of meeting the

burdens of state for the foreseeable future. A wiser ruler might have used that time to either strike out against Mongol holdings in northern China and try to take back lost territory while the northerners were still embroiled in their own civil war, or elsewise use the uncertain position of the Vying Khans to effect a more permanent peace agreement to the Song's ultimate benefit. Instead, Duzong, under Jiasi Dao, wilded away the years, blissfully unawares of the sword dangling by a single horsehair perched over his head. That is at least the criticism leveled by many traditional historians against this, who would be the last significant emperor of the Song dynasty. Davis gives us the other side of the coin, however, reminding us

that, quote, the reality is that war, peace, conservations, and reforms had all been attempted only a few years earlier. The results had been unimpressive at best, and at times were disastrous. Perhaps the conflict and divisiveness of the recent past, more than the emperor's timid personality, explain why Duzong chose to do nothing dramatic in seeking to reverse the situation. These were largely years of maintenance, not years entirely wasted." Though he was looked down on by many of his contemporaries for lack of any official degree, and the fact that he'd been a holdover from Lidzong's personal retinue of close friends, Chancellor Jasedao may have actually proved to be a reasonable and valuable choice for head of government in these trying years. His area of expertise was, after all,

military affairs, and he'd even personally led armies against the Mongols, a distinction very few others, if indeed anyone else at court, could boast. Though his critics would repeatedly charge him as a fraud who exaggerated and misinterpreted his own feats to enhance his career, both his past service record and his management of the affairs of state while chancellor seemed to clearly demonstrate otherwise. Sidao had made his bones and won his promotions to the chancellery in 1260 for his part in the defense of Xiangyang City, and between 1269 and 1273 he oversaw the allotment of some 14 million strings of cash to the defense of that region, known generally as Jinghu, another 10 million to the eastern regions of Sichuan still controlled

by Song, and a further 4 million to the Huai border along the eastern front. A new defensive wall was ordered to be constructed around the capital itself, a precautionary measure since Sidao had already flatly refused to evacuate the government from Hangzhou. Able-bodied men were recruited at a frenzied pace, while soldiers-at-arms were directed to assist in expanding agricultural production as necessary for war, by participating in tilling the land themselves as part of their duties. And through all of this, though the Mongol armies maintained an encirclement of Xiangyang city itself, the Song forces were able to repeatedly penetrate the siege lines and deliver much-needed resupply to the harried defenders within, allowing them to hold out for an impressive five years. This was no state meekly waiting the death stroke to swing down, but an empire doing what it thought best to resist where and how it could. There were even some limited offensive operations to regain lost territories in the northwest, specifically against Chengdu, Luzhou, and Tongchuan in western Sichuan, which did yield

some positive gains in the short term. The ultimate problem for Song then was not that it wasn't doing all that it could to push back against Mongol incursion, but that in a war of attrition, which this surely was, the much diminished and thoroughly isolated Chinese state was simply unable to keep pace with the scope and scale of the transcontinental northern war machine. This would prove especially true once the new nominal Great Khan of the Mongols was able to turn his full attention back to the affairs of the south. So what had been going on up there in Mongolia anyway? What was keeping the Borjigian scythe from swinging down to reap the song.

It was a civil war, known largely as the Toluid War. Put briefly, when Mongke Khan died outside of Chongqing in 1259, and Kublai had pulled his armies back to take him home, he'd been rather horrified to learn on the way that his youngest brother, Arik Bok, had been proclaimed the Great Khan in the absence of either of his elder brothers, Hulagu or Kublai himself. Pulling up short from Karakorum, Kublai accepted the advice of his ministers, and in 1260 convened his own Kurultai, naming himself as Great Khan. For more than three years, the rival claimants and their supporters all across the Mongol Empire battled it out, with Kublai gaining the upper hand and twice seizing, finally largely destroying, Karakorum in the process. Finally, in late 1263, Arik Bok realized that his cause was lost and traveled alone to Shangdu, better known at times

as Xanadu, in modern southern Inner Mongolia, which then served as Kublai's base of operations and capital. He went there in order to surrender. In spite of this victory, however, upon attempting to secure his primacy of place by holding yet another Kurultai in Mongolia proper, Kublai found that none of the other three Khans would lend their support to his claim. The Eke-Mongol Ulus, the Great Mongol Nation, would forever after be four effectively independent nations,

and their grandfather Genghis's dream of a united empire spanning the world would be lost for good. Nevertheless, with not only Mongolia, but all of northern China, Manchuria, and Korea under his control, Kublai still had more than sufficient resources to finish off the southern Song. He would, however, seek a change in strategy from that of his late elder brother, whereas Mongke had favored the traditional Mongol military methodology of relying almost solely on cavalry. In the course of his time in the south, Kublai had come to understand such methods' limitations, especially in areas so regularly crisscrossed by waterways. Modern

problems require modern solutions, and his problem was the waterways. The Chinese solution had long been navies, so why not him as well? He would now focus his empire's resources on, quote, central Song territory and exploit the waterways there to menace Hangzhou at closer range. Kublai chose largely to ignore the Sichuan theater. Indispensably to this new strategy was building a sizable naval force, a somewhat novel idea for the horse-loving Mongols, but an excellent tactic nonetheless. Construction and training of this new Mongol navy would begin circa 1260, with the recruitment of some 70,000 men from along the Yangtze River, and sending provisions and construction equipment to the shipyards there from as far away as Kaifeng. Pillage was, as ever, a constant source of both

men and material as well. More than 50,000 prisoners and hundreds of ships would be forcibly conscripted into this new enterprise from around the Xiangyang region as well as across Sichuan. Apart from the obvious threat posed by this new river-based naval force, this provided two new and strange challenges for the Song defenders. First would be the fact that now, by a ratio of at least five to one, the enemy army they would be facing would be their own Han Chinese people. Now granted, the Mongols had long employed the tactic of driving civilians and prisoners before their own ranks, but now some 80% of their entire army would not just be ethnically non-Mongol, but Han. Certainly not the first time

that the Chinese have ever had to fight other Chinese, but still a rather strange and off-putting situation. The second, and far more serious difficulty, was that this massive conscription of men by the Mongols was, well, that it left way fewer men to be conscripted by the Song armies. Quote, as the Mongol armies carted off a growing number of Han Chinese from the south, the Song found itself short of prospective soldiers and taxpayers, a problem that undermined the empire's military and economic viability. End quote. It would prove a problem that spiraled viciously on itself, compounding and growing ever worse. As the tax base and pool of military-aged

men dried up, soldiers became younger and older and less and less well-equipped. This meant, of course, that they'd be even less able to defend against the next attack, which would see even more people carried off and killed, and so on and so forth. According to one prefect's reports from Jiangling, and almost certainly a conservative estimate to try to allay panic at the court, at least 20% of the city's defense force was either too young or too old to meet normal military standards. Increasingly, over the course of the dynasty's final years, militias were given more and more responsibility for critical border defense as the imperial military apparatus further broke down, and with even deserters being offered pardon rather than facing punishment should they deign to return. Quote, it offered high office and generous rewards in the hope of winning back some of the martial talent lost to the enemy.

Nothing worked. A practical solution would have involved adoption of enemy tactics by harassing the northern border regions, carting off provisions, and snatching up young men for induction into the armed service. The Song did not do this. End quote. For virtually the whole of Duzong's troubled decade of rule, both Song and Mongol military strategy centered onto the besieged city of Xiangyang, sitting astride the Han River, a major tributary of the Yangtze. With its high walls and heavy defenses, Xiangyang sat squarely in the way of Kublai's plan to float his navy down into the Yangtze itself and then roll up the Song defensive lines all the way to Hangzhou. Both sides realized the central importance of the city,

and that its fate would likely be mirrored in the outcome of the war overall. As such, the Song military continually reinforced both the city itself as well as the other garrison towns up and down the Han River, while the Mongols committed to bolstering their encirclement of the city into an ever more impenetrable blockade. The standoff would last for more than five years. Commanding the Mongol siege effort was General Ah Ju, the grandson of Subutai the Great and the son of General Uryankadai. His was a truly daunting task. Davis writes, quote, fully surrounding Xiangyang posed immense obstacles, for the heavily defended city sat on the southern bank of the Han River and, when cut off by land from the south, could often turn for assistance to Fancheng, a town directly opposite on the Han River's northern bank, end quote.

Thus, cutting off Xiangyang from resupply would mean both the Mongols would have to simultaneously besiege the cities on both sides of the river and heavily patrol the river itself, all while holding off Chinese attempts to disrupt and break their lines from every direction, with the Song military, by 1271, throwing as many as 100,000 men into one such effort. It was slow, torturous going, but at last, in early 1273, Fan Cheng was overrun and its inhabitants slaughtered. Now truly without hope, after five years of bravely holding out, the governor of Xiangyang finally realized that all was truly lost. In order to prevent the fate of Fan Cheng from occurring to his city, in the third month of 1273, he surrendered Xiangyang at long last. The mighty bastion had

fallen. The way to the south was open. The Song imperial court immediately went into full-blown panic mode. On the heels of this great victory, Kublai Khan decided to capitalize on the Southerners' vulnerability and called a temporary halt to his planned invasion of Japan. Instead, he diverted those troops and resources to pressing the Khanate's advantage in bringing the Song to its knees. The declaration of a renewal of full-scale war would arrive at the Song court in the sixth month of the year. When the main thrust of the attack came just three months later, it was just as the Song officials had feared, straight down the gaping hole in their defenses that was the Han River as it fed into the Yangtze. The first target of the assault, led once again by General Aju, as well as Bayan of the Bahrain, was against yet another heavily

fortified target, this time Yingzhou, roughly 60 miles downriver from Xiangyang. Though it put up stiff resistance, by the year's end, Yingzhou and every other city down the length of the Han had been stormed by the Mongols, who were now able to cross the Yangtze at will and put their feared cavalry on the southern banks. There, a mere 350 miles from Hangzhou itself, they assembled and prepared to strike at the beating heart of the Song Dynasty. And then, it got worse. Scarcely one month after Kublai had announced his renewed campaign, at the height of summer in 1274, the 34-year-old Emperor Duzong took suddenly ill of, quote, a chronic infection, end quote, and died.

Historical records apparently offer no useful information about the nature of this illness, and it seems to have taken everyone at the palace quite by surprise. His only son by his empress, Zhao Xian, wasn't yet four years old, and yet was seen as the best or maybe only option for the throne, in spite of having two likewise young half-brothers by other consorts. Quote, For Chancellor Jia Sidao personally, from the west, the succession of a powerless child had even graver repercussions. End quote. For Chancellor Jia Sidao personally, this meant that in spite of all of his years of planning and preparation, he suddenly found himself on dangerously thin ice. He'd long cultivated favor with Duzong such that he had little to fear while the young emperor was alive.

Even after the disastrous loss of Xiangyang and the Han River garrisons, which many in the court blamed firmly on Jia and his supporters' incompetent command, Sidao had retained the emperor's favor. But that was no more. Though he, for now at least, retained his position, as the Grand Empress Dowager felt the need for continuity outweighed almost any other consideration in such unstable times, Chancellor Jia understood that he would need a big win if he were going to maintain his position in the post-Duzhong political world. As such, at 61 years old, he opted to personally lead a grand assault against the northern barbarians, to take virtually the totality of Song's strength and use it to push the Mongols

out of the south and back across the Yangtze once and for all. The target would be the recently captured city of Jiangzhou, in a counteroffensive that would cost a reported 100,000 ounces of gold, 500,000 ounces of silver, and 10 million strings of cash. To further intimidate the Mongol troops, the court reportedly placed under the general command of Jiasadao a million men, mostly naval forces. Intimidation of the enemy entailed some exaggeration of troop levels, so the boast of a million men cannot be taken at face value. Other sources inform us that the entire Song army contained no more than 700,000 regular soldiers, and surely the Song court did

not commit its whole army in a single campaign. Yuan sources suggest that Song invested 130,000 men in the battle, probably a more accurate assessment. Even so, 130,000 represented nearly one-fifth of the Song arms, an indication of the importance attached to this particular campaign. End quote. Yet for all that, the grand counter-assault to drive the Mongol menace back was scarcely even assembled before it was undone. The majority of the troops were placed under the direct command of General Sun Huchun,

who almost immediately came under attack by Bayan and Aju along the Yangtze. Though Sun's troops bore the attack for a time, they ultimately collapsed and were brutally routed, dooming the entire campaign then and there. Jia himself, only 25 miles or so from the decisive defeat, was forced to flee at top speed to Yangzhou. There, surely realizing that he was well and truly finished, he wrote to the capital, informing the court of the disaster and advising that they abandon Hangzhou at once for a more defensible location. For the time being, the Empress Dowager rejected the plea to take flight,

citing a fear of disturbing the people that such a move would likely create. Likewise, she also rejected the furious demands from many within the court, particularly the Assistant Chancellor, Chen Yizhong, a native of Wenzhou, that Jiasidao pay for his abject failure with his life. Nevertheless, he was immediately stripped of his titles and position and dismissed from office. But the bad news just kept rolling in. By the early months of 1275, cities up and down the Yangtze had been captured by the Mongols. This, in turn, touched off a round of defections and surrenders

from more than a dozen other major cities across the east, including Chuzhou, Nanjing, Zhenjiang, Changzhou, Wuxi, and Suzhou. Cities began capitulating without even a show of resistance as soon as the Mongol horde showed up outside. Quote, they were relinquished by civilian or military officers who, when not surrendering to the Mongols, had simply fled their posts. Desertion was not confined to the regional level. It infected the capital as well. Metropolitan officials began to flee, as did a particular councillor of the right, followed closely by three high-level executives of the Bureau of Military Affairs and numerous other officials at all levels of the bureaucracy.

Once again, a call was made that the capital should be relocated, this time by the chief commander of the palace guard, Han Zhen, an alleged ally of Jia Sidao. Furious, the assistant chancellor, Chen Yizhong, secretly ordered that the guard commander be beaten to death. This, however, caused a mutiny within the ranks of the palace guard, which, while it was quelled by the following morning, resulted in a sizable number of the guardsmen fleeing the capital and then defecting to the Mongols. It's impossible to miss both the frustration and icy hopelessness of the approaching inevitable doom in the words written by the Empress Dowager Xie in a notice posted on her orders across the palace.

She said, quote, Our dynasty, for over 300 years, has treated scholar-officials with propriety. While the new successor and I have met with assorted family hardships, you subjects, both high and low, have offered no proposals whatsoever for saving the empire. Within the capital, officials forsake their commissions and vacate posts. Away from the capital, responsible officers relinquish their seals and abandon cities. End quote. Fate would prove no kinder to Jia Sidao, and the court wasted much of its precious little remaining time debating just what should be done with him for his failure to stave off the Mongols. In spite of the Empress's initial insistence on leniency for the disgraced former

Chancellor, repeated calls by the likes of Chen Yizhong for Sidao's death resulted in escalating series of punishments against both him and his family. Banishment, followed by property confiscation, and finally on October 1275, Jia Sidao was taken into custody by a court-designated sheriff and then assassinated, most likely without explicit court authorization, since later the sheriff responsible for the murder would be arraigned and executed for the act. Still, Jia Sidao's death ruffled very few feathers within the remaining Song bureaucracy. He wasn't death much as he'd been in life, an outsider, unloved and unmissed.

Quote, Like Han Touzhou seven decades earlier, Jia Sidao had become a convenient scapegoat for a time without hope. End quote. The Song's final defenses have been breached, and its government now lies in disarray, officials either at each other's throats within the palace or fleeing into the dead of night, while the Mongols gallop outside, waiting for the gates to open before them. The four-year-old emperor and the sixty-five-year-old Grand Empress Dowager still sit the throne, but as powerless to stop the unfolding tragedy around them

as their respective ages might suggest. And so next time, we will, once and for all, bring the song to its finale. Thanks for listening. History isn't black and white, yet too often it's presented as such. Grey History, The French Revolution is a long-form history podcast dedicated to exploring the ambiguities and nuances of the past.

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