The History of China - #173 - S. Song 15: Swan Song

Episode Date: September 7, 2019

Hangzhou is surrounded by the Mongol Yuan army, and is soon to fall. When the child-emperor and the Empress Dowager are taken captive, it will fall to the last two princes of House Zhao to flee to the... islands and archipelagos of the Deep South, if they’re to stand any chance at all of keeping the flame of the Song from guttering out forever. Time Period Covered: 1275-1279 CE Southern Song: Grand Empress Dowager Xie Empress Dowager Chuan Emperor Zhao Xian (Gong of Song) [r.1274-1276, d. 1323] Emperor Zhao Shi (Duanzong) [r. 1276-1278] Emperor Zhao Bing [r. 1278-1279] Chancellor Chen Yizhong Mongol Yuan Dynasty: Khubilai, Mongol Khan & Emperor of Yuan General Bayan, Commander of the Southern Campaign General Atzuhan Admiral Dong Wenping Lt. Menkhutai Lt. Fan Wenhu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:43 Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 173, Swan Song We last left the southern Song perched upon the very precipice of destruction. Its defenses breached, its navy outmatched, its armies crumbling, its officials fleeing in the dead of night, and its capital of Hangzhou feeling directly for the very first time
Starting point is 00:01:13 the tug of the Mongol cord around the collective necks. This time, then, we'll pull the lever and swing open the trapdoor waiting below. The execution is about to commence. The song will sing its last today. We pick up with the rains of spring giving way to the stifling heat and humidity of the southern summer along the southern banks of the Yangtze River.
Starting point is 00:01:38 This changeover of the seasons, though uncomfortable in itself, did manage to buy, at least for one last time, the Song government a bit of breathing space. Though vastly reinforced by ethnic Han Chinese troops, the Mongol commanders could still scarcely tolerate the oppressive summer weather of the southlands, and as such, tended to still withdraw from the most recently acquired cities and positions in favor of consolidating back in the at least slightly more tolerable temperatures of the north. This allowed, in the short term at least, a chance for the Song to rebound and at least appear to regain something of their old
Starting point is 00:02:16 footing. This was by no means some total reconquest of the territories seized by the northerners. Even having pulled back for the height of the summer, the Mongols still retained firm control over the far south and westerlands, and the popular understanding was still very much in their favor. This is evidenced by the Song's ongoing strategy of attempting to lure defectors back to their side by means of first rewards and promotions, but when that fell flat, deciding once again to threaten punishment instead, though to equally little effect. The Song could therefore do little more than try to fortify and hold the much-diminished
Starting point is 00:02:53 territories they yet held, and to attempt to stave off the Mongol drive eastward from Sichuan that would be coming as surely as the cool autumn winds. The bleed of men, material, and territory had slowed in the heat of 1275, but it had no means been stemmed completely, and summer would prove all too brief a respite. The recommencement of the campaigning season would open on the Yangtze River itself, where at Jiaoshan City, the Song navy attempted to blockade the river with a massive fleet and thereby deny the Mongol flotilla access to the sea.
Starting point is 00:03:29 When the Chinese navy arrived at their port, they lashed together their huge fleet of large ships with anchors and chains and then placed the now immobilized fleet under heavy guard. This would prove of little benefit, however, when a far smaller Mongol naval force struck in a coordinated blow with land forces against the moored fleet. Mongol incendiaries and fire arrows burned the greater part of the Song fleet before any response could be mounted, while the Chinese defenders on shore were quickly routed before the Mongol attack. Quote,
Starting point is 00:04:01 The Mongols won an overwhelming victory and captured 700 seagoing ships, which they could now deploy on the open sea. The Song lost 16,000 men, and as many were taken captive. End quote. The major focus of this phase of Mongol operations was the city of Yangzhou, near the mouth of the Yangtze Delta, which provided access to the sea. It had been one of the few cities the Song armies had managed to recapture over the summer of 1275, and its strategic importance was evident to both sides. In autumn, the Mongols would commit to a full-fledged attack of the city in the hopes of retaking it, but the Song defenses were stronger than anticipated. In spite of repeated attempts to force the city, Yangzhou would actually hold out through the autumn of 1275,
Starting point is 00:04:48 and longer than even the capital city itself. Even so, such singular displays of valor were more the exceptions that proved the rule, that the southern defenders were already well beyond their exhaustion point, decimated by repeated Mongol attacks, and fundamentally unable muster in sufficient numbers to stem the northern tide. During this lull in the campaign, at his summer capital in Chengdu, Kublai Khan had met with the commander in charge of prosecuting the final stages of the war against the Song, his great general Bai Yan, to formulate his strategy in meeting out the Chinese regime's final death blow. It was no longer a question of whether the South would fall to Kublai's horde.
Starting point is 00:05:29 The simple arithmetic of that question had long ago been solved. But rather, in what way the self-proclaimed founder of the Yuan dynasty would at last definitively seize the mandate of heaven from the crumbling Zhao clan. For his grandfather Genghis, such a consideration would have had only one possible answer. Total annihilation, or at least near enough. Yet this Mongol Khan, and the claimant of the Chinese throne, had a markedly different view of the world than his grandfather, and of rulership itself. One that, if certainly not the way of Genghis, the punishment of God,
Starting point is 00:06:06 that his grandfather, at least toward the end of his life, may well have approved of. Kublai, for all his ferocity, understood that if he were to rule China in its totality, and with any sense of legitimacy, there was a certain way that these things were done. Indiscriminate slaughter was therefore but one tool in his arsenal, and often no longer even the most effective one. There were, as it stood, more civilized ways of achieving the same outcome, and such ways would help him enhance the image that he was cultivating already as an enlightened, benevolent monarch, heaven's own son, a ruler to be dutifully submitted to by all, rather than a terrible barbarian bent on nothing more than annihilation and death to be resisted to the last. Kublai
Starting point is 00:06:54 meant to shear the wool from China, not to skin it alive. There would, however, still need to be proper motivation against the vestiges of the tottering southern regime to induce them to that same conclusion. As such, Kublai ordered that when the weather turned more favorable, that General Bayan direct a merciless three-pronged campaign against the south, basing his operations out of Nanjing, and then pressing inward against Hangzhou and the imperial clan from the west, north, and even from the eastern sea. Therefore, upon his return to the warfront that December, Bayan directed his efforts against the riverside city of Changzhou, besieging the city for a month before finally capturing it. Indiscriminate slaughter was no longer the only tool in the Mongols' kit, but it still had its uses. In order to induce the quick surrender of the surrounding cities
Starting point is 00:07:46 up and down the banks of the Yangtze, the population of Changzhou were one and all put to the sword. The horrific slaughter worked exactly as intended. Understanding that resistance would mean the same fate meted out upon them, the nearby cities were torn apart from within as the garrison commanders, determined to resist, were turned on by their own civilian populations now desperate for nothing more than survival. As the year of 1275 wound toward its end, the strategic pass of Dusong, just 40 miles west of the capital, fell to the Mongol advance. Meanwhile, to the east, Jiangyang City surrendered to the Mongol Armada, providing them free access via the Yangtze to Hangzhou directly.
Starting point is 00:08:27 Soon, the cities around Lake Tai to Hangzhou's north likewise fell. The Song capital was being steadily converged upon by three directions, with only the south still offering any hope of escape. And now the Song government had to once again wrestle with the decision of whether or not to make good on that escape route or to stand firm. It was a more difficult decision than one might expect. Davis writes, quote, The remaining Song leadership from Linan, Hangzhou, had to decide whether to retreat further south or to stand firm. With a minimum of from 30,000 to 40,000 troops available and irregulars numbering several times that, defeat was far from inevitable. The alternative was to negotiate by making some irrefusably generous offer and stall for time.
Starting point is 00:09:15 It would be that tactic that the Song government would finally seek to employ. Diplomacy and negotiation. Though they would wind up doing so in such a self-defeating and incomprehensibly ham-handed way that it almost beggars belief. First, the Song finally released the Mongol ambassador, Hao Jing, who'd languished as a political prisoner of war for the prior decade and a half on the shakiest of pretexts. Alright, so not off to a terrible start here. It's always nice to release a hostage as a show of good faith, right? Well, then came the Song embassy to the camp of General Baiyan with official tidings from the Song imperial court and an offer of peace. It was, in essence,
Starting point is 00:09:58 withdraw all of your armies, without condition, from everywhere you have illegally seized south of the Yangtze River, and we'll give you the shiny penny. Yeah, it was more than a penny, of course, but it was a sum deemed to be a modest payment of tribute, at best, which is to say, a slap in the face. It was, of course, summarily rejected by Bayan, who insisted that nothing less than unconditional surrender of the entire regime would suffice. Even so, a month or so later, Kublai dispatched an emissary of his own to the Song. What his orders or offer to the Chinese government might have been, however, are unknown, since he was unceremoniously murdered at the border by officers who he might charitably call over-eager.
Starting point is 00:10:47 Apparently realizing the magnitude of this particular misstep, the Song government took an uncharacteristic step of outright apologizing for the ambassador's death, and then promised that it would not happen again, and sent a new round of envoys to Bayan's military camp. Yet, when Bayan magnanimously returned the gesture, the Mongol embassy was once again cut down at the border. It was, all in all, just a stunningly stupid set of circumstances and decisions. Time and again, the Mongols seemed to be moving towards some kind of negotiated peace with the Song government, and yet time and again, the Chinese, often, and without any apparent sense of irony, concluded that their foes were operating in bad faith and then either arrested or killed them outright. Meanwhile,
Starting point is 00:11:32 the long-understood usage of diplomacy and negotiations from the Chinese end was as little more than a delaying tactic, without any real expectation that it even could lead to a real agreement between the two warring sides, much less that any kind of widespread acceptance of the idea of such a brokered peace, with likely massive financial and territorial penalties imposed, would have been at all acceptable to the southern regime. But yeah, sure, it's the Mongols negotiating in bad faith. Right. In fact, the top-tier Song government was still so vehemently anti-negotiation that it would be they who would delay the resumption of diplomatic talks until the end of the year.
Starting point is 00:12:10 And by that point, the Mongol campaign against Hangzhou itself was truly underway. Once again, things went nowhere, as the Mongols demanded unconditional surrender, whereas the Song were still unwilling to offer anything more than the most perfunctory of concessions. The Song's situation deteriorated rapidly into the new year of 1276. Under General Baiyang's command, the Mongol forces continued to press in against the Chinese capital from all three directions. Baiyang himself set about conquering the northern outskirts of Hangzhou, including the nearby cities of Jiaxing, Anzhi, and Chang'an Garrison in the capital suburbs. At the same time, the Mongol admiral, Dong Wenping, made an
Starting point is 00:12:51 amphibious landing on the northern coast of the capital, and approached the city via the northeastern bay. The third prong of the Mongol trident was led by General Azuhan, who closed in from the west along the Yangtze's southern banks. By the midpoint of the first lunar month, that is to say, mid-February, the three forces had converged at Mount Gauteng in the capital suburbs to prepare their final assault. Within the city walls, news was pouring in, not just of the massing armies of barbarians outside of the gates themselves, but also of the further defeats that the Song armies were suffering all across the ravaged empire. From the heart of Hunan to northern Guangxi in the south and all the way up and down the Yangtze River, cities that had held it for months were finally
Starting point is 00:13:34 giving way before the onslaught, or surrendering outright to avoid further slaughter. Just like that, the Mongols had total control over the Yangtze River Valley. Such news, as we might well expect, triggered a fresh wave of defections and desertions from the leading civil servants within the capital. When the requests to resign their posts were rejected, such officials had the tendency to simply not appear in court one morning, and never reply to any messages commanding their appearance thereafter. They'd slipped off into the dark of night with whatever they could carry of value, hoping to find some refuge and to ride out the coming storm. Military defections were likewise a severe problem,
Starting point is 00:14:13 with some troops surrendering their arms to the invaders out of fear, while others, especially the command officers, doing so more out of sheer frustration with the recalcitrant bungling of Chen Yizhong, who still refused to even plan for an evacuation of the capital. When the court's leading commanders proposed that the royal family prepare to board ships in anticipation of a tactical retreat, Chen vehemently opposed the move, "...proportedly because he still hoped the negotiated settlement could be worked out, but perhaps because he could not accept the notion of defeat."
Starting point is 00:14:44 Even at the very end, Chen could only think of offering the Mongols meager concessions. could be worked out, but perhaps because he could not accept the notion of defeat. Even at the very end, Chen could only think of offering the Mongols meager concessions. It would take one more, and one more failed, diplomatic mission to General Bayan's camp for even Chen Yizhong to realize that the jig was well and truly up. When word of the mission's failure was received by the court in early February, Chen at last recommended that the royal family be evacuated, to which the emperor dowager Xie, as she'd done before, opposed it on the grounds of it upsetting the population and leading to civil disorder. Chen urged her to reconsider, and then went home, packed his travel bag, and disappeared into the night, riding for his hometown, Wenzhou. When the morning of February 5th dawned, and disappeared into the night riding for his hometown, Wenzhou. When the morning of February 5th dawned and Chen was nowhere to be found, Emperor Xie at last
Starting point is 00:15:31 realized that the idea of getting out while there was still time was a pretty good idea indeed. It would turn out, however, that her time was up. Hangzhou was by this point entirely surrounded and cut off from any route of escape, a reality that seemed to only slowly dawn on the imperial household in the weeks to come. Finally, on February 17th, the Empress Dowager accepted her family's lot, and by the 22nd, had dispatched an envoy to negotiate the city's and the Emperor's surrender to the Mongol commander. General Bayan replied that, as before, nothing less than total and unconditional surrender was acceptable to his lord and master, the true emperor of China, Kublai. This would be, in the end, the final word of the matter. Still, it would take another month, until late March, before the Mongol general formally entered the city to take command.
Starting point is 00:16:26 The reasons for this are very interesting, and so let's take a further look. The campaign against Hangzhou and the Song Ruo court overall was among the most carefully devised and least violent conquests in Mongol history. Discipline was exceedingly tight among the three armies Bayan oversaw in overtaking the southern capital, and their movements were carefully directed by the general himself. On February 5th, for instance, he specifically forbade any of his soldiers from entering the capital and threatened severe punishment for any transgressors. Only after he'd received the Song Emperor's formal surrender did he dispatch two of his trusted lieutenants, Menggu Dai and Fan Wan Hu, to the city proper to prepare for an orderly transition of power,
Starting point is 00:17:11 purposely keeping back his two more powerful commanders of the other armies, lest they might decide to meet out a more classic style of Mongol justice in the city. The palace eunuchs were rounded up and then instructed to begin gathering up the valuables within the imperial palace, as well as all of the imperial paraphernalia, including the great jade seal of the realm. It was a process that would prove to take a further week and a half. But when it was finally done, as Davis writes of Bayan's triumphal entry into the city, quote, on the 28th of March, nearly two months after his arrival in the city suburbs, Bayan paraded through the gates of Linan as conqueror of the once great Song City.
Starting point is 00:17:50 Such restraint may not have been expected of a warrior famed for depopulation of entire cities, but the circumstances of the occupation of the Song capital made it expedient. That expedience was centered less from any real concern for loss of life, for instance, than from the prospect that, if general looting were allowed to occur, that the valuable treasures from the imperial palace might go missing. Given the highly significant symbolic meaning of such pieces to Bayan and his master to the north in Shangdu, that would have been an unacceptable outcome. As for the fate of the imperial family itself,
Starting point is 00:18:26 that had been decided as well during the strategic meeting the year prior. In exchange for the total surrender to Kublai, the Zhao royal family would be afforded a rare gift from the Khan himself, their family temples, as well as their lives, that they might continue to offer sacrifices to their ancestors in accordance with Chinese beliefs. It seems almost certain that these assurances were what compelled Dowager Empress Xie to finally accept Bayan's demand to surrender in February of 1276. She was, after all, well into her 60s, and a woman beside.
Starting point is 00:18:59 And the emperor, well, he was barely six years old. What did the two of them truly care for the trappings of quote-unquote imperial power that they would never see and could never use? So long as Kublai would spare them, well, so be it. The tides of fate had spoken, and who were they to stand against them? The captured Zhao clan members would be, along with the other palace residents, transported to the far north. First, to the still-under-construction new capital of Dadu, which is modern Beijing, and then on to Chengdu, the all-capital, in order to ensure that they were kept safe from the Mongol soldiers on
Starting point is 00:19:37 the 600-plus-mile journey north from Hangzhou, by an order that the palace eunuchs be roped together in a circle around the other captives to act as a sort of physical barrier between the two groups. Now this does sound odd, but then again, that had been quite literally their function in palace life as well, to act as a literal barrier, an intermediary, between the palace women of the inner court and the waiting world outside. So why not now again? Not everyone in the palace was quite so stoically accepting of this prospect of becoming the slaves of the great Khan Kublai, or of being triumphally paraded through the UN dynasty's capital cities like so much war booty. Quote, many palace women chose suicide en route. Other palace women committed suicide after they'd arrived in Peking out of fidelity to spouses long deceased. In fact, all across the capital and the surrounding
Starting point is 00:20:32 regions of Song, suicide was a common, and commonly unreported, way out for those who assumed the worst had come, and simply wished to avoid needless pain and humiliation. Entire families would poison themselves, while individuals routinely hanged or strangled themselves, with some even choosing to starve themselves to death. The actual toll of such suicides across the South in the months both preceding and following the Mongol capture and occupation of Hangzhou will never be truly known, but it was certainly considerable. Even so, most palace attendants accepted Mongol bondage, and Bayan was kind enough to spare members of the imperial family the humiliation of donning chains as they journeyed north.
Starting point is 00:21:18 Now, you'll surely remember that such forced removal and relocation was far from strange or unique across Chinese history at the turn of one dynasty to another. Much to the contrary, it was almost exactly two form. The Mongol iteration of this ceremonial dethronement was, however, notable in a few respects. First of all, its size. Now, you might think that I mean it was much larger than normal, but the opposite is actually true. Whereas previous dynastic overthrows often saw tens or even hundreds of thousands of captives transported from one region of the empire to another,
Starting point is 00:21:55 Bayan oversaw the removal of no more than 1,000 people from Hangzhou, some of whom, such as aspiring students of the Imperial Academy, seeing clearly which way the career winds were blowing, actually volunteered to make the trip. Moreover, eventually the vast majority of those brought north would be ultimately allowed to return south if they wanted, and in essence resume their normal lives. Though many, especially the prominent figures, were encouraged heavily to remain north,
Starting point is 00:22:24 and I will point out that my source does say that they were encouraged, not compelled. As for the imperial family itself, Kublai had given his word that the Zhao clan would come to no harm, and he very much seems to have meant to keep it. The child emperor, Zhao Xian, upon arriving before the emperor of Yuan, was given a new lesser title, Yinggu Guo Gong, or the Duke of Ying, and was thereafter married to an unidentified noble girl of the Borjigin clan, with whom he'd eventually sire one son. He would eventually then be shuffled off from Shangdu and allowed to quote-unquote retire to Tibet with his wife to live a more or less monastic life of Buddhist contemplation. A similar fate awaited his mother, the Empress Dowager Tuan, though on account of her frail and failing health, she was allowed to delay her own journey to the Yuan capitals by a further
Starting point is 00:23:16 five months, arriving at last in Chengdu later that June. She'd live until 1309, and once she died, was buried alongside her mother-in-law, the Grand Empress Dowager Xie, outside of Beijing to full imperial ceremony and honors. For the rest of his life, Kublai would honor his promise and ensure that the Zhao bloodline lived on, even if it was at the ends of the earth and under his own constant surveillance. The great Mongol Emperor of Yuan had not managed to capture every last scion of House Zhao, however. In particular, following the final disastrous peace mission to the camp of Bayan in February of 1276, the two other sons of the late emperor Du Zong, the princes Zhao Shi and Zhao Bing, were able to make good their escape from the besieged capital city and
Starting point is 00:24:05 flee to the far south in the care of their respective mothers, a handful of faithful court officials, servants, and close relatives, as well as a contingent of the palace guard. Though they were, like their soon-to-be-captured half-brother, the Emperor Gong, just young children, four and seven respectively, they were already seen as perhaps the final possible hope for the continuation of the Song dynasty in any form. Again from Davis, quote, The two children departed Linan around 8th of February, and in the nick of time, for within a matter of days the Mongol armies sealed off the city. Dowager Empress Xie may have authorized the boys' assignment to regional posts, but she clearly had not authorized their departure, for she dispatched messengers demanding the convoy's return.
Starting point is 00:24:52 Her demands, if they ever even reached the fleeing caravan, would go unheeded, for there would be no return, and nothing to return to. By this point, the Mongol navy had already taken precautions so as to not repeat their costly mistake as they had made against the Jin dynasty. That is, of allowing the rulers freedom of the seas by which they might effect a southward escape. Virtually every sea route and waterway was under heavy patrol, making them thereby impassable. Every route that is, except moving up the Qiantang River towards Wuzhou, which is modern Jinhua in Zhejiang province, and then proceeding carefully overland south to safety. Quote, it was a hazardous escape, and Mongol pursuit forced the fugitives into the mountains for a week. But their evasive tactics succeeded, and they reached the coastal city of Wenzhou in southern Zhejiang province.
Starting point is 00:25:46 There, the group rested, replenished their military and naval forces, and set sail for Fuzhou." There they would arrive by mid-May, 1276. 400 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. Listen to season one to hear about England's first attempts at empire building, in Ireland, in North America, and in the Caribbean, the first steps of the East India Company, and the political battles between King and Parliament. Listen to Season 2 to hear about the chaotic years of civil war,
Starting point is 00:26:33 revolution, and regicide which rocked the Three Kingdoms and the Fledgling Empire. In Season 3, we see how Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell ruled the powerful Commonwealth, and challenged the Dutch and the Spanish for the wealth and power of the Americas and Asia. Learn the history of the British Empire by listening to Pax Britannica everywhere you find your podcasts, or go to pod.link slash pax. News, as it so often does, spread quickly, that two of the Emperor Duzong's sons had survived and were free in the southlands, rallying resistance to the Mongol occupation. Across the empire, loyalist uprisings sprang up in support of the Zhao clan,
Starting point is 00:27:12 with one group, purportedly as large as 40,000 men, even ambushing the retinue taking the captured Emperor Gong and his grandmother north as it moved along the Grand Canal. Although when the Dowager Empress refused to support their efforts, it quickly faded away after a brief scuffle. It's fairly easy to understand why Empress Chuan did not wish to risk supporting the loyalists. She and her son were already in the Mongols' power, after all, and more or less resigned to their fates. Very little reason, therefore, to make Kublai Khan rethink his assurances toward them by betraying their own offer of surrender for little more than the shadow of a hope.
Starting point is 00:27:49 In spite of this failure to free their captive child emperor, Song loyalist fighters continued to rally to the cause that China was not yet lost. They centered around the far southwestern provinces of Fujian and Guangnan, the southern part of modern Guangdong. As with the prevailing sense of despair and hopelessness that had washed over the Song earlier that year, so too did this new sense of hope and further resolve to fight on now spread across the south. For the Mongols, this was both a shock and a disappointment. It seems that they'd been counting on being able to strike the head from their foe, and that the body would then simply collapse on its own. There had been no prepared plan for a major drive against the Deep South, and they seemed to have thought that there would be no rogue element of the Zhao clan for the Chinese to rally around. Yet for all that,
Starting point is 00:28:39 here it was nonetheless. On June 14th, 1276, therefore, ensconced safely in the protective mountains of Fuzhou, the seven-year-old Zhao Shi was elevated and enthroned as the second-to-last Emperor of Song. It was a moment of rallying, a moment of hope, a moment where it seemed that maybe, just maybe, there might be a new dawn. And then that moment passed. By that following autumn, the Mongol generals Aduhan and Dongwan Ping had renewed their relentless drive southward in a combined land-sea operation aimed at squeezing the fugitive Song court
Starting point is 00:29:16 from both east and west. By winter, the Mongols had seized northern Fujian, prompting the Song court to once again take flight. From Fuzhou, they boarded ships and sailed even further south, first to Quanzhou, and then a scattering of towns and cities along eastern Guangdong, moving toward Guangzhou city proper. Yet a permanent safe haven continued to elude the fugitive court, and their flight across the south was harried at every step by the relentless Azzihan and Dong Wanping. Quote, Unlike the half-year's respite at Fuzhou, which afforded Song strategists precious time to regroup
Starting point is 00:29:53 and reassess, subsequent lodgings proved brief. For a year and a half, from early 1277 to mid-1278, the ship-bound court meandered off the coast of Guangnan, disembarking at countless towns and outposts in the vicinity of Guangzhou. Under constant enemy pressure, it spent no more than a month or two at each stop. Territories seized by Song loyalists across the south were quickly retaken by the Mongol armies. It became clear, however, that the Song court had pinned all of its hopes on being able to hold Guangzhou itself, the most economically and culturally prosperous city in the whole of the south. As such, when retaking the Pearl River port city for the fourth time in late 1278, the Mongol commanders were sure this time to permanently secure the region
Starting point is 00:30:41 against any further trouble by the Song, while also inflicting mass slaughters as a terror tactic across other southern holdouts, such as Xianghua, Fujian, Chaozhou, and Guangdong itself. These had the desired effect of further suppressing support and enthusiasm for the fugitive Song court. More and more, defeatism gripped even the most ardent supporters of the Song cause, with some high officials even being recorded as having frequently been caught openly weeping at the futility of their cause. When forced out of Guangzhou for the final time due to an outbreak of an epidemic in late 1277, the court was forced to flee even further south to a small island near modern Macau called Qing'ao, its eighth stop in less than a
Starting point is 00:31:26 year. The idea of fleeing all the way to Vietnam was briefly entertained by several in the court, though this was eventually given up as being impractical, while still other officials, once again, began deserting in the dead of night, disappearing out to sea, often never to be seen again. Here at Qing'ao Island, spirits were even further dampened when the child emperor Zhao Shi's ship sank and the boy nearly drowned. Though spared from immediate death, Zhao Shi would never recover and would die mid-May the following year, 1278, and not yet ten years old, on Kangzhou Island.
Starting point is 00:32:03 Ultimately, his body would be carried with the retinue to be interred at what would prove to be the Song court's final bastion, the tiny island in the South Sea then known as Yaishan. It would be his six-year-old half-brother, Zhao Bing, who would succeed him, although by this point, many within what was left of the court considered simply disbanding it altogether rather than seeing this farce all the way through. After all, a third child king in as many years was hardly an auspicious sign for the future. Still, after heavy debate, the proponents of the succession won out. The boy would be enthroned. Yaishan was to be the Song dynasty's last stand. The remaining leadership appears to have assumed from early on that the aimless itinerancy needed to come to an end. The island, located just off
Starting point is 00:32:50 the coast, around about 25 miles west of modern Macau, was part of Xinhui County, and about 60 miles south from Guangzhou itself. Largely mountainous, Yaishan contained a stretch of relatively flat and moderately hilly land. It was protected to the east and west by large precipitous islands, from which its name, Yaishan, or Cliff Hills, derives. These tiny islets served as a surveillance post and obstructed passage for intruding vessels, while shallow waters inhibited any large-scale amphibious approach from the north. Another strategic advantage was the island's proximity to the coast, which facilitated immediate communication between the court and its remnant armies on the mainland. Once established at Yaishan,
Starting point is 00:33:37 the Song court quickly got to work, apparently rapidly constructing more than 30 buildings that at least were termed palaces, as well as some 3,000 other structures to house the purported 200,000 Song loyalists within them. Now, this is, as you might well expect, a very dubious figure, as it seems highly unlikely that even assuming successful recruiting efforts across the wide spans of Guangdong, Guangdong, and Guangxi, that they could have even scrounged together, much less maintained a force of hundreds of thousands at this point. Davis guesses that perhaps the real figure was something more like a quarter of that stated size, although it should
Starting point is 00:34:16 be noted that even a force of 50,000 would represent a real threat to the Mongol hegemony over the south. Though the Song court was now re-established at the further southern reaches of the known world at Yaishan, this tiny islet did not yet represent the final bastion of loyalist resistance. Owing to Kublai's highly successful refocusing of his war effort onto the eastern front, that had left the far-flung Sichuan in the west, which had long been the center of Mongol destruction and plunder, relatively untouched during the 1270s. It would therefore be the cities of Chengdu, Hezhou, and Chongqing that would be among the final redoubts
Starting point is 00:34:57 of Song resistance on the mainland. They'd continue to hold out in some cases for as long as three years past the fall of Hangzhou and the flight of the imperial family, in most cases only succumbing to devastating droughts and famine rather than enemy force of arms. It makes for an interesting what-if scenario, therefore, had the Song court managed to make its way to Sichuan and rally resistance from there. That remains, however, a historical counterfactual. Thus it would be in 1278 that Kublai would authorize what would be the last of his campaigns against the Song remnant. The land portion of this operation would be overseen this time by a Tangut commander called Li Heng, who had already proven his military bona fides by successfully taking and holding Jiangxi province the previous year. Meanwhile, a naval amphibious force would sail down the coast under the command of Admiral Zhang Hengfang, a notable choice because he was ethnically Chinese,
Starting point is 00:35:54 which was very unusual in itself for the Yuan dynasty to be appointed to such a position of power, as well as because he was a blood relative of the general commander of the Song resistance. Davis writes, quote, the assignment underscored the increased isolation of the southern Song loyalists and the extent to which they had sacrificed home and family by refusing to submit, end quote. By the end of that year, the Song had been effectively pushed out of their holdouts across the coastal prefectures of Zhangzhou, Chaozhou, and Huizhou, which is to say pretty much everywhere along the sea but tiny Yishan itself, with the inland loyalist forces now well and truly cut off and thereafter trapped. Even this last mainland force was ambushed and trapped in early February of 1279,
Starting point is 00:36:43 then overrun as its commander attempted, and failed, to commit suicide. The final assault on Yaishan was thereafter prepared, to be launched from Guangzhou itself. The Mongol armada would set out at the end of February, toward the Song Island citadel. Doubtless informed of the coming apocalypse, the Song commanders on Yaishan had done all they could in the interim to prepare to resist to the very last. According to reports, they formed a line of a thousand ocean-going boats and ships. Once they were anchored, maneuvered by his crack troops, and protected against arrows and incendiary missiles by matting along their sides,
Starting point is 00:37:23 the Song emperor and his court went on board a large vessel in the center of the line. The imperial presence was intended to strengthen the resolve of the war-weary and homesick soldiers, but it may also have been designed to facilitate the court's swift flight should the need arise." The Mongol navy seemed to have anticipated that last possibility. They knew well by this point, after all, of the Song Emperor's propensity to run away when threatened. As such, their first move was to seal off the major escape routes to the north and west before they began engaging and harassing the Song naval forces from the south. Aboard the Mongol command ship, the captured commander of that final Song mainland force, the general who failed to commit suicide, was pressed by the
Starting point is 00:38:05 Mongol admiral to plead with the Song navy to surrender peacefully. The general, however, flatly refused to so betray his emperor and nation, and when attempts to set the Song ships ablaze, as they'd done in the Yangtze River, failed, thanks to the precautions taken before the battle, something of a stalemate set in. The Mongol admiral, it seemed, was wary of committing his whole force to the uncertainty of an all-out assault, especially since, at least numerically, the Song navy was larger than his own. Indeed, they opted to blockade the Song navy and Yaishan itself, a waterfront siege that would last for about a half month. Now, it might seem strange that a siege would only last for a half month,
Starting point is 00:38:58 given that the Song had repeatedly shown itself capable of holding on to its fortresses for months, if not years at a time. However, the Song forces at Yaishan had steeled themselves for an all-out final attack. Had one presented itself, they indeed might have even prevailed. But what they were not, and indeed could not, have been prepared for was the prospect of an extended siege. With the island itself so small and overcrowded with loyalists, and with few, if indeed at this point any, remaining supply depots or supply lines to draw from, even if they could penetrate the Mongol blockade, supplies and fresh water quickly ran out for the Song defenders. Quickly driven mad with thirst, eventually some of the sailors began drinking the sea water directly,
Starting point is 00:39:36 falling even further ill and to death. Finally sensing that their enemy had reached a breaking point, on March 19th, Admiral Zhang Hongfang changed tactics and attacked the Song navy from the north and south simultaneously. Davis writes, the sad truth, that they had lost the bulk of their navy, and this time there was no escape. Apparently wishing to spare the child emperor the humiliation of capture and captivity, Lu Xiaofu dressed himself in his full court regalia, brought forth the imperial seals, and then the emperor himself. Grasping both tightly, all three then plunged into the sea and to their deaths. The last scion of the imperial house of Zhao, Zhao Bing, the 18th and final emperor of the Song dynasty, perished in the South Sea at just six years old, and after a nominal reign of just 313 days.
Starting point is 00:40:47 The counselor and the child emperor would hardly be the only ones to choose such patriotic suicide rather than surrender. According to both the Song and Yuan dynastic histories, more than 100,000 followed their last emperor into the sea, with only about 100 choosing to surrender themselves to the triumphant Mongols. Stories tell that when Zhao Bing's mother, the Empress Dowager, learned of her son's fate, she too opted to join him, and her lifeless form would later be found and buried on the beaches of Yaishan, before the one who buried her threw himself into the sea as well. It's all very melodramatic, heroic, and romantic, and as such we do well to remain very skeptical of such tellings. Eyewitness accounts of the last few months of the Song at Yaishan are, as we might well expect, few and far between. Most of the reports we do have come from the Mongol commanders, who are characteristically terse and military-minded.
Starting point is 00:41:45 Those few survivors of the tragedy at Yaishan, who were sympathetic to the Song's lost cause, are almost uniformly, quote, too politically passionate to be wholly credible as historical sources, end quote, with numbers and figures almost certainly wildly exaggerated. It's hardly credible that the Song court during its last desperate days possessed either thousands of warships or hundreds of thousands of soldiers. The fact that many thousands of bodies were found floating on the sea need not represent suicide, but perhaps simply battle casualties after all. Still, every fable is constructed from a core of truth, even if later exaggerated. Malwa records indicate that their force strength at about 30,000 to 40,000 troops,
Starting point is 00:42:25 indicating that a Song force of perhaps as many as 50,000 to 60,000 wouldn't have been unrealistic. Mass suicide, though the numbers were certainly inflated at Yaishan, had already been demonstrably shown as a widespread response of Song soldiers and civilians alike to imminent defeat and capture by the Mongols. Perhaps the most interesting question we might ask, therefore, of the defeat and mass suicide is not how many or did it happen, because to some extent it certainly did, but rather why? As in, why here? Why now? Why did resistance so stiffen at Yaishan Island to the point of suicidal martyrdom, but not at Hangzhou? The traditional answer to this question has been little more than sheer
Starting point is 00:43:12 incompetence by the imperial court at Hangzhou, which led the populace and the soldiery itself to lose hope and thereafter simply accept their fate. But that's problematic, since it's not as though the Song imperial leadership at Yaishan was somehow better than it had been at Hangzhou. They were defending at this point with about a third-string imperial heir who was seven and at the edge of the world, already facing near-certain doom. There was no win situation at Yaishan, let's just be clear. There had been fundamentally way more hope at Hangzhou than the final island redoubt, and yet significantly less resistance. Another possibility was that it was maybe the composition of the court that affected the decision-making processes and the morale of
Starting point is 00:43:58 the government and army overall. It's certainly not the average Joe who made the journey from the North all the way to the Southern Island. Instead, we're talking about a dedicated, cohesive, and thoroughly determined hardcore of loyalists who were clearly willing to put their own lives and fortunes and even families and connections on the line for the sake of preserving the dynasty. Everyone else by this point had had the good sense, or you might call it cowardice, or simple self-preservation instinct, to run off into the dark of night and hide or surrender or otherwise find some method of survival. The fall of Hangzhou, likewise, while terrible, still meant that there were other places to turn and hide, to reform their resistance, and to fight back from. There just wasn't the sense of inevitable, immediate doom at Hangzhou as there was at Yaishan. At the island, the Song
Starting point is 00:44:54 Dynasty and everyone there knew that they had their backs against the wall. There was nowhere left to run. It was either victory or death, and almost certainly the latter of the two options. No one had any illusions about that going in. Davis himself offers an additional analysis. He writes, quote, I suspect that the spirit of loyalism did not suddenly materialize at Yaishan. It was always present, a product of the Song dynasty's unique cultural traditions and a testimony to the government's effectiveness in using education to mold culture. Whatever the motives of the men and women at Yaishan, the Song court, and especially in the final weeks when confronted with the grim prospect of Mongol domination, was able to generate a high degree of loyalist fervor.
Starting point is 00:45:38 I find a large degree of truth in that assessment. The Song was pretty unique, after all, among Chinese dynasties, in that even when things were falling apart all around it, it was not forced to contend with massive outbreaks of domestic upheaval and rebellion from within. The citizens of Song were, to the bitter end it seems, unusually loyal to their dynastic government. It's unfortunate, then, that such a sense of common purpose and unity of spirit and arms could not be effectively made manifest by the bumbling court at Hangzhou some decades earlier, in say the 1250s or 1260s, when it might have
Starting point is 00:46:17 well been enough to turn the northern tide while the Mongols were busy with their own little civil war. Alas, it was not to be. And by the 1270s, and certainly by 1278-79, all that could avail them was one final raging battle cry against the dying of the light. The final boy king of Song, Zhao Bing, had his small body fished out of the South Sea and was buried near modern Hong Kong, with a small temple erected.
Starting point is 00:46:44 His imperial regalia and seals, however, were never recovered. out of the South Sea and was buried near modern Hong Kong, with a small temple erected. His imperial regalia and seals, however, were never recovered. Apart from the final three child emperors of Southern Song, virtually all others would have their resting places some 60 miles west of Hangzhou, a place then called Baoshan, or the Precious Mountain. Chosen for its majestic views and relative isolation, providing the appropriate level of sanctuary from the hustle and bustle of daily life, it had served as a fitting cemetery for the emperors of the south, even if it had always meant to be temporary. It was unfortunate then, and in light of Kublai's assurances to his defeated captives rather unforgivable, that in 1279 the tombs of Baoshan were pried open and then looted,
Starting point is 00:47:26 apparently under the direction of a Tangut Buddhist monk as, quote-unquote, retribution for insults against Buddhist temples long past. Davis gives us a startling image of the ghoulish scene as it played out. Quote, Without Kublai's approval, the looters chased away custodial guards and unearthed, first, the massive tombs of Ningzong and his empress Yang, followed before long by the crypts of other former emperors and empresses. In the process of plundering, the intruders crudely tore burial garments from the bodies, only partly decomposed. The head of Lidzong, ripped from the body, was played with like a toy. The looters left the corpses strewn about as well, with no apparent concern for either etiquette or hygiene, while destroying a sizable portion, if not all,
Starting point is 00:48:09 of the magnificent funeral statuary surrounding the graves. End quote. It was to be one final insult to the dynasty that had already lost everything. The former imperial palaces in Hangzhou were not spared either. Purportedly, the same Tangut monk responsible for the tomb desecration would afterwards tear down several of the Song imperial structures to make way for his White Tower Pagoda, while others were converted into Buddhist monasteries.
Starting point is 00:48:38 This all in addition to the aforementioned looting and stripping of the royal family valuables by the Mongol conquerors. As a matter of state policy, and simply the typical spoils of war as we understand them, both the Mongol Yuan looting of the palace, as well as the looting and desecration by non-sanctioned individuals of even the imperial tombs, is pretty typical and even, to a degree at least, understandable in the course of war and conquest. Nevertheless, it's likewise understandable that such malice and greed would reinforce and propagate Han Chinese loyalism and a lingering anti-Mongol sentiment across a newly conquered Chinese empire.
Starting point is 00:49:19 It was with no small degree of self-satisfied irony that the great commander of the conquest, General Bayan, noted a historical parallel in his own victory over the Song. Clearly himself a student of history, Bayan alluded to the initial formation of the Song, the coup at Chun Bridge, which saw Zhao Kuangyin, draped in the yellow, and turn his army against what would be the final emperor of later Zhou in the year 960. Noting that the final Zhou emperor had been but a child militarily conquered by a great general, but I observed that he too was a great general who had
Starting point is 00:49:51 overthrown a child emperor. The cycle, it seemed, was complete. The Song had come to its finale. Kota. For the first time in more than a century and a half, the vast swath of territory across East Asia, typically known as China, was politically reunified. Moreover, it now encompassed far-flung territories never before considered a part of the Middle Kingdom, from the steppes of Mongolia and Manchuria to the north and northeast, to Korea, to as far as the Tibetan highlands and the mighty Himalayas that scraped the very roof of heaven to the north and northeast, to Korea, to as far as the Tibetan highlands and the mighty Himalayas that scraped the very roof of heaven to the far west. Yet though it might have been politically reunified, it had been done so in a manner never before completed, by an outsider, a foreign
Starting point is 00:50:37 conqueror, a barbarian horse lord who now dare claim the mantle of heaven itself to rule over all beneath the eternal blue sky, unto the four corners of the world. The great Yuan dynasty was ruled over by the grandson of Tamajin, the son of Tolui, the brother of Mongke. I'm talking about Kublai, a thoroughly Mongol ruler, if ever there was one. And yet for that, as we'll see looking forward, and as we've already seen to a degree already, for all of his legendary ferocity, Kublai envisioned
Starting point is 00:51:11 and positioned himself as more than his steppe origins might suggest. Kublai would position himself to become more a son of heaven than a child of the blue wolf. That is, to become a Chinese ruler in form and function, as well as title. All, of course, while ensuring that his Mongol brethren retain their primacy of place at the top of his imperial tower. And so, next time, we'll leave behind the Song and launch into the hooves that pounded it into the dustbin of history.
Starting point is 00:51:41 The Dai On Ulus. The Great Primal Nation. The Yuan Dynasty. Thanks for listening. 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.

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