The History of China - #180 - Yuan 5: Dismounting the Horse to Sit the Dragon

Episode Date: December 8, 2019

While his armies have been keeping busy in every direction on both offense and defense, Emperor Khubilai had been hard at work re-organizing the mess his family made in China and reformatting it into a stable, lawful Yuan Dynasty. And Grandpa Genghis was right: it's was a *lot* more work to run an empire, than to conquer one... Period Covered: ca. 1261-1290 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. 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. From a revolution of hope and liberty to the infamous Reign of terror. You can't understand the modern world without understanding the French Revolution. So search for the French Revolution today. Hello and welcome to the History of China. Episode 180, Dismounting the Horse to Sit the Dragon Last time we left off with Kublai Khan beginning to wake up to the fact that,

in spite of his lofty titles and claims of universal sovereignty, he could not bring his estranged extended family members to heel, and was therefore the great Khan of the Mongols in name only. His mandate of rule was indeed vast, including Mongolia, Tibet, Korea, Northern China, and more and more, even the recalcitrant Song territories bending to his will. But his reach was not infinite. Though he did not yet realize or truly accept it, the fact was that by about 1265, Kublai's empire had reached what would become its permanent borders. So today, we'll be following not his continued external campaigns and attempts at further conquests, but instead the Great Khan's journey toward becoming, ultimately, an Emperor of China. His grandfather, Lord Genghis, had once cautioned his progeny that the true challenge of rule was

not in conquering great swaths of territory on horseback. In spite of the blood and sweat, the tragedy and glory of such great campaigns, that was actually the easy part. Rather, it was being able to dismount from that horse and to ascend to the throne, to actually rule that which one had conquered, that would prove the greatest challenge of the Bojigin men. That required not strength of arms, focused in the thick of battle, or trustworthy comrades in arms to storm the enemy lines, but something far harder and rarer. The strength of will, focused determination, and trustworthy counselors and executors

to steer that vision true, to prove capable of ruling effectively what force of arms had conquered. History is replete with examples of men capable of the first, sometimes with apparent ease, but utterly incompetent at the second. Theirs had been the empires that scarcely survived the death of its founder. Already, the imperial project begun by Genghis had been badly frayed, and it seems begun to burst by the mismanagement of his successors. Moreover, ruling over the nomads of the open steppes as a Mongol Khan, like Kaidu, was literally worlds different in terms of just about every facet of being when compared to

ruling over a sedentary agrarian territory like China. Even in the best of times, it seems like almost an impossible chasm to span, and China in the 1260s was by no means experiencing the best of times. In spite of nearly three decades at this point of nominally peaceful rule by the Mongol Great Khans since the fall of the Jin Dynasty in 1234, northern China remained a region still grievously devastated both by the conquest itself and its aftermath. Not only had the lands been largely stripped barren or left fallow as their populations were displaced and called off to war, but even the populations that had been by the 1260s returned

to something perhaps approaching normalcy were still beset by uncertainty and the capricious whims of their conquering occupiers. For an entire generation of peasants living in North China, the idea of rule of law was a bad joke. Law? What law? Not even the Mongols seemed to really know, or much care, about the laws that their Chinese subjects needed to follow. Since the reign of Ogedei, China had been subjected to a rather ad hoc combination of the traditional Mongol Yasa code of law, with all of its strictures and harshness, and a warmed-over rehash of the Jin dynasty's own legal code, which had very early on been understood as necessary in a land of farmers rather than herders. The Khans had tried, when it suited them, to implement a uniform system of taxation, typically at the behest of the native

Chinese and Khitan advisors, who earnestly, and usually correctly, emphasized that a normalized system would actually increase state revenues while simultaneously making the populace much less angry at the Mongols. Even so, enforcement of even the most level-headed of these tax measures had been lax even on a good day, and in the many huvi, the privately held princely appanages that had been distributed amongst the Mongol nobility, known in Chinese as fen di, the force of imperial laws seemed often not to apply at all. The lesser Mongol khans and princes brooked scant interference from even their alleged superiors within their own manorial estates, and more often than not, viewed the peasantry assigned to them as a resource for them to personally exploit at will, rather than as a populace to be cared for or carefully sheared at regular intervals. Even beyond the arbitrary and exorbitant tax system, uncertainty gripped the wider Chinese society that Kublai lorded over.

Trade had, beginning with Kublai's dispute with his own brother, Arik Bok, had now again with the ongoing hostility between him and Kaidu been negatively impacted, and that hit everyone's bottom line. The educational system was in disarray because, let's be real here, what was the point? The civil service examinations had been suspended, apparently indefinitely, and the Mongol Khan seemed little interested in what his Chinese subjects had to say on many matters, but listened only to his own and to other foreign advisors imported from faraway lands. Even in the instance when the exams had been reinstituted, such as during the reigns of Ogedei,

they had proved to be ineffectual and useless. The Khan simply ignored the results and appointed his own favorites to government posts anyway, to which the duly graduated officials, who, I writes, should have gotten those plush jobs, were lucky to even get an advisory or clerical position for the foreigners. So really, why bother at all with all that interminable schooling and testing if it wasn't even going to lead anywhere? The formal religions across China were likewise in a state of confusion over their own position within Kublai's regime,

both now and into the future. Even the famous Great Debate of 1258, in which Kublai oversaw the philosophical competition between the Tibetan Buddhists and Chinese Taoists, had hardly settled the matter. The Taoist monks, having lost the debate, had had several of their more dubious texts destroyed, but had otherwise been allowed to carry on their merry way. Even so, they could never truly be sure of their future position within the empire. Could they face further repercussions or discrimination in the future by their Buddhist-sympathetic Khan? The Confucians, too, remained uncertain of their place within the regime, and were concerned that the traditions of the court might be abandoned by this Mongol government, and their

status as scholars downgraded. These ivory tower concerns might appear to be the remote and unrelatable worries of the hyper-elite classes of the intelligentsia of China, worrying that their silk slippers might be trodden upon. But their worries were reflective of the wider Chinese populace as a whole. That is to say, what would their status be in this new Mongol dynasty? They already understood that they would not be the top tier of society any longer. But how far down the social pyramid would they drop, and what hardships might they face on the way down?

Even something as seemingly simple as the population of the empire the Mongols now ruled over had been effectively lost in the melee during the intervening decades. though the Chinese had long been fastidious in their census-taking and record-keeping. Losing first one half, and then the other, of your entire civilization will tend to make a bit of a mess of the paperwork. As a result, we're stuck only looking around the periphery of this era of Chinese population data, rather than directly at it. Even so, the results are startling. Censuses at the time listed the total population of North China under the late Jin Dynasty, circa 1195, at north of 45 million people, only roughly 7 million of which were the ruling Zhechen class, with the Southern Song accounting for an even larger figure at about

55 million, amounting to more than 100 million people at the turn of the 13th century. A hundred years later, under the count of 1300, the UN census takers reported fewer than 60 million people across both North and South. Where had the other 40 million gone? The destruction and depopulation of China under the Mongol onslaught in the course of the 1300s is certainly in part to blame, for it was undoubtedly of a scope and scale that had rarely been seen across Asia. Even so, that only tells part of the story.

Likely, an even larger segment of the missing population is accounted for by the inaccuracies of the census itself, exacerbated in large part by large segments of the population, potentially on the order of millions or tens of millions of people, having simply left their homes behind in order to avoid the usurious and ruinous taxation rates that had been levied on them by their new overlords and the merchant classes that followed in their wake. Regardless of the specific percentages one wishes to attribute to one cause or the other, mass slaughter versus mass itinerancy, Razabi notes that either combination of reasons for the reduction, quote, points to misery in North China, end quote. All these doubts and uncertainties would be the seeds of intractable social

instability and disorder, if they were left to germinate. Kublai needed to address these pressing questions from the Chinese populace, his populace, and he needed to do it quickly, if he were to have any hope of holding this shaky enterprise together. From Asabi, quote, the government agencies that he had formed were valuable mechanisms, but they required direction. Kublai had to articulate the political, social, and economic policies that he meant to implement. He had to disclose his plans for ruling rather than merely exploiting China, and his officials might then emulate in a system in seeking to govern the sedentary civilization, end quote. It's worth

asking, in all this, just how much of a role did Kublai himself really play in the implementation and rollout of such policies? Looking over many of the emperors of China in the course of the centuries in their respective dynasties, it is a fair question. After all, how many Chinese emperors before him had been content to simply enjoy the luxuries and leisurely pursuits around them and leave all the difficult and thankless work of statecraft to his underlings. Yet Kublai, at least in the early portion of his reign, cannot be said to have been one of those indolent despots. Rather, he was an active, engaged, and attentive member of the process of achieving state-level policy, as it would ultimately be enacted across the empire. Now, of course, most, perhaps virtually all, of the specific policy proposals as it would ultimately be enacted across the empire. Now, of course, most, perhaps virtually

all, of the specific policy proposals his regime would ultimately adopt and implement did not originate with the Great Khan himself, but we can hardly hold that against him. I mean, how many original policy proposals can we point to among the modern set of nations and global politicians? Good politicians and rulers know that they don't know everything, and do not possess in themselves all the answers. Instead, they know well enough to surround themselves with the best and brightest minds, who can, working together, do more than any single one of them, even an emperor, could envision or implement. So perhaps Kublai was not the idea man, but he was certainly active and engaged in his role, as in the parlance of a not-too-distant world leader, the decider. In spite of his relative sympathy toward and hands-on experience with the sedentary world, he was himself still of an alien-enough mindset that its complexities and peculiarities

still made him rather dependent on his close advisors to tell him what was what with the peasant farmers. Even so, he was nothing if not proactive in his solicitations for suggestions. One of his officials would quote Kublai himself, who stipulated that, quote, Those who present memorials to make proposals may present them with the envelopes sealed. If the proposals cannot be adopted, there will be no punishment. If their proposals are useful, the court will liberally promote and reward the persons who make their proposals in order to encourage the loyal and sincere ones. End quote. So not only was there every upside, and literally no downside to pitching the Khan your ideas, but you could now submit it directly to the imperial court, still sealed,

without it having been first vetted by the administrative underlings who might simply write it off as being too out there. It was nothing if not a bold initiative. In his personal schedule as well, Kublai devoted many hours of most every day to conducting audiences and hearings with any number of his officials, underlings, and subjects. One account from a mid-level courtier, the official Wang Yun, would write that in the course of but a single week in May 1261, he had personally been a part of three courtly audiences with the Great Khan in order to discuss certain governmental affairs. And if this mid-tier nobody was able to get three meetings in a week with the CEO of Mongol Inc., we can be assured that the upper echelons of the officialdom, the actual doers

and shakers of a Great Yuan, could bend the Khan's ear with even greater frequency. Before definitively rolling out his grand vision to define and clarify his social, political, and economic ideals, as they applied to his empire, however, Kublai would first need to ensure its stability and relieve the misery that he and his predecessors had inflicted on it. The Mongols were not, of course, the sole cause or perpetrators of suffering across the north, though they were certainly the most recent and most successful in those twin tasks. Rossi writes that, quote, The war preceding the Mongolian takeover caused much destruction and enormous loss of life in and most successful in those twin tasks. Rossi writes that, quote, Thus, for the first few years of his Assumption of the Throne,

Kublai repeatedly responded to the desperate requests for assistance from the hardest-hit regions of the former Jin Empire, with both material assistance in the form of paper money, grain, and clothing to villages afflicted by natural disasters, as well as granting temporary or partial tax relief to many of the afflicted areas. Such measures, however, were just temporary stop gaps, and not permanent fixes to such problems. In terms of more long-term solutions, therefore, Kublai ordered the founding of the Chuannongse, or the Office for Agricultural Stimulation, which was charged with selecting a body of men deemed most capable in the more agricultural sciences, and in teaching the wider peasantry how best to cultivate their lands in order to

maximize growth potential. This would include annual reports on not only farming techniques and yields, but also water control projects across the kingdom. Another of Kublai's projects to assist the peasantry recover was an organization that would, in effect, help them learn to help themselves. Known as the She system, given official mandate in 1270, these local affiliates, quote, composed about 50 households under the direction of a Shezang, or village leader, to stimulate agricultural production and to promote reclamation, end quote. This would include teaching villagers how to properly farm, plant trees, clear and prepare barren areas for future farming,

improve and maintain the flood controls and irrigation, oversee and improve silk production, and restocking of local rivers and lakes with fish. The Xizhang would be tasked with punishing the lazy and compelling them to work, as well as rewarding and upholding the industrious among their group. Quote, the fact that the Chinese themselves were granted responsibility over the She was, in this sense, a means of giving them control over their lives. End quote. Beyond this initial set of self-help expectations, though, the imperial court hoped to eventually be able to graft onto the Xie agencies a whole host of secondary functions. Kublai hoped that these organizations could help him maintain and enhance imperial control and stability over localities, in tasks as varied as surveillance of the population

to conducting the decennial census. Rossi writes, Perhaps the government's most innovative objective was to employ the new organization to promote universal education. Each Xie was entrusted with the task of setting up schools for the children of the villages. The peasant children would attend the schools when little labor was required on the farms, end quote. And this certainly was a noble goal, but one that would never even come close to being reached as its envisaged universal education system. The dynastic history of the Yuan records that as of 1286, there were just 166 such she-peasant schools across the empire, a number that Rossopi safely writes off as being likely inflated.

Quote, For the leaders of the she, recognizing what was expected of them, probably exaggerated their reports to the central government, conveying an image of a growing number of schools. End quote. In spite of such glowing reports, there is little corroborating evidence from almost any part of the Yuan China, outside of the Great Khan's own personal domain around the capital, showing effectively organized or implementing of the She school system. And as I was just reading through

that, I had to smile and shake my head because, wow, local bureaucrats vastly overstating their successes and under overstating their successes and understating their shortfalls to a distant central capital while pocketing the difference? Truly, some things in China never change, even after eight centuries. Though the local education system would prove to be far more aspirational than actual, it remains worth noting in this period. This is because it does show that in spite of his local bureaucracy's personal torpor, Kublai himself did appear to be genuinely interested in forming a literate peasantry that would be capable of interacting meaningfully with their government, as well as a government

that was re-gearing itself towards serving that agrarian populace's interests foremost. No longer would the Mongolian rulers of China concern themselves exclusively with the nomads. Peasants would receive a share of the Mongols. For example, Kublai required the She to establish charity granaries, or yi cang, to assist unfortunates during bad harvests or droughts, and to provide grain for orphans, widows, and the elderly, end quote. This might all sound pretty ho-hum if we were talking about a regular old Chinese dynasty, but remember who these people in charge were and still are. These are the people that a mere generation prior viewed the settled agrarian populace as little better than the pigs they lived alongside. And just years before now, Kublai's own Khitan advisors had had to vehemently convince the great Khan and his kinsmen that

expelling or killing all of the peasantry and reverting North China to pastureland for their horses and goats, as Genghis had actually done, by the way, in the Ordos Loop earlier this very century, was a bad idea, and not for any humanitarian reason. The thing that convinced Kublai was that it would destroy his taxable base across the region. Yet in spite of that background, and very much because of his mother's background and the upbringing she imparted onto Kublai and his brothers, the Great Khan had so bucked that trend that he was now considering ways of educating the populace and setting up emergency granaries for when the hard times inevitably hit. That's the kind of personality 180 that usually requires three ghosts visiting you on Christmas Eve. The court's apparent care for the well-being

and livelihood of the peasantry went even further than that, however. The introduction of a fixed and regular system of taxation. This was designed to completely replace the Mongols' earlier method of quote-unquote taxation, which was, at best, contracting the job out to tax farmers who promised the best returns and then got to keep whatever extra they could squeeze out of the populace, meaning, of course, that they would do any and everything they could to squeeze the peasantry dry. That was the former system at its best. At its worst, it was little more than the old tried-and-true Mongol methodology of a private appendage's Mongol warriors sweeping through the villages every so often, unpredictably, whenever their lord felt like it, to tax their people in

a way that looked just like the looting and pillaging by any other name. Kublai had long disliked the feudalistic, near-absolute authority his fellow Mongol princes traditionally enjoyed within their own abanage domains, where they would brook scant outside interference in their affairs, even from one such as the great Khan himself. Thus he was ever on the lookout for ways that he might reduce these manorial estate's powers, and thereby increase their dependence on, and therefore loyalty to, him and his central administration. Taxation could prove to be a powerful means toward that end. By reversing the traditional flow of tax revenue from the populace, he would seek to turn the balance of power definitively in his favor. The old system had seen the taxes flow upward from the peasantry,

to the local lords, and then up from them to the central government, with every tax farmer and middleman in between taking, of course, a goodly chunk along the way. This made the coffers of Kublai's court largely dependent on the generosity of these principalities. This new system, on the other hand, would replace the old system with a regularized and clearly laid out date, time, and rate of collection straight from and to the central government, which would then apportion out in equal amounts to all the Mongolian appanages and imperial provinces. This would mean that the Mongol princes would have to look to the central capital for their funds, rather than vice versa. Apart from these direct taxes conducted in coin, cloth, or kind, the other obligate burden

traditionally imposed on the population was, and always had been, corvée labor duties. These could be as financially arduous as the taxes themselves, and were often significantly more dangerous. Kublai had no intention of doing away with conscripted peasant labor. Much the opposite. He, quote, built roads in a capital city, extended the Grand Canal, and organized a postal relay system, all of which required vast investments of labor. Yet he sought throughout his reign to limit excessive demands on the peasants,

and on occasion waived other taxes on those called for corvée, end quote. So that was nice. Still, though he personally sought to be responsible and judicious in his use of the compulsory labor service, he would find, to his eternal frustration, that his best-laid plans and promulgations of law often did not extend in practice much beyond his own capital region. Often as not, his fellow Mongol princes did what they would with the people within their own abinidious states, with little the great Khan could do but tut-tut them from the capital. From Fort Sumter to the Battle of Gettysburg. From the Emancipation Proclamation to Appomattox Courthouse.

From the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Compromise of 1877. From Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. To Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history. I'm Rich and I'm Tracy, and we're the hosts of a podcast that takes a deep dive into that era when a war was fought to save the Union and to free the slaves. And when the work to rebuild the nation after that war was over turned into a struggle to guarantee liberty and justice for all Americans. Look for The Civil War and Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts. Beyond the peasantry, Kublai, like his forebears, held in great esteem the artisanal class of skilled workers. As the Mongols traditionally, and even now, had few skilled workers of fine goods from

amongst their own people, they had long relied on foreign craftsmen to make the goods that they required beyond basic necessities. Thus, markedly unlike the Chinese ruling classes of previous dynasties, the Yuan tended to exalt the merchant and artisan classes as even above the farming class. To this end, Kublai enacted numerous regulations that proved largely favorable to this group, offering good salaries, rations of food and clothing, as well as exemptions from manual labor duties. In addition, once they'd met their annual quotas mandated by the court, they were largely free to continue to produce their line of goods at will and sell them for additional profit.

Of course, these sizable benefits did not come without some costs of their own. In exchange for these privileges, the artisans were mandated to become a hereditary class. Rossaby writes that, quote, By the late 13th century, about 300,000 families were classified as artisan households and could not detach themselves from that designation. Despite this restriction, craftsmen in general profited from Mongolian rule in China. Medicine and its practitioners were likewise accorded significantly higher status and support under the Mongol regime than under the previous Chinese dynasties.

Imperial hospitals, called the Huanghui Si, were established at Kaiping and at various cities across the north, and staffed primarily by that most scientific and medically advanced group of the era, Muslim caregivers. Moreover, 36 volumes of Persian Islamic-based medicinal knowledge and prescriptions were added to the imperial library. In the capital itself, Kublai established the Taiyi Yan, the imperial academy of medicine, which, quote, specified the criteria for selecting instructors of medicines, supervised the training of physicians and the preparation of medical texts, devised the examinations to certify successful, and far more than ever before, the Chinese elites began to regard the medical professions as both useful and potentially lucrative work,

and, even more enticingly, whose practitioners were often exempted from corvée labor requirements. The sciences in general flourished under the cultivation of the great Khan of the Yuan. Again from Rossaby, Kublai also valued scientists and sought to promote their work. He offered them financial support and attempted to elevate their status in Chinese society. One of the more famous imported scientists acquired by Kublai was the renowned Persian astronomer Jalal al-Din, who arrived at the court at Chengdu in 1267. He brought with him several inventions and discoveries that amazed the court, including sundials, an astrolabe, a globe of the known world, a globe of the heavens, and a new and more accurate calendar, which came to be known

in China as the Wanyanli, or the Ten Thousand Years Calendar. Geography and cartography likewise prospered under Kublai's patronage, as Persian, Arab, and other Western travelers and traders brought with them copious information about the wider world, far beyond what relatively little had been recorded in recent centuries by the increasingly insular and self-interested Chinese dynasties. The clergy and artists were also among those favored and especially protected by Kublai's will to upend the centuries of prescriptive and stuffy Confucian dictums on which professions were and were not honorable or valuable. Kublai was, like many of his kinsmen, above all an altruist. What worked, worked, and should be promoted. What did not, should be discarded, regardless of what ancient

tradition might have to say on the matter. To that very end, the class that perhaps benefited most spectacularly from Kublai's policies were the merchants. Long despised as little more than quasi-necessary parasites by Confucian scholar-officials, under the Yuan, the merchant class was at long last afforded truly high status among the imperial society. The merchants most closely associated with the trade most valued by the Mongols, that of the Trans-Asiatic Silk Road, were afforded the most direct government support. These caravan-based businessmen, known by their Turkic name as the Ort-Hulk, were afforded the vast capital they needed to conduct their long-range and risky trade ventures through loans offered by extremely low rates by the Connet, listed at about three and a half percent interest. Marco Polo would write of the Connet's affinity for

the merchants of the realm, saying of their prosperity, quote, I believe there's not a place in the world to which so many merchants come, and that dearer things and of greater value and more strange come into this town than into any city of the world. In part, in order to better facilitate the ease of operation and transferability of these merchants' commercial revenues, Kublai greatly expanded the production and use of paper currency across the realm, at a scale far broader and more wide-reaching than any previous Chinese administration. In 1260, the imperial court began issuing the first of what would be three different types of new currency. It was the zhongtongyuanbaochao, literally the

era of moderate rule ingot banknote, backed, as the name would imply, by the imperial silver reserve, that earned the confidence and wide adoption by the Chinese populace. That the court itself was willing to accept tax revenues in these paper banknotes rather than hard specie instilled a trust in the currency, and for a decade and a half it operated stably and in the interests of the throne, the merchants, and the populace at large. In order to encourage the use of this new paper currency, much less coinage was minted during the Yuan, and payment in specie was heavily discouraged. Niv Horesh writes in the Chinese Money in the Global Context, This meant that the Yuan had somehow satisfied the demand for petty cash in the agrarian sectors with notes. Thus, whereas most Song notes were usually denominated in thousands of coins, 200 bronze coins was probably the minimal note of denomination, Yuan note values varied from

several guan, or several strings of thousand coins, right down to the equivalent of just two individual bronze coins, wen. End quote. The good times for the Zhongtong notes, however, were not to last. Initially printed to the face value of 73,352 ingots worth of silver, the amount of paper bills in circulation was kept under a tight enough regulation that by 1265 it had only increased to 116,208 ingots. Yet little more than a decade later, faced with the spiraling costs of the wars against the southern Song and Japan, the temptation to

simply print their way out of a monetary tight spot got the better of the imperial government, and the amount of paper bills by 1276 had mushroomed to more than 1.4 million ingots worth of silver. At that point, however, the Yuan court was able to derive sufficient value from its successful conquest of southern China to more than offset that inflationary trend, and it would maintain the use of the Zhongtong Bill until 1287. That year, Kublai's newly appointed treasurer, the Tibetan Sangha, ruled that the Zhongtong notes would be thereafter unredeemable and could only be exchanged for the newly issued Jiyuan notes, at an exchange rate of 5 to 1. Unsurprisingly, that had a significant chilling effect on the Yuan paper money economy. Again, from Horesh, quote,

The year 1287 then, as famously underscored by Marco Polo, signified the end of the golden age of Yuan paper money. The initial thrust toward inconvertibility may have been catalyzed by dwindling specie in state coffers as a result of offensive outlay, namely the expensive and unsuccessful Mongol attempts to conquer Japan in 1274 and 1281. Subsequently, the thrust toward inconvertibility was much catalyzed by the Mongol custom of constantly granting tribute to relatives of the imperial clan. Such pistols came more frequently after Kublai Khan's death in 1294. Ultimately, by the twilight of the Yuan dynasty in the 1360s, the fiscal situation had become catastrophic. The nominal value of the currency notes in circulation had in the course of that

century spiraled from an initial value of 3.6 million taels in 1260 to an astronomical 250 million taels in 1368. Meanwhile, the amount of physical bullion held in reserve by the treasury had long ago run dry, from about 937,000 tails in 1260 to a mere 192,000 by the dawn of the 14th century and ever dropping. And yeah, when the central bank can actually back less than 0.08% of the money that it's circulating, that's generally bad. Far before that point of dynastic disintegration, however, through Kublai's own reign, things were proceeding fairly smoothly within the empire. The tax revenues, monetary innovations, and corvée labor all facilitated numerous grand projects across the empire. Beginning in 1264, for instance,

the construction of a new and even greater capital city than Chengdu was mandated, atop the ruins of the old Zhongdu of the Jin Dynasty. Since visiting the site that year, Kublai had been enchanted with the place and planned to move his capital there. Like Chengdu, this new city would be built in accordance with the rites of Zhou, stipulating a city built along nine vertical and horizontal axes. That is to say, a great big multi-walled square in the tradition of most well-planned Chinese cities. Shortly after his proclamation of the Yuan Dynasty in 1271, Kublai officially designated this new city, still only partially constructed and without even its main imperial palace yet completed, as a new imperial capital, Dadu, meaning Great Capital, with its former seat, Shangdu, being redesignated as the Summer Capital

for the months that the Khan needed to escape the oppressive heat of the South. Though Dadu was its official Chinese name, it became at least as well-known by its Mongol name, Khanbalik, or the City of the Khan, or, as once again bastardized by Marco Polo, Kambulak, to the great confusion of centuries' worth of Western scholars thereafter. Another of these great projects was the extension of the ancient but still vital Grand Canal network directly to this new capital city, as well as the construction of many roads

across the north. Polo would write glowingly of these roads in his tales, quote, Tubalai has had trees planted there beside the ways on either side, two or three paces distant from the other. The Reikhan has had this done so that each may see the roads, that the merchants may Perhaps the greatest achievement of Kublai's regime, however, was the rollout of his postal relay system across the empire. Postal systems were, of course, nothing new to China. They'd been in use, at least in a limited capacity, since at least the Han Dynasty.

Kublai's system, therefore, differed less in idea rather than sheer scale. An extension of the aero-messenger system long employed by the Mongol Imperium, this Yuan postal service established stations at regular intervals across the empire, typically between 15 to 40 miles apart, officially for the speedy delivery of official mail and missives, but also usually available to traveling officials, military men, and foreign guests of state. Their usage did not end at official imperial business, however. Though they were not intended as hostels for merchants, Rossaby writes, quote, they came to be used as such and were vital links in the networks of foreign and domestic commerce, end quote. Thus, these postal outposts

became integral to the Yuan dynasty's commercial success and financial stability while it lasted. By the end of Kublai's reign, more than 1,400 such stations dotted Yuan China, housing some 50,000 horses, 1,400 oxen, 6,700 mules, 4,000 carts, 6,000 boats, 200 dogs, and 1,150 sheep. They were staffed by civilian subjects as a part of their corvée labor obligations. In spite of some reported abuses of the system by officials and merchants, the postal system of the Yuan was by all accounts remarkably efficient. In the event of an emergency, an official rider messenger could cover as many as two hundred and fifty miles in a single day, meaning that even from the furthest corner of his

realm, news could reach Kublai's capital in less than two weeks, a significant achievement for the 13th century. We'll end off today, then, with a look at maybe the two most important and pressing aspects facing the reformist Khan-slash-emperor, the military and the law. The military, of course, was of paramount importance in terms of both defensive and offensive capability, as was the necessity of it remaining firmly under Mongolian control. To those twin ends, Kublai Iri established in 1263 the Privy Council in order to oversee the dispensation and actions of the Keshik, the traditional imperial guards in charge of protecting the royal households.

It would also oversee the commanders of the Tumans, the Tuman-u-Nuion, which is evocatively, and literally, translated through Greek as the myriarchs. The cavalry, unsurprisingly, was composed almost entirely of Mongolians, but the infantry, which now comprised the bulk of the Yuan army, was overwhelmingly Han Chinese. This proved a challenge for the military command, since at all times and in virtually every posting, there would be a relatively small number of Mongols surrounded by an overwhelming force of ethnic Chinese. Maintaining discipline and command was of paramount importance. Similarly, Kublai's court understood the need to tightly control military

and militarily applicable supplies. One seemingly unlikely good that was targeted and heavily restricted by the Yuan was the buying and selling of that most Chinese of grasses, bamboo. This was, of course, because bamboo's high value in the crafting of arrows and bows, which could conceivably be used against the Mongol overlords if left unregulated. Thus, the court monopolized it. As they moved out of the Central Asian steppes and into China proper, the Mongol court would also discover that it now faced a very similar conundrum to the Chinese dynasties of old, namely, how to ensure a constant and secure supply of battle-ready horses. Kublai therefore ordered what amounted to a 1% horse tax

on the Chinese populace, that one out of every 100 horses be turned over to the government. Additionally, he ordered that at the government's discretion, it could compel Chinese subjects to sell it their horses at officially mandated prices. Private sale of horses was forbidden, and any caught attempting to conceal their horses faced severe punishment. Loaded over by the government agency known as the Court of the Imperial Stud, which is definitely going to be the name of my new man cave from here on out, these restrictions proved successful enough, through Kublai's reign at least, to ensure a stable and viable stock of cavalry, in spite of sporadic reports of smuggling, tax evasion, and other infractions. That brings us at last to the wider legal code that would

be laid out to more effectively govern the Yuan Empire. It had been determined fairly early on that the traditional Mongolian codex of law, the yasa, quite simply did not have the sufficient level of nuance or sophistication required of a sedentary agrarian civilization. It reflected instead the simpler, more direct concerns of its birthplace and people, the harsh nomadic law for a harsh nomadic people. Upon coming to power over northern China, Kublai, having recognized the insufficiency of his grandfather's legal code, had enacted a stopgap measure, reinstituting the legal code of the defeated Jin dynasty. By 1262, however, he had two of his most trusted advisors on the topic of legal codes, Yao Shu and Shi Tianzi, formulate a new code of laws that would more properly reflect the spirit of the old Mongolian

laws and customs, while blending them with that of the Chinese and their own particular needs and expectations. Completed and enacted in 1271, upon the formal declaration of the Yuan Dynasty, this new legal code, quote, apparently introduced greater leniency into the Chinese legal system, end quote. While there were still a significant number of crimes for which death was prescribed, 135 in all, which sounds ludicrously harsh to most modern ears, the US for instance currently has 41 crimes which constitute capital offenses, 32 in Singapore, and the PRC officially only has 13. Even so, that number, 135, constituted less than half the number of death-punishable offenses as listed in the Song dynastic code. For lesser offenses, even in some capital offenses, the convicted could legally

forego the penalty by paying a set amount to the state, a carryover from Mongolian practices. The Great Khan could, and of course did, grant amnesties and pardons as he saw fit, even to rebels and political enemies. Raspy notes that it remains difficult to definitively show to what degree such reforms translated to a more lenient or flexible system in practice as compared to earlier regimes, quote, yet the legal ideals embodied in this code supported by Kublai and the Mongols did indeed appear to be less harsh than earlier Chinese ones. End quote.

And that really does heap a big shovel full of dirt onto the idea that the Mongols were outrageously more barbarous or cruel in their method of governance than the civilized societies they'd come to rule over. Probably the most well-known aspect of this Yuan legal code was its formalization of social and legal rankings between different groups of subjects, the Sideng Renzhi, or the four-class system. At the top of this pyramid, needless to say, were the Mongols themselves. Exempt from the death penalty, and with legal punishments often being merely payable by fines, they formed the apex of the social and political pyramid of the Yuan. As we've seen, however, they were simply incapable of ruling such a vast and

populist territory as the Yuan Empire on their own, owing both to their small number, perhaps only a few hundred thousand at most, and their overall inexperience with the people they lorded over. Thus, the second social strata was that of the Samuren, the foreign auxiliaries of the Mongol royalty. The term Samuren literally translated as people of multi-colored eyes, which speaks to their multi-ethnic nature and composition. Not of any one group of people, they were instead brought into the Great Khan's court from all over Eurasia, as their particular skill set might be demanded. Uyghurs, Persians, Arabs, Qayrakhanids, Khwarizmians.

In spite of their multinational makeup, many among this functionary class would in time come to accept the common designation given them all by the Chinese populace, the Huihui, a corruption of Uyghur, because after all, all those foreigners are indistinguishable, right? These were the people, as we've seen, who filled out the actual high-level official and functionary positions of the Yuan court, and oversaw the day-to-day affairs and work to keep the system chugging along. As with the Mongols, the Samuren enjoyed near total tax exemption and preferential usage of the roads and postal systems and the services they provided. The greater whole of the population belonged to the lower two classes of the Sidon-Ren-Zhe, the Han-Ren and the Nan-Ren, the Han people and the Southerners, respectively.

Now, this looks very racially based, and I wouldn't blame you if you thought that, but in fact, the order of these castes has little or nothing to do with ethnicity. As we'll see in a moment, the very same ethnic group could be in two entirely separate classes. Instead, what this ranking was contingent upon was what it always had been contingent upon, the order of their submission to the Khanate's power and will. Quite simply, the Khwarazmiyans, for instance, had been inducted into the empire before the northern Chinese, and were therefore more fully part of the in-group and reliable. By that same token, the northern Chinese were more on the ends and reliable than their southern cousins. So the Hanran, meaning in general mostly the northern Han Chinese people, but also

encompassing the various other ethnicities of the former Jin state, including Tangut, Jurchen, Khitan, Bohai, and Koreans, made up the bulk of the middle and lower tiers of the official posts, as well as the general peasant class of the north. They were subject to all taxation and the strictures of the laws. Though they could sit for imperial examination, they were required to take additional levels of testing compared to their Semu or Mongol fellows. And even if they passed, they could expect a significantly lower and more truncated career path. They certainly would not be anywhere near the throne room itself. Finally, at least in terms of the non-slave population, there were the southerners,

the Nanren, also pejoratively known as the Manza, or through Marco Polo as Manji, meaning southern barbarians. These were the Han Chinese who had held out longest against Mongol supremacy within the southern Song regime, and as a result now occupied the lowest tier on the social ladder. Clocking in at about three-fourths of the total Yuan population and accounting for some four-fifths of all tax revenue, the Nanren would be the thankless backbone of the Mongol Yuan engine for the remainder of its lifespan, quietly and fastidiously shouldering the heaviest burdens with the fewest rewards,

until such a time might present itself to rise up and throw off that foreign yoke once again, if such a time, in fact, ever came. That is where we'll leave off today. Next time, I'll be getting around at last to answering as many of the questions you sent in as I possibly can. Thanks one and all for participating in this sixth anniversary of the show, and as ever, thanks for listening. The French Revolution set Europe ablaze. It was an age of enlightenment and progress, but also of tyranny and oppression. It was an age of glory and an age of tragedy. One man stood above it all. This was the Age of Napoleon.

I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast. Join me as I examine the life and times of one of the most fascinating and enigmatic characters in modern history. Look for the Age of Napoleon wherever you find your podcasts.