The History of China - #184 - Yuan 7: Mark It Zero

Episode Date: February 6, 2020

Khubilai Khan has led a pretty blessed existence as of the year 1279. But fate has a way of balancing things out in starkly brutal fashion... Time Period Covered: ~1279-1287 CE Major Historical Figures: Yuan Dynasty: Emperor Khubilai Empress Chabi (d. 1281) Crown Prince Zhenjin (1242-1285) Prince Toghon, Prince of Suppression of the South Finance Minister Ahmad Fanakati (d. 1282) Finance Minister Lu Shijing (d. 1285) Admiral Hong Tau General Fan Wenhu General Xindu General Nasir al-Din Commander Sodu (d. 1285) Commander Arigh Khaya Japanese Shogunate: Hojo Tokimune, Regent of the Shogun Kingdom of Pagan: King Narathihapate Kingdom of Champa: King Jaya Indravarman VI Kingdom of Dai-Viet: Emperor Tran Than-Tong Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Hi everyone, this is Scott. If you want to learn about the world's oldest civilizations, find out how they were rediscovered, follow the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra's descendants over ten generations, or take a deep dive into the Iron Age or the Hellenistic era, then check out the Ancient World Podcast. Available on all podcasting platforms or go to ancientworldpodcast.com. That's the Ancient World Podcast. Hello and welcome to the History of China.

Episode 184, Market Zero. 花色映霞香彩魂, 芦烟复无瑞光虫, 雨钻冲干颜变朱, 芳喜青生灵寂松, 静刹又好战离吧, 回程仙嫁又苍龙。 In friendly spring I made ascent atop yon fragrant spire. Steadfast I climbed to summit peak and gazed to the golden face. And all the while buds bloomed and shone in rainbow-colored fire. Midst drifting smoke and blessed light, I prayed to heaven's grace. The raindrops fell on jade bamboo that grew from stone-faced chine. Through green pines far below, the gusting wind sang timeless chant. With incense lit, I made my prayer before the Buddha's shrine. In the year 1279, Kublaai of House Borjigin, great Khan of the Mongols and divine emperor of the great Yuan dynasty, was a man who had scarcely ever in his life quaffed the bitter taste of defeat. In almost all of his 64 years, his had been a story of overcoming odds, exceeding expectations,

and carving out with steel, gold, leather, and silk a place alongside his lord-grandfathers in history as both victorious conqueror and wise governor. As a young man, he had earned his spurs and crushed all resistance in Dali, and then proved his wisdom in overseeing the Buddhist-Taoist debate of 1258. Once he had taken over the throne following his elder brother Mungka's untimely death, Kublai had proved himself singular and unyielding in the fulfillment of his destiny, even if it brought him into direct conflict with his own younger brother Arikboka, or his cousin Kaidu. He had shown himself an able administrator, capable of seeing and utilizing the value

of Chinese administration and governmental models, while steadfastly refusing to become subservient to them. Though the great nation had fractured irrevocably upon his accession, he retained not only his ancestral heartland of Mongolia itself, but the endless riches of the entirety of China and Korea beside. Up through 1279, the closest Kublai had really come to anything like defeat was the embarrassing, abortive attempted invasion of Japan some five years prior. And that was easily enough dismissed and rationalized as a literal act of God. The Mongols and their Sino-Korean conscripts had not been defeated by any force of arms on the battlefield, after all, but had drowned in the East Sea following a freak storm

that even the prideful and headstrong Japanese were referring to as a divine wind that had saved them from their sure destruction. That one little hiccup aside, which was, again, a totally freak occurrence that could definitely never, ever repeat itself almost verbatim in 1281, things were going A-OK for Kublai and his burgeoning Yuan empire. Yet even for the greatest among us, life holds us to an excruciating, exacting arithmetic. There's nothing it gives that will not be ultimately taken back. And as we'll see today, in his later reign, Kublai will learn the lessons of this brutally fair calculus, all in due course. The Great Khan had become, well, old. He had reached the age of his grandfather, Genghis, and though he was in no danger of taking a calamitous fall from horseback,

his years, and his very success, had started to take their inexorable toll on his body. He likely could not have ridden a horse very often at all, even if he'd wanted to. His rich diet, lavish lifestyle, and typically Mongol prodigious drinking had caused him to become markedly overweight in his later years, as well as becoming frequently afflicted by that most infamous of rich man's diseases, gout, which made it frequently impossible for Kublai to even so much as walk. As such, he both physically and mentally could no longer be the youthful, active, energetic head of state he once had been. Instead, he was forced to rely more and more on proxies and trusted ministers to govern

on his behalf, a decision born out of necessity, but often with severe fallout. As we've discussed at some lengths in previous episodes, one of the issues that cropped up and continued to compound on itself over the course of his reign was the vexations of state finances. Kublai had, we all know, never been one to think small, or let piddling things like money issues keep him from grasping to the heavens. He had constructed not one, but two entire capital cities from scratch. By his writ, he had vastly expanded and improved the Grand Canal Network's linking southern and northern China, and instituted an unprecedented postal relay network of hundreds of waystations across tens of thousands of miles. He had become a tremendously generous patron of both the arts and of the various faiths of the realm.

Moreover, he had waged a ceaseless series of wars and conquests to expand and consolidate his holdings against foes both foreign and even the all-too-familiar. And that's all great, but it all costs money. The UN court had managed to somewhat defer the consequences of this ongoing deficit spending with the rollout of the first empire-wide paper currency system, which largely replaced trade, and even tax collection, in coin and kind. Yet year by year, the costs continued to mount, and in spite of a massive tax infusion from the conquest of the South, the inputs never even came close to meeting the outputs. The treasury kept printing more and more increasingly worthless paper bills, and the state coffers continued to empty at a worrying rate. In an attempt to rectify this situation, Kublai turned to one of his

favorite servants, the finance minister Ahmad Fanakari. Though characterized in his typically lazy fashion by Marco Polo as being Persian, Ahmad, while Muslim, hailed from Karakhetai, in a town near Tashkent along the Sirdaria, called by Polo by its Alexandrian-era name, the Zakharts. Ahmad had entered into Mongol service through Empress Jamui before her marriage to Kublai, and thereafter become a favorite of the court, particularly of Chabi. This, of course, had brought Ahmad onto the radar of the Great Khan himself, who, as luck would have it, just so happened to be looking for someone who could rub two golden coins together and somehow produce a third.

Ahmad, in Chinese, Western, and popular sources, is routinely remembered as one had secret designs on killing and replacing Kublai himself, which is ludicrous and not at all supported by any of the evidence we actually have. Still, I guess it makes for good Netflix drama. The Chinese historians excoriate him for ruthlessly wringing out every spare coin he could from the Chinese populace by any means that he could, which is rather more supported in the historical record, and the traditional Western tellings have tended to piggyback on that, with some additional lurid details of Eastern mystique and sexual deviancy thrown in just for good measure. The majority of these come from Polo himself, who wrote of Ahmad that he thought

the minister had, quote, bewitched the Khan with spells, end quote, that caused Kublai to allow Ahmad to amass a vast personal fortune and indulge in all sorts of sexual escapades. He wrote further, quote, There was no lady whom, if Ahmad wanted her, he did not have at his will, taking her for wife if she was not married, or otherwise making her consent. And when he knew that anyone had some pretty daughter, he had ruffians who went to the father of the girl, saying to him,

What wilt thou do? Thou hast this daughter of thine. Give her for wife to the bailiff Hamad, and we will make him give thee such a governorship or such for an office of three years. End quote. How much of that was truth, and how much were the fantasies of a travel-weary storyteller languishing in a Venetian prison cell? Well, we must each judge for ourselves.

It is certainly true that Ahmad was zealous in his enforcement of the dynasty's tax collection policies. After all, that was literally his job. And he would have well understood that his power, position, and very career all hinged on him bringing in the Yuanbaos. He certainly did profit from his position as head tax collector, and may indeed have used them to purchase the affections of more than his fair share of women and girls. But it must be remembered that when reading the Chinese accounts,

that they were written after the fact by scholars and officials who were often personally invested in his downfall and post-mortem damnatio memoriae. How fair of an account can we really expect from the very authors who write of him as being a villainous minister, after all? At the end of the day, it seems that the Chinese hated him because he was very effective at his appointed job, which was to make money for the state. As just one measure of his success, under his watch, the state's salt monopolies revenues grew from 30,000 ingots of silver worth in 1271 to 180,000 ingots by 1286. What we can definitively say is that by the late 1270s, the Chinese ministers had been joined in their objections to Ahmad's alleged cronyism and rapaciousness by no less than the crown prince, Zhenjin.

From Rasavi, quote, Zhenjin objected to the prominent positions accorded to Ahmad's sons and relatives. On 10 April 1282, while Kublai was in his secondary capital at Chengdu, a cabal of Chinese conspirators lured Ahmad out of his house and assassinated him. Within a few days, Kublai had returned to the capital and executed the conspirators, but his Chinese advisors eventually persuaded him of Ahmad's treachery and corruption. The evidence they used against Ahmad was suspect, but Kublai was convinced of the Muslim minister's guilt and so had the corpse exhumed and hung in a bazaar. Then he allowed dogs to attack it. End quote.

For whatever satisfaction Ahmad's assassination and post-mortem public vilification might have given the Chinese ministers, his death pointedly did not solve any of the systemic problems of the realm. In fact, it only served to exacerbate several of them. Kublai, after all, wasn't growing any younger or more energetic, and with Ahmad's death came the need for a replacement finance minister, now Liu Shijing, yet another of the so-called villainous ministers. A market seems more of the financial instability of the whole period than of any particular moral failing on any of the ministers' behalf. Liu would serve for nearly three years, until

his reign too ended violently in 1285, but we will get to that in due course. Financial instability, coupled with the all-too-recent conquest of southern China, led by 1281 to a series of uprisings against Mongolian rule. These, probably most notably that of Chen Guilong in Fujian, among the ever-difficult-to-control mountains of China's southeast coast, were nevertheless swiftly put down by 100,000 Yuan soldiers. In typically Mongol style of spectacular, almost mechanistic brutality, purportedly following the final defeat of Chen Guilong's army, more than 20,000 of his soldiers were subsequently beheaded. Other forms of resistance to Mongol rule,

however, were not nearly so clear-cut or easily discernible as something that was legally punishable. While many Confucian scholars did take up positions within the UN court, for instance, no small number of them simply opted to... not. A few refused to serve the Mongols. Others found special academies to pursue their own intellectual interests while simply avoiding involvement with the Mongols. Such opposition deprived Kublai and the Yuan court of badly needed expertise, while the continuing turbulence compelled them to station troops in the south at great expense. In 1281, Empress Chabi died at or about the age of 56. Though the specific reasons remain unknown, it seems that

a lengthy period of failing health preceded her death, such that she may have personally selected her own successor as Khatun, named Nambi. For virtually his entire adult life, Kublai had relied foremost on his beloved wife's wisdom and counsel to guide his thinking and moderate his harsher nature. It is telling that, of all of his wives, only Chabi was allotted the honor of having a memorial tablet installed in Kublai's personal temple. So, too, is her portrait the only one of Kublai's queens to have survived the ages and remained preserved. This was the first truly cruel blow to Kublai in his life, but it would prove far from the last. Between this devastating personal loss and the

ongoing and seemingly spiraling domestic failures, Kublai lashed out in what can probably best be understood as grief-filled rage and capricious despondency. First and foremost, at the one place that had, up until this point, evaded his grasp—Japan. After the disastrous invasion of 1274, Kublai had tried to force the submission of the island kingdom by sending emissaries demanding the emperor and the shogun's peaceable submission. The de facto ruler of Japan, the regent for the shogun, Hojo Tokimune, had responded by executing all of the ambassadors right on the spot, and then preparing for the next wave of what was sure to be the imminent Mongol assault. He sent a legion of his samurai to the southeastern coasts of Kyushu to await the Mongols' return, and erected a large stone wall along the Hakara Bay, the nearest and most

likely point of invasion from the sea. The wall would require some five years to complete, yet when the attack came, it would prove to have been an effort well spent. In the seven-year-long lull in the fighting, Regent Hojo and his warriors prepared themselves as best they could, forming a formidable, though admittedly not quite impregnable, line of defense. As to what took Kublai so long to follow up on his previous embarrassment, Rossody writes, quote, Only after the drowning of the last pretender to the Song throne in 1279 could Kublai focus his attention on the subjugation of the Japanese. Moreover, the Koreans, who were vital in any planned campaign against the Japanese, needed to

recuperate from the 1274 expedition, which had devastated the Korean economy, end quote. In spite of the fact that by 1280, Dadu was still being forced to send periodic grain shipments to Korea to account for the loss of manpower and thus agricultural productivity across the peninsula, by 1280, Kublai was determined to make good his attack and finally revenge himself for the embarrassment of 1274. One final envoy had been sent the previous year, with the same gruesome reception as the last. And so, it was on. The leadership of this punitive expedition would be carefully considered for balance in terms of strategic thinking and even ethnic makeup. Three commanders, one Mongol, one Korean, and one Chinese, would lead the force against the recalcitrant island kingdom.

The Korean, Hong Tao, would serve as the fleet admiral, since the Korean sailors would perform best under one of their own. As for the ground forces, General Fan Wan Hu, a former commander of the southern Song armies before having submitted to Mongol rule, would be assisted and overseen by his Mongol co-commander, Xindu. Now, as with virtually all these pre-modern battles, actual numbers get rather shaky. Traditional numbers, even those listed at the time, can often be more propagandistic statements intended to intimidate a potential opponent than an actual statement of force strength. To that end, the history of Yuan's estimates of a force of more than 142,000 sailing in 3,500 ships is... rightly

suspect. Even so, Japanese sources seem to confirm that number, though again, there would be potential propaganda benefits for them doing so as well. Some modern historians, like that of Professor Thomas Kenlon, lowball the Mongol force by an entire order of magnitude, claiming that it was more like 10,000 to 15,000 soldiers and 4,000 sailors. This, however, seems rather unlikely as well. It would hardly be like Kublai, or the Mongols more generally, to commit only a single tumen's worth of soldiers to the invasion of a kingdom that had already once thwarted their will. Most estimates seem to split the difference. Rasaby, for instance, puts his estimate at just north of 70,000 soldiers, citing along with others that one could expect an

invasion force of about three times larger than the first failed expedition, which is most widely accepted as having been about 23,000 strong. Yet even from the outset, there were ill omens. Quote, according to the Chinese accounts, there were premonitions that the expedition would not go well. The omens included the sighting of a serpent at sea and the smell of sulfur that emanated from the sea water. The various commanders apparently argued among themselves. The troops from the south in Chinese ships were delayed because their larger numbers required more logistical support. End quote. The northern commanders waited and waited and waited for the arrival of their southern counterparts, but at last decided that they must not be coming after all and determined to set off without them.

Thus, without the main Chinese contingent, the northern troops landed on and took the minor island of Iki on June 10, 1281. Two weeks later, they departed the staging point, heading for Kyushu proper. This northern force would land near Manakata, just north of the stone wall that the Japanese had so laboriously constructed. By this point, though, the southern force had finally arrived in play and landed much further south on Kyushu. Learning of where the smaller northern force had made their landing, the Chinese commanders resolved to push northward, fight through whatever defenses the Japanese may have in their way, and link up with their allies. With such a powerful military machine and with such momentum, success ought to have been in

their grasp. Yet for all of their advantages on paper, the UN push into Kyushu was an abject failure. Through August, the Japanese defensive positions tenaciously held out, frustratingly stymieing the attackers' advance time and again. In the UN's own ranks, tension and dissension between their own elements only served to exacerbate the already tense situation. The Mongol and Chinese leaders disagreed as to what strategy would be best to pursue. Meanwhile, the largely Chinese troops, with no real stake of their own to fight and die for a regime that had just crushed their own government and taken over their own homeland, were hardly willing to give it their fighting all in an attempt to take someone else's home away from them, all in the service of some

distant, faceless foreign Khan. From Rossi, he quote, From the time that they had landed on Kyushu, they found themselves vulnerable, without protection from their enemies or from the elements. They were out in the open, In all human history, there are few stories like that of ancient Egypt. On the banks of the Nile, these people created one of the most enduring and significant cultures. Their tale comes to life in the History of Egypt podcast. Every week, we explore the tales of this amazing culture, from the legendary days of creation and the gods, all the way to Cleopatra, and everything in between.

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As a storm rolled in, the Korean sailors, experienced as they were in such things, attempted, much as they'd done back in 1274, to pull their ships away from the coastlines and into the safer open waters, or at least tried to seek safety by docking at Imari Bay. Their efforts would prove just as futile this time, however, as last time, and many of the ships and their entire crews were dashed against the coastal cliffs and rocks, or foundered out at sea. Things were a little better for the exposed and ill-prepared UN ground troops. Quote, one-third of the 40,000 northern soldiers perished, and more than half of the 100,000 southern troops died while trying to escape. The soldiers who were stranded on Kyushu were slaughtered or captured or drowned when they sought to flee on small vessels that remained near

the shore. End quote. To put it bluntly, it had all happened all over again. To the Japanese, of course, the intervention of nature on their behalf was no accident and not unexpected. Their land was divinely protected, and the gods had sent forth their kamikaze once more to stave off this barbarian invasion. Quote, To the Japanese, the lesson was that the gods would never allow Japan's enemies to conquer and occupy their territory. End quote. For the Mongols, and Kublai especially, it was every old nightmare from seven years ago made real once more.

And more than that, it was a far more devastating cost and scale than that first ill-fated campaign. This could no longer be written off as some minor embarrassment from a sideshow campaign. This had been the dynasty's primary focus, and it had not only failed, but spectacularly and devastatingly so. It was not a lesson, however, that Kublai was prepared to learn. Angered, humiliated, and facing a crisis of his very legitimacy if he allowed this setback to remain unovercome, he immediately began to draw up plans for a third strike against Japan.

And this time, no damnable typhoon was going to get in his way. In 1283, Kublai ordered the merchants of South China to begin construction of a new Grand Armada, a fleet of 500 seaworthy ships. In addition, in the north he ordered that the Jurchen people build him a further fleet of 200 such vessels. From Korea, he demanded large quantities of rice be stockpiled for the upcoming assault. Yet, shockingly, to him at least, there was fast and significant pushback against his directives. In the south, the Chinese complained that the burden of 500 ships was too much for them and their finances to bear. Korea could still scarcely feed itself. What rice did

the Great Khan think they were going to be able to stockpile on his behalf. By 1285, even his own senior advisors and courtiers were urging him to read the writing on the wall and let that rink-a-dink archipelago go. It just wasn't worth it. At last, in 1286, Kublai finally yielded to the overwhelming pressure from every quarter and declare the third campaign cancelled. Yet for all that, even Kublai did not yet realize the true damage that had already been done, and irrevocably so. For close to a century at this point, whether it had been in Central Asia, Persia, Europe, or China, the Mongols had been able to rely on an aura of invincibility. Like Thanos with his infinity gauntlet, they had been able to shrug off everything Eurasia had been able to rely on an aura of invincibility. Like Thanos with his Infinity Gauntlet, they'd been able to shrug off everything Eurasia had been able to throw at them with the

terrifying reply of, I am inevitable. Yet suddenly here, now, everyone seemed to realize that Kublai's Gauntlet no longer had the Infinity Stones encased. The Mongols, in spite of their own rhetoric and the flop-sweat nightmares of generations of Chinese, were, in fact, evitable. I mean, if some rink-a-dink archipelago full of pirates and dwarves could not only once but twice throw off the Mongol yoke, well, what exactly was stopping everyone else? At least as damaging as the loss of the psychological force field, though, was the tremendous expense of this now-failed undertaking. The Yuan had effectively run out of juice. Kublai had become so focused on the military conquest of Japan,

no matter the cost, that the costs had finally overrun his ability to ignore them. His prestige and his finances were both, quote, squandered in these campaigns. His efforts once again revealed the same lack of control as in his financial policies of the 1280s, end quote. If his empress Chabi's death had left the Khan wretched and alone in 1281, then the events that would conspire to strip him of his favored son with her

and his designated heir besides, Prince Zhen events that would conspire to strip him of his favored son with her, and his designated heir besides, Prince Zhenjin, would crush him completely. As we've talked about before, Zhenjin had been the presumptive heir virtually since his birth, and had been carefully groomed, educated, and trained since childhood to make a wise and effective ruler. His loss in 1285 was an unmitigated disaster for Kulai personally, but like as not also an unrecoverable loss for the realm at large. For all that, little indeed is written about Prince Zhenjin or his untimely death at 43. The history of Yuan simply states that his cause of death was that old bugaboo of Mongol noblemen, chronic alcoholism. Though that is the official reason, however, there are

tantalizing traces that there might have been a far more intriguing plot. Apparently, one or more of the scholars of the south had been making waves circa 1282, writing missives that began urging the aged Kublai to abdicate the throne in favor of Azar. Zhenjin caught word of this, and feared that such talk might implicate him in some kind of potentially treasonous plot against his father, and attempted to silence these scholars. Nevertheless, Kublai did learn of these writings, and became furious at the prospect. Overcome with fear at the idea of his father's wrath, Zhenjin plunged himself into what would prove to be a fatal drinking binge.

The death of his favored son, which, regardless of whatever anger he might have felt, was certainly never his will or intent, seems to have utterly broken whatever was left of Kublai's spirit. Suddenly, without his heir at near 70, and in spite of numerous other sons still alive, Kublai would honor Zhenjin, and eventually designate his son with his prime wife Kokuchin, the 21-year-old Temur, as his ultimate successor. In spite of the aged and miserable Khan losing himself day by day to torpor, food, and drink, he nevertheless was compelled to continue on his life's work of continual conquest and additional legitimacy-seeking, for he and his successors both.

Thus, he turned his sights on Southeast Asia, whose various kingdoms had offered up a veritable smorgasbord of rationales to exact vengeance. Hostilities had actually first erupted more than a decade prior, in the early 1270s, when the king of Pagan, which is modern Burma, Narathi Hapate, a, quote, vain despot who described himself as supreme commander of 36 million, swallower of 300 dishes of curry daily, and sexual mate of 3,000 concubines, end quote, ordered the execution of three Mongol ambassadors who had advised him to submit to the Great Khan. Kublai had replied by dispatching his general Nasir al-Din in 1277 to lead an expedition to Pagan and mete out appropriate Mongol justice on the southern king. The expedition first met the foe along the Yunnan-

Burmese border, and the Mongol forces came very close to disastrous destruction then and there. As the two forces met, the Mongol horses panicked at something the likes of which they had never before seen. 2,000 war elephants at the head of the Pagan columns. Aldin, realizing conventional tactics would be useless, as the Mongol horses refused to do anything but flee before the elephants, ordered his men to instead tie them up within the dense forest nearby, and then form a battle line on foot with bows and arrows knocked and at the ready. Aldine commanded but a single tumen of 10,000 on this expedition, which he now saw would not be

nearly enough to carry the day in a pitched battle. Thus, he ordered his men to conduct a novel but very hazardous plan, aimed not at the men but at the unprotected elephants. Even if the giant beasts could not be killed outright, Aldine pinned all his hopes of survival on being able to drive the beasts into a pained rage. Marco Polo gives us a very colorful account of the battle that was to follow. Quote, You may know that so great was the number of arrows in this beginning, and all at the mark of the elephants, that they were wounded on every side of the body. And when the elephants were so wounded, as I have told you,

and felt the pain of the wounds of the pellets which came at such numbers like rain, and were frightened by the great noise of the shouting, I tell you, they all turned themselves en route, and in flight toward the people of the king, with so great an uproar that it seems that the whole world must be rent, putting the people of the king with so great an uproar that it seems that the whole world must be rent, putting the army of the king of Mien, Pagan, into great confusion. End quote. Their initial charge broken, the Pagan troops nevertheless continued their advance, and the two sides engaged in a pitched battle for some time.

Slowly, the Mongol force gained the advantage. Again, from Polo, quote, They were beginning to turn back, and when the Tartars saw that those were turned in flight, they go beating and chasing and killing them so evilly that it was a pity to see. End quote. Polo concludes that the Mongol forces managed to capture some 200 elephants, which they brought back to Kublai's court as a gift. Though this seems to have been Marco's penchant for overstatement yet again, as the Chinese records indicate that only 12 elephants were brought back to Dadu. In any event, the king himself, Narathi Hapate, escaped the battle and made good his retreat back to his own capital, a fact that Kublai did not fail to note upon the return of Nasir al-Din, and would order additional follow-up campaigns

that would require another decade to complete. Where we'll finish off today, however, is with yet another pair of vexations to the southeast, the kingdoms of Dai Viet and Champa, respectively accounting for modern northern and southern Vietnam. On numerous occasions, Kublai had sent ambassadors and messengers to urge the two monarchs, Tran Thanh Dong of Dai Viet and Jaya Indravarman VI of Champa, to come and personally attend him at Dak Du, yet neither had ever made the trip. Further, Kublai demanded that they send population registers to Great Yuan,

so that the empire could effectively collect taxes and meet out corvée labor assignments on the respective populace, as good little vassal states. Finally, he demanded that each send him one of their younger brothers to court to serve as hostage for their fealty. The emperor of Dai Viet responded by sending what was nominally a tribute's mission, which included golden statues of men who were supposed to stand in as substitutes for him personally coming, a journey that he would, alas, be unable to undertake. Rossavy writes that this was likely a clever bit of wordplay on the part of the Chan monarch. Quote, the king probably regarded their tribute missions as commercial ventures, but knowing that the court in China was more receptive to merchants if they were members of tribute missions, he disguised these essentially mercantile undertakings as official embassies.

Champa and its king, Jaya Indravarman, would pose a significantly tougher nut to crack. Though it did send a tribute mission in 1279, consisting of an elephant, a rhinoceros, and some precious jewelry, it was apparently quite clear that it only sent it grudgingly. All the more so when Kublai demanded that next time, the king should make the journey personally. Yet when a new tribute mission reached Dadu in 1280, but without the king, Kublai flew into a rage and rejected it, demanding that the king now send him brothers and sons as hostages.

Champa went silent, and so Kublai decided on a sterner approach. He sent a force of 5,000 soldiers via 100 ships under the direction of Commander Sodhu to punish the recalcitrant Champan monarch. The UN ships deployed and landed at the coastal capital of Vizjaya, seizing the city in short order. They quickly found, however, that Jaya and Dravaraman had already effected his own escape along with his court inland into the mountains. Though Sodoo and his expedition attempted to pursue them, they found themselves unable to make any headway through the thick jungles and impassable mountains, especially as they were constantly beset by guerrilla fighters and deadly booby traps laid for them by the Champans. The following year, Sodhu was sent

reinforcements, this time an additional 15,000 under the command of the Mongol Atahai. But even these bolstered numbers proved as nothing against the implacable, invisible enemy in the forests. A third Mongol commander, Arig Kaya, was sent, but still to no avail. At last, very much frustrated, Kublai decided that the only thing for it would be to send a much larger force overland to sweep Champa clear of resistors and take its vexatious king into custody. Just one little minor detail. That would mean needing to send said overland army through the territory of Dai Viet. No problem, thought the Great Khan. Tran Thanh Dong had been a good little vassal so far,

and so he'd surely have no problem with me just sending a few little guys on through to deal with Jaya and Dravarman. Thus he dispatched his ninth son, Togon, who he ennobled as the Prince of suppressing the south, Prince Zhen'nan, taking both his family and his army on south and establishing his base camp at the southern city of Ezo, before setting out toward the Viet border. But, you know what happens when you assume? Yeah, Togon found himself unexpectedly barred from using Dai Viet as a staging point against Champa, and soon enough was embroiled in a new war against the Viettes.

Quote, Gathering an army from Fujian and other southern provinces of China, Togon and Sodou headed south towards Annam, or Dai Viet. They seemed at first unbeatable, advancing into the Hanoi region without much opposition as the troops repeatedly defeated and pushed back the Anami soldiers. End quote. It was all too easy. Yes, too easy. They had overextended, and as it turned out, put themselves right in the heart of the enemy's homeland, a place to which the Mongols were entirely unfamiliar and unaccustomed. The Viettes faded back into their impenetrable jungles, waiting for opportune moments to launch hit-and-fade ambushes

and other guerrilla operations against the beleaguered Yuan troops. At least as bad was the interminable heat and humidity of the tropics, and with it, deadly tropical diseases. Sick, uncomfortable, sticky, and paranoid, the Mongol troops found themselves increasingly demoralized. They were experienced in pitched battles, not in small-scale, unexpected engagements. But this was not bowling, Smokey. This was Nam. The whole world has gone crazy, and no one around here gave a shit about the rules. At last, in the summer of 1285, Togon had decided that he had had enough, and ordered his men to pack up and make ready to withdraw. But in the tumult to leave, somehow, they had forgot to

inform the other Mongol company under the command of Sodu. Togon's army retreated north, and Sodu found himself and his men very suddenly without any support. Beating his own swift retreat, his force made it as far as a place called Xuming on the Sino-Viet border. There, he was cut off and surrounded by a Viet force commanded by Prince Tran Nhat Khan, and in one of the only true battles of the entire invasion, So Du was decisively defeated and killed. It was yet another fiasco, and another failure that, quite simply, Kublai could not let stand.

Thus, in late spring of the following year, he assigned his grandson, Esen Timur, to assist Commander Arik Kaya. A few months later, no less than General Nasir al-Din had been dispatched to the border as well. Finally, in 1287, the trio was joined by a much larger force commanded by Pohon, whom they set out, once again into the thick, dark heat of the Viet forests. But as they already must have known, they were entering a world of pain. Once again, they made it as far as Hanoi, only to discover that the Viet emperor and his retinue had already fled into the impenetrable jungles and mountains. Finally, over the line, and no longer able to bear the oppressive summer heat,

the Yuan force once again turned and retreated north, leaving the Viettes to recover their capital and having never fought so much as a battle. Market zero. This time, there would be punishments meted out by the enraged Kublai on those who had failed him, and in so doing, further embarrassed him, especially his son Togon. Togon was not allowed to return to Dadu or his father's court, and was instead transferred to a minor sinecure in Yangzhou at the mouth of the Yangtze. Even so, Kublai must have realized that this failure did not lay solely at his son's feet. After all, as Rasubi puts it,

none of the competent, or in some cases brilliant, commanders sent by Kublai was able to defeat the kingdoms of Annam and Champa, end quote. In spite of this thorough trouncing of the Mongol-Yuan armies sent against his kingdom, Chöndan-Dong realized that an accommodation was in order. For now, he held the upper hand, yes, but it was likely that the Mongols would be headstrong enough to keep coming, and coming, and coming, yes, but it was likely that the Mongols would be headstrong enough to keep coming, and coming, and coming, and one of these days they just might get lucky. As such, he used this opportunity to formally send notification of his kingdom's acquiescence and acceptance of Yuan's suzerainty. Though he still made no move to personally go to Daodu

to pay homage, he instead sent envoys offering tokens of Dai Viet's nominal submission to the UN and pledge of the king's loyalty to its emperor. Kublai, certainly in no position to demand much more than even this tokenistic quote-unquote submission, accepted, and promised to send no further punitive expeditions against Dai Viet. As a result, the Viet's began sending regular trade, I mean tribute, missions to Da Du, and were soon joined in voluntary submission to Kublai by Champa, who quickly realized that this was definitely the more lucrative and less dangerous way to go. That's where we're going to leave off today, But next time, we're not done in the South.

Because the arrogant king of Pagan, he who eats 300 bowls of curry a day, must still be made to pay. And Kublai will hear tell of another island kingdom to the distant south, one called Java. And it sounds very nice indeed, rich in trade and goods. Heck, it certainly couldn't be any worse than Japan, right? Thanks for listening. 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.