The History of China - #203 - Yuan 16: The White Hare's Curse

Episode Date: November 12, 2020

"The list of their disasters was much lengthened [...] and whenever they tried to force a way into the borders of the empire, they were beaten back. They were once more confined to the great desert, whence they originally sprang.” “Although I am a woman, I have avenged the vengeance of my husband. When I die, there will be no regret.” Time Period Covered: 1368~1399 CE Major Historical Figures: Yuan/ Northern Yuan: Toghon Temür (Emperor Shun) [r. 1333-1368, 1368-1369] Ayurshiridara (Biligtü Khan) [r. 1370-1378] Prince Maidiribala [1338-1378] General Köke Temür [1330-1375] Elbeg Khan [r. 1393-1399] Oljeitu Khatun [d. ~1399] Ming: Zhu Yuanzhang (Hongwu Emperor) [r. 1368-1399] Xu Da, "Barbarian-Conquering Generalissimo" [1332-1385] General Li Wenzhong [1339-1383] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. TD Direct Investing offers live support. So whether you're a newbie or a seasoned pro, you can make your investing steps count. And if you're like me and think a TFSA stands for Total Fund Savings Adventure, maybe reach out to the History of China. Episode 203, The White Hair's Curse

Jewel Dao Du was built with many an adornment. In Kaiping, Xanadu, I spent the summers in peaceful relaxation. By a hapless error, they have been lost to China. A circling bad name has come upon the sage Khan. The awe-inspiring reputation carried by the Lord Khan. The dear Da Du built by the extraordinary wise Khan Kublai. The bejeweled Hearth City, the revered sanctuary of the entire nation, Deer Dadu. I have lost it all to China.

The Sage Khan, the reincarnation of all Bodhisattvas, by the destiny willed by Khan Tangri has lost dear Dadu. Lost the golden palace of the wise Khan Kublai, who is the reincarnation of all the gods. Who is the golden seed of Genghis Khan, the son of Khan Tangri. I hid the jade seal of the Lord Khan in my sleeve and left the city. Fighting through a multitude of enemies, I broke through and left. From the fighters, may Bukhatamar Chinsan, for ten thousand generations, become a Khan in the golden line of the Lord Khan. Caught unaware, I have lost dear Dadu. When I left home, it was then that the jewel of religion and doctrine was left behind. In the future, may wise and enlightened Bodhisattvas take heed and understand.

May it go around and establish itself on the golden lineage of Genghis Khan. From The Lament of Togon Temur, circa 1368 The South was lost. Whether one chose to believe it was by Chinese trickery and wax-encased cannons, or perhaps simply the unpredictable tilts of the geopolitical chessboard, after some 96 years, the empire forged by Kublai Khan had been dug out root and stem from the Middle Kingdom, and then forced, with spear and arrow poking at its heels, to flee back to the safety and the dangers of the northern wilds of the steppes. Today, we're going to take a somewhat bifocal view of this tumultuous, and we can even assert

world-changing, shift in the power structure of Central and Eastern Asia. Certainly, we're going to look ahead, yes, to the future of this remnant Yuan dynasty and the travails it will face once back in the apparent safety of their homeland, but will also be looking back and trying to assess the totality of the Yuan Empire and how it had come to find itself at such an impasse. By the time of the Mongols' forced flight from the rising might of Zhu Yuanzhang's Ming forces, it's estimated that there were some 400,000 ethnic Mongols living across the Yuan Empire. This is, of course, a tiny fraction of the total population of the realm, even at the time, which boasted, even according to the notoriously undercounted and shoddily reported Yuan census

figures, at least 60 million people, thereby amounting to no more than 0.7% of the total population. Moreover, the Mongols, by overwhelming preference, which I as a fellow arid Northerner hardly agree with and understand, congregated in the northern reaches of the empire that they had conquered, rather than the sticky, miserable, disease-ridden Southlands. No offense. Yet difficult though it might seem to believe at first blush, not all of the Mongols who resided in China, most, if not quite all, for all of their lives,

were quite so willing to pull up anchor and abandon the way of life to which they'd either always known or else otherwise grown quite accustomed. Indeed, the vast majority were either compelled, or else chose not, to accompany the fleeing Imperial Yuan court back to Mongolia proper. Of the 400,000 Mongols scattered across China, only about 60,000 or so were willing to so relocate, with the other 85% choosing to remain behind in the land that offered them so much, even if now under a new and ethnically different regime, rather than face the perils and deprivations of their unforgiving ancestral homeland.

Jack Weatherford puts it in his excellent The Secret History of the Mongol Queens, The Borjigin rulers, now neither Chinese nor Mongol, had so alienated their Mongol subjects and soldiers that at the final moment of expulsion from China by this newly rising and natively authentic Ming dynasty, the majority of the Mongol commoners chose to stay in China. They preferred to serve China rather than return to Mongolia with the Bojjigian clan and its corrupt horde of foreign advisors, sexually permissive monks, alien guards, pampered astrologers, and non-denominational spiritual quacks, end quote. However one might wish to refer to them, the loyalist core,

or at least those swept up in the evacuation before they could properly assess their perhaps better options, the 60,000 or so Yuan refugees fled Dadu in mid-September 1368, as it fell to the Ming, and broke for the oldest and far more sacred capital within China proper, Shangdu, some 400 kilometers to the northwest. It wasn't, of course, solely the royal retinue making their way back into the effective exile of their ancestral homeland. In drips and drabs, those who either couldn't or wouldn't live among those they could no longer subjugate made the journey northward. It was, in spite of their assertions of being of and from the steppes, a completely alien world to the by now thoroughly signified Mongol nobility and their multiracial hangers-on.

Again from Weatherford, quote, Not knowing where to go in Mongolia, the royal refugees headed back to the Keraloon River, to the source of their myths at the foot of Mount Burkhan Khaldun. The caravan stretched back across many miles, and it took many weeks before all the people and animals arrived. One cluster after another limped back. The camels carried large leather trunks and folded tents of colored silk and damask. Although on horseback, the women wore their heavy Mongol-style jewelry, their flowing gowns of embroidered gold lined with cashmere,

and their coats of tiger and leopard skin trimmed with sable. The children rode on carts pulled by lumbering oxen and yaks. The men wore their silk sashes tied extra tight against the hunger and the constant bouncing on horseback. The people and all they carried arrived coated with a thick layer of goby dust. The armor was bent, the lances twisted, the flags tattered, the horses thin. End quote. As noted before, many of these refugees weren't even ethnically Mongol, per se, but rather that multitudinous panoply of Central Asian Semujan officials. The descendants, for instance, of the Ossetians and Kipchak imperial guardsmen, who had generations ago been brought in specially by Kublai to serve as his thoroughly alien, and thus unswervingly loyal, personal bodyguard. For their own part, the Mongols who had never left their homeland for the south did little to welcome these strange,

foolish, and essentially worthless distant cousins of theirs. During their seven generations away from home, the royal family had not become Chinese. However, they no longer lived as Mongols, either. They had all the confidence and bravado of the original Mongols of Genghis Khan, but they had none of the skills, strength, or stamina. They seemed to have abandoned the virtue of Mongol life and ignored the virtue of Chinese civilization, preferring instead to combine the worst of both. The only occupation

they had learned was ruling, and after the death of Genghis Khan, they had not done that well. Once back in Mongolia, they found themselves marooned in a vast sea of grass, with little knowledge of their own nomadic culture. For the nomads of the steppe, life remained largely as it had ever been, simple lives of motion and balance with the rhythms of the steppe, life remained largely as it had ever been, simple lives of motion and balance with the rhythms of the harsh natural world around them. For the imperial Borgians, excess was something now so inborn and innate that anything less seemed like the most austere of privations. Hunting, an essential survival skill in the rugged Mongolian wilderness, had been utterly transformed by the Yuan Mongols into a ritualized sport available only to the elite. Quote, it was best done by transport elephants, dancing girls

for the long evenings, trained warriors to pursue the animals, beaters to drive the animals to where the royals waited with their bowmen at their side, and a cadre of chefs to concoct exotic delicacies from the game. End quote. Their methods proved as damaging as they must have seemed ridiculous to their step-cousins. Within a year of arrival, the bungling southern cousins had, like a swarm of locusts, stripped entirely bare of all suitable game the whole region around which they resided. Back south of the Gobi, however, the Ming army under the command of Xu Da, recently promoted to the title of Zhenglu Dajangjun or the Barbarian Conquering Generalissimo, swept through Shanxi and Shanxi. All the while, the Yuan Rump state huddled there in the Northlands, surely hoping against hope that they could, somehow, reverse this ill turn of fate.

It would not prove to be. In early 1370, the Hongwu Emperor finalized plans with his command staff to complete the task of liquefying Mongol power once and for all. The plan would be twofold. General Xu Da would lead one force from Shanxi and press westward toward the Gansu Corridor in order to engage and tie up, and of course hopefully destroy, the still active and very dangerous Mongol general Kokutemur. At the same time, another army, led by General Li Wanzhong, would proceed due north, passing through the newly constructed cloud-platform gate of the Zhuyong Pass section of the Great Wall, adjacent, as it were, to the most popular and crowded section of the wall today, Badaling.

From there, they would pursue the Yuan Emperor across the expanse of the Gobi. This dual strike would ensure that neither of the enemy forces could hope to turn or assist the other. Xu Da and his lieutenant, Deng Yu, struck fast and hard at Koka Temur's encampment near Gongchang in southeastern Gansu. The result was a total rout of the surprised Mongol forces. In the course of the panicked retreat, some 84,000 soldiers were taken captive, though Koka himself managed to make good his own escape. Even so, his power across the region was effectively broken, and he knew it. Instead of trying to piece together a new force

to fight back, Kokatema now took what was left of his army and fled across the desert. Instead of following, Shuda and Deng Yu decided to press further westward in order to effectively display Ming power all along the upper reaches of the Yellow River for all to see. In the meantime, Li Wenzhong proceeded north to Mongolia, first to Xinhua and then proceeding to Shangdu in an effort to entrap and capture its emperor, Togontemur. The fleeing Yuan emperor managed to slip this net, however, having quit the former capital before the Ming general's arrival and fleeing even further north to Yingchang on the shores of Dalinur Lake in

modern Washington Banner, Inner Mongolia. Yingchang had purportedly been established almost a century prior, in 1271, the same year that Kublai Khan had proclaimed the Yuan dynasty in the first place by a group known as the Khongirad clan. It had, like Shangdu and Dadu beside, been constructed in a conspicuously Chinese style, which is to say, as a walled square with wide axial streets crisscrossing it. It would be here that Togon Temur would decide that he'd given himself just enough breathing space to stop, assess, and then decide. He would re-proclaim his Yuan dynasty from Yingchuan, while acknowledging the difficult circumstance in which it currently found itself at the moment. It would surely be the Great Yuan again, and soon, of course.

But purely for the moment, it would be called the Northern Yuan regime. For the next year and change, Togon Temur, no longer emperor in anything but really pretense, instead now the founding Khan of Northern Yuan, would reign over his rump state from Yingchang, before dying on May 23rd, 1370, at the age of 49. He was immediately succeeded by his son and heir, by Empress Qi, Prince Ayushiridhara, then 32, who was enthroned as Biligtu Khan, the Wise Khan. Yet almost no sooner was his enthronement complete than Ayushiridhara was forced to flee Yingchang forever, when the Ming army, under Li Wenzhong, arrived on June 10th. Swiftly overcoming the city's paltry defenses,

the Ming seized the city with many of the Mongol nobility still trapped inside, including the new emperor's own son, Prince Maiderabala, as well as the Yuan imperial seals. Even so, the crown jewel of the Northern Yuan, the person of the emperor himself, of course, did manage to elude the Ming expedition once again. Ayar Sharadara slipped away and made for Karakorum, where he would eventually be joined by the remnants of Kokatemur's likewise bloodied and battered forces. That July, the captive Mongol prince, Mayardirabala, was delivered into the presence of the

Hongwu emperor himself at his palace in Nanjing. There, with full ceremonial pomp and honors, the prisoner prince was informed that the emperor had, after due consideration and respect for proper tradition and protocols, decided not to follow the urgings of his own advisors, who had been vehemently calling for the prince being burned alive in his own ancestral hall. Instead, he informed the youth that he needed to remove his Mongol-style clothing and to don appropriately Chinese garb. When that was done, Hongwu formally bestowed a posthumous title upon Maidya Ubala's recently deceased imperial grandfather. Togon Temur, the last emperor of Great Yuan, would, in the Ming

records, be known ever after as Xundi, the Obedient Emperor, a name chosen with due care and with all appropriateness since, as it was explained to the imprisoned prince, he had indeed been obedient to the will of heaven by choosing to leave China. Maidirabala himself would live out the next five years as a pampered prisoner of the Ming Imperial Palace, himself bestowed with the title of the Marquis of Zunli, or Respectful Politeness. And with that, it was time for an imperial victory lap. On July 12th, Hongwu ascended the capital's southeastern altar to heaven and officially reported that he had achieved total victory over the Yuan, proclaiming the very same the following day to his own family's ancestral shrine.

Mission accomplished. Roll credits. Um, well, not quite. Back north of the Gobi, the northern Yuan had admitted no such defeat and rebuffed each and every one of the Ming Emperor's commands to surrender and submit as such. From the Mongol perspective, at least, they had lost some territory, I mean, okay, let's be real, a lot of territory, into a powerful rebel element, but they were by no means, like, done for. Not at all. I mean, apart from China, they still had territory in the Altai Mountains all the way to the coasts of Korea. Moreover, they still had strong loyalist pockets that did and would continue to exist in the more remote regions of Yunnan and Guizhou for more

than a decade to come. Even so, things were going, no real surprise here, not so terribly well up there in the cold, harsh northern extremes. For one, as of 1371, the vast northeastern province of Liaodong had finally surrendered itself to the Ming, and in spite of several holdout Yuan loyalist generals holding themselves up within near-impenetrable mountain fortresses and continuing to cause trouble, the territory would remain ever after outside of Mongol power. But military and territorial losses were just the tip of the iceberg for Mongolian problems. Within the first few years of their return to the steppes, as mentioned before, the imperial Borjigians and their followers had essentially stripped their ancestral homeland clean to the bone. They maintained, as best they could, their vast herds of horses, even as they were warned that goats, yaks, and camels were far

more resource efficient in turning grass into milk and meat than the rather energy-intensive equines. The pasturelands, therefore, were quickly exhausted, with little heed for how the herds might survive the coming winter or the years to follow, much less, you know, anyone else. Likewise, the relatively sparse woods were rapidly cut down and burned as fuel for the Borjigin's fires in place of the traditional Mongol dung fires. In short order, not only the imperial interlopers, but even the steppe nomads who had been warning them that this was a terrible idea and would totally get worse if they kept being so stupid, had no choice but to pull up stakes and make for even further north, towards the Siberian forests and mountains, which had not yet been utterly exhausted by the Borjigians' wastefulness. Even through all these trials and difficulties,

it appears to have hardly so much as crossed the minds of the Khans of Northern Yuan that they might not actually be the legitimate emperors of China anymore. It faced a setback, sure, admittedly a very serious one by a very powerful enemy, but in due course that would be corrected and their line would be ultimately restored to its proper place on top of the civilized world from Khanbaliq, or Dadu. And at least for the time being, it actually wasn't the totally crazy pipe dream that it would later obviously become. In spite of the apparent triumph of this pretender, Zhu Yuanzhong, and his Ming rebels in forcing the imperial court to the harsh climes of the north, the Yuan regime could still look to several significant portions of their southern empire that remained steadfastly loyal to them and intensely opposed to Ming

aggression. The greatest of the southern bastions was the Mongol loyalist reaches of Yunnan, where its governor, the Prince of Liang, Basalwami, remained faithful to the return of his imperial brethren from the surely temporary exile. H. H. Howarth, whose book is rather older than I typically consult, published in 1876, but in this instance is actually one of the relatively few sources on this era from the perspective of the Mongols and their plight, and so it's been quite valuable, writes on this ultimately forlorn cause, quote, after they, the Borgian court, had been driven beyond the Great Wall, he, Basal Warmi, continued to send embassies which evaded the Ming troops. But after the submission of Sichuan and after the capture of Suwai, one of his envoys, the Ming emperor thought it would be

a good opportunity to send an embassy to him. He accordingly sent Huang Yi, who was well-received by the Prince of Liang. At this time, there happened to be a messenger of the ex-emperors in Yunnan, who'd gone there to raise a contribution. His name was Toto. He was enraged at the reception Wang Yi received, and was very insolent to him, wishing him to prostrate himself. The Ming envoy replied with the same spirit,

now quoting Wang Yi, Heaven has put an end to the Yuan dynasty, and it is seemly that the expiring sparks of a torch should dispute the brightness of the sun and moon. It is you who ought thus salute to me, end quote, continuing Haworth's quote. It would seem that the Prince of Liang was intimidated by Toto, for we are told that Wang Yi committed the happy dispatch. Demaya says that he was put to death with his suite. End quote. Faced with such infuriating intransigence, Hongwu once again charged his great commander, Xu Da, with leading a renewed expedition against the obstinate Mongol rebels in Karakoram in mid-1372, sending him at the head of 150,000 soldiers to bring the renegade Khan to justice at long last.

Upon learning of the renewed Ming offensive, Ayashiridhara dispatched his own champion, Kokatemer, to intercept and turn back Shuda's army. The two forces would meet on the banks of the Tule River, where Koka's forces plunged headlong against the central column of the Ming invaders, commanded by Shuda himself, no doubt hoping to slay the enemy commander on the field then and there. This wouldn't come to pass, but Koka's strike did manage to break Xu's line and force the Ming soldiers to a bloody and ignominious rout. The easternmost division of the

Ming army, meanwhile, made its way to the banks of the Keraloon River, the very birthplace of Genghis Khan two centuries prior. They raided and rampaged up and down the shores of the body, putting to sword and torch everyone and everything they found. Until, that is, once again they were confronted by an organized Mongol resistance, putting the Ming raiders to flight all the way back to the Orkhon River, which would become the site of yet another bloody defeat for the Chinese. The official Chinese histories try to salvage some sense of national honor by chalking up a minor point of victory here and there, such as capturing some cattle, but it remains more than clear that the Northern Expedition of 1372 was turning out to be an unmitigated fiasco for the

Ming. Quote, we are told that in their retreat they found the roads across the desert obliterated by the rolling sand, and that many men and horses died from thirst. At San Korma, the horses trampled in the sand and discovered a spring, which saved the army." After this fortuitous event, the Ming forces apparently encountered another Mongol army, apparently by chance, and this time were, in spite of their own sorry state, able to turn the tide of battle in their favor and critically seize the enemy's herd of cattle, which again proved a life-saving boon. With their enemy now undeniably knocked back on their heels, the Mongol Khan wrote now to the king of Korea, long a stalwart Mongol vassal, called Gongmin. The letter entreated the king of Goryeo to aid his Mongol brethren, stating,

O king, you are a descendant of Genghis Khan, same as I. Therefore, we wish you to work with us to establish justice and truth under heaven, end quote. Indeed, Gongmin was at least Mongol enough to have been granted a Mongolian name all his own. And yes, that's right, it's exactly what you think it's going to be. Say it all together now, Bayan Temur. Because you just never can have too many temurs, after all. Gongmin was, however, rather less than moved by the Khan's exhortations for aid. Instead, the Korean king not only flatly rejected the request, but started his own opposition movement against the peninsular kingdom's long-standing Mongolian subjugation,

thereby touching off a civil war all his own. And one Gongmin himself would not live to see the end of. Less than two years later, in 1374, King Gongmin would find himself on the business end of an assassination plot that may or may not have been tied to the widespread opposition within the royal court about his position of betraying the Yuan and establishing formal ties with the Ming. It was ostensibly a plot born out of the king finding out that one of his concubines was having an affair with another man, leading him to become overcome with a royal wrath. Fearing, rightly, for his life, the young gentleman paramour, a guy named Hong Yun, acted first, and with an accomplice, killed Gong Min as he slept.

Was that all there was to it, just a love triangle turned deadly? Perhaps, but perhaps not. These dirty deeds done dirt cheap are so often difficult to quite pin down. Another version of the story is that it was led by a military hero called Yi Yinim as an explicitly anti-Ming action. In any event, with his passing, the royal court quickly rallied in support of the accession of a new puppet, I mean sovereign, the 11-year-old King Wu, who could be relied upon to be more staunchly anti-Ming. Wu would at least nominally reign for about 14 years, until 1388, when his officials overthrew him and installed his own son,

the seven-year-old Prince Chang, as the new king, before shortly disposing of them both with poison the following year, heralding the last king of Goryeo, Gongyeon, before he was overthrown and succeeded by the founder of Joseon, Yi Songye, aka Taijo of Joseon. Long story short, with no aid forthcoming from the Korean king, the Yuan court found itself, in spite of its recent successful rebuffing of Ming invasion, essentially running out of military and even political fuel. In the following year, a small force of Yuan troops would make a foray south into Chinese territory, as far as Liangzhou, Gansu. Yet there, they were defeated and pushed back again to Yechinae, where the force commander, along with the majority of his soldiers,

were at last caught and killed. The war continued on inconclusively. In 1374, the Hongwu emperor decided that the time had come, seemingly as a kind of gesture of good faith, to release his longtime hostage, Prince Maidirabala, back to his own people. He explained his rationale thus, quote, Plants and trees grow in spring and die in autumn. Other things are subject to the same vicissitudes, and man himself is not exempt from them. Maidirbala, grandson of the last emperor of Yuan, has now been here five years. He is no longer a child. His father and mother seem to have abandoned him. We had better send him back to them with the presents I am dispatching. End quote. The prince, we're told,

was in no rush at all to leave the lavish comforts of the southern capital to rejoin his exiled family in the wilds of Mongolia, but his complaints fell on deaf ears. Instead, he was packed off in the charge of two specially selected eunuchs who had been personally instructed by the emperor to let no harm or otherwise ill chance befall the Mongol prince, including him slipping away back to the capital on his way to rejoin his family. The following year, word reached the courts at Nanjing that the great commander of the Yuan, Koka Temur, had died at his palace at Halana Hai in the Shingon Mountains, and that his wife had decided to join her husband and thus hanged herself when she found out. Hongwu decided that, though in his life his mortal enemy, Koka had indeed been an honorable and

worthy foe, worthy of respect and death. As such, he gathered his own generals, and once assembled, asked them all to name an extraordinary hero. When in all, the answer from the commanders came back. Surely he must be speaking of no less than Chang Y-Chen, the great general and hero of Ming, who alone could command a hundred thousand troops, and who had marched on Kambalik, and who Hongwu himself had honored in death as the Prince of Kaiping. The emperor nodded and replied, he was no doubt a great hero, but if you would name an extraordinary one, it was the Prince Wang Baobao. Kokatemer. 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 1 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, revolution and regicide, which rocked the Three Kingdoms and the Fledgling Empire. In season three, 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. Kuka's death would prove to be a grievous blow to the fighting capacity of the Northern Yuan, as well as its morale, and in the course of the years to follow, his absence would indeed prove conspicuous and irreplaceable. Time and again, they faced disastrous defeat by the Ming, in addition to several truly strange command-own goals of their own. All of that might have ultimately been recoverable, perhaps, but we will never know. Because just three years later, Kokatamra was followed into death by the Yuan Emperor himself, Ayusharidala, Biligtu Khan, at the age of 38 for unspecified reasons. With him, the last sparks of the Torch of Yuan, or at least of restoring it to its former grandeur and glory, were extinguished as well. Haworth concludes his chapter on the exiled leader, quote,

His reign added a painful chapter to the later Mongol annals. The list of their disasters was much lengthened. They were excluded from Liaodong, and whenever they tried to force a way into the borders of the empire, they were beaten back. They were once more confined to the great desert, whence they originally sprang. End quote. This is quite the poetic point. Going back to start.

The circle being complete. The Mongols started from the edge of nowhere, on theenti range of Mongolia on the edge of Siberia, and they come right back there again. As such, this is as good a place as any to draw down this show's extended love affair with the Mongols as central players and actors. This is, after all, not the history of Mongolia, but the history of China, and I know that there are other podcasts that go into much further depth on the subsequent adventures of the Mongols and their myriad descendants. Now, don't get me wrong here. I'm still not done with the bonus episode series that will eventually connect up to the beginning of this Yuan series.

Not by a long shot, in fact. Nor are the Mongols going to be vanishing from the story anytime soon. Not ever, in fact. They will remain on the periphery of the Great Imperium, always lingering, ever a potential, and at times potent, threat. At least to those near enough to the border regions. So long as the horse and bow are the supreme weapons of the rolling steplands, the unrivaled lords of those weapons and mounts will never vanish as a force to be reckoned with. But neither will they ever rise again to their former seat of power and glory, as under Lord Jengis. There are many reasons for this. Chinese wariness, the fractious nature of steppe alliances themselves absent a powerful

and visionary enough leader like Tamajin. But the tale the Mongols themselves told and recorded down amongst themselves was something far more unearthly, and as such, it's worth telling. The tale goes that more than two centuries before the expulsion of the Mongol Yuan emperors from China back to the steppes, Genghis Khan's eventual father, Yesugei, then a young poor bachelor of the Siberian forests, was out hunting with his brother in the year 1159, by the Chinese calendar, the year of the earth rabbit. While pursuing a rabbit for his next meal, he came upon the unmistakable tracks of a young woman in the snow. Leaving the rabbit's trail and following that of the woman, Yesugei would come

upon the young and beautiful Huilun and eventually kidnap her, ultimately making her his wife, and together they would produce Tamajin, with him the Borjigin imperial line itself. From Weatherford, quote, Normally the rabbit stoodenghis Khan in 1206, the story notes, the year of the fire rabbit. And every 12 years or so, with the turning of the Chinese zodiac, the Bojjigin's spiritual rabbit protector would return, bearing each time a special encounter with the family members. And so on it went. Quote, somewhere along the way, though, the Bojjigin clan forgot about its relationship with the rabbit and the debt owed to the animal as a source of the family's power.

When the yellow earth rabbit year returned in 1399, the Mongol ruler, Elbeg Khan, again met the rabbit at the edge of the forest. But this time, the encounter produced a much more gruesome result. End quote. This time, the Borjigin Khan, having had no success in his hunt that day so far, wasted little time inciting the rabbit and sinking one of his arrows deep into its flesh. As the dying rabbit bled out into the snow, a dramatic splash of crimson on a field of white, it's said that the animal's spirit, until then the guardian of the Borjigins, fled its dying body and straight into that of Elbeg Khan, who had been swept into something of a hypnotic trance by the encounter and the otherworldly forces at work. Possessed by the now quite vengeful spirit, Elbeg became obsessed with the color of red upon white, and as such,

with the new bride of his own son and heir, the young and beautiful Princess Oljetu, who had skin as white as snow and cheeks as red as blood. In spite of the taboo nature of any such contact between father and daughter-in-law, Elbeg demanded to meet with Oljetu. The princess, however, rejected the request sent her by the Khan, replying to his messenger, quote, Are heaven and earth no longer separate, that it is acceptable for a great Khan to look upon his daughter-in-law? Or have you come to tell me of the death of my husband? Or has my End quote. Eldig, we're told, took exactly the wrong lesson from this firm rejection of his advances, and rather than giving up the pursuit of this beautiful woman,

the demonic spirit possessing him drove him to now hunt down and kill his own son so that it would be permissible to look upon his widow. Weatherford continues, Rather than satisfying the Khan's desire, however, the attack only increased it. As his obsession with the young woman grew, he made her his wife. When she became the new Khatun, Alba Khan made his servant and accomplice Dayu, the Taishi, an office generally equivalent to prime minister and the highest position allowed to any man outside the Borjigin clan.

End quote. At this point in the story, the crazed rabbit spirit basically turns into a Ju-on grudge ghost situation, and begins infecting with bloodlust and insanity everyone it comes in contact with. And the next soul it would claim would be the beautiful young Katoon, who, having already lost her husband, would then be forced into a new marriage, and thus soon, quote, became infected herself with the same wicked obsession of red on white, end quote. In her case, however, it was neither blood on snow nor red cheek upon pale skin, but rather the burning desire to see her new husband's blood spattered upon the skin

of the Taishi who had helped the Khan murder his own son and then violate her. Just as the Khan lusted after sex, she lusted for revenge, and would use sex to avenge herself on both of them. Now, let me just pause for a moment here to acknowledge that this story, as it's told, is, yes, saying that a woman such as Princess Olgitu, who seeks her own bloody vengeance, is somehow inflicted by a black curse. Personally, I see her very much more in the vein of the bride and Kill Bill, and therefore cheer right along with everything she's about to do, because damn it, they had it coming. They only had themselves to blame. If you'd have been there, if you'd have seen it, I bet you you would have done the same. All right, back to the story.

Old Day 2 Khatun waited for the ideal moment to strike, and in the meantime availed herself to both her husband and his right-hand man of just what a kind, gracious, and yes, thankful bride she was in her new setting. Until, at last, Elbe Khan set out for a hunt with his pet falcon and left behind Dayu Taishi to safeguard their encampment. The Taishi approached the royal tent and, as per custom and law, waited outside until the Khan had returned. Shortly though, word reached the Khatun within the tent that the Taishi waited without, and so she immediately sent him one of her servants,

imploring him to come inside as it was so cold and within the royal gur there was fire, milk, and food. The time she accepted, no doubt with at least some nominal level of reluctance, as it was against strict custom, but it was cold outside after all. Within waited the young queen, who immediately set about making him feel very much at home, and as nothing less than an honored and eminent guest of the household. Quote, she served him a platter of prized foods, including butter dainties and dried dairy dishes. She also offered him a drink of twice-distilled mare's milk, the potent black drink of the steppe tribes.

End quote. Dayu ate and drank and ate some more and drank some more and drank and drank until he was very obviously well past the point of a little tipsy. Now the queen began to speak with the minister, saying in the most coquettish and warm fashion of just how grateful she was to the man, and what a debt she owed him for making possible the life she now led. Quote, You have made my poor person important, and I wish to thank you for making my insignificant person great, for making me a queen, end quote. As such, she wished to present to the minister a token of her appreciation, her personal bowl of pure silver. She presented

the bowl, no doubt with all the flourish of a great gift, and then ladled yet more of the black drink into its hollow. It was high-step etiquette that when presented any bowl, much less one so great as this and as a royal gift, no less, one must drink the whole of its contents down at once to show that one accepted the proffered gift. And Dayu did just that, at which point he lapsed immediately into a deep unconsciousness. The fly had entered the spider's own parlor, wrapped himself in her own silks, and then

drank her poison down with gusto. That's not to say he was dead. Not yet, at least. Merely deeply asleep. Unsure of just how long her envenomed bull's effects would last on the man, the queen moved with all due haste. She dragged his limp body upon her own bed. When that effort was over, her true labor began. She did nothing to harm the minister. Not yet, at least. But instead now tore and clawed at her own clothes and body,

even ripping out chunks of her own hair and gouging at her face. The interior of her home she likewise smashed up and clawed, making it seem as though a great struggle had taken place. When all this was done, the Tai Chi yet slumbered peacefully and unawares. And then, Algetoo began to scream with all the horror and pain that she'd kept locked away within her all these weeks and months since the murder of her beloved husband. She screamed as if to wake the dead. Or at least, to add to their ranks. Guards and servants came immediately running, of course, and what they saw was seemingly irrefutable and damning.

Clearly, Dayu Taishi had attacked the queen in some kind of terrible, drunken frenzy. She explained as much to them, and when her lord husband, Elbig, returned, being immediately summoned back to the camp by messenger Ryder when news of the grievous crime was reported to him, she said as much to him as well. Quote, When the Khan returned, she emotionally explained that she had summoned the counselor to thank him for making it possible to marry the Khan. Then, when she gave him her bowl in gratitude and he drank its contents, he wanted to become intimate with me,

she explained. When I refused, he attacked me, end quote. In the course of all this, Dayu himself was slowly returning to consciousness, and with it, a dawning understanding of just what all these very angry voices were saying, and that they were saying it all about him. In a dazed panic at the accusations he was hearing, he leapt up and made a mad dash from the tent, grabbing the reins of the first horse he could and beating a swift escape from the encampment and out into the plains. It was, of course, a brief dalliance with liberty. Assuming, understandably, that his Taishi's flight was proof of guilt in the matter, Elbeg and his men mounted their steeds and ruthlessly pursued and hunted down that which had defiled what was his.

Ultimately, the Khan caught up with the fleeing minister, and a fierce fight ensued. As the Khan approached, Dayu fired an arrow and struck Elbeg Khan in the hand, slicing off his little finger. In retaliation, the Khan shot his former friend and let him lie moaning in agony before finally killing him. Now, the enraged Khan skinned the body of his friend, precisely as he'd skinned the rabbit. The Khan brought the flesh from the dead man's backside to his young queen

as a gift of revenge against her accused attacker. End quote. For old Jatu, however, the minister's disembodied skin was but the canvas upon which her vengeance would be painted. When her husband approached her with the man's skin dangling from his wounded hand, she reached out and took the Khan's wounded hand. She brought it up to her lips to kiss it, and she lovingly licked the blood from the stump of his missing finger. At the same time, she gently took the gift of the freshly flayed skin of her husband's dead friend,

and also brought it to her lips. The Khan now saw what his obsession for a woman as beautiful as the red blood on white snow had brought him. Only now it was red human blood, his own blood, dripping onto the snow-white fat of his former friend. She gently licked the skin in the same way that she had licked her husband's bleeding finger, and then swallowed the grease of the skin together with the blood of her husband. Although I am a woman, she proclaimed to her husband, I have avenged the vengeance of my husband. When I die, there will be no regret. End quote. Is any of this true? How much of it is sheer legend? Weatherford puts it, quote, that act would prove to be no more than the opening of the rabbit's curse on the royal family and the Mongol nation, end quote. For decades, centuries thereafter, the once mighty Mongol

nation would again dissolve into dissolute, mutually warring tribes, clan against clan, sister against brother, mother against son, husband against wife, and daughter against father. Regardless of how much faith one might choose to place in the specific tale of the rabbit's vengeful spirit and its curse, it does at least serve as an effective allegory for the path the Mongol homeland now faced. Mongolia itself had degenerated into a state of not only wildness and lawlessness, but utter degradation and ruin. Quote, On the fertile steppe where millions of animals once roamed, now hunger stalked the few surviving

animals and threatened the nomads who depended on them. The scattered clans and tribes moved in scattered groups across the once beautiful landscape, now ravaged by war and overgrazing, and through forests decimated by the returning royal court. Animals starved amid the environmental degradation, and roving gangs of thugs seized the animals that survived. The returning invaders abided by neither Mongol custom nor law. It was not yet the end of time, but surely the end could not be far away." It sounds, I mean, not to get too terribly Dan Carlin-ish about it, but it sounds rather like something out of Mordor. Although sort of a reverse Mordor, in that Sauron was destroying everything in the process of industrializing the orcs for further conquest, whereas the Borgians back in Mongolia

are undergoing a slow-motion re-de-industrialization as they tear through the limited resources of their homeland in the process of coming to terms with their own sudden, lesser status. The Mongol nation and the once glorious golden family sank so low and suffered so much abuse that it would possibly have been a blessing for the whole family to have died and the name of the nation to have disappeared in the wind like the cold ashes of an abandoned camp. End quote. In spite of the Mongols' truly singular accomplishments, such an ignominious fading from life and memory would have, truth be told, been far more par for the course than any lasting legacy coming from the steppe peoples.

In the millennia and aeons that accompanies human history, it can never be known just how many of these steppe civilizations rose, conquered, ruled, and then fell, only to be forgotten and consigned to the dusts and mists of unrecorded time. Even the once mighty, terrifying Xiongnu Empire is known to us today only because the scribes of its mortal enemy, the Qin and the Han Chinese, bothered to record them at all. The legendary flail of God, Attila, and his Hunnic hordes, so reminiscent of Genghis Khan more than a thousand years later, exist in our collective consciousness thanks only to Roman and European records,

certainly not their own. Without such literate societies to make mention of their exploits, they would be as perfectly invisible to us as the probably hundreds or thousands of other such stories and epic tales that occurred before the advent of written language at all. That is the true tragedy of studying history, to look at all there is and realize how much more that was but was never recorded. We remain and never shall enshrouded in darkness of 95% of our own history. All else has been lost like tears in the rain. Fortunately for us, step history generally, and Mongol history more specifically, it all goes well on after this, and heck, unto this very day. History isn't dead. It's not even past. For our own purposes, however, in the scope of this particular show, the retreat of the Mongol Empire out of China and back into relative smallness shall mark our final foray into dealing with them as the

protagonist of this ongoing drama. As I said before, after all, this was, and remains, the history of China. And when you're out, you're out. As such, next time we'll leave the Northern Yuan to assume their tertiary role in the remainder of Chinese history, and instead boldly plunge forward into the reign of the Ming's first emperor, a man we've all gotten to know quite well by this point, the great Zhu Yuanzhang, a.k.a. the Hongwu Emperor. Thanks for listening. 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.