CHAPTER FIVE
The Emperor of China

Khubilai wished to be perceived both as the legitimate Khan of Khans of the Mongols and as the Emperor of China.  Though he had, by the early 1260s, become closely identified with China, he still, for a time, claimed universal rule.  He sought recognition of his status as the undisputed ruler of all the Mongol domains.  The Golden Horde in Russia, however, had supported Arigh Böke’s candidacy as the Great Khan, and the Central Asian khans had often remained on the sidelines in the struggle between the two brothers.  Khubilai was on good terms with the Il-Khans of Persia, but the Mongol rulers there, starting with his brother Hülegü, were essentially self-governing.  Though the Il-Khans continued throughout Khubilai’s reign to seek formal investiture from him, they were virtually autonomous.  Thus, despite his successes in China and Korea, Khubilai was unable to have himself accepted as the Great Khan.

China was to be his main base, a realization that dawned on him within a decade of his enthronement as Great Khan.  He needed to concentrate on governing China.  Though he may have perceived of the Chinese as his “colonial subjects,” he recognized that he had to rule China and that to do so he had to employ Chinese advisers and officials.  Yet he could not rely totally on Chinese advisers because he had to maintain a delicate balancing act between ruling the sedentary civilization of China and preserving the cultural identity and values of the Mongols.  In governing China, he was concerned with the interests of his Chinese subjects, but also with exploiting the resources of the empire for his own aggrandizement.  His motivations and objectives alternated from one to the other throughout his reign.

SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC PROBLEMS

The China that Khubilai sought to rule in 1260 faced serious problems.  It had not really recovered from the destruction caused by the Mongol conflicts with the Chin dynasty from 1211 to 1234.  The battles with the Southern Sung and the wars of succession within the Mongol elite had also contributed to the devastation suffered in North China.  Despite Yeh-lü Ch’u-ts’ai’s efforts in the 1230s and Mongke’s laws in the 1250s, the tax system lacked coherence and regularity.  The Chinese peasants were uncertain about the intentions of their Mongol rulers.  Would these new overlords simply expropriate their land and convert it into pasture for their animals?  Would they devise arbitrary and exorbitant taxes on the peasants?  The wars with Arigh Böke in Mongolia and Central Asia and the hostility of the Southern Sung hampered international commerce, and domestic trade had been disrupted by the unrest within China.  The Mongols had not developed a code of laws for North China.  A combination of the code of the Chin dynasty and the Mongol traditional laws appeared to be dominant, but confusion prevailed; a clear-cut guide to legal and illegal behavior was needed.

The system of education, too, was in disarray.  The object of education in the past had been preparation for the civil service examinations.  With the suspension of these exams, the Chinese and their Mongol overlords as well began to wonder about the purposes of education.  The religious organizations were also confused.  The Buddhist hierarchy recognized that Khubilai was sympathetic, but the Taoists did not know to what degree the government would discriminate against them.  The Confucians were concerned lest the Mongol emperors ignore or abandon their rituals and their code of conduct.  The less popular religions (e.g., Islam) were unsettled about the Mongols’ attitudes toward them.  In addition, the fates of the Mongol and Chinese militaries were uncertain.  What kinds of relationships would these two vastly different forces develop?  Would the army play as important a role as it had in traditional Mongol society?  The responsibilities of the foreigners, principally Central Asians, brought to China by Khubilai and his predecessors were vague.  How would they fit in with the government that Khubilai had just established?  The four-class system that he had devised—Mongols, Muslims and Jurchens, Northern Chinese, and Southern Chinese—needed clearer definition.  What privileges and responsibilities would each of these groups be granted?  What other social divisions would be mandated?

One of the most pressing problems was the apparent depopulation of North China.  In 1195, the population of North China under the Chin dynasty amounted to more than forty-five million, six million of whom were Jurchens, and the combined Southern Sung and Chin populations exceeded one hundred million.  By 1393, in the early years of the native Chinese dynasty that succeeded the Mongols, the total population of China had declined to sixty million.  This remarkable reduction remains unexplained.  The wars at the end of the Mongol dynasty must have sharply reduced the population of the North and are a partial explanation for the drop.  Even more significant was the inaccuracy of the census caused by evasion and corrupt census takers.  Yet some loss in the population of the North is undeniable.  The reduction points to misery in North China.

Khubilai needed to respond to these questions and to cope with these problems if he wished to create order in Chinese society.  The government agencies he had formed were valuable mechanisms, but they required direction.  Khubilai had to articulate the political, social, and economic policies that he meant them to implement.  The clearer and the more specific his policies, the more effective his government agencies could be.  He had to disclose his plans for ruling, rather than simply exploiting, China, and his officials might then emulate and assist him in seeking to govern the sedentary civilization.  He had already promoted the interests of the Chinese peasants in his own appanage in the 1230s and 1240s, but now he had to reveal his intentions to the rest of the Chinese.

However, before embarking on a planned, orderly program to define and clarify his social, political, and economic ideals, Khubilai was required to relieve the misery.  The records of the first few years of his reign are replete with accounts of his efforts at relief.  He was called upon to decide on appeals for assistance and tax exemption from many regions in his domain in North China, and he often responded by granting such relief.  In 1261, he waived taxes on Huaimeng in Honan and other regions because of reports that they were experiencing economic difficulties.  In April of 1262, he did the same for the area around modern Peking, Kuang-ning, and other localities that had suffered as a result of the warfare in the north.  He also reduced the tax levies on peasants whose mulberry trees and silkworms had been damaged during these battles.  In the same year, he granted paper money to peasants in Ho-hsi whose lands had been devastated by natural disasters.  He repeatedly provided grain to widows and orphans without other means of support.  In 1262, he ordered his Mongol commissioners to avoid excessive demands of corvée labor on peasants, particularly those who were reclaiming land.  And from that time on, he prohibited his officials and his army from making exorbitant demands on the Chinese people.  He even rewarded Chinese who submitted but had earlier been hostile, providing them with clothing and other gifts from the court.  On the other hand, those Chinese who deliberately sought to avoid the paying of taxes were to be severely punished.  Yet a plethora of remissions and exemptions and criticisms of exploitative or oppressive officials is recorded in the early years of Khubilai’s reign.  Khubilai was concerned with the welfare of his Chinese subjects and with the economic rehabilitation of the territory that he hoped to rule.

Some scholars have wondered about Khubilai’s own involvement in the social, political, and economic decisions that charted the course for the early years of his reign.  Did he take an active role in devising the policies and programs pursued during this time?  Or did his Chinese advisers merely present him with proposals that he, with little reflection, then adopted?  To be sure, Khubilai did not originate many of the policies that were subsequently implemented.  Despite his exposure to and sympathy for the sedentary world, his relative lack of experience in governing an empire like China made him somewhat dependent on advisers.  But he did not simply sit back and await proposals; he actively solicited suggestions.  One of his officials quotes him as saying: “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.  But if the proposals are useful, the Court will liberally promote and reward the persons who make the proposals in order to encourage the loyal and sincere ones.”  Wang Yün, a contemporary observer, tells us that Khubilai participated in the deliberations at court, and that his advisers and officials had ready access to him.  In the space of a week in May of 1261, Wang had three audiences with Khubilai to discuss governmental affairs.  Other, more influential officials surely met with the khan even more frequently.  In these early days, Khubilai appears to have been intimately involved with and surprisingly well informed about developments at court and in the country.  He was not the creative force behind the numerous policies initiated at that time, but he did influence these policies and on occasion modified them to accommodate Mongol practices.

The programs were also not devised simply by his Chinese advisers.  Khubilai had an international staff working for him in the early 1260s.  His trusted Tibetan adviser, the `Phags-pa lama, had received the title of Kuo-shih (State Preceptor) in 1260 and was eventually granted jurisdiction over Tibet.  Muslims from Central Asia were encouraged to come to China to supervise trade, and several became financial administrators in the empire.  Turks, who had served the Mongols since the time of Chinggis Khan, were even more prominent during Khubilai’s reign.  They were not simply involved in military campaigns; only seven of the seventy-three Uighur Turks in Khubilai’s service were military men.  Twenty-one of them were resident commissioners (Mong.: darughachi) or local officials, several served as tutors to the imperial princes, and a few translated documents for the court.  Khubilai also employed men from other Turkish groups (Khanglis, Kipchaks, etc.) in similar government positions.  He was, in effect, recruiting an international corps of advisers, and his economic program necessarily reflected a more cosmopolitan outlook than the programs of earlier Chinese dynasties.

KHUBILAI’S ECONOMIC PROGRAM

One of the pivots of the program was the encouragement of agriculture.  In 1261, Khubilai founded an Office for the Stimulation of Agriculture (in Chinese, Ch’üan-nung ssu) and appointed eight officials to initiate programs to support the peasant economy.  Khubilai chose Yao Shu to lead the agency, an indication of the value he placed on agriculture.  The agency’s officials, in turn, selected men knowledgeable in agronomy to help the peasants with their land.  Eventually, a sizable hierarchy and bureaucracy were organized to promote the more efficient and productive use of the land.  The lands in North China had been damaged by the warfare that had afflicted the territory for half a century, and Khubilai had to initiate policies leading to its recovery.  Relief measures, including tax remissions, would be insufficient.  Granaries for the storage of surplus grain had to be built as insurance against shortages of food in these devastated lands.  Khubilai’s capital would eventually have fifty-eight such granaries, which stored 145,000 shih (each shih being equivalent to about 133 pounds) of grain.  But such measures were palliatives.  Khubilai needed to call for more positive efforts to assist the Chinese peasants.

Khubilai’s edicts and program reveal attempts to safeguard the interests of the peasants.  One of his first instructions to his Mongol underlings was meant to protect the peasants’ most valuable possession—their land.  Early in 1262, he prohibited the nomads’ animals from roaming in the farmlands.  He did not wish his own people to encroach upon and perhaps cause additional damage to the valuable territory of the peasants.  This edict and other regulations disclose his growing concern for his sedentary subjects.  But these measures do not necessarily indicate that Khubilai identified solely with the peasants.  It seemed to Khubilai, however, that his Chinese domains could not be properly governed without a flourishing or at least an adequately sustained peasant class.

Khubilai thus sought to help the peasants organize themselves for economic recovery.  By 1270, he had found a convenient vehicle for such an organization, the she.  This new state-sponsored rural organization, composed of about fifty households under the direction of a village leader known as the she-chang, had as its principal purpose the stimulation of agricultural production and promotion of reclamation.  Khubilai gave the she a mandate to help in farming, planting trees, opening up barren areas, improving flood control and irrigation, increasing silk production, and stocking the lakes and rivers with fish.  The she leader was to compel the indolent to work and to reward the industrious.  Khubilai and his advisers conceived of the she as a self-help organization for the peasants.  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.

Khubilai and his advisers intended, however, to graft other functions onto the she.  Stability was a principal goal.  It appears that “many peasants were willing to bind themselves together, not in revolutionary groups designed to change the existing social structure, but in organizations designed to re-establish the old social structure and restore stability to peasant villages.”  Khubilai also planned to use the she as an aid in surveillance and in conducting periodic censuses.  Perhaps the most innovative objective was to employ this new organization to promote education.  Each she had the task of setting up schools for the village boys.  The schools were planned to introduce the peasant children to better and more efficient means of farming as well as to provide them with the rudiments of literacy.  Although this vision of an educational system, lying outside the confines of the traditional civil service examinations, was not fulfilled, it reveals that the concept of a literate peasantry whose interests the government would protect was embraced by Khubilai and his advisers.  No longer would the government concern itself exclusively with the nomads.  Peasants would receive a share of the attention of the Mongols.  For example, Khubilai required the she to establish “charity granaries” (Chin.: i-ts’ang) to assist unfortunates during bad harvests or droughts and to provide grain for orphans, widows, and the elderly.

Another way of protecting the peasants was to devise a fixed, regular system of taxation.  Khubilai wished to abolish tax farming, a structure that could not easily be controlled and often lent itself to abuses.  Perhaps as critical, he sought to reduce the power of the appanages.  Under the new system that Khubilai enacted, the payments that peasants had previously made to the appanage would now be remitted to the government and then divided equally between appanage and central government.  The peasants would pay annual taxes and need not concern themselves about capricious levies by the appanage holders.

The other principal burden on the peasants, corvée obligations, was as onerous as the taxes.  Khubilai embarked upon a series of public works projects, such as the extension of the Grand Canal, that necessitated vast investments of labor and capital.  The postal relay system, which linked the Mongol capital to the rest of China, also entailed corvée in the form of supplying labor and horses, and provisions for both men and animals.  Such corvées were clearly burdensome obligations; however, Khubilai sought, throughout his reign, to limit excessive demands on the population.  On occasion, he waived the taxes on those particularly called upon for corvée.  He repeatedly issued regulations demanding that his official envoys and troops not make extralegal impositions on the peasants.  To be sure, the fact that these injunctions to his own personnel had to be repeated indicates that abuses persisted.  Yet it is clear that Khubilai, unlike some of the more conservative Mongols, did not wish merely to exploit the Chinese peasants or to compel them to abandon their farms so that the land could be used for grazing.

Another group he sought to protect was the artisans.  Khubilai set up a number of offices in his government both to organize and to safeguard the welfare of craftsmen.  These household agencies were charged with providing jewelry, clothing, and textiles for the private use of the court.  Moreover, public works projects required the services of highly skilled craftsmen.  To garner their allegiance and to help them prosper, Khubilai enacted regulations favoring artisans.  The government offered them rations of food, clothing, and salt and exempted them from corvée labor.  It also permitted them to sell some goods on the open market.  Thus, artisans were in an enviable position during Khubilai’s reign.  Though the usual complaints of official corruption were magnified by the onerous demands and graft of the supervisors of the artisans, the court certainly attempted to prevent such abuses and exploitation, and craftsmen, in general, benefited from Mongol rule.

Merchants also prospered during Khubilai’s reign.  The Chinese dynasties of the past had occasionally imposed restrictions on merchants, and powerful segments of the Confucian official class disapproved of trade.  Merchants were traditionally perceived as parasitical, crafty, and avaricious, and the various Chinese courts attempted to regulate their activities as well as their profits.  Khubilai did not share this bias against merchants; in fact, he accorded them high status.  Trade within China prospered, and foreign commerce also flourished.  Muslim merchants served as intermediaries in the overland trade from China to Central Asia, the Middle East, and Persia.  They imported camels, horses, carpets, medicines, and spices and exported Chinese textiles, ceramics, lacquerware, ginger, and cassia.  From the southeastern port cities of Ch’üan-chou and Fuchou, they transported Chinese ceramics, silks, and copper cash westward, returning with precious stones, rhinoceros horns, medicines, incense, carpets, pepper, nutmeg, and other spices.  Some Chinese ceramics, in fact, were designed for export.  The Chinese exhibited a “genuine willingness ... to supply wares in forms agreeable to Muslim taste.”

Individual merchants, as well as merchant associations known in Mongolian as ortogh, eventually contributed to the Mongol economy in China.  The new dynasty’s regulations required foreign merchants to convert their precious metals into paper currency as soon as they set foot in China.  This policy was extremely profitable for the court, and the merchants abided by the regulation because it granted them entry into the lucrative trade with China.  The ortogh also performed invaluable services for the court and were cultivated by it.  In the years of the Mongol conquests, for instance, they provided badly needed loans to the Mongol nobility.  In 1268, Khubilai, as a reward, created the General Administration for the Supervision of the Ortogh.  This office loaned funds (known as wo-to-ch’ien, or “ortogh money”), which it obtained from the Mongol elite and from the government, to the ortogh at 0.8 percent monthly interest, which was lower than the 3 percent monthly interest charged to most borrowers.  The ortogh used this money either to finance trade caravans or to loan funds at a higher rate of interest to Chinese merchants.  Khubilai’s policies were thus extremely beneficial to traders.  The tax imposed upon commercial transactions amounted to only three and one-third percent.  Even the excesses of the merchant associations were tolerated.  Some of the merchants, for instance, would commandeer soldiers to protect them on their travels, while others used improper methods to force borrowers to repay their loans promptly.  The dynastic sources record numerous complaints about abuses by merchants, but stern warnings, rather than stiff punishments, were the main tactic used to control the ortogh.

To facilitate trade and to promote the welfare of the merchants, Khubilai initiated the use of paper currency throughout his domains.  Khubilai was the first Mongol ruler to seek a countrywide system of paper currency.  The Chinese sources credit Liu Ping-chung with persuading Khubilai to adopt paper money for North China.  But Khubilai did not need Liu’s prompting to notice the benefits and utility of paper currency.  Here again the chronicles tell the story of a sage Chinese adviser inveigling an ignorant, unsophisticated Mongol ruler to sanction an innovative, brilliant policy.  Whether or not that story is true, Khubilai invalidated the local paper currencies that had circulated under the earlier Mongol khans and called upon the people of North China to surrender gold, silver, and copper coins to the government.  He was determined to impose government controls on the currency and to replace coins with paper money.

In his first year in power, Khubilai devised three types of paper currency, one of which remained in use throughout his reign.  The first, known in Chinese as the ssu-ch’ao, was based upon silk, but the two others, the Chung-t’ung yüan pao-ch’ao and the Chung-t’ung yin-huo, were backed by a silver reserve.  The Chung-t’ung yüan-pao-ch’ao eventually prevailed and won the confidence of the population.  These notes must have been readily available and widely used, for Marco Polo described them at length in his account of his stay in thirteenth-century China.  The system operated well at least until 1276, partly because Khubilai kept tight controls on the amount of paper money printed.  Until the conquest of the Southern Sung, the government did not appreciably increase the amount of paper money it produced annually.  In 1276, the court, faced with staggering expenses for military campaigns in Southern China and Japan, dramatically expanded the amount it printed.  Yet inflation did not get out of hand during Khubilai’s reign.

Another form of governmental assistance for the merchants was improvement of the system of transport.  Khubilai promoted the building of roads, on either side of which “willows and other trees [had] been planted so that the shadow of the trees [fell] upon the road.”  In addition, he established postal stations, which, though originally designed to transmit and deliver official mail, also served to facilitate trade.  In addition to hosting traveling officials and foreign guests, the postal stations also served as hostelries for merchants.  By the end of Khubilai’s reign, China had more than 1,400 postal stations, which had at their disposal about 50,000 horses, 8,400 oxen, 6,700 mules, 4,000 carts, almost 6,000 boats, over 200 dogs, and 1,150 sheep.  The individual stations varied considerably, but they all had hostels for visitors, kitchens, a main hall, enclosures for animals, and storehouses for grain.  Under ideal conditions, the rider-messengers at the postal stations could cover 250 miles a day to deliver significant news, a remarkably efficient mail service for the thirteenth, or any other, century.

Thus, in a variety of ways Khubilai’s policies fostered trade and demonstrated his concern for the merchants.  In contrast to many Chinese, Khubilai was not biased against traders.  And the evidence from contemporary observers indicates that he succeeded: merchants did prosper.  Marco Polo, for example, wrote that there were many factories

in which stay and lodge the merchants and the travelling foreigners, of whom there are many from all parts to bring things as presents to the lord and to sell to the court, and all other men who come there for their business, who come there in very great quantity, between [those who come] for the court of the lord ... and for this that the town is in so good a market that the merchants and the other men come there for their business.... I believe there is not a place in the world to which so many merchants come & that dearer things and of greater value and more strange come into this town ... than into any city of the world.

Other classes of people and occupational groups also appeared to fare better under Khubilai than under the Chinese emperors.  Medicine, for one example, was an occupation favored by the court.  The pragmatic Mongol rulers valued medicine and emphasized it as a suitable and attractive profession.  Khubilai, himself afflicted with gout and other ailments, was particularly hospitable to physicians.  As a pragmatist, Khubilai was impressed by the efficacy of the treatments and medicines offered by the doctors around his court.  In 1285, 1288, and 1290 he dispatched envoys to South India to seek not only precious goods but also skilled craftsmen and doctors.  Two branches of the Kuang-hui ssu (imperial hospitals), composed primarily of Muslim doctors, were established in K’ai-p’ing and in North China to treat the emperor and the court.  Other Mongol officials as well consulted Muslim physicians, and thirty-six volumes of Muslim medicinal recipes were placed in the court library.  Starting in 1268, for example, a drug known in Persian as sharbat (Chin.: she-li-pieh), which was used as a laxative and to counter colic, was imported from Samarkand.  Khubilai established an Imperial Academy of Medicine (Chin.: T’ai-i yüan), which specified the criteria for the selection of instructors of medicine and supervised the training of physicians and the preparation of medical texts.  The regulations maintained high standards for prospective physicians and therefore members of the Chinese elite in greater numbers than in earlier dynasties were attracted to the field.  The physician’s calling was lucrative, offered access to influence through the doctor’s patients, and conformed to the Confucian emphasis on righteousness and altruism.  Moreover, physicians often received exemption from corvée labor and other services and fiscal obligations.  With government support, the social status of doctors improved dramatically.

Similarly, Khubilai regarded astronomers and other scientists highly and invited numerous foreign scientists to China.  In 1258, the Persians had built an observatory at Maragheh in Azerbaijan where new astronomical instruments were fashioned and important discoveries were made.  In 1267, Khubilai invited the Persian astronomer Jamal al-Din to come to China to transmit these discoveries.  He brought along diagrams of an armillary sphere, sundials, an astrolabe, a terrestrial globe, and a celestial globe as gifts for the court.  He also offered a new, more accurate calendar, known in Chinese as the Wannien li (Calendar for Ten Thousand Years), to Khubilai.  Four years later, in 1271, Khubilai finally established the institute of Muslim Astronomy (Hui-hui ssu-t’ien chien).  There, the Chinese astronomer Kuo Shou-ching (1231-1316) used the Persian diagrams and calculations to build his own instruments and to devise his own calendar, the Shou-shih li (Calendar Delivering the Seasons), which with minor revisions was employed through the Ming dynasty.

The Muslims contributed also to geographic knowledge and mapmaking during this period.  With Arab and Persian travelers and traders transmitting information about Central Asia and the Middle East, “geography in China [flourished], incorporating data on the non-Chinese world taken from Arab sources.”  A world map drawn during the Mongol dynasty, probably based on information derived from Muslim sources, gives a fairly accurate rendering of Asia and Europe.  And, along with providing inducements for scientists, Khubilai also favored clergymen and artists, whom the Chinese dynasties had cultivated as well.  His attitude toward these two groups will be discussed more fully later in this chapter.

In sum, Khubilai eliminated some discriminatory practices and sought to alter the biases against occupational groups that had not fared well under the Chinese dynasties.  Though he sought to treat farmers with fairness and encourage farm productivity, those not involved in farming—merchants, physicians, and scientists—were accorded greater benefits and attracted more court concern.  Khubilai clearly hoped to gain their support in his effort to rule China.  The group whose interests were most damaged by the Mongols was the landed elite, from whom derived the bulk of the scholar-official class that had governed China.  Khubilai and the Mongols had displaced them as the rulers of the country.  Without the civil service examinations, the Chinese elite had few options.  Some acquiesced and served the Mongols; others abandoned public life to become recluses or dabble in the arts; and still others, disgruntled with Mongol rule, formed a potentially disruptive force, particularly in South China.  Khubilai nonetheless attempted to gain their favor by retaining government offices that offered opportunities for scholar-officials.  These included the Han-lin Academy (the Academy of Worthies), which supervised the Chinese National College (Kuo-tzu hsüeh), the Directorate for the Diffusion of Confucian Texts, the Archives, and the Imperial Diarists’ Office.

While concerning himself with social and economic matters, Khubilai continued to pay attention to the military.  He placed real power over the military in the hands of the Privy Council (Chin.: Shu-mi yüan), an agency created by the Sung dynasty that he revived in 1263.  Khubilai sought to centralize all of the military under the Council but faced considerable opposition from the Mongol commanders, who had traditionally had great independence.  Khubilai conceded to them by creating a separate military for them.  The Mongol troops totally under Khubilai’s jurisdiction were organized as the Meng-ku chün (Mongol Army), while those over which he did not have full control were called in Mongol the Tammachi.  These two forces were composed primarily of cavalry, and a third division, consisting of ethnic Chinese, was used as the infantry.

All Mongol adult males under the age of seventy were liable for conscription.  In addition, certain Chinese families were designated as hereditary military households and were to provide soldiers and supplies for the Yüan armies.  But now, having established a bureaucracy and having encouraged sedentary agriculture, Khubilai could not readily mobilize the entire male population for war.  He had granted land to the Mongol soldiers as payment for their services, and they simply could not leave their farms to go on military campaigns.  Still, they apparently retained their fighting skills and could be relied upon in emergencies.  Both the Chinese and the Mongol militaries were exempted from half the taxes imposed on ordinary citizens, but they were forced to provide their own supplies, saving valuable resources for the court.  According to a recent study of the army, “the military households ... formed a hereditary military caste with heavy physical and financial burdens.”

During Khubilai’s reign, the burdens were tolerable.  The army remained an effective fighting force, as evidenced by its later successes in Manchuria and in Southeast Asia.  But opportunities for graft, corruption, and other abuses were numerous.  Officers extorted funds from their men.  Moreover, the military administration was not pervasive.  Though the Privy Council controlled the region around the capital, local branches, which were often virtually autonomous, controlled the military needs of most other regions.

Some in the traditional Mongol military remained influential even after Khubilai became Emperor of China.  Khubilai retained the kesig, the old bodyguards of Chinggis, and offered them special privileges and rewards.  The men in the kesig were generally part of the elite and preserved their positions in the hierarchy.  Khubilai needed them to counterbalance the Chinese forces he recruited.  Thus, he relied on the kesig, not the Chinese, as bodyguards for himself and for those around the court.  Similarly, in establishing garrisons throughout his domains Khubilai sensed the need to maintain Mongol dominance.  These garrisons, which were stationed in the capital, along the border, in Inner Asia, and in potentially troublesome regions within China, remained under the supervision of Mongol commanders.

Khubilai also perceived Mongol control of military supplies to be essential.  He initiated a government monopoly on bamboo, not to acquire income but to prevent the unauthorized use of bamboo for weapons.  Since bamboo could be used to make bows and arrows, its use was restricted to the Mongol government, and the Chinese were strictly prohibited from buying and selling it.

Khubilai also recognized the military value of horses and knew that a sensible system of obtaining horses was needed.  Now that some Mongols were settling in the sedentary world, they began to face the same problems as the Chinese in acquiring horses.  For the expansion of his domain and for defense against his enemies, Khubilai had to have a dependable supply of horses suitable for warfare.  Therefore, Khubilai fashioned a “horse administration” and devised regulations guaranteed to protect his steeds.  He established the Court of the Imperial Stud to tend his own herds as well as to manage horses assigned to the postal stations and to the imperial guards and armies.  Under the regulations issued by his court, one out of every one hundred horses owned by the people was to be turned over to the government.  Khubilai also reserved the right to purchase horses, and owners were compelled to sell their animals at official prices.  On occasion, he even requisitioned horses without compensating their owners, and offered the following justification: “Horses have already been requisitioned from those Buddhist monks, Christians, Taoists, Mohammedan teachers of North China who had them.... Now what need have the monks and Taoists, sitting in their temples, of horses?” There were severe punishments for Chinese families who concealed their horses, as there were for Chinese or Muslim merchants who smuggled them across the border to be sold to Khubilai’s enemies.  Mongol control over such smuggling was, to Khubilai, essential.

Early on, Khubilai recognized that a new legal system was needed.  He had inherited a code devised by the Jurchen Chin dynasty, which he employed temporarily but then abandoned in 1271.  Even earlier, in 1262, he had instructed his trusted advisers Yao Shu and Shih T’ien-tse to devise a new code that would be suitable in particular for his Chinese subjects.  By 1264, the new code had been prepared, but the Chin laws remained in force until 1271.  Even after that date, the new code was not implemented.  Yet the Mongol laws were not imposed on the Chinese.  Precedents derived from the decisions made from 1260 to 1271 were used in determining cases brought to the government or to the courts.  Mongol customs, laws, and practices doubtless influenced these decisions, however.  The Mongols, with Khubilai’s blessing, apparently introduced greater leniency to the Chinese legal system.  One hundred thirty-five capital crimes were specified, less than half the number mandated in the Sung law codes.  In addition, the annual lists of executions for the early years of Khubilai’s reign reveal that the Mongols seldom resorted to such retribution.  In 1263, for instance, seven people were executed; in 1265, forty-two; and in 1269, again forty-two, rather minuscule for the size of the population, the nature of the opposition, and the level of violence at that time.  As so often in Chinese history, the emperor reviewed sentences of execution, and Khubilai took this responsibility seriously.  Once when quite a few prisoners were facing the death penalty, he admonished his officials, saying: “Prisoners are not a mere flock of sheep.  How can they be suddenly executed?  It is proper that they be instead enslaved and assigned to pan gold with a sieve.”

Khubilai often granted amnesties, even to his own political enemies.  Following Mongol practice, he permitted criminals to avoid punishment through payment of a fine to the government.  This kind of monetary compensation was characteristic of Mongol law.  Under Khubilai, the principle of monetary compensation was extended somewhat to more serious crimes.  From this time on, compensatory fines, so typical of the Mongols, became part of the Chinese system of justice.  The investigation of cases was also modified, incorporating certain Mongol practices.  Most cases were handled on the local level, but the more serious ones were subject to review by officials at the provincial government level or even at the level of the central government.  These reviews served as a check on abuses of the rights of the accused.

We still do not know enough about Khubilai’s legal system to tell whether the statutory reforms and changes in customs actually translated into a more lenient and flexible system.  More research is needed to ascertain how effective in practice the legal innovations were.  The one indisputable fact is that Khubilai prompted the creation of a legal system that incorporated both Mongol and Chinese elements.  And the legal ideals that he had in mind appeared to be more flexible and lenient than earlier Chinese ones.  Although the system tended to favor the Mongols, it neither imposed numerous restrictions nor discriminated severely against the Chinese.

Thus, by the mid-1260s, Khubilai had laid the foundations for a stable society in North China.  While contending with his brother Arigh Böke and with the Chinese rebel Li T’an, he answered some of the major questions and began to resolve the uncertainties about his plans for China.  He had devised methods and institutions for promoting the interests of peasants, artisans, and merchants; he had instituted a fixed scale of taxes and obligations on the Chinese; and he had promoted the use of paper money to facilitate trade and built postal stations to improve communications and transport in his domains.  His court rewarded doctors, scientists, and others in formerly servile occupations whom the Chinese had offered little prestige, status, and compensation for their contributions.  He also succeeded in developing innovative military and legal systems that included Mongol and Chinese elements.  In sum, he appeared to have reconciled some of the disparate Mongol and Chinese elements that confronted him.