Kublai Khanemperor of Yuan dynasty
Also known as
  • Khubilai Khan
  • Kubla Khan




Kublai Khan, Kublai also spelled Khubilai, or Kubla   (born 1215—died 1294), Mongolian general and statesman, grandson of Genghis Khan. He conquered China and became the first emperor of its Yuan, or Mongol, dynasty. He was thus at the same time the overlord of all the Mongol dominions—which included areas as diverse as that of the Golden Horde in southern Russia, the Il-Khanate of Persia, and the steppe heartlands where Mongol princes were still living the traditional nomadic life—and the ruler of his own realm of China. To govern China, with its long and individual political and cultural history, demanded statecraft of a special order.

Historical background

The Mongols were a parvenu nomadic power. Before the time of Genghis Khan they had been no more than a group of semibarbaric tribes, more or less unknown to history. They had only primitive cultural traditions, and, except for some organized hunting and the management of their herds, they had little experience of economic activity. Until a few years before Kublai’s birth, they had been illiterate. They had only the most elementary ideas of statecraft.

This political incompetence contributed much to the rapid collapse of their empire. With a few outstanding exceptions, such as Kublai himself (whom the Mongols always called Setsen Khan, the Wise Khan), the rulers of the Mongols seem to have looked upon power as a personal, at most a family, possession, to be exploited for immediate gain. Hence, except in areas where, like China, there was a firm native political tradition, they never succeeded in organizing a durable state. In China, too, everything depended ultimately upon the willpower and ability of the ruler.

The Mongols had come to power in China, as elsewhere, by sheer force of arms; and with this prestige to back him, relying on his dominant personality, and building on the foundations of the brilliant civilization developed by the preceding Song dynasty, Kublai for a while could maintain the illusion that Mongol supremacy was firmly based. Indeed, his reign must have appeared to be a period of solid expansion and lasting achievement to his contemporaries, including Marco Polo, the Venetian traveler who became Kublai’s agent and whose book is the chief Renaissance source of information on the East.

Yet Kublai Khan was faced at the outset of his reign by an insoluble dilemma, which was given vivid expression in a memorial presented to him by one of his Chinese advisers: “I have heard that one can conquer the empire on horseback, but one cannot govern it on horseback.” In other words, to administer China the inexperienced Mongols would have to adopt Chinese methods, even live according to a Chinese pattern; and, to the extent that they did so, they would be bound to become more and more assimilated and perhaps lose their identity altogether. If, on the other hand, they worked through Chinese and other agents they would become alienated from the mass of the population, which would reject them. In either case, the Mongols, culturally and numerically inferior and used to a different pattern of life, could not continue for long to rule China as a distinct and privileged caste; and only the brilliance of Kublai’s personal achievement obscured this truth.

Rise to power

Kublai Khan was the fourth son of Tolui, the youngest of Genghis’s four sons by his favourite wife. He began to play an important part in the extension and consolidation of the Mongol empire only in 1251, when he was in his middle 30s. His brother, the emperor Möngke, resolved to complete the conquest of Song China, which had been planned by Genghis’s third son, Ögödei, and also to subdue Persia—a task allotted to Kublai’s brother Hülegü. Kublai was invested with full civil and military responsibility for the affairs of China. He appears never to have learned to read or write Chinese, but already he had recognized the superiority of Chinese thought and had gathered around himself a group of trustworthy Confucian advisers.

His attitude toward government was formed under the influence of these learned Chinese, who convinced him of the necessary interdependence of ruler and ruled and reinforced his innate tendency toward humanity and magnanimity. At home, in the fief allotted to him in the Wei River valley (in modern Gansu and Shaanxi provinces), he established a competent administration and a supply base. In the field, he stressed to his generals the precepts of his mentors—the importance and effectiveness of clemency toward the conquered. This was a great advance in civilized behaviour compared to the methods of Genghis Khan and those of Kublai’s contemporaries in Central Asia, where the massacre of the population was still the expected sequel to the capture of a city.

Kublai took Song China in the flank, subjugating the Dai kingdom of Nanzhao in present-day Yunnan before handing over command to his general Uriyangqadai. In 1257 Möngke assumed personal charge of the war, but he died in 1259. When Kublai, who with another army was besieging a city, heard that his brother, Arigböge, who had been left in charge of the homeland because he was younger, was planning to have himself elected khan, he patched up a truce with the Song. In April 1260 he arrived at his residence of Shangdu (the Xanadu of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s famous poem), in southeastern Mongolia. Here his associates held a kuriltai, or “great assembly,” and on May 5 Kublai was unanimously elected khan in succession to Möngke.

Ten days later he announced his succession in a proclamation drawn up in Classical Chinese. Because primogeniture was not a recognized principle at the time, Arigböge, with some very powerful supporters, held a kuriltai at Karakorum and had himself declared khan, ignoring Kublai’s action. In spite of Marco Polo’s insistence that Kublai was the lineal and legitimate descendant of Genghis Khan and the rightful sovereign, there have always been doubts about this legitimacy. A legend recorded in Mongol chronicles to the effect that the dying Genghis designated the child Kublai as a future khan seems to have been contrived so as to provide retrospective justification of an act of usurpation.

In 1264 Kublai defeated Arigböge in battle and forced him to submit. He died two years later. But the family feud, of which this was one manifestation, continued throughout Kublai’s reign. Against him were ranged those who resented the abandonment of the old ways of the steppe and the adoption of an alien, China-centred culture. The split was all the deeper because the leader of the opposition was Kaidu, who, as a grandson of Ögödei, who had been designated personally by Genghis as his successor, represented the cause of legitimacy. The throne had passed from the line of Ögödei to that of his brother Tolui in 1250 as a result of a coup d’etat. Kaidu never relaxed his hostility toward Kublai and remained master of Mongolia proper and Turkistan until his death in 1301.

The war with Kaidu showed how decisively Kublai had identified himself with the Chinese world and turned against the world of the nomads. Genghis had been strong and ruthless enough to compel the Mongols, always inclined to family feuds, to serve his cause; but Kublai, powerful though he was, could no longer control the steppe aristocracy effectively.

Unification of China

Kublai’s achievement was to reestablish the unity of China, which had been divided since the end of the Tang dynasty. This achievement was that much greater because he was a barbarian, nomadic conqueror. Even in Chinese official historiography the Mongol Kublai is treated with respect. As early as 1260 he instituted a reign period, in the Chinese manner, to date his reign; and in 1271, eight years before the disintegration of the Song, he proclaimed his own dynasty under the title of Da Yuan, or Great Origin. He never resided at Karakorum, Ögödei’s short-lived capital in northern Mongolia, but set up his own capital at what is now Beijing, a city known in his time as Dadu, the Great Capital.

The final conquest of Song China took several years. Kublai might well have been content to rule the North and to leave the Song dynasty nominally in control of South China, but the detention and ill treatment of envoys he had sent convinced him that the declining regime in the south must be dealt with decisively. Military operations opened once again in 1267. The Song emperor was apparently badly served by his last ministers, who are said to have kept him misinformed of the true situation, whereas many Song commanders went over voluntarily to the Mongols. In 1276 Kublai’s general Bayan captured the child emperor of the day, but loyalists in the south delayed the inevitable end until 1279.

With all China in Mongol hands, the Mongol conquests in the south and east had reached their effective limit; but Kublai, seeking to restore China’s prestige, engaged in a series of costly and troublesome wars that brought little return. At various times tribute was demanded of the peripheral kingdoms: from Burma (now Myanmar), from Annam and Champa in Indochina, from Java, and from Japan. The Mongol armies suffered some disastrous defeats in these campaigns. In particular, invasion fleets sent to Japan in 1274 and 1281 were virtually annihilated, though their loss was due as much to storms as to Japanese resistance.

Kublai was never entirely discouraged by the indifferent results of these colonial wars nor by their expense, and they were brought to an end only under his successor. Marco Polo suggests that Kublai wished to annex Japan simply because he was excited by reports of its great wealth. It seems, however, that his colonial wars were fought mainly with a political objective—to establish China once more as the centre of the world.


Social and administrative policy

By themselves the Mongols were incapable of ruling China, and, though at the lower levels they made use of Chinese civil servants, posts of importance were allotted to foreigners. Of these Marco Polo is a familiar example. Kublai instituted a “nationalities policy” under which the population of China was divided into four categories. At the top were the Mongols, forming a privileged, military caste of a few hundred thousand, exempt from taxation, and living at the expense of the Chinese peasantry who worked the great estates allocated for their upkeep.

The foreign auxiliaries of the Mongols, natives for the most part of Central Asia, formed the second group, the semu ren, or persons with special status. This class furnished the higher officialdom, and its members, with their worldwide contacts and their privileged status, also formed a new breed of merchants and speculators. Like the Mongols, they were exempt from taxation and enjoyed preferential use of the official postroads and services.

The bulk of the population belonged to the third and fourth classes, the han ren, or northern Chinese, and the nan ren, or southern barbarians, who lived in what had been Song China. The expenses of state and the support of the privileged bore heavily on these two classes, with Kublai’s continuing wars and his extravagant building operations at Dadu. Peasants were brought in as labourers, to the neglect of their farms. Food supplies in the north were inadequate for the new labour force and the unproductive Mongols, and large quantities had to be brought by sea and, when the sea routes proved insecure, along the Grand Canal. The repair and extension of this canal also demanded much labour.

Kublai, in common with other Mongol rulers, was much preoccupied with religion. His reign was a time of toleration for rival religions and of economic privilege for the favoured religions. Clerics and their communities were exempted from taxation, and Buddhist temples especially were granted generous donations of land and of peasants for their upkeep. The arrogance of the many Tibetan lamas who enjoyed a special status in China was particularly detested.

Such a discriminatory social policy was eventually bound to arouse strong resentment. Moreover, it was only on the surface that Kublai’s China, with its intense commercial activity, was economically strong and wealthy. Trade was mainly carried on in the interests of a privileged, foreign merchant class, not those of the community at large. The common people of China were becoming progressively poorer. The old examination system, which admitted to the civil service only men with a proper knowledge of Confucian philosophy, had lapsed, and customary restraints upon absolutism and arbitrary rule, such as would have been imposed by the censorate (a body that scrutinized the conduct of officials) and a professional public service, were lacking.

The Chinese literati were excluded from public office and responsibility. As a result, adventurers could attain high positions, and even an emperor of Kublai’s unique ability remained for years on end in ignorance of, and unable to check, the depredations of his dishonest foreign financial advisers. The extravagant policies that Kublai had countenanced and the financial ineptitude of later Mongol emperors, provoked, in the 14th century, the economically motivated uprisings that brought the dynasty down.

Kublai is celebrated, mainly because of Marco Polo’s account, for his use of paper money. Paper money had, however, been in use in China under the Song, and Kublai’s innovation was merely to make it the sole medium of exchange. Toward the end of the dynasty, an incapable financial administration stimulated inflation by the overissue of paper money, but in Kublai’s time the use of banknotes was essential. The supply of copper was too small to form a metal currency in a period of expanding trade, and in any case large quantities were diverted to the temples to be made into statues and other cult objects.


Though celebrated above all as a Chinese emperor, Kublai also helped to form the political traditions of his own Mongol people. To him and to his adviser, the Tibetan grand lama ’Phags-pa, is attributed the development of the political theory known as the “dual principle”—that is, the parity of power and dignity of church and state in political affairs. This theory was turned to practical account on more than one occasion in the subsequent history of Mongolia and, for example, underlay the constitution of the theocratic monarchy proclaimed in 1911, when Mongolia recovered its independence from China.

Kublai’s character is difficult to assess. The only personal account of him is by Marco Polo, and this is more of a panegyric than a sober appraisal. Polo presents Kublai as the ideal of a universal sovereign. Yet he does not overlook his human weaknesses, above all, an indulgence in feasting and hunting, a complicated and expensive sexual life, a failure to exercise proper supervision over his subordinates, and occasional outbursts of cruelty.

Kublai’s career is interesting above all because of the way in which he interpreted—and finally failed to reconcile—his dual roles. As it turned out, he became a Chinese emperor of traditional type. China absorbed his interests and energies to the exclusion of the Mongol homeland, and for years he was actually engaged in civil war with rival Mongol princes of the steppes. Under him, China, and of course the privileged Mongols, enjoyed a brilliant spell of prosperity, but his politics, pursued with less skill by his successors, isolated the Mongols in China from their environment. With the collapse of the dynasty, the Mongols withdrew to the steppes and never again played any role of more than local importance.

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