Contents
Introduction… 1
Grassland Culture… 1
Politics, Law… 2
Commerce… 3
Agriculture, Technology, Religion… 3
Conclusion… 3
Bibliography… 4
Introduction
The Yuan dynasty was an exceedingly distinctive period in Chinese history: although its span was very short, it exerted a decisive influence on, and gave powerful impetus to, the development of both Chinese and world history.
From the perspective of world history, the Mongol conquest utterly shattered the preexisting order of the entire Eurasian continent, creating a new balance of power in Eurasia[①]; and the Eurasian continent, now linked together, greatly facilitated the movement of religions, technologies, populations, and goods. From then on, only did world history truly gather together, from the histories of civilizations that had developed in parallel yet independently, into a single whole that could scarcely be torn apart again.
For China, the Yuan dynasty was also an extremely important transitional period.
We often take the “An Lushan Rebellion” as the marker of ancient China’s shift from prosperity to decline. In my view, if one is to comprehensively assess prosperity or decline from the angles of economy, politics, culture, technology, and so on, it is impossible to divide things with a single, simple point in time. China’s bureaucratic political system should have reached its apogee in the Song dynasty; the period of greatest flourishing in economy, technology, and other fields perhaps also came only in the Song, or even later. The Yuan dynasty was clearly a crucial link in this transition: it toppled and reconstructed the habits that had continued from the Tang and Song, and the political ideas of the subsequent Ming and Qing dynasties, it must be said, inherited more from the Yuan than from the Tang and Song. Therefore, in order to understand more clearly the characteristics of Chinese politics and culture since the Ming and Qing, we also need to pay attention to the influence exerted by the Yuan dynasty.
My own ability is very limited; in the following pages, I shall merely offer a broad appraisal of the various features of the Mongol-Yuan empire.
Grassland Culture
The distinctive feature of the Yuan dynasty lies first of all in the fact that it was the first nomadic regime in history to conquer and rule all of China. It is easy to imagine that the influence of grassland culture permeated the whole of Yuan society.
Agricultural culture is static; it does everything it can to cling to the experience of the ancestors. Grassland culture, by contrast, is dynamic[②]; it demands change and also brings it about. The interweaving of motion and stasis forms the driving force of civilization’s development.
One could say that the history of China is a history of the fusion of nomadic and agricultural peoples[③]. Yet it can be seen that the role played by the Mongols, as a nomadic people, in Chinese history was quite different. Compared with the Xianbei, Khitan, Jurchens, or Manchus, the Mongols were the least Sinicized; even when the Yuan dynasty was overthrown, they still had not been fully integrated into Chinese culture. Precisely for this reason, the characteristics of Mongol grassland culture were all the more prominent.
In addition, the earliest Mongols were not yet herders living on the steppe, but hill people living in forest regions[④]. The Mongol tribes were divided into two economic forms: hunting and nomadism[⑤]. Obviously, in terms of military tactics, the Mongols indeed “inherited the hunter’s cunning[⑥]”; the combination of hunter and herdsman made them more aggressive and harder to resist than any other nomadic barbarians.
In general, people from forest tribes are more savage, and farther removed from human civilization, than people from nomadic tribes[⑦]. On the one hand, the Mongols were always quickly assimilated by the local civilization; on the other hand, they consistently refused to further dissolve themselves into those agricultural civilizations. Their backwardness and estrangement from agricultural civilization may perhaps be one of the reasons for this.
The influence of grassland culture is evident in every aspect of Yuan rule, economy, religion, and so on; I shall discuss it in the following sections.
Politics, Law
The complete, rigorous, tedious, and complex bureaucratic-political system of the Song dynasty was difficult for the Jin and Yuan regimes, both established by nomadic peoples, to accept. Thus the political institutions of Jin did not simply continue the development of Tang and Song, but were simplified on that basis; the institutions of Yuan, in turn, incorporated a great deal of older steppe practice into the framework of the Jin system, making them rather chaotic. Yet the political institutions of the Yuan dynasty were of extremely important significance in Chinese history, for the systems of the later Ming and Qing were formed precisely through the sorting out and reform of Yuan institutions[⑧].
Yuan politics was a return to aristocratic politics, and the originally established state in which the imperial house and the bureaucracy constrained one another was broken: the coloration of “household rule” was heavy, and the bureaucracy’s restraint upon and limitation of imperial power was markedly reduced[⑨]. The expansion of imperial power that began at this time continued on through the Ming and Qing dynasties.
It is worth mentioning that, as a nomadic regime, the Mongol-Yuan regime attached great importance to law — this too was one of the marks of grassland culture: primitive society was a society governed by customary law, and pastoral society inherited this tradition; it did not emphasize the establishment of a pagoda-like system of power, but rather emphasized governing society according to customary law. When nomadic peoples entered agricultural regions, they would establish codes[⑩].
The Mongols did indeed establish at the outset their stern code — the Great Yassa. This code, after later revisions, ultimately became a complete and serious body of law, and it truly and effectively maintained order throughout the Mongol Empire. Strict discipline meant that from Beijing to the Caspian Sea, caravans enjoyed unprecedented protection[11]. And in China, the full circulation of paper money could also become possible only under the safeguard of strict law. This “peace in the style of Genghis Khan” was something no central plain regime of an agricultural civilization could ever attain.
Commerce
Pastoral culture inherited the essence of primitive culture, and commercial culture in turn inherited the essence of pastoral culture[12]. Merchants and herdsmen have many similarities: for example, mobility and lack of a fixed place of residence. Thus, compared with agricultural culture, the Mongol-Yuan empire, stemming from grassland culture, was more willing to accept commerce; at the same time, the conduct of commercial activity required strict legal protection, and Mongol-Yuan law happened to meet this condition. Therefore, commerce in China received ample support and openness during the Yuan dynasty.
As Bai Yang put it: “The Mongol Empire’s continuous warfare abroad did not seriously affect the natural growth of the social economy. Moreover, because the entire Eurasian region was under the rule of a single great khan, transportation and trade both developed significantly. Urban centers flourished, even surpassing the age of the Tang dynasty in the eighth century.”[13] It should be recognized that the Mongols’ devastation and destruction of settled civilization occurred mainly during the period of conquest at the Jin-Yuan transition; this brutality was necessary for a backward steppe nomadic regime to gain a foothold in agricultural regions. But once its rule had been established, the dynamic grassland culture did not stand in contradiction to social development; furthermore, conquest’s “topple and rebuild” of static agricultural civilization often brought with it elements of vitality and innovation. Thus we may observe that once China recovered from the grave destruction caused by the Mongol conquest, Chinese culture continued to develop on the basis of the Song[14]. This continuation of development was not confined to the economic sphere; it was also reflected in agriculture, technology, and many other areas.
Agriculture, Technology, Religion
Contrary to what many imagine, agriculture under the Yuan dynasty was not stagnant, nor was it subjected to devastating destruction. In fact, although the Yuan peasantry held a low status, agriculture was by no means neglected. We can see that, thanks to Kublai’s policy of prioritizing agriculture, in the early Yuan period agricultural production in the Jianghuai and Yellow River basins gradually recovered and developed; the south maintained the development level of the Song dynasty; some remote regions were opened up; and agricultural production saw marked growth[15]. Not only this, but after establishing themselves in the Central Plains, the Yuan rulers turned to measures such as developing water conservancy, encouraging the cultivation of mulberry and grain, and printing and disseminating agricultural books; so although the Yuan dynasty lasted less than a hundred years, it still achieved very great accomplishments in agricultural science[16]. These facts also, from one angle, reflect the characteristics of grassland culture: it is dynamic in itself and not bound by any ancestral conventions. Of course, it was also because of certain innate deficiencies brought by grassland culture that agriculture declined in the later Yuan, while politics became increasingly corrupt, and so on.
The openness of grassland culture also gave the development of science and religion in the Mongol-Yuan period a distinctive character. On the one hand, the unification of Eurasia provided the conditions for the rapid spread of science and religion across the world, and the Mongols’ nonexclusive attitude toward various ideas and cultures further promoted this spread. For example, the Yassa stipulated: with regard to various religions, not to abandon this and take that, not to honor this and suppress that, but to treat all equally, without distinction[17]. Such a situation is exceedingly rare in Chinese history, and indeed in world history as well!
Conclusion
Seen from every angle, the political and social form of the Mongol-Yuan period was highly distinctive. The main factors producing these characteristics were these: the Mongols were a steppe people, and moreover one that rose from a grassland culture far removed from settled civilization. When they rapidly expanded from an extremely backward and barbarous condition into the masters of the world, the characteristics of their grassland culture were fully laid bare. They destroyed the civilizations they conquered, yet never formed a culture of their own, and therefore had to reconstruct themselves by following the culture of the conquered. However, owing to their own extreme backwardness and their particular temperament, the Mongols also found it difficult truly to integrate into any civilization at all. Thus there arose this characteristic: the Mongols had no fixed position, but instead did not absolutely reject any culture and were willing to accept anything. This made the Mongol-Yuan period a unique scene in Chinese history.
The Germanic barbarians’ conquest of Rome changed European history; the Arabs, rising from primitive tribes, created the Muslim world through their conquests in West Asia; and the Mongols’ conquest of China likewise surely exerted an influence on the trajectory of Chinese history that cannot be ignored.
Bibliography
World History by Stavrianos [US], Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences Press
Grassland Culture and Human History by Meng Chibei, International Culture Publishing Company
Steppe Empire by René Grousset [France], International Culture Publishing Company
Minority Peoples and Chinese Culture by Tian Jizhou et al., Shanghai People’s Publishing House
A Study of Ancient Chinese Bureaucratic Political Institutions, ed. Wu Zongguo, Peking University Press
The Confucian Scholars and Han Culture at the Jin-Yuan Transition by Zhao Qi, People’s Publishing House
Outline History of the Chinese People by Bai Yang, revised edition of 1998, China Friendship Publishing Company
China: A Macro History by Huang Renyu, SDX Joint Publishing Company
History of Asia by Rhodes Murphy [US], Hainan Publishing House, Sanhuan Publishing House
General History of China, ed. Bai Shouyi, Volume 8, Shanghai People’s Publishing House
[①] World History: The World Before 1500 by Stavrianos [US], p. 390
[②] Grassland Culture and Human History by Meng Chibei, Volume 1, p. 5
[③] Ibid., p. 25
[④] Steppe Empire by René Grousset [France], p. 158
[⑤] Minority Peoples and Chinese Culture by Tian Jizhou et al., p. 227
[⑥] Steppe Empire by René Grousset [France], p. 188
[⑦] Ibid., p. 159
[⑧] A Study of Ancient Chinese Bureaucratic Political Institutions, ed. Wu Zongguo, p. 289
[⑨] Ibid., p. 309
[⑩] Grassland Culture and Human History by Meng Chibei, Volume 1, p. 7
[11] Steppe Empire by René Grousset [France], p. 216
[12] Grassland Culture and Human History by Meng Chibei, Volume 1, p. 6
[13] Outline History of the Chinese People by Bai Yang, Volume 2, p. 221
[14] History of Asia by Rhodes Murphy [US], p. 213
[15] General History of China, ed. Bai Shouyi, Volume 8 (13), p. 699
[16] Ibid., p. 711
[17] Ibid., p. 1013
December 28, 2004
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