Mongol Conquest of China
The Song dynasty ended on 19 March 1279 at Yamen, when a minister jumped into the sea holding the eight-year-old emperor. The Mongol campaign against China had taken about seventy years and three generations. Genghis Khan attacked the Jin in the north from 1211; the Jin fell in 1234; and the Southern Song, behind the Yangtze and defended by walled cities, water and disease, took another forty-five years. Kublai Khan changed the method. He recruited Chinese and Korean engineers and a Persian siege team who built counterweight trebuchets, and he built a navy — because the Song's advantage was riverine, and the Mongols could not ride across the Yangtze. Xiangyang, the fortress commanding the river, held out for five years and fell in 1273 when the new artillery arrived. After that the campaign moved fast. Hangzhou, the Song capital and probably the largest city in the world, surrendered in 1276, and the child emperor and the dowager empress were sent north. Loyalists fled to the coast with two younger princes, one of whom died of illness. At Yamen in the Pearl River delta the Song fleet chained its ships together and was destroyed by a smaller Mongol force. Lu Xiufu put on his court robes, took the emperor Bing on his back, and stepped off the deck; the chronicles say tens of thousands followed. China was ruled by a foreign dynasty for the first time in its entirety. The Yuan lasted eighty-nine years. Kublai kept the Chinese bureaucracy and much of the law, which is why he is remembered there as an emperor rather than only as a conqueror.
- Year: 1211 CE
- Category: Conquest
