Kublai Khan
Kublai Khan conquered China, founded the Yuan dynasty, and turned the Mongol empire into a Chinese one. Born in 1215, the grandson of Genghis Khan, he was given responsibility for northern China in 1251 by his brother Möngke, and governed it with Chinese advisers, tax registers and Confucian scholars rather than by the extraction the Mongols had practised. Möngke died on campaign in 1259, and Kublai fought a four-year civil war against his younger brother Ariq Böke, who had been elected in Mongolia by the traditionalists. He won by controlling the resources of northern China, which is exactly what his opponents objected to. The victory split the empire permanently. The western khanates never accepted his authority, and the Mongol world ceased to be a single state. He proclaimed the Yuan dynasty in 1271, taking a Chinese dynastic name from the Book of Changes, and completed the conquest of the Southern Song in 1279 after a campaign of nearly two decades — the naval battle of Yamen ended it, with a Song official jumping into the sea holding the child emperor. He built a new capital at Dadu, now Beijing, extended the Grand Canal, issued paper currency, and organised society into four ranks with Mongols at the top and southern Chinese at the bottom. Two invasions of Japan, in 1274 and 1281, were destroyed by typhoons the Japanese called kamikaze. Marco Polo claimed to have served him for seventeen years. He died in 1294, and the dynasty fell within eighty. He is the one Mongol ruler remembered in China as an emperor rather than as a conqueror.
- Lived: 1215 CE – 1294 CE
- Nationality: Mongol
- Roles: ruler, conqueror
