Transcription
So the great thing left that Chingghaskhan said on his deathbed, "Finish conquering China." You know, that was the great objective. So Kublai was going to fulfill this, and they didn't know how. The Great Wall of ships was protecting the Southern Song. This huge Yangtze River was so wide. The ocean on the side, all of these things were protecting them.
So he had one of his very smart generals named Aju, who was a real Mongol, but he was also able to think in an innovative way. He was the grandson of Subutai, and he went with his father, Uriankhai, on the conquest of the Red River of Northern Vietnam against the Dviet people. They went down the river. They were trying to surround this Chinese territory. They were going to hit them from the north, from the west, and from the south.
So they went down the Red River to conquer the Dviet. The Dviet moved their army up on the other side by boat, and then they had a whole corps of elephants. So they have the Mongols on one side of the river and the Dviet forces on the other side. Uriankhai was a smart man, not a genius, but smart. And he already knew from campaigns in Burma that the only way to rout the elephants was with flaming arrows to defeat. That was it.
But he recognized that they came up on boats. Mongols didn't like boats. It just, they crossed the river on a goatskin. They wanted to do something organic. A boat was like a cart. A cart belonged to a woman. It was a floating cart. "I am not going over on a floating cart. I'm going to ride a goatskin across the river." So he assigned one detachment. "You have to burn the boats so the Dviet cannot escape when we rout the elephants."
Well, the war, battle, I mean, got started. The elephants are running wild. All kinds of chaos is going on. The group that's sent to burn the boats, they're Mongols. They want to go to war. I mean, why burn a bunch of women's carts? It's just not, you know, floating. So, they go and join the battle. They leave the boats.
Well, the Mongols won the battle, but the Dviet forces got on the boats and sailed back to what's now Hanoi. And then they evacuated the city, took all the food, everything out of the city, and they disappeared into the delta. The Mongols arrived, they conquered, quote unquote, Hanoi, the capital city, and they had nothing. They had nothing. They won every battle. They lost the war. They retreated.
Aju was the son of Uriankhai, and he saw all this happen, and he recognized the importance of water and boats. And so he knew, and he spent his time studying the Yangtze River and every little river around it and the cities. And the crucial thing he saw was the cities are heavily, heavily fortified on the land side because invasion comes from the land, and they expect this little line of boats to protect them on the water. And so their city walls are weak. The defenses are weak on that side. That's where we have to attack.
So how they sent off to the Ilkhanate to Persia, where Chinggis Khan, his uncle, was now dead, and his cousins were ruling there, or his nephews, we would say, or cousins' nephews. So, uh, they sent over engineers to build a special kind of trebuchet catapult, and they had to play around with it to adapt it for a boat because they were usually made for stable ground, but they adapted it for the boat and for throwing heavy things, and also for some incendiary bombs. They developed it, and they attacked the first city, it fell. They attacked the next, it fell. They had something that was working. They worked their way down the Yangtze River, destroying city after city with this navy, and then the army would move in after the navy had broken down.
So this is a catapult on a ship. Catapult on a ship, but it's, yeah, we call it a type of ship for this type of catapult. So this is an engineering solution for people who are deeply uncomfortable with boats. Yes. And they've accepted it. Yes. Now it's a great weapon. It's like, it's not, it's no longer a woman's cart. It's a bow and arrow. It is a giant bow and arrow. Yeah. It's fascinating. So that they go, they hit them hard on the walls on the weak side. Yes. Where there's no army protection. Yes. And they conquer their way down to Hangzhou, the capital of the Southern Song. They'd been in power for a long time since 970. And now we're already into the 1270s. That's a long time. They are dissipated. They've had child emperors, they had imbeciles ruling, all kinds of things going on. And at this point, we have a child in command.
But Kublai makes a very strange move. He says, "Okay, let's invade Japan now." They think, "What? We're fighting against the Song Dynasty." And most people ascribe it to all kinds of things, but actually, I think there was a great logic to it. One was he had abolished his grandfather's policy of "defeat and destroy until they are no more." That was the phrase that was used for their enemies, and he had replaced it with a kind of mercy policy. Try to incorporate them into your army if possible, but be merciful. He did not want to destroy, and he was not. He had a lot of defectors coming in, and because the Mongols prized people with skills, a lot of very clever people with shipbuilding and engineers, and these people were flocking to the Mongols. Whereas the scholars were all hanging out in Guangzhou doing calligraphy and poetry and having contests over who could sing or paint, or I don't know what scholars do, but they were being scholars. Yes.
But there actually, I think there's a very, very good reason for invading Japan. Several. The main one was to cut off the supply of sulfur. They needed it for gunpowder in South China. They lost their sources in northern China when they were driven out. They got it from Japan. It was a great source. But I think there were other reasons. If they could trade, they could also perhaps flee to Japan, and they didn't want that to happen. And then there's this idea of, you know, like, kill the chicken to scare the monkey. It's like, okay, we'll go do this, and then maybe they'll just surrender down there if they see us conquer Japan.
Well, it was a total failure. You've got a bunch of ships that are mainly great on the river and ride along the coast, and you're crossing some treacherous water there, and the Mongols basically just did not know what they were doing. Okay, you can arrive with a trebuchet and you can throw grenades at the beach. It's not really going to do a lot of damage. It might scare a few horses, but you're not destroying cities. And the Japanese cities were more inland. They weren't there on the beach waiting for Mongols to come invade. So he failed in that invasion.
So we should say that this is the time of the samurai, right? Samurai. Yeah. So, um, so there was never a real test of like, No, there was some fighting, and the samurai learned some very valuable things. The samurai had such a ritualized way of it's like the knights of Europe. Yes. Coming out with armor that had to be lifted up on a crane onto a horse, and I mean, it was just craziness. Craziness. The samurai almost at that point, you ride out in front of your enemy and you recite the story of your genealogy, right? What you know, Mongols, they have no use for that. They're there to fight. They're there to win.
But on the other hand, this was an unknown territory to them, and the weather did turn against them. But I don't want to give too much credit to the weather. I really think that the Japanese defeated them. The Mongols weren't well prepared. Their ships were not very good. They were defeated in the first invasion. Could they get off the ships onto the beach? Oh, they did. They had some skirmishes or small battles on land. Yes, they did. But they didn't successfully complete them. I mean, no. So they couldn't do their usual Mongol thing, right? Well, see, they don't have enough horses for one thing. Yeah. You know, and there were many tactical things that they had done incorrectly. It's the first time anybody had ever tried to have such a massive invasion. Yeah. So they're just learning the basics of what it means to have a navy.
So he has failed to conquer, and he's thinking like a Mongol, that you rule those waters and lands, but he ruled the ocean. He stopped the trade. He stopped the supply. He cut off the possibility of the Song Dynasty fleeing to Japan. He won in a certain way. He lost, but he had won his objective of cutting off southern China. Also, it gave his navy some experience with the ocean, and now they were ready to move out into the ocean around southern China. So they were closing in.
Then Aju was in command, but actually the head command was a man named Bayan, who was a Mongol who had been raised more in Central Asia. He was perhaps born close to the Fana Valley in that area. We're not exactly sure where he was born, but he grew up over there, and then he eventually was living in what's now Iran, but he came and he took over command of the army. He was very cosmopolitan, sophisticated, intelligent. Aju should have been in command, but Bayan recognized that, and he and Aju worked together very well. Aju knew how to fight the war. Bayan was able to negotiate things back with the capital city and handle things. So Bayan is in command.
And so the generals are deserting the Southern Song right and left. The artisans are all coming up to join the Mongols. They paid the generals, loading up the boats with all the jewels, and they grab a couple of brothers to the little five-year-old emperor, and they put them on a boat, and they're fleeing. They even deserted their own families. The generals were corrupt cowards who fled. The person left in charge was the Dowager Empress, an old lady. She had no children. She was her name, the Dowager Empress. She said she was missing an eye. She was ugly. They called her ugly. She, that's what they called her at that time. She was in charge. And she offered the Mongols everything. "I'll give you everything. Please let the emperor stay. Okay, even if you demote him to just being a king, please let him stay." Bayan said no. Total surrender. Total surrender.
So she decided to surrender. Well, she said, "Yes, we will surrender the capital." So Bayan came in with a small group of soldiers. They looked around, and she invited him to come to the palace to surrender. And he said, "No, I didn't win this war in the palace. My soldiers won this war in the field. You have to come with the emperor in front of my soldiers to surrender." But he did not harm her. He respected her. And there was no looting of the city. Now, later, they take everything in a very systematic way. They take the archives and all this kind of stuff away, but there was no wholesale looting and killing of people, nothing like that.
So they've taken the capital, and she comes out, she surrenders, she bows on the ground towards Beijing, and then she takes the child emperor, and they slowly make their way. She was a little bit sick. It took her a longer time to Beijing, and they surrender again in a public ceremony, bowing to Kublai Khan. He gives each of them a palace. He gives them a new title. He protects, he's trying to show the world this is the new face of Mongols. We don't kill off the old people anymore who are ruling. We're going to give them a palace, treat them nicely, and all.
But the navy that had fled did not defend the city. Those cowardly generals, they made the new little boy, seven-year-old brother, half-brother to the emperor, Gong was his name. They made him the emperor. Well, they're just floating around on the ocean, losing all support from city after city. The Muslims who were controlling the trade and controlling many of the ships of that area, they were Chinese Muslims, but they were still Muslims. They switched sides to the Mongols because of the religious freedom thing, and because they were merchants, and their status would be raised. So the Mongol, the Muslims were switching over. The fleet was kind of a fleet lost without a country out there. They had some loyal supporters in some places. They dropped the emperor in the ocean. You think, how do you drop the emperor in the ocean? They accidentally spilled him into the ocean, and then they fished him out, but he died.
So fortunately, they had one more seven-year-old half-brother. So on Lantau Island, exactly where the Hong Kong airport is today, the new, well, it's not so new anymore, but I still think it was the new airport on Lantau Island. So they went there, and they had a big coronation ceremony and all, but the people there were not supportive enough. It certainly wasn't Hong Kong then, anyway, the delta of the Pearl River. But so they sailed out farther south to another island, and then they took it over. And of course, the first thing they did was, "Well, we have to build a palace." What? The Mongols are chasing you, and you're going to stop and build a palace? So these are like the remains of the Chinese. Yes. The generals and the army and the navy. And there was a real competence issue. Yes. Okay.
So they're going to build, "We're going to protect it with a great wall of the sea." Right. They chained together the boats across the entrance to the harbor, and they put the palace boat, so-called, in the middle. The generals didn't trust their own soldiers enough. So they made all of them leave the island and go to the boats to fight the Mongols. So the Mongols arrived, and over and over and over they asked them to surrender. "You won't be harmed. All this kind of stuff." And all, but the Mongols now took over the land. So they had the water all around them, and they had the land, and once the fighting started, they could just shoot down from the highland right onto the ships, and they'd cut the ships off from the fresh supply of wood and water. So they can't boil rice. They have to try to eat rice and drink seawater. They're all sick as dogs out there.
And the leaders refuse to surrender. The little boy is there, seven-year-old Emperor Bing was his name, with his pet parrot. That's the only thing he had left in life was his pet parrot. And then the Mongols, they offered every opportunity. But the prime minister, so-called coward that he is, although he's treated as a hero today in China and throughout their history, the coward that he was, he said, "We will not disgrace the country by letting them capture the emperor." So, first he threw his own wife and children into the water to drown. And then he took the emperor and held him, the seven-year-old. He was seven years and one month. He had just turned seven years old, and jumped into the water with his child. A child murderer. He is a child murderer to do that.
Somehow, in the whole ruckus, the cage came undone with the parrot, and the parrot fell in the water, too. So the seven-year-old boy and the parrot died in the water. That was the end of one of the greatest dynasties in the history of the world, the Song Dynasty. They were intellectually great. They were artistically great. They were technologically great. They were just one of the greatest moments of world history. And it ends with this coward killing a child and his pet parrot in order to save the honor that was betrayed by this woman. The men lost the war. The men lost the war. Who's to blame? An old, one-eyed, ugly lady, Empress Shi.
Well, the bigger picture there is probably that the institutions became corrupt and stale, and the army weakened, and the political, the politician class probably has lost their skill and competence at ruling and all that kind of stuff. And all that is true, and the Chinese summarize that with losing the mandate of heaven, right? I mean, everybody has their perspective. Maybe if the way you told the story has a very kind of objective sort of way of revealing the absurdity and the cowardice of it. But you know, there's probably the Chinese perspective that they tell the story in some kind of like maintained honor to the last, yes, to the last moment. They very often, most scholars depict Empress Shi as the traitor to the country. And I say, "No, that boy lived on for another 45 years." And so she did not betray the country. She protected her emperor that she was supposed to protect. It was the man who killed the child emperor, who killed young Bing.