Yuan Dynasty

The Yuan Dynasty was the Mongol-ruled imperial dynasty of China, founded in 1271 when Kublai Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, adopted a Chinese-style dynastic name, Da Yuan ('Great Yuan'), for his realm. It marked the first time that all of China came under the rule of a non-Han people.

Kublai completed the conquest begun by his predecessors, defeating the Southern Song and unifying China by 1279, and established his capital at Dadu (modern Beijing). The Yuan governed a Chinese bureaucratic state through a Mongol ruling elite, integrating China into the vast trans-Eurasian networks of the Mongol world. The dynasty maintained a four-tier ethnic hierarchy that privileged Mongols and Central Asian 'Semu' peoples over the Han Chinese, and it made extensive use of paper currency, foreign administrators, and patronage of diverse religions. Under Yuan rule, overland and maritime trade flourished, and contacts between China and the wider world deepened, exemplified by the reported travels of the Venetian merchant Marco Polo and the spread of Chinese technologies westward. Tibet and Korea were brought under Mongol overlordship, while ambitious but costly expeditions against Japan, Vietnam, and Java largely failed. Culturally the period saw the growth of vernacular drama and the novel, though the traditional civil-service examination system was suspended for much of the dynasty, limiting Han literati participation in government. From the early fourteenth century the Yuan was weakened by chronic factional struggles at court, fiscal mismanagement and ruinous inflation of its paper money, and a succession of natural disasters, including catastrophic flooding of the Yellow River. Mounting hardship fuelled widespread rebellion, most notably the Red Turban uprisings. In 1368 the rebel leader Zhu Yuanzhang captured Dadu and founded the Ming Dynasty, driving the Mongol court back onto the steppe, where it persisted as the Northern Yuan. Despite its relatively short span, the Yuan left a lasting imprint, incorporating Tibet and Yunnan more firmly into the Chinese state and bequeathing a more cosmopolitan, Eurasian-connected China.

Key figures