Northern Yuan

Out of the northern gate

Drafted from Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part I: The Mongols Proper and the Kalmuks (1876)formation

Most conquest dynasties in China end with a body. This one ended with a departure, and that is the whole reason there is anything else to write.

The retreat

Toghon Temür left Dadu in 1368 and went north, and kept going. He was at Shangdu, then at Yingchang beyond the Wall, and when the Ming general Li Wenzhong marched on Yingchang he learned on the road that the emperor was already dead. He was fifty-one and had reigned thirty-five years.

Li Wenzhong took the city anyway. The heir, Ayushiridara, got away towards Karakorum; his own son was captured, along with the late emperor's harem and several princes and grandees, and sent to China. At Xingzhou thirty-seven thousand Mongols submitted, and at Honglo Khan sixteen thousand more.

What the Ming emperor said

The court congratulated the Hongwu emperor on the destruction of the Yuan. His reply is the most interesting document of the whole transition. He had not taken up arms against the Yuan dynasty, he said, but merely to put down the rebels who were desolating the empire, and if the Yuan emperors had behaved decently he would not have displaced them.

His grandees demanded that the captured prince Maidiribala be sacrificed in the hall of the imperial ancestors. The emperor refused. There were precedents, he said, but he would not follow them: the princes of the Yuan had been masters of China for nearly a hundred years, and his own ancestors had been their subjects, and he could not bring himself to do such a thing.

He had the young man change out of Mongol dress into Chinese, made him a prince of the third rank with a title meaning he who respects politeness, and gave him and the princesses a palace and attendants.

That is a dynasty being displaced rather than exterminated, on the explicit grounds that it had held the Mandate — and it is why the men who rode north could go on being the Yuan.

The Yuan in the north

At Karakorum, Ayushiridara was joined by the general Köke Temür and proclaimed emperor. Sanang Setsen, the Mongol chronicler Howorth follows for the steppe side, calls him Biliktu Khagan, the wise, and says he was born in 1338 and mounted the throne in 1371.

Nothing about the titles changed. The reign names went on being issued. The dynasty went on being the Great Yuan. What changed was that it now governed pasture instead of provinces, and that the men who had been its army were now its constituents.

The unfinished war

Liaodong held out for the Mongols into 1371, and when its governor surrendered he was assassinated by officers loyal to the fallen dynasty. Kao Jianu still held the mountain forts there. Naghachu had a strong force in the Khingan range and threatened the province for sixteen more years before his whole horde came in.

Ming armies went north repeatedly. In 1372 one reached Karakorum and was beaten so badly that the offensive stopped for a decade. The frontier settled into raids and markets and embassies, which is where it stayed, with interruptions, for the next two hundred and fifty years.

The Yuan had not fallen. It had been evicted, and it knew the difference even if nobody else did.

The seal taken at Buyur Nor

Drafted from Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part I: The Mongols Proper and the Kalmuks (1876)contraction

In 1388 the Ming general Lan Yu asked permission to attack the Mongols at their headquarters and scatter them thoroughly, and was given more than a hundred thousand men to do it with.

The march

Uskhal Khan — Tögüs Temür, the third of the exiled emperors — was camped near lake Buyur, in the country full of reminiscences of the glorious days of Chinggis.

The Chinese came stealthily, lighting no fires, marching at night, the last stage of the approach covered by a cloud of blowing sand. They were on the camp before it knew. The Mongols struck their tents and fled after a short resistance.

The tally

The khan got away with his heir. Almost nothing else did.

His second son was taken, with sixty-four of his suite; the wife of the crown prince with fifty-nine of her household; many princesses; the Prince of Wu; the Prince of Dai; Palan, one of the best Mongol generals; two thousand nine hundred and ninety-four officers and seventy-seven thousand soldiers. A hundred and fifty thousand head of cattle. An immense booty of gold and silver.

And the imperial seal.

Afterwards

The khan made for Karakorum to join his minister, got as far as the Tula, and was attacked there by one of his own relatives. His troops scattered. He was left with sixteen horsemen, and a snowstorm came down on him, and the pursuers caught up and killed him and his son.

The Ming divided the country into departments, appointed Mongol officers over them and let them administer by their own customs.

Sanang Setsen does not mention any of it. The Mongol chronicle gives the khan's accession and his death and passes over the worst day in the dynasty's post-Chinese history in silence; the whole account comes from the Chinese side. Howorth notes the omission, which is the sort of thing worth knowing about a source.

What it meant

Two things, and the second is the one that shaped the next eighty years.

The line of Khubilai stopped being able to hold the eastern steppe. A Ming expedition the following year marched to the north of the Gobi and came back without seeing a single Mongol; the nation was disintegrated and scattered, and whatever authority the next khan had was very local. Other chiefs set up on their own account in other neighbourhoods, and Howorth's judgement is that their main bond of union was the plundering of the Chinese frontier.

And the western Mongols — the Oirats, the Kalmuks of the European sources — became supreme in Mongolia. They were not Chinggisids. They could not take the title. So for the better part of a century they did what the Manghit did on the other side of the continent: kept a khan, and ruled.

The emperor in the tent

Drafted from Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part I: The Mongols Proper and the Kalmuks (1876)contraction

In 1449 the Mongols captured a reigning emperor of China alive, and the man who did it was not the khan and could not have been.

Esen

Esen was an Oirat — a western Mongol, of the Choros — and he was taishi, the minister, to a Chinggisid khan he had installed. He held the western steppe and much of the eastern one, and the Chinese frontier trade with it.

The Zhengtong emperor went out against him at the urging of a eunuch who overruled every competent officer he had. The army was too large to manoeuvre, short of food, soaked by rain; when the astrologer said the stars were unfavourable the eunuch replied that if disaster came it would be by the decree of heaven. At Datong they decided to retreat, and the eunuch insisted the route go through his own home district so that his brother might have the honour of entertaining the emperor.

That took them through Tumu. Esen fell on the rearguard as the army crossed the Qiminshan; the count of Gongshun and his brother were killed with all their men. Forty thousand more came to the rescue and perished. The army dug wells at Tumu and found no water. Esen sent a spy, learned the state of it, and attacked on all sides as it moved off.

More than a hundred thousand Chinese were killed. Esen had ordered quarter for any who did not resist and his men did not listen.

The prisoner

The emperor, seeing himself surrounded, got off his horse, knelt facing south, and then sat down on a cushion without any sign of agitation. The composure impressed the Tatars. Their commander went to tell Esen, who did not believe it and sent two Chinese to confirm it.

He asked his chiefs what should be done with him. One said there was no question: the house of Ming had destroyed the house of Yuan and he must be killed. Bayan Temür argued warmly that he should be treated as a lord, and that Esen would make his name immortal by sending him home.

Esen had other plans. He kept him, honourably, and used him — sending him to the gates of Chinese cities to be admitted; sending demands to a court that promptly enthroned the prisoner's brother and stopped needing him. In the end Esen entertained him in his own tent, served him himself, sent him home with three thousand escorts and presents of game, and rode part of the way with him.

Why it went nowhere

Because Esen could not convert a military triumph into a throne.

He was styled only taishi and jinong while a Chinggisid puppet lived. When he finally killed the khan Toghtoa Bukha and had himself proclaimed khan, he broke the one rule that held the Mongol world together, and it destroyed him within three years. Two of his own commanders — Alag and Temür, very probably his brothers — asked for the title of taishi. He refused, saying he had given it to his son. They reproached him, raised an army, and drove him out. In flight he ran into the son of a man he had put to death, who killed him and hung his body on a tree on the mountain Kügei Khan.

Howorth's verdict is generous and correct: under Esen the whole Mongol world was once more united, and he revenged the Mongols on the Chinese by capturing their sacred ruler, a stroke of fortune that has seldom fallen to a nomad chief; with a little more vigour abroad and a little more unity at home he might have rivalled Chinggis, at least in Asia.

What he lacked was not vigour. It was a grandfather.

Mandukhai

Drafted from Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part I: The Mongols Proper and the Kalmuks (1876)contraction

By 1470 the house of Khubilai had been reduced to one child, and he was a hunchback, because of how he had been handled.

What was left

Batu Möngke's father had been killed. His widowed mother married the man whose slander had caused the quarrel. The boy stayed with his nurse, was taken from her by force by a Mongol called Temür Khadagh, and had been so roughly used that he grew up with a crooked back; Temür Khadagh's wife, Sanang Setsen says, tried to rub it straight with a silver bowl.

He was five years old and he was the imperial line.

The choice

Mandukhai Setsen Khatun was twenty-three and widowed, and Unebolod of the Khorchin — a descendant of Chinggis's brother Khasar, and therefore of the blood but not of the line — was courting her. She told him that if there had not been a descendant of the imperial house in existence she would have listened, but that such a one existed in the person of Batu Möngke.

She consulted two friends. One said it would be better for the people if she married Unebolod at once and did not wait for the boy to grow up. The other, Saghan Agha, said that if she married Khasar's descendant she would darken her path, divorce herself from the people and lose the title of khatun; whereas if she protected the boy she would be cherished by the gods, rule the whole people, and keep her title with honour.

Mandukhai took the second argument, and hit the first adviser on the head with a bowl of tea.

The vow

Then she took the five-year-old by the hand and led him before the goddess-mother of the royal house.

I have wandered unconsciously into a place where one cannot distinguish black from white. The family of the Borjigin is nearly extinct.

She set out the case — Unebolod had wooed her; when he suggested the boy was too young and insignificant she began to be nervous for his life — and made the bargain. If she should despise the goddess's gates or accept Unebolod, let her be punished. If she fulfilled her promise and protected the little descendant and in due time became his wife, let there be born of that union seven sons and one daughter, and she would name the seven the seven Bolods, the seven men of steel, and would fan the flames on the altar.

Unebolod heard what had happened, reconciled himself gracefully, and stopped courting her.

The wagon

She married the five-year-old. She seated him before the goddess on a throne and gave him the name Dayan Khagan, and expressed a hope that he would rule the united people. Then she loosened her hair and gathered it on the crown of her head in the manner of a married woman, put Dayan Khagan in a wagon, and marched at the head of the army against the Four Oirats, from whom they took much booty.

What it was worth, and what it cost

It worked. Dayan Khan grew up and did what she had named him for: he broke the Oirat ascendancy, brought the eastern tümens under one authority, and restored a Chinggisid khan who actually governed. Every Mongol prince of consequence for the next two centuries — Ordos, Tümed, Khalkha, Chakhar — descends from him.

At the time she made the vow the khanate was so nominal that the Ming annals note three or four Mongol raids a year from 1470, carrying off men and cattle in enormous numbers, while the frontier commanders avoided contact and attacked the rearguards to decapitate enough old and helpless people to claim the bounty.

And the restoration carried its own ending inside it. Dayan divided Mongolia among his sons as appanages. Within three generations that left, in Howorth's comparison, something like Russia in the thirteenth century: a disintegrated body of units whose mutual jealousies were not reduced by their rulers being so closely related.

Mandukhai saved the line. Nobody could save the office.

A market and a title

Drafted from Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part I: The Mongols Proper and the Kalmuks (1876)contraction

The two things that changed the steppe most in the sixteenth century were both achieved by a grandson of Dayan Khan who was not the khan, and neither of them did the khanship any good at all.

The war for a fair

Altan Khan of the Tümed spent nineteen years attacking China, and what he was attacking it for was permission to trade.

The pattern is monotonous in the annals: an invasion, a town taken, a retreat; a raid in 1557 and one in 1558; an entry into China in 1566 when the emperor died, a town plundered, a withdrawal. Then in 1570 his own grandson defected to the Ming and was invested with a mandarin's title and presents of silk, and Altan demanded him back, and got him on condition that he return some Chinese deserters.

He was much pleased, and sent envoys asking to be admitted as a tributary. The Chinese account and the Mongol chronicle describe the same settlement from opposite sides — De Mailla's Mongols ask to submit, Sanang Setsen's have pressed the Chinese so hard that they grant a title and a golden seal — and both agree on the terms and the year.

In 1571 Altan received the title Shunyi Wang, a golden seal, and the frontier markets. He then forbade the other Mongol princes to make war on China. In 1572 he sent two hundred and fifty picked horses as tribute and his messengers brought home two companions who had been prisoners for twenty years. In 1573 the Chinese authorities engraved gold and silver seals for him and for the other chiefs. When his son was refused a fair west of the Yellow River he moved to Kokonor and attacked Shaanxi until he got one.

For the first time since 1368 the steppe had a legal economy. Horses for tea, at places with names, on dates.

The Lama

The other change came out of Tibet, and it was his great-nephew's idea.

In 1576 Setsen Khungtaiji of the Ordos came to visit him and urged him to make a journey south and restore the religion that had prevailed among the Mongols in the days of Khubilai and the Phagpa Lama. Altan agreed, took counsel with the chiefs of the three western tümens, and sent an embassy to invite Sonam Gyatso, head of the Yellow Hat order, to come to him. The embassy was well received; the lama sent back a letter and presents and a promise to follow directly, and built a temple at Tsabchiyal on Kokonor to receive him.

In 1577 Altan and the three tümens set out to meet him, and the chronicle Howorth follows fills the approach with wonders. An advance party asked the lama for a sign and he put his hand in the Ulaghan Muren and the water turned and ran the other way. A second party drew near and a spring spouted out of dry ground. In the night the dragons and evil spirits of Mongolia — with the heads of camels, oxen, sheep, cats, hawks and wolves — were driven before him and subjected against their wills. Where his horse walked, the hoofprints held the six sacred syllables.

It was in 1578 the Allwise Bogda first showed himself in Mongolia.

Two men who had seen him before

At the first interview the khan and his great-nephew stared at the lama, and he asked them why.

Altan answered first. He had long had a disease in his foot; he had been advised to thrust it into the open breast of a freshly killed horse and had done so, and the pain became insufferable; he looked up and there was a white man in the sky who said Khagan, how can you commit such a great sin? and vanished. After that he was constantly frightened until a Tangut lama taught him the six syllables and another taught him the rosary, and he had said the six syllables a hundred and eight times a day since. I recognise you as the man who appeared to me.

Setsen Khungtaiji answered second. Sitting at chess before his mother, he had been given a fat piece of horseflesh; as he ate, the knife leapt out of his hand into the air and came down past his knees, and when he looked for it there was a young man in black clothes who asked him crossly why he was eating horseflesh, and also became invisible. He had not eaten horseflesh since. I saw you were the man who had rebuked me.

The lama said it was all true, and that this was not the first time they had met. When Altan Khan had previously been born as Khubilai Setsen Khagan, he himself had lived as the Phagpa Lama — and he reminded the khan, in the second person, of the titles, the costly seal and the yellow signature that Khubilai had given him, and of the place at the head of the religious administration. The interpreter standing between them had done the same office between Khubilai and Phagpa, under another name, and was now doing it after a third birth.

The assembly

Altan put on a white dress, mounted a white horse and went back to the lama with his wife and ten thousand men to bring him to the new temple at Tsabchiyal. His presents are itemised: the seven noble precious things with the eight objects of sacrifice, five hundred sidshirs in weight; a golden bowl of thirty sidshirs filled with precious stones; silks of untold worth, ten pieces of each kind and a hundred of each of five colours; ten white horses with saddles of gold and jewels; and five thousand head of cattle.

More than a hundred thousand people were there — Chinese, Tibetans, Mongols and Uyghurs, clergy and laity — and Setsen Khungtaiji made the speech that told them what was being done and why. Chinggis had subdued the five banners and the four nations at the command of Khormusta; his grandsons had put Sakya Pandita and Phagpa at the head of the religious institutions; and since then, he said, religion and justice among us have fallen very low — we shed the blood and eat the flesh of living beings. From this day, with Shakyamuni reappeared in the Lama and the lord of the earth in the Khagan, the piled-up waves of the tempestuous blood-stream should be transformed into a deep, peaceful sea of milk.

Like the voice of the cuckoo in the first month of summer, Sanang Setsen says, so these words sounded in the ears of the assembly.

What was legislated

Then the khan and the lama put proposals to the assembly and they were accepted unanimously.

The khan gave the lama the title Vajradhara Dalai Lama and raised him to the rank Phagpa had held under Khubilai. The lama gave the khan the title of the thousand golden wheel-turning Chakravartin Setsen Khagan.

The custom by which camels and horses were killed and buried with a dead man according to his wealth — the khoilgha — was abolished, and the beasts appointed for it were to be given to the priests instead. Slaughter and hunting were to cease on the fast days. The priesthood was graded into four ranks with the legal standing of princes and nobles, exempt from taxes, from the army, from the great hunts. A monk who broke his vows was to have his face blackened with soot and be walked three times backwards round the temple as a laughing stock, and then expelled. The whole was collected under the title the laws of the science of the ten meritorious works, and traced explicitly back to Khubilai.

Altan promised a Buddha of gold, silver and precious stones at Kökeqota; the Jinong promised a copy of the hundred and eight volumes of the Kanjur in letters of gold and silver; another prince promised a temple. Then the khan went home, taking with him the monk Howorth calls the evangelist of the Mongols.

What it did

Altan Khan died in 1583 aged seventy-seven, five years after the meeting, and the Chinese court sent mandarins with presents to perform the ceremonies over his body.

The following year his son sent the funeral offerings to the Dalai Lama and summoned him, and he came. He was feasted at Ganzhou, where the ash of the incense burning before him arranged itself into letters and hardened; at Ningxia he showed himself to the people with four hands and a rainbow round him; in 1585 he reached the Ordos and gave the whole people the consecration; when he got to the Tümed he blamed them for having buried Altan's body, had it exhumed and burned, and found relics in the ashes.

He also stopped a custom. A son of Altan's had died and his mother had determined to kill a hundred boys and a hundred camel foals to escort him to the next world. She had killed more than forty when a tumult arose among the people and it stopped.

Within a generation the Mongols were Buddhists, the monasteries held a great part of the herds and the manpower, and the next Dalai Lama but one was born into Altan Khan's own family — a Mongol prince as the head of the Tibetan church, which a Mongol pilgrim in 1625 would remind his successor of, in tears, while asking him to come and visit.

Where the khan was

Not in any of it. The title, the seal, the markets and the church all went to the Tümed line. The great khan of the Chakhar, the actual heir of Khubilai, was a spectator at the refounding of his own nation.

A raging khan

Drafted from Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part I: The Mongols Proper and the Kalmuks (1876)end

Ligdan was born in 1592 and succeeded his grandfather in 1604 with the title Khutughtu Khan, which he owed to his zeal for Lamaism. He had the Kanjur translated into Mongolian, raised a great statue of Shakyamuni in 1617, and built temples and monasteries — all of them, the chronicle says, finished in one summer.

He also decided to be what his title said he was, and that destroyed the dynasty.

The position he inherited

Mongolia had been divided among the sons of Dayan Khan and had gone on dividing. The senior family's authority, especially north of the Gobi, had become very nominal. The tribes had been emancipating themselves from it for a century, and the great khan of the Chakhar was in practice one prince among a dozen with a better title than the rest.

Wanting the position his ancestors had filled was not unreasonable. How he went about it was.

The method

Sanang Setsen, who was an Ordos prince and no impartial judge, reproaches him for having scattered the six tümens, and quotes a proverb at him: a raging khan disturbs the state, as a raging elephant overthrows his keepers.

Every time he asserted himself a tribe left. He raided Liaodong, out of jealousy of the rising Manchu power. When the Khorchin allied with the Manchus he marched against them and ravaged their lands; they called the Manchus in and the Chakhar were beaten. In 1626 the chiefs of the Naiman and the Aokhan, who were his own vassals, abandoned him and submitted to the Manchus; the Barin and Jarud fled to the Khorchin; the Üzemchin and Abaga escaped over the desert to the Khalkha.

In 1627 the Ordos, Tümed, Khorchin, Abaga and several Khalkha clans made a league against him and fought his forty thousand men at Ju Tseng in the Tümed country and beat them. On the way home the confederates ran into another three thousand Chakhar going to ask the Ming emperor for rewards, and dispersed them too.

In 1628 he beat the Kharachin. He subdued the Tümed. He attacked Datong and Xuanhua and demanded an annual tribute from the Chinese court. He drove Sanang Setsen himself into the desert.

Every victory cost him another tribe.

The end

The Manchus marched against him and he fled. He went towards Tangut and died on the way, in the steppe of Shira Talas. Sanang Setsen dates it 1634.

His widow, who was herself of Manchu royal descent, took their son Erke Khongkhor into the Ordos country to a place called Toli. The Manchu emperor received them kindly. He married his own daughter to the young khan. He took Ligdan's second wife into his own harem. He treated Erke Khongkhor and his brother as his own sons.

What was handed over

The line of Khubilai did not die out and was not destroyed. It was married in.

And it was after his successes in Mongolia, and very largely with the help of the Mongols who had joined his banners, that the Manchu emperor marched victoriously from one end of China to the other. The house that left Dadu in 1368 supplied the cavalry for the conquest that replaced the dynasty which had expelled it.

Two hundred and sixty-seven years

Drafted from Howorth, History of the Mongols from the 9th to the 19th Century, Part I: The Mongols Proper and the Kalmuks (1876)afterlife

The Mongols entered the Qing empire as its most privileged subjects and its most carefully managed ones, and the terms were set in the years around Ligdan's death.

The banners

The tribes that had come over were reorganised as banners — the forty-nine of Inner Mongolia, with the Khalkha north of the desert added later — each under its own hereditary prince, each with fixed pastures it could not leave, each answering to Beijing rather than to any Mongol above it.

It was the appanage system Dayan Khan had created, frozen. What had been a fragmentation problem for the khans became an administrative convenience for an empire: a hundred princes of the blood of Chinggis, all of equal rank, none able to combine.

The dynastic link was made and remade by marriage. Ligdan's son married a Manchu princess; the Khorchin supplied empresses; the descendants of Dayan Khan became imperial in-laws with court ranks, and their sons came to Beijing.

The church

The other instrument was already in place. The conversion Altan Khan began put a great share of the Mongols' herds, wealth and manpower into monasteries, and the monasteries looked to Lhasa, and after the 1640s Lhasa looked to the Qing.

The Mongol pilgrims who went to Tibet in 1625 had reminded the nine-year-old Dalai Lama that his own predecessor was born into one of their princely houses and asked, through an interpreter, whether he would not come and visit the Mongol land. He did not answer. He began to cry. Those present said to one another that this seemed to be a prognostication, and was certainly not an accident.

The arithmetic

Reckon from the abandonment of Dadu in 1368 to the surrender of Ligdan's son in 1635 and the Yuan, in its own reckoning of itself, lasted two hundred and sixty-seven years after it stopped ruling China — three times as long as it ruled it.

That is not a paradox, and it is the thing most easily missed about the Yuan. The dynasty that lost China did not fall; it went home, and kept its name, its genealogy and its claim, and was finally ended not by the state that expelled it but by a different steppe power four centuries later, which then did to China exactly what Khubilai had done.

What it never recovered was the ability to make Mongols obey a Mongol. Buyur Nor took the seal; the Oirats took the century after it; Mandukhai and Dayan Khan restored the line and divided the country; Altan Khan got the market, the seal and the church, and none of the three for the khan; Ligdan tried to take them all back and emptied his own camp.

The title survived every one of those. The authority went at the first blow and never came back.