Kublai Khan by Man John

Author:Man, John [Man, John]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9781446486153
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2012-03-30T16:00:00+00:00

III

AUTUMN

10

BURNED BY THE RISING SUN

ON THE VERGE of achieving actual or nominal dominion over much of Eurasia, having seen his commanders build and sail warships down the Yangtze, and already making preparations to pursue the remnants of Song resistance down 1,500 kilometres of coastline, Kublai was in a position to look outwards across the ocean, to Japan.

Officially, Japan had had remarkably little to do with China for 400 years, ever since China had persecuted Buddhists in the middle of the ninth century. The two had no running disputes, no cause for war; indeed, the opposite, because there were long-established private trading contacts. In Japan, Chinese fashions were all the rage among the ruling classes. Gold, lacquer ware, swords and timber flowed in from Japan, in exchange for silk, porcelain, perfumes and copper coins. Monks arriving in Japan in response to an upsurge in Zen Buddhism brought with them tea, made a fashionable part of Zen studies by a celebrated monk, Eisai, around 1200. None of this reflected official policy. But it was happening under Song rule, and the Song were about to be targeted by Kublai. It didn’t take much imagination for strategists in Xanadu to foresee the Japanese sending aid to the Song. Better take them out fast.

Like other imperialists at other times, Kublai saw an overriding reason to do this: because it seemed possible. A Korean monk who had become an interpreter at Kublai’s court told him Japan would be a pushover: ruled by a figurehead emperor and rival warlords and samurai warriors more interested in their own chivalric codes than in their decrepit coastal defences, it had no large field army nor any experienced commanders to match the Mongols. Kublai not only had well-tried armies and commanders with unrivalled experience – he had a new navy; and he had a springboard in the form of Korea, whose southern coast is a mere 200 kilometres from Japan.

The Mongols had had experience of Korea since their first invasion in 1231. At that time Korea had proved a tough nut, in the hands of a military clique which had seized power from the king 60 years before in order to fight off barbarians from Manchuria. While the king remained a figurehead for 30 more years, the generals fought the Mongols, much helped by their naval skills, which allowed them to hole up in an offshore island and supply themselves with food by sea, in effect thumbing their noses at the Mongol cavalry. In response, the Mongols turned to arson, slaughter and theft, all on a vast scale. In their 1254 invasion they had taken some 200,000 captives and devastated much of the country. In 1258 the king and his officials staged a counter-coup, assassinated the military boss and sued for peace, the crown prince himself travelling to China to submit – directly to Kublai, as it happened, because Mönkhe was campaigning far away to the west. It all worked out neatly: both the Korean king and Mönkhe died, and Kublai was left with a new vassal, the former crown prince and now king, Wonjong.

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