The Mongol Empire by John Man

Author:John Man
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Transworld

15

A NEW CAPITAL

BEIJING WAS NO one’s first choice as a capital – too far North, no good rivers – until the Mongols’ predecessors, the Jin, invaded from Manchuria in 1122. With the Song ruling southern China from Hangzhou, it was the northerners from outside the Chinese heartland who made Beijing a capital, and drew Genghis’s attention.

The city that the Mongols seized and devastated in 1215 was small by modern standards, a square of 3.5 kilometres per side standing south-west of today’s Tiananmen Square. In 1260, it had still not recovered from the destruction meted out by Genghis’s army. No doubt the sights and sounds of medieval Beijing would have returned to its alleyways: travelling barbers twanging their tuning forks to signal their arrival, soft-drink sellers clanging their copper bowls, the day- and night-watchmen sounding their bells, street vendors yelling everywhere. But the walls and the burned-out palaces were still in ruins.

Kublai had several options. He might have ignored Beijing and ruled from Xanadu. But if he did that he would declare himself forever an outsider. Seeing the benefits of governing from a Chinese base, he might have chosen to revive an ancient seat of government, like Kaifeng or Xian. But Beijing had a major advantage: of the many possibilities for a Chinese capital in the north, it was the closest to Xanadu and to Mongolia. In 1264, only eight years after building Xanadu, Kublai decided to make Beijing his main capital. He would abandon Karakorum and commute between his two bases, spending summers in Xanadu and winters in Beijing, which was his way of straddling his two worlds. That’s why Beijing is China’s capital today. Mongol traditionalists never forgave him, and some today still regard him as a traitor.

How best to handle this dilapidated piece of real estate? Incoming dynasties have often made their mark by total demolition and reconstruction (as the Ming would do to Mongol Beijing). But the ancient alleyways, as Kublai’s advisers pointed out, were seething with resentment. Kublai decided on an entirely new capital.

Just north and east of the Jin capital was a perfect site, where runoff from the Western Hills fed Beihai (the North Lake), which for thirty years before the Mongols arrived had been a playground for the wealthy. The 35-hectare lake had been created by the Song 300 years before, and then in the twelfth century chosen by the Jin emperor as the site of his summer palace, with a second retreat on top of today’s Jade Island, the city’s highest point (now crowned by the seventeenth-century White Dagoba, Beijing’s equivalent of the Eiffel Tower). The imperial buildings had been ransacked when Genghis assaulted Beijing, but the lake was still at the centre of the abandoned and overgrown park. This would be the heart of the new city.

It would be thoroughly Chinese, starting virtually from scratch. After fifty years of neglect, imagine the lake choked with silt and plants, summerhouses decaying around its edges, and here and there smallholdings where farmers had dared colonize the once-royal parkland.

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