Ch 6 - Koryo Under the Mongols

Marco Polo, the Stuff of Dreams

Kublai Khan began the difficult process of administering his new government and made dramatic improvements in people's lives as a direct result of his new policies. China became a major trade center linked to world commerce by land and sea routes. The brothers Niccolo and Maffeo Polo and Niccolo's son Marco Polo spent 26 years traveling throughout Asia. Marco Polo's accounts of his journey became one of the most popular texts of the medieval period.

A strong, stocky, handsome man of medium height with an enormous appetite for food, drink, hunting, women, and colorful display, not to mention warfare, everything about Kublai Khan seemed destined for legend. Although he conquered the Middle Kingdom, he refrained from styling himself as the Conqueror of China. Instead, Kublai Khan attempted to master the minds of its people, preserving the best of China's earlier institutions and trying to correct the harm resulting from generations of warfare. It was no easy task. The Chinese, with an ancient literary tradition, a developed technology, and a fastidious ceremonialism, found many reasons to condemn their conquerors. The Mongols were seen as aliens, foreign invaders with a cultural legacy that clashed with China's ancient customs and traditions.

While Kublai Khan's affinity for the symbols and customs of the country drew him to China's bosom, he remained a true Mongol at heart and never fully embraced the Chinese culture. He had conquered China from the back of his horse, but discovered he could not rule his vast empire from the saddle. He needed an elaborate administration to govern, yet the Mongols had little experience, if any, in administering so vast an empire. The Chinese had an existing bureaucracy and far more government experience than the Mongols, but the Mongols were reluctant to use the Chinese, particular the Southern Song, in their government. Genghis Khan filled lower positions in his government with some Chinese, abolished the civil service exams, kept separate laws for Mongols and for the Chinese, and preferred to employ foreigners rather than Chinese in his bureaucracy as he thought they would be more trustworthy. This legacy of distrust carried over into the reign of Kublai Khan.

If the Mongols had one redeeming virtue, it was practicality. Although primitive, often cruel, and with little material or intellectual culture of their own, whenever they encountered something that was cheaper and better than the old ways, they adopted it with little opposition. They quickly saw the usefulness of new ideas and practices they encountered and were easily moved by appeals to their self-interest. They adapted themselves to the sedentary societies they ruled and rapidly absorbed whatever they discovered during their conquests. They did not however, adopt the culture of those societies. Despite their tolerant policies, they staffed high government offices with Mongols or foreigners and separated themselves as much as possible from the Chinese they ruled. Kublai Khan and the Mongols did not want to "become" Chinese. They continued to dress in their own clothing, clung to their own values and way of life, and celebrated and enjoyed their traditional feasts and festivals.

The Mongols harbored none of the xenophobic distrust of foreign ways that characterized the Chinese, the Japanese and the Koreans. Still, according to several European monks who observed them first hand, they were arrogant toward non-Mongols, looking down on them whether they were noblemen or commoners. They displayed impatience and a quick temper toward foreigners and were known to lie to them. Sly, deceitful and cunning, if a Mongol intended to injure someone, he would keep his plans secret to prevent his enemy from building a defense.

Despite their reputation for "barbarism," the Mongols possessed many endearing characteristics. Perhaps their most outstanding trait was their immediate and total obedience to their masters. The Mongols held their leaders in high regard and did not readily lie to them. The Mongols never locked or secured their tents or the carts used to keep their valuables. They showed respect for one another, were friendly and willing to share their food with each other, even though it often was scarce. Petty theft was rare among Mongols and no one committed large-scale robbery. Killing enemies was considered to be of no consequence, yet among themselves they rarely ever argued and murder or wounding were rare. They were not fond of luxury, nor envious of one another. Mongol women playfully used vulgar and offensive language, but they remained chaste and had good reputations.

The process of cultural assimilation proved to be far more dangerous to the Mongol Empire than the internal splits in empire's political structure. At a time when the western Mongols were falling under Russian influence, the Mongols in Persia succumbed to the cultural influence of Islam and Iran. The Mongols of Kublai Khan's Yuan Dynasty absorbed much of the cultural influence of the Chinese. The process was so complete that after 1260, Chinese histories refer to Kublai as a Chinese monarch. The only pure Mongols remaining were the conservatives still living in the Mongolian homeland.

Not long after Kublai Khan became the Emperor of China, he ordered a population census and divided people into four categories:  Mongols;  miscellaneous aliens which included West Asian Muslims who performed important services for the Mongols;  northern Chinese and their descendants who lived under the Jin state, including Chinese, Jurchen, Khitans and Koreans;  and finally southern Chinese of the Song Dynasty, people the Mongols considered the least trustworthy. The results of this census showed that wars under Genghis Khan and his successors had decimated the Chinese population by more than 40,000,000 people.

Native Chinese saw the Mongols as aliens and invaders, and it was never easy to keep the restless Chinese people under control. Still, Kublai Khan truly loved his people and dramatically improved their daily lives as a direct result of the many new policies he put into place. Raised under the influence of Genghis Khan's Great Yasa code, he understood the importance of fair laws. He believed that with bribery, there was only enough money to satisfy a few. Since those few would become unendingly greedy, it was better to have justice. Like his grandfather, Genghis Khan, Kublai displayed a tolerance of various religious groups and Buddhism and Daoism thrived in his court. When he installed Buddhism as the state religion, he alienated the Chinese Confucian gentry, a loss which played a major role in the decline of Mongol power in China.

Realizing the importance of agriculture, Kublai Khan created an Office for Stimulation of Agriculture to promote education in better agricultural techniques and basic literacy. Instead of allowing the Mongols to establish animal herding as way of life in China, in 1262, Kublai Khan actually prohibited the nomads' animals from roaming on farm land. State granaries were filled to capacity to provide food in times of famine, especially across the northern territories where farmlands had been devastated by constant fighting. The 58 granaries in Khanbalik held 145,000 shih (9,643 tons), from which he fed some 30,000 poor people in the capital every day. He organized farmers into small groups of 50 families and encouraged them to take on self-help projects such as planting trees, working on irrigation and flood control, stocking lakes and rivers with fish, and promoting silk production.

Kublai Khan was the first Chinese ruler to put paper currency into widespread use in China. He ordered it used for payments of any kind throughout his domain and no one dared refuse to accept it on pain of death. Even merchants crossing into China were required to exchange their foreign metal coins for paper currency. He saw the wisdom in taxing people instead of killing them and organized a fixed, regular tax system. Instead of paying their taxes to local collectors, the people made a single payment directly to the government, which then paid the nobles.

The vast amount of construction and repair in China required manpower, and Kublai Khan demanded a great deal of forced labor, horses and supplies. Unlike past Chinese rulers, he did not use forced labor as an excuse to get farmers off their land so it could be turned into grazing land. Most of the work centered on expanding the postal system, constructing palaces and temples and building new extensions to the famous Grand Canal. By extending the canal further north to Khanbalik, the Mongols were able to transport grain directly to the capital. Kublai Khan also made improvements to the empire's communication system. Originally built to carry official news, it soon became a way for merchants to send and receive market information. The system was built around a network of hostels equipped with kitchens, dining halls, stables and granaries. Rider-messengers carrying messages along this network generally covered about 250 miles a day. Near the end of his reign, Kublai Khans' communication system was comprised of some 1,400 postal stations, which used 50,000 horses, 8,400 oxen, 6,700 mules, 4,000 carts, and 6,000 boats.

China became a major trade center with a flourishing economy linked to world commerce by land and sea routes. Although Mongols themselves did not get involved in caravan trade, they certainly encouraged others to do so. Merchants felt secure in Yuan China and had relatively high status. Kublai Khan not only protected and encouraged caravan merchants, he used them to gather intelligence on the outside world. At the height of his ruling power in 1279, Kublai Khan had established himself as a great warrior and an intellectual, a man with a voracious appetite for knowledge. He enjoyed the company of scholars, intellectuals and men of wit and regularly invited scholars, painters, poets, and architects from all parts of the world to visit his court in Khanbalik. In order to impress on his fellow Mongols that he was indeed ruler of the world, he encouraged diplomats and traders from the Far West to kowtow in his presence! He thankfully accepted the advice given him by learned men. The Mongols welcomed foreigners who included Russians, Arabs, Jews, Genoese and Venetians.

Europe enjoyed a remarkable period of economic prosperity during the thirteenth century, a time that witnessed growing demand for such luxury goods as spices and silk from the East. The market demand sparked a great interest among merchants to grab a share of this exotic trade, most of which arrived over the Silk Road from China. Shrewd and far-sighted entrepreneurs, especially the Venetians, knew that great fortunes awaited those who established contacts with the Mongol overlords of East Asia. The brothers Niccolo and Maffeo Polo became the first Venetian merchants to travel into the Far East when they left Constantinople in 1260 on a journey to Sarai, on the Volga River, to visit the court of Batu Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan. They were treated courteously and with honor and spent a year trading in the Khan's territory.

After being cut off from Constantinople by warfare among rival Mongol khans, the two men traveled further east for seventeen days to Bukhara, where they met Mongol envoys enroute to Khanbalik and the court of Kublai Khan. The envoys persuaded the Polo brothers to join them in their trip, as the Great Khan had never seen anyone from the Mediterranean and would treat them with great honor. One year later, Niccolo and Maffeo Polo were awe-struck at the sight of the Mongol capital with its chessboard pattern of streets surrounding the walled Imperial Palace at its core. Kublai Khan greeted the first Europeans to ever visit his court dressed in a magnificent colored silk robe so stiff with golden embroidery he appeared to be wearing gold cloth.

Kublai Khan welcomed the men with lavish hospitality and bombarded them with questions about the West, including questions about European rulers and the Christian religion. They found him to be a man of wide-ranging curiosity and possessing a keen intellect. After remaining in Khanbalik for a year answering all manner of questions, Kublai Khan was so intrigued by Christianity that he dispatched them back to Europe as his envoys with a request to the Pope for 100 missionaries educated in all the Seven Arts to teach him and his people about this strange religion and western science. A great collector of religious relics of all kinds, he also asked them to bring him some of the oil from the lamp at the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem.

The Polo brothers arrived back in Europe in 1269, only to learn that the Pope was dead and the religious situation was very confused. After they returned to Venice, the newly elected Pope Gregory X did not offer them 100 missionaries, but assigned two Dominican monks to accompany them on their journey. They were able to obtain a sample of the holy oil requested by Kublai Khan, a fact that greatly impressed the Mongol leader and deepened his trust in their word.

They left Venice in 1271, once again bound for the court of Kublai Khan. This time, Niccolo Polo's seventeen-year-old son, Marco, traveled with them to the court of Kublai Khan. Marco Polo had a great historical impact on this journey because he took voluminous and detailed notes of his travels in Asia. From Venice to Baghdad and across the Persian Desert to Badakhsan, through the high peaks of the Pamir Mountains and down to the western edge of the Tarim Basin in northwest China, across the wastelands of the Mongolian steppes and the former kingdom of Xi Xia, it took the three Venetians three and a half years to reach Khanbalik. Kublai Khan received the Venetians with great honor and quickly sensed the talent of the twenty-one-year-old Marco. The Great Khan immediately enlisted him in the service of the court and sent him on embassies to country after country.

Whenever Kublai Khan's ambassadors and envoys returned from a mission, they never failed to report the details of their business. Unfortunately, that's about all they could report, for they rarely noticed anything else in their travels. Marco Polo however, always took great pains to learn about all manner of different things in the lands he visited in order to talk about them with the Great Khan. With the eye of a Venetian merchant surveying potential markets, he collected detailed descriptions of the provinces and cities he visited, noting the main exports of each region and the kinds of goods manufactured and sold there. His notes provided Kublai Khan a clear picture of prosperous communities with busy marketplaces in his realm. a great deal of commercial and cultural traffic passed into and out of Khanbalik from Koryo, and it is thought that perhaps Marco Polo first introduced Koryo to the Western world as "Coree," or "Corea," or "Korea."

During the seventeen years the Polo's spent in China, the always curious Marco had more knowledge of, or had actually visited more countries than any other man. Marco Polo described the province of Fu-chow as follows:

"The province has villages and towns in plenty. Silk is produced here in abundance and the silken fabrics and cloth-of-gold woven here are the finest ever seen. There are also the best goshawks in the world. There are ample supplies of everything, and commerce and industry flourish."

"In a city called Tinju they make bowls of porcelain, large and small, of incomparable beauty. They are made nowhere else except in this city, and from here they are exported all over the world. In the city itself they are so plentiful and cheap that for a Venetian goat you might buy three bowls of such beauty that nothing lovelier could be imagined."

Year by year, Marco Polo became more valuable to Kublai Khan. In 1292 however, a matter of serious consequence arose that would separate these two men forever. A special escort was needed to deliver a young Mongol princess to the Ilkhan of Persia. Persian envoys had failed to deliver her overland and had returned to Khanbalik. At about the same time, Marco Polo returned to the capital after a long embassy that took him on a sea voyage to India. The Persian envoys, who knew of the seagoing reputation of Venetians, persuaded Kublai Khan to allow the Polos to accompany them and the seventeen-year-old bride-to-be on a sea voyage to Persia. Reluctantly, the Great Khan agreed and outfitted the mini-expedition with fourteen ships and an entourage of six hundred along with supplies for two years. He also gave the Polos letters to deliver to the Pope and to the kings of Europe, including King Edward of England and King Louis of France. Upon being released from the Khan's service, Marco reportedly told his father, "It must be God's pleasure that we return to Venice to tell people of all the things the world contains."

After completing their mission successfully, the Polos returned home, arriving in Venice in the winter of 1295. Their family had long ago given them up for dead. Marco Polo soon married and settled down, only to become involved in the heated maritime rivalry between Venice and Genoa. On September 6, 1298, the "gentleman commander" became one of seven thousand prisoners transported in chains to a Genoa prison. While in prison, Marco became friends with a fellow prisoner from Pisa, Italy, a highly reputed romance writer named Rustichello. Though no literary master, he was persuasive, industrious, and a master of the genre. After hearing Marco's tales of the Far East, he persuaded him to dictate the entire story so he could write it down. Thus began the manuscript entitled, "The Description of the World," a text that would become, as some historians have claimed, "the most valuable account of the world outside Europe that was available at the time."

Originally written in French, the manuscript was first published in 1299, and eventually translated into most European languages. Marco Polo gave Europeans the first authoritative view of life in China and the mysteries and wealth of the Far East. His vivid descriptions of Kublai Khan's gilded and lacquered palace and the flourishing marketplaces filled with exotic goods from faraway ports captivated readers as no other book had done before. Marco Polo's manuscript became one of the most popular texts of the medieval period. It excited the imagination of dreamers, stirred the greed of merchants, gave new direction to the adventuresome spirit of explorers, and awakened possibilities of empire among European conquerors. Christopher Columbus became one of his most ardent believers.

Most people found the stories fascinating, if not a bit unbelievable, and many debated whether it was fact or merely fiction. Not even Marco's friends believed all the seemingly far-fetched tales contained in the manuscript. By the early fourteenth century the debate became pointless, for within a few years of the Polos' return to Venice, Turkish and Moslem advances in Central Asia closed the Silk Road and blockaded all access to China by land. On his deathbed in 1324, friends urged Marco to meet God with a clear conscience by retracting some of his more obvious exaggerations. Marco Polo never retracted a word of his account. His only response was, "I never told the half of what I saw ...."