The
Mongol conquest of Sung China is completed in 1279, by Kublai
Khan, the grandson of Chingghis. Kublai, called the "Great
Khan" did not destroy Chinese culture. To the Chinese,
he was Emperor Shih-tsu of the Yuan dynasty. It was also a time
of technical innovation, with the invention of cannon and the
beginning development of a flying machine, the submarine, torpedo
and telescope. In part an anti-Mongolian reaction, the Chinese
abandoned development of these projects, considering them crude
and foreign.
During this period, the Mongols twice attacked northern Kyushu,
Japan, once in 1274 and again in 1281. Despite inferior weapons,
Japanese warriors were successful using ambushes and avoiding
large battles--what we now call guerrilla warfare. Following
the destruction of most of their fleet by typhoons (called kamikaze
or "divine wind" by the Japanese), which struck on
both attempted invasions, the Mongol forces withdrew from Japan.
In 1325, a great famine with severe flooding hit China. This
may have been due to in part a world-wide cooling trend, and
in part due to the Mongols. A livestock rearing people, the
Mongols saw little value in irrigation projects to support grain
and rice crops. As a result, irrigation systems were allowed
to fall into disuse and rice and grain production fell. An estimated
8 million people died in the famine, out of a Chinese population
of 45 million. Then in 1334, Hopei province was hit by a mysterious
plague which killed 5 million people, or nine out every ten.
It was the bubonic plague, which would travel with merchants
across Asia, finally reaching Europe as the Black Death.
These disasters led to a huge revolt against the Mongols, whose
leadership had already been much weakened by in-fighting amongst
the ruling family after the death of Kublai. In 1368, one of
the rebel leaders, a Buddhist monk called Chu Yuan-chang established
a new Chinese dynasty called the Ming, with a capital at Nanking.
A centralized, authoritarian form of government was imposed
based on Confucian ideas. Trade, industry and education were
all controlled by the government, and censorship was imposed.
Naval expeditions as far as Africa opened new trade routes,
but there was a growing rejection of anything foreign.
Imports of Chinese porcelain into Europe, the famous Ming vases,
became one of the main trade goods. The blue glazes used by
the Chinese (copied from the Persians) grew to be so popular,
that the Europeans, especially the Dutch, began to make copies
of their own.
In Japan, this was one of the great periods of artistic development.
Chinese writing was borrowed, but because of the complexity
of Chinese characters, the Japanese invented their own phonetic
alphabet, which was closer to the Roman alphabet, the one used
in Europe and the Americas today. A Chinese character does not
just represent a sound, like one of our letters, but can mean
a whole idea. Where we make words by joining letters together,
the Chinese can use just one character. But the Chinese have
more than 30,000 different characters, where the Roman alphabet
has just 26 letters to remember. By 1200 AD, these phonetic
alphabets, or kana as they are called, had been improved and
brought into fairly wide use, opening the way for a literature
of a pure Japanese style.
25
years ago / 50 years ago
/ 80 years ago / 125
years ago / 150 years ago
250 years ago / 400
years ago / 700 years ago
/ 1,200 years ago
1,500 years ago / 2,000
years ago / 3,000 years ago
/ 4,000 years ago / 5,000
years ago / 10,000 years
ago
