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.