You were so generous last time, Jack. I felt almost guilty towards the end of it, you know, this poor guy is just letting me barrage him with questions.
No, but it's a mutual... I mean, we get to talking and you're listening, you're letting me rattle on, so it's not your fault. I take advantage of the opportunity.
Right. I was re-listening to our interview on the plane yesterday, because you know that was episode 19 of this show, Jack, we're almost at 200 now. So you had come to my life and I felt like this deep sense of, I do not deserve to have such a magnificent author give me so much time, and I was feeling guilty beyond the hour mark thinking, come on, this guy's got better things to do than talk to me. But it was amazing because listening back to it, you know, it was actually so much on Mongolia and this incredible new chapter that you just forged for yourself after 50. The Berlin Wall falls, you fly over to the former bloc, and then, you know, this is like an entire new life that you've been able to carve out post-50, which I just think is so cool and unique. Like, where else do you see that?
Well, I don't think... well, tomorrow I turn 78, so I'm ready for a new life, you know.
Oh God, is there another twist on the horizon for you, Jack?
You know, this is my last book on Mongolia. I've been living in Cambodia for a while, and you know, I always feel an obligation to the people who take me in, you know, as a refugee or whatever. And I would really... I've been working for a few years on this thing in my head mostly, but also now I'm writing. Cambodia needs a good history, not just the Killing Fields and all. And so I thought I've chosen kind of the first Buddhist king of Cambodia, unknown to the world, no biography outside of Cambodia, but he's a very interesting person and I think he has a lot of lessons for the modern world. And I would love to see a book do well in the world that doesn't have to do with genocide. That's about all we know about Cambodia's genocide, and it was horrible, horrific beyond words for four years. But it's a great civilization, a great country, and they deserve something good. And I think their Buddhist king, because he created a universal health care system for the Khmer Empire, free hospitals, free medication, trained doctors, he built 102 hospitals. I mean, it was something unheard of in the world, and it was about the same time as Chinggis. So for me, how about that?
I know, I was going to say, I came to it actually by way of the first Mongol ambassador. That's when I came to Cambodia, following him and what he did. He came here and he stayed a year or there in Cambodia, and he stayed one year in the Khmer Empire, and that got me started on it. And then I thought, wow, there's an interesting story here, because there was a big and thriving civilization before the 1200s, which would be the timeline that this first king that you've just described...
Yes, he was really near the end.
Have historians really uncovered the great ancient history of Cambodia in that region?
Not so much. You know, the French scholars who were here, they did, of course, a lot of work, but they had their own interests that were a little bit different from mine, and generally they were not interested in Buddhism. And this was the greatest king in Cambodian history, and he did an incredible job with building roads, bridges, rest centers, and then hospitals. But he had also been a conqueror for the first half of his life, and it was his second wife, his first wife died, and he married her older sister who was actually a prof, we would say a professor, teaching women at that time about theology and philosophy. And he married the older sister after his wife died, and she led him in a new direction.
And you're an anthropologist by trade, right, Jack?
By trade, yes, but I just drift around, you know, and whatever.
But there is such rich narrative to the books that you write, and they read as almost narrative nonfiction rather than anthropological texts. Is that really intentional by you?
You know, it's sort of odd, but you know, yes and no. I'm not sure of the answer. When I was struggling around as a young graduate student and doing the dissertation and what came after, you know, then you're learning a certain style. And fortunately I had also been trained in Germany, so I could make sentences that were enormously long with lots of clauses, and that got me really through graduate school, you know. But I was playing around with how do I make these ideas, and my wife, she said, okay, you're just talking to me, but you're on the radio and I'm in another place, and you're talking to me on the radio and I can't see anything except what you tell me. And wow, you know, it's just amazing that something that simple. Say, wow, that's a whole different way to think about it. I'm not talking about just scholars at a conference who are looking for me to make a mistake about 1269 versus 1279 and got him, you know. No, it's just... but also history is the story of people's lives, and you can make great principles, great movements of history, class struggles, and religious and civilization struggles, but every one of those at the heart is still a person who has an emotion. They're doing something for a reason, other people are doing something for a reason, they have an emotion, maybe the same or conflicting or what. It's the story, and that's what interests me. And any of these abstract principles, they come out of the actions of individual people.
I read in one of the reviews of Emperor of the Seas that Weatherford continues his decades-long quest to rescue the Mongols from their reputation as uncivilized marauders.
Well, I like that in a way. I mean, I do think that that is their reputation, and I do think it's much more... however, that's only a selective representation of that reputation, because I think, as you and I have talked about in the past, people such as Jebe and Charles are greatly respected. Genghis Khan, the Mongols, we had many great people who did, and I'm following in that line. Now, the majority did not, especially if the Mongols conquered you, for the most part you did not like them. People don't like their conquerors, and that's all understandable. But also the Mongols themselves perpetuated these horrible stereotypes. It was a part of their war propaganda, you know, and so they would send out refugees who said, oh, they killed six million people in that city. Well, there was no city in the world with even one million at that time, but nevertheless the Mongols let it go out, you know, and then the scribes eagerly recorded that, you know, it's a number, let's put that down. And so the Mongols are partially responsible for their own horrible reputation, but it's also a part of a larger bias against nomadic people. All tribal people have been sort of characterized by that, whether it's the Germans attacking the great civilization of Rome, you know, or the Moors attacking Europe, or all these different groups. And I reject a lot of that. I reject most of it, not just in the case of Mongols, but in any case of our tribal people, a broad characterization of if people live in tents and just subsistence animal herding, then they must be uncivilized and savage, and maybe a little bit less than the more civilized people that live in apartment buildings.
Yes, yes, that's the bias that runs all the way through history, but then there's always a counterstream.
You know, we had even with the Romans, we had Tacitus. Tacitus wrote about the Germans with tremendous respect, these barbarian tribes. He realized there was more to them than barbarian tribes. We also had Ibn Khaldun among the Arabs. He also was one of the great defenders of tribal people as being the revitalizing force over and over of civilizations, that civilizations tended to ripen and decay, and then tribal people would come in, they would conquer, and they would revitalize those civilizations. So there has been this counter-narrative, but it's mostly ignored. I mean, how many people read even Khaldun or read Tacitus or something? But it's great, exciting to have a great TV epic or streaming epic about barbarians and fighting and swords and gladiators and all these kinds of things.
And in the Western understanding, or at least the Western propaganda, it was really propagated first by Voltaire, right? Because he wanted to characterize the politicians of his day in a negative light but couldn't directly call them out, so rather they were tagged as Mongols, and it all kind of goes downstream from there.
Yes, he really changed the narrative that had developed in France. It was very positive to the Mongols. We had a very great scholar-diplomat named Pierre de Lacouperie, who did the first biography of Genghis Khan, and he called him Genghis Khan the Great. Very simple. That was a book that was very popular in the American colonies, especially with Thomas Jefferson. He bought so many copies and gave them out. But so for some reason, you know, Voltaire then seized on Genghis as a way to criticize the King of France without risking his own life by saying what he meant. So he wrote this play about him that was really sort of a rip-off of a Yuan Dynasty play, which was Orphan of China, and that began to change it. The other thing I think was soon after that, the rise of Napoleon. He gave a very sort of newly invigorated negative view of conquerors in general. And so I can see even in the writing of Thomas Jefferson, as his life went on after he faced that Napoleonic era, he decreased the amount of praise he had had earlier in life for Genghis Khan, and he began to be more suspicious. Also, I think at that time the Americans were feeling a little bit of threat from American Indians out west, and so that was all the more reason not to talk about these tribes too much. In fact, Jefferson believed that the Native Americans, American Indians, were related to the Mongols, so they had come over from Asia.
Is there any anthropological proof of that, or is that rather just, you know, a characterization?
There's great DNA evidence of North Siberian connections with Native American people through tens of thousands of years of people moving back and forth, but to specify it as the Mongols is much, much too specific and much too late in history. No, but genetics, of course, eventually DNA connects us all, but the Bering Strait was no barrier to the movement of people back and forth.
But it's fascinating how these negative, whether intentional or not, propagandistic terms of phrase can carry down, because I even remember when I was growing up, if someone was deformed or something, it'd be very derogatory, but it would be logically downstream of this same word, Mongolian or Mongol. And so you can just see how it persists and persists. So I guess there is truth to the idea that you are on this decades-long quest to just rewrite and rechange this association.
But you know, sadly, something like calling these children didn't come out of ignorant folk wisdom, that came from scientists. The scientists in Europe had decided that, well, if the Europeans are obviously a superior race, I mean, they're superior to Asians, they're superior to Africans, they're the superior race, so how can we have these children who are not as smart as everybody? How can that happen to the superior race? And their solution was, oh, they're not really white children, they are descended from Mongol rape victims. This was a scientific theory, and it's horrific. And so therefore we don't call them white children, we call them mongoloids. Yeah, just absolutely horrific, and it came from science, not from the ignorant people at the bottom, it came from scientists.
But it does feel like, I don't know if you're swimming in the same corners of the internet as me, Jack, but the attitude towards Genghis and the Mongolian Empire, all the way down to Khubilai, which you've just written about, is changing. It's more spoken of with reverence now and appreciation and respect, and maybe a little bit more understanding of the time period within which it happened. Obviously these are thousands of men on horseback going to take over, you know, people who didn't necessarily deserve it, they were just living their lives, so there is something quite bad about that, but it's also all couched in the time of that's how an ambitious person would be able to express themselves in one way or another.
Yes, you know, warfare is horrific at any time, any era, any culture, any place. And we're talking about today, the wars that go on in the world, they are horrific. They kill children, they kill innocent people, women, elderly, young men who are soldiers, young women who are fighting for their kind, everyone. The United States alone dropping atomic bombs on civilian targets of cities, we don't think about that. You know, we just somehow, oh, quest for freedom, democracy, fighting against fascism, and I don't know, we have all these vague ideas like that. But it's true in every single war, and I'm not condemning the United States for doing that. That was a tactical decision that they made, whether good or bad, that's a different subject. But the Mongols also, they killed people in war, there is no denying that, but they also accomplished great things. And sometimes in our history we only want to talk about what we accomplished, not about really too much slavery or genocide or dropping atomic bombs or invading countries all over the world. No, we don't want to talk about that. It's just we couch all of that in terms of sort of theoretical ideas of doing good in the world, and even if it goes wrong, we were trying to do good in Vietnam, and all these are lies, these are just pure outright lies. And we can't see that in ourselves, then we see other people, we tend to minimize their accomplishments and maximize the barbarity of what they were doing. And I'm not trying to deny the barbarity of any group of humans, including us today, I don't deny that, but I wanted to look at a different side of the history in a certain way. I feel like it helps to lift us up if we can see in other people ideas that we may share in part but not wholly. I think it helps us to understand the world better and in our own lives, in our own situation better.
Yeah, because it is this expression of an attempt at power and groups of ambitious people that has shaped the current landscape that we inhabit. My own country, Australia, was invaded by English people, and it was really horrible, obviously, to the indigenous people that lived there. But now I'm here as a proud Australian. It is obviously an ongoing discussion which probably doesn't even have a conclusion or right answer.
You know, I think none of us should bear the sins of the past. Those are not our sins unless we continue to commit them. You know, it's good to help us understand either our privileged position in society or victimization in society, but what happened before us is not our fault, but what happens today is our responsibility. And so I think that we need to be aware of it. Yes, you can be a proud Australian today and still be very aware of the tragedy of the history. You can be a proud American today and be very well aware of the horrors of American history, and still, that happened then, now we're trying to change it, now we don't want that, now we want something else, and I think that's true everywhere in the world.
So you're in Southeast Asia at the moment, Thailand. You mentioned in the very beginning this transition to a new book about the first Buddhist Cambodian king. I was really, really shocked to see that Khubilai had made it all the way down to Vietnam and Indonesia. You know, these Mongols on horseback in thick dense forest on the other side, on elephants, like it was quite a dramatic thing.
Yes, Khubilai, first Khubilai was really following the old Mongol system of conquering by land, and so you send the army farther and farther and farther. The problem with the Mongolian army was that pretty much under Genghis Khan they had reached kind of all the areas that you can really reach easily on land by horses, and then you start hitting rivers that are too big to cross, or they don't freeze up in the winter, you cannot walk across them on the ice, or you started hitting jungles, humid areas. And so Khubilai really had a problem. He was thinking in the old Mongol way, if you send in the cavalry, that's all the Mongols had basically, you send in the cavalry and you go. But when you hit Vietnam, it's jungle country and has all these large rivers, and it's a whole different game, and the people attacking you or fighting against you are not arriving on horseback, they're on elephants. So the first efforts, actually all the efforts, are going to prove unsuccessful in Vietnam, but the first efforts in 1258 when he sent down a very good general named Uriyangkhadai, who was the son of the greatest general of Genghis Khan's time, Subutai, he was his son, and they had conquered Yunnan, the province now part of China, at that time it was not, they had conquered that, and then they just came on down very nearby to the Red River of northern Vietnam. And so Uriyangkhadai and his son Aju were coming down the river, and they were in totally unknown territory. It was very difficult because the horses did not have food, they didn't have fodder, there just wasn't enough grass, there was jungle, but the horses can't eat the jungle, and then there are all these rice fields with stubble, but the rice straw is not very healthy for a horse or for any animal really. So they had a great problem. They got down the river, and the Dai king or emperor, whichever you call him, different people want to call him with a different title, he had come up the river on boats, and they had brought elephants with them, and they were on one side of the river where Uriyangkhadai and Aju and those were on the other side of the river, and the Mongols had to come up with a plan. But by this time Mongols had also fought elephants in Burma and a few other places, so they knew the trick: take flaming arrows and shoot at the feet. If you hit the feet of the elephants, they will panic and run. They had that part of the plan, but they also were thinking about what to do about the boats, and they had a clear plan. They understood the importance of the boats. They said, okay, we're going to send one contingent to attack the elephants, we're going to send one contingent to burn the boats so the people can't escape. There's jungle around them, they can't escape. Well, Mongols just don't understand, the soldiers just don't quite get it about, go attack a boat, it's an empty boat, but I want to attack the elephant, I want to attack the elephant. So they all rushed off to attack the elephant, they ignored the boats, they succeeded, the elephants panicked, ran, but the soldier and the entire court loaded onto their boats and sailed away. One could say they won the battle in a way, you know, they were standing there still and the enemy was gone. And this happened over and over in Vietnam, and they failed by land, and then later they tried by sea, and also they failed by sea. So they failed, and it was a series of invasions that went over nearly thirty years under the reign of Khubilai, and they never succeeded in conquering Vietnam, but they sure tried.
That battle that you just described in the book, what stood out to me was the sort of pride of the Mongol warriors to almost find it as an improper way to almost fight the battle, to not actually take on the warriors themselves but burn the boats, which they failed to do because they did it in reverse. But historically, if we look back to Genghis Khan and The Making of the Modern World, like the Mongols weren't above doing these very sort of trickster moves. Famously they would do the false flee, you know, pretend to be running away just to ambush a bunch of people. So why is it that, you know, fifty years after Genghis has died and Khubilai is managing this army, the Mongols are fighting with this type of pride rather than the tactical nous that they might have had otherwise?
I think the tactics work perfectly on wide open plains, the steppe, where you could have this fake flight, you run away, you lure the enemy out, they get spread out, and you turn around, you go back, and you destroy them. It doesn't work in a jungle environment, it's just a whole different world. And also the idea that a boat could be important was very difficult for the early Mongols to comprehend. They crossed the river on, or the men would cross the river on inflated goat skins. That was because it's a very deeply rooted thing in the Mongolian culture. On the land, men ride a horse, women have carts, they have carts that are usually pulled by oxen or sometimes by camel. All carts belong to women. The men would just never ride in a cart unless they're totally unconscious and being taken somewhere, and even then they'd rather be thrown across their horse to be taken. If they had to guide a cart, they would simply guide it by the rein, staying on their horse, or if necessary they'd get off and walk before they would sit on a cart. A cart is a wooden thing, it's not a living thing, and they see a boat and it's kind of like a cart on the water, so it just doesn't strike them as a weapon, as anything dangerous. And why am I going to go and attack the boat? It really took a while for them to change. But the defeat of the victory of Uriyangkhadai in the battle, but his defeat in Vietnam, and he had to flee, his son Aju, he learned those lessons, and Aju became the one who really led the military transformation under Khubilai Khan to understand that a boat could also be a weapon. Once the Mongols had it, that the boat can be a weapon, they were pretty much okay, then they got to move. But anything that moved for the Mongols could be a weapon, anything that didn't move could be a target.
Throughout the book there's a series of proverbs, Mongolian proverbs, and what really stands out is just their deep irrational fear of water, maybe not irrational but nonetheless fear of water, and it was even comparing deep water to being as dangerous as flames or a field of flames. So yeah, so how did Khubilai sort of transition the Mongolian forces into opening up to the idea of putting their horses on these wooden ships and going across the seas?
Yeah, well, Southern China was controlled when Khubilai was ruling Northern China, Southern China was controlled by the Southern Song, the old Song Dynasty, and they had a navy, a defensive navy, and they called this the Great Wall of the Sea. This is before the Great Wall of the Ming Dynasty was building, but they had a Great Wall of the Sea. But in their, in the Southern Song mentality, they saw it as a wall, so they would put ships side by side, chain them together, and they would make a wall on water to keep out the Mongols. So then the Mongols had already been dealing a little bit with walls up north, about fortified cities, and they had learned how to conquer them. And the first efforts from Genghis Khan actually to bring down a wall were very difficult because he saw the walls and he knew that their men couldn't scale, and you can't go over the wall on a horse. If you can't do that on a horse, the Mongol doesn't quite know what to do. But he also looked all around and he saw these canals and how they had diverted rivers and everything, so he diverted part of the Yellow River to attack the walls of the city. The first time he did it, it was not successful because he flooded his own camp, the levee, the embankments broke and flooded his camp, but he did it again correctly and he succeeded. So they had learned how to break down the walls on land, and then they had to learn how to do it on sea. And one of the important things was again with Aju, when he was besieging some of the cities of China, of Southern China along the Yangtze River, he studied them very carefully. He would go out day and night on the rivers, the creeks, looking at the cities and examining, and he realized that on the land side they had massive walls because they always expected a land invasion, an army would come by land, attack their wall. On the water side, they also had a wall, but it wasn't so strong. It was just there, just kind of keep people out because they never expected an attack from the water. So he knew, okay, he had to attack in the water. How would he do that with the boats? And he thought about their land equipment, and they were using catapults, trebuchets, but they were not strong enough. And so they sent off to what's now Iran, the Ilkhanate back then, which was being ruled by Khubilai's nephew at this time, and they ordered engineers to come in from Iran to build new types of trebuchet or catapult that could be mounted on a ship and they could be fired at the wall without sinking the ship. It took a while to do this, it was a very complex thing, but they perfected it, they did it, and then they hit those walls, and then the defenders of the cities had no ability to repair the walls fast enough, so they broke down the walls on the weakest point. So they began in this way to transform into a really offensive navy. At first it was a riverine navy, just, you know, along the Yangtze River and the tributaries, but then they had to go down the coast, and they kept getting farther and farther out into the water. Their first big trial, you know, to try to conquer a place by water was against Japan, with their attempted invasion of Japan, and it failed, but they learned a lot by doing it. And, you know, with the invasion of Japan, usually they treat it as so well, he wanted to conquer Japan and rule it. I think that's probably true in the sense he wanted them to swear allegiance to him, but mostly he wanted to cut off their trade with the Southern Song. The sulfur sources of China were located at that time in the north, and so the Mongols had them for making gunpowder. The Southern Song was off from their supply of materials, but they were getting it from Japan. So if he could cut that trade, and so he did, even though they failed to conquer Japan, they cut the trade, and so it's sort of half successful depending on how you look at it.
Nice. We're definitely going to get to Japan, Jack, but I just want to sort of set up this question because I realize about thirty minutes in we haven't maybe introduced properly who Khubilai is and the main context for what he's entering into. So Genghis, who no one needs an introduction to, is Khubilai's grandfather, hereditary grandfather. Oh wait, is there any other type of grandfather? Okay. And Genghis had conquered the great Eurasian steppe, and at the time of his death had conquered more territory than any other person who had lived. But the Khaganate Empire continued to expand, and the great agricultural fields in the south of China, this Song Dynasty, was something Genghis could never achieve. And then he has a son and a grandson, both who are fierce, great leaders, great warriors, but it's this less warrior, more cerebral, sickly kind of Khubilai Khan who ends up being the successor that does expand the territories. So with that as sort of the context, could you explain, you know, where he comes into the story, how he himself amassed the power and resources and following to ultimately conquer the Song Dynasty, which his grandfather never could?
Well, I think you've explained it very well, you've summarized it. And if you looked at Khubilai, when he was born, by coincidence, in the very same year that his grandfather Genghis Khan conquered Beijing, 1215, he was born about three months later. But he was the second son of Genghis Khan's fourth son, so there are lots of older cousins who were already out there fighting battles, and they were very good at war. He already had an older brother who was very popular, he was already charismatic, he was at the court of, after Genghis Khan, he grew up in the court of his uncle Ogedei, who was the Great Khan of the Empire. He was sophisticated in the Mongol way, he knew everybody of any importance. And then Khubilai, for some reason, his mother recognized that Khubilai wasn't the best of Mongols. Well, I should say Genghis Khan had recognized it, because he said that about him, that's the only comment we have. He said, you don't look like a Mongol, it's kind of, he says, you look like your mother's people group. She was more Turkic actually than anything, but Sanic. But I don't know if that caused him to have a different life trajectory or what, that one comment. But she was educating him with a lot of tutors, Chinese tutors, but also different religious tutors. She herself was a Christian woman, his mother was Christian, but he had a nurse for him who was a Tangut Buddhist. And so he grew up in this very mixed atmosphere, and he was doing very well, he was becoming the more educated Mongol. He really didn't seem to be in line to ever become anybody. His older brothers were all doing better, I mean, older cousins were all doing better, they were conquering Europe and looting Russia and Ukraine and dashing through Iran and all these places, and he was back home looking at Buddhist philosophy and Christian ideas and this kind of stuff. And also he was overweight, you know, he could ride a horse, all Mongols could ride a horse, but he was not the most graceful of all, so really didn't seem like he was destined for much. But his mother was a mastermind politician, and she had maneuvered his eldest brother, Möngke, who became named Möngke Khan, into the position of the Great Khan of the Mongol Empire, and she herself was ruling northern China at that point as the regent for her deceased husband. And so I think her idea was, train him, train Khubilai to become a good administrator for China. I think that was her plan, and she was doing a very good job, with no idea that soon after she died, Möngke Khan himself died in 1259. And so when he died, all of a sudden it was very unclear who would take over. And his youngest brother, so Khubilai Khan's younger brother, Ariq Böke, he was back in Mongolia, he was a real Mongol, he was a hothead. At one time he had been put in charge of administering the religious affairs, and so he had debates between the Daoists and Buddhists, and he got irritated, he picked up a statue of the Buddha and beat the Daoist representative to death. So he wasn't working out too well as the religious administrator, and his brother Möngke had then moved Khubilai to take over those issues. But Ariq Böke was a real Mongol, he was out there on the horse all the time, he was erratic, he was like his father, who had a reputation as a very wild conqueror actually, you know, sometimes the youngest son can turn out like that, and his father had been the youngest son. And so Ariq Böke was taking over, and at this time Khubilai was actually on the Yellow River, oh sorry, on the Yi River, because his brother Möngke had assigned him. Möngke died, and Khubilai thought, okay, I'll just continue to work, he told me what to do. But oddly, it's his wife, her name was Chabi, Chabi, she sent encoded messages to him, it's like, get yourself back here, forget about the Southern Song, they're going to be there forever, we can conquer them later. Your brother is taking over Mongolia, the people are flocking to him, come back, you should be the Great Khan. There's no indication that he had tremendous ambition before that, he had mostly tried to retreat from the war front. He would tell his older brother, oh, my gut is acting up, I got to go home for a couple months to kind of recover, and then he'd go home and lounge around and hunt a little bit maybe, which meant he would go out on the elephant, and then they would let the leopards and the eagles go catch the animals, and he had archers to shoot for him. He always shot that one, and there was a shoot, that's how he contacted. So we really don't have indication, maybe he did have ambition that I just can't see, I don't know, I have no true inside information. But Chabi, she seemed to really be very clear about what needed to be done. Focus on Ariq Böke, he's your youngest brother, he is taking over. But Khubilai had the greatest resource of all, he had northern China. Ariq Böke had Mongolia. Well, there are not that many people in Mongolia, and they may love him very much, and they have all the animals, but that's not really going to help you that much if you don't have enough food. And he did not. And his allies in Central Asia, what's now Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, all that area, they were allied with him, but when he then demanded all their food, they didn't want to give it up, and so his army was virtually starving. He surrendered to his brother, who had all the food of China and the huge, massive army of China, northern China. And Ariq Böke surrendered in 1264 and disappeared from history. He, like many people, he died mysteriously.
Are you implying that there was foul play there, or it's just...
Yeah, I think definitely there was. I think there was, but I don't want to point the finger exactly at Khubilai. You know, sometimes if people know the ruler needs something, they do it without being told to do it. So I cannot point the finger at him. Actually, he had organized, Khubilai had organized an investigation and a trial of his brother. It never got to the point of trial, but the investigation had started, so something was going on, and then he died.
So you've set up how Khubilai ascended to the power that he amassed. How does he then manage to add all the additional territory to the Khaganate Empire?
I think one thing about Khubilai was that, okay, now he has a better understanding of how the Chinese system works, of the Chinese bureaucracy, and of the advantages and disadvantages offered by China. He did not see a lot of advantage in Confucianism and all the rituals that went with it, other than maybe a certain amount of public relations, he could see that. But he saw the advantages of the technology that was there, and he also had, like his grandfather, he had a fairly good judgment for choosing very competent people. One of those was Aju, whom I mentioned, but Aju's father, Uryankhadai, had been also very competent. Another great one, who became the most famous of the generals, was named Bayan. And Bayan was a very sophisticated Mongol. He had lived in the Middle East with the Mongols ruling there, he lived in China, he had been around, he was at court, a very exotic, handsome, exciting figure, and he gets most of the credit through Marco Polo and other people for the conquest of southern China. I certainly believe that he had a great, great role, there's no question, but Aju is overlooked because Aju was still pretty much Mongol. He was thinking in new ways, but he was out there, he was a little bit harsh with his soldiers, he wasn't as sort of nice and accommodating as Bayan was, and so Aju has been to some extent forgotten. But he was the one who organized that technological... he wasn't a technological person, but getting those personnel there to make the ships into offensive weapons that could be used to attack. And then he probably should have been in command of the entire army, but Khubilai placed Bayan, which was not a bad choice. And fortunately those two men, very different in temperament, very different in many ways, but they cooperated, they seemed to like each other very much, or in the sense, I should say, they respected each other very much. They realized that they each had different talents, and they worked together very well, they made an effective team. They sort of worked their way down the Yangtze River, conquering one city after another, until they finally reached the capital, and that was Khubilai still back there in Beijing. But he is organizing something that he is the best of, like, of all of his Muslim subjects and their skills. The Muslims were very good with numbers, you know, they knew about the zero, and they could do miracle things with numbers. Great for taxes for the Mongols, not so good for the Chinese people, you know, the Chinese were good with technology and production. So he had all these things, and he was, I don't want to say a genius, but he was skilled and good at organizing it. But in contrast to his grandfather, who was a warrior first and a politician second, Khubilai was more just a politician through and through, and could manage all the people below him. That's rather how he ruled.
Yeah, I think that's fair to say. It's almost insulting for any Mongol to be called a politician, more a politician, but it's probably fair to say, yes. Did Khubilai himself see much sort of action in his life? You mentioned the story of how he would hunt, the fact that he was quite sickly, he couldn't really ride a horse, you know, did he ever see much action?
No, he did when his older brother was the Great Khan and the conquest of Yunnan, he was very important. He went there despite pleading gout. His brother said, okay, get the gout finished with and get back in the saddle and go back. So he did go back, and oddly, it was in a very clever move that he had to negotiate. It wasn't the traditional Mongol way again, but the kingdom that was in Yunnan at that time, they felt fairly secure behind their river. They didn't think that the Mongols were going to be able to cross on goat skins, and they were just kind of, they had this ad hoc army, they all gathered, the peasants put down their, you know, their implements and they came off and gathered, but it wasn't a real good army, but they didn't think the Mongols were going to be much of a danger because they couldn't get across the river. But in that case, he requisitioned rafts, and they made rafts, and sometimes if they would put a goat skin under the raft, it's kind of like pretending it's not really a wooden raft, it's a goat skin raft, you know, yeah, so Mongols felt more comfortable crossing the river on a goat skin. And so he had, he was instrumental in that. And then later, as when Möngke died, Khubilai was down and he negotiated a kind of a false victory at the battle where money was being exchanged back and forth. And so he had, and even late in life, he did go out in the campaign one time against his uncle in the north. So he did go out, but mostly he was not on the forefront. He was not like Genghis Khan, his grandfather.
Those details about coaxing the warriors onto the wooden ships, you know, by putting down the goat skins and so forth to make them feel more comfortable, I get the sense like it was as alien to the Mongol to be either parted from their horse or to cross the seas as it would be if we were to go to an uncontacted Amazon tribe and put them on an airplane and then fly them to another part of the world. It's almost inconceivable that one would do it.
It's a form of magic and trickery in some sense. They were very much dependent, you know, none of the technology was Mongolian, none of it. They were mostly dependent on Chinese and to some extent Korean technology and craftsmen. But there again, there was a great advantage, you know, artisans, they have a reasonable position in Asian society at that time, but not a high position. They were not really very well respected, they were just workers, they weren't seen as anything special. The Mongols, however, from the time of Genghis Khan, they valued every artisan. If you could weave a rug, if you could make a pot, if you could write a page, translate, if you could work metal, anything you could do, the Mongols greatly respected it, and they respected them more than scholars, you know, which in the Asian perspective overall is anathema, you know, you spend your whole life respecting the scholars, the mandarins, and Confucian study and poetry and calligraphy. Mongols had no use for that, but they greatly valued the craftsmen, those artisans, and so many of them defected to the Mongols, and many of the Southern Song's best craftsmen defected to the Mongols, and they knew they would get better treatment, they would be treated with more respect, and they would get higher rewards. So they were bringing in technology from other places, mostly to say from Southern China, but also from Korea.
Did Khubilai continue Genghis's tradition of religious tolerance for all the subjects?
Yes, he did continue the tradition of religious tolerance. Even Genghis Khan had also, he had religious tolerance which was absolute, but he also was able to use the conflict among, or the rivalry, I should say, among different religious groups to his own advantage. And then Khubilai actually developed that aspect even more. He used the rivalry, especially in China, and it wasn't so much a religious ideological rivalry as a kind of a power and materialist rivalry among the different religions for how many monasteries they had and how much gold they had for their statues and all. And he was able to play off Daoist, Confucianist, Buddhists, and then he threw in, of course, Christians, Muslims, and even Manichaeans and everything. So he was even better at playing off one against the other, but he did allow religious freedom, yes.
Jack, remind me the name of the Mongol queen when the Khaganate Empire was at its most expansive. Remind me of the Mongol queen who oversaw that, just her name.
Töregene, which E and D are the same in Mongolian, but usually we spell it T-O-R-E-G-N-E, Töregene. But she had been the wife of, she was chosen as the wife of Genghis Khan's son, Ogedei. Genghis Khan chose her, he was very, very clever about choosing good wives for his sons, especially who had sometimes certain failures of their own. So he had chosen her, she was extremely smart, and she was already running the empire before her husband died. But then once he died, she became the official empress regent of the empire, and she ruled in a peaceful time. She stopped the conquest, which this machine had been going on now. After her came then her son, who was totally incompetent, Güyük, and he had to restart everything, and he only was in office eighteen months, and he died mysteriously on the way to conquer Russia or reconquer Russia. It was already under the control of his cousins, or we don't know what he was doing. He was off to some bad task anyway, and he died. And then his wife took over, Oghul Qaimish, and unfortunately she was not like her mother-in-law. She was a sort of a greedy, narrow-minded woman who didn't have the expansive interest of Töregene and her mother-in-law, who had a real set of ideas about the world and about the Mongol Empire and about peace and especially supporting religions. She was very active in supporting every religion. So unfortunately with Oghul Qaimish, she did not last very long in office either, and that's how the princess Orkhon, the mother of Khubilai, was able to have a little revolution and get her eldest son Möngke in office as Great Khan and get rid of Ogedei's descendants. But Töregene was a great, great queen, a great empress of the largest empire in the world at the time.
It's funny, a perennial story when reading your books and then, you know, absorbing the stories of all these various Mongol leaders and characters is that those who have more brains than glory, Genghis, Khubilai, Töregene, you know, they do quite fine, but then those who just have glory seeping through their veins, the candle that burns bright, burns twice as bright, burns half as long, they live a big life, but it doesn't, you know, doesn't live throughout history the same way. And I suppose that's also perennial, irrespective of the Mongols, just through history, those with more brains than glory might end up... So Töregene was in charge when the Khaganate Empire was at its most expansive. Could you just put on a map for us what regions they had dominion over?
And in her lifetime, they had all of northern China, they had most of what we call Russia today, and also Ukraine. They had almost all of the Middle East at that time, with the Persian world and Central Asia, all the Stans: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Turkistan, Iran, the Caucasus, yes, Iran, Georgia, Armenia. They also had armies that were operating in the area of Poland and Hungary and the Balkans, but those were never incorporated, we would say, into the empire, say the way Russia was or Ukraine and Russia were incorporated. Those areas were not, but the armies were certainly there. So the armies, at the time her husband died, the armies were fighting on the German border in Poland, they were fighting in what's now Czech Republic, in Hungary. In fact, they had reached the suburbs of Vienna even. So that was extremely wide. And then they had reached the Indus River in what's now Pakistan, and some little groups had managed to cross the river, but the Mongols never had any success across the Indus River. There would be only raids that they could bring about, but they were not successful. So it was a huge... and Korea, of course, you had everything with Korea. And so it was a huge empire. I mean, you think about, no one else in the world has ever ruled China and Russia. It's never happened. And then you throw in Iran, Afghanistan, all these are places that the world gets bogged down today in wars and cannot conquer, but the Mongols had conquered it all.
Didn't Genghis take Afghanistan in less than a year? And he absolutely loved it. It was one of his favorite places in the world.
Yes, it was one of his favorite places that he had conquered because he liked the environment. He took it very quickly, but it was also the place of his greatest sadness and of some of the greatest destruction because his favorite grandson was killed there.
And that resulted in tremendous loss of life for everyone concerned with that. He lost, he had never lost anyone. His sons were all alive, all of his grandsons were alive, and for him to lose the one grandson whom he loved the most, that was a very difficult time for him in Afghanistan. But yes, he had loved it very much.
