In 1215, Genghis Khan conquered the city we now know as Beijing. It was the capital of the Jin Dynasty of Northern China, and at that time, Southern China was ruled by the Song Dynasty, or usually called the Southern Song. He had already conquered the Xixia Kingdom of the Tangut people, and so most of Northern China was under the control of the Mongols from about 1215. And then he conquered middle — later, his descendants conquered middle — and then Kublai Khan was the one to take on the South.
But Kublai Khan was born that year in 1215, about three months after the capture of Beijing. And he was nobody. He was the second son of the fourth son of Genghis Khan. Well, he's got lots of cousins out there who've been riding around, they're conquering Russia, and they've already burned down Kiev, and they've conquered different places in the world — they're real Mongols. That's their whole life.
And he's born, and he doesn't meet Genghis Khan until he's about seven years old, 'cause Genghis Khan was away on a conquest in Central Asia. And Genghis Khan came back, and he met him, and he said, "Oh, he doesn't look like a Mongol, he looks like his mother's people." His mother was Sorghaghtani, who was actually a part of the royal family of the Merkit people, whom he had conquered sometime earlier. And so he looks like his mother's people, who's a little bit more tawny. Mongols tend to be very white, with very bright red cheeks, and have a certain very round face, and so on. And so he looked different.
And for whatever reason, his mother, I think, she recognized the difference and treated him differently. Her oldest son was called Mongke, later Mongke Khan, Mongke, and she wanted him to become — even though her husband was drunk, who died out on campaign drunk — and she took over Northern China, and she began to put it together, and she wanted her son to become the Great Khan, the Emperor of the Mongol Empire. And this wasn't in line, this wasn't gonna happen, 'cause he's the fourth son out of three. Others are way in line, way ahead of her. But she calls the revolution, she made it happen. She put her son in Mongke in 1251, he became Great Khan.
He only lived till 1259. He died of something, it could have been cholera, or there are different stories, and I don't know the truth of it. But he died on campaign in China, trying to conquer Southern China. Well, up to this point, Kublai Khan had not been distinguishing himself. His mother was — she was a Christian woman, but she had a Buddhist nurse for him, and she had Chinese scholars come in to tutor him, she had a very good education for him, and I think that she planned that he was gonna be a great administrator under his older brother, and he was gonna administer the lands in China, and so he was learning all this stuff for it.
But the older brother, he insisted on sending him out on campaign. Oh, but he was overweight, he was fat, he had gout, he needed to go rest, there was always some excuse. And the brother was assigning people — Uriyangkhadai, who was the son of Subutai, the great general. He assigned him to teach him warfare. He wasn't great on the battlefield. He really was not. But he was very smart, and at first, a little bit lazy, liked talking about the religion, sitting around, go hunting, as long as he had men with him to do the shooting, and then to prepare the food, and all.
And his territory in Northern China was just being run into the dirt by these administrators the Mongols had brought in. They were just overtaxing the people, cheating the people, doing everything wrong. And his mother basically just pulled his chain, and she said, "Go to your land. This is your land. You have to administer this land. You go there, you live there, you take charge." And everybody was terrified of the mother, and so he ran off to China, and he started administering his land, and he started learning how to do it.
Well, when his brother died in 1259, he was down on the Yangtze River on a campaign that he was sent by his brother, he was having no success at all, but he thought, "Okay, the brother's dead, I should finish the campaign." Meanwhile, his youngest brother, Ariq Boke — Ariq Boke was another hothead Mongol, like their father, Tolui. He was rather hotheaded, and he was back in Mongolia, and his tolerance for religions — he was headed to oversee the debate one time between the Daoist and the Buddhist, because the Mongols thought the Daoists were overtaxing everybody, the Buddhists, and so he had to oversee it, he got mad and he picked up a statue of the Buddha and beat the Daoist representative to death. So he just wasn't good for moderating debates, you know.
So he was going to be the new Great Khan. So he was declared the Great Khan in Mongolia, but this was a turning point for Kublai Khan, who had never achieved much of anything other than talking to people. So his wife, Chabi, sent him some coded messages, basically telling him, "Forget about Southern China, it's gonna always be there. You can conquer that some other time. Right now, your brother is taking over the empire. You should be the new Emperor. You are the next son after Mongke Khan."
And somehow she invigorated him, and he came back, and even though he didn't have all the military strategy, he had Northern China, the resources were immense, he could cut off Mongolia. Mongolia was very dependent on Northern China for food. All the Mongols supported Ariq Boke, all the ones in Central Asia, all of whom were supporting Ariq Boke. And so he went to get food from them, and then they didn't wanna give up their food. "Yeah, we wanna support you for Great Khan, but we're not giving up our food." So he was basically kind of starved into submission in 1262, and then he was taken prisoner into China, and then he mysteriously passed away in 1264 while a legal case was being brought against him for trial, but he never made it to trial. He was gone.
So Kublai Khan had not really distinguished himself very much, but he didn't have the genius of his grandfather. I won't say that. But he was smart and clever, he understood more about China than most Mongols did, and he understood more about Mongols than most Chinese did. So the great thing left — Genghis Khan said on his deathbed, "Finish conquering China." You know, that was the great objective. So Kublai was going to fulfill this, and they didn't know how. The Great Wall of Ships was protecting the Southern Song. This huge Yangtze River was so wide, the ocean on the side, all of these things were protecting them.
So he had one of his very smart generals, named Aju, who was a real Mongol, but he was also able to think in an innovative way. He was the grandson of Subutai, and he went with his father, Uriyangkhadai, on the conquest of the Red River of Northern Vietnam against the Dai Viet people. They went down the river, they were trying to surround this Chinese territory, they were gonna hit 'em from the North, from the West, and from the South. So they went down the Red River, and to conquer the Dai Viet, the Dai Viet moved their army up on the other side by boat, and then they had a whole corps of elephants, so the Mongols were on one side of the river, and the Dai Viet forces on the other side.
Uriyangkhadai was a smart man, not a genius, but smart, and he already knew from campaigns in Burma that the only way to rout the elephants was with flaming arrows to the feet. That was it. But he recognized that they came up on boats, Mongols didn't like boats, it just — they crossed the river on a goat skin. They wanted to do something organic. A boat was like a cart. A cart belonged to a woman, it was a floating cart. "I am not going over on a floating cart, I'm gonna ride a goat skin across the river." So he assigned one detachment, "You have to burn the boats, so the Dai Viet cannot escape when we rout the elephants."
Well, the war, battle, I mean, got started, the elephants are running wild, all kinds of chaos is going on, the group that was sent to burn the boats — they're Mongols. They wanna go to war, I mean, why burn a bunch of women's carts? It's just not, you know, floating. So they go and join the battle, they leave the boats. Well, the Mongols won the battle, but the Dai Viet forces got on the boats and sailed back to what's now Hanoi. And then they evacuated the city, took all the food, everything out of the city, and they disappeared into the delta. The Mongols arrived, they "conquered," quote unquote, Hanoi, the capital city, and they had nothing. They had nothing. They won every battle, they lost the war. They retreated.
Aju was the son of Uriyangkhadai, and he saw all this happen, and he recognized the importance of water and boats, and so he knew, and he spent his time studying the Yangtze River, and every little river around it, and the cities. Now the crucial thing he saw was the cities are heavily, heavily fortified on the land side, 'cause invasion comes from the land, and they expect this little line of boats to protect them on the water, and so their city walls are weak, the defenses are weak on that side. That's where we have to attack. So how? They sent off to the Ilkhanate to Persia, where Genghis Khan's uncle was now dead, and his cousins were ruling there — or his nephews, we would say, the cousins, nephews. So they sent over engineers to build a special kind of trebuchet or catapult.
And they had to play around with it to adapt it for a boat, 'cause they were usually made for stable ground, but they adapted it for the boat, and for throwing heavy things, and also for some incendiary bombs that they developed. They attacked the first city, it fell. They attacked, and then it fell. They had something that was working. They worked their way down the Yangtze River, destroying city after city with this navy. And then the army would move in after the navy had broken through.
