mongol
The Mongol invasion of China was perhaps one of the greatest political, social, and economic upheavals in Chinese history. Fierce and obscure people who lived in the outer reaches of the Gobi Desert, present day Outer Mongolia, accomplished it. The outcome of this invasion was the destruction of the Sung Dynasty, and the creation of the Yuan Dynasty, one of the shortest lived of the major Dynasties in Chinese history. The Mongols were an alien people who completely subjugated the Chinese people and in doing so, they opened China to Europe in ways the Chinese had never done nor wanted. Their rule was harsh and brutal and would eventually lead to their demise. Although the Mongols brought several changes during their reign very little seems to have rubbed off on the Chinese culture. The cultural interaction was not really a cultural exchange, for the situation was perhaps too unstable in the Mongol regime. To really understand the Mongol invasion and its effects on Chinese cultu!re you must go to the beginning of this great Empire. Temujin, latter called Genghis Khan, was the son of a local Chieftain who had a small clan. His father was poisoned when he was still young and, the clan, for lack of an effective leader, abandoned Temu
of Beijing, and by 1241 the Mongols had conquered all of northern China. After the death of Genghis Khan in 1227, the next Great Khan to rule was Genghis' son, Ogodei (1229-1241). It was during his reign that China began to be fully exploited both economically and politically. The Mongols, in order to form durable political units, and to continue their expansion, began to associate with the peoples they had conquered. Since the Mongols were a small minority in a sea of many different people of differing backgrounds, they began to copy Chinese institutions. However the Mongols turned to foreigners, namely, Jurchin and Khitan, subjects of the Chin Empire, to help them copy Chinese institutions rather than turning to the Chinese people themselves, whom they distrusted. The chief designer of the Mongol conversion to the Chinese administrative method was Yeh-lu Chu-ts'ai. On the accession of Ogodei in 1229, Yeh-lu Chu-ts'ai demonstrated to the new sovereign the usefulness of a reg! around the year 1368 due in part to the uprising of Chinese peasants. The Mongols had through brutal means subjugated the Chinese people to the point that only rebellion could bring an end to so oppressive a yoke. The causes which lead to the collapse of the Yuan Empire were many and, as so often happens, mutually related to each other: disorder in the administration, where innumerable contradictory regulations were in force, the rapacity of the Mongol and Moslem officials, an extremely rapid inflation of the paper money, the corruption of the Tibetan 'lamaist' monks who controlled all the Chinese clergy and interfered in political affairs, the oppression suffered every day by the Chinese population and the growing poverty of the peasantry. In the end the orphaned child of itinerant peasant parents, Chu Yuan-chang, would lead a rebel army against the Yuan tyrants, successfully driving the Mongols first out of North China and then in 1368 total expulsion was complete. The rebe! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ty service; those talented enough turned to writing, poetry, calligraphy, and especially to painting, sometimes intimating in their subject matter ideas of protest against the alien rule. Chinese theater also made dramatic changes during the Mongol occupation. Plays that had previously been written for the expression of religious devotion to Buddhism began to appeal to the sympathy of a larger audience and aroused an ardent feeling of identification with the story being acted out. The subject matter of the Yuan plays is often taken from humbler literature of the previous periods, such as the short stories of the T'ang era, or from history; complicated crime and love-stories were, of course, very popular. This type of drama was usually well plotted and in melodramatic four or five act plays. Increasingly the plays would be written in a mixture of the classical and vernacular forms of Chinese. Cul
Some common words found in the essay are:
Genghis Khan, China Examination, Yuan Dynasty, Marco Polo, Europe Chinese, Mongol Moslem, Kublai Khan, North China, Yeh-lu Chu-ts'ai, Chinese Cultural, kublai khan, chinese people, yuan dynasty, genghis khan, marco polo, cultural exchange, mongol occupation, rest world, north china, chinese institutions, copy chinese institutions, subjugated chinese people, china rest world,
Approximate Word count = 1982
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)
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