Dogs. |
By Olumide T. Agunbiade
China has a love-hate relationship with
what is foreign. Traditionally all people beyond the Great Wall were barbarians
- only part human. But invaders have sometimes been welcomed, in time, into the
Chinese family. One was Kublai Khan who famously owns 5,000
mastiff dogs.
Kublai Khan |
In the 13th Century, no-one knew how big the
world was so it was not so wild for the Mongols to set off from the grassland
with the idea that they were going to conquer all of it.
When the mighty Genghis Khan died in 1227, he
had already claimed an empire stretching from the Pacific to Europe. His
grandson Kublai set out to finish the job, and started by moving south to
attack China's Song dynasty.
But China had been a united empire on and off
for more than 1,000 years. So what did the Song dynasty rulers make of Kublai's
ambition?
"For the Song, it would been absolutely
inconceivable that the Mongols could take over the whole of China," says
John Man, author of a biography of Kublai Khan.
"It would have been like, I don't know,
the Picts taking over the Roman Empire or the Sioux in North America taking
over the whole of Canada and the United States - inconceivable. So when it
actually happened, the shock was catastrophic."
The child emperor committed suicide. So did
many loyal officials and their families.
Over centuries, the Chinese had got used to
regarding themselves as THE world civilisation, and now this civilisation was
at the mercy of people they viewed as barbarians.
"Barbarians are these people who are not
Chinese - savages, hovering between human and some kind of beast," says
Xun Zhou, a historian at Hong Kong University.
She points out that unease
about the barbarian or foreign devil is embedded in Chinese writing. Part of
the character used to refer to them is the one used for animals.
"These
people looked different. And that difference proposed a problem," says Xun
Zhou. "For China, they don't really know how they should react to these
people."
Mongol
pleasures included wrestling, fermented mare's milk and throat singing, where
the singer sings chords instead of single notes.
All
very different from the southern Chinese elites who wore exquisite silks,
admired each other's poetry and went to art exhibitions. They paid armies to do
the fighting.
Kublai
was hugely outnumbered. The Song dynasty was a "a monumental culture"
of 70 million people, says Man, and 10 to 100 times stronger in military terms.
The Mongols had to be
clever. One major battle took place at Xiangyang, a city with impenetrable
walls dominating the Han River, a tributary of the Yangtze.
"This turned into
a sort of a mini Troy," says Man.
"The siege went
on for five years. The Chinese could not break out, the Mongols could not break
in. There were countless attempts to sneak in, to break in, to break out - all
foiled. So there had to be some sort of a new initiative, and the initiative
was suggested by the empire itself."
The Mongol empire,
that is.
Kublai's relatives
ruled all the way to Eastern Europe and he had heard of great catapults the
Christians had used during the Crusades. He summoned two Persian engineers, who
built the equivalent of heavy artillery - a catapult that could sling 100kg
(220lb) of rock over 200m-300m (650ft - 1,000ft).
Kublai, in fact, ruled over all
of present-day China. Yunnan in the south-west bordering Vietnam and Burma,
Xinjiang stretching into central Asia, and of course Tibet. It is paradoxical
that the country owes its enormous size to invaders with expansionist
ambitions.
Kublai's capital was Beijing. The city today
goes on putting up scaffolding and high-rises. But it was Kublai who gave it
its first big makeover.
He gave his dynasty a Chinese name, Yuan, and
he ruled through a Chinese civil service. Chinese history has returned the
compliment by absorbing the Mongol dynasty into its own imperial story - and
absorbing part of Mongolia itself into the Chinese state.
Today the Mongolians form one of China's 56
ethnic groups, along with Tibetans, Uighurs and the dominant Han.
Having a porous sense of what is Chinese is
itself part of the Chinese tradition.
The same applies to innovations the barbarians
brought with them and which China found useful. Chinese medicine absorbed
Islamic medicine, points out Xun, "but they never talk about it".
Galloping as they did from one end of Eurasia
to the other, the Mongols had picked up plenty of useful novelties.
"They introduced buttons," says
Verity Wilson, an expert on Chinese clothes and textiles.
"Prior to this time, men and women had
always closed their robes with some sort of belt. But, the Yuan dynasty is
credited with bringing to China the toggle-and-loop button, which now today we
just call Chinese. It's a real marker of Chinese dress that they're closed with
these toggle-and-loop buttons. But they didn't really come in until the Yuan
dynasty."
This process of assimilation
has continued ever since. Chillies are a later example, arriving from the New
World in the Ming dynasty of the 15th and 16th centuries.
"But
now they've been absolutely incorporated into the Chinese way of life, and we
can't really think about Chinese cooking without chillies," says Wilson.
"And
the other thing we think about is teapots. Teapots have very much become an
item associated with China. But pre-Ming dynasty, there were no teapots in
China. So I think all those things which we take to be quintessentially Chinese
have actually been absorbed by the Chinese from other cultures."
The
arrival of the bicycle some 500 years later was initially greeted with scorn.
To
begin with, it was only so-called "foreign devils" who rode them. No
self-respecting Chinese gentleman - and even less a woman - would be seen
sweating under their own locomotion. But soon it would become the Chinese
worker's vehicle of choice.
Just 50 years ago, if a Chinese
had declared a preference for American food, it might have cost them their
liberty, if not their life. China rid itself of Japanese occupation at the end
of World War II and the communists had thrown out Westerners after 1949. Soon,
even the Soviets were sent packing.
It was
part of the party's narrative of a united China standing up to foreign
aggressors.
But by
the 1980s, foreigners were being welcomed back. Which is why, 20 years ago, I
attended the opening of the first McDonald's restaurant in Beijing. Now it
feels as if there is American fast food or coffee on every corner.
In some ways, today's
penetration of foreign products - American fast food, German cars and Japanese
electronics - mirrors that of a century ago when the colonial powers had forced
open Chinese ports to trade. The difference is that this time it is at China's
invitation.
Kublai's own dream of world
domination would never be realised. Twice he launched an armada against Japan,
the largest the world had ever seen or would ever see again until the Allied
invasion of Europe 700 years later. And twice his navy was scattered by what
the Japanese called their kamikaze, or "divine wind".
The
Mongol dream of world conquest sank with Kublai's ships.
"He
became old, he became fat, he became ill. His only son and heir died, his wife
died, and he himself died in 1294 and left this part of the empire to his
heirs, and none of them matched him in competence," says Man.
"So
80 years later, they were chased out in a revolution and went back to the
grassland from which they originally emerged."
The
revolution put a home-grown emperor on the throne, but only until the next
foreign dynasty which again brought China new territory and ideas.
The
very last emperor of all loved bicycles, by the way. He is said to have removed
doorstops in the Forbidden City so that he could cycle around, but that is
another story. The point I want to make is that there is complicated history
around what is Chinese… and what is not.
“Start Quote
Good to know there is a fellow lover of history in this neck of the wood. We could come together and discuss further on the feats achieved by the Mongols. We often lay emphasis on the Khans and forget the feats of the generals who served under them. The mighty general under Genghis Khan, Subutai, is one of my favourites. His conquest against the Russians, the Poles, the Hungarians is celebrated today as one of the greatest military command and control feats. Why don't we have records of our heroes in Nigeria?
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