Kublai Khan, Maker of Modern China by John Man
The Mongol King Who Remade China and Helped Shape Much of Asia
“In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a Pleasure Dome erect” sang Frankie Goes to Hollywood back in the 1980s. How little they actually knew when set against John Man’s very readable biography of Khan.
Creation of the Modern Chinese State – By a Mongol
Khan’s pleasure dome, a figment of the drug- driven imagination of British Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was probably the very least of his achievements as Man’s biography asserts. The biggest of these is also the most ironic Khan’s creation of what was and is the modern Chinese state.
Ironic because Khan was like his grandfather Genghis Khan, a Mongol but profound because of how he shaped not just China but Asia. This ranges from the design and layout of Beijing which he made his capital, through to his inclusion of Yunnan and the Southern China, Song, into that Kingdom and its failure to extend to either Japan or Vietnam.
Tibet From Empire to Vassal State
Man also provides a good précis of the history of Tibet from being its own Empire to becoming a Mongol vassal state and so sadly for it ending up a part of China. He rather labours the ironies (again) but if other parts of this book were as concise as this part it would be a much improved volume.
So whilst the length and the conversation style can be criticized this is a book and a story with relevance. Or it must be said interest and appeal.
Foreign Policy Establishment Should Read
As the American foreign policy establishment ponders Afghanistan in the light of Vietnam it might do well to consider why it thinks it can do what Kublai at this point Emperor of China signally failed to do. He took on the adjacent Vietnamese and lost badly.
The Mongols like Kublai were the world’s greatest power at the time, a point even Man seems incredulous about and constantly refers to yet they were defeated by small countries close to them. Let alone small powers several thousand kilometers distant.
Interesting Precedents for the War on Terror
More worryingly still, at least for American hawks, he shows the interesting precedents for the first War on Terror. This was in the thirteenth century but as Man says it seems” oddly familiar.”
The basic line is whilst the Mongols conquered and held Baghdad and Iraq as well as Persia now Iran for a century (now there’s a precedent worth thinking about) when they were eventually forced to quit many of them had become Muslim and their defeat was effectively both military and cultural. Again its precedent worth thinking about.
But this illustrates this books principal and recurring flaw. The occupation of large swathes of the Middle East predates Kublai’s time by up to a century although it explains his decision to make the Mongol Empire an Asian rather than a EurAsian entity. Readable though this book is it is quite simply too long and too full of ‘what if’ digressions.
Kublai Khan by John Man published by Bantam books. www,bookstransworld.co.uk
Kublai Khan - shaper of the modern world
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