Ranks, Registers and Roads: How the Yuan Sorted Its People and Opened Eurasia

Act I: Ranks and Registers (Review Question 5)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, "Life in China Under the Mongols," pp. 202–205, especially the four grades and the occupational categories (p. 203) and the legal and military restrictions (p. 205). Reading-guide question: how did the four-grade ethnic classification and hereditary occupational categories serve Mongol interests while subjugating the Chinese?

The arithmetic of minority rule

Start with numbers (slide d). The Yuan count of 1290 recorded 13,196,206 households and 58,834,711 people, and Ebrey and every modern historian agree that many people were never registered.¹ The Mongols in China were a tiny fraction of that, perhaps a few hundred thousand households of soldiers, nobles and their dependents. They held the throne and the army, but they could not staff every office, read every register or speak every language. They governed through others: Uyghur and Tangut secretaries, Muslim financiers from Central and West Asia, and above all Chinese officials and clerks. Ebrey makes the political point directly. The Mongols "aimed instead at stability" and wanted to keep the Chinese from "using their numbers to gain a dominant position" (p. 203).

The Chinese were themselves two populations. The north had lived under the Jurchen Jin since the 1120s and under the Mongols since 1234; the south had been Song territory until 1276. They had different tax systems, different laws and different elites, and the Yuan kept them apart. The north was taxed by household, following Jin practice, and the south by acreage, following Song practice (p. 203).

Four labels

Ebrey calls the result "four grades" (p. 203; slide e). At the top were the Mongols. Next came the semu ren, "people of various kinds," a catch-all for Uyghurs, Tanguts, Kipchaks, Persians, Arabs and others from the west. Third were the Hanren, the people of the former Jin lands. The word did not mean simply "ethnic Chinese." It took in Khitans, Jurchens and some Koreans as well as Chinese. At the bottom were the Nanren, the southerners, former subjects of the Song and by far the largest group.

The clearest evidence that the order mattered is an order of 1265 recorded in Khubilai's annals: "Mongols shall serve as the darughachi of every circuit, Han as the governors, and Muslims as the associate governors. Let this be a permanent rule."² The darughachi, the overseer with the final seal, was the post the Mongols reserved for themselves.

The labels in law

The labels shaped particular rules rather than one master law (slide f). Ebrey lists the main ones (p. 205). Chinese could not take Mongol names, and intermarriage was discouraged. They were forbidden to own weapons or to gather in public, and Khubilai even banned dealing in bamboo because it could be made into bows and arrows. In criminal cases each group was sentenced under its own tradition, so only Chinese were tattooed for theft (p. 203). Chinese who fought back when a Mongol attacked them faced severe penalties.

The deck quotes the law treatise of the Yuan shi to show what these rules looked like. If a Mongol struck a Han, the Han was not to strike back, but could complain to the authorities. On the hardest case, Ebrey writes that a Mongol "merely had to pay a fine if found guilty of murdering a Chinese" (p. 205). The code is a little harsher than that. A Mongol who killed a Han in a quarrel or while drunk was sentenced to serve on campaign and had to pay the victim's family the full burial money. The general rule for everyone else was death for murder.³ Either way, the punishment was far lighter than a Chinese killer would have received, which is Ebrey's point.

How rigid was it?

Review Question 5 asks about "rigid social stratification," and students should be able to answer it as asked and then weigh it (slide g). The picture of a fixed four-class ladder comes largely from Meng Siming's study of 1938, which general histories still follow. Later scholars have qualified it. Funada Yoshiyuki points out that no single Yuan law created a "four classes" system, and that semu appears in Chinese-language sources as an administrative label, not as a category the Mongols or Persians used.⁴ The late Yuan writer Tao Zongyi listed eight kinds of Hanren and more than thirty kinds of semu, with repeats and overlaps, which suggests that even educated contemporaries did not share one precise definition.

Practice was looser than the law. Elizabeth Endicott-West shows that Mongol darughachi depended on Chinese clerks to do the work, and Mote calls many of the controls harsh but unevenly enforced.⁵ People rose anyway. The northerner Shi Tianze became a chief minister under Khubilai, and the southerner Zhao Mengfu, whom Lecture 3 follows, reached the presidency of the Hanlin Academy. A fair summary is that the labels were real and mattered most for office, quotas, punishment and weapons, but they were applied unevenly and did not freeze every life.

Hereditary households

The second half of the question is about occupation, which was a separate system (slide h). Ebrey describes it as a way to aim at stability by placing people in "hereditary occupational categories: farmer, Confucian scholar, physician, astrologer, soldier, artisan, salt producer, miner, Buddhist monk, and others" (p. 203). Military households (junhu) owed a soldier every generation. Artisan households (jianghu) worked in government and princely workshops, and many descended from craftsmen spared in the conquests and moved to new cities. Confucian households (ruhu) were scholar families excused from many labor services so that their sons could study; in the north many won that status in a test of 1238. Relay-station, salt, hunting, medical and clergy households had their own registers, and Yuan documents call the whole array zhuse huji, "households of all categories."

Many registered families owed unpaid service on a rotating schedule and earned their living the rest of the year, and Ebrey notes that the only way out for those whose obligations threatened to ruin them was to run away (p. 203). Keep the two systems apart. A family could be Nanren by origin and registered as a military, artisan or Confucian household by duty. The labels decided rank, and the registers decided work.

"Ninth Scholars, Tenth Beggars"

Students meet a famous saying online and in older books: under the Yuan, scholars ranked ninth of ten grades, below prostitutes and just above beggars (slide i). The earliest datable version is in a farewell preface of 1288 by the Song loyalist Xie Fangde. Read closely, it is a joke that Xie attributes to "a great wit" mocking Confucians, which Xie repeats to protest how far scholars had fallen. A second version appears in the Xinshi, a loyalist text said to have been found sealed in an iron box in a Suzhou well in 1638, which many scholars, starting in the Qing, have suspected was a forgery.⁶ No surviving Yuan code ranks people in ten grades, and registered Confucian households had real privileges. The grievance was real, but it was about lost careers and prestige. That story belongs to Lecture 3.

Semu financiers: Ahmad

Ahmad shows what semu meant in practice (slide j). A Muslim from Fanākat, near modern Tashkent, he ran Khubilai's finances from 1262 until 1282. His job was to pay for a new capital, a war against the Song and gifts to princes. He expanded the state monopolies on salt, iron and other goods, and he was good at raising money. That made him hated. Chinese officials and the heir apparent accused him of greed, of selling offices and of filling the government with his sons and allies. In April 1282, while Khubilai was at Shangdu, a Chinese officer named Wang Zhu lured him out at night and killed him with a bronze mace. Khubilai first had Wang Zhu executed. After investigators reported Ahmad's crimes, the official history says, the emperor declared, "Wang Zhu was right to kill him," and had Ahmad's body dug up and thrown to the dogs.⁷

Nearly everything we know about Ahmad comes from his enemies. The Yuan shi was written by early Ming Confucians, who placed him among the "treacherous ministers." Marco Polo's long account survives only in Ramusio's edition of 1559, and Rashid al-Din had his own Ilkhanid view. Nor were all the hated finance ministers semu. Ahmad's successor Lu Shirong was Chinese, and he was executed in 1285. The next strongman, Sangha, whom Ebrey calls Tibetan (p. 207), was executed in 1291. His origins are obscure, but recent studies, Rossabi notes, suggest he was Tibetan.⁸ Running Yuan finances was dangerous for anyone.

One script for the state

In 1269 Khubilai made official a new alphabet designed by the Tibetan lama Phags-pa from Tibetan letters, and he ordered that it be used for government documents (slide k).⁹ One set of letters could spell Mongolian, Chinese and other languages, so edicts, seals and passes looked alike across Yuan China. The seal on the slide sums up Yuan rule: a Chinese title, written in a Tibetan-based script, for a Mongol state. Officials kept using Chinese characters and the older Uyghur-style Mongolian script, and Phags-pa faded after the Yuan fell. Its ambition is the point. It was a script designed to rank no language above another, used by a state that ranked people.

Act II: Roads, Ports and Porcelain (Review Question 8)

Textbook anchor: Ebrey, the Material Culture feature "Blue-and-White Porcelain" (p. 205) and the economy under the Yuan (pp. 205–206), including the Grand Canal and the 1323 shipwreck. Reading-guide question: using blue-and-white porcelain as a case study, how did the Mongol Empire's Eurasian networks influence Chinese material culture and international trade?

The canal and the sea

Ebrey notes that the Mongols "had every incentive to develop the economy" because they wanted to extract wealth from China. They encouraged trade, kept paper money in circulation and repaired the Grand Canal (pp. 205–206). The deck shows what the repair involved (slide m). Dadu sat in the dry north, but the rice surplus grew in the Yangzi delta. The old Sui canal bent far west toward Luoyang. Yuan engineers straightened the route with new cuts through Shandong: the Jizhou canal in 1283 and the Huitong canal, opened in February 1289. Guo Shoujing's Tonghui canal, begun in 1292 and finished in 1293, carried barges into the city itself.¹⁰ The modern Grand Canal largely follows this Yuan line.

Because the summit sections were often short of water, the Yuan also tried something bold: shipping grain by the open sea. The first fleet, organized by the former smugglers and pirates Zhu Qing and Zhang Xuan, sailed in 1282 and reached the north the next year. In peak years the Yuan shi records more than three million shi arriving by sea, though the same treatise admits heavy losses to storms.¹¹ The routes that fed the capital also carried merchants, goods and ideas. They are the domestic half of the network that Review Question 8 asks about.

Quanzhou, or Zaytun

Quanzhou, called Zaytun by Arab and Persian merchants, linked Yuan China to the Indian Ocean (slide n). It had been a great port under the Song, and its trade office was run by Pu Shougeng, from a family of Muslim merchants, who handed the city to the Yuan in 1276 and was rewarded with high office. The Yuan relied on merchant communities that were already in place. Quanzhou's mosques, Hindu temple carvings, the Latin tombstone of the Franciscan bishop Andrew of Perugia (d. 1332) and hundreds of Arabic, Persian and Syriac gravestones show how many faiths lived there. Marco Polo claimed that for every shipload of pepper bound for Christendom, a hundred came to Zaytun. That is a storyteller's ratio, but Ibn Battuta's description, below, suggests the general picture holds.¹²

Ebrey adds a piece of hard evidence for the scale of trade: a ship from Ningbo to Japan, wrecked off Korea in 1323, carried about seventeen thousand ceramics, mostly celadon from near Ningbo, with the next largest group from Jingdezhen (p. 206). This is the Sinan wreck, excavated from 1976.

Two travelers

The deck frames the lecture with two journeys that ran in opposite directions (slides b, o, p). Rabban Sauma, a Christian monk of the Church of the East, was born near Dadu. In the 1270s he and his disciple Markos set out for Jerusalem. War between the Mongols and the Mamluks blocked the road, and in 1281 church leaders in Iraq elected Markos patriarch as Yahballaha III, partly because he knew Mongol language and customs. In 1287 the Ilkhan Arghun sent Sauma west to seek allies against the Mamluks. He met the Byzantine emperor, Philip IV of France and Edward I of England, and in 1288 he received communion from Pope Nicholas IV. No alliance came of it. His story survives in a Syriac account that says it drew on his own notes, and Arghun's letter of 1289 in the French archives, with its seals in Chinese characters, independently confirms the embassy.¹³

Ibn Battuta, a legal scholar from Tangier, came the other way. Sent by the sultan of Delhi on an embassy, he reached the Chinese coast around 1345 after a shipwreck and many detours. He called Zaytun's harbor the greatest in the world, with about a hundred large junks in port. He also gave one of the best outside descriptions of Yuan paper money: palm-sized notes stamped with the ruler's seal, so widely used that shops would not take gold or silver until it was changed into paper. His book was dictated in Morocco in 1355 with an editor's help, and his accounts of the north are vague. Some of the events he describes never happened, so scholars doubt how far north he went. Most accept that he saw the southern ports.¹⁴ Between them, the two travelers show that Mongol networks moved faiths, diplomacy and money as well as goods.

Cobalt and Jingdezhen

Blue-and-white porcelain brought a Chinese material together with a West Asian color (slide q). The material was Chinese. Jingdezhen, in Jiangxi, had hard white porcelain stone, high-firing kilns and centuries of skill, and under the Song it was famous for pale bluish-white wares (Ebrey, p. 205). The Yuan took an interest early and set up the Fuliang Porcelain Bureau there in 1278.¹⁵ The color was a West Asian specialty. Iranian potters had painted with cobalt for centuries, and scientific analyses support imported cobalt for much Yuan blue, with Iranian deposits among the proposed sources. The sources are still debated, and some local cobalt may have been used, so the deck says "much," not "all." Muslim merchant networks, the same ones that ran Quanzhou and lent money as ortogh partners, linked Mongol Iran, the Indian Ocean ports and Jiangxi.¹⁶

Ebrey writes that the Jingdezhen artists "invented a new style of decoration" (p. 205). That is right as long as "new style" is read carefully. Cobalt-blue decoration on Chinese ceramics is much older. Tang potters at the Gongxian kilns in Henan made blue-and-white wares, and three such dishes from about 830 were found in the Belitung shipwreck. The Yuan achievement was the mature underglaze style on true porcelain and its production on a large scale.¹⁷ By the 1320s to 1350s Jingdezhen was producing confident, crowded designs in quantity. Chinese elite taste took time to follow. A connoisseur's guide of 1388, the Gegu yaolun, still called the blue-painted wares "very vulgar."

Made for West Asian buyers

Ebrey notes that the designs "seem to have been stimulated by Arab clients" who wanted durable, refined wares with the dense patterns familiar from their textiles and carpets, and that Yuan pieces survive in the Topkapı collection in Istanbul (p. 205; slide r). The deck adds the size of the great dishes, up to about 45 centimeters across, which suited West Asian meals served from one shared platter. Some shapes and banded layouts echo West Asian metalwork, while the motifs (dragons, phoenixes, lotus) were long established in China. Students should call this selective borrowing and adaptation. Be careful with the two great collections at Ardabil and Istanbul. They were assembled later by Safavid shahs and Ottoman sultans, so they prove long-lasting demand. They do not show that a particular dish reached Iran in a particular year.

The David Vases, 1351

The pair of temple vases in the British Museum known as the David Vases carry a dedication by Zhang Wenjin of Yushan county, Jiangxi, dated the fourth month of the eleventh year of Zhizheng, that is, 1351 (slide s).¹⁸ Few Yuan pieces carry dates, so experts compare others with these two. They prove that mature blue-and-white existed under the Yuan, overturning the older assumption that the style began in the Ming. They also show that Chinese buyers used it at home. These vases were made for a temple altar in Jiangxi, not for export.

Astronomy, medicine and history

The same networks carried knowledge (slides t, u). In 1267 the Persian astronomer Jamal al-Din presented Khubilai with seven instruments and a calendar. In 1271 the court set up a Muslim astronomical office beside the Chinese one. Guo Shoujing and Wang Xun then built new bronze instruments, sent observers to stations across Yuan China and produced the Shoushi calendar, issued in 1280 and in force from 1281. Historians debate how much Guo borrowed from the Persians. The safe answer is that the two traditions worked side by side, and Guo's methods were mostly Chinese.¹⁹ In 1270 the court created an office for Muslim physicians to prepare Western medicines. Knowledge also went west. Bolad, a Mongol who had served Khubilai, went to Iran in 1285 and stayed. With Rashid al-Din, chief minister of the Ilkhans, he helped produce a history of China inside the Compendium of Chronicles, and Chinese works on the pulse were translated into Persian. Allsen calls Bolad one of the key cultural brokers of the age.²⁰

Corrections and Cautions

Quotations from the Yuan shi in the deck were translated for the course from the Chinese text (chapters 6, 105 and 205). Page references are to the scanned course PDF of Ebrey's Chapter 12.

Notes

1. Yuan shi, ch. 58, geography treatise; F. W. Mote, "Chinese Society under Mongol Rule, 1215–1368," CHC 6, pp. 616–664, at p. 617. Ebrey warns that Yuan population records are "not good enough to be certain" of totals (p. 209). ↩

2. Yuan shi, ch. 6, entry for 1265. The deck's slide e gives a translation made for the course. Note that the order names Muslims (Huihui), not the broader label semu. ↩

3. Yuan shi, ch. 105, law treatise (諸蒙古人因爭及乘醉毆死漢人者，斷罰出征，並全徵燒埋銀). The deck's instructor note on slide f records Ebrey's wording and this source. ↩

4. Meng Siming, Yuandai shehui jieji zhidu (Beiping: Yenching University, 1938); Funada Yoshiyuki, "The Image of the Semu People: Mongols, Chinese, Southerners, and Various Other Peoples under the Mongol Empire," in Reuven Amitai and Michal Biran, eds., Mongols, Turks, and Others (Leiden: Brill, 2005). ↩

5. Elizabeth Endicott-West, Mongolian Rule in China: Local Administration in the Yuan Dynasty (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); Mote, CHC 6, pp. 616–664. ↩

6. Xie Fangde, "Song Fang Bozai gui Sanshan xu," in Dieshan ji. On the Xinshi, see Jennifer W. Jay, A Change in Dynasties: Loyalism in Thirteenth-Century China (Bellingham: Western Washington University, 1991). ↩

7. Yuan shi, ch. 205, biography of Ahmad (王著殺之，誠是也). Rossabi, CHC 6, pp. 473–474, who notes that the charges come from hostile Chinese and Western sources; the classic study is Herbert Franke, "Ahmed: Ein Beitrag zur Wirtschaftsgeschichte Chinas unter Qubilai," Oriens 1 (1948). ↩

8. CHC 6, p. 478. ↩

9. CHC 6, pp. 465, 605. ↩

10. Yuan shi, chs. 64–65, river and canal treatises (the Jizhou cut of 1283 and the Tonghui canal of 1292–1293); Rossabi, CHC 6, pp. 476–478 (the Huitong canal open in February 1289). ↩

11. Yuan shi, ch. 93, treatise on food and money, sea transport; CHC 6, p. 476. Zhu and Zhang were themselves brought down in 1303 (CHC 6, p. 499). ↩

12. On Quanzhou, see Angela Schottenhammer, ed., The Emporium of the World: Maritime Quanzhou, 1000–1400 (Leiden: Brill, 2001), and Hugh R. Clark, Community, Trade, and Networks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Quanzhou was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2021 as "Quanzhou: Emporium of the World in Song-Yuan China." ↩

13. Morris Rossabi, Voyager from Xanadu: Rabban Sauma and the First Journey from China to the West (Tokyo: Kodansha, 1992); the Syriac history is translated by E. A. Wallis Budge, The Monks of Kûblâi Khân, Emperor of China (London, 1928). ↩

14. Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century, rev. ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), on the China chapters of the Rihla. ↩

15. Yuan shi, ch. 88, treatise on offices (浮梁磁局 … 至元十五年立). Ebrey refers to it as "an official agency to supervise ceramic production" (p. 205). ↩

16. Margaret Medley, Yuan Porcelain and Stoneware (London: Pitman, 1974); Robert Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). ↩

17. Regina Krahl, "Tang Blue-and-White," in Regina Krahl et al., eds., Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2010). The deck's instructor note on slide q records Ebrey's wording and this source. ↩

18. British Museum, Sir Percival David Collection, PDF B.613 and B.614, collection-online entries with the museum's translation of the inscription. The deck's slide s quotes a shortened version. ↩

19. Nathan Sivin, Granting the Seasons: The Chinese Astronomical Reform of 1280 (New York: Springer, 2009); Thomas T. Allsen, Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). ↩

20. Allsen, Culture and Conquest, on Bolad and Rashid al-Din. ↩

Suggested Reading for Deeper Preparation

F. W. Mote, "Chinese Society under Mongol Rule, 1215–1368," in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 6 (1994). The best single account of the labels, the registers and how they worked in practice.

Elizabeth Endicott-West, Mongolian Rule in China: Local Administration in the Yuan Dynasty (1989). The darughachi and their clerks, and why the system was looser than its rules.

Reuven Amitai and Michal Biran, eds., Mongols, Turks, and Others (2005). Includes Funada's essay on the semu; good on the categories as contemporaries used them.

Thomas T. Allsen, Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia (2001). Bolad, Rashid al-Din and the exchange of astronomy, medicine and history between China and Iran.

Robert Finlay, The Pilgrim Art: Cultures of Porcelain in World History (2010). Blue-and-white from Jingdezhen to Istanbul and Delft; readable and global.

Regina Krahl et al., eds., Shipwrecked: Tang Treasures and Monsoon Winds (2010). The Belitung cargo, including the Tang blue-and-white that came before the Yuan style.

Morris Rossabi, Voyager from Xanadu (1992). Rabban Sauma's journey, told for students.

Ross E. Dunn, The Adventures of Ibn Battuta, rev. ed. (2012). The standard guide to the Rihla, careful about what Ibn Battuta saw and what he borrowed.

Nathan Sivin, Granting the Seasons (2009). Guo Shoujing's calendar reform of 1280, with the question of Persian influence.