In the Wake of the Mongols: The Making of a New Social Order in North China, 1200–1600. By Jinping Wang

Abstract

In the early thirteenth century, Mongol warriors decimated northern China. Armed with compound bows, men on horseback stormed through the land laying waste to any city, town, or village that did not submit. They burned houses and dismantled walls; they trampled fields and broke irrigation systems. Anyone who tried to resist was killed. Contemporary surveys of the northern provinces show a sharp reduction in population and households: some 53.5 million people in 1207, compared to just over 16 million in 1235. As one scholar put it in the 1230s, “Less than one-tenth of [literati] survived. Among those still alive, countless became homeless, fell into slavery, and could not preserve themselves from cold and hunger” (62). Indeed, in their conquest, the Mongols destroyed local communities and hollowed out Chinese society. While the population recovered, societal normalcy did not return under Mongol rule. The new government, which was later announced as the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368), upended political and social order. The population was divided into four ethnic groups of descending political and social status, with the Chinese occupying the bottom rungs. The civil examination system, once a path to political office, local influence, and wealth, was replaced by a system of hereditary transmission and personal connections. Even when the exam system was reinstated in 1313, strict quotas meant that only fifty Chinese could pass every three years (compared to hundreds in the previous dynasties). Furthermore, Mongol rulers began to patronize Buddhism and Daoism, granting monks and priests tax and corvee labor exemptions; Confucians were not recognized as a religious group, and received no favorable tax status. These developments effectively suppressed the Chinese literati, limiting their career options, so that men who had spent their lives in literary study, and the families who had invested in them, were cut adrift.