By the early spring of 1368 the Red Turban armies of Zhu Yuanzhang had been besieging Khanbaliq, the great Mongol capital on the road from Shangdu to the southern territories, for the better part of a year. The Yuan emperor Toghon Temür, the last sovereign of the unified Mongol empire, watched from his walled palace as the lakes south of the city turned green and then black with the tents of the siege. The plague that broke out in his army had already taken his favourite son. The grain stores were lower than the Ministry of Revenue had reported. The Tibetan lamas who advised the imperial family were recommending concession, but no one among the Mongol commanders was willing to send the message back to the steppe. In the dark of the night of 14 March 1368 the emperor slipped out of the city with his family, his bodyguard, and most of the imperial seal cabinets, and rode north into the twilight of the Mongolian plateau. Eight days later, the Red Turban vanguard under Xu Da entered Khanbaliq and renamed it Beiping. Six months after that, the new Ming dynasty was proclaimed in Nanjing, and a new chapter of Chinese history began. Toghon Temür, by then renamed Uskhal Khan in the Mongol sources, retreated to the steppe and reigned for another two decades in the territories he still controlled. The Mongol empire was not over. What had happened was that the dynasty had been forced out of its capital.
It is the habit of European historians to call this flight the fall of the Yuan dynasty, but the Mongols themselves never did. To the Mongols, the foundation of the Ming was a regional civil war between two competing regimes for the right to tax the Han Chinese population, and the Mongol war-band that had previously held the territorial titles of the Yuan simply withdrew to the territory that it already held. The Mongol empire was older than the dynasty that ruled it from 1271 to 1368. The dynasty was an administrative framework imposed by Kublai Khan on top of an existing Mongol empire; the empire had been in existence since Genghis Khan’s proclamation on the Onon River in 1206. The withdrawal from Khanbaliq in 1368 was the loss of the Chinese portion of the empire, not the end of the empire.
What made the post-1368 period interesting was that the Mongol empire, having lost its most lucrative source of tax revenue and most of the cultural instruments of Chinese statecraft, did not collapse on the steppe. It continued, under a sequence of khans that historians now call the Northern Yuan, until 1635, when the last claimant to the imperial title, Ligdan Khan, died of smallpox in the foothills of the Khangai mountains. The Northern Yuan, in other words, lasted for two hundred and sixty-seven years. It was contemporary with the reigns of eleven emperors of the Ming and the reigns of the founders of the Later Jin, the Later Jin being the dynasty that the Manchu leader Nurhachi founded in 1616 and that would eventually become the Qing. During those two and a half centuries the Mongol empire was a fact of Asian geopolitics that no other Asian state could afford to ignore.
The reason the Northern Yuan survived lies in the nature of the original Mongol empire. Genghis Khan had built a structure that was deliberately light: a confederation of tribes, bound together by a system of decimal organisation and ruled by a single paramount chief, who took the title of Khan. The system was politically clever, because it allowed each tribal chief to retain local sovereignty over his own people in exchange for a fixed proportion of his fighting men to the central command. The Yuan dynasty that Kublai founded in 1271 was an attempt to bolt a Chinese-style imperial bureaucracy on top of this structure. The bureaucracy worked as long as the Khan had access to Chinese tax revenue and grain. Once Khanbaliq fell and the Chinese tax base was lost, the Chinese bureaucracy was useless. The Mongol confederation, by contrast, had always been funded by pastoral production and tribute from the tribes of the steppe. It did not depend on Chinese tax revenue to survive. The confederation would survive in essentially its original form for another three centuries.
What the Ming inherited was therefore not the whole of the Yuan empire but the southern rim of it. The Mongol court that retreated to the steppe in 1368 retained, in addition to the imperial seal and the imperial archives, the legal right to rule the northern portion of the empire. The Borjigin lineage that the Yuan dynasty had inherited from Genghis Khan was the legitimate ruling house of the Mongol empire in a way that the Ming founder’s Han Chinese lineage was not. The Ming dynasty that was proclaimed in Nanjing in 1368 was, in the eyes of the Mongol court, a rebel regime that had temporarily seized the Chinese administrative apparatus. The Mongol court’s eventual aim was not to recover the Chinese administrative apparatus but to resume its legitimate sovereignty over the Mongol territories that the Yuan had administered from the steppe. The Northern Yuan that emerged from the events of 1368 was thus a recovery of the original Mongol empire, not a retreat from the Chinese portion of it.
Toghus Temur and the Re-Establishment of the Steppe Court
Toghon Temür reached the Mongol heartland in the late spring of 1368 and set up a court at the Karakorum ruins, the old imperial capital that Genghis Khan’s grandson Ögedei had built in the 1220s. The Yuan archives, the imperial seal, the imperial genealogy, and most of the imperial treasure had been moved north before the fall of Khanbaliq; the court that Toghon Temür re-established was a reduced version of the old Yuan court but with most of its symbolic apparatus still intact. The court continued to issue Chinese-style reign titles: Toghon Temür used the era name Zhizheng until 1370, when he died at the age of fifty-five, and his successor Ayushiridar continued the same era name until 1378. The Chinese-style calendar was kept. The ceremonial clothing and the headwear inherited from the Kublai-era court were worn at official functions. The seal of the Yuan dynasty, which had been the symbol of the legitimate successor to Genghis Khan since 1271, was used to validate the documents of the Northern Yuan court in the steppe.
The army that came north with Toghon Temür was substantial. The official Mongol records preserved in the Altan Tobchi and the Erdeni-yin Tobci, compiled in the seventeenth century, suggest that as many as 600,000 Mongols may have withdrawn from China in 1368. The number is implausibly high; the Mongol records tended to inflate the population figures of the past. A more realistic estimate, based on the number of households that the Ming censuses of the early 1380s record for the Mongol territories south of the Gobi, is that between 200,000 and 300,000 Mongols withdrew with the Yuan court. This included the imperial household, the imperial guard, the bureaucratic staff of the Yuan central administration, and the military households that had been stationed along the Ming frontier. The military households were particularly important. The Yuan had maintained a system of garrison units, called the wei-suo system, that combined military service with agricultural cultivation, and these units retained much of their training and most of their equipment even when relocated to the steppe.
The Ming never forgot that the Mongols they had displaced were a substantial military force. The Yongle Emperor’s famous five northern campaigns, in 1410, 1414, 1422, 1423, and 1424, were explicitly aimed at preventing the Northern Yuan from reconsolidating its power on the steppe. The campaign of 1449 at Tumu, which we will discuss in the next section, was the most spectacular Ming effort at pre-empting a Mongol re-occupation. The campaigns were not always successful. They were, in fact, sometimes disastrous. But the fact that the Ming felt compelled to mount them, at enormous cost in men and treasure, is itself evidence that the Northern Yuan remained a serious political and military entity for the whole of the Ming period.
The army was accompanied by a substantial civilian following. The Yuan imperial household numbered several thousand officials, scribes, artisans, and attendants, most of whom were Mongols or Mongol-courtified Semu people who had served the dynasty in North China for generations. They brought with them the imperially produced objects that the Yuan court had hoarded: the imperial seals, the Buddhist relics that had been transferred from Tibet, the silk court robes of the Khubilai pattern, the saddle furniture, the chancery documents, and the library of the imperial academy. The army was also accompanied by a substantial number of Chinese soldiers and officers from the elite Shuntian and Taiyuan garrisons who had preferred to go into exile with the emperor rather than submit to the rebellion. These Chinese officers, although a small fraction of the total, brought with them the trained technical knowledge that the Mongol court needed: artillery expertise, siege engineering, and the calendar-keeping practices of the Yuan astronomical bureau. The Ming campaigns that took the Yongle Emperor personally into the steppe in the early 1400s reflected this uncomfortable reality. Each campaign cost the Ming far more than it gained. Each one left the border in roughly the same state. The Ming eventually abandoned the offence and built walls.
The Tumu Crisis and the Deepening of the Schism
The Tumu Crisis of 1449 is one of the great set-pieces of Asian military history. The Ming emperor Zhengtong, who had been on the throne since 1435, was 22 years old in 1449 and had been persuaded by a court eunuch, Wang Zhen, to lead an army in person against a Mongol incursion from the steppe. The Mongol incursion was led by Esen Tayisi, the de facto ruler of the Oirat Mongols, who was at that point the most powerful Mongol general on the steppe. The Ming invasion force numbered around 200,000 men according to the Ming records, and it was, at the time it crossed the Great Wall, the largest army that the Ming had ever fielded against the Mongols. The Mongol force was much smaller, perhaps 20,000 men according to most reconstructions, but it was fast, mobile, and well disciplined. Esen’s strategy was to refuse battle when the Ming army was intact and to attack only when it had begun to fracture.
The fracture came at Tumu, a small fortified post about 100 km north of present-day Huailai in Hebei. The Ming army had begun to break up under the logistical strain of the rapid advance. Wang Zhen, who was in command of logistics, ordered the army to camp in a narrow valley that was too small for the force. The Mongol cavalry noticed that the Ming formation had lost its cohesion and struck in force on the night of 1 September 1449. The Ming army was annihilated. The emperor himself was captured. He was taken back to the Mongol court and held there for a year. In Ming historiography the Tumu defeat is treated as one of the worst military disasters in the dynasty’s history, on a par with the collapse of the Song in 1127 and the destruction of the southern Ming in 1645. The emperor was eventually released. He returned to China in 1450, only to find that his brother had already been proclaimed emperor by the Ming court. He was forced to abdicate in favour of his brother and spent the rest of his life as the retired Tianshun Emperor, watching the campaigns he had launched against the Mongols being conducted by others.
For the Northern Yuan, Tumu was a moment of vindication. The Mongols had captured a Ming emperor, and the Ming was forced to negotiate a release. The treaty that Esen negotiated in 1450 included an exchange of gifts, a promise of annual tribute from the Ming to the Northern Yuan, and the release of some Chinese frontier forts. It was, in short, a treaty of nominal equality between the two empires, not a surrender or a peace dictated by the Ming. Even more important, the existence of a treaty that acknowledged the Northern Yuan as a state equal to the Ming was a proof, in the eyes of the Mongol court, that the empire was still in being.
The Tumu Crisis had a strange aftermath in Mongol historiography. Esen Tayisi was not himself the Khan of the Northern Yuan at the time. The khan was a figurehead, a nominal descendant of Toghon Temür named Toghtua Bukha. Esen was the Tayisi, a kind of commander-in-chief of the Oirat Mongols. After the Tumu victory Esen tried to claim the imperial title for himself, but the Mongol political tradition did not allow a non-direct descendant of Genghis Khan to hold the title of Khan. Esen was, in fact, a member of the Oirat branch, related to the Borjigin only through marriage, and his claim to the throne was rejected by most of the Mongol tribes. He was killed by his own officers in 1454. The episode illustrates the structural fragility of the Northern Yuan. The Mongol confederation, even when it had won the most spectacular military victory of the period, could not bring itself to break the rules of succession that had been in place since Genghis Khan’s original proclamation.
The Tumu Crisis also deepened the internal divisions within the Northern Yuan. The Oirat Mongols, who were the strongest military force on the western edge of the steppe, used Esen’s prestige to expand their territorial control at the expense of the eastern Borjigin-led tribes. The Borjigin, who were the legitimate heirs of the imperial title, gradually lost control of the eastern steppe to the Oirat. By 1450 the Northern Yuan was in fact a federation of three or four competing power centres: the Oirat confederation in the west, the Borjigin court in central Mongolia, the declining Yuan-loyalist aristocracies in the eastern Gobi, and a number of smaller Mongol chieftaincies along the frontiers of Manchuria and southern Siberia. The Ming, observing this fragmentation, gradually reduced the size of its northern campaigns and shifted from offence to defence along the Great Wall. The Great Wall as we know it today is largely a product of the post-Tumu defensive strategy that the Ming adopted in the 1450s and 1460s.
Esen Tayisi’s career after Tumu illustrates both the strengths and the limits of the post-Yuan Mongol political structure. The Tumu victory made him, by any military measure, the most powerful Mongol commander alive. His control over the Oirat tribal confederation was reinforced by the success, and the tribute that the Ming agreed to pay was a substantial financial resource that Esen’s court could redistribute to other Oirat aristocrats. Yet Esen could not convert his military power into imperial legitimacy. The succession customs of the Mongol confederation reserved the supreme title for a direct male-line descendant of Genghis Khan. Esen was not. His claim to the throne in 1454, made shortly after the death of the Borjigin Khan Toghtua Bukha, was rejected by a coalition of Oirat and Borjigin nobles. He was attacked by his own officers at a winter encampment near the Bogda Khan mountains. He was captured and killed. His skull was reportedly sent to the Ming court as a trophy, the manner of his death confirming the limits of how far Mongol political traditions could be stretched.
Dayan Khan and the Mongol Restoration
The Mongol restoration came in the late fifteenth century. The figure who is credited with it in the Mongol sources is Dayan Khan, who came to the throne as a young man in 1470 and reigned until 1543, by which time he had been Khan for seventy-three years. His long reign is one of the most remarkable in Asian political history. Dayan Khan inherited a confederation that had been broken by the Oirat expansion and the loss of the eastern provinces to other Mongol groups. By the time he died, the Borjigin line had been restored to all of Mongolia, the Oirats had been pushed west of the Altai mountains, and the Mongol confederation had been rebuilt along approximately the same boundaries it had had at the time of the Yuan collapse.
The instrument of Dayan Khan’s restoration was a series of campaigns against the Oirats and against the fragmented eastern tribes, conducted over the period 1470-1490. The campaigns are well documented in the Erdeni-yin Tobci, which was compiled at the Mongol court in the seventeenth century by Sagang Sechen. Dayan Khan was not an innovator. He was, rather, a military commander who restored the tactics of the old Mongol empire to a steppe that had grown unused to them. He made the Borjigin line of succession work as the political centre of the confederation. He insisted on the strict rotation of tribal levies that Genghis Khan had used as the fundamental operating principle of the empire. He made the eastern Mongolian tribes, who had been the most demoralised after the Yuan collapse, into reliable standing contingents. The eastern Mongol conquest of the Khalkha and the Buryat tribal territories that we now associate with northern Mongolia was completed under his reign.
Dayan Khan’s legacy is more important than his personal campaigns. He re-established a working Mongol state at a moment when no Asian observer would have predicted it. The Ming, who had assumed that the Mongol empire would continue to fragment, was caught by surprise. By the late 1490s the Mongol court had resumed the use of the Yuan-era reign titles, the imperial seal, and the imperial ceremonial. The Mongol court had been, since the early Ming period, a routine diplomatic correspondent of the Ming court; under Dayan Khan it became a serious diplomatic antagonist again. The Ming, having largely withdrawn from the offensive in the 1460s, found itself forced to undertake a substantial programme of frontier defence in the 1480s and 1490s, including the construction of new garrisons in the Ordos region and in central Inner Mongolia.
The Mongol confederation that Dayan Khan built was not identical to the original Mongol empire. It was smaller. It included fewer of the western Mongol tribes than Genghis Khan’s empire had. It was also more centralised, in the sense that the Borjigin court had more practical authority over the tribes than the Borjigin court had had in Genghis Khan’s day, when the steppe had been a federation of semi-independent chieftaincies. The court and the confederation were stable during Dayan Khan’s lifetime and for about fifty years after his death in 1543. The confederation would be seriously challenged only in the early seventeenth century, when the new Manchu power to the east and the Oirat power to the west combined to make the Mongol position increasingly precarious.
Dayan Khan’s restoration was, in the long view, more durable than the Tumu Crisis had been. By the late 1480s the new generation of Borjigin leaders had rebuilt enough of the old tribal structure that the Ming officials on the frontier began to write about the Mongol court in terms that the Yuan-era records would have recognised. A 1495 dispatch from the Ming frontier commander at Datong describes the Mongol court at Hohhot — a city that had not yet been founded, since it was Altan Khan’s later capital — but the political vocabulary used by the dispatch is the vocabulary of Yuan. The dispatch lists the titles of the Mongol ministers, the names of the imperial relays, the system of tribute circulation. The system that the Ming official is describing is, in important respects, the Yuan system. Dayan Khan had not invented anything new. He had rebuilt what already existed.
Altan Khan and the Buddhist Conversion
If Dayan Khan was the military restorer of the Northern Yuan, Altan Khan was the religious and cultural refounder. Altan Khan was the grandson of Dayan Khan, and he ruled as Khan of the Tümed Mongols from 1543 to 1582. He was an effective military commander in his own right, leading campaigns against the Oirats and the Ming in the 1540s and 1550s. He is most remembered today for his decision, taken around 1578, to convert the Mongol court and the Mongol tribes to Tibetan Buddhism of the Gelugpa order. The decision would, over the following century, transform Mongolian culture from a shamanic-pastoral culture to a Buddhist culture, with the consequences that this change would have for the political identity of the Mongol empire.
Altan Khan’s conversion was itself the consequence of a meeting in 1578 between the Khan and the third Dalai Lama, Sonam Gyatso, at a place called Koke Khot in present-day Qinghai. The meeting was a diplomatic event of considerable importance. Altan Khan, who had been seeking a religious authority that would give his court the kind of sacral legitimacy that the Ming court had in Confucian ritual, was impressed by the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of religious-kingship. Sonam Gyatso, who had been seeking a political patron in the Mongol territories to support his monastic reforms in Tibet, was impressed by the resources and the prestige that Altan Khan could bring to the alliance. The meeting gave both parties what they wanted. Altan Khan recognised Sonam Gyatso as the third Dalai Lama, and Sonam Gyatso recognised Altan Khan as a manifestation of the bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, the patron deity of Tibet. The Mongol-Tibetan alliance that came out of this meeting was a major shift in the political landscape of Inner Asia.
The religious conversion produced three long-term consequences for the Northern Yuan. The first was the construction of monasteries. The Mongol territories saw the building of hundreds of Gelugpa monasteries between 1580 and 1635, of which the most famous was Erdene Zuu, founded near the ruins of Karakorum in 1585, and which remained a centre of Mongol monasticism into the twentieth century. The monasteries became centres of literacy, art, and political patronage. They absorbed a substantial proportion of the Mongol elite’s wealth. They introduced literacy in Tibetan and the Tibetan-derived Mongol script of Soyombo, which would become the standard Mongolian alphabet over the following century.
The second consequence was the construction of an ideological framework for Mongol imperial claims that was independent of China. The Yuan dynasty’s claim to rule all of China had always been a claim that the Mongols did not need a Chinese origin for; the Mongol sources, from the Secret History of the Mongols forward, traced the Mongol imperial lineage back to the high gods of the Mongol pantheon, not to any Chinese imperial descent. The Buddhist conversion reinforced this older Mongol imperial theology with a new layer of religious legitimacy. The Northern Yuan court claimed to be the legitimate descendants of Genghis Khan not only by hereditary right but also by the grace of the Buddha. The Ming, who were Confucian and treated the Mongol court as barbarous, did not recognise any of these claims, but the Mongol court did not need the Ming’s recognition to be legitimate in its own eyes. The Buddhist framework helped to make the Mongol position intellectually self-sufficient.
The third consequence was a quieter but more consequential one: the rise of a literate class. The Gelugpa monasteries produced a population of monks who were literate in Tibetan and Classical Mongolian. The Mongol court began to compile its own historical records. The Altan Tobchi, the most important Mongol historical chronicle from this period, was compiled in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries using the religious framework of the new Buddhist Mongolia. The Erdeni-yin Tobci, the second of the great Mongol histories, was compiled in 1662 by Sagang Sechen using the same framework. These chronicles are the primary source for the modern historical understanding of the Northern Yuan period. Without the Buddhist conversion, the Mongol court would have lacked the religious infrastructure that produced these chronicles, and modern historians of Mongolia would have a much thinner documentary base.
The fourth consequence of the Buddhist conversion, and the most consequential in the long run, was the rise of the Dalai Lama lineage. Sonam Gyatso was, in his own right, the third Dalai Lama. The institution of the Dalai Lama, as the supreme clerical authority of the Gelugpa school of Tibetan Buddhism, was consolidated by the arrangement between Sonam Gyatso and Altan Khan in 1578. The Dalai Lama lineage was to survive the Northern Yuan by centuries. The institution had been the Mongol court in 1578 — specifically, the Borjigin court at Hohhot — that was recognised as the principal temporal patron of the Dalai Lama. The Mongol recognition was, in retrospect, the founding event of the modern institution of the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama’s political reach, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, depended on the continuing Mongol patronage that the recognition in 1578 had made possible.
Ligdan Khan and the End of the Northern Yuan
By the late sixteenth century the Northern Yuan was still structurally intact. The Mongol confederation controlled all of the territory that is now Mongolia, parts of Inner Mongolia, parts of Manchuria, and parts of southern Siberia. The court was at Hohhot, the city that Altan Khan had founded on the site of the old Ming fortress of Suiyuan. The monasteries and the Buddhist culture were flourishing. But two external pressures were accumulating against the confederation. The first was the rise of a new nomadic military power to the east: the Manchu. The second was the rise of a new confederated power to the west: the Oirat, who had been pushed out of the Mongol heartland by Dayan Khan and Altan Khan but who had rebuilt their confederation in the Junggar Basin and were now pushing east again.
The Manchu confederation grew up in the early seventeenth century along the southern edge of the Mongol territories. The Manchu, who were originally Jurchen tribes, had been dominated by the Northern Yuan court for most of the post-1368 period. In 1616, however, a Jurchen chief named Nurhaci proclaimed a new dynasty, the Later Jin, and began to unify the Jurchen tribes under a single military command. Nurhaci used the Borjigin lineage as a model for his own confederation. He copied the decimal organisation, the system of banner-units, and the imperial vocabulary. The Borjigin claim to Mongol legitimacy was the implicit model for Nurhaci’s claim to Jurchen legitimacy. The two empires were, in this respect, structurally competing versions of the same kind of polity. By 1625 the Later Jin was strong enough to attack the Mongol territories in southern Manchuria, and the Mongol vassals in that region began to defect to the Manchu.
The Khan of the Northern Yuan at the start of this crisis was Ligdan Khan. He came to the throne in 1604 as a young man of twenty. Ligdan was a formidable ruler in some respects. He was, by the standards of the Mongol court, well educated and intellectually serious. He was a patron of Buddhist art. He managed, in the early years of his reign, to continue the suppression of the Oirats that his predecessors had begun. He rebuilt the loyalty of the eastern Mongolian tribes, who had begun to drift away from the Borjigin court in the late Dayan-Khanid period. He was, however, an arrogant ruler who trusted his own judgement more than the councils of his advisers, and he was tragically slow to recognise that the Manchu danger was different from the Oirat danger he had spent his reign dealing with.
The conflict between Ligdan Khan and the Manchu accelerated in the late 1620s. Nurhaci died in 1626 and was succeeded by his son Hong Taiji, who was more aggressive and more aware of the strategic possibilities of the Mongol situation. Hong Taiji made a series of subtle moves: he opened negotiations with the eastern Mongol tribes; he made a personal correspondence with the Tumet and Khorchin chiefs who had been the closest allies of the Borjigin court; he offered them nominal equality within the Manchu confederation in exchange for accepting Manchu suzerainty. By 1630 most of the eastern Mongol tribes had defected to the Manchu. The Borjigin court, surrounded by hostile or indifferent tribes, was left with only the Tümed and a few central-Mongolian tribes as its direct followers.
Ligdan Khan, faced with the collapse of his support, took a desperate decision. In 1634 he led the remaining Borjigin forces west, intending to cross the Gobi and reach the Oirat territories, where he hoped to negotiate with the Oirat confederation for a joint campaign against the Manchu. He never reached the Oirat. His army ran short of food and water in the Gobi. The Tumet contingent mutinied against him under the leadership of his own grandson, who had been won over by the Manchu. Ligdan Khan died of smallpox in the foothills of the Khangai mountains on 29 April 1635. He was the last Khan to claim the legitimate Borjigin succession. The title of Khan did not disappear from Mongol politics; several of the Mongol tribes continued to use khanly titles into the eighteenth century. But the imperial title, the seal of the Yuan, the reign-era chronology, and the political authority that those instruments had carried since 1271 ended with Ligdan Khan. The Northern Yuan was over.
The death of Ligdan Khan in 1635 was the formal end of the imperial title that had been passed down through the Borjigin line from Genghis Khan. The political community that the Borjigin line had ruled did not disappear with that death. Mongol tribal and clan structures continued, both within the territory that the Qing was now administering and in the western territories that the Qing had not yet reached. The imperial lineage continued. Khalkha Mongol aristocrats recognised the legitimacy of a Borjigin descendant named Yeke Juyan as a claimant to the title of Khan in the 1630s. The later Khalkha khans of the eighteenth century, in their turn, derived much of their legitimacy from a Borjigin ancestry. The political tradition that the Northern Yuan had embodied did not require the dynasty to continue. It required only the Borjigin lineage, and the Borjigin lineage did continue, into the Qing period and beyond.
Why the Northern Yuan Endured
The Northern Yuan lasted for two hundred and sixty-seven years. Several explanations help us to understand why. The first is structural. The Mongol empire had always been a confederation, not a unitary state. The confederation could survive the loss of any single component as long as the political logic of the confederation survived. The 1368 loss of the Chinese tax base removed a critical source of income for the central khan, but the confederation survived because the political logic of the Borjigin line, the decimal organisation, the loyalty of the tribal chiefs, and the Mongol sense of imperial destiny did not depend on the Chinese portion of the empire. The Western historians’ claim that the Mongols lost the Yuan empire in 1368 was simply wrong. The Mongols lost the Chinese portion of the empire in 1368 and continued to hold the steppe.
The second reason is geographic. The Mongol steppe is enormous, stretching from Lake Baikal to the Khangai mountains, from the Altai to the Gobi. It is sparsely populated and largely inaccessible to infantry armies, which is what the Ming were. The Ming dynasty was built primarily on Chinese infantry, supplemented by cavalry drawn from the front-line garrison units. The Ming could project power into the steppe only at high cost and with substantial logistical strain. The Great Wall, which the Ming built and rebuilt over the whole of the dynasty’s lifetime, was a defensive structure that signalled the limits of Chinese power rather than the extent of Chinese power. The Northern Yuan, in contrast, was a mobile force that could move across the steppe faster than any Chinese army could follow it. The geographic asymmetry between the sedentary Chinese state and the mobile Mongol confederation was a structural feature of Inner Asian politics that no Mongolian dynasty could escape but that the Northern Yuan had learned to live with.
The third reason is cultural. The Northern Yuan court preserved the Yuan-era cultural apparatus of Chinese-style reign titles, the imperial seal, the Chinese-style ceremonial, and the bureaucratic instruments of the Yuan court, but it was also a tribal court that preserved the Mongol sense of imperial destiny, the ritual practices inherited from Genghis Khan, and the political forms of the original Mongol confederation. The dual character of the Northern Yuan, both Chinese and Mongol, made it difficult for external powers to attack. The Ming could not pin the Northern Yuan as a Chinese rebel regime, because the Northern Yuan retained a Borjigin imperial lineage that was explicitly non-Chinese. The Ming could also not pin the Northern Yuan as a purely Mongol tribal confederation, because the Northern Yuan had the institutional apparatus of a Chinese-style state. The dual character of the Northern Yuan, in other words, gave it a strategic depth that neither a pure tribal confederation nor a pure Chinese-style dynasty could have achieved.
The fourth reason is religious. The Buddhist conversion of the late sixteenth century gave the Northern Yuan an ideological framework for imperial claims that was not derived from Chinese political models. The Mongol court’s claim to rule all of the Mongols could be, and was, expressed in Buddhist terms. The Mongol clergy, who were aligned with the Borjigin court and dependent on the Borjigin court for patronage, gave the court an additional layer of sacral legitimacy that survived the religious changes of the period. The Mongol monasteries, which were built across the steppe between 1580 and 1630, became centres of power in their own right. The Mongol political community, in other words, was not a single tribe or a single state; it was a political community that included the tribes, the Borjigin imperial lineage, the Buddhist monasteries, and the Buddhist clergy. The Mongol political community had a thickness and a multiplicity of institutional bases that the Ming political community, which was primarily a bureaucratic state with a thin imperial cult, did not have.
The fifth reason is demographic. The Mongol steppe, between 1368 and 1635, was never less populated than it had been at the time of the original Mongol empire. The population of the Mongol territories in the 1620s, on the best estimates that we have, was about 2.5 million people. The population of the Yuan dynasty at its peak in 1330 was about the same. The Mongol population had recovered from the wars of the late Yuan period and was growing in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The demographic recovery gave the Mongol court a tax base, a recruitment base, and a marriage market for the aristocratic families that could sustain the kind of dynastic imperial politics that the Borjigin lineage had practised since 1206. The Ming, who were accustomed to the vastly larger Chinese population, often did not appreciate the significance of the Mongol demographic recovery. They assumed that the Mongol court, deprived of its Chinese tax base, would slowly decline. The demographic recovery ensured that the Mongol court did not decline.
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