Jack Weatherford: observation

Transcript context

…tutor him. She had a very good education for him. And I think that she planned that he was going to be a great administrator under his older brother, and he was going to administer the lands in China. And so he was learning all this stuff for it. But the older brother, he insisted on sending him out on campaign. Oh, but he was overweight, he was fat, he had gout. He needed to go rest. There was always some excuse. And the brother was assigning people, Uriyangkhadai, who was the son of Subutai, the great general, he assigned him to teach him warfare. He wasn’t great on the battlefield. He really was not. But he was very smart. And at first a little bit lazy, he liked talking about the religion, sitting around, go hunting, as long as he had many with him to do the shooting, and then to prepare the food and all. And his territory in Northern China was just being run into the dirt by these administrators the Mongols had brought in. They were just overtaxing the people, cheating the people, doing everything wrong. And his mother basically just pulled his chain and she said, “Go to your land. This is your land. You have to administer this land. You go there, you live there, you take charge.” And everybody was terrified of the mother. So he ran off to China and he started administering his land, and he started learning how to do it. Well, when his brother died in 1259, he was down on the Yangtze River, on a campaign that he was sent by his brother. He was having no success at all. But he thought, “Okay, the brother’s dead. I should finish the campaign.” Meanwhile, his youngest brother, Ariq Boke, Ariq Boke was another hothead Mongol like their father, Tolui. He was rather hotheaded. And he was back in Mongolia. And his tolerance for religions, he had to oversee the debate one time between the Daoists and the Buddhists, because the Mongols thought the Daoists were overtaxing everybody, the Buddhists. So he had to oversee it. He got mad, and he picked up a statue of the Buddha and beat the Daoist representative to death. So he just wasn’t good for moderating debates. So he was going to be the new Great Khan. So he was declared the Great Khan in Mongolia. But this was a turning life for Kublai Khan, who had never achieved much of anything other than talking to people. So his wife, Chabi sent him some coded messages, basically telling him, “Forget about Southern China. It’s going to always be there. You can conquer that some other time. Right now, your brother is taking over the empire. You should be the new Emperor. You are the next son after Mongke Khan.” And somehow she invigorated him, and he came back. And even though he didn’t have all the military strategy, he had Northern China, the resources were immense. You are the next son after Mongke Khan.” And somehow she invigorated him, and he came back. And even though he didn’t have all the military strategy, he had Northern China, the resources were immense. He could cut off Mongolia. Mongolia was very dependent on Northern China for food. All the Mongols supported Ariq Boke, all the ones in Central Asia, all of whom were supporting Ariq Boke. So he went to get food from them, and then they didn’t want to give up their food. “Yeah, we want to support you for Great Khan, but we’re not giving up our food.” So he was basically starved into submission in 1262. And then he was taken prisoner into China, and then he mysteriously passed away in 1264, while a legal case was being brought against him for trial, but he never made it to trial. He was gone. So Kublai Khan had not really distinguished himself very much, but he didn’t have the genius of his grandfather. I won’t say that. But he was smart and clever. He understood more about China than most Mongols did, and he understood more about Mongols than most Chinese did. So the great thing left, that Chinggis Khan said on his deathbed, “Finish conquering China.” That was the great objective. So Kublai was going to fulfill this, and they didn’t know how. The Great Wall of Ships was protecting the Southern Song. This huge Yangtze River was so wide, the ocean on the side, all of these things were protecting them. So he had one of his very smart generals named Aju, who was a real Mongol, but he was also able to think in innovative way. He was the grandson of Subutai, and he went with his father Uriyangkhadai on the conquest of the Red River of Northern Vietnam against the Dai Viet people. They went down the river. They were trying to surround this Chinese territory. So they were going to hit them from the north, from the west, and from the south. So they went down the Red River to conquer the Dai Viet. The Dai Viet moved the army up on the other side by boat. And then they had a whole core of elephants. So they have the Mongols on one side of the river, the Dai Viet forces on the other side. Uriyangkhadai was a smart man, not a genius, but smart. And he already knew from campaigns in Burma that the only way to route the elephants was with flaming arrows to their feet. That was it. But he recognized that they came up on boats. Mongols didn’t like boats. They crossed the river on a goatskin. They wanted to do something organic. A boat was like a cart. A cart belonged to a woman. It was a floating cart. I am not going over on a floating cart. I’m going to ride a goatskin across the river. So he’s assigned one detachment, “You have to burn the boats so the Dai Viet cannot escape when we route the elephants.” t going over on a floating cart. I’m going to ride a goatskin across the river. So he’s assigned one detachment, “You have to burn the boats so the Dai Viet cannot escape when we route the elephants.” Well, the battle, I mean, got started. The elephants are running wild. All kinds of chaos is going on. The group that’s sent to burn the boats, they’re Mongols. They want to go to war. Why burn a bunch of women’s carts? It’s just not floating … So they go and join the battle. They leave the boats. Well, the Mongols won the battle, but the Dai Viet forces got on the boats and sailed back to what’s now Hanoi. And then they evacuated the city, took all the food, everything out of the city, and they disappeared into the Delta. The Mongols arrived. They conquered, quote-unquote, Hanoi, the capital city. And they had nothing. They had nothing. They won every battle, they lost the war. They retreated. Aju was the son of Uriyangkhadai, and he saw all this happen, and he recognized the importance of water and boats. And so he knew, and he spent his time studying the Yangtze River and every little river around it, and the cities. And the crucial thing he saw was the cities are heavily, heavily fortified on the land side, because invasion comes from the land, and they expect this little line of boats to protect them on the water. And so their city walls are weak. The defenses are weak on that side. That’s where we have to attack. So how? They sent off to the Ilkhanate, to Persia, where Chinggis Khan, his uncle was now dead, and his cousins were ruling there, or his nephews, we would say, or cousins, nephews. So they sent over engineers to build special kind of trebuchet, a catapult. And they had to play around with it to adapt it for a boat, because they were usually made for stable ground, but they adapted it for the boat and for throwing heavy things. And also for some incendiary bombs, they developed it. They attacked the first city, it fell. They attacked the … it fell. They had something that was working. They worked their way down the Yangtze River, destroying city after city with this navy. And then the army would move in after the navy had broken down.…

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