The Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368)
History of the dynasty as a whole
The Mongols were an obscure peoples who lived in the outer reaches of the Gobi Desert in what is now Outer Mongolia. They were a pastoral and tribal people that did not really seem to be of any consequence to neighboring peoples. By the mid-thirteenth century however, the Mongols were a force to be reckoned with! They had overpowered Korea and the Muslim kingdoms of Central Asia and had twice penetrated Europe. In 1234, they defeated the Jin dynasty of northern China. They then focused on subjugating the Song dynasty, which governed the regions south of the Yangtze River. The Song's military vulnerability and political instability allowed the Mongols, who had adopted the Chinese dynastic title of "Yuan" (meaning "first") in 1271, to move on in. They captured Hangzhou in 1276, and thus defeated the last Song emperor in 1279. The Mongols now held what proved to be the largest contiguous land empire in world history. Under the leadership of Genghis Khan (also known as "Chinggis") and then of his descendants, the Mongols in the 13th century carved out an empire stretching from what is now Korea and western Russia in the north to Myanmar and Iraq in the south. The Mongol Empire linked Europe and East Asia, initiating the first direct contacts between China and the West. Chinese silks and ceramics arrived in Europe and stimulated European demand for these products, inspiring the search for a sea route to East Asia.
With the defeat of the Song dynasty though, Mongol leader and grandson of the great Genghis, Kublai Khan realized that he had to establish political and administrative institutions similar to those native to China in order to attract the support of his subjects. After all, why should the people obey him and not oust him like he just did the previous dynasty? So, Kublai assumed the Chinese title of emperor and reestablished a Secretariat to advise him on policy. He and the later Yuan rulers wished to portray themselves as supporting the Chinese ideology of Confucianism (among many other traditions soon to be discussed), so they restored many Confucian rituals and recruited prominent Confucian scholars to advise the emperor and to perform the important task of writing the histories of the immediately preceding dynasties. The most obvious evidence of Mongol integration into China was Kublai's shift of the capital from Karakorum in Mongolia to Khanbalik (what we now know as Beijing) in China for better governance. In 1266 Kublai ordered the construction of the new capital based on Chinese models.
Despite Kublai's efforts to stay relatively "Chinese," the Mongols did deviate from some Chinese patterns. Kublai abolished the traditional Chinese civil service examinations, which had been the age-old traditional basis for entry into the bureaucracy that administered China. Instead, he recruited an international group of advisors and administrators to assist him in ruling China. Also differing from traditional practices was the power that he allocated to censors: they spied on the bureaucracy and reported abuses in the government and the military! Perhaps this has its advantages though in that Kublai could thus have eyes and ears through out China in addition to a much more authoritarian style of control. I find it hard to see any faults with these changes in policy. Although they were radical, Kublai did have a rather successful period as a ruler.
Also unlike previous dynasties, the Yuan rulers fostered trade and bestowed merchants a higher social status. Anybody who studies China can tell you, social status was everything and the merchants never had it! They were the lowest of the low. Also moving up in terms of social scale were the artisans, physicians, scientists, and engineers. They were all granted higher status and greater rewards. In an even greater change of pace though was the status of the scholar-official class, the traditional Chinese elite. They were often excluded from positions of authority and thus were generally hostile toward Mongol rule. For instance, the court divided the population into classes: the Mongols at the top, and the Chinese scholar-official class at the bottom. The army was divided into a Mongol force, composed principally of cavalry, and a solely Chinese division of infantry. This sort of division contributed to general Chinese dissatisfaction with Yuan rule.
The Yuan court also initiated the project of extending the Grand Canal (this canal was built primarily for linking up sections of China, namely to make transport of goods easier and on top of that, possible.) connecting the Yangtze and Yellow rivers to Khanbalik. Such government support for merchants, together with the peace imposed on much of Asia by the Mongols, resulted in the greatest expansion of commerce in Eurasian history, so we can certainly say, they weren't all bad.
On the topic of commerce though, the economic policies were somewhat in accordance with previous traditions. The Yuan rulers did not try to convert China into the Mongol-style nomadic economy; instead, they fostered agriculture as they did the merchants. Early Yuan emperors sought to protect the peasants by devising a regular, fixed system of taxation.
In 1291 the Mongols enacted a new legal code that was based primarily on Chinese legal traditions. However, one must note that the Yuan regime was generally authoritarian.
The Yuan was the shortest lived of the major dynasties. From the time that Kublai occupied Beijing in 1264 to the fall of the dynasty in 1368, a mere hundred years had passed, relatively short in comparison to previous dynasties. Kublai was a highly successful emperor as was his son, but the later Yuan emperors could not stop the slide into powerlessness. For one thing, the Beijing Khans lost legitimacy among the Mongols still in Mongolia who thought they had become too Chinese (further corroborating the fact that the 'opposition' of the western khaganates began with the reign of Ayrubarwada in the 14th century, when the subsequent mongol emperors were already experiencing a 'reign of powerlessness', and was one of the, and not the principal cause of, the decline of the Yuan empire). The fourteenth century is accentuated by Mongolian rebellions against the Yuan. On the other hand, the Chinese never accepted the Yuan as a legitimate dynasty but regarded them rather as bandits or an occupying army. Now you see the problem. The failure to learn Chinese (translators were often required for Mongol/Chinese communication) and integrate themselves into Chinese culture greatly undermined the Mongol rulers. After all, the Chinese weren't even ruling China!
As with all Chinese dynasties, nature conspired in the downfall; the Yellow River changed course and flooded irrigation canals and so brought on massive famine in the 1340's (partially attributable to the lack of maintenance). The decline of the Yuan coincided with similar declines in all the other Khanates throughout Asia. Finally, a peasant, Chu Yuan-chang (a.k.a. "Zhu Yuanzhang"), led a rebel army against the Yuan. He had lost most of his family in the famine, and had spent part of his life as a monk and then as a bandit leader. He took Beijing in 1368 and the Yuan emperor fled to Shangtu. When he drove the Yuan from Shangtu back to Mongolia, he declared himself the founder of a new dynasty: the Ming (1369-1644).