Emperor of the seas Kublai Khan and the making of China

Weatherford, the anthropologist who rehabilitated Western impressions of Genghis Khan, turns to the Mongolian warrior-statesman's grandson, Kublai, who conquered all China not on horseback but by dominating the seas. Despite Kublai's auspicious ancestry, this is an underdog story. Urbanized, scholarly, and overweight, an incompetent general and an inconsistent administrator, Kublai eschewed the traditional Mongolian horseman ethos and gravitated toward Chinese culture. But when his older brother Möngke died, it fell to Kublai to shore up the fraying Mongol empire. Inheriting the Jin empire's "poorly constructed, poorly organized and poorly managed river navy," Kublai observed the success of the Song dynasty's battleships and the tactics of Korean pirates. Contact with Arab states to the west, accelerated by an increasingly cosmopolitan political orientation, dramatically improved navigation methods. To finance his naval dominance, Kublai reformed the empire's tributary economy into a commercial one and introduced paper money. Weatherford paints Kublai as a disruptor and innovator, an iconoclast who achieved greatness by learning from his failures. For those who know Kublai only through Coleridge's opium-laced verse, this is an eye-opening history.

A biography of Mongol ruler Kublai Khan, focused on his role in creating a unified China and a maritime empire. Genghis Khan, Kublai's grandfather, gained control of large parts of China, along with much of the rest of Asia and Eastern Europe. But southern China, ruled by the Song dynasty, was protected by broad rivers that the Mongols found challenging to bring their warriors across. Kublai and his generals overcame the traditional Mongol distrust of boats and developed strategies that allowed them to cross the rivers and defeat the Song. With all of China in his grasp, Kublai began to look farther; Japan, Korea, and Vietnam seemed ripe for conquest. At the same time, Mongol outposts in Persia and the Middle East would be easier to reach by sea than by the often dangerous overland routes of the time. Pu Shougeng, who had overseen coastal defense and shipping for the Song, was enlisted to build a navy and a merchant fleet for the Mongol dynasty. Mongol invasions of Japan and Vietnam failed, but the merchant fleets more than repaid Kublai's investment, making China the preeminent economic power of its day. Shortly before his death, Kublai managed to launch an impressive fleet to carry a Mongol princess to Persia to marry its Mongol ruler. Marco Polo, whose writings provided most of what Europeans knew of Kublai and his realm for generations to come, traveled with that fleet on his return to Europe. Weatherford puts Kublai's accomplishments in full context, following up with a summary of China's maritime history right up to the present day. Readers will find this a valuable treatment of a part of history previously familiar primarily to specialists. A detailed look at one of history's most powerful rulers, and his impact on a huge swath of the world. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.