Mongols Conquer all of China

In 1279, the last resistance of the Southern Song dynasty collapsed at sea, completing a Mongol conquest of China that had stretched across several decades. For the first time, all of China was ruled by a non-Han people. The Yuan dynasty, founded by Kublai Khan, governed it until 1368. The event matters because it joined China to the largest contiguous land empire in history and reshaped trade, government, and cultural exchange across Eurasia.

The Mongol assault on China began under Genghis Khan, whose armies attacked the Western Xia and the Jin dynasty in northern China in the early thirteenth century. The Jin fell in 1234 under his successor Ögedei. The Southern Song, centered on the wealthy Yangzi River valley and the capital at Hangzhou, remained independent. It was a prosperous, technologically advanced state, with a large population, a strong navy, and fortified cities. Campaigns against it under Möngke Khan in the 1250s made limited progress, and Möngke died during the fighting in 1259.

Kublai, Möngke's brother, won a succession struggle and was proclaimed Great Khan. He adopted the Chinese dynastic name Yuan in 1271 and moved his primary base to what became Dadu, near modern Beijing. His forces then pressed south. The long siege of the twin cities of Xiangyang and Fancheng, which ended in 1273, was a turning point, aided by Mongol use of engineers and siege weapons, including expertise from Muslim and Chinese specialists. Under the general Bayan, Yuan armies advanced down the Yangzi, and Hangzhou surrendered in 1276. Loyalists continued to resist with child emperors, but in 1279 the Song fleet was destroyed at the Battle of Yamen, and the last emperor died, according to tradition by being carried into the sea by a loyal minister.

Yuan rule combined Mongol, Chinese, and other traditions. The regime used Chinese-style bureaucracy but relied heavily on Central and West Asian officials, and it maintained a social hierarchy that privileged Mongols and their allies over northern and southern Chinese. Historians debate how harsh this was in practice. The Yuan extended the Grand Canal, promoted paper currency and commerce, and supported the overland and maritime trade routes later described by travelers such as Marco Polo, though the details of his account remain disputed.

Conquest and war brought heavy loss of life, though population estimates are uncertain. By the mid-fourteenth century, famine, flooding of the Yellow River, epidemics, court rivalries, and rebellions weakened the dynasty. The Red Turban uprisings led to the rise of Zhu Yuanzhang, who captured Dadu in 1368 and founded the Ming dynasty. The Mongol court withdrew to the steppe, but the Yuan era left a lasting mark on China's territorial scope and its connections to the wider world.