Khubilai and the Yuan Salary Code

In 1260, Khubilai emerged triumphant from a civil war against his younger brother and was duly proclaimed khaghan of the Mongol Empire. Since his youth, Khubilai had been exposed to Chinese culture, and he later gathered around him a group of talented Chinese scholars who educated the Mongol prince in Confucianism and governance.Footnote ⁹ Thus, Khubilai's ascension in 1260 was markedly different from that of his predecessors. His ascension edict, drafted by one of his Confucian advisers, plainly laid out his desire to build a Chinese-style state, and he soon adopted a Chinese era name – Zhongtong 中統 (“moderate rule” or “pivotal succession”).Footnote ¹⁰ Almost immediately, the court began to oversee the implementation of a salary code as part of the creation of a centralized bureaucracy. The Yuanshi records the following:

Records regarding salaries in the early Khubilai years are sparse, as no comprehensive records of the salary amount before the 1285 adjustment survive, but they must have been very low, for even Khubilai himself at one point expressed his dissatisfaction. The biography of Jia Juzhen 賈居貞 (1218–1280) records a curious exchange between emperor and subject regarding the salaries during the Zhongtong period. When Khubilai asked Jia about his salary and Jia responded accordingly, Khubilai deemed it too low and ordered it raised, but Jia declined, stating that the pay he received corresponded to his rank and that the emperor should not make an exception for him.Footnote ¹² It was only in 1285 that Khubilai attempted a major reform to raise salaries. In an edict promulgated in the 2nd month of that year, he stated that due to mounting inflation, current salary levels would not be enough to maintain officials’ honesty and thus decreed that all officials would have their salaries increased by 50 percent. Furthermore, each of the nine ranks was subdivided into three different classes, based on their office and workload.Footnote ¹³ The result of this adjustment, shown in Table 1.1 for officials of the court and in Table 2 for provincial officials (see Appendix), became the foundation for the Yuan salary code.

The salary code under Khubilai initially comprised only two components. The first was paper money, which was called “salary notes” (feng chao 俸鈔), paid with Zhongtong notes, and this became the main element of the salaries. The amount of the salary notes was determined by the official's rank and class, though the Yuan differentiated between inner (court) and outer (regional) officials. Aside from the major officials of the regional Branch Secretariats (xing zhongshu sheng 行中書省), all other outer officials received fewer salary notes than their counterparts at court, even if they held the same rank.Footnote ¹⁴ For certain outer officials, the Yuan also granted them office lands (zhi tian 職田) to compensate for the fact that they received fewer salary notes. These were lands held by officials while they were in office and from which they collected a certain amount of rent to supplement their income. Regarding office land regulations established under Khubilai, the Yuanshi states that:

In addition to the offices listed above, office lands were also granted to the Salt Distribution Commissions, the Salt Offices, the Salt Works, the local Police Offices and the local Prison Offices, as shown in the Appendix below. Later, as inflation rose and the value of paper money declined, the Yuan court instituted salary rice (lu mi 祿米) as the third component of salaries.

The Han Vision of Salaries and Bureaucracy

Although the construction of a Chinese-style bureaucracy and salary code under Khubilai was led by Han Chinese scholar-officials, this large group continued to be vocal about the shortcomings of Yuan governance. Of course, no bureaucracy is truly perfect, but the Yuan seemed to be a special case, for although it had built up the façade of a Chinese bureaucracy and accepted a large degree of Chinese influence, the monarchy and the upper echelons of government remained distinctly Mongolian.Footnote ¹⁶ In this regard, the discontent of their Chinese advisers was understandable – they had succeeded, to an extent, in impressing on their Mongol rulers their vision of a centralized government, but the Mongols had not gone far enough in that direction. As such, it was only natural that they continued to push, attempting to resurrect the administrative structures of the Song and even the sinicized Jin. One of the individuals who led this push was Hu Qiyu 胡祇遹 (1227–1293). Born in northern China during the final years of the Jin, Hu rose to prominence during Khubilai's reign and served in a number of central and regional posts. Although lesser known than some of Khubilai's other Chinese advisers, Hu was nonetheless a prolific writer who leveled lengthy criticisms against the unorganized nature of the administration, the negative consequences that resulted from poor government policies, and the abuses officials and clerks inflicted on the common people. In a letter to a colleague, Hu wrote that: “The major policies and the legal codes have been abandoned and [the rulers] refuse to implement them, [their] most pressing concern is merely military prestige and financial aggrandizement.”Footnote ¹⁷ In an effort to correct these flaws, Hu devoted enormous energy to drawing up lengthy tracts of advice and solutions that covered everything from regulating the paper currency, to the taming of unruly and corrupt clerks, to improving the efficiency of the military administration.

Of particular concern to Hu was the issue of clerical corruption and abuse. Though clerks had been a vital component of the bureaucracy in previous dynasties, their status in the Yuan rose even higher, the result of the bureaucracy's peculiarities. In the absence of the civil service examination system, becoming a clerk was one of the major routes to office.Footnote ¹⁸ But while the number and types of clerks increased, their salaries were still many times lower than that of ranked officials, and this led to their negligence and bribe-taking habits. Hu Qiyu complained that:

In another essay about clerical malfeasance, Hu pointed out that the clerks were taking advantage of the Yuan practice of transferring them to a new jurisdiction every two years to delay processing litigations and other official paperwork, shifting the burden to their successors. Meanwhile, the new transferees would say that the responsibility for those duties and the blame for the delay lay not with them but with their predecessors, and so nothing would be accomplished. Hu lambasted the Mongols’ inability to see this as a problem: “The harm caused by transfers has already reached such an extent, but the rulers still think this is a good method, why do they not contemplate its seriousness?”Footnote ²⁰

Hu attributed these abuses to a host of factors, including oversights in personnel selection and lax discipline, but he saw the main issue as lying in the failure of the Yuan government to incentivize the clerks to fulfill their duties. Regarding their low salaries, Hu wrote:

Hu also lamented the inability of many clerks to enter officialdom. Already having to endure low salaries and the high costs associated with transfers, the clerks could work for years without gaining office:

In order to properly incentivize these clerks, Hu believed that their salaries must be generous. The problem he saw was that the government was wasting enormous sums of money on supernumeraries, which he bluntly termed the “three redundancies” (san rong 三冗) – redundant paperwork, which led to redundant clerks and redundant clerks, which led to redundant affairs.Footnote ²³ He also suggested amalgamating several sub-prefectures with counties, arguing that the populations of those regions were too low to qualify them as sub-prefectures. He pointed out that one of the immediate benefits was that the government could spare the salaries paid out to those sub-prefectural officials.Footnote ²⁴ To increase salaries, to incentivize, meant that the government must rid itself of these supernumeraries to achieve savings: “redundant personnel lead to chaos in [official] discussions and produce no results; low salaries cannot provide a livelihood and thus breeds corruption. Looking at it today, every single department should reduce its personnel by half and double the salaries.”Footnote ²⁵

Hu's counterpart Cheng Jufu 程鉅夫 (1249–1318), a southerner who also rose to high office under Khubilai, similarly related generous salaries to preventing officials from growing corrupt. Unlike Hu Qiyu, however, Cheng Jufu concerned himself primarily with the distribution of office lands, which the Yuan government implemented in the south in 1284. But, because southern lands were considered more fertile, the court decided that the amount of office lands in the south would only be half of those in the north.Footnote ²⁶ In addition, office lands were distributed in an uneven manner – not all regional officials were given office lands, and even those who were entitled to them sometimes did not receive them due to the scarcity of available land.Footnote ²⁷ To Cheng, this presented two problems. The first was that he considered office lands to be an indispensable part of the regional officials’ salaries. In a memorial to Khubilai, Cheng argued that it was not practical to raise salaries by increasing the amount of salary notes, as it would lead to the printing of more paper money. Thus, office lands became the best solution and Cheng proposed that: “every regional official should be allocated state land (guantian 官田) as their office lands. It should follow the example of Fuli, and should not be reduced.”Footnote ²⁸

Second and more importantly, Cheng used the issue of office lands to level charges against the Branch Secretariats, an administrative organ he had opposed since its inception. Indeed, Cheng had once memorialized the throne calling for their abolition, claiming that their title (mingcheng 名稱) was too excessive and that their power (wei quan 威權) was too great. Not only were the various Branch Secretariats not cooperating with each other, but Cheng also feared that their broad authority over military affairs within their territories would be a threat to central authority. He proposed that the court should replace them instead with Pacification Commissions, which would wield less power than the Branch Secretariats.Footnote ²⁹ In his memorial on office lands, Cheng was careful to point out how the Branch Secretariats were not properly implementing government policies:

In all likelihood, Cheng was truly concerned with low salaries, but it is clear from his writings that his ultimate purpose was the abolition of the various Branch Secretariats and the concentration of more power into the hands of the central government.

A generation later, the civilian scholar Zheng Jiefu raised once more the issues that had been advanced by Hu and Cheng. In the “Taiping ce” that he submitted to the throne in 1303, Zheng provided the most detailed and comprehensive analysis on the problems facing the Yuan salary code. He focused heavily on the inequality caused by the office lands, arguing that the lands were not distributed evenly and that those with office lands earned significantly more than those without.Footnote ³¹ Zheng also criticized the government for supernumeraries:

The discrepancy in salaries was so vast and the number of supernumeraries so detrimental that Zheng stated: “The current problem is not that salaries are low, but that salaries are uneven; we should not worry that the salary is not enough, but worry about the excessive appointment of officials.”Footnote ³³ Similar to Hu Qiyu, Zheng proposed cashiering supernumeraries and using the savings to increase salaries. As for equality, Zheng believed that the only way to achieve it was by abolishing office lands, replacing it with salary rice instead:

Certain aspects of Zheng's radical solution of centralizing salary distribution were followed by Emperor Wuzong (Khaisan, r. 1307–1311), who in 1310 confiscated all office lands and replaced them with centrally distributed rice (discussed in the following section). However, this reform was short-lived, for it was cancelled the following year upon his death by his younger brother Emperor Renzong (Ayurbarwada, r. 1311–1320), who promptly restored the office lands.

Zheng Jiefu was not the last person to write about the salary code and its shortcomings, as inflation and the failure by the government to reform office lands led to continued complaints. These writers highlighted the government's inability to incentivize its officials as a major flaw and called for action. The mid-Yuan scholar and official Wu Cheng 吳澄 (1249–1333), writing about the importance of county sheriffs and the need to keep their salaries generous, decried the unequal distributions of office lands: “There are those today who even with office lands cannot maintain their honesty, let alone those without any office lands.”Footnote ³⁵ Wu's protégé Su Tianjue 蘇天爵 (1294–1352) similarly called for more office lands to be distributed to regional officials.Footnote ³⁶ Su also stressed the need to incentivize the clerks, writing that: “Alas, if the clerks are not honest and upright, then the way of governance will decay. It is because of this that the Han [dynasty] instituted salaries for clerks, so how can the [present] rulers not think about correcting this flaw?”Footnote ³⁷ Such complaints and calls for more generous salaries would persist up until the fall of the Yuan.

Government Readjustment of Salaries

With paper money being the primary component of salaries, the real income of officials was naturally tied to inflation. When the Zhongtong notes were first introduced, Khubilai's Chinese advisers were eager to avoid the ruinous inflation that had befallen the Jin paper currency and took necessary precautions, thus creating a stable paper currency regime.Footnote ³⁸ Beginning in 1276, due to Khubilai's invasion of southern China and Japan, the court was forced to print additional Zhongtong notes in order to meet expenditure. By 1284, inflation had begun to seriously affect the people's standard of living.Footnote ³⁹ According to Hu Qiyu, at the start of the Zhongtong period, one dan of rice was only priced at around 600–700 wen, but by the mid-1280s, prices had increased as much as ten times.Footnote ⁴⁰ Long periods of inflation plagued much of the mid-Yuan, becoming especially serious during the period between 1299 and 1310,Footnote ⁴¹ as increased personal spending by the emperors as well as huge military expenditure made it necessary to print more paper money. Writing about inflation in the Chengzong (Temür, r. 1294–1307) period, Zheng Jiefu pointed out that “goods worth one qian 錢 of Zhongtong notes in the past now cost one guan. Taking the Zhiyuan notes as an example, five li 釐 and one fen cannot buy a single thing and [the Zhiyuan notes] are not used in the markets.”Footnote ⁴² It was not until the 1330s that inflation finally stabilized, before serious inflation struck once again in the 1350s.Footnote ⁴³

For a family of five, Hu Qiyu had estimated that every person needed at least one sheng of grains, a total of thirty dan per annum for the entire family, and two bolts of cloth and two jin of cotton annually. The amount spent on salt, condiments, oil and other “miscellaneous items” was equivalent to that spent on grains.Footnote ⁴⁴ Therefore, a sixth-rank capital official during Khubilai's reign needed to spend at least half his salary just for the sustenance of his family.Footnote ⁴⁵ As inflation decreased the purchasing power of the paper notes, an increasing amount of the official's income became devoted simply to buying grains. The Mongols’ refusal to use copper coins, a currency that the Chinese literati believed to be stable, and their continued insistence on relying on volatile paper money instead, was a major motivating factor behind the literati's calls for increased salaries.

The court listened to their complaints. Khubilai's salary reform in 1285, which increased all salaries by 50 percent, was an attempt to alleviate salary problems caused by inflation. Not considering this to be enough, Khubilai ordered the Central Secretariat to discuss increasing salaries further for inner and outer officials and clerks in the 11th month of 1291. A month later, the Central Secretariat recommended that the seventy types of corvée taxes of the Southern Song should be collected again in the south and used to increase salaries of officials.Footnote ⁴⁶ However, this policy was never put into practice. In 1299, the Central Secretariat decreed that clerks would receive, in addition to an increased amount of salary notes, anywhere between six dou to one dan of rice a month depending on their office.Footnote ⁴⁷ Four years later, officials too began receiving salary rice. In his 1303 decree, Emperor Chengzong stated that: “The salaries for officials and clerks are low and cannot cultivate honesty. Salary rice [should] be added.” Subsequently, the Central Secretariat decided to follow the 1299 practice of increasing salaries for clerks and recommended that one sheng of rice be given for every liang of salary notes. An official receiving between ten and twenty-five liang would be given one dan of rice, and one sheng would be issued for every ten liang above that amount. In the non-rice producing regions of the north and northwest, officials were given an additional twenty-five liang of Zhongtong notes for every dan of rice that they would otherwise receive.Footnote ⁴⁸ This was, in fact, the same as what Zheng Jiefu wanted, although he proposed double the amount given by the Yuan government.Footnote ⁴⁹

The most serious readjustment of this period came in 1309, during the reign of Khaisan. A year prior, the court had ordered that all official salaries would be changed to Zhiyuan notes (Zhiyuan chao 至元鈔), prorated in terms of Zhongtong notes, and the abolition of salary rice. As Zhiyuan notes, which were first issued in 1287 in tandem with Zhongtong notes, had a one to five exchange rate with their predecessor, this would have represented a fivefold increase in official salaries.Footnote ⁵⁰ In 1309, official salaries were stopped for a second time, and the new salary code was promulgated in the following year. For court officials, the 50 percent increase from 1285 was removed and the remaining amount was converted to Zhiyuan notes. The amount of salary notes for regional officials was reduced by 30 percent and the remaining amount was also converted to Zhiyuan notes. All salary rice for officials was cancelled, though officials who received less than ten liang per month were entitled to five dou of rice, and salary rice for clerks remained the same.Footnote ⁵¹ Although many of Khaisan's policies were abolished by his brother Ayurbarwada, the decision to convert salaries for central officials to Zhiyuan notes was kept. Salary rice was initially not included, and it was not until 1320 that the Yuan court restored salary rice by decreeing that 30 percent of all court officials’ salaries would be paid in rice, converted at a rate of twenty liang of Zhongtong notes (or four liang of Zhiyuan notes) per dan.Footnote ⁵²

The seventeen years from 1320 to 1337 saw no further adjustments to salaries, as inflation overall remained relatively stable. Yet even with the restoration of salary rice, virtually no literatus considered the salaries to be enough. The main problem was that after the 1320 restoration of salary rice, the rice was deducted directly from the cash portion of the salaries (see Table 1.3 in the Appendix), rather than given separately, as was the case before the 1309 adjustment.Footnote ⁵³ Not only was the amount of rice given not enough for most officials, especially those with large families, it also decreased the cash portion of their salaries. Lu Wengui 陸文圭 (1253–1336) was able to sum up the situation succinctly, stating that, “The monthly salary rice [of officials] in the capital is not enough for their daily needs. Thus, people dream of being dispatched to regional offices and detest being transferred to the capital.”Footnote ⁵⁴

The final readjustments came during the reign of Emperor Shun (Toghon Temür, r. 1333–1370). Bowing to pressure from officials, in 1337 the amount of salary rice was increased for court officials by reducing the conversion of salary notes to salary rice from twenty liang Zhongtong notes per dan to fifteen liang. Then, in 1341, officials without office lands in the Branch Secretariats, Branch Censorates, and Pacification Commissions were given salary rice – ten dan for rank one officials, eight dan for rank two officials, six dan for rank three officials, four dan for rank four and five officials, and two dan for officials rank six and below. Regions that did not produce any rice would see the rice converted into Zhongtong notes at a rate of twenty-five liang per dan. Finally, salaries for the Regional Investigation Commissions and officials in the border regions were increased in 1351.Footnote ⁵⁵

On the bureaucratic front, the Yuan court also took measures to reduce government supernumeraries. Supernumeraries had been plaguing the Yuan since Khubilai's time, as seen from Hu Qiyu's writings, but the issue became increasingly serious during the reigns of Temür and Khaisan when so many new officials were being added that it was causing a serious drain on government revenue. In 1311, immediately upon taking the throne after Khaisan's death, Ayurbarwada ordered a reduction of government officials to 1293 levels.Footnote ⁵⁶ Emperor Yingzong (Shidebala, r. 1320–1323), perhaps the most “Chinese” of any Yuan emperor, continued his father's policies of retrenchment, ordering the abolition of all offices created after Khubilai's reign and imposing stricter discipline over the bureaucracy.Footnote ⁵⁷ In 1330, a general retrenchment of imperial guards and palace service personnel took place under Emperor Wenzong (Tugh Temür, r. 1328–1332) and saw the dismissal of as many as 10,000 people.Footnote ⁵⁸ Though retrenchment and salary raises did not reach the level envisioned by the Chinese literati, it nonetheless showed that the Mongol rulers were concerned about the negative impacts of these issues.

The Problem of Office Lands

No aspect of Yuan salaries was more scrutinized than office lands. Although the concept of office lands was not new, it was the Yuan that first implemented them throughout China on a large scale.Footnote ⁵⁹ Concerning office lands, the Chinese literati were generally divided into two main camps. The first called for the complete abolition of office lands while the second believed that more office lands were necessary. But regardless of their beliefs, they were all quick to point out the inequality and abuse that stemmed out of the current system. Zheng Jiefu, for example, wrote that a third-rank regional official could claim as much as 800 dan of rice annually from his office lands.Footnote ⁶⁰ Su Tianjue wrote that in Fujian, officials were taking three dan of rice per mu from their office lands, impoverishing the common people.Footnote ⁶¹ The average yield per mu in southern China during the Yuan was between one and one and a half dan, so for an official to claim that much rice meant he would have taken the entire harvest without leaving any for his tenants.Footnote ⁶²

The Yuan court was well aware of these abuses. In 1284, the Censorate reported that officials were over-collecting rent from their office lands, often by force and with complete disregard for harvest conditions. In 1302, the Henan Branch Secretariat reported that officials were collecting from their office lands even during times of natural disasters and famine, and the Central Secretariat decreed that all rent should be cancelled in such cases.Footnote ⁶³ The amount of rent collected from office lands also drastically increased over time. In the 1270s, a rank 3a official of the Regional Investigation Office in Huguang (modern day Hunan and Hubei provinces) collected three dou of rice per mu from his office lands. In the 1290s, he collected six dou of rice per mu. By 1315, an official in the same office was collecting double that amount. The court thus circulated another decree prohibiting the over-collection of land rent from office lands.Footnote ⁶⁴

But aside from issuing stern injunctions to curtail abuses, the Yuan made only one effort to reform office lands. In 1310, as part of his reforms to ameliorate the dire financial situation facing the government, Khaisan abolished the office land system and replaced it with salary rice instead – “to collect rice from the fields [office lands] in order to supplement the needs of the capital.”Footnote ⁶⁵ However, this reform did not balance the salaries in the same way that Zheng Jiefu had envisioned in his memorial. Not only were local officials who previously did not hold office lands not given any salary rice, even salary rice for court officials was cancelled. Furthermore, the amount of rice given to the regional officials was far below what their lands produced, leading to widespread discontent.Footnote ⁶⁶ So disastrous was this reform that the censor Zhang Yanghao 張養浩 (1270–1329), in a carefully worded memorial, placed the confiscation of office lands first in a long list of grievances against Khaisan's rule. Zhang did not mention the discontent harbored by regional officials, but rather articulated the measure as a neglect of the legacy of Khubilai, an accusation that carried serious consequences:

After Khaisan's death in 1311, this unpopular policy was immediately reversed and office lands were restored to the local officials who originally had them. This was confirmed in a 1313 edict, which stated that “office lands and salary notes for outer officials would follow the old regulations.”Footnote ⁶⁸ The term “old regulations” (jiuli 舊例) indicated that not only were the office lands restored to those officials, but their salary notes were also paid with Zhongtong notes and according to the 1285 standards. Only officials without lands followed the 1310 adjustments and had their salary notes replaced with Zhiyuan notes.Footnote ⁶⁹ From 1313 until the end of the Yuan in 1368, no further changes were made to the office land system.

Why Did the Yuan Not Embrace Reform?

Hu Qiyu once complained that whenever envoys from the Central or Branch Secretariats came to the localities, in order to satisfy them, the local clerks would requisition from the people everything from food, to cooking utensils, to bedding.Footnote ⁷⁰ In 1295, the Censorate reported that local officials were unlawfully deducting money from the salaries of their subordinates in order to pay for feasts and bribes to entertain officials from the Branch Secretariats and the Pacification Commissions.Footnote ⁷¹ This created a pattern in which the higher officials took from the lower officials, lower officials took from the clerks, and clerks took from the people. To the Chinese literati, perhaps an obvious solution would have been to restore the operating funds (gongshi qian 公使錢) of the Song, which were funds kept by local officials for the purpose of entertaining imperial envoys and other high-ranking officials.Footnote ⁷² But the Yuan court never did so, and like the abuses that were reported with the office lands, only an injunction was issued banning the practice. What we are left with then is an interesting paradox – on one hand, the Mongols attached a degree of importance to the issue of salaries and its effects on the bureaucracy, but on the other hand, they seemed uninterested in really trying to solve the problem.

The key to understanding this paradox lay in understanding what mattered to the Mongols. Nomadic patrimonial notions of society and government meant that holding onto power demanded the redistribution of wealth and possessions by the leader to his family, retainers, and followers.Footnote ⁷³ The Mongols were no exception – this principle was enshrined by Chinggis Khan when he first established the Mongol Empire and was continued by his successors.Footnote ⁷⁴ Khubilai's foundation of a Chinese-style bureaucracy did not change that fact, and he supported this creation because he realized that only with such a bureaucracy and with the help of the Chinese could he perpetuate Mongol rule and extract greater wealth for redistribution.Footnote ⁷⁵ To the extent that adjustment would help them maintain their rule, the Mongols were not unwilling to follow their Chinese advisers’ counsel – salary increases were given to officials and clerks, the court sought to mitigate the abuse of office lands, and there were serious attempts to reduce the number of government supernumeraries. But, these measures by themselves were not enough to solve the Yuan's inability to incentivize the bureaucracy, and implementing the policies and reforms that the Chinese believed would address the root of the issue was simply beyond the expertise of the Mongols. To do so would have required the services of the Chinese, many of whom were “Southerners” (nanren 南人), a group that the Mongols did not fully trust.Footnote ⁷⁶ Thus, the Mongols’ unwillingness to embrace reforms partly stemmed from a deep distrust of their conquered subjects.

As a result of this distrust, the Mongols staffed the high offices of the central government exclusively with other Mongols and Central Asians.Footnote ⁷⁷ More than half of the regional Branch Secretariats’ Prime Ministers were Mongols, and together, Mongols and Central Asians made up over 64 percent of the Branch Secretariats’ ranked personnel.Footnote ⁷⁸ The darughachi (regional overseers), the highest-ranking official in the local administrations, were again mostly Mongol or Central Asian.Footnote ⁷⁹ Clerks were favored not only because their utility was easily recognizable to the Mongols, but also because clerks, unlike the scholar-officials, presented no ideological challenge to their rule.Footnote ⁸⁰ Even when civil service examinations were instituted in 1315 and again in 1342, it worked heavily in favor of the Mongols – the Mongols were given easier questions and the quotas for the Mongols and the Chinese were the same, despite the fact that the Mongol population was significantly smaller.Footnote ⁸¹ These practices show that the Mongols simply had no intention of sharing power with the Chinese.

An even more important reason for the Mongols’ resistance to reform lay in the features of steppe political institutions, much of it influenced by tribal cultures and customs, which were preserved in the Yuan bureaucracy. As Endicott-West pointed out, the Mongols had no tradition of concentrating power in one person, and so instituted a conciliar style of decision-making that was embodied in daily councils, which itself grew out of the traditional khurlitai, in which all officials from the Branch Secretariats down to the counties were required to attend in order to deliberate on government matters.Footnote ⁸² In addition, the Mongols feared that one agency might grow too powerful, and thus often delegated the same authority to different offices so that they would act as a check against one another. This, however, led to the creation of offices with overlapping authorities. The mid-Yuan official Wang Jie 王結 (1274–1336) succinctly described this problem in a memorial:

This, of course, was not a problem unique to the Yuan – the Song also had a precedent of establishing offices with overlapping authorities.Footnote ⁸⁵ But while the Song bureaucracy, despite its problems, has generally received high marks from historians, the same cannot be said for the Yuan.Footnote ⁸⁶ In addition, the Yuan’s use of several different scripts on official documentsFootnote ⁸⁷ and its polyethnic nature meant that all branches and levels of government needed to employ a number of translation and interpreter clerks, thus making the reduction of clerks difficult. These factors not only caused the Yuan bureaucracy to grow inefficient, but also greatly increased the number of people paid by the government. If taking into account Hu Qiyu, Zheng Jiefu, and Wang Jie's descriptions of government supernumeraries, then the court's efforts to reduce them would have been considered ineffective.

The Yuan's financial difficulties were further exacerbated by the emperors’ free-spending habits. Drawing from their custom of distributing conquered peoples and wealth to members of the ruling family, the Yuan emperors paid out enormous sums in the form of gold, silver, silk, and paper currency as annual grants (suici 歲賜) to members of the imperial family and the nobility. In 1294, for example, Emperor Chengzong had some 744,500 liang of silver that had been kept in reserve for the paper currency in the various circuits transported to the capital so that it could be given out as grants to relatives and nobles.Footnote ⁸⁸ Military spending naturally accounted for a huge portion of the expenditures as well, but the peculiar nature of the Yuan bureaucracy also played an important role. As the civil service examination was not made available to most of the Yuan, the path to officialdom was limited to other routes. One of the easiest ways to become an official was through joining the imperial guard (keshig), whose members were not only well rewarded by the emperor but also given preference in official appointments. This naturally led to the ballooning of the guard force, and there were repeated attempts by Yuan emperors to reduce its numbers.Footnote ⁸⁹ The practice of granting appanages (touxia 投下) to imperial princes not only deprived the court of revenue from those lands but also contributed to the Yuan's political instability.Footnote ⁹⁰ Of course, there were other expenditures, such as the imperial family's annual trips to the summer capital of Shangdu and the patronization of Buddhist ceremonies, all of which further added to the expense of the Yuan court. Consequently, continuously increasing salaries would have been very difficult for the Yuan court to achieve, as the government's large expenditures dwarfed its annual revenue.Footnote ⁹¹

Most of these practices, the staffing of the bureaucracy with Mongols and Central Asians, the conciliar style of decision-making, the distribution of grants and appanages, and the importance of the keshig, could be traced to the political apparatus of the steppes. In writing about nomadic state formation, Di Cosmo has pointed out that new khans consolidated their power by staffing high positions with a tribal aristocracy composed of imperial family members, consort clan members, and loyal military commanders, as well as by monopolizing revenue, which was then redistributed to the aristocracy.Footnote ⁹² Khubilai could ill afford to rid himself of these tribal institutions and values, upon which part of his legitimacy hinged, and he preserved these practices during his state-building process in China. Khubilai envisioned that the mixture of Chinese bureaucratic and Mongol steppe institutions would not only satisfy both the Chinese literati and the Mongol nobles but also serve as a check upon one another. Yet the balance between these two opposing institutions was kept in large part through the personal power and prestige Khubilai wielded, and which his successors lacked. This forced them to rely increasingly on steppe institutions – the paying of annual grants, the granting of appanages, and the appointing of loyal allies to positions of powers – to maintain their rule.Footnote ⁹³ Later Yuan emperors attempted to reduce excesses by “returning” the government back to Khubilai's time, yet it was precisely Khubilai's political apparatus that was the source of their problems in the first place, saddling the administration with a tremendous financial burden, as it needed to support a host of court apparatuses, the privileges of the elites, and the military.Footnote ⁹⁴

These flaws were of course recognized by the Chinese literati, but reforming the government along the lines they wanted would have meant the Mongols needed to jettison these tribal institutions. Furthering the Chinese system at the expense of Mongol values would have meant employing more Chinese to staff higher government positions. This, the Mongols were unwilling to do, for it would have infringed directly on the privilege of their elites. The Mongol rulers valued the advice of the Chinese, but that value did not translate into trust. In this regard, Zheng Jiefu's plan to reform office lands was destined to fail. The act of confiscating office lands would have drastically lowered the income of high- and mid-rank officials, a significant proportion of whom were Mongols and Central Asians, and this would have constituted an attack on their interests. The state could also not replace the office lands with sufficient amounts of rice, as this would have further strained the already troubled budget. For this reform to succeed, the Mongols needed to adapt themselves more, if not completely, to Chinese and Confucian values, something the Mongols showed no interest in doing. As long as the bureaucracy was still functioning and wealth continued to be transported to the capital, the Mongols were content with simple remedial measures.