Emperor of the Seas: Kublai Khan and the Making of China is the latest book on the Mongol empire published by Jack Weatherford, the Dewitt Wallace Professor of Anthropology at Macalester College. Weatherford is known for several popular books on the Mongol Empire, including the 2004 bestseller Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. The book is also the newest English-language biography of Qubilai Qa’an (1215–1294, r. 1260–1294), joining the 1988 classic by noted historian Morris Rossabi as well as later publications by British historian John Man and freelance writer Andrew Vietze,Footnote ¹ and biographies by the Chinese historian Li Zhi’an and the Japanese historian Sugiyama Masaaki.Footnote ²

Weatherford’s book is organized into four parts with twenty-seven body chapters, and includes an introduction, an epilogue, a section on research notes and sources, and footnotes. Despite the book’s being billed as a biography of Qubilai, only fifteen chapters are about him and he does not appear as the main character until the sixth chapter. Weatherford goes far beyond the Mongols and takes the narrative down to the mid-nineteenth century. Chapter 25 is curiously entitled “China Retreats from the Sea,” even though most of the chapter deals with the famous voyages of the Ming eunuch-admiral Zheng He (1371–1433/35). Nonetheless, the maritime aspect is central to Weatherford’s book, and he attributes the creation of the Mongol maritime empire to Qubilai. As he writes in the Preface, “Genghis Khan [Chinggis Qan] had conquered the greatest empire in history, but all of it was on land. Kublai [Qubilai] was the unlikely Mongol who moved their conquest and army to the sea” (ix–x). At the end of the book Weatherford further notes that the Mongol empire in China “was the opening of a century of exceptional commercial and cultural development for China and the world” (314).

This is a commendable effort, as Weatherford joins a wave of recent scholarship that seeks to explore the maritime dimensions of Mongol rule.Footnote ³ Indeed, Weatherford engages with some of this work throughout Emperor of the Seas. Although the book is geared more toward a general audience, Weatherford includes a healthy number of footnotes linked to a large corpus of secondary scholarship. And as in his book on Chinggis Qan (1162–1227), Weatherford skillfully weaves narrative with analysis to tell a tale of how the Mongols not only created the largest contiguous land empire in history but also became masters of a vast maritime commercial network. One must, of course, make allowances for works of popular history; they cannot be held to the same standard as academic monographs. Nonetheless, Emperor of the Seas suffers from a host of deficiencies notable even by the standards of popular history books—a flawed portrayal of Qubilai, factual errors and distortions, confusing citations, and sweeping claims and overgeneralizations that are not supported by the sources.

One of the major problems with Emperor of the Seas is the way that Qubilai is portrayed: as the “ugly duckling” of the Chinggisids with no skills or talent who still managed to build a large empire. This portrayal risks ignoring Qubilai’s early accomplishments. The problem begins immediately, with Qubilai’s birth, as Weatherford writes that Qubilai’s grandfather Chinggis thought Qubilai did not even look like a Mongol (15, 58–59). Weatherford is referring to a passage in the Persian historian Rashid al-Din’s Compendium of Chronicles where Chinggis was said to have remarked shortly after Qubilai’s birth, “All our children are of a ruddy complexion, but this child is swarthy like his maternal uncles. Tell Sorqaqtani Beki to give him to a good nurse to be reared.”Footnote ⁴ Nothing in this passage suggests that Chinggis thought that Qubilai was not a Mongol, unless we are to assume that all Mongols have a ruddy complexion. Chinggis was simply commenting on the fact that Qubilai looked more like his mother’s side of the family.

Likewise, in Chapter 6, the author writes that “[a]t nearly 44 years of age, Kublai had scarcely made a major independent decision in his life” (59). This ignores Qubilai’s active courtship of Confucian scholars and Buddhist monks, as well as his management of his appanages during his time as a prince. In fact, Qubilai had become so independent that his older brother Möngke Qa’an (r. 1251–1259) dispatched commissioners to investigate Qubilai and executed several of his officials. Qubilai was compelled to travel to the capital Qaraqorum to beg for his older brother’s forgiveness. The author also ignores the 1258 debate between the Buddhists and Daoists, which Qubilai moderated on Möngke’s behalf to settle a violent dispute between these two religions.Footnote ⁵ Qubilai’s decision in 1259 to cross the Yangzi River and attack the Song in the wake of Möngke’s death is dismissed as “blindly following orders” from the now deceased Möngke because he was “unaccustomed to making big plans of his own” (59). While the Yuanshi and Rashid al-Din might have exaggerated Qubilai’s heroics in this campaign, Morris Rossabi posits that Qubilai was likely seeking a military victory to bolster his claim against his younger brother Ariq Böke (d. 1266) while at the same time binding his army more tightly to his own control and gathering resources for use in the coming civil war.Footnote ⁶ That Rossabi’s is a far more convincing explanation for why Qubilai decided to push on with the campaign appears in the fact that Weatherford contradicts himself two pages later, writing that “Kubilai … wanted to return north and face his younger brother with a great victory across the Yangtze River” (61).

Qubilai’s earlier 1253 campaign against the Dali Kingdom in what is today Yunnan is distorted to such an extent as to be unrecognizable. Weatherford suggests that Qubilai demurred about going on the campaign by complaining of the campaign’s difficulties and his gout (41–42). No sources suggest this ever happened. The author compounds this mistake on page 47, when he writes that when Möngke ordered Qubilai to attack Dali, “this time he [Qubilai] didn’t complain or make excuses.” This suggests that Möngke ordered Qubilai to attack Dali twice; in fact, Möngke gave the order to Qubilai only once, when the two met in 1252. Qubilai was far from reluctant to take on his first military command and have a chance to prove himself on the battlefield, and he immediately set out.Footnote ⁷ The campaign was over by the end of 1253, with Qubilai victorious and Yunnan incorporated into the Mongol Empire.Footnote ⁸ In fact, Rashid al-Din writes that it was Qubilai who proposed the Dali campaign to Möngke.Footnote ⁹

The author further confuses the sequence of events by mistakenly combining the Dali campaign with Möngke’s 1259 campaign against the Southern Song. In Weatherford’s narrative, Möngke had intended Qubilai to attack the Southern Song immediately after Dali was conquered, but because Qubilai returned home and complained of gout, Möngke angrily rebuked him and he hurried back to the front. Weatherford cites Rashid al-Din for this episode, but while he acknowledges that he does not read Chinese or Persian, Rashid al-Din’s great work has been translated into English (partial translation by John A. Boyle and full translation by W.M. Thackston). According to Rashid al-Din, Qubilai was originally excluded from Möngke’s 1259 campaign against the Southern Song, having been sidelined because of the brothers’ earlier conflict (with Möngke using Qubilai’s gout as an excuse). But when the east wing of the army under the Mongol noble Taghachar performed poorly, Qubilai volunteered, claiming that his gout had gotten better. In other words, the person whom Möngke reprimanded was Taghachar and not Qubilai, and he ordered Qubilai to replace Taghachar.Footnote ¹⁰ The author unfortunately misreads the English translation, leading to this confusion.

Further misreadings of English-language sources occur throughout the book. On page 16, Weatherford recounts, without providing a source, an episode of a young Qubilai hunting with his older brother Möngke, who shot and killed an antelope and rabbit as offering for their grandfather Chinggis. This story appears only in Rashid al-Din, who wrote that it was Qubilai and his younger brother Hulegu (1217–1265) who were the ones hunting; that they were there “by chance” when they met Chinggis; and that it was Qubilai who shot the rabbit and Hulegu who shot the antelope.Footnote ¹¹ Again, later in the book, Weatherford notes that as part of Temür Qa’an’s (r. 1294–1307) reforms, he attacked pirates who preyed on the grain and salt trade and who became virtual sea lords (249). He cites Hsiao Ch’i-ch’ing’s chapter in the Cambridge History of China volume on the Yuan. However, Hsiao was referring to the two powerful naval officials whom Qubilai had placed in charge of transporting grain to the capital. They were no longer pirates by then, and they amassed wealth by working for the Yuan government, not attacking Yuan ships.Footnote ¹²

This leads to another major problem with Emperor of the Seas—the citations. While Weatherford does include many footnotes, they are often confusingly placed and have little to do with what is being discussed. For example, he writes that Qubilai placed his eldest son and heir apparent Jingim (1243–1285/86) and Bayan of the Baarin (1236–1295) in charge of an expedition against the rebellious prince Qaidu (1235–1301) in spring 1270, noting that it was an exceptionally cold year (104). There is nothing in the sources about this. In fact, all sources agree that the person whom Qubilai sent was his fourth son Nomuqan (d. 1301).Footnote ¹³ Bayan was not even given a military command until the Southern Song campaign of 1274. The author cites a Yuanshi chapter from Timothy Brook’s article on Yuan and Ming climate history,Footnote ¹⁴ but it is the Yuanshi treatise on climate and natural disasters. Moreover, Brook did not even quote the Yuanshi and only cited it in the footnotes to support his argument on climate change in the Yuan. In other words, Weatherford’s citation is really for the fact that 1270 was an exceptionally cold year (a minor and irrelevant detail), not that Jingim and Bayan went on campaign.Footnote ¹⁵

In other places, the author supplies no citations, making it difficult to trace his information. Temür’s succession is the most glaring example of this. Weatherford writes that “Qubilai had stated his preference to be succeeded as emperor by his grandson Gammala” (240). Stated where and to whom? No sources are provided for this statement. While Gammala did have a claim to the throne, and while Qubilai was not totally satisfied with Temür as a candidate, Qubilai still chose Temür to succeed. He not only gave Temür command of all military units in Mongolia but also the seal of the heir apparent.Footnote ¹⁶ If Qubilai had favored Gammala, why did he give the seal to Temür? Furthermore, Temür had the backing of his mother Kökejin, whom Qubilai greatly trusted.

In fact, the entire episode is reduced to a matter of names. Weatherford believes that since Temür’s name was more “Mongol” than Gammala’s (which comes from Sanskrit), this made him the more favored candidate. The author also attributes Temür’s succession to the machinations of Bayan, who “masterfully orchestrated a gathering of all the Mongol clans within China” (241). Even if one sets aside the fact that the quriltai conference had to be held every time a qa’an died to elect his successor, Bayan was only one of three executors of Qubilai’s will.Footnote ¹⁷ If Temür beat out Gammala, it was because he was Qubilai’s ultimate choice.

Finally, Emperor of the Seas suffers from sweeping claims and overgeneralizations that cannot be substantiated. Möngke’s purge of the imperial clan in Chapter 4 is reduced to issues of gender and money. Since Mongol women had money and Mongol men did not, the only solution was to get rid of these women and take their wealth (Weatherford calls Möngke the “most aggressive offender”). This claim ignores the nature of Möngke’s ascension and his violent purges of rival factions and lineages. Weatherford does not cite Thomas Allsen’s classic study on this.Footnote ¹⁸ In Chapter 18, the author overstates Qubilai’s control and influence over the Ilkhanate in Iran, even suggesting that the Ilkhanate’s campaigns against the Mamluks was part of Qubilai’s plan to link China with Egypt. While the Ilkhanate did acknowledge the authority of the qa’an, it was an autonomous and independent entity. Nor is there any evidence that Qubilai had ordered the Ilkhanate to attack Egypt. In the same chapter, Weatherford similarly overstates Qubilai’s failure to conquer Vietnam, writing that “it seemed that even Kublai’s most immediate hope of establishing a maritime connection to the distant Ilkhanate might never succeed” (208). But in the following chapter, the author recounts Princess Kököjin’s voyage from China to Persia. Somehow the Vietnamese threat completely dissipated, and the new maritime threat came from Java. Why did the Vietnamese threat, assuming it existed, simply disappear? Furthermore, why did the failure to conquer Vietnam threaten Qubilai’s maritime plans, whereas the unsuccessful campaign against Java did not have the same effect? Weatherford does not address these issues.

There is a tendency also to present everything as simple binaries. On page 112, the author neatly divides Qubilai as the emperor of China in Beijing (Daidu) and as the qa’an in the summer capital of Shangdu. In reality, no such binaries existed and Qubilai always saw himself as the Mongol qa’an ruling both areas.Footnote ¹⁹ Similarly, the third ruler of the Ilkhanate Ahmad Tegüder (r. 1282–1284) pursued “pro-Muslim and anti-Mongol policies” (208) when in fact being Muslim and Mongol were not mutually exclusive (if they were, how could Ahmad Tegüder have been elected qan?). Weatherford reduces all the intricacies and nuances of the Yuan bureaucracy to confusing institutions and corruption (232): an oversimplified view, even for a work of general history.

In sum, Emperor of the Seas is an ambitious attempt to rethink Mongol and Chinese history through the lens of maritime history and connections. Weatherford is correct that the Mongols also became masters of the sea, and that the Yuan had a significant influence on the later development of Chinese history.Footnote ²⁰ Yet the work suffers from severe flaws in its portrayal of Qubilai; its distortion of historical facts and events; confusing citations; overgeneralizations; and big claims that are unsupported by any sources. Until a more thoroughly researched biography of Qubilai and his legacy in China becomes available, readers may wish to consult alternative sources.