Mongol conquest of the Southern Song

On March 19, 1279, a Mongol-led fleet crushed the last Song forces in the Battle of Yamen, in the waters off what is now Guangdong province. The Song court had fled south with a child emperor, Zhao Bing, who was about eight years old. As defeat became certain, the Song minister Lu Xiufu is traditionally said to have jumped into the sea carrying the boy, ending the dynasty. It was the first time all of China was ruled by a foreign conquest dynasty.¹²

The Song had been among the richest and most inventive states in history, with paper money, gunpowder weapons and a huge urban economy, but it was militarily weaker than the steppe powers to its north. The Mongols under Genghis Khan had already taken northern China from the Jin dynasty, and in 1271 his grandson Kublai Khan proclaimed the Yuan dynasty. Kublai then turned to the south. The war was long because the Song held rivers, walled cities and a navy.¹³

The decisive campaign centered on the twin cities of Xiangyang and Fancheng, which held out for about five years before falling in 1273 after the Mongols built their own fleet, helped by engineers and sailors from Song and Muslim lands. The Yuan army then took the capital Hangzhou in 1276, and loyalists carried on the fight from the sea until Yamen. Under Mongol rule the Yuan dynasty reunified the country, extended the Grand Canal and opened China to travelers such as Marco Polo, though it also placed Chinese in a lower legal status than Mongols.¹²