How was the Yuan Dynasty established? When did the country unify?

The establishment of the Yuan Dynasty

Meng Ge, the Khan of the Mongol Empire, died in Sichuan in 1259 at the age of 52. His fourth brother Kublai Khan and his seventh brother Ali Buge began to compete for the throne. In March 1260, with the support of the majority of Mongolian orthodox factions such as Zong Wang Asotai, Ali Buge passed the "Hulil Tai" conference in the capital of the Mongolian Empire, Harakhorin, and became the Great Khan. At the same time, Kublai Khan returned to Kaiping (today's Duolun, Inner Mongolia) after negotiating peace with the Southern Song Dynasty. With the support of Confucian officials from the Central Plains and some Mongolian kings, he gathered to call himself the Great Khan. In April 1260, Kublai Khan established the Zhongshu Province to take charge of national government affairs. In May 1260, Kublai Khan promulgated the "Accession Edict" and established the Central Government of the Yuan Dynasty. Because Kublai Khan held a self-proclaimed khan in the Han region of the Central Plains and implemented Han law, which obviously violated Mongolian traditions, it aroused strong dissatisfaction between Ali Buge and the Mongolian orthodox faction. Kublai Khan and Ali Buge immediately launched a four-year war. Khan war. It was not until 1264 that Ali Buge was defeated and surrendered, and Kublai Khan was designated as a king. However, his promotion of the "Han Law" caused dissatisfaction among many Mongolian nobles and refused to submit to the Kublai Khanate. As a result, several other Mongolian Khans Countries became hostile one after another, and Kublai Khan's regime only included "China" (not exactly China in today's sense) and the Mongolian plateau. From then on, the Mongol Empire ceased to exist.

In the eighth year of the Yuan Dynasty (1271 AD), Kublai Khan promulgated the "Edict on the Founding of the Kingdom", which took the meaning of "Great Qian Yuan" in the "Book of Changes" and officially named the founding of the country "Yuan". This was the watershed when the Mongolian Empire transformed from a cosmopolitan unified empire to a Central Plains dynasty. The Mongolian regime had previously implemented a highly nomadic predatory rule over the Central Plains region. The Central Plains region was only part of its territory. By the time of Kublai Khan It transformed into a dynasty with China as its main territory, and the name "Yuan" had not appeared before that, so the establishment of "Yuan" should be calculated from this time.

In the ninth year of the Yuan Dynasty (AD 1272), under the plan of Liu Bingzhong, the capital was built in Dadu (now Beijing) in the Central Plains. In the thirteenth year of the Yuan Dynasty (1276 AD), the Yuan army captured Lin'an (now Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province), the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty, and captured the 6-year-old Emperor Gong of the Song Dynasty and the Empress Dowager Xie. In the sixteenth year of the Yuan Dynasty (1279 AD), the Yuan army eliminated the last resistance of the Southern Song Dynasty at the Yashan Sea Battle. Lu Xiufu threw himself into the sea carrying the 9-year-old emperor Zhao Bing on his back, and China (Southern Song Dynasty) was destroyed.

Later, the Yuan army attacked some surrounding areas, such as Vietnam and Japan. Among them, the war to conquer Japan was the most famous. It is generally believed that typhoons (called "divine winds" by the Japanese) were responsible for the Yuan war. The biggest reason for military failure. However, the latest scientific findings deny this reason. A new archaeological discovery recently published in the British "New Scientist" magazine pointed out that the Koryo people who built warships for Kublai Khan deliberately built and designed ships with extremely poor quality, which was the main reason why Kublai Khan's Mongolian fleet was buried in the belly of the fish.