Yuan dynasty

The Yuan dynasty (/jɜːn/ YEN; Chinese: 元朝; pinyin: Yuáncháo), officially the Great Yuan (大元; Dà Yuán; Mongolian: ᠶᠡᠬᠡ
ᠶᠤᠸᠠᠨ
ᠤᠯᠤᠰ, Yeke Yuwan Ulus, literally 'Great Yuan State'), was a Mongol-led imperial dynasty of China and a successor state to the Mongol Empire after its division. It was established by Kublai (Emperor Shizu or Setsen Khan), the fifth khagan-emperor of the Mongol Empire from the Borjigin clan, and lasted from 1271 to 1368. In Chinese history, the Yuan dynasty followed the Song dynasty and preceded the Ming dynasty.

Although Genghis Khan's enthronement as Khagan in 1206 was described in Chinese as the Han-style title of Emperor and the Mongol Empire had ruled territories including modern-day northern China for decades, it was not until 1271 that Kublai Khan officially proclaimed the dynasty in the traditional Han style, and the conquest was not complete until 1279 when the Southern Song dynasty was defeated in the Battle of Yamen. His realm was, by this point, isolated from the other Mongol-led khanates and controlled most of modern-day China and its surrounding areas, including modern-day Mongolia. It was the first dynasty founded by a non-Han ethnicity that ruled all of China proper.^: 312 In 1368, following the defeat of the Yuan forces by the Ming dynasty, the Genghisid rulers retreated to the Mongolian Plateau and continued to rule until 1635 when they surrendered to the Later Jin dynasty (which later evolved into the Qing dynasty). The rump state is known in historiography as the Northern Yuan.

After the division of the Mongol Empire, the Yuan dynasty was the khanate ruled by the successors of Möngke. In official Chinese histories, the Yuan dynasty bore the Mandate of Heaven. The dynasty was established by Kublai Khan, yet he placed his grandfather Genghis Khan on the imperial records as the official founder of the dynasty and accorded him the temple name Taizu. In the edict titled Proclamation of the Dynastic Name issued in 1271, Kublai announced the name of the new dynasty as Great Yuan and claimed the succession of former Chinese dynasties from the Three Sovereigns and Five Emperors to the Tang dynasty. Some of the Yuan emperors mastered the Chinese language, while others only used their native Mongolian language, written with the ʼPhags-pa script.

Kublai, as a Khagan (Great Khan) of the Mongol Empire from 1260, had claimed supremacy over the other successor Mongol khanates: the Chagatai, the Golden Horde, and the Ilkhanate, before proclaiming as the Emperor of China in 1271. As such, the Yuan was also sometimes referred to as the Empire of the Great Khan. However, even though the claim of supremacy by the Yuan emperors was recognized by the western khans in 1304, their subservience was nominal and each continued its own separate development.