the innovative approach of Zhao Mengfu as practiced by reclusive scholars from the Suzhou-Wuxing area. Four of these— the landscape painters Huang Gongwang, Wu Zhen, Ni Zan, and Wang Meng— transformed and blended certain elements from the past into highly personal, easily recognizable styles and later came to be known as the Four Masters of the Yuan dynasty. In the early Ming period the Hongwu emperor decimated the Suzhou literati and with it Suzhou painting; by the end of the 15th century, however, Suzhou artists once again dominated Chinese painting, and the styles of the Four Masters became the most influential of all painting models in later Chinese history.

Yuan China and the West

As has been mentioned, Mongol rulers favoured trade in all their dominions. In China too they eliminated state trade controls that had existed under the Song and Jin, so that internal and external trade reached unprecedented proportions. It seems, however, that China’s transcontinental trade with the Middle East and Europe was in the hands of nonChinese (mainly Persians, Arabs, and Syrians). Silk, the Chinese export commodity par excellence, reached the Middle East and even Europe via the caravan routes across Asia; Chinese ceramics were also exported, chiefly into the Islamic countries. The Asian countries concentrated their European trade

largely with the Italian republics (e.g., Genoa, Venice). To the Italians, trade with the East was so important that the

Practica della mercatura, a handbook on foreign trade, included the description of trade routes to China.

Direct contacts between China and Europe were insignificant, however, even though China was part of an empire stretching from Dadu to southern Russia. Chinese historical and geographic literature had little to say about the European parts of the Mongol empire; in the official dynastic history of the Yuan, references to foreign countries are limited to countries such as Korea, Japan, Nam Viet, Myanmar (Burma), and Champa, with which China had carried on trade or tributary relations for centuries, and there are some scattered data on Russia. For some time a Russian guards regiment existed in Dadu, and some Russian soldiers were settled in military colonies in eastern Manchuria. As a whole, however, the civilizations of Europe and China did not meet, although contacts were made easy; Europe remained for the Chinese a vague region somewhere “beyond the Uighur.”

More important were the contributions from the Islamic countries of the Middle East, chiefly in the fields of science and technology. During the reign of Kublai Khan, Arab-Persian astronomy and astronomical instruments were introduced into China, and the Chinese astronomer Guo Shoujing operated an observatory. Nevertheless, the basic

conceptions of astronomy remained Chinese, and no attempt was made to adopt the Middle Eastern mathematical and theoretical framework. Similarly, Middle Eastern physicians and surgeons practiced successfully in China, but Chinese medical theory remained uninfluenced by Western practices. In geography a Chinese world map of the 14th century incorporates Arabic geographical knowledge into the Chinese worldview. It shows not only China and the adjacent countries but also the Middle East, Europe, and Africa; the African continent is already given in its actual triangular shape. But this knowledge probably never spread beyond a limited circle of professional geographers, and it is certain that the Sino-centric world conception continued unchallenged under the Yuan dynasty; no curiosity of what lay beyond the Chinese borders was aroused. For the countries to be reached by sea (such as Southeast Asian countries and India), Chinese works of the Yuan offer only a poor extract from the Song work Zhufanzhi (c. 1225; “Description of the Barbarians”).

The situation was different regarding European knowledge of China. The Mongol advance into eastern Europe had given Europeans an acute awareness that actual people lived in regions hitherto shrouded in vague folkloric legends and myths. The Islamic world had similarly become a reality to Europeans with the first Crusades. It was, therefore, only natural that the Roman Catholic Church

looked for potential converts among nonMuslim people of Asia. After Franciscan envoys brought back information on what was known as Cathay (northern China) in the mid-13th century, Pope Nicholas IV, a former Franciscan, dispatched a Franciscan mission to the court of the grand khan in Dadu (known in Europe as Cambaluc). The missionaries formed the nucleus of a Catholic hierarchy on Chinese soil: Cambaluc became the seat of an archbishopric, and in 1323 a bishopric was established in Quanzhou. A renowned Franciscan missionary was Odoric of Pordenone, who traveled in China in the 1320s; his reports, together with letters written by other Catholic missionaries, brought firsthand information on China to medieval Europe and today throw some light on the earliest missionary work in China. The Franciscan mission, which had to compete with the Nestorian clergy, was carried on more by the foreigners in China than by the Chinese themselves. The friars preached in Tatar (i.e., either Mongol or Turkic) and apparently won no Chinese converts. Significantly, no Chinese source mentions the activities of these missionaries; the Chinese probably regarded the Franciscans as one of the many strange, foreign sects, perhaps an outlandish variety of Buddhism. Archaeological evidence of the presence of Europeans and of Roman Catholicism has been discovered only in modern times; one example is from Yangzhou (in presentday Jiangsu), where the Latin inscription

on a tombstone dated 1342 is a record of the death of an Italian lady whose name suggests some relation to a Venetian family engaged in trade with Asia.

Only the last direct contact between the papal see and Yuan China can be corroborated by both Western and Chinese sources. In 1336 a group of Alani Christians in Dadu sent a letter to Pope Benedict XII, who sent John of Marignola with a mission to the Mongol court. The mission reached the summer capital, Shangdu, in 1342. Chinese sources recorded the date of its audience as Aug. 19, 1342. The country the envoys came from is given by the Chinese source as Fulang, a Chinese version of the name Farang (Franks), which was used in the Middle East as a general term for Europeans. The arrival of envoys from what must have seemed the end of the world so impressed the court that an artist was commissioned to paint a portrait of the battle horse that Marignola had brought as a present; this portrait was still extant in the 18th century but is now lost. Chinese literati wrote many eulogies on the portrait of the horse; the country of Fulang, however, did not interest the Chinese poets, and the whole embassy of Marignola is invariably described in terms that point to an unbroken Sinocentric attitude. Thus, the contact between the pontiff and the Mongol court remained without further consequence.

The end of Mongol rule over China and the strong nationalism of the Ming dynasty also doomed the Catholic missions of the 14th century. The reports of

the Venetian adventurer Marco Polo, on the other hand, inaugurated for Europe the era of discoveries and created a new vision of the world, with China as a part.

Although China as a separate cultural entity was realized only dimly and gradually in the European West, Chinese influences spread under the Yuan dynasty to other parts of Asia. Chinese medical treatises were translated into Persian, and Persian miniature painting in the 13th and 14th centuries shows many influences of Chinese art. Chinesetype administration and chancellery practices were adopted by various Mongol dominions in Central Asia and the Middle East. It has even been suggested that the invention of gunpowder and of printing in Europe was because of a sort of stimulus diffusion from China, although a direct influence from China cannot be proved.

Chinese civilization itself remained very much what it had been before the Yuan dynasty, with a certain cultural isolationism a distinctive element. Neither the self-image of the Chinese nor China’s position in the world changed very drastically. The change and challenges to which China was exposed under the Yuan, however, can explain many of the characteristic traits of Ming history.

The End of Mongol Rule

The basic dilemma of Mongol rule in China—the Mongols’ inability to achieve a durable identification with Chinese civilian institutions and to modify the

military and colonialist character of their rule—became more apparent under Kublai’s successors and reached a maximum under Togon-temür, the last Yuan ruler. Togon-temür was not unfriendly toward Chinese civilization, but this could not alter the contempt of many leading Mongols for Chinese civilian institutions. For centuries China had known clique factionalism at court, but this was mostly fought with political means; Mongol factionalism usually resorted to military power. Militarization gradually spread from the Mongol ruling class into Chinese society, and not a few dissatisfied Chinese leaders established regional power based on local soldiery. The central administration headed by a weak emperor proved incapable of preserving its supremacy.

Thus, the military character of Mongol rule paved the way for the success of Chinese rebels, some of whom came from the upper class, while others were messianic sectarians who found followers among the exploited peasantry. The Mongol court and the provincial administrations could still rely on a number of faithful officials and

soldiers, and so the progress of the rebel movement in the 1350s and 1360s remained slow. But the rebel armies who had chosen what is now Nanjing as their base took Dadu in 1368; the Mongol emperor fled, followed by the remnants of his overthrown government.

The Mongols remained a strong potential enemy of China for the next century, and the Genghis Khan clan in Mongolia continued to regard itself as the legitimate ruler of China. The century of Mongol rule had some undesirable effects on the government of China: imperial absolutism and a certain brutalization of authoritarian rule, inherited from the Yuan, were features of the succeeding Ming government. Yet, Mongol rule lifted some of the traditional ideological and political constraints on Chinese society. The Confucian hierarchical order was not rigidly enforced as it had been under the Tang and Song, and the Mongols thereby facilitated the upward mobility of some social classes, such as the merchants, and encouraged extensive growth of popular culture, which had been traditionally downgraded by the literati.