by PEPE ESCOBAR
Have an auspicious Year of the Ox, everybody. And to celebrate it in style, fleetingly alleviating our burden in these times of trouble, let’s plunge into a dream within a dream, going back to the future for a game-changing moment in Chinese history.
Chinese New Year’s Day, 1272. At the time, that fell on January 18. Kublai Khan, after issuing an imperial edict, establishes the official beginning of the Yuan dynasty in China.
That may have been a Chinese-style dynasty in all its accouterments, set up according to millenary rituals and following a classic structure. But the people who were running the show were definitely the sons of the steppe: the Mongols.
Kublai Khan was on a roll.
In 1256 he had started building a summer capital north of the Great Wall of China, Kaiping – renamed Shangdu in 1263. That was the Xanadu of Coleridge’s sublime poem – later decoded by the genius of Jorge Luis Borges, that Buddha in a gray suit, as containing an “unrevealed archetype,” an “eternal object” whose “first manifestation was the palace; the second, the poem.”
In 1258, after overcoming a court conspiracy, Kublai’s brother Mongke – then the Great Khan – gave him strategic command of one of the four divisions of the Mongol army in a new offensive against the Song dynasty in China.
But then Mongke died of fever outside Chungking (today’s Chongqing), in 1259. The succession was epic. The Khan’s younger brother, Ariq – who had stayed in the Mongol capital Karakorum to protect the homeland – was about to go medieval to capture the throne.
Hulagu, another of Kublai’s brothers, was the conqueror (and destroyer) of Baghdad – actually the conqueror of nearly all of West Asia. Hulagu stopped his military campaign in Syria and run back home to support Kublai.
Kublai finally got back to Kaiping. A khuriltai – the imposing, ceremonial Mongol council of tribal chieftains held for very special occasions – finally was held. And Kublai was proclaimed Great Khan in June 1260.
Telegraf for more