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Chinese Third Empire

Yuan Dynasty 元朝 (1279-1368)

大蒙古國 1206年—1368年; 元 1271年—1368年¹⁴; 北元 1368年—1388年¹⁵

The Yuan dynasty 元 (1279-1368) was the house of the great Mongol khan Qubilai (Chinese name Emperor Shizu 元世祖, r. 1260-1294, aka Kublai Khan) and his descendants that ruled over China. The Mongol federation under Činggis Qaɣan (Chinese name Emperor Taizu of the Yuan 元太祖, r. 1206-1227, aka Genghis Khan) had created a huge war machine that first conquered the Western Xia empire 西夏 (1038-1227), then the Jin 金 (1115-1234) in northern China, and finally the Southern Song empire 南宋 (1127-1279). More to the west, the Central Asian city states, Persia, Baghdad, and the Russian principalities fell victim to the Mongols.

Ming Dynasty 明朝 (1368-1644)

The Ming was the last imperial dynasty of China ruled by the Han people, the majority ethnic group in China. The Ming dynasty’s founder, the Hongwu Emperor (r. 1368–1398), attempted to create a society of self-sufficient rural communities ordered in a rigid, immobile system that would guarantee and support a permanent class of soldiers for his dynasty: the empire’s standing army exceeded one million troops and the navy’s dockyards in Nanjing were the largest in the world.[7] He also took great care breaking the power of the court eunuchs and unrelated magnates, enfeoffing his many sons throughout China and attempting to guide these princes through the Huang-Ming Zuxun, a set of published dynastic instructions. This failed when his teenage successor, the Jianwen Emperor, attempted to curtail his uncle’s power, prompting the Jingnan campaign, an uprising that placed the Prince of Yan upon the throne as the Yongle Emperor in 1402. The Yongle Emperor established Yan as a secondary capital and renamed it Beijing, constructed the Forbidden City, and restored the Grand Canal and the primacy of the imperial examinations in official appointments. He rewarded his eunuch supporters and employed them as a counterweight against the Confucian scholar-bureaucrats. One eunuch, Zheng He, led seven enormous voyages of exploration into the Indian Ocean as far as Arabia and the eastern coasts of Africa. Hongwu and Yongle emperors had also expanded the empire’s rule into Inner Asia.

Zheng He’s Seven Expeditions (1405-1433)

The Age of Discovery in European history was a glorious period of exploration and discovery between the 15th and 17th century. Many famous explorers like Magellan, Da Gamas, Columbus and others came from this period. Among those European explorers, there’s one odd man out to make this an European monopoly – Zheng He 郑和 from China.

Between 1405 and 1433 Zheng He commanded huge fleets loaded with trade goods and high-value gifts to such far-flung places as Hormuz in the Persian Gulf and Mogadishu in East Africa. Historical records show that he explored Southeast Asia, India, the Persian Gulf and the east coast of Africa, using navigational techniques and ships that were far ahead of their time. For more information, please refer to Zheng He’s Voyages 郑和下西洋.

In the late sixteenth century the Japanese warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi 豊臣秀吉 invaded Korea and endangered the Ming dominance of the Peninsula. At the same time the Jurchen tribes were united under the khan Nurhaci (Chinese name Taizu of the Qing 清太祖, r. 1616-1626). He founded the Later Jin dynasty 後金, the predecessor of the Qing 清 (1644-1911) that eventually conquered the Ming empire.

Qing Dynasty 清朝 (1644-1912)

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