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Emperor of the Seas: Kublai Khan and the Making of China. By Jack Weatherford. London: Bloomsbury, 2024. 357 pp. $35 (cloth), $18 (paper).
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Emperor of the Seas: Kublai Khan and the Making of China. By Jack Weatherford. London: Bloomsbury, 2024. 357 pp. $35 (cloth), $18 (paper).
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2026
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- Book Review
- Information
- Journal of Chinese History 中國歷史學刊 , Volume 10 , Special Issue 2: History of Chinese Food Culture , July 2026 , pp. 653 - 657
- Copyright
- © The Author(s), 2026. Published by Cambridge University Press
References
1 Morris Rossabi, Khubilai Khan: His Life and Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); John Man, Kublai Khan: The Mongol King Who Remade China (London: Bantam Press, 2006); Andrew Vietze, Kublai Khan: Emperor of China (New York: Rosen, 2017).
2 Li Zhi’an 李治安, Hubilie zhuan 忽必烈傳 (Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshuguan, 2017, originally pubd 2004); Sugiyama Masaaki 杉山正明, Kubirai no chōsen: Mongoru ni yoru seikaishi no daitenkai クビライの挑戦: モンゴルによる世界史の大転回 (Tokyo: Kodansha, 2010).
3 For some representative works, see John Chaffee, “Cultural Transmission by Sea: Maritime Trade Routes in Yuan China,” in Eurasian Influences on Yuan China, edited by Morris Rossabi (Singapore: ISEAS, 2015), 41–59; Paul D. Buell and Francesa Fiaschetti, “Qubilai’s Maritime Mongols,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Asian History, July 30, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277727.013.472 (accessed November 19, 2025); Paul D. Buell, “Maritime Silk Route: The Mongols and the Indian Ocean,” in The Mongol World, edited by Timothy May and Michael Hope (London: Routledge, 2022), 458–67; Angela Schottenhammer, China and the Silk Roads (ca. 100 BCE to 1800 CE) (Leiden: Brill, 2023), 213–66.
4 John Andrew Boyle, The Successors of Genghis Khan: Translated from the Persian of Rashīd al-Dīn (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 241.
5 Rossabi, Khubilai Khan, 28–43; Li, Hubilie zhuan, 54–56.
6 Rossabi, Khubilai Khan, 49.
7 Li, Hubilie zhuan, 42–43.
8 Weatherford writes that Qubilai defeated the Dali kingdom in 1256 when in reality the kingdom already capitulated in 1253. Qubilai departed Yunnan then, leaving the general Uriyanqadai to mop up resistance, which he completed by 1256.
9 W.M. Thackston, trans., Rashiduddin Fazlullah’s Jami’ u’t-tawarikh Compendium of Chronicles: A History of the Mongols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, 1999), 418–19.
10 Boyle, Successors of Genghis Khan, 247.
11 Thackston, Compendium of Chronicles, 258.
12 Ch’i-ch’ing Hsiao, “Mid-Yüan Politics,” in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 6: Alien Regime and Border States, 907–1368, ed. Denis Twitchett and John K. Fairbank (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 499.
13 Michal Biran, Qaidu and the Rise of the Independent Mongol State in Central Asia (London: Routledge, 2016), 37.
14 Timothy Brook, “Nine Sloughs: Profiling the Climate History of the Yuan and Ming Dynasties, 1260–1644,” Journal of Chinese History 1.1 (2017), 27–58.
15 Nowhere on the page does Brook mention the year 1270.
16 Rossabi, Khubilai Khan, 226; Hsiao, “Mid-Yüan Politics,” 494–96; Li, Hubilie zhuan, 648–64.
17 Hsiao, “Mid-Yüan Politics,” 495.
18 Thomas T. Allsen, Mongol Imperialism: The Policies of the Grand Qan Möngke in China, Russia, and the Islamic Lands; 1251–1259 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
19 Rossabi, Khubilai Khan, 172–76. See also Hodong Kim, “Was ‘Da Yuan’ a Chinese Dynasty?,” Journal of Song-Yuan Studies 45 (2015), 270–305.
20 See works cited in n3.