Kublai waited until 1271 to declare a Chinese-style Yuan
Mongols ruled northern China for decades after Ögedei destroyed the Jin in 1234, yet Kublai Khan only proclaimed the Great Yuan dynasty in 1271, claiming the Mandate of Heaven and placing his grandfather Genghis first on the imperial rolls. The dynasty was at once a Mongol khanate and a Chinese imperial house.
The conquest of the north leaned on defectors: the Han Chinese commanders Shi Tianze and Liu Heima and the Khitan Xiao Zhala each led one of three tumens in Ögedei’s army. Möngke later threw a force larger than his Middle Eastern expedition of 1256 at the Song, but died in 1259 at the siege of Diaoyucheng without a named heir, and Kublai hurried back to claim power.
As khagan from 1260, Kublai asserted primacy over the Chagatai, Golden Horde, and Ilkhanate, while Ögedei’s grandson Kaidu refused to submit and menaced the west. After 1262 his government balanced Mongol interests against Chinese demands, adopting advisers’ proposals to centralise the bureaucracy and spread paper money. He moved the capital from Karakorum to Khanbaliq in 1264, raising a new city near the old Jurchen capital Zhongdu, now Beijing, in 1266, and declared 1272 the first year of the Great Yuan.
He courted Silk Road merchants by protecting the postal relay system, building infrastructure, lending money to caravans, and promoting jiaochao banknotes. The dynastic name came from a line in the I Ching; in Mongolian it became Dai Ön Ulus, often paired with Yeqe Mongɣul Ulus, the Great Mongol State, on bilingual steles of 1335, 1338, and 1362.
By modern convention the Yuan means the realm governed from Dadu, and Western writers sometimes call it the Mongol dynasty, much as the Qing is called the Manchu dynasty. After the Ming drove the court out in 1368, its heirs kept the Great Yuan title on the steppe as the Northern Yuan into the seventeenth century.
Source: Yuan dynasty
