The Mongol Horde - how and why were they so strong

[AntiDamascus]

- How did they manage to crush China?

HAHA! My Asian degree is somewhat useful now!

There were several "Mongol" invasions of China throughout its history. Reading about China it almost becomes comical in how repetitive this is. A dynasty would take over and would be pushed south either by new hostiles or a desire for better crops and trade. Dynastic changes like that almost always came from the north. The invaders would come, take over parts of the north, win and then move south to solidify their gains and be more the Han Chinese in the south. Eventually a new northern aggressor would come. This wasn't all dynasty changes, but enough that when learning about it, it almost became a joke for me.

But onto the Mongols. The Mongol invasion actually took a very long time to complete. First the Mongols hit the Xia, who were in western Asia and more what is considered Mongolia now. They they actually worked with the Song of the south (AHA That's a fun reference!) to fight the Jurchen Jin in what is northern China today. When that was done, the Song, being incredibly stupid, attacked the Mongols and lost a long 50 year war with them.

That was a major problem with some of the Chinese dynasties. They would always think themselves way better than those uppity northern tribes and would be sooooo shocked when they rode down south and killed them. And then those groups would become the new southern dynasty and would look down on those northern tribes and the cycle would start anew.

The Mongols did lose their kingdom here eventually and it was when southern Han Chinese rose up to push off a northern aggressor. The Mongols in China were between a rock and a hard place. Other Mongol areas saw them as too Chinese and most Chinese still saw them as not true Han, which they weren't. Eventually the Ming Dynasty overthrew the Mongols and they went back to Mongolia and China went on as usual.

But to answer the question of how the Mongols could take on China. China has historically be taken over all the time. The irony of it all is the invaders or whatever want to be Han Chinese so where other invasions would see a culture change, most tried to emulate it. It's like when people become rich, they want to emulate the rich instead of change what rich is. The Chinese weren't actually that great, it's just one of those funny quirks of history of having a country be so large surrounded by and populated by so many people.