Waterson, Defending Heaven: China’s Mongol Wars 1209-1370 (Claussen)

James Waterson

Defending Heaven: China’s Mongol Wars 1209-1370

(Frontline Books: 2013) XXXIV and 236 pp.  $31.59

Defending HeavenThe Mongol conquest of China serves as a clear break in Chinese history, helping to determine the character of China’s final two imperial dynasties, the Ming and the Qing.  James Waterson’s Defending Heaven offers readers a fuller account of the wars perpetrated and caused by the influx of the steppe warriors of Chinggis Khan and his descendants.  With the ostensible goal of understanding “perceptions” of the Jin and Song Dynasty governments as well as the Chinese people as they faced the onslaught from the north[1], Waterson has undertaken to add a crucial element to the Anglophone historiography of both the Mongols and medieval China.  The promise of a Chinese point of view, whether militarily, ideologically, or popularly, is indeed enticing and something that students of either the Mongols or medieval China desperately need.

Waterson hits the mark excellently on providing the Chinese side of the military history of the Mongol conquests, both in augmenting our understanding of well-known events and in revealing the more hidden particulars of China’s Mongol wars.  Waterson is at his best as a military historian when he analyzes the siege of the “twin” cities of Xiangyang and Fancheng between 1267 and 1274, one of the more famous events in Mongol military history, during which the Mongols deployed the counterweight trebuchet (huihuipao), apparently imported from their cousins in Iran.  The use of this heavy siege equipment, combined with the developing Mongol riverine navy, the bravery of Chinese troops serving in the Mongol army, and the Mongols’ typical use of brutality as a component of psychological warfare was simply too much for the Song’s defenses, including bamboo netting across buildings, city walls reinforced with clay, and multiple moats.  In his description and assessment of this siege, Waterson agilely displays both the Mongol skill for military adaptation and the errors of the Song government in their resistance of the Mongols.  Similarly, the author impresses his reader in his assessment of the military rise of Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming Dynasty as the future Hongwu Emperor.  Where previous English language works have given us only the barest outline of Zhu Yuanzhang’s military career and his rivalries with other challengers to the Yuan Dynasty, Waterson provides a comprehensive narrative of the development of Zhu Yuanzhang’s geographical bases of support, his alliances with other warlords, and an account of his martial successes, from the earliest days, through his successes around Lake Chao, to his defeat of the retreating Mongols in Shanxi and Shaanxi.  These specifics truly help us to understand how the Mongols came to conquer China and how the Red Turban Army under Zhu’s leadership was able to evict the Mongols from China.

Where his account of military history is frankly unsurpassed, Waterson is less effective in his broader effort to analyze the “perceptions” of the Jin and Song governments and people from non-military approaches.  Throughout his narrative, Waterson weaves the traditional and well-understood errors of the Yuan government and their poor reception by the Chinese Confucian elite.  It should come as no surprise to the scholar of Mongol history that the Mongol social hierarchy, which placed the nanren, or southern Chinese, in the lowest class, upset the southern Chinese.  It should come as no surprise that resistance to Mongol rule was most pronounced among the southern Chinese and that their opposition to Mongol rule found voice both in the traditional Confucian ideology of wenming and in millenarian sects of Buddhism.  Waterson fails to offer much new here and fails to effectively join these political, ideological, and religious narratives with his excellent military narrative.  He mentions, for example, literary criticisms of the Mongol regime without connecting them explicitly to popular or military resistance to the Yuan government.  The narrative of military history is incredibly useful but cannot alone explain the problems of the Yuan period.  We can, nonetheless, forgive Waterson for giving shallower coverage of the broader history of ideas if we allow that his book is intended to be a very particular study in military history.

In both his introduction and epilogue, Waterson acknowledges that he views the Mongols as “one of the worst man-made catastrophes ever to strike Eurasia” and actively resists “the rehabilitation, through books and film, of Chinggis Khan that is currently taking place.”[2]  This goal, only infrequently visited through most of the book, is clearly part of what animates the author to examine his subject.  There is something laudable in rejecting the deification of Chinggis and the Mongols and there are certainly multitudinous criticisms of the Mongols broadly and the Yuan Dynasty specifically that could be marshalled to condemn Mongol brutality and mismanagement.  The military history of the Mongols and of the Jin and Song states, as presented by the author, is not a sufficient foundation for the criticism that the author wishes to make of the Yuan Dynasty.  The Mongols may or may not have been a purely destructive force in Chinese history and this question is at the heart of much current Mongol historiography; extrapolating a condemnation of the Yuan Dynasty’s entire legacy based purely on their military tactics and the military resistance to them is problematic.

Less forgivable is the lack of reference to primary sources.  Waterson is clearly familiar with the primary sources from both the Chinese and Mongol sides of the wars, which makes it all the more baffling that references to primary sources are so hard to come by.  The excellent military narrative, new to most Anglophone historians, has almost no citations from chronicles or records of central or local government.  At times the author will explain in the body of his book what document he is drawing on, but he almost never offers an actual source for his reader to which his reader can refer.  Many of his references direct the reader to other secondary sources, some of which offer accounts of primary sources.  Even for sources that would require no archival or manuscript access, the author is reluctant to provide proper citations.  There are instances where he is clearly referring to the Secret History of the Mongols, available in several published English translations, or to the published works of Marco Polo or William of Rubruck.  If this lacuna is due to the publisher’s reluctance rather than the author’s it is regrettable indeed, as it leaves an otherwise valuable book in a middle ground between popular and academic history.

As a result of these strengths and weaknesses, Defending Heaven would not serve well as a popular history nor as a particularly useful classroom text.  Historians who already have a general familiarity with the military history of the Mongols or of medieval China will find it most valuable, whether they aim to construct a broader approach to Mongol history, institute a comparative approach to the east and west in the late Middle Ages, or examine the institutional military development of Song, Yuan, and Ming China.  While broader conclusions derived from this work may be elusive, its particular military history is unrivaled.

Samuel A. Claussen
University of Rochester
[email protected]

[1] xxix

[2] xxviii

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