Pu'a's Boast and Doqolqu's Death: Historiography of a Hidden Scandal in the Mongol Conquest of the Jin

The Mongol conquest of North China has received little attention from modern historians in comparison to that of Central Asia, Iran, or South China, or to its undeniable importance to the Mongol empire.¹ Being the first major conquest outside the Mongolian plateau, the conquest of Jin dynasty in North China had seminal importance for the Mongol institutions. Moreover, as recent research has emphasized (e.g., Wang 2011: 45–64; Iiyama 2014: 475–76), the prolonged and traumatic nature of the conquest provoked massive depopulation and migration which in turn resulted in major changes in community and social structure.

One of the reasons for the inattention to this seminal event in Chinese history has been the difficulty in synthesizing the available sources on it. Understanding the almost quarter century of continuous war between the Mongol and Jin dynasties necessitates above all the synthesis of Jin-perspective militarypolitical narratives together with Mongol Yuan-perspective military-political narratives, mostly of an official character. The different perspectives differ in more than just regime allegiance, however. Even the Chinese-language Mongol Yuan military-political narratives, such as the basic annals and biographies of the Yuan shi, were largely shaped by Mongolian precursors from which they were derived by translation and adaption into Chinese formats.² The contrast between Jin- and Yuan-style documents is thus one of historiographical tradition as much as it is one of regime loyalty and information.

This contrast is heightened for the later stages of the conflict where Mongolian sources and Persian-language Mongolian sources acquire an important role. The Persian sources on the conquest of North China also appear to be based on translation and adaption of originally Mongolian histories and biographies. We thus have four different historical traditions at work: the directly accessible Mongolian tradition, of which the famous Secret History of the Mongols is the only example, a somewhat more extensive Perso-Mongolian tradition, a very extensive, but often quite problematic, Sino-Mongolian historical tradition, and finally, the Jin historiographical tradition, which is one of the finer examples of Chinese official historiography, but shares many of the limitations of that tradition, particularly in military matters.³

Finally, military history is perhaps uniquely susceptible to the teleological fallacy, the tendency to assume that whatever actually happened must have been inevitable. Successful conquests can be easily explainable by reference to the conqueror's formidable "military machine" while unsuccessful ones will be seen as the natural failure of what was an unreasonable ambition to begin with. Having been successful, the Mongol conquest is certainly seen as the result of a formidable "military machine."⁴ Yet as Thomas Barfield's otherwise rather problematic Perilous Frontier (1989) justly points out, in the long-term historical perspective, the hope of a dynasty fresh from the "outer frontier" of the Mongolian plateau to conquer North China would certainly appear to be a wild and unreasonable ambition.

In this paper I aim to address two related points. First I wish to give an example of how attention to the full range of historiographical traditions on the Mongol conquest of North China and the utilization of source criticism in their analysis can yield a very different, and much more convincing, narrative than that found in any tradition taken by itself. Secondly, I aim to show that this new narrative also challenges the teleological assumption that the Jin dynasty due was destined to fall and that the "Mongol military machine" was unstoppable. These two aims are linked since what the historiographical traditions share is precisely a commitment to such a teleological view: the Mongol-originated ones viewing the Mongol Yuan dynasty as destined by Heaven to success, and the Jin tradition viewing the Jin as examples of the "nobility of failure" (Morris 1988). By contrast, when the traditions are combined, what emerges is a picture of a dynasty not content with being a noble lost cause, but attempting in a way that almost succeeded to emulate the Mongol military style. The question of a mysterious Mongol figure, Doqolqu...