The Mongol Century: Visual Cultures of Yuan China, 1271–1368 by Shane McCausland (review)

Richly illustrated, The Mongol Century synthesizes twenty years of transformative research on the art of the Mongol-Yuan dynasty that has articulated its cultural pluralism. Showcasing many new perspectives on the visual and material cultures of this polity, The Mongol Century reinforces the message of seminal work undertaken by many scholars in ground-breaking journal articles, doctoral dissertations, and major museum exhibitions and their accompanying catalogs. Most notable among this scholarship, intended for broad and scholarly audiences, are: Adam Kessler's Empires Beyond the Great Wall: The Heritage of Genghis Khan (1993), Shih Shou-ch'ien 石守謙 and Ge Wanzhang's 葛婉章 Dahande shiji: Meng Yuan shidaide duoyuan wenhua yu yishu 大汗的世紀: 蒙元時代的多元文化與藝術 (The Age of the Great Khan: Pluralism in Chinese Art and Culture of the Mongol-Yuan Period) of 2001, Jutta Frigg and Claudius Müller's Dschingis Khan und seine Erben: Das Weltreich der Mongolen (Chinggis Khan and His Legacy: The World-Empire of the Mongols) of 2005, and James C. Y. Watt et al.'s The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty of 2010.¹ Although they are not included in the "Select Bibliography" of The Mongol Century, the works of Shih and Ge and of Frigg and Müller have been especially transformative of the field. To its presentation of the topic, The Mongol Century also adds new research by the author.

The Mongol Century is organized thematically. Its narrative structure bookends the dynasty between its center (Chapter 1, "Dadu: Eurasia's Metropolis") and its global reach (Chapter 7, "Blue-and-White: The Yuan Global Brand"). Between these, chapters address art produced in specific contexts of the Yuan state, including: the desecration of the former dynasty (Chapter 2, "The Impunity of a Religious Vandal"), dynastic omens (Chapter 3, "Heaven's Omens: Earthquakes, Typhoons, Floods, Dragons"), the civil service examinations (Chapter 4, "China's Examination Halls Reopen"), literary culture (Chapter 5, "The Hall of the Stars: The Dissemination of a Yuan Literary Culture"), and natural disasters (Chapter 6, "The World in Flux: The Arts amid Floods and Rebellions"). The chapter titles do not perfectly represent their content. Indeed, the ways in which the Yuan state understood the world and exercised power do not map perfectly onto artistic production, at least as recounted by the author.

The topical organization of the book gives pride of place to themes developed by other scholars in the past twenty years. The first chapter addresses the geography and cartography of the Yuan dynasty, as well as the morphology of its capital, Dadu 大都. It recalls Walter Fuchs' classic study of Zhu Siben's 朱思本 Atlas, the Guangyu tu 廣輿圖,² and evokes the pioneering scholarship on Dadu by Chen Gaohua 陳高華, Nancy Steinhardt, Cary Liu, and others.³ The second chapter takes its title from the portion of the chapter that explores the desecration of the Southern Song imperial tombs after the Mongol Conquest, following the path-breaking work of Robert Linrothe's article, "The Commissioner's Commissions."⁴ The opening of Chapter Three, "Heaven's Omens: Earthquakes, Typhoons, Floods, Dragons," recalls the early chapters of Timothy Brook's The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties.⁵ Notably McCausland's research on the question of the perceived interrelation of human and natural realms, as they obtain to art-making and the Yuan mandate to rule in times of natural disasters, contributes to the larger synthetic narrative of the chapter.

The Mongol Century is at its best when discussing cultural pluralism in artistic production of the Yuan dynasty. Despite its title, Chapter 4, "China's Examination Halls Reopen," does not so much address the 1313 restoration of the Chinese civil service examinations under Mongol rule as it does the place of Chinese culture in society following this event; a reader interested in the stated topic of the chapter might be better served by reading sections of Benjamin...