His Invocation To Heaven, "I Have Done
Everything I Could To Sustain On The Throne The Sung Dynasty.
When one
prince died I caused another to be proclaimed emperor.
He also has
perished, and I still live! Oh, heaven, shall I be acting against thy
desires if I sought to place a new prince of this family on the throne?"
sounded the dirge of the race he had served so well.
Thus was the conquest of China by the Mongols completed. After half a
century of warfare the kingdom of the Sungs shared the same fate as its
old rival the Kin, and Kublai had the personal satisfaction of completing
the work begun by his grandfather Genghis seventy years before. Of all the
Mongol triumphs it was the longest in being attained. The Chinese of the
north and of the south resisted with extraordinary powers of endurance the
whole force of the greatest conquering race Asia had ever seen. They were
not skilled in war and their generals were generally incompetent, but they
held out with desperate courage and obstinacy long after other races would
have given in. The student of history will not fail to see in these facts
striking testimony of the extraordinary resources of China, and of the
capacity of resistance to even a vigorous conqueror possessed by its inert
masses. Even the Mongols did not conquer until they had obtained the aid
of a large section of the Chinese nation, or before Kublai had shown that
he intended to prove himself a worthy Emperor of China and not merely a
great Khan of the Mongol Hordes.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 153 of 704
Words from 41195 to 41464
of 191255
