Kublai Khan Quotes

Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone. 'But which is the stone that supports the bridge?' Kublai Khan asks. 'The bridge is not supported by one stone or another,' Marco answers, 'but by the line of the arch that they form.' Kublai Khan remains silent, reflecting. Then he adds: 'Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me.' Polo answers: 'Without stones there is no arch.

The map of the world is drawn by travelers and nomads. Built into it are steps, nights and days, stations and encounters.

The Great Khan tried to concentrate on the game: but now it was the game’s reason that eluded him. The end of every game is a gain or a loss: but of what? What were the real stakes? At checkmate, beneath the foot of the king, knocked aside by the winner’s hand, nothingness remains: a black square, or a white one. By disembodying his conquests to reduce them to the essential, Kublai had arrived at the extreme operation: the definitive conquest, of which the empire’s multiform treasures were only illusory envelopes; it was reduced to a square of planed wood.

Marco reported that homeless children [in Kublai Kahn's city of Daidu] were cared for and educated. While he says little about the system of education in China, we know from records of the time that Kublai Khan created thousands of public schools to provide a basic education for all children, including those of poor peasants. Until then, only the wealthy were literate. Kublai's bid at 'universal education' had never been attempted by any country on Earth. In the western world, nearly 500 years would pass before governments began to take responsibility for the public education of all children.

The brain, he writes, is like Kublai Khan, the great Mongol emperor of the thirteenth century. It sits enthroned in its skull, "encased in darkness and silence," at a lofty remove from brute reality. Messengers stream in from every corner of the sensory kingdom, bringing word of distant sights, sounds, and smells. Their reports arrive at different rates, often long out of date, yet the details are all stitched together into a seamless chronology. The difference is that Kublai Khan was piecing together the past. The brain is describing the present—processing reams of disjointed data on the fly, editing everything down to an instantaneous now. How does it manage it?

The Assassin fortress in Alamut came under attack by Hulegu’s forces around 1256. The head of the Muslim sect that held the fortress of Alamut was, in fact, Ala Ad-Din. I avoided his true name because of the similarity to “Aladdin” and because

This story began with a single, starving family, hunted and alone on the plains of Mongolia—and ends with Kublai Khan ruling an empire larger than that of Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar. Over just three generations, that is simply the greatest rags-to-riches tale in human history.

He is no fool, Kublai. He understands far better than you realize. The khan’s vast armies cannot return to being herdsmen, not anymore. He is riding the tiger now, my son. He dare not climb down.

Kublai went on as if he had not spoken. “Before you all, in the lands of my enemies, I declare myself great khan of the nation, of the khanates under my brothers, Hulegu and Arik-Boke, of the Chagatai khanate and all others. I declare myself great khan of the Chin lands and the Sung. I have spoken and my word is iron!

In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them...It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that our corruption's gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing. Only in Marco Polo's accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termite's gnawing.

China’s claim on Tibet was a classic case of historical distortion, which was buttressed by the British who double-crossed the Himalayan kingdom in their desire to appease China so that they could further their trade interests. Dismissing Indian arguments on the grounds that post 1947 the Indians were only parroting British imperial policy, the Chinese justified their takeover of Tibet on the grounds that in the twelfth century, Tibet had been briefly incorporated into China when the Mongols under Kublai Khan had established the Yuan Dynasty in China (ad 1271-1368).

The last thing I want to give to the Great Master is a wooden plate inscribed with the word million . This word has been created all these years of my service with the Great Khan. Recounting to the Great Khan about his Great Empire I lacked a word which would at the same time represent a number, and yet so big to stand for the countless values of his Great Empire.

No matter what sorrow or happiness may come to us on account of external and internal conditions, we must not be depressed or joyous about them. They occur through the karma of our previous actions. These sorrows and happinesses will also change and end. So look at it like this: When we have illness, the sorrows of parting from beloved friends, the theft of our possessions, when we are ridiculed by others and they say unpleasant things, we must not get stuck in the sorrow and become depressed, saying: “It isn’t right that these things happen to me.”               These sorts of experiences that are difficult to bear do not occur on account of extenuating conditions in our present life. In previous lifetimes we did the evils that are the cause for it to happen that we experience these kinds of things.               Specifically,

When the conditions we set up through our own bad karma from the past make every sentient being experience karmas of sorrow, we get additional bad karma, and when we do things that are harmful to others we will have immeasurable sorrows in the future. So we take a vow:   From now on, Even if I lay down my life, I will not do evil in general, And specifically, I will not harm others.   To

Yet they are the same as poisonous snakes When they dictate things like Massacre, whipping, torture, and plunder, Imprisoning rulers and confiscating possessions. These

Marco Polo descreve uma ponte, pedra por pedra. – Mas qual é a pedra que sustenta a ponte? — pergunta Kublai Khan. – A ponte não é sustentada por esta ou aquela pedra — responde Marco —, mas pela curva do arco que estas formam. Kublai Khan permanece em silêncio, refletindo. Depois acrescenta: – Por que falar em pedras? Só o arco me interessa. Polo responde: – Sem pedras, o arco não existe. (p. 84)

As a Muslim author crowed a few years afterward, Christianity was self-evidently the religion of losers: “[Islam] has blotted out their strong and well defended kingdoms, and their lofty and towering fortifications, and has turned them into refugees in hiding.” When Latin Christians invited Kublai Khan to convert, he scoffed: “How do you wish me to make myself a Christian? You see Christians in these parts are so ignorant that they do nothing and have no power.”21

Marco Polo’s father, Niccolò Polo, traded with the Persians who were known to the early Europeans. These early Persians came from the province of Fârs, sometimes known in Old Persian as Pârsâ, located in the southwestern region of Iran. As a people, they were united under the Achaemenid Dynasty in the 6th century BC, by Cyrus the Great. In 1260, Niccolò Polo and his brother Maffeo lived in Constantinople, now Istanbul, Turkey. After the Mongol conquest of Asia Minor, the Polo brothers liquidated their assets into tangible valuables such as gold and jewels and moved out of harm’s way. Having heard of advanced eastern civilizations the brothers traveled through much of Asia, and even met with the Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, who later became emperor of China and established the Yuan Dynasty. Not being the first to travel east of Iran, they had heard numerous stories regarding the riches to be discovered in the Far East. Twenty-four years later in 1295, after traveling almost 15,000 miles, they returned to Venice with many riches and treasures. The Polo brothers had experienced a quarter century of adventures on their way to Asia that were later transcribed into The Book of Marco Polo by a writer named Rustichello, who came from Pisa in Tuscany, Italy. This was the beginning of a quest that motivated explorers, including Christopher Columbus, from that time on.

Paper money, virtually unknown in the West until Marco’s return, revolutionized finance and commerce throughout the West. Coal, another item that had caught Marco’s attention in China, provided a new and relatively efficient source of heat to an energy-starved Europe. Eyeglasses (in the form of ground lenses), which some accounts say he brought back with him, became accepted as a remedy for failing eyesight. In addition, lenses gave rise to the telescope—which in turn revolutionized naval battles, since it allowed combatants to view ships at a great distance—and the microscope. Two hundred years later, Galileo used the telescope—based on the same technology—to revolutionize science and cosmology by supporting and disseminating the Copernican theory that Earth and other planets revolved around the Sun. Gunpowder, which the Chinese had employed for at least three centuries, revolutionized European warfare as armies exchanged their lances, swords, and crossbows for cannon, portable harquebuses, and pistols. Marco brought back gifts of a more personal nature as well. The golden paiza, or passport, given to him by Kublai Khan had seen him through years of travel, war, and hardship. Marco kept it still, and would to the end of his days. He also brought back a Mongol servant, whom he named Peter, a living reminder of the status he had once enjoyed in a far-off land. In all, it is difficult to imagine the Renaissance—or, for that matter, the modern world—without the benefit of Marco Polo’s example of cultural transmission between East and West.

By 1279, when Kublai Khan completed the conquest of China, the Mongols ruled the largest land empire in all of history. Their domains included China, Russia, and Central Asia, in addition to Persia and most of Southwest Asia.

1266, Kublai Khan, the renowned leader of the Mongols, mandated

Kublai abandoned Karakorum to found a new winter capital known as Dadu in Chinese (Great Capital) or Khanbalic in Mongolian (Khan’s City; later Beijing), which he had designed by an Arab architect, Iktiyar al-Din. Its only surviving building, the White Pagoda, was the work of Arniko, a Nepalese. Dadu was thus a carefully created Chinese city built for a Mongol by an Arab and a Nepalese.

Kublai appointed his brother Hulagu the Il-Khan of Persia-Iraq: when he died in 1265, he was buried with the human sacrifice of his favourite slaves. The Golden Horde (Russia) remained the khanate of Batu’s family, now Muslims.

Kublai Khan founded the comparatively short-lived Yuan Dynasty (1279–1368).

paved the way for his grandson Kublai to conquer more of China and establish the Yuan dynasty,

the next 70 years, under the rule of Genghis’ son and his grandson, Kublai Khan, the size of the Mongol Empire doubled.

As Chris Robbins (the author) pointed out in his book, The Ravens, the “Vietnamese were one of a few nations ever to defeat the Mongols on the field of battle, and routed Kublai Khan. . . in 1278.” The Chinese also invaded Vietnam in the early 1400s. China at that time was perhaps the wealthiest country on earth, with the

Visando estender sua dominação mais ao leste do reino tributário coreano de Goryeo (918 - 1392), esta anterior a Choson (Joseon), Kublai Khan enviou um emissário ao Japão em 1268, após uma primeira tentativa fracassada dois anos antes, exigindo submissão e tributos. As exigências do Grande Khan foram ignoradas pela corte japonesa em Quioto e pelo bakufu em Kamakura. A rejeição foi considerada como um insulto a ser resolvida com uma invasão às ilhas [50

thought of him as a citizen not of New York but of the invisible city of Octavia which Marco Polo described to Kublai Khan in Calvino’s book, a spiderweb city hanging in a great net over an abyss between two mountains.

who’s universal sovereign? In 1287, after not one but two failed invasions of Japan, Kublai Khan issued a new kind of paper money. The paper still had pictures of bronze coins on it, but this time they were just pictures. Government offices refused to redeem the paper for silver or bronze; people could no longer exchange their treasure exchange vouchers for treasure. We have to imagine there was some panic. There was inflation: prices rose as money became less valuable. But then the economy stabilized. The center held. Pieces of paper that were just paper, that weren’t even pretending to be treasure vouchers or silver IOUs, still worked as money. This is the radical experiment that Marco Polo witnessed: money as almost pure abstraction, backed by nothing. It would be like if Wile E. Coyote ran off the cliff, looked down, saw empty space below him—and didn’t fall. Partly this is a testament to the sheer power of the Mongol state: use this paper as money or I’ll kill you. But partly, after three hundred years of using paper money, people in China had figured out that paper money worked not because it was backed by silver or bronze, but because everybody agreed paper could be money.

…Marco’s answers and objections took their place in a discourse already proceeding on its own, in the Great Khan’s head. That is to say, between the two of them it did not matter whether questions and solutions were uttered aloud or whether each of the two went on pondering in silence. In fact, they were silent, their eyes half-closed, reclining on cushions, swaying in hammocks, smoking long amber pipes. Marco Polo imagined answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there…