Marco Polo: A Clash of Cultures

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Chin Han, Jia Sidao, Jingim, Marco Polo, Mei Lin, Mongol China, Olivia Chang, Remy Hii

One of the more interesting elements of Netflix’ Marco Polo series is the way it explores the tensions present in early Yuan China between traditional Chinese culture and the upstart but now dominant culture of the Mongols. By the time Genghis Khan conquered China, Chinese culture was already thousands of years old. China had been ruled by emperors for about 1400 years. As a result, China was proud of its old, sophisticated culture and viewed the younger non-Chinese cultures around it as barbarians, upstarts, or uncultured, much the same way that the Romans and Byzantines thought of the cultures around them. The more influenced a culture was by Chinese culture, the more “cooked” it was in Chinese eyes. To be subjected to Mongol rule was a terrible shock, because they were “raw”, entirely uninfluenced by China when they arrived on the scene.

Chinese culture was heavily focused on agriculture and was in that sense sedentary. As befitting a true “civilization” (which technically refers to a culture that builds cities), China was characterized by permanent urban settlements that fostered substantial economic and cultural specialization. China possessed a complex and minutely graded state bureaucracy today referred to as the mandarins; to qualify for a position within the bureaucracy, a candidate had to have successfully passed rigorous civil service exams which emphasized practical bureaucratic skills such as knowledge of mathematics, taxation, and agriculture; military skills such as horseback riding, archery, and military strategy; and cultural skills such as music, court ritual, and the Confucian classics that underlay much of Chinese culture. As a result, the mandarins were both bureaucrats and scholars. The mandarinate was a meritocracy of knowledge and skill in applying that knowledge, and access to the system was surprisingly open, allowing many talented non-nobles to rise to high levels of power. Above the mandarins, however, was the emperor, who typically inherited his office from his father or other close kinsman.

In contrast, Mongol culture was nomadic and not urban in any modern sense of the term. The culture emphasized the maintenance of herds of horses and sheep. The horses were used for warfare and transport, while the sheep provided milk, meat, wool, and other necessities (although the Mongols definitely consumed mare’s milk and ate horseflesh to some extent). Because they lived off their livestock and the livestock had to have fresh supplies of grass to eat, the Mongols had to move around over the course of the year, which meant that they lived out of tents and did not build permanent structures or cities. As a non-urbanized people, cultural and economic specialization was low; most adult men were expected to engage in hunting, herding, and warfare. Leadership was based on a mixture of family ties, military skill, personal loyalty, and in the case of the khans, election. In other words, these two cultures had almost nothing in common.

Initially, Genghis and Ögedei simply imposed Mongol organization onto China. Those who possessed the khan’s seal were given near-total authority, and the Chinese were taxed almost arbitrarily. By the end of Ögedei’s reign, however, the Mongols had begun to standardize their rule of China, and Chinese advisors persuaded Kublai to embrace the role of a traditional Chinese emperor. His first major signal of this was his decision to abandon Karakorum, the traditional Mongolian “capital”, in favor of two cities, Shangdu in Mongolia as the summer capital and Khanbalik (modern Beijing) as the winter capital. As a result, Mongolia ceased to be the heart of the Mongol Empire early in Kublai’s reign. Then in 1271, he adopted the traditional nomenclature of the emperors, declaring a name for his dynasty, the Yuan. Over the course of Kublai’s reign, he increasingly adopted the Chinese model for his administration, while retaining the Mongol military system.

However, he imposed a distinctly non-Chinese social hierarchy, which put a tiny Mongolian elite at the top, followed by non-Chinese allied peoples, then residents of the former Jin and Xi Xia states in Northern China, and finally on the bottom the residents of the Southern Song in Southern China. This last group made up perhaps 80% of Yuan China’s population, paid the highest taxes, and in violation of the traditional mandarin meritocracy were excluded from high government office. The result was a system in which ethnic mixing was sharply discouraged, which led to the perpetuation of hostility against the Mongols by the native Chinese peoples who never fully accepted the Yuan as a truly Chinese dynasty.

Portrait of the court of Temur, Kublai’s grandson and successor

In the Series

The series, to its credit, addresses this cultural tension in a variety of ways. The traditional Mongols are shown as one end of a spectrum of culture, the Southern Song as the other end, and Kublai’s court at Khanbalik as somewhere in between.

For the series, Mongol culture is very simple. They live on horseback and in gers (Mongol tents sometimes mistakenly called yurts, which is actually a Turkish version of the structure). Karakorum is depicted as being much less a city than a camp ground; the only permanent structures it seems to have are some grain bins. They feast vigorously on roasted sheep while sitting around campfires. For sport, they wrestle, and they allow women to serve as warriors. This last detail seems loosely accurate; historically Mongol women were given considerable domestic authority and participated in sports like wrestling, horse-racing, and archery, but probably did not engage in warfare on any regular basis. The Mongols dress in a mixture of leather, fur, and cloth, and wear a very distinctive haircut and beard. They don’t seem to have concubines, only a few servants.

Benedict Wong as Kubali Khan. Note the hair.

In contrast, the Southern Song are entirely city-dwelling, with the major Southern Song characters living in complex palaces with large spacious rooms arranged around cultivated gardens. Their court protocols are complex and refined, and political intrigue takes the form of back-room deals and secret plotting. They wear fine silk clothing, go beardless for the most part, and instead of complex haircuts, they have elaborate hats. Whereas the Mongols are horse-riding nomads, Xiangyang has an enormous wall around it manned by archers. The women seem to live very different lives from the men, with numerous concubines. They occasionally impose foot-binding on their women, a genuine historical practice that literally crippled women so that they would have to be physically carried. The only sport they seem to possess is cricket fighting.

Chin Han as Jia Sidao. Note the hair.

The court at Khanbalik has elements of both these cultural poles. It lives within a palace, although one that is much darker than the one at Xiangyang. Instead of a delicate lacquered throne, Kublai lounges in an enormous fabric-draped throne that seems made from stone. He and most of the other Mongols wear the traditional Mongol hairstyle, but their dress is more Chinese. Kublai’s elaborate Hall of the Five Senses is a sprawling harem populated by numerous concubines overseen by Empress Chabi herself, who personally selects her husband’s partners. The only game they engage in is a board game that looks like a version of chess. Kublai shows some respect for Chinese cultural traditions (in one scene, he consults the I Ching) but doesn’t seem to truly appreciate them.

The figure who most effectively represents this cultural tension is Prince Jingim (Remy Hii). For the most part, Jingim is shown as an ineffectual whiner who is constantly getting upstaged by Marco Polo (Lorenzo Richelmy), but he becomes interesting when he shows himself as torn between Mongol cultural and Chinese culture. He struggles to be militarily effective, knowing that the Mongols will not respect him if he is a poor war leader. But he dresses in a more Chinese style. His hair is styled completely differently than the other Mongols; he wears his hair long and either loose or in a bun, without braids or the distinctive Mongol forelock, and he doesn’t wear a beard. It has the effect of making him seem curiously feminine in contrast to all the bearded, braided men around him, but perhaps that’s meant to underline his ineffectiveness in Mongol eyes.

Hii as Jingim. Compare his hair with Kublai’s and Sidao’s.

 

But Let’s Not Forget the Western Viewers

However, there’s a third culture relevant here, that of the Western world. In the series, that view is represented by Marco, but he rarely offers much pushback against either Mongol or Chinese culture. For the most part, he is presented as a tabula rasa for Eastern cultures to write on. He is Christian, but apart from one brief moment when his possession of a cross becomes an issue, he never expresses any religious opinions or any sort of alternate view of Mongol or Chinese morality. Perhaps the only time he truly criticizes Mongol culture is when he demonstrates horror and disgust after he realizes that the Mongols are literally butchering and stewing the captured soldiers of the Southern Song. The scene is truly horrific, but it’s not clear (at least to me) what the point of it was. Nor am I at all certain that this is historically accurate; I certainly haven’t been able to find any sources that claim the Mongols actually did that.

However, while Marco doesn’t really represent Western culture within the series, the fact that the series was made by Westerners for Westerners feels inescapable. Rather than seeking to explain Chinese or Mongolian customs in a way that will normalize them for viewers, the show tends to treat its setting as an excuse for gaping at how different Mongol and Chinese culture are. The series frequently resorts to clichéd notions of Asian society.

The most obvious way it does this with the excessive use of kung fu and occasional wire-fu stunts. The series suggests that knowledge of kung fu was wide-spread; Kublai has appointed the blind martial arts master Hundred Eyes (Tom Wu) to teach kung fu to various members of the court, including his son Jingim (Remy Hii) and Marco. The Song Chancellor Jia Sidao (Chin Han) and his sister Mei Lin (Olivia Chang) are both brilliant martial artists, as are at least some of the soldiers of the Song army and the assassins who attempt to kill Kublai. Another concubine, Jing Fei, also seems to know some martial arts. The Mongol princess Kokachin and Empress Chabi are apparently skilled archers.

All of this is improbable. While kung fu existed in this period, it certainly wasn’t widely known; it’s highly unlikely that concubines and foot soldiers would have been trained in it. The history of Chinese martial arts is quite complex and there seems to be considerable debate whether Shaolin kung fu was particularly common before the 16^th century (some sources insist it was, while others argue that the historical evidence for this is largely fabricated by later generations). The mandarins did study military matters, but probably more from a theoretical perspective than as a matter of daily regimen (remember, they were bureaucrats and scholars), and there’s no evidence so far as I know that Jia Sidao was personally a warrior. Having so many characters be martial artists is really just pandering to Western audiences who have been trained to expect kung fu in any film set in Asia. In this, the series is perhaps slightly less racist than the embarrassing tendency of every Asian character in a 1980s Hollywood film to know martial arts (Short Round, I’m looking at you), but not by much.

Examples of Asian exoticism abound. Concubines are everywhere in Xiangyang and Khanbalik, and the series repeatedly dwells on the lurid sexuality of the Hall of Five Senses (the name a cliché in itself); in one scene we witness one concubine pleasuring another with a silk scarf. Jing Fei does exotic dances for Chancellor Sidao. Poison is a common method of assassination; the assassins who attack Kublai use it, and Mei Lin uses it in an attempt to kill Chabi (although I have to say that poisoning your lips strikes me as a particularly dangerous way to kill someone if you actually intend to live). Kokachin’s bodyguard is a eunich who needs a special instrument to urinate. Sidao is fond of insect metaphors; he gives the young Song emperor that most Chinese of insects, a preying mantis, as a moral lesson. Kublai Khan is a decent and rather sympathetic character, but he is also an autocratic military despot of an entirely non-democratic system (the series barely acknowledges that Kublai was actually elected by the Mongols), while Jia Sidao is an emotionless, calculating monster who whores out his sister, mutilates his niece, and orders his concubine to commit suicide. So the show gives us both stereotypes of Asian rulers at once.

In particular, Chang’s Mei Lin fits a lot of the stereotype of the Dragon Lady. She is an Asian beauty, very sexualized but also very dangerous, employing both seduction and violence as tools for assassination. Unlike some Dragon Ladies in Western literature, she is not a mastermind, but rather her brother’s puppet, but at the end of the season she appears poised to find her agency. In fairness, she’s motivated primarily by maternal love rather than lust for power, but in most other respects she fits the cliché. (As a side note, can I point out how odd it is in the last episode that, as she’s trying to escape captivity, she would pause to scrutinize a mural?)

This image of Mei Lin is probably the most cliché-ridden piece of advertising the show has produced.

The result of all of these clichés is to confirm Western stereotypes of China as mysterious, sexualized, and dangerous, as profoundly different from Western culture. This is perhaps the worst aspect of the series. On the one hand, it seeks to introduce Western viewers to a time and place that is little known to them, and it strives to have at least a semblance of historical accuracy (although it’s quite free in its manipulation of the facts), but on the other hand it feels a need to lure viewers in with familiar clichés and sexual debauchery.

And this, I think, is a big part of why the series has not done very well with critics and viewers. It seeks to emulate the HBO model offered by shows like The Sopranos and Game of Thrones, which draw viewers in with a promise of tits and ass and violence in every episode. But it also wants to have the more leisurely pace of a prestige drama on PBS. The result is a show that is too languid for those who want lots of sex and too sexual for those who want a period drama. It is too cliché-ridden and factually inaccurate to be highbrow and too talky to be lowbrow. While offering us the clash of Mongol and Chinese culture, it has accidentally situated itself within a very different culture clash of modern Western society.

Marco Polo: A Tall Tale for the Modern West

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Bayan Hundred Eyes, Chin Han, Genghis Khan, Jia Sidao, Kokachin, Kublai Khan, Lorenzo Richelmy, Marco Polo, Mongol China, The Mongols, Tom Wu, Zhu Zhu

Netflix’ Marco Polo series made quite a splash, drawing attention for its lavish sets, enormous budget (it’s reportedly the second-most expensive television series ever), and its rather lack-luster showing with critics. But, as I commented last time, I think it deserves some credit for trying to bring a little-known period and setting to Western audiences. The fact that the Mongols are well-known but little known-about in the West gives the series considerable room to play fast and loose with the facts, a bit the way the original source material probably does.

The Mongols

The Mongol tribes were first unified by Temujin, who assumed the title Genghis Khan (“Universal Leader”) in 1206. He began expanding, pushing westward into central Asia, parts of Persia, and modern Russia. To the east, he had to deal with China, but fortunately for him, China was politically disunited. The Jin Dynasty had broken northern China away from the Song Dynasty (who were forced to relocated their capital to southern China, and are thereafter known as the Southern Song) about a century earlier, and western China was ruled by the Xi Xia Dynasty. Genghis forced the Xi Xia into submission, and after a rebellion, completely destroyed and absorbed the territory in 1227, shortly before his death the same year.

Genghis Khan, as depicted by a 14th century Chinese artist

As was the Mongol tradition, leaders were elected at a kurultai held at the Mongol capital of Karakorum, which required the presence of all the major members of the ruling family. (The Mongol state functioned a bit like a federation whose branches were ruled by members of the same family, with a senior member presiding over all of the parts.) Genghis was succeeded by his third son Ogedei, who in 1234 conquered the Jin Dynasty. On the western end of the growing Mongol Empire, his nephew Batu had largely conquered western Russia and the Caucasus region. Ögedei attempted an invasion of modern India, but was forced to retreat. In 1241, just before Batu was to invade eastern Europe, Ögedei died and Batu and the other Mongol princes were forced to return to Mongolia for a kurultai to choose his successor, thus sparing most of Europe a Mongol invasion it would probably have been unable to withstand.

China at the time of the Mongol invasion

In the two decades that followed, the various Mongol princes struggled over who would rule the Empire. First Ögedei’s son Güyük and then a cousin, Möngke, gained power. Möngke sought to purge the sons of Ögedei to secure his own branch of the family’s position. He attempted the conquest of the Southern Song, but died of disease in 1259 during the campaign, forcing the withdrawal of the Mongols to choose a new khan at a new kurultai.

At this point, the two main contenders were Möngke’s brothers Hulagu and Kublai, neither of whom was actually in Mongolia. Their brother Ariq Böke manged to get himself elected, but Kublai convened his own kurultai in China and had himself elected. That produced a civil war between Kublai and Ariq Böke. Ultimately in 1264, Ariq Böke surrendered. This rift was an expression of a growing cultural divide between what might be seen as the ‘Sinicizing Mongols’, who followed Kublai and found some elements of Chinese culture worthy of adopting, and ‘traditional Mongols’, who supported Ariq Böke and felt that the Sinicizing Mongols were becoming soft and unmongolian. Ariq Böke’s legacy was taken up by Kaidu, his nephew and successor.

Kublai Khan, by a Chinese artist

In 1271, Kublai declared the new Yuan Dynasty in China, as a way of seeking support from the Chinese. He relocated his capital from Karakorum to Khanbalik (modern Beijing), despite considerable opposition from the traditionalists, who rallied around Kaidu.

While this was going on, the old Southern Song Emperor Duzong died in 1274 and was succeeded by his four-year-old son Zhao Xian as Emperor Gong. His paternal grandmother, the Dowager Empress Xie, acted as regent, while the Chancellor Jia Sidao controlled the army and much of the state bureaucracy. Sidao came to power reportedly because his sister was a concubine of Duzong’s father. He was extremely popular with Duzong, who insisted on standing up when he entered the room, much to the scandal of the court.

Jia Sidao

Finally, in 1273, Kublai’s forces, aided by a pair of Persian engineers, captured the Southern Song capital of Xiangyang. Sidao had managed to hide the military crisis from the court, and as a consequence was widely accused of corruption and incompetence; a particular charge was that his fondness for cricket fighting had distracted him from the more serious military problems at hand.

After the court fled Xiangyang and ensured a subsequent defeat at Yihu, Sidao was forced out of office and then murdered in 1275, despite Xie’s objections. The next year, the Song rulers finally surrendered to Kublai. Xie and Zhao Xian were sent to live at Khanbalik and Zhao was given the honorific title of Duke of Ying. He eventually was sent to Tibet, where he became a Buddhist monk. As an old man in 1323, his poetry incurred the displeasure of one of Kublai’s successors and he was forced to commit suicide.

During Kublai’s conquest of the Southern Song, one of his most important generals was Bayan Chingsang. Marco Polo refers to him as “Bayan Hundred Eyes”, probably a mistranslation of the Chinese form of ‘Bayan’. Bayan was probably a Mongol; he married a niece of Empress Chabi. He remained a very important figure at Kublai’s court, and his support enabled Kublai’s son Timur to succeed to the throne in 1294.

Marco Polo

If you’ve seen the series, you’ll recognize much of the preceding summary, but very distorted. The historical Marco Polo arrived in China in 1275 or 76, well after the capture of Xiangyang, but the cinematic Marco (Lorenzo Richelmy) arrives in 1273, well before the capture of Xiangyang. That means that all the events of the first season happen in the space of perhaps half a year or a little more, which strains plausibility, given the considerable distances that Polo travels after he gets to China (just his journey to seek out the Old Man of the Mountain takes at least 3 weeks one way, according to the episode in which it happens).

The first major crisis in the series is the rebellion of Ariq Böke, which in fact happened almost a decade before Polo’s arrival. In the series Kublai kills his brother, but in fact the khan spared him, although he died later that year. When you put this together with the capture of Xiangyang, it’s clear that there’s no way to reconcile the events of the film with history; events are happening both too soon and too late.

An even bigger chronological mutilation involves Kokachin, the Blue Princess of the Bayaut. In the series, Marco sees Kokachin (Zhu Zhu) soon after his arrival at court, although it takes him a while to actually get a chance to speak with her. She explains that she is a princess of the Bayaut tribe, which was wiped out by Kublai. She is being kept at court until an appropriate marriage can be arranged for her, and by the end of the season, the decision has been made to wed her to Jingim, Kublai’s son and heir, which is a problem, because Marco is in love with her.

Kokachin the Blue Princess was a real person; when the Polos got permission to return to the west in 1296, their last service to the khan was to escort her to the Ilkhanate of Persia, a breakaway branch of the Mongol Empire under the rule of Hulegu’s descendants. She was 17 at the time, meaning that she was born around 1279. So the real Kokachin hadn’t even been born when Marco arrived at Khanbalik (making her Marco Polo‘s version of Isabella of France, I suppose). Also, Kublai did not wipe out the Bayaut tribe; they still exist today as one of the most important branches of the Mongolian people.

Zhu Zhu as Kokachin

The Mongol general Bayan has become Hundred Eyes (Tom Wu), a blind Chinese Taoist monk and martial arts expert. The character engages in a lot of cool wire-fu chop-socky and spouts a good deal of “ancient Chinese wisdom”, but his depiction is so far removed from historical reality as to bring the series perilously close to outright fantasy. It ought to be obvious that in the real world, blind men cannot routinely outfight sighted men or chop a piece of fruit into four pieces in mid-air, but as I’ve learned from the search history on my blog, there are a lot of people out there who suspect that such things might be plausible.

Tom Wu as Hundred Eyes, getting his kung fu on.

The series’ depiction of Jia Sidao is also problematic. They get some details about him right; he was the chancellor in the early 1270s and oversaw the defense of Xiangyang. His sister was reportedly an imperial concubine, and he was genuinely obsessed with crickets, earning him the derisive nickname the Cricket Minister. But whereas in the series Jia Sidao (Chin Han) is a master politician, cunning schemer, and powerful martial artist, the historical Jia Sidao is remembered more as an incompetent politician who owed his power to somewhat undeserved imperial favor and whose military screw-ups have sometimes been identified as the primary cause of the defeat of the Southern Song. The climactic battle between him on the one hand and Marco and Hundred Eyes on the other is entirely fictitious. (And would it have been so hard to get the whole cast to agree on one pronunciation of his name?)

Chin Han as Jia Sidao, demonstrating his martial arts awesomeness at a soldier’s expense

As I said, I think the best way to approach this series is to consider it neither a depiction of historical fact nor a version of the Travels of Marco Polo, since it doesn’t conform to the text very well, but simply as an alternative tall tale from Marco Polo, telling us a story that is exotic enough that he assumes we won’t realize just how much he’s making up and reworking the facts.

Correction: In an earlier draft of this essay, I referred to the Mongol general Subutai as a nephew of Genghis Khan. After being challenged on this by a couple of commenters, I looked into it more closely, and found conflicting statements on the issue. Since I’m not a Mongologist and can’t entirely evaluate the information for myself, I decided to be cautious and remove the reference to Subutai entirely. Sorry for the mistake.

Correction: In an earlier draft of this essay, I referred to Hulagu and Kublai as Mongke’s sons. They were in fact his brothers. I regret the mistake.