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Jack Weatherford, Emperor of the Seas: Kublai Khan and the Making of China. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024. 368 pgs.
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Emperor of the Seas recounts one of history’s most remarkable transformation narratives—a reinvention on a transcontinental scale. How did the pastoral nomads of the Mongolian steppes—a people who once feared water and despised boats—emerge as history’s first true maritime superpower?
It chronicles the extraordinary story of how Kublai Khan—grandson of Genghis Khan, Great Khan of the Mongol Empire, and founder of China’s Yuan dynasty—forged the world’s largest navy, established a vast commercial network stretching from the Pacific Arctic to the tropical coasts of southern China, and inaugurated a new global order underpinned by maritime supremacy. In doing so, he shifted the course of history—from the land to the sea.
Naturally, it is a book propelled by counterintuitive insights. It also seeks to challenge entrenched perceptions of China as an insular, land-centric civilisation, and of the Mongols as relentless conquerors driven solely by an insatiable lust for territory and subjects. While it may appear to tell a story of astonishing reversals, Emperor of the Seas presents its most persuasive arguments not through rupture—but through continuity. Jack Weatherford deftly weaves compelling throughlines into the narrative of Mongol maritime ascendancy and decline, rendering what initially seem like implausible twists all but inevitable in retrospect.
One of the Mongols’ greatest strengths was their extraordinary adaptability. Originating as a landlocked people who revered water as they did fire—both sacred and perilous—the Mongols held deep-rooted cultural prejudices against seafaring. Mongol men, Weatherford tells us, viewed boats with particular disdain, regarding them as effeminate—a notion rooted in the traditional ownership of ox-drawn carts by women in Mongolian society. So strong was this aversion that men would guide carts only by tethering a rope from the ox to their horse, and even gravely wounded warriors preferred to be slung across horseback rather than suffer the perceived indignity of riding in a cart. In this worldview, a boat was no more than “a floating cart for women”. As a result, Mongol soldiers devised elaborate means to avoid travelling by boat, fording rivers by resting their saddles atop inflated bags tethered to their horses’ tails—an attempt to ride the water as one would ride the land. Drifting across rivers on inflated animal skins—arguably the most primitive form of watercraft in history—was, for them, the most tolerable alternative.
Defeating Kublai’s ultimate adversary—the Southern Song dynasty of China—meant overcoming the “Great Wall of Water”: the vast Yangtze River and the coastal defences of southern China, which had proven far more effective than the Great Wall of stone in keeping the Mongols at bay. It also entailed confronting and transforming elements of Mongolian culture that had historically held them back. Kublai and his allies advanced methodically, initiating minor river skirmishes to probe the Song’s tactics in riparian warfare and to seize vessels that could be studied and reverse-engineered. They recruited extensively from coastal populations and dispatched tens of thousands of troops for rigorous maritime training. Senior generals led by example, working to reshape cultural perceptions by demonstrating that “heroism was as possible on a boat as on a horse.”
The Mongols’ other great advantage was their receptiveness to foreign ideas. Incrementally, they absorbed knowledge from the peoples they conquered in their campaign to encircle the Song empire—adopting river-crossing strategies from the Dali Kingdom in Yunnan and capitalising on their Korean subjects’ expertise in shipbuilding and navigation. The financial acumen of Muslim merchants facilitated monetary reforms that underwrote the construction of a new naval fleet, while Arab techniques for calculating longitude and latitude were incorporated to enhance Chinese maritime charts.
At times, the Mongols’ equestrian mindset even proved advantageous at sea. While Song commanders treated their vessels as static fortresses—wooden citadels anchored to the riverbed—the Yuan deployed their ships as they would horses, maintaining constant motion and offensive momentum, deftly outmanoeuvring their adversaries. The fusion of Song technological ingenuity with Mongol tactical dynamism produced a lethal new hybrid. Ultimately, it is this trail of strategic adaptation and cultural synthesis that renders Kublai’s maritime conquest such a compelling narrative. As the author himself observes:
While the sea was strangely different from the Mongolian world on the high steppe plateau, it was also strangely familiar. Riding a horse over the steppe or a ship over the sea, Mongols could see to the horizon in every direction, a feeling that can be extremely disconcerting to people living in a city or village, but was as familiar to the nomads of the watery sea as it was to the nomads of the grassy sea.
Weatherford is in his element when offering insights into the Mongolian mindset and the inner workings of Kublai’s court. An award-winning scholar—widely esteemed in Mongolia for his numerous volumes on the nation’s history—his authority on the subject is unmistakable. Where he falls somewhat short, however, is in the depth and range of his engagement with Chinese sources. He relies heavily, for instance, on the Yuanshi—the official dynastic history compiled centuries later by Ming historians, whose task was not objective record-keeping but the strategic rewriting of the past to serve contemporary political aims.
Emperor of the Seas occasionally finds itself becalmed in the doldrums. Even the most ardent thalassophiles may find their interest waning during the extended detours into court politics and the fraught relationships between Kublai and his distant kinsmen in the Middle Eastern Ilkhanate and the Golden Horde. Yet these digressions—however reluctantly one might admit it—are essential for grasping the scope of Kublai’s imperial ambitions and the rationale behind his decision-making. Later diversions, recounting the Yuan–Ming transition and the famed voyages of Zheng He, cover well-trodden ground for readers already familiar with Chinese history of the period—but remain crucial to understanding how Chinese maritime dominance was ultimately relinquished. Less compelling, however, is the book’s final chapter, which ends somewhat jarringly with the tale of the Empress of China, a Boston trading vessel, and the earliest maritime encounters between the United States and the Manchu-led Qing dynasty. For non-American readers in particular, it may strike a rather limp and incongruous note—a shuddering, accidental gybe, to labour the nautical metaphors one final time, on what had otherwise been a brisk and well-trimmed downwind run.
But that is not to say Emperor of the Seas loses momentum after the death of its titular emperor, Kublai Khan—indeed, some of its most compelling insights follow in his wake.
Readers familiar with the history of Yuan naval ambition will likely recall its most conspicuous failures—the unsuccessful invasions of Japan, Java, and Champa in southern Vietnam. Weatherford does not shy away from these episodes. He offers compelling explanations for their collapse, ranging from an over-reliance on prisoners and conscripted former Song soldiers, to poorly constructed, hastily assembled vessels ill-suited to the cold, unfamiliar waters of the Sea of Japan. Yet Weatherford is equally intent on redirecting attention to the Yuan’s maritime successes—such as the conquests of Sakhalin and Jeju islands, and the decisive waterborne victory over the Song. While Kublai may not have succeeded in claiming the islands of Japan or Southeast Asia, he accomplished something arguably more significant—control over the sea lanes that surrounded them. By retreating on land but expanding at sea, the Yuan dynasty laid the foundations for the strategies adopted by later maritime powers.
“Kublai was not interested in conquering the oceans,” Weatherford observes. “He wanted to conquer the world, and the sea happened to be in his way.” Yet—perhaps unintentionally—he laid the foundations for what would become, in effect, the world’s first maritime superpower: constructing the largest navy in history and establishing an expansive seaborne network that extended from the Pacific Arctic to the tropical coasts of China and across the Indian Ocean. His grandson and successor as Great Khan, Temür, perceived the broader strategic vision. He transformed the Mongol Empire from a territorially defined dominion into a far-reaching web of commercial, diplomatic, and cultural relationships—with Yuan China at its centre. Command of the sea ensured economic dominance on land. Following the repulsion of Yuan invasions, Champa, Japan, and Java nonetheless entered into the Mongol maritime system. What Kublai had failed to secure through military conquest, Temür accomplished through trade—a valuable lesson not lost on the later seaborne empires of Portugal, the Netherlands, and Britain, as well as on the now-receding global influence of the United States.
“Emperor of the Seas”—a title Kublai Khan bestowed upon himself—might at first glance appear to be yet another vainglorious boast, characteristic of so many conquerors. The book of the same name, however, earns the right to its title. In an age when much ink is spilled over China’s maritime resurgence—its so-called “turn to the sea” and transformation from an exclusively continental power into one increasingly defined by naval expansion—Emperor of the Seas offers a timely and illuminating perspective. The modern story of how an agrarian state rooted in the dusty Loess Plateau of northern China came to possess the world’s largest navy in the twenty-first century may seem improbable—but no more so than the tale of how horse-riding pastoralists once built the most formidable navy the world had ever seen under Kublai Khan.
How to cite: Kilpatrick, Ryan Hok. “The Making of An Unlikely Maritime Superpower—Jack Weatherford’s Emperor of the Seas: Kublai Khan and the Making of China.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 24 Mar. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/03/24/emperor.
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Ryan Ho Kilpatrick is an award-winning journalist and writer from Hong Kong. He has previously served as Managing Editor of the China Media Project and worked as a reporter for TaiwanPlus, The Washington Post, Hong Kong Free Press, TIME, and dpa. A divemaster as well as a seasoned paddler and sailor, he has a particular interest in the maritime history and culture of Hong Kong and the surrounding region. You can find his website and portfolio here.