The flames of war have not been extinguished and the "History of the Yuan" has become a great regret for future generations

Wen | Guo Yemin

The flames of war were not extinguished, but the "History of the Yuan" was completed. This satisfies Zhu Yuanzhang's political needs, but it leaves a great regret for the "History of yuan" itself.

The most obvious problem is the lack of leakage. As far as the Mongol Empire as a whole is concerned, the early history is undoubtedly more magnificent. Temujin started as an orphan and widow, and was able to unify the desert steppe and build a khan. Its generations of heirs have been able to forge ahead, and the Mongol iron horse has reached the hoof, all of which are the territory. By the time of Kublai Khan, the ancestor of the Yuan Dynasty, the Mongol Empire had already taken shape, so after changing the name of the country to Dayuan, in addition to unifying the Southern Song Dynasty, it was mostly the lord of Shou. However, the length of the "Yuan History" arrangement is partial to "before and after", and it is extremely excessive.

In terms of the most important "Benji", the "History of Yuan" has a total of 47 volumes, of which Yuan Shizu and Yuan Shun Emperor account for half (a total of 24 volumes). If this is because these two emperors reigned for more than thirty years, so the information is abundant, the later Yuan emperors such as Emperor Taiding (reigned 1324-1328) and Emperor Wenzong reigned for only four or five years, but each accounted for two volumes and five volumes, which is unreasonable- if compared with the "Benji" of the "Patriarchs". Genghis Khan, the ancestor of the Yuan Dynasty, galloped across the country and his prestige was so great that he had only one volume in the History of the Yuan, and he had to "share" it with the ancestors below the tenth ancestor. Yuan Taizong (Wokoutai Khan) and Yuan Dingzong (Guiyu Khan) were even more "miserable", and they were actually co-authored by the two of them, and the treatment was not as good as that of Yuan Ningzong (1326-1332), who reigned for 53 days at the age of 7!

As a result, the famous ministers and generals in the early days of the Mongol Khanate were often omitted in the "History of the Yuan". For example, Genghis Khan had four outstanding generals, known as the "Four Masters", namely Borku, Muhuali, Borshu and Chilaowen. The four of them made great contributions to the rise of the Mongol Khanate, and as a result, in the "History of the Yuan", Chi Lao Wen had no biography at all, and Borku's biography only had the sentence "The matter taizu is the thousandth household", which is almost similar to no transmission.

In addition to the "four masters", Genghis Khan has another "four dogs". One of the brave generals, Le Contempt, had saved Genghis Khan's life many times. For this reason Genghis Khan said to him, "Before, when I was surrounded by the beggars of the Beggars, you came with your father to come to me; this time you sucked the bruises for me, so that I had a life; I was thirsty, and you gave up your life to find cheese to feed me, so that I could regain my energy." You have been kind to me three times, and I will never forget it. "However, in the "History of the Yuan", the scorn is also not passed on, and its treatment is the same as that of Tetsubetsu, who is quite popular because of the "Legend of the Archery Hero"...

If the "Four Masters" and "Four Dogs" are only subordinates, what is the situation of Genghis Khan's heirs in the "History of the Yuan"? Among the four sons born to Genghis Khan's wife, Wo Kuotai was the "Yuan Taizong", and TuoLei was the biological father of Kublai Khan, the ancestor of the Yuan Dynasty, and each of them had his own "Benji" and "Liechuan" in the "History of the Yuan". In contrast, the biography of the eldest son Shu chi is only more than 240 words (most of which is still describing the lineage of the khans of the Golden Horde), which is too brief, and the second son Chagatai is simply not passed on in the "History of the Yuan"! However, his fourth grandson, Bald, left his "name" in Qingshi because of a conspiracy rebellion during the reign of Emperor Wuzong of Yuan (reigned 1308-1311), which led to the "second son of Taizu Chagatai", which really made people cry and laugh.

Even the three western expeditions of the Mongol khanate that shook the entire Eurasian continent (to some extent, north Africa) at that time, the so-called "tens of thousands of miles of pacifying tribes at the beginning of the country", its offensive and defensive battles and post-war disposition, are not recorded in the "History of the Yuan", only scattered in the present era and the biography of the sporadic outline, dazed "like falling clouds". It is no wonder that Wei Yuan would lament that "the previous four dynasties of the ancestors (namely Genghis Khan, Wokoutai Khan, Guiyu Khan, and Möngke Khan) were lost to desolation." For this serious flaw, the compilers of the "Yuan History" are actually well aware. Otherwise, they would not have been busy defending themselves at the end of the Taizu Benji after acknowledging that Genghis Khan was "very famous and great": "Unfortunately, the historians at that time were not prepared, or they lost more than the record cloud."

Today, it seems that this "washing the ground" has completely failed. Is it really lost in the record? Not. In the early 14th century, Rasht of the Ilkhanate wrote the early history of the Mongol Khanate into the famous book "History Collection". If it is still possible to say that the Ilkhanate is far away in West Asia, and the "History Collection" is written in Persian and has not yet been introduced to Middle-earth, the "Yuan History" compilation team can not but miss the "Secret History of Mongolia" can not help but make people strangle.

Around the middle of the 13th century or earlier, the Secret History of Mongolia, the most important book of medieval Mongolian history and culture, was written in Uighur Mongolian. The book records the early history of Genghis Khan and his "golden family" ancestors, so it has been secretly stored in the Mongolian (Yuan) court since its completion, and it is strictly forbidden to spread it. However, one thing is certain, in the end the book must have fallen into the hands of the Ming Dynasty. Because with the passage of time, the original Mongolian version of this book has been scattered, and the surviving version is instead the Ming Dynasty's Chinese character version of the Mongolian textbook "Busy Huolun NuChate Cha'an ("The Secret History of Mongolia"),which takes the original Mongolian text as the main text and adopts Chinese character zhuyin to facilitate the Han people to learn the pronunciation of Mongolian (with a general Translation of Chinese after each verse). If Song Lian and Wang Yi and others knew about the existence of this book early on, the problem of "founding heroes and lost" criticized by people in the "History of the Yuan" may be able to alleviate a lot - of course, it is Zhu Zhongba who is responsible for haste and haste. In the future, the "General Catalogue of the Four Libraries" viewed the "History of the Yuan" as "not in the speed of the Tibetan affairs, but in the suddenness of the beginning".