Exhibitions: The Worldly Warrior

National Palace Museum, Taipei
Empire builder The Great Khan left a legacy of conquest but also culture

A middle kingdom flexing its muscles, its capital a magnet for wealth, its growing power both fascinating and unnerving to foreigners. For anyone who thinks that China's ascendancy is a relatively recent phenomenon, a trip back to the 13th century reign of Kublai Khan provides a lesson in the cyclical nature of history and the recurrent themes of Asian politics.

Today, the Great Khan grandson of the famed marauder Genghis has become a sort of byword for imperial shock and awe. His empire was the largest the world has seen, a product of relentless conquest. By the time of his death in 1294, the Yuan dynasty he founded had expanded China's borders to the fringes of Siberia and the jungles of Indochina. Kublai's new capital at Dadu modern-day Beijing was the seat of an ambitious, powerful regime seen by some scholars as an early forerunner of the modern Chinese state.

Yet, as a sprawling new exhibition at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art shows, Kublai's reign was not all pillaging and bloodshed. James Watt, the Hong Kong born curator of "The World of Khubilai Khan: Chinese Art in the Yuan Dynasty," points to the great revitalization of Chinese culture under Kublai's watch. "China was unified for the first time in more than 400 years," says Watt. "There was an immense amount of turmoil, but it led to an influx of other peoples and cultures." Over time, these melded together in a fascinatingly cosmopolitan milieu.

Watt says the exhibit lived in his mind for some 15 years. It is a meticulous undertaking, pulling in items from collections in seven countries, including many exhibits from smaller regional museums in China. The objects conjure up a heady realm of warlike nobles and scholarly monks, and reinforce an appealing notion of China as a place at the crossroads of myriad movements of not only people and history but also art.

While there was a distinctive Mongol aesthetic characterized by an emphasis on the use of gold and images rendered with what Watt refers to as "a kind of primeval vitality" pluralism is the chief feature of art from the Yuan period. Kublai lived the entirety of his life in what is now China. But his court was staffed not only by Han Chinese and Mongols, but also had Uighurs and nobles from other Central Asian peoples. Diverse communities took root. Muslims, for instance, were not uncommon in most parts of China, as attested by one of the exhibits: a dignitary's headstone written in both Chinese and Arabic. Tamil Hindu traders lived in the southern port city Quanzhou on display is a stone relief of an elephant that was once attached to their temple. In the western reaches of the empire, communities of craftsmen from the Persian-speaking cities of Central Asia injected what Watt calls a "highly Iranized" influence into Chinese culture, its legacy surviving in everything from carpet design to the blue tint now ubiquitous in Chinese porcelain.

The Yuan dynasty also ushered in a revival of Buddhism, which had been subdued by preceding dynasties, and in effect made it the state-sanctioned religion. It's known that Kublai's consort, Chabi, practiced an esoteric, Tibetan strain, and the exhibition brims with icons of multilimbed deities and tapestries that look far more Himalayan than Chinese. But other beliefs flourished too. Manichaeism, which had been chased out of the Middle East and Europe, found its way east along the Silk Road. One of the exhibit's most beguiling works is a portrait of Jesus Christ as a Manichaean prophet, and since the adherents of this transplanted sect knew only the conventions of their adopted home, he is depicted entirely in Buddhist style and garb.

A blackened, ornate cross excavated near Hohhot belonged to another group deemed heretical in the West: the Nestorian Christians. The presence of this community in Asia led to excited tales throughout medieval Europe of the existence of Prester John, a fabled Christian king from the East who would rescue European Christendom at the time of its greatest perils. But the real Nestorians in China counted some of Kublai's more influential Turkic nobles in their ranks. They had little interest in redeeming the lands that had once spurned their faith, preferring to live as part of the Mongol elite. An ink painting of bamboo stems, done by a prominent Mongol courtier, would be unremarkable if it wasn't for a congratulatory poem written atop it by a friend of the artist. It is signed "Yahu," a Sinification of the Christian name Jacob.

The scale of ethnic and religious diversity under Kublai is compelling on its own, but becomes even more important when considering the impact the Yuan dynasty had on Chinese civilization. Watt says the majority of stories still told in Peking opera stem from Yuan folklore, and lasting traditions of pottery, weaving and ink painting coalesced around this time. "For the average Chinese viewer, most of the objects here would seem so familiar," says Watt. "It shows how strong the Yuan period was on the rest of Chinese history."

Modern tales date China's opening up from the economic reforms of the 1980s, yet in some senses it took place during a far earlier era. Eight hundred years ago, Yuan China was not afraid of foreign ideas and influences, but the narrative of that cosmopolitanism eventually lost ground to another touting the virtues of a single culture and centralized rule. Kublai is remembered far more for his expansionist warmongering and his statecraft than the fact that he presided over a flowering of multicultural, multiethnic art and thought. He needs to be viewed afresh.

Standing alone in a section of the gallery is a rare stone pillar from Shangdu, the Great Khan's summer home. It depicts a serpentine dragon, a motif the dilettante would identify as Chinese. Not so, says Watt. The dragon rests on a blanket of flowers imagery that was originally Central Asian. As is often the case, it's what recedes to the background that tells the better story.