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Crushed by a Mountain. Such indifference was of no avail when the mighty Mongol hordes, headed by Kubla Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, arrived at the gates of fragrant Hangchou. Before his fierce tribesmen the southern capital fell—crushed, one Chinese historian wrote, as "the Sacred Mountain T'ai would crush an egg." What followed was a galling 100-year reign by the Mongol foreigners.
Kubla Khan ruled his far-flung empire from Korea to Hungary, using a pony express of 200,000 horses to maintain rapid communication, from his palace in Peking (which Marco Polo described with its "walls covered with gold and silver") or his pleasure-domed summer palace, with its 16-square-mile enclosed park at Shangtu (the Xanadu of Coleridge's famed verses). But because the Mongol Khans decreed that the elite Confucian scholars —who, under the Sung Dynasty, had ranked just below royalty—should be reduced to a category one degree above beggars, few Chinese scholars showed up in Peking to answer Kubla Khan's invitation to join his court.
This boycott opened the way for a rise to fame of a naturalized Chinese named Kao K'o-kung, whose ancestors came Lorn Central Asia. He joined the Khan's court, and rose to become his Minister of Justice. Endowed with extraordinary ability as a painter, he first patterned his style on the impressionist manner of Mi, later emulated the landscapes of loth century Painter Tung Yuan, finally retired to savor the intellectual climate of Hangchow. His Mist in Wooded Mountains shows that he could combine these earlier influences into a work that became uniquely his own. The drama is in the landscape itself, in the mountains and solid trees seen emerging through the fog. But 500 years later it was the small, indistinct figures that caught the eye of Ch'ing (Manchu) Emperor Ch'ien-lung, caused him to write his appreciation at the top of the scroll: "Mountain and villages, dimly seen through rain and clouds; the fisherman on his way home feels the weight [of rain] on his clothes."
Ground Rubies & Nutmegs. The national uprising that finally drove the Mongol troops north of the Great Wall and installed a young peasant on the throne as the first Ming Emperor in 1368 rapidly produced an epicurean age of elegance, not unlike that which marked the courts of Europe in the 18th century. The great pottery works of the Sung emperors were revived and expanded. For Emperor Hsuan-te's Dragon Soup Bowl, craftsmen ground rubies to powder to achieve richness of color; court ladies dipped their fingers into exquisite candy dishes for the cardamoms and nutmegs that served as breath sweeteners. Jade was in such demand that by the time of the Manchus there were thousands of workmen carving and polishing objects, many so precious that they were used only for display.