The Mongol Cultural Legacy in East and Central Asia: The Early Ming and Timurid Courts (original) (raw)
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Between about 1300 and 1500, the most inclusive and detailed representations of the Eurasian oikoumene-the known, inhabited, and inhabitable parts of the world 2-were shaped by migrating worldviews based on knowledge structures that had been created, aggregated, and disseminated over many centuries. These structures emerged in the contexts of trade, war, religious proselytism, forced diasporas, and nomadism, and they involved many civilizations and peoples. The expansion of the Mongols in thirteenth-and fourteenth-century Eurasia and the foundation of the Mongol-Chinese Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) were two fundamental events in these shifts and developments. In the course of the fifteenth century, when the Mongol Empire had already broken up and a new dynasty, the Ming, was ruling in China, this accumulation of knowledge allowed the design of worldviews that would in turn play a crucial role in the coming age of maritime expansion in Europe and Asia. The fracturing and subsequent disappearance of the Mongol Empire and its cultural and administrative infrastructures have obscured its cultural dimensions and legacy, as have historiographies, both European and Asian, which since the nineteenth century have favored histories shaped by national political contexts. The problem is complex, especially if we consider the high rate of loss of the libraries, archives, and material cultures of the Mongol-Chinese Yuan dynasty, often treated as a Cinderella (as Morris Rossabi puts it), a stepsister in the study of China, when compared to the Song (960-1279) and Ming (1368-1644) dynasties. 3 In order to highlight one forgotten legacy of the Mongol Empire, this essay develops a comparative cultural study of Fra Mauro's mappa mundi, drawn in Venice c. 1450, with text in the Venetian vernacular (fig. 1), and the "Map of the Lands in a Single Extension and of the Capitals of the Kingdoms of the Past Dynasties" (混一疆理歷代國都之圖 Honil Gangni Yeokdae Gukdo Ji Do) 4 , currently held at the Ryukoku University in Kyoto (hereafter Ryukoku Gangnido). 5 266 ANGELO CATTANEO This was designed in Korea around 1480 6 but based on a lost prototype made in 1402, ten years after the foundation of the Joseon dynasty (1392-1910) (fig. 2). It is the oldest surviving East Asian map to represent not only Eastern Asia but also the Caspian region, Persia, the Arabian peninsula, Europe, and Africa. This significant expansion of geographical knowledge in East Asia was made possible by Islamic scholars who reached Khanbaliq (also known as Dadu 大都, the capital of the Mongol Empire established by Khubilai Khan around 1272) after the conquest of Persia and fall of Baghdad, the capital of the caliphate, in 1258. 7
Administering Art, History, and Science in the Mongol Empire: Rashid al-Din and Bolad Chengxiang
Berlekamp, Persis, Vivienne Lo, and Yidan Wang. “Administering Art, History, and Science in the Mongol Empire: Rashid al-Din and Bolad Chengxiang.” In Pearls on a String: Art in the Age of Great Islamic Empires, ed. Amy Landau, 53-85. (Baltimore and Seattle: Walters Art Museum and Washington University Press, 2015).
Culture and arts of the Yuan Empire in XIII-XIV centuries
2014
In XIII-XIV centuries, Emperor Kublai Khan of the Yuan Empire provided special attention to artists, about whose work their enlightened contemporaries talk as about a "revolution" in the art of the time. In this period, culture including pictorial skill as such had not disappeared; it rather turned into a different quality, as it happened with the culture of Yuan period as a whole. The time of Mongol domination was not accompanied by a weakening of the high spiritual tension in Chinese culture: when else, as not in a period of unrest, wars and external pressure a culture suffers not only a shock, but the ultimate spiritual tension? It's more accurate to say that the Mongol time a new system of priorities turned up. For example, the Yuan period easel painting undergoing changes in the level of concentration is often really inferior to its predecessor - Sung painting, as she sometimes is inferior in this respect to its contemporary - Buddhist bronze plastic, that perhaps...