Empire Like the Wind: An Alternative History of the Yuan Dynasty

Author: Mei Yi
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-10-01
Features: We are not unfamiliar with the history of the Tang, Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties; however, how much do we know about the Yuan Dynasty? The complex and tangled threads, the obscure and difficult-to-understand text, the unmemorable names, combined with the confusion of translations, make reading about it truly like being in a fog, setting a significant obstacle to understanding Yuan history. Fortunately, there is Mei Yi, a guardian of history, who sifts through and organizes the vast amount of materials, uncovers the past, restores history, and writes a clear and vivid history of the Yuan Dynasty, filling a gap in current historical reading.
The past is like the wind. The glorious Yuan Empire was neither a meteor nor a fleeting flower, nor a regret. That colossal entity spanning three continents was brief but extremely magnificent. Within its 1.2 million square kilometers, the Yuan Empire witnessed countless stories and dazzling human lives over a hundred years: the empire's frenzied overseas expansion, the power struggles within the court, the difficult survival of Northern Han people in the cracks, and the independent and immortal creations of intellectuals in the literary and artistic circles. If we temporarily "forget" the cruelty and destructiveness of the Mongol Yuan's eastward and westward conquests, the boundless creativity, expansionary power, competitiveness, and enterprising spirit that burst forth from that era still deserve admiration from later generations.