Dayan Khan as a Yuan Emperor The Political Legitimacy in 15th Century Mongolia
OKADA Hidehiro
One of the basic assumptions of the traditional Chinese historiography is that the Mongol Yiian Dynasty came to an end upon its loss of China in 1368, when its Heavenly Mandate supposedly passed to the Chinese Ming Dynasty. Nothing could be more wrong, for the Qubilaid Mongols never gave up their dynastie style Dai on ýZŤt , along with their claim of political legitimacy inherent in it, for the next two centuries and a half before they became subjects of the Manchu Ch'ing emperors.
Still modern Chinese historians, who for ideological reasons cling to the traditional concept of the political legitimacy by dynastic succession that supposedly defines what China is, labor hard to deny the fact that the Mongols in the post-imperial period never accepted the Ming Dynasty as a legitimate successor to their empire.
In 1991 Ts'ai Mei-piao ШШШ , Director of the Chinese Association for the Study of Mongolian History ^ЩШ'ЕзУ^'ЙШЩ-Ж , read a paper titled "The Mongols of the Ming period and the dynastic style Ta-yiian Щ^^У^^ЬУосШШ" at the autumn meeting of the Japan Association for Mongolian Studies В^^>^*Д/1РИ1' held in Kyoto. In that paper he contended that the Mongols had ceased to use their dynastic style Ta-yiian after the violent death of Toquz Temiir Usqal Khan ^ТсШЙ'й'&ФЙтКМ in 1388. Ts'ai reasoned that: a dynasty of conquest needs its Chinese dynastic style only when it has China under its control; a Chinese dynastic style is used only coupled with Chinese reign styles ^Ш \ neither of those two conditions existed for the Mongols in the late fourteenth century and later; hence they must have given up their dynastic style after 1388, when they had no use for it any longer, along with their imperial pretensions.
Contrary to Ts'ai' s contention, three instances of the Mongol use of their Chinese dynastic and reign styles after 1388 crop up in contemporary Korean and Chinese records.
First, The Korean Veritable Records ШШЖШ report under the year 1442 that a letter of a Mongol khan arrived on the Korean border, whose text in Mongolian read: "When our grand ancestor Chinggis Khan governed all the eight directions, and when our ancestor [Qubilai] Sechen Khan was on the throne, there was none under heaven who would not obey their commands. Korea among others was friendlier with us than any other nation, being close as true brothers might be. As the age declined, we fell into disorder, abandoned our cities and retreated to the north. That was already many years ago. Now we ourself have succeeded to the mandate of our ancestors and ascended the throne since ten years ago. Should we fail to exchange embassies to
