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"Crafting the Mongol Sovereign: Merging the Qa’an and Huangdi in the Yuan (1271-1368) Court"
Qubilai Qa’an (1215–1294), sovereign of the splintering Mongol Empire, declared the beginning of the Yuan (1271–1368) dynasty in 1271, thereby making himself the first Mongol emperor (huangdi 皇帝) of the conquered territories in contemporary China. Shortly before, in 1266, Qubilai had begun to build a new capital, Dadu (contemporary Beijing). My dissertation explores the ways in which Mongol sovereigns used performances of gender and reconfigurations of imperial space to institutionalize Mongol ontologies of kingship, those of the qa’an, within the institutions of the huangdi that they inherited from the Jurchen-founded Jin (1115–1234) and Song (960–1279) empires. I argue that the reconstruction of the institution of the huangdi took place through reconfigurations of gendered space in the capital Dadu and through imperial women’s visibility at the Yuan and Korean courts, to which Mongol princesses were sent to marry Korean kings. The spatial reconfigurations of the emperor’s and his family’s palaces and the newfound visibility and power of imperial women at court demonstrate that Qubilai interpreted his role as emperor through the masculinity of the qa’an, a sovereign role that had different gender expectations from those of the huangdi. This study illuminates that the construction of ethnicity, in this case “Mongol,” was a process that occurred in tandem with gender construction. The project further challenges the binary of “Sinicized-not Sinicized.” Instead, I consider the positions of Mongol imperial life and the urban planning of Dadu within ongoing processes of interaction and exchange across Eurasia.
Andrea Valedon-Trapote is a Ph.D. Candidate in History.
