Transformations of Post-Mongol East Asia
The political transformation of East Asia was prompted first and foremost by the retreat of the Mongol world. Over the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Mongol forces had swept across Eurasia, destroying old polities but also transforming the continent by opening direct lines of communication across a vast swath of territory.
In particular, the Mongol unification had connected the agrarian core regions that surrounded the steppe, bringing to the Sinic world a heretofore unseen level of cultural interaction with western and central Asia. The constant exchange of people, particularly expert administrative specialists, had been a characteristic feature of Mongol statecraft. Prominent within this mobile class of experts were all manner of religious specialists: Tibetan lamas, Buddhist monks, Nestorian Christians and Daoist priests, among many others. The confessional cosmopolitanism of the Yuan (1271-1368), the key Mongol state in East Asia, allowed for the flow of religious texts, bringing new ideas and cosmologies, such as central Asian Manichaeism, into wider circulation.1The Mongol retreat generated a rise of a new era of assertive states in East Asia. The most important of these was the Ming (1368-1644), which during the late fourteenth century reasserted China's traditional status as the dominant power on the continent. During the decades that followed neighbouring states negotiated the shift from a waning Mongol order and a rising Chinese hegemony. After years of equivocation, a coup within the Koryo (918-1392) court decisively pulled Korea out of the Mongol orbit and into a Chinese political model (the subsequent Choson state (1392-1897) would nevertheless retain ties with its northern neighbours and with the remaining Yuan court). In Japan, the Kamakura (1192-1333) and Ashikaga (1338-1573) shogunates had avoided the trauma of direct conquest, but had nevertheless been deeply influenced by events on the continent, including the strains of preparing for a Mongol assault that never materialised in full force. Emerging in the late sixteenth century from a period of prolonged internal conflict, the unified Tokugawa shogunate (1600-1868) would follow Choson Korea in adopting many political and cultural influences from the continent, particularly a strong bureaucratic state. [745]