Toghon Temür

The last Yuan emperor to rule from China, Toghon Temür (1320-1370) reigned from 1333 until the dynasty's expulsion in 1368, presiding over the collapse of Mongol power in East Asia a century and a half after his ancestor Genghis Khan had united the steppe. He was a descendant of Kublai Khan in the Toluid line — the branch of the Chinggisid family that had held China while its cousins ruled the Golden Horde, the Chagatai ulus, and, until its recent disintegration, the Ilkhanate in Persia.

His path to the throne ran through the murderous succession politics of the late Yuan court. A son of the emperor Khoshila, who died suddenly in 1329 amid a disputed succession, the boy was exiled first to an island off Korea and then to Guangxi in the far south. After the deaths of his uncle Tugh Temür and his own younger brother, court factions enthroned him in 1333 at the age of thirteen. Real power lay for years with chancellors: first the conservative Bayan of the Merkit, who excluded Chinese from office and dominated the government until his nephew Toqto'a engineered his dismissal in 1340, and then Toqto'a himself, who restored the examination system and compiled the official histories of the Liao, Jin, and Song dynasties.

The dynasty's foundations were eroding. Repeated Yellow River floods, famine, epidemic disease, and the inflation of the paper currency bred desperation, and the vast river-rechanneling project of 1351, though an engineering success, concentrated discontented laborers whose risings fed the Red Turban rebellions. Toqto'a's dismissal in 1354, while leading the campaign against the rebels, removed the court's most capable figure. In the following decade the emperor withdrew increasingly from government, the court split between factions aligned with the empress and the crown prince, and regional commanders fought one another while rebel states grew in the south.

Zhu Yuanzhang, the strongest of the rebel leaders, proclaimed the Ming dynasty in 1368 and sent his armies north. Toghon Temür abandoned the capital of Dadu without a battle that year, withdrawing first to Shangdu and then onto the Mongolian steppe, where he died at Yingchang in 1370. His successors maintained the Northern Yuan in Mongolia, still claiming the Chinggisid imperial title long after China itself was lost.