Gegeen Khan

Shidebala, who reigned as Gegeen Khan and bears the temple name Yingzong, was the youngest man to take the Yuan throne and the first of the dynasty's emperors to die by assassination. Born in 1302 (some sources give 1303), he was the son of Ayurbarwada, Buyantu Khan, and owed his designation as heir to his father's breach of the pact with the line of Külüg Khan, whose sons were passed over. He became emperor in 1320, in his late teens.

The opening years of the reign belonged to others. His grandmother, the grand empress dowager Dagi, and her long-standing ally, the minister Temüder, dominated the court, continuing the patronage politics and corruption that had marked the previous reign. Shidebala, educated in the Confucian manner like his father, chafed under the arrangement but could do little while the two lived. Both died in 1322, and the young emperor moved at once to govern in his own right, appointing as grand councillor Baiju, a descendant of Muqali of the Jalayir, one of Genghis Khan's greatest commanders.

With Baiju, Gegeen Khan pursued a reform program in the Confucian idiom: retrenchment of court expenditure, employment of scholar-officials, and posthumous proceedings against Temüder, whose titles were revoked and whose clique was investigated. In 1323 the government promulgated the Da Yuan Tong Zhi, a major compilation of the dynasty's statutes and precedents. The reforms threatened the men who had flourished under the old dispensation, above all Temüder's associates and adoptive kin, who faced ruin as the investigations widened.

Their answer was murder. In the ninth month of 1323, as the emperor traveled south from the summer capital Shangdu toward Dadu, conspirators led by the censor Tegshi, Temüder's adopted son, struck the imperial camp at a place called Nanpo. Baiju was killed first, and Shidebala was assassinated in his tent. He was twenty or twenty-one and left no heir in a position to succeed. The conspirators had arranged the succession in advance, sending word to Yesün Temür, prince of Jin, who held the old homeland command in Mongolia; he took the throne and shortly afterward executed the assassins. The Nanpo coup ended the Yuan dynasty's brief experiment in reformist government and opened a period of recurring succession violence.