Zhenjin

Zhenjin (1243-1286) was the second son of Kublai Khan and his chief empress Chabi, and the designated heir to the Yuan throne, though he died before he could occupy it. His position in the dynasty proved consequential nonetheless: every Yuan emperor after Kublai descended from him, beginning with his own son Temür Khan, so that Zhenjin stands as the genealogical hinge between the dynasty's founder and its later rulers.

Born as his grandfather's family was completing the conquest of China, Zhenjin received an upbringing unusual for a Chinggisid prince of the Toluid line. Kublai entrusted his education to Chinese scholars, and the prince was schooled in the Confucian classics as well as in Mongol tradition, with Buddhist teachers also among his instructors; his very name, meaning "true gold," is Chinese. In 1273 Kublai formally invested him as crown prince in the Chinese manner — a departure from the steppe custom of succession by kurultai that the other branches of Genghis Khan's family, in the Golden Horde, the Chagatai ulus, and the Ilkhanate, continued to observe. Zhenjin was also given nominal direction of the Central Secretariat, the empire's chief administrative organ.

At court he became the focus of the Confucian-minded officials' hopes. He was identified with opposition to the Central Asian finance minister Ahmad Fanakati, whose aggressive revenue policies dominated the government until Ahmad's assassination in 1282, and with the faction urging government along Chinese bureaucratic lines. The scholars around the prince looked forward to a reign in which their program would prevail.

It never came. In 1285 a censor's memorial suggested that the aging Kublai abdicate in favor of the crown prince; the proposal enraged the emperor, and although officials attempted to suppress the document, the affair came to light. Zhenjin, deeply implicated despite having no part in drafting it, fell ill amid the crisis and died early in 1286, at the age of about forty-two. Kublai, who outlived this son as he outlived much of his family, eventually settled the succession on Zhenjin's line: the prince's widow Kökejin preserved her sons' claims, and in 1294 her third son was enthroned as Temür Khan. Zhenjin was posthumously accorded imperial rank with the temple name Yuzong, an emperor by courtesy in the dynasty his descendants ruled until its fall in 1368.