Strategies of survival: Uyghur elites in Yuan and early-Ming China

An important component of the Mongol empire that emerged after 1206 were the personnel recruited from Central and West Asia who submitted to or were conquered by the Mongols. These men (known in Mongol China as “ semuren”) served as advisors and tutors to the Mongol elites, and as administrators and technicians in the sedentary societies conquered by the Mongols, and they constituted a distinctive group in Yuan China. Considerable scholarship has been devoted to prominent individual semuren, but few studies have attempted to study the semuren diachronically, as a class across the entire Yuan dynasty. This dissertation addresses this lacunae; it examines one prominent family of semuren, the Uyghur Xie family, from the time they entered China in the early 13 th century through the first decades of the Ming dynasty.; The Xie family were aristocratic elites in their homeland, and they successfully integrated first into the Mongol political hierarchy, and eventually also into southeast China as social elites. Their story provides a window onto the strategies that many semuren used to retain their identities as political and social elites after their dispersal from their homelands by the Mongols. A wide variety of sources (official biographies, entries in gazetteers, essays and poems written in their honor by semuren and Chinese contemporaries, and materials written by Xie family members themselves) are used to study the Xie family's strategies of survival as elites. The sources reveal members of the Xie family used their cultural capital as multi-literate, educated persons to integrate into the Mongol realm as political elites. Within three generations, Xie family members were also participating in Chinese literati activities, and had become accepted as members of the social elite in a community in southeast China. By the end of the Yuan period, they had accrued substantial social and cultural capital, and were able to survive the fall of the Yuan. Moreover, one branch of the family remained in southeast China, where they served in the new Ming government.