Battle of Yamen

The Battle of Yamen, fought on 19 March 1279 in a bay near today's Jiangmen in Guangdong, was the final defeat of the Song dynasty. A fleet of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty destroyed the last Song navy, and the boy emperor Zhao Bing drowned when his chief minister leapt into the sea with him. The battle ended the Mongol conquest of the Song and left Kublai Khan ruler of all China.

The Southern Song, founded after the Jingkang incident, was by then losing its long war against the Yuan. In 1276 the court fled its capital, Lin'an (Hangzhou), leaving Emperor Gong to be captured. Loyalists made his elder brother, Zhao Shi, emperor. When Fuzhou fell in 1277 the court moved to Quanzhou, where the Grand General Zhang Shijie hoped to obtain ships. The Muslim merchant Pu Shougeng refused, so Zhang seized his property and fled with the court in commandeered vessels. Pu then killed members of the imperial clan and many officials in the city and went over to the Yuan, strengthening their navy.

The Song could no longer face the Yuan in open battle, so Zhang Shijie built a large fleet to keep the court moving. On the way to Guangdong, Zhao Shi's ship capsized in a storm; he survived but fell ill, and later died, according to one tradition at Mui Wo on Lantau Island. His six-year-old brother, Zhao Bing, succeeded him, and Zhang took the new emperor to Yamen. In 1278 the loyalist Wen Tianxiang was captured, ending Song resistance on land in the area.

In 1279 the Yuan commander Zhang Hongfan, reinforced by Li Heng, attacked. According to one estimate the Song side numbered around 200,000 people with more than 1,000 ships, but most were courtiers, servants and other non-combatants; the Yuan had perhaps 20,000 soldiers and more than 50 warships. Zhang Shijie refused advice to secure the mouth of the bay as a line of retreat, and burned the buildings and forts on shore so that his men could not desert. He chained his ships together in a long line, with the emperor's vessel at the centre. Yuan fire ships failed because the Song hulls had been coated with fire-resistant mud, so the Yuan blockaded the bay and cut the Song off from fresh water and firewood on land. The Song crews were soon reduced to dry food and seawater, and many fell sick. Zhang Hongfan, who held Zhang Shijie's nephew, called on him three times to surrender, without success.

Zhang Hongfan chose not to use cannon, fearing they would break the chains and let the Song ships escape. He split his fleet into four groups. An attack from the north was beaten off. The Yuan then played festive music, and the Song, believing their enemies were feasting, relaxed. At noon Zhang Hongfan launched a frontal assault with soldiers hidden under cloth. Caught unprepared, the weakened Song crews were overwhelmed in close fighting, and the chained ships could neither help one another nor flee. Zhang Shijie cut about a dozen ships free and broke out. In the centre, the minister Lu Xiufu, seeing no escape, jumped into the sea with Zhao Bing, and both drowned. Many officials and court women followed them.

The History of Song records that thousands of bodies rose to the surface in the following days. Zhang Shijie was thought to have drowned in a storm soon afterwards, though no trace of his fleet was found. With the last emperor dead, the Song dynasty was finished. The Yuan ruled China for 97 years until the Ming dynasty was founded by the Hongwu Emperor. Temples near the site honour Wen Tianxiang, Lu Xiufu and Zhang Shijie, a memorial to Zhao Bing was built near Shekou in Shenzhen in the 1980s, and a museum complex now stands east of the battlefield.

Our 1279 map, drawn for the year of the battle, shows the Yuan realm covering all of China.