Rethinking the Yuan “Chinese” Imperial City: Building Ordo Spatial Logic into the Mongol Great Capital by Andrea Valedón-Trapote

Current scholarship describes the layout and architecture of the Yuan dynasty’s (1279-1368) capital Dadu (contemporary Beijing) as a “Chinese” city. However, archaeological remains and textual descriptions of the “Great Capital” Dadu indicate that in comparison to previous and contemporaneous capitals constructed above and below the Great Wall, Khubilai Khan (r. 1260-1294) built a specifically Mongol gendered logic of tent cities (ordo) into the Yuan palatial complex. Moreover, the layout of Dadu aligned more closely with the spatial logic of cities in Mongolia and northeastern Asia than with urban traditions of “Chinese” capitals, to which Dadu is often compared. I assert that in order to understand the logic of Dadu, we must look more towards the urban spaces and places that Mongols had been building and engaging with in the steppe.

Gateways of Charity: Mongol Sacred Kingship in Fourteenth Century Iran by Golriz Farshi

This paper explores charitable complexes built by Mongol Khans to historicize sacred kingship in the thirteenth and fourteenth century Iran. As new converts to Islam, the Mongol Khans deployed divine symbols and rituals to lay claim on their ancestral lineage and the inherited mantel of the Islamic Caliphate. This project was not limited to the discursive realm but was embodied in the charitable cities the Khans endowed. These mausoleum-centered endowed charitable city-cum-sovereign was the material representations of the Khan’s sacred kingship. Inspired by Buddhist temples and Sufi shrines dotting the landscape of the greater Mongol Empire, endowed cities came to define sovereign piety and authority, linking imperial legitimacy to the circulation of goods and people around the sacred body of the Khan. I examine and reconstruct the physical space of these cities from their extant endowment deeds, ruins and remains to read the public performance of sacred kingship and the crafting of a new body politic. In specific, I explore endowed charitable cites built in or around Tabriz. I argue that these building projects, referred to as ‘gateways of charity,’ were the material representation of Mongol Islam that illuminated the confessional politics of shrine-centered kingship popularized in this period.