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A child emperor and his parrot
Surrender at Hangzhou
When the Mongols closed in on the Song capital of Hangzhou, the generals loaded boats with jewels and fled, abandoning even their own families and taking two half-brothers of the five-year-old emperor with them. The Dowager Empress Xie was left in charge. She offered everything if the emperor could stay on as a mere king, but the Mongol commander Bayan demanded total surrender, and she gave it, bowing toward Beijing. The city was not looted.
The Chained Fleet
The fleet crowned one of the half-brothers emperor, and when he was accidentally spilled into the ocean and fished out dead, it crowned another. On an island farther south they started building a palace, then chained their ships together across the harbor entrance with the palace boat in the middle. The Mongols took the land around them, shot down at the ships from the highlands, and cut off fresh wood and water, so the crews could not boil rice and drank seawater.
The Last Emperor
The new emperor, Bing, had just turned seven, and the only thing he had left was his pet parrot. The prime minister refused every offer of surrender, threw his own wife and children into the water, and jumped in holding the boy. The parrot's cage came undone in the commotion, and the bird fell into the water too.
How did the Mongols win the sea battle?
The final battle was fought at Yamen, off the Pearl River delta, in March 1279. The Yuan fleet was commanded by Zhang Hongfan, a Han Chinese general serving Kublai Khan. Chaining the Song ships together turned the fleet into one fixed target that could neither maneuver nor retreat. The Yuan side had also cut off the fleet's water and wood before the attack.
What became of the surrendered Song emperor?
The child emperor who surrendered at Hangzhou was Emperor Gong. The Mongols took him north to their capital, where he received a noble title. In 1288 he was sent to Tibet to become a Buddhist monk. He died in 1323.
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