Mongke’s brother Kublai is thirty-eight in 1253 when, ordered to attack Yunnan to outflank the Song, he leads one hundred thousand soldiers through eastern Tibet to Yunnan.

It is claimed that despite their military prowess and superior numbers, the Mongols could not breach the defenses of the Erhai valley, which was so suited to defense that even just a few defenders could hold out for years.

It is said that the Mongols had found a traitor who led them over the Cangshan mountains along a secret path, and only in this way were they able to penetrate and overrun the Bai defenders.

Thus ends five centuries of Bai independence.

Turning back a flank of the Song army, Kublai marches his troops through Laos to attack the Song southern flank.

The deadliest earthquake in history, in which as many as eight hundred and thirty thousand people may have died, occurs on January 23, 1556, with its epicenter in Shaanxi province, China.

The sweet potato first enters China in the 1560s from the New World of the Spanish Americas; it will come to replace rice as the major staple crop of the poor in China, and will carry a culturally negative association with poverty up until the Communist era.

The long reign of Chia-ching, eleventh emperor of the Ming dynasty, has added a degree of stability to the government but whose neglect of official duties ushered in an era of misrule.

Notoriously cruel, Jiajing has caused hundreds of officials who had had the temerity to disagree with him to be tortured, demoted, or killed.

He has spent much of his time and money, especially in his later years, patronizing Taoist alchemists in the hopes of finding an elixir to prolong his life, leaving the government in the hands of a few favorites who have allowed the situation on China's borders to deteriorate.

Mongol tribesmen under the leadership of Altan Khan (dies 1583) raid the northwest frontier and several times even besiege the Chinese capital at Peking.

Japanese pirates harass trade along the coast, and rebellions in the southern provinces have been frequent.

Emperor Jiajing dies in 1567—possibly due to mercury overdose—after forty-five years on the throne (the second longest reign in the Ming dynasty) and is succeeded by his son, the Longqing Emperor.

Though his long rule has given the dynasty an era of stability, Jiajing's neglect of his official duties results in the decline of the dynasty at the end of the sixteenth century.

His style of governing or for that matter the lack thereof will be emulated by his grandson, the Wanli emperor, later in the century.

...Wang Fuchen also rise in revolt in Guangxi and Shaanxi provinces.

The rebels, at the peak of their fortunes, had managed to extend their control as far north as the Yangtze River but by 1676 the tide has turned in favor of the Qing forces, as Wang Fuchen surrenders after a three-year long stalemate with the imperials, while ...

Another Muslim uprising develops in the Wei Valley in Shensi in 1862.

The general cause of the trouble is the same as in Yunnan, but the Taiping advance to Shensi has stimulated the Muslims into rebellion.

There are many independent Muslim leaders in Shensi and Kansu, but they have neither a common headquarters nor unified policy, and there are no all-out revolutionaries.

Pacification of rebellious Shensi and Kansu is delayed because the Imperial camp is preoccupied with the Taiping and the Nien and cannot afford the expenditure needed for an expedition to the remote border provinces.

In 1866, Zuo Zontang is made governor-general of Shensi and Kansu to quell the Muslim rebels there with part of the Huai Army.

Encouraged by the Nien invading Shensi at the end of 1866, the core of the rebel troops return from Kansu to Shensi, and sporadic clashes continue in the two provinces.

Zuo Zongtang slowly and systematically defeats the Muslim rebels in Shensi and ..