Oleksandr Zholud’s Reviews > Defending Heaven: China's Mongol Wars, 1209-1370 > Status Update

The year 1338 saw probably the first peasant rising in the Red Turbans’ name, in Yangzhou. ... At first glance the battle cry used by the society in Hebei in this early period seems strange as it was made in the name of the old Song Dynasty, and Hebei had not been under the control of the Song since 1125.

cancellation of the examination system, presumably on the basis that it was too expensive to maintain, was viewed as a very major step towards cultural genocide by the Yuan’s Chinese subjects and also brought a great deal of violent opposition to the chancellor’s rule from Mongols with a vested interest in the system.

the majority of the men of the northern [Yuan] army were now Han Chinese involved in what was now effectively a Chinese civil war. As if to add a sardonic twist to this situation, the Song historian Xu Maguang tells us of Mongol defectors fighting in the front ranks of the Song army. When these men were captured by the Yuan armies they were simply reincorporated into the army of the north.

Any advantage the defenders held disappeared, however, in early 1273 with the introduction by the Mongols of the huihuipao or counterweight trebuchet to the siege.
The evidence for the revolutionary impact of the ‘new’ super-weapon is based less on documentary evidence of its construction and more on the way it completely changed the campaign for Xiangyang.

in 1261 when the Lu clan had felt threatened by the Liu clan, another military household, he had denounced General Liu Zheng for misuse of funds. Liu Zheng was undoubtedly innocent of the groundless charges but, expecting no justice, he had fled to the court of Qubilai with his entire army.
He was welcomed, they realised that he knew of the weaknesses of the Song defence system than they could ever hope to discover.

Certain ‘top-secret’ weapons were never to be produced by civilians but technology leaks were impossible to control, and by the mid-1250s the Mongols had even obtained winch-crossbows, capable of firing arrows in a near-constant stream, and naphtha-throwing trebuchets.

The leaking of technology to the enemy was not surprising, given that maintaining the vast supplies required civilian artisans who, although technically forbidden to manufacture weapons, were enlisted in the war effort since imperial workshops alone could not possibly meet the demand.

The trebuchet had a long lineage in China before the Song, but the huopao, or fire-bomb catapult, was a Song innovation. These devices had done enormous damage to the Jin armies at the siege of Kaifeng in 1126, and throughout the Song dynasty the imperial ordinance industry mass-produced them. Jingzhou was just one of the many factory towns, and it produced two thousand trebuchets per month between 1253 and 1258

In 1262 Li Tan offered Shandong to the Song. He had certainly overextended himself and when Qubilai, largely because of his problems in Mongolia, had declared himself emperor of China, Li Tan had challenged the claim, no doubt hoping for a popular uprising in his name. It never came and so he turned quickly to the Song as Qubilai dispatched armies to destroy the upstart.