As has been mentioned, Mongol rulers favored trade in all their dominions. In China too they eliminated state trade controls that had existed under the Song and Jin, so that internal and external trade reached unprecedented proportions. It seems, however, that China’s transcontinental trade with the Middle East and Europe was in the hands of non-Chinese (mainly Persians, Arabs, and Syrians). Silk, the Chinese export commodity par excellence, reached the Middle East and even Europe via the caravan routes across Asia; Chinese ceramics were also exported, chiefly into the Islamic countries. The Asian countries concentrated their European trade largely with the Italian republics (e.g., Genoa, Venice). To the Italians, trade with the East was so important that the Practica della mercatura, a handbook on foreign trade, included the description of trade routes to China.

Direct contacts between China and Europe were insignificant, however, even though China was part of an empire stretching from Dadu to southern Russia. Chinese historical and geographic literature had little to say about the European parts of the Mongol empire; in the official dynastic history of the Yuan, references to foreign countries are limited to countries such as Korea, Japan, Nam Viet, Myanmar (Burma), and Champa, with which China had carried on trade or tributary relations for centuries, and there are some scattered data on Russia. For some time a Russian guards regiment existed in Dadu, and some Russian soldiers were settled in military colonies in eastern Manchuria. As a whole, however, the civilizations of Europe and China did not meet, although contacts were made easy; Europe remained for the Chinese a vague region somewhere “beyond the Uighur.”

More important were the contributions from the Islamic countries of the Middle East, chiefly in the fields of science and technology. During the reign of Kublai Khan, Arab-Persian astronomy and astronomical instruments were introduced into China, and the Chinese astronomer Guo Shoujing operated an observatory. Nevertheless, the basic conceptions of astronomy remained Chinese, and no attempt was made to adopt the Middle Eastern mathematical and theoretical framework. Similarly, Middle Eastern physicians and surgeons practiced successfully in China, but Chinese medical theory remained uninfluenced by Western practices. In geography a Chinese world map of the 14th century incorporates Arabic geographical knowledge into the Chinese worldview. It shows not only China and the adjacent countries but also the Middle East, Europe, and Africa; the African continent is already given in its actual triangular shape. But this knowledge probably never spread beyond a limited circle of professional geographers, and it is certain that the Sino-centric world conception continued unchallenged under the Yuan dynasty; no curiosity of what lay beyond the Chinese borders was aroused. For the countries to be reached by sea (such as Southeast Asian countries and India), Chinese works of the Yuan offer only a poor extract from the Song work Zhufanzhi (c. 1225; “Description of the Barbarians”).

The situation was different regarding European knowledge of China. The Mongol advance into eastern Europe had given Europeans an acute awareness that actual people lived in regions hitherto shrouded in vague folkloric legends and myths. The Islamic world had similarly become a reality to Europeans with the first Crusades. It was, therefore, only natural that the Roman Catholic Church looked for potential converts among non-Muslim people of Asia. After Franciscan envoys brought back information on what was known as Cathay (northern China) in the mid-13th century, Pope Nicholas IV, a former Franciscan, dispatched a Franciscan mission to the court of the grand khan in Dadu (known in Europe as Cambaluc). The missionaries formed the nucleus of a Roman Catholic hierarchy on Chinese soil: Cambaluc became the seat of an archbishopric, and in 1323 a bishopric was established in Quanzhou. A renowned Franciscan missionary was Odoric of Pordenone, who traveled in China in the 1320s; his reports, together with letters written by other Roman Catholic missionaries, brought firsthand information on China to medieval Europe and today throw some light on the earliest missionary work in China. The Franciscan mission, which had to compete with the Nestorian clergy, was carried on more by the foreigners in China than by the Chinese themselves. The friars preached in Tatar (i.e., either Mongol or Turkic) and apparently won no Chinese converts. Significantly, no Chinese source mentions the activities of these missionaries; the Chinese probably regarded the Franciscans as one of the many strange, foreign sects, perhaps an outlandish variety of Buddhism. Archaeological evidence of the presence of Europeans and of Roman Catholicism has been discovered only in modern times; one example is from Yangzhou (in present-day Jiangsu), where the Latin inscription on a tombstone dated 1342 is a record of the death of an Italian lady whose name suggests some relation to a Venetian family engaged in trade with Asia.

Only the last direct contact between the papal see and Yuan China can be corroborated by both Western and Chinese sources. In 1336 a group of Alani Christians in Dadu sent a letter to Pope Benedict XII, who sent John of Marignola with a mission to the Mongol court. The mission reached the summer capital, Shangdu, in 1342. Chinese sources recorded the date of its audience as August 19, 1342. The country the envoys came from is given by the Chinese source as Fulang, a Chinese version of the name Farang (Franks), which was used in the Middle East as a general term for Europeans. The arrival of envoys from what must have seemed the end of the world so impressed the court that an artist was commissioned to paint a portrait of the battle horse that Marignola had brought as a present; this portrait was still extant in the 18th century but is now lost. Chinese literati wrote many eulogies on the portrait of the horse; the country of Fulang, however, did not interest the Chinese poets, and the whole embassy of Marignola is invariably described in terms that point to an unbroken Sino-centric attitude. Thus, the contact between the pontiff and the Mongol court remained without further consequence.

The end of Mongol rule over China and the strong nationalism of the Ming dynasty also doomed the Roman Catholic missions of the 14th century. The reports of the Venetian adventurer Marco Polo, on the other hand, inaugurated for Europe the era of discoveries and created a new vision of the world, with China as a part.

Although China as a separate cultural entity was realized only dimly and gradually in the European West, Chinese influences spread under the Yuan dynasty to other parts of Asia. Chinese medical treatises were translated into Persian, and Persian miniature painting in the 13th and 14th centuries shows many influences of Chinese art. Chinese-type administration and chancellery practices were adopted by various Mongol dominions in Central Asia and the Middle East. It has even been suggested that the invention of gunpowder and of printing in Europe was because of a sort of stimulus diffusion from China, although a direct influence from China cannot be proved.

Chinese civilization itself remained very much what it had been before the Yuan dynasty, with a certain cultural isolationism a distinctive element. Neither the self-image of the Chinese nor China’s position in the world changed very drastically. The change and challenges to which China was exposed under the Yuan, however, can explain many of the characteristic traits of Ming history.