Around 40 episodes ago, we discussed Chinggis Khan fighting for control of the Mongolian steppe. Now, some 90 years later in our chronology, we will discuss his grandson sending Mongol armies across the sea to lands beyond Chinggis’ imagination. While Japan, Vietnam and Burma were all subjects of invasions towards the end of Kublai Khan’s life, all of these were regions relatively close to Yuan China, directly bordering its subject territories. Our discussion today focuses on a much less obvious target: the island of Java in modern Indonesia. The expedition against Java was one of the last military campaigns ordered by Kublai in his long life, and like many of these later invasions, cost the Yuan heavily in men and resources for little gain. I’m your host David, and this is Kings and Generals: Ages of Conquest.   In the 13th century, Eastern Java and parts of the neighbouring islands of Sumatra and Borneo came under the influence of the Kingdom of Tumapel, named for the city of the same name on the island of Java- or atleast it was the same name until the reign of King Jaya Wisnuhardhana, who changed it to Singhasari. You’ll find this state therefore referred either as the Kingdom of Tumapel, or Singahsari.The Tumapel kings were not absolute rulers, with much of their kingdom made up of loosely controlled vassal kings and chiefs. Rather, their significance for our purposes came from their place on a  lucrative position along the maritime trade routes going through Indonesia and across the southern coastline of the Eurasian landmass. By the 12th century, the island of Java was one of China’s chief suppliers of pepper and safflower dye, along with Bali. The island exported rice, and held trade contacts from China to India. In turn, they imported gold, silver, lacquerware, iron goods and ceramics from China. The southeast Asian sea trade was a valuable market which had been expanding considerably since the ninth century- and one which now attracted the attention of a man hungry for conquest and with less and less patience for, well, patience.   By the 1280s, Kublai Khan had completed his conquest of China proper, but good, overwhelming victories were frustraingly eluding him in Central Asia, Japan, Vietnam and Myanmar, and as he advanced in years, the knowledge that he was failing to bring the world under Mongol authority must have weighed heavily on him. Now in his seventies, with his poor health, depression, deaths of his friends and family, increasing removal from affairs of state and awareness of his own impending mortality, Kublai must have been desperate for victories to console his aching spirit. In addition, the economic aspects must not be overlooked -though they were not separate, from Kublai’s point of view, but merely a component of universal rule. Kublai’s Yuan dynasty, while obviously influenced by China’s Confucian norms and traditions, felt no need to bind themselves to it, and kept for instance, the Mongolian practicality regarding merchants. Rather than treat them as inherently lower class, they were invited and rewarded, and trade as a whole encouraged. This took a notable form on the recent completion of the conquest of the southern Chinese coastline. Soon after the imposition of Mongol rule at the end of the 1270s, a new Bureau of Maritime Trade was established as the major port of Quanzhou. The Bureau not only oversaw and taxed the trade in and out of Quanzhou, but sought to actively encourage it as well as the settlement of foreign traders there. Contacts were made across the region- the Southeast Asian coastline of course, but also the Phillipines, Indonesia including Java and Sumatra and to India and Iran’s southern coastline. We, have for instance, south Indian style Hindu temples with Tamil transcriptions in Quanzhou from this period, and knowledge of a significant Muslim population and resettled Persian. To the Islamic world Quanzhou was known as Zayton, by which Marco Polo recorded the name. The Yua