Genghis Khan

On 31 May 1215, Genghis Khan’s Mongols captured Zhongdu, the capital of the Jin Dynasty. It was the watershed moment when a nomadic steppe confederation acquired the siege technology, wealth, and administrative centre needed to build the largest contiguous land empire in history.

On 5 May 1260, Kublai Khan was proclaimed Great Khan at Shangdu - the place Coleridge would later imagine as Xanadu. He went on to conquer all of China, found the Yuan dynasty, and invent fiat money. He also started the process that ended his grandfather's empire.