By 1279 the Southern Song court was a fugitive government afloat, protecting a seven-year-old emperor, Zhao Bing. Its commander Zhang Shijie chained more than 1,000 ships together in the bay at Yamen, a defensive formation that left them unable to manoeuvre. The Yuan fleet under Zhang Hongfan attacked with the tide. As defeat became certain, the official Lu Xiufu took the boy emperor in his arms and jumped into the sea, and China passed wholly under Mongol rule.
The Mongol conquest of southern China took four decades, the longest of all their campaigns. The Song capital Lin'an (Hangzhou) had surrendered in 1276, but loyalists fled south with two young princes and kept the dynasty alive along the coast. By early 1279 they had retreated to the island of Yamen, near modern Jiangmen in Guangdong, with a large but poorly supplied fleet.
Zhang Shijie lashed his ships into a floating fortress. The Yuan blockaded it, cutting off fresh water, so that Song sailors were soon drinking seawater. On March 19 the Yuan commanders launched a coordinated assault from two directions, using the morning and afternoon tides. They broke into the formation and the battle turned into a slaughter.
Seeing that the imperial flagship could not escape, Lu Xiufu, the chancellor, is said to have told the young emperor that a Song ruler should not be humiliated as his brother had been, then carried him into the water. Chinese chronicles record that many courtiers and soldiers followed them. Zhang Shijie escaped but drowned in a storm weeks later. The Yuan dynasty now ruled all of China.
Key people: Lu Xiufu, Zhang Hongfan, Zhao Bing, Zhang Shijie