Lina Nie | Before Kamikaze: Diplomatic Negotiations among the Mongols, Japan, and Korea before 1274 Bun'ei Campaign

Inner Asian Altaic Studies 2025-26 Lecture Series
Co-sponsored by the Harvard Korea Institute

Lina Nie, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Texas A&M University

Lina Nie teaches courses on the Mongol empire, China and Japan. She is currently completing a book on diplomatic exchanges of Eurasia from the eleventh to fifteenth centuries. She received her PhD in History from the University of Southern California, after undergraduate study at the University of Hong Kong and Kyoto University and an MA from Harvard University. Her research has been supported by fellowships such as the Harvard Yenching Institute Fellowship, Yale’s Middle Period Conference Grants, and the USC–Huntington Early Modern Institute Dissertation Fellowship. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Song-Yuan Studies, Bulletin of Ming-Qing Studies, and Monumenta Nipponica.

Chaired by Leonard van der Kuijp, Professor of Tibetan and Himalayan Studies; Chair, Committee on Inner Asia and Altaic Studies, Harvard University

Abstract:
The Mongol invasions of Japan (1274 and 1281) are among the most widely studied events in thirteenth-century East Asian maritime history. Less attention, however, has been paid to the lengthy negotiations that took place prior to the first invasion and involved Khubilai Khan (1215–1294), his Chinese advisers, the Koryŏ king, the Kamakura shogunate, and the Japanese imperial court. Based on primary sources from the Mongols, Koreans, and Japanese, this presentation demonstrates that merely focusing on the invasions themselves is insufficient to describe their complexity. The diverse strategies that different regimes utilized in dealing with the Mongol Empire demonstrate new possibilities for interpreting the premodern Eurasia in ways that go beyond the conventional historical narrative, which treats Mongolian expansion as the overarching framework. Adopting a transrealm perspective contributes to moving beyond the national history's boundaries to study interconnections and variations in premodern East Asia.

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