ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the new configuration of power that the Mongols created, from the medical point of view. It explores how the world looked in the eyes of Yuan Jue and his father Yuan Hong when South China became part of the Yuan dynasty. The Mongols favored and trusted physicians and politicians with medical expertise. They created medical households, a special category in the population registration system, and bestowed levy privileges. In the bureaucracy that they created in China, physicians gained positions in the Imperial Academy of Medicine and benefited from the tax that they collected from medical households. The Academy revived medical schools and hired local physicians as instructors there. It had the ambitious goal of stopping the activities of medical practitioners who were not able to read medical books. As Yuan Hong's contemporary Zheng Sixiao observed, each occupational group had its own hierarchy.
