In 1229, Ögedei Khan inherited an empire with a serious cash-flow problem. His father's conquests had been enormously destructive but not especially profitable — plunder went to whichever commander captured a city, so almost nothing reached the imperial treasury. By the time Ögedei took the throne, contemporary accounts describe the state warehouses as effectively empty.
A faction at court had a solution that made perfect sense by steppe logic: the recently conquered farmland of northern China was useless to Mongols. Sedentary peasants produced nothing a nomadic army valued. So exterminate the population and convert the whole North China Plain into grazing pasture. Millions of people, reclassified as an inefficient land use.
Yelü Chucai was a Khitan aristocrat descended from the old Liao imperial house, a Confucian-trained administrator who had served the Jin dynasty) before the Mongols took Beijing. He understood exactly what his own court was and was not persuaded by. An appeal to mercy, culture or the value of human life would have marked him as a soft conquered-people's advocate and gotten him ignored, or worse.
So he argued in the only currency that carried weight: revenue.
He told Ögedei that a properly administered tax system in the Central Plains — land tax, commercial tax, plus state monopolies on salt, iron, wine and vinegar — would return roughly 500,000 liang of silver, 80,000 bolts of silk and over 400,000 shi of grain every year. Not once. Every year, forever, while the conquest of the Southern Song still had to be paid for. Dead peasants pay tax exactly once.
Ögedei told him to prove it. Yelü Chucai set up ten regional tax bureaus staffed with Confucian scholars who actually knew how to administer the region. In 1231, he had the year's take laid out in the palace courtyard for the Khan to walk through personally: the silver, the silk, the grain, matching his projection.
He got the job of running taxation in northern China. The pasture plan was never revived.
The fact-check corner: the story comes primarily from his biography in the History of Yuan, the official dynastic history compiled about a century later, plus a memorial written by his contemporary Song Zizhen. Both are sympathetic sources, and some historians think the "turn China into pasture" proposal was never as close to being enacted as the account implies — that it's partly a literary device to make Yelü Chucai the hero of the fiscal reform he genuinely did carry out. The tax figures and the 1231 courtyard display, though, are consistently attested.
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