Yelu Chut Si - The Most Powerful Person

When the mongols invaded china in the twelfth century, they threatened to obliterate a culture that had thrived for over two thousand years. It was not a soldier, a general or a king who saved the chinese from devastation, but a man named yelu chut si. He persuaded gangis khan that he would reap riches out of the place if, instead of destroying it, he simply taxed everyone who lived there. When khan took the city of kai fung after a long siege and decided to massacre its inhabitants, as he had in other cities that had resisted him, chut si told him that the finest craftsmen and engineers in chana had