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Ming Dynasty
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The Ming Dynasty (Chinese: 明朝; pinyin: Míng Cháo) was the ruling dynasty of China from 1368 to 1644, following the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty. The Ming was the last dynasty in China ruled by ethnic Hans (the main Chinese ethnic group), before falling to the rebellion led by Li Zicheng and soon after replaced by the Manchu-led Qing Dynasty. The Ming Dynasty, founded by Zhu Yuanzhang, ruled over the Empire of the Great Ming (traditional Chinese: 大明國; simplified Chinese: 大明国; pinyin: Dà Míng Guó), as China was then known. Although the later Ming capital, Beijing, fell in 1644, remnants of the Ming throne and power (collectively called the Southern Ming) survived until 1662. During the subsequent Qing Dynasty, some Han Chinese harbored strong feelings against the rule by a non-Han ethnic group (the Manchus); consequently, the restoration of the Ming Dynasty was used as a rallying cry up until the modern era.
Ming rule saw the construction of a vast navy, including four-masted ships of 1,500 tons displacement, and a standing army of 1,000,000 troops.[1] Although private maritime trade and official tribute missions from China took place in previous dynasties, the size of the tributary fleet under the Muslim eunuch admiral Zheng He in the 15th century surpassed all others in grandeur. There were enormous projects of construction, including the restoration of the Grand Canal, the restoration of the Great Wall as it is seen today, and the establishment of the Forbidden City in Beijing during the first quarter of the 15th century.
The founder of the dynasty, Emperor Hongwu (r. 1368–1398), attempted to create a society of self-sufficient rural communities in a rigid, immobile system that should have no need to engage with the commercial life and trade of urban centers. His rebuilding of China's agricultural base and the strengthening of communication routes through the militarized courier system had the unintended effect of creating a vast agricultural surplus that could be sold at burgeoning markets located along official courier routes. Rural cultural trends became characteristically more commercialized and urbanized. The high echelons of society embodied in the scholarly gentry class were also affected by this new consumptionary-based culture. Going against traditional norms, merchant families began producing exam candidates to become scholar-officials and took on cultural traits and practices that were distinctly those of the scholarly gentry class.
By the 16th century, the Ming economy was stimulated by maritime trade with the Portuguese Empire and Spanish Empire. China became involved in a new global trade of goods, plants, animals, and food crops known as the Columbian Exchange. Trade with European powers and the Japanese brought in massive amounts of silver, the latter of which had became the common medium of exchange in China to replace copper and paper banknotes. The flow of silver into China was greatly diminished during the last decades of the Ming, silver that was needed to keep the Ming economy functioning and quotas for state revenues fulfilled.
At its height, the Ming Dynasty had a population of 160 million people;[2] Patricia Ebrey asserts the population could actually have been as large as 200 million.[3] However, this figure dropped significantly after the first quarter of the 17th century. China's agriculture and economy—along with the rest of the world—was greatly affected by the beginning of the Little Ice Age. The damage to the economy from the lack of silver was coupled with the effects of natural calamities, crop failure, and sudden epidemics. The ensuing breakdown of authority and people's livelihoods allowed rebel leaders such as Li Zicheng to challenge Ming authority. After Beijing had been sacked by Li's forces, a general Wu Sangui allowed Manchu forces in through the north to retake the capital. The invasion solidified Qing rule in the north, as they would eventually extend their authority over the whole of Inner China as well as Manchuria, Mongolia, the Tarim Basin, and Tibet.
Contents
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- Further information: List of Emperors of the Ming Dynasty
The Mongol-led Yuan Dynasty (1279–1368) ruled before the establishment of the Ming Dynasty. The institutionalized ethnic discrimination against Han Chinese led to peasant revolt that eventually forced the Mongols to retreat into the Mongolian steppes. Yet historians dispute this as the only explanation for the Yuan's demise; other causes include overtaxing areas hard-hit by crop failure, paper currency over-circulation which caused inflation, and massive flooding of the Yellow River as a result of the abandonment of irrigation projects.[4] In the late Yuan era, agriculture and the economy were in shambles. A rebellion broke out when hundreds of thousands of peasants were called upon to work on repairing the dykes of the Yellow River.[4]
A number of Han Chinese groups revolted, including the Red Turbans in 1351. The Red Turbans were affiliated with the Buddhist secret society of the White Lotus, which propagated Manichean beliefs in the struggle of good against evil and worship of the Maitreya Buddha.[5] In 1352 a penniless peasant named Zhu Yuanzhang joined the rebel movement; he had lost both his parents at age sixteen due to the famine caused by the flooding of the Yellow River and joined a monastery to become a monk.[6] After the monastery was burned down by a Yuan militia fighting a rebel army, Zhu joined the Red Turbans, and gained a reputation after marrying the foster daughter of a rebel commander.[7] In 1356 Zhu's rebel force captured the city of Nanjing,[8] which he would later establish as the capital of the Ming Dynasty. Zhu enlisted the aid of many able advisors, including the artillery and explosives specialists Jiao Yu and Liu Ji.
Zhu cemented his power in the south by eliminating his arch rival and rebel leader Chen Youliang in the Battle of Lake Poyang in 1363. After the dynastic head of the Red Turbans suspiciously died in 1367 while hosted as a guest of Hongwu, the latter made his imperial ambitions known by sending an army toward the Yuan capital in 1368.[9] The last Yuan emperor fled north into Mongolia and Hongwu declared the founding of the Ming Dynasty after razing the Yuan palaces of Khanbaliq (Beijing) to the ground.[9]
Instead of the traditional way of naming a dynasty after the first ruler's home district, Hongwu's choice of 'Ming' or 'Brilliant' for his dynasty followed a Mongol precedent of an uplifting title.[8] Zhu Yuanzhang also took Hongwu, or 'Vastly Martial' as his reign title. Although the White Lotus had fomented his rise to power, Hongwu later denied that he had ever been a member of their organization and began suppressing their religious movement after he became emperor.[8][10]
Hongwu immediately went to task in rebuilding the state infrastructure. He built a 48 km (30 mile) long wall around Nanjing, as well as new palaces and government halls.[9] The historical text of the Ming Shi stated that as early as 1364 Zhu Yuanzhang had begun drafting a new Confucian law code known as the Daming Lu. Hongwu organized a military system known as the weisuo, which was similar to the fubing system of the Tang Dynasty (618–907). The goal was to have soldiers become self-reliant farmers in order to sustain themselves while not fighting or training.[11] This system was also similar to the Yuan Dynasty military organization of a hereditary caste of soldiers and a hereditary nobility of commanders.[11] The system of the self-sufficient agricultural soldier, however, was largely a farce; infrequent rations and awards were not enough to sustain the troops, and many deserted their ranks if they weren't located in the heavily-supplied frontier.[12]
Although a Confucian, Hongwu had a deep distrust for the scholar-officials of the gentry class and was not afraid to have them beaten in court for offenses.[13] He halted the civil service examinations in 1373 after complaining that the 120 scholar-officials who obtained a jinshi degree were incompitent ministers.[14][15] After the examinations were reinstated in 1384,[15] he had the chief examiner executed after it was discovered that he allowed only candidates from the south to be granted jinshi degrees.[14] In 1380 Hongwu had the Chancellor Hu Weiyong executed upon suspicion of a conspiracy plot to overthrow him; after that Hongwu abolished the Chinese Chancellery and assumed this role as chief executive and emperor.[16][17] With growing amount of suspicion for his ministers and subjects, Hongwu established the Jinyi Wei, a network of secret police drawn from his own palace guard. They were partly responsible for the loss of 100,000 lives in several major purges over three decades of his controversial rule.[16][18]
In 1381, the Ming Dynasty annexed the areas of the southwest that had once been part of the Kingdom of Dali. By the end of the 14th century, some 200,000 military colonists settled some 2,000,000 mu (350,000 acres) of land in what is now Yunnan and Guizhou provinces.[19] Roughly half a million more Chinese settlers entered the region by later periods; these migrations caused a major shift in the ethnic make-up of the region, since more than half of the roughly 3,000,000 inhabitants at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty were non-Han peoples.[19] In this region, the Ming government adopted a policy of dual administration. Areas with majority ethnic Chinese were governed according to Ming laws and policies; areas where native tribal groups dominated had their own set of laws while tribal chiefs promised to maintain order and send tribute to the Ming court in return for goods they required.[19] From 1464 to 1466 the Miao and Yao people revolted against what they saw as oppressive government rule; in response, the Ming government sent a central army of 30,000 troops (including 1,000 Mongols) to join the 160,000 local troops of Guangxi and crushed the rebellion.[3] After the scholar and philosopher Wang Yangming (1472–1529) suppressed another rebellion in the region, he advocated joint administration of Chinese and local ethnic groups in order to bring about sinification in the culture of the local peoples.[3]
According to historian Timothy Brook, the Hongwu Emperor attempted to immobilize society by creating rigid, state-regulated boundaries between villages and larger townships, discouraging trade, travel, and interaction in society not permitted by government authorities.[20] Hongwu attempted to instill austere values by imposing uniform dress codes, standard methods of speech, and standard style of writing classical prose that did not flaunt the skills of the highly educated.[21] His suspicion for the educated elite matched his disdain for the commercial elites, imposing inordinately high taxes upon the hotbed of powerful merchant families in the region of Suzhou in Jiangsu province.[14] He also forcibly moved thousands of wealthy families from the southeast and resettled them around Nanjing in the Jiangnan region, forbidding them to move once they were settled.[14][22] To keep track of the merchants' activities, Hongwu forced them to register all of their goods once a month.[23] One of Hongwu's main goals as ruler was to permanently curb the influence of powerful merchants and landlords, yet several of his policies would eventually encourage them to amass more wealth and power.
Hongwu's oppressive system of massive relocation and the desire to escape his harsh taxes encouraged many to become itinerant retailers, peddlers, or migrant workers finding tenant landowners who would rent them space to farm and labor on.[24] By the mid Ming era, emperors had abandoned Hongwu's relocation scheme and instead trusted local officials to document migrant workers in order to bring in more revenue.[25] An elite of wealthy landlords and merchants reigning over land tenants, wage laborers, domestic servants, and migrant workers was hardly the vision of Hongwu's: strict adherence to the ancient hierarchic status system of the four occupations.[26]
Hongwu's revival of the agricultural sector was an effort to create self-sufficient communities that would not rely on commerce, which he assumed would remain only in urban areas.[28] However, the surplus created from this revival encouraged rural farmers to make profits by first selling their goods at thoroughfares and by the mid Ming period they began selling their goods in regional urban markets.[29] As the countryside and urban areas became more connected through commerce, households in rural areas began taking on traditionally urban speciacializations, such as the production of silk and cotton textiles.[30] By the late Ming there was a growing concern amongst conservative Confucians that the metaphorical delicate fabric holding together the communal social order was being undermined by country rustics accepting every manner of urban life and decadence.[31]
The rural farmer wasn't the only social group affected by growing commercialization of Chinese society; it also heavily influenced the landholding gentry that traditionally produced scholar-officials for civil service. The scholar-officials were traditionally held as a frugal individuals who deterred themselves from arrogance in the wealth garnered from his prestigious career; they were known even to walk from their country homes into the city where they were employed.[32] By the time of the Zhengde Emperor (1505–1521), officials chose to be hauled around in luxurious sedan chairs instead and began purchasing lavish homes in affluent urban neighborhoods instead of living in the countryside.[32] By the late Ming era, gaining wealth became the prime indicator of social prestige, even more so than gaining a scholarly degree.[33]
In the first half of the Ming era, scholar-officials would rarely mention the contribution of merchants in society while constructing their local gazetteer;[35] officials were certainly capable of funding their own public works projects, a symbol of their virtuous political leadership.[36] However, by the second half of the Ming era it became common for officials to solicit money from merchants in order to fund their various projects, such as building bridges or establishing new schools of Confucian learning for the betterment of the gentry.[37] From that point on the gazetteers began mentioning merchants and often in high esteem, since the wealth produced by their economic activity produced resources for the state as well as increased production of books needed for the education of the gentry.[38] Merchants began taking on the highly-cultured, connoisseur's attitude and cultivated traits of the gentry class, blurring the lines between merchant and gentry and paving the way for merchant families to produce scholar-officials.[39] The roots of this social transformation and class indistinction could be found in the Song Dynasty (960–1279),[40] but it became much more pronounced in the Ming. Writings of family instructions for lineage groups in the late Ming period display the fact that one no longer inherited his position in the categorization of the four occupations (in descending order): gentry, farmers, artisans, and merchants.[41]
In his view, Hongwu reasoned that only government couriers and lowly retail merchants should have the right to travel far outside their home town or settlement.[23] Despite his efforts to impose this view on society, his building of an efficient communication network for his military and official personnel strengthened and fomented the rise of a potential commercial network running parallel to the courier network.[42] The shipwrecked Korean Ch'oe Pu (1454–1504) remarked in 1488 how the locals along the eastern coasts of China did not know the exact distances between certain places, which was virtually exclusive knowledge of the Ministry of War and courier agents.[43] This was in stark contrast to the late Ming period, when merchants not only traveled further distances to convey their goods, but also bribed courier officials to use their routes and even had printed geographical guides of commercial routes that imitated the couriers' maps.[44]
The scholar-officials' dependence upon the economic activities of the merchants became more than a trend when it was semi-institutionalized by the state in the mid Ming era. Qiu Jun (1420–1495), a scholar-official from Hainan, argued that the state should only mitigate market affairs during times of pending crisis and that merchants were the best gauge in determining the strength of a nation's riches in resources.[45] The government followed this guideline by the mid Ming era when it allowed merchants to take over the state monopoly of salt production. This was a gradual process where the state supplied northern frontier armies with enough grain by granting merchants licenses to trade in salt in return for their shipping services.[46] The state realized that merchants could buy salt licenses with silver and in turn boost state revenues to the point where buying grain was not an issue.[46] The governments of both Hongwu and Zhengtong (r. 1457–1464) attempted to cut the flow of silver into the economy in favor of paper currency, yet mining the precious metal simply became a lucrative illegal pursuit practiced by many.[47] Hongwu was unaware of economic inflation even as he continued to hand out multitudes of banknotes as awards; by 1425, paper currency was worth only 0.025% to 0.014% its original value in the 14th century.[12] The value of standard copper coinage dropped significantly as well due to counterfeit minting; by the 16th century, new maritime trade contacts with Europe provided massive amounts of imported silver, which increasingly became the common medium of exchange.[48] In 1581 the Single Whip Reform installed by Grand Secretary Zhang Juzheng (1525–1582) finally assessed taxes on the amount of land paid entirely in silver.[49]
Hongwu had designated his son Zhu Biao as crown prince, yet he died in 1392, so Hongwu designated Biao's son Zhu Yunwen as his successor. Zhu Yunwen assumed the throne as the Jianwen Emperor (1398–1402) after Hongwu's death in 1398. In a prelude to a three-year-long civil war, Jianwen became engaged in a political showdown with his uncle Zhu Di, the Prince of Yan and younger brother of Zhu Biao. Jianwen was aware of the ambitions of his princely uncles, establishing measures to limit their authority. The militant Zhu Di, given charge over the area encompassing Beijing to watch the Mongols on the frontier, was the most feared of these princes. After Jianwen arrested many of Zhu Di's associates, Zhu Di plotted a rebellion. Under the guise of rescuing the young Jianwen from corrupting officials, Zhu Di personally led forces in the revolt; the palace in Nanjing was burned to the ground, along with Zhu Di's nephew Jianwen, his wife, mother, and courtiers. Zhu Di then assumed the throne as the Yongle Emperor (1402–1424). The reign of Yongle is seen as a second founding of the Ming Dynasty, since Yongle reversed many of his father's policies.
Yongle demoted Nanjing as a secondary capital and in 1403 announced the new capital of China was to be at his power base in Beijing. Construction of a new city there lasted from 1407 to 1420, employing hundreds of thousands of workers daily.[50] At the center was the political node of the Imperial City, and at the center of this was the Forbidden City, the palatial residence of the emperor and his family. By 1553, the Outer City was added to the south, which brought the overall size of Beijing to 4 by 4½ miles.[51]
After laying dormant and dilapidated for decades, the Grand Canal was restored under Yongle from 1411–1415. The impetus for restoring the canal was to solve the perennial problem of shipping grain north to Beijing. Shipping the annual 4,000,000 shi (one shi is equal to 107 liters) was made difficult with an inefficient system of shipping grain through the East China Sea or by several different inland canals that necessitated the transferring of grain onto several different barge types in the process, including shallow and deep water barges.[52] Yongle commissioned some 165,000 workers to dredge the canal bed in western Shandong and built a series of fifteen canal locks.[51][53] The reopening of the Grand Canal had implications for Nanjing as well, as it was surpassed by the well-positioned city of Suzhou as the paramount commercial center of China.[54]
Although Yongle ordered episodes of bloody purges like his father—including the execution of Fang Xiaoru who refused to draft the proclamation of his succession—Yongle had a different attitude about the scholar-officials.[50] He had a selection of texts compiled from the Cheng-Zhu school of Confucianism—or Neo-Confucianism—in order to assist those who studied for the civil service examinations.[50] Yongle commissioned two thousand scholars to create a 50-million word (22,938-chapter) long encyclopedia—the Yongle Encyclopedia— from seven thousand books.[50] This surpassed all previous encyclopedias in scope and size, including the 11th century compilation of the Four Great Books of Song.
Beginning in 1405, the Yongle Emperor entrusted his favored eunuch commander Zheng He (1371–1433) as the naval admiral for a gigantic new fleet of ships designated for international tributary missions. The Chinese had sent diplomatic missions over land and west since the Han Dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE) and had been engaged in private overseas trade leading all the way to East Africa for centuries—culminating in the Song and Yuan dynasties—but no government-sponsored tributary mission of this grandeur size had ever been assembled before. To service seven different tributary missions abroad, the Nanjing shipyards constructed two thousand vessels from 1403 to 1419, which included the large treasure ships that measured 112 m (370 ft) to 134 m (440 ft) in length and 45 m (150 ft) to 54 m (180 ft) in width.[55] The first voyage from 1405 to 1407 contained 317 vessels with a staff of 70 eunuchs, 180 military personnel, 5 astrologers, and 300 military officers commanding a total estimated force of 26,800 men.[56]
The enormous tributary missions were discontinued after the death of Zheng He, yet his death was only one of many culminating factors which brought the missions to an end. Yongle had conquered Vietnam in 1407, but Ming troops were pushed out in 1428 with significant costs to the Ming treasury; in 1431 the new Lê Dynasty of Vietnam was recognized as an independent tribute state.[57] There was also the threat and revival of Mongol power on the northern steppe which drew court attention away from other matters; to face this threat, a massive amount of funds were used to to build the Great Wall after 1474.[58] Yongle's moving of the capital from Nanjing to Beijing was largely in response to the court's need of keeping a closer eye on the Mongol threat in the north.[59] Scholar-officials also associated the lavish expense of the fleets with eunuch power at court, and so halted funding for these ventures as a means to curtail further eunuch influence.[60]
The Ming had sent a large force into Vietnam to help the collapsing Trần Dynasty, but when this situation deteriorated the Ming sought outright annexation.[61] The fall of Da Bang fortress, and the defeats of the Hồ at Moc Pham Giang and Ham Tu all precipitated the fall of the Hồ Dynasty. At the Ham Tu Battle, the Hồ family tried to escape the enemy but was caught by the Chinese and sent to exile in China. From 1407–1428, the Ming ruled Vietnam as the province Jiaozhi.[62] The Ming sent valuable treasures such as gems, jade, golden artworks as well as many valuable books back to Beijing. Among these were the National History Books of Vietnam which told of Vietnam's past up to the Trần Dynasty. The cruelty and exploitation of the Ming fueled the awakening of the Việt Rebellion led by Lê Lợi. By 1428 Ming troops were pushed out of Vietnam.
The Oirat Mongol leader Esen Tayisi launched an invasion into Ming China in July of 1449. The chief eunuch Wang Zhen encouraged the twenty-one-year-old Emperor Zhengtong (r. 1435–1449) to personally lead a force to face the Mongols after a recent Ming defeat; marching off with 50,000 troops, Zhengtong left the capital and put his half-brother Zhu Qiyu in charge of affairs as a temporary regent. In the battle that ensued on September 8, his force of 50,000 troops were decimated by Esen's army and Zhengtong was captured and held in captivity by the Mongols—an event known as the Tumu Crisis.[63] After Zhengtong's capture, Esen's forces plundered their way across the countryside and all the way to the suburbs of Beijing.[64] Following this was another plundering of the Beijing suburbs in November of that year; this time by local bandits and Ming Dynasty soldiers of Mongol descent who dressed as invading Mongols and took advantge of the chaos.[65]
The Mongols held the Zhengtong Emperor for ransom. However, this scheme was foiled once Zhengtong's younger brother assumed the throne as the Jingtai Emperor (r. 1449–1457); the Mongols were also repelled once Jingtai's confidant and defense minister Yu Qian (1398–1457) gained control of the Ming armed forces. Holding Zhengtong in captivity was a useless bargaining chip by the Mongols as long as another sat on his throne, so they released him back into Ming China.[63] Zhengtong was placed under house arrest in the palace until the death of Jingtai in 1457, when Zhengtong retook the throne as the Tianshun Emperor (r. 1457–1464).
Zhu Qizhen's reign as Tianshun was a troubled one and Mongol forces within the Ming military structure continued to be a problematic issue. On August 7, 1461, the Chinese general Cao Qin and his Ming troops of Mongol descent staged a coup against Tianshun out of fear of being next on his purge-list of those who aided Jingtai's succession and reign.[66] Mongols serving the Ming military also became increasingly circumspect as the Chinese began to heavily distrust their Mongol subjects after the Tumu Crisis.[67] Cao's rebel force managed to set fire to the western and eastern gates of the Forbidden City (yet doused by rain during the battle) and killed several leading ministers before his forces were finally cornered;[68] Cao threw himself down the well of his urban Beijing home.[69]
The Mongol threat to China was at its greatest level in the 15th century, although periodic raiding continued throughout the dynasty. Like in the Tumu Crisis, the Mongol leader Altan Khan (r. 1470–1582) invaded China and raided as far as the outskirts of Beijing.[70][71] Interestingly enough, the Ming employed troops of Mongol descent to fight back Altan Khan's invasion, as well as Mongol military officers against Cao Qin's abortive coup.[72] The Mongol incursions prompted the Ming authorities to construct the Great Wall from the late 15th century to the 16th century; John Fairbank notes that "it proved to be a futile military gesture but vividly expressed China's siege mentality."[58] Considering its enormous length, the Great Wall was not meant to be a purely defensive fortification; its towers functioned rather as a series of lit beacons and signalling stations to allow rapid warning to friendly units of advancing enemy troops.[73]
In 1479, the vice president of the Ministry of War burned the court records documenting Zheng He's voyages; it was one of many events signalling China's shift to an inward foreign policy.[57] Shipbuilding laws were implemented that restricted vessels to a small size; the concurrent decline of the Ming navy allowed the growth of piracy along China's coasts.[58] Japanese pirates—or wokou—began staging raids on Chinese ships and coastal communities, although much of the acts of piracy was carried out by native Chinese.[58]
Instead of mounting a counterattack, Ming authorities chose to shut down coastal facilities and starve the pirates out; all foreign trade was to be conducted by the state under the guise of formal tribute missions.[58] These were known as the hai jin laws, a strict ban on private maritime activity until its formal abolishment in 1567.[57] In this period government-managed overseas trade with Japan was carried out exclusively at the seaport of Ningbo, trade with the Philippines exclusively at Fuzhou, and trade with Indonesia exclusively at Guangzhou.[74] Even then the Japanese were only allowed into port once every ten years and were allowed to bring a maximum of three hundred men on two ships; these strict laws encouraged many Chinese merchants to simply engage in widespread illegal trade and smuggling.[74]
The low-point in relations between Ming China and Japan occurred during the rule of the great Japanese warlord Hideyoshi, who in 1592 announced he was going to conquer China. A vast army of some 300,000 Japanese were mobilized (only about half actually left Japan). In two campaigns (now known collectively as the Imjin War) the Japanese fought with the Korean and Ming armies. Both sides won victories in the war but with Hideyoshi's death in 1598, the Japanese gave up their last Korean bases and returned to Japan. Despite this and the great leadership of Koreans such as the admiral Yi Sun-sin, the Ming generals took credit for the victory. However, the victory came at an enormous cost to the Ming government's treasury: some 26,000,000 ounces of silver.[75]
Rafael Perestrello—a cousin of the famed Christopher Columbus—became the first European explorer to land on the southern coast of China in 1513, in a Portuguese vessel that had sailed from Malacca.[76] The Portuguese sent a large subsequent expedition in 1517 to enter port at Guangzhou to trade with the Chinese merchants there.[76] During this expedition the Portuguese attempted to send an inland delegation in the name of Manuel I of Portugal to the court of the Ming emperor Zhengde; instead the diplomatic mission languished in a Chinese jail and died there.[76] In 1521, Ming Dynasty naval forces repulsed a Portuguese attack on Tuen Mun, where some of the first breech-loading culverins were introduced to China.[77] Despite initial hostilities, by 1549 the Portuguese were sending annual trade missions to Shangchuan Island and in 1557 the Portuguese managed to convince the Ming court to agree on a legal port treaty that would establish Macao as a tiny Portuguese colony on the coasts of the South China Sea.[76]
From China the major exports were silk and porcelain. After noting the variety of silk goods traded to Europeans, Ebrey writes of the considerable size of commercial transactions:
In one case a galleon to the Spanish territories in the New World carried over 50,000 pairs of silk stockings. In return China imported mostly silver from Peruvian and Mexican mines, transported via Manila. Chinese merchants were active in these trading ventures, and many emigrated to such places as th Philippines and Borneo to take advantage of the new commercial opportunities.[74]
After the Chinese had banned direct trade by Chinese merchants with Japan, the Portuguese filled this commercial vacuum as intermediaries between China and Japan.[78] The Portuguese bought Chinese silk and sold it to the Japanese in return for Japanese-mined silver; since silver was more highly valued in China, the Portuguese could then use Japanese silver to buy even larger stocks of Chinese silk.[78] However, this trade was trumped by the prime source of incoming silver from the Spanish Americas, which had entered China since the 1570s ever since the Spanish established a base in Manila.[79]
Although the bulk of imports to China were silver, the Chinese also purchased crops from the New World under the Spanish Empire. This included sweet potatoes, maize, and peanuts, foods that could be cultivated in lands where traditional Chinese staple crops—wheat, millet, and rice—couldn't grow, hence facilitating a rise in the population of China.[74][80] In the Song Dynasty (960–1279), rice had become the major staple crop of the poor;[81] after sweet potatoes were introduced to China around 1560, it gradually became the traditional food of the lower classes.[82]
The Ming Dynasty's decline can be traced to many problems which all came to a head in the 1640s. Militarily, the Ming armies were unable to defeat the skilled and fast moving armies of the Manchu. The instability of government with the emperors' withdrawal from politics, political factions rising at court, and corrupt eunuchs taking over affairs left the central authority of the Ming Empire vulnerable to attack. Economically, the conversion of the economy to one based on silver left it vulnerable to fluctuations in silver supply coming in from outside of China. Natural disaster and epidemics devastated the agricultural base and population of the empire.
The financial drain of the Imjin War in Korea against the Japanese was one of the many problems—fiscal or other—facing Ming China during the reign of the Wanli Emperor (r. 1572–1620). In the beginning of his reign, Wanli surrounded himself with able advisors and made a conscientious effort to handle state affairs. His Grand Secretary Zhang Juzheng (in office from 1572 to 1582) built up an effective network of alliances with senior officials.[83] However, there was no one after him skilled enough to maintain the stability of these alliances;[83] officials soon banded together in opposing political factions. Over time Wanli grew tiresome of court affairs and frequent political quarreling amongst his ministers, preferring to stay behind the walls of the Forbidden City and out of his officials' sight.[84]
Officials aggravated Wanli about which of his sons should succeed to the throne; he also grew equally disgusted with senior advisors constantly bickering about how to manage court affairs and run the state.[84] There were rising factions at court and across the intellectual sphere of China stemming from the philosophical debate for or against the teaching of Wang Yangming (1472–1529), the latter of whom rejected some of the orthodox views of Neo-Confucianism.[85][86] Annoyed by all of this, Wanli began neglecting his duties, remaining absent from court audiences to discuss politics, lost interest in studying the Confucian Classics, refused to read petitions and other state papers, and stopped filling the recurrent vacancies of vital upper level administrative posts.[84][87] Scholar-officials lost prominence in administration as eunuchs became intermediaries between the aloof emperor and his officials; any senior official who wanted to discuss state matters had to persuade powerful eunuchs with a bribe simply to have his demands or message relayed to the emperor.[88]
It was said that Hongwu forbade eunuchs to learn how to read or engage in politics.[51] Whether or not these restrictions were carried out with absolute success in his reign, eunuchs in the Yongle reign period and after managed huge imperial workshops, commanded armies, and participated in matters of appointment and promotion of officials.[51] Ebrey states that there were 70,000 eunuchs employed in the last century of the Ming Dynasty, with 10,000 of these stationed in the capital.[51] Charles Hucker states that there were 10,000 eunuchs in the capital at the end of the 15th century, but says this number had ballooned to the size of 70,000 in the capital, and 100,000 nationwide by the dynasty's end.[89] The eunuchs developed their own bureaucracy that was organized parallel to but was not subject to the civil service bureaucracy.[51] Although there were several dictatorial eunuchs throughout the Ming, such as Wang Zhen, Wang Zhi, and Liu Jin, excessive tyrranical eunuch power did not become evident until the 1590s when Wanli increased their rights over the civil bureaucracy and granted them power to collect provincial taxes.[87][88][89]
The eunuch Wei Zhongxian (1568–1627) dominated the court of the Tianqi Emperor (r. 1620–1627) had his political rivals tortured to death, mostly the vocal critics from the faction of the "Donglin Society".[90] He ordered temples built in his honor throughout the Ming Empire,[88] and built personal palaces created with funds allocated for building the previous emperor's tombs. His friends and family gained important positions without qualifications. Wei also published a historical work lambasting and belitting his political opponents.[88]
While Wei Zhongxian was something of an extreme example of a corrupt eunuch, in general the problem of eunuchs running the country instead of the senior Confucian scholars was a hallmark of the later Ming Dynasty. The instability at court came right as natural calamity, pestilence, rebellion, and foreign invasion came to a peak. Although the Chongzhen Emperor (r. 1627–1644) had Wei dismissed from court—which led to Wei's suicide shortly after—the problem with court eunuchs persisted until the dynasty's collapse less than two decades later.
During the last years of Wanli's reign and those of his two successors, an economic crisis developed that was centered around a sudden widespread lack of the empire's chief medium of exchange: silver. The Protestant powers of the Dutch Republic and the Kingdom of England staged frequent raids and acts of piracy against the Catholic-based empires of Spain and Portugal in order to weaken their global economic power.[91] Meanwhile, Philip IV of Spain (r. 1621–1665) began cracking down on illegal smuggling of silver from Mexico and Peru across the Pacific towards China, in favor of shipping American-mined silver directly from Spain to Manila. In 1639, the new Tokugawa regime of Japan shut down most of its foreign trade with European powers, causing a halt of yet another source of silver coming into China.
These events occurring at roughly the same time caused a dramatic spike in the value of silver and made paying taxes nearly impossible for most provinces. People began hoarding precious silver as there was progressively less of it, forcing the ratio of the value of copper to silver into a steep decline.[79] In the 1630s, a string of one thousand copper coins was worth an ounce of silver; by 1640 this was reduced to the value of half an ounce; by 1643 it was worth roughly one-third of an ounce.[79] For peasants this was an economic disaster, since they paid taxes in silver while conducting local trade and selling their crops with copper coins.[92]
In this early half of the 17th century, famines became common in northern China because of unusual dry and cold weather that shortened the growing season; these were effects of a larger ecological event now known as the Little Ice Age.[93] Famine, alongside tax increases, widespread military desertions, a declining relief system, and natural disasters such as flooding and inability of the government to properly manage irrigation and flood-control projects caused widespread loss of life and normal civility.[93] The central government was starved of resources and could do very little to mitigate the effects of these calamities. Making matters worse, a widespread epidemic spread across China from Zhejiang to Henan, killing an unknown number of people.[94] One observer in a city of Henan—writing in the summer of 1643—stated that there were few signs of human life in the streets after much of the populace had died off while most of the noise came from the buzzing of flies.[95] Many observations like this have drawn historians to believe that this widespread epidemic killed off half the population in certain areas.[96]
The fall of the Ming Dynasty was a protracted affair, its roots beginning as early as 1600 with the emergence of the Manchu under Nurhaci (r. 1616–1626). A new power was growing in the north east of what is now known as Manchuria. The remarkable tribal leader Nurhaci, starting with just a small tribe, rapidly gained control over all the Manchu tribes. During the Imjin war he offered to lead his tribes in support of the Ming army. This offer was declined, but he was granted honorific Ming titles for his gesture.[97] Recognizing the weakness in the Ming authority north of their border, he took control over all of the other unrelated tribes surrounding his homeland.[97] In 1610 he broke relations with the Ming court; in 1618 he demanded the Ming pay tribute to him to redress the seven grievances which he documented and sent to the Ming court. This was, in a very real sense, a declaration of war as the Ming were not about to pay money to the Manchu. After a crushing defeat by Nurhaci's incredibly mobile and highly trained army, the Ming Chinese never again attempted to destroy the Manchu and instead relied on building defensive strong-points. The Manchu raided into northern China almost constantly from 1620 onward (interrupted for a three year period by Nurhaci's death in 1626).
Under the brilliant commander Yuan Chonghuan (1584–1630), the Ming were able to repeatedly fight off the Manchus, notably in 1626 at the Battle of Ningyuan and in 1628. Under Yuan's command the Ming had securely fortified the Shanhai pass, thus blocking the Manchus from crossing the pass to attack the Liaodong Peninsula. Using European firearms acquired from his cook, he was able to stave off Nurhaci's advances along the Liao River.[98] Although he was named field marshal of all the northeastern forces in 1628, he was executed in 1630 on trumped-up charges of colluding with the Manchus as they staged their raids.[99] Succeeding generals proved unable to eliminate the Manchu threat.
Unable to attack the heart of Ming directly, the Manchu instead bided their time, developing their own artillery and gathering allies. They were able to enlist Ming government officials and generals as their strategic advisors. A large part of the Ming Army deserted to the Manchu banner. In 1632, they had conquered much of Inner Mongolia,[98] resulting in a large scale recruitment of Mongol troops under the Manchu banner and the securing of an additional route into the Ming heartland.
By 1636, the Manchu ruler Huang Taiji was confident enough to proclaim the Imperial Qing Dynasty at Shenyang, which had fallen to the Manchu in 1621 and was made their capital in 1625.[98][100] Huang Taiji took the Imperial title Chongde and changed the ethnic name of his people from Jurchen to Manchu.[101] In 1638 the Manchu defeated and conquered Ming China's traditional ally Korea with an army of 100,000 troops. Shortly after the Koreans renounced their long-held loyalty to the Ming Dynasty.[101]
A peasant soldier named Li Zicheng (1606–1644)—who worked previously in a wine shop and as as an ironworker's apprentice—mutinied with his fellow soldiers in western Shaanxi in the early 1630s after the government failed to ship much-needed supplies there.[93] In 1634 he was captured by a Ming general and released only on the terms that he return to service.[102] The agreement soon broke down when a local magistrate had thirty-six of his fellow rebels executed; Li's troops retaliated by killing the officials and continued to lead a rebellion based in Rongyang, central Henan province by 1635.[96] By the 1640s, an ex-soldier and rival to Li—Zhang Xianzhong (1606–1647)—had created a firm rebel base in Chengdu, Sichuan, while Li's center of power was in Hubei with extended influence over Shaanxi and Henan.[96]
In 1640, masses of Chinese peasants who were starving, unable to pay their taxes, and no longer in fear of the frequently defeated Chinese army, began to form into huge bands of rebels. The Chinese military, caught between fruitless efforts to defeat the Manchu raiders from the north and huge peasant revolts in the provinces, essentially fell apart. Unpaid, unfed, the army was defeated by Li Zicheng—now self-styled as the Prince of Shun—and deserted the capital without much of a fight.[103] Li's forces were allowed into the city when the gates were treacherously opened from within.[103] On May 26, 1644, Beijing fell to a rebel army led by Li Zicheng; during the turmoil,