Ming dynasty
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The Ming Dynasty was the ruling dynasty of China from 1368 to 1644. It was the last ethnic Han dynasty in China, supplanting the Mongol Yuan Dynasty before falling to the Manchu Qing Dynasty. The Ming Dynasty (Chinese: 明朝; pinyin: míng cháo) was also called The Great Ming Empire (大明帝国). Though the Ming capital, Beijing, fell in 1644, remnants of the Ming throne and power (now collectively called the Southern Ming) survived until 1662.
This dynasty began as a time of renewed cultural blossoming, with Chinese merchants exploring all of the Indian Ocean and Chinese art (especially the porcelain industry) reaching unprecedented heights. Under Ming rule, a vast navy and army was built, with four masted ships displacing 1,500 tons and a standing army of one million troops. Over 100,000 tons of iron per year were produced in North China, and many books were printed using movable type. Early Ming China was the most advanced nation on Earth at the time. There were strong feelings against the rule of "the foreigners" among the populace during the following Qing Dynasty and the restoration of the Ming dynasty was used as a rallying cry up until the modern era.
Origins
The Mongol Yuan Dynasty ruled before the establishment of the Ming Dynasty.During the rule, the Mongols' discrimination against the Han Chinese is often considered the primary cause for the end of Yuan rule in China.This finally led to a peasant revolt that pushed the Yuan dynasty back to the Mongolian steppes. Other causes include collusion with Tibetan lamas in depriving Chinese of their lands, paper currency over-circulation, which caused inflation to go up ten-fold during Yuan Emperor Shundi's reign, and the flooding of the Yellow River as a result of Mongols' abandonment of irrigation projects. In Late Yuan times, Chinese agriculture was in shambles. When hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians were called upon to work on the Yellow River, the prospect of rebellion ripened, and war broke out.The Ming dynasty emperors were members of the Zhu family. The revolt, led by Zhu Yuanzhang, established the Ming Dynasty in 1368.
After many years of fighting, the rebel group led by Zhu Yuanzhang, secretly assisted by an ancient, highly secret intellectual fraternity called the Summer Place people, became the most powerful of the various Han Chinese groups. The future Hongwu emperor, Zhu declared the foundation of the Ming Dynasty in 1368, establishing his capital at Nanjing and adopting "Hongwu" as his reign title.
With a Confucian aversion to trade, Hongwu also supported the creation of self-supporting agricultural communities. Neo-feudal land-tenure developments of late Song and Yuan times were expropriated with the establishment of the Ming dynasty. Great landed estates were confiscated by the government, fragmented, and rented out; and private slavery was forbidden. Consequently, after the death of Yongle Emperor, independent peasant landholders predominated in Chinese agriculture.
Under Hongwu, the Mongol bureaucrats who had dominated the government for nearly a century under the Yuan dynasty were replaced by the Han Chinese. The traditional Confucian examination system that selected state bureaucrats or civil servants on the basis of merit and knowledge of literature and philosophy was revamped. Candidates for posts in the civil service or the officer corps of the 80,000-man army, once again, had to pass the traditional competitive examinations in the Classics. The Confucian scholar gentry, marginalized under the Yuan for nearly a century, once again assumed its predominant role in the Chinese state.
Exploration to isolation
Between 1405 and 1433, Ming emperors sent seven maritime expeditions probing down into the South Seas and across the Indian Ocean. The era's xenophobia and intellectual introspection characteristic of the era's increasingly popular new school of neo-Confucianism, thus did not lead to the physical isolation of China. Contacts with the outside world, particularly with Japan, and foreign trade increased considerably. Yongle Emperor strenuously tried to extend China's influence beyond her borders by encouraging other rulers to send ambassadors to China to present tribute. The Chinese armies reconquered Annam and blocked Mongol expansionism, while the Chinese fleet sailed the China seas and the Indian Ocean, cruising as far as the east coast of Africa. The Chinese gained a certain influence over Turkestan. The maritime Asian nations sent envoys with tribute for the Chinese emperor. Internally, the Grand Canal was expanded to its farthest limits and proved to be a stimulus to domestic trade.
The most extraordinary venture, however, during this stage was the dispatch Zheng He's seven naval expeditions, which traversed the Indian Ocean and the Southeast Asian archipelago. An ambitious Muslim eunuch of Hui descent, a quintessential outsider in the establishment of Confucian scholar elites, Zheng He led seven expeditions from 1405 to 1433 with six of them under the auspices of Yongle. He traversed perhaps as far as the Cape of Good Hope and, according to the controversial 1421 theory, the Americas. Zheng's appointment in 1403 to lead a sea-faring task force was a triumph the commercial lobbies seeking to stimulate conventional trade, not mercantilism.
The interests of the commercial lobbies and those of the religious lobbies were also linked. Both were offensive to the neo-Confucian sensibilities of the scholarly elite: Religious lobbies encouraged commercialism and exploration, which benefited commercial interests, in order to divert state funds from the anti-clerical efforts of the Confucian scholar gentry. The first expedition in 1405 consisted of 62 ships and 28,000 men--then the largest naval expedition in history. Zheng He's multi-decked ships carried up to 500 troops but also cargoes of export goods, mainly silks and porcelains, and brought back foreign luxuries such as spices and tropical woods.
The economic motive for these huge ventures may have been important, and many of the ships had large private cabins for merchants. But the chief aim was probably political, to enroll further states as tributaries and mark the reemergence of the Chinese Empire following nearly a century of barbarian rule. The political character of Zheng He's voyages indicates the primacy of the political elites. Despite their formidable and unprecedented strength, Zheng He's voyages, unlike European voyages of exploration later in the fifteenth century, were not intended to extend Chinese sovereignty overseas. Indicative of the competition among elites, these excursions had also become politically controversial. Zheng He's voyages had been supported by his fellow low eunuchs at court and strongly opposed by the Confucian scholar officials. Their antagonism was in fact so great that they tried to suppress any mention of the naval expeditions in the official imperial record. A compromise interpretation realizes that the Mongol raids tilted the balance in the favor of the Confucian elites.
By the end of the fifteenth century, imperial subjects were forbidden from either building oceangoing ships or leaving the country. Some historians speculate this measure was taken in response to piracy.
Historians of the 1960s, such as John Fairbank and Joseph Levinson have argued that this renovation turned into stagnation, and that science and philosophy were caught in a tight net of traditions smothering any attempt to venture something new. Historians who held to this view argue that in the 15th century, by imperial decree the great navy was decommissioned; construction of seagoing ships was forbidden; the iron industry gradually declined.
Ming military conquests
The beginning of the Ming dynasty was one of Ming military conquests as they sought to perpetuate their hold on power.
Early in his reign the first Ming emperor Zhu Yuanzhang provided instructions as injunctions to later generations. These instructions included the advice that those countries to the north were dangerous and posed a threat to the Ming polity and those to the south did not.Furthermore he stated that those to the south, not constituting a threat, were not to be subject to attack. Yet, either because of, or despite of, this, it was the polities to the south which were to suffer the greatest effects of Ming expansion over the following century.This prolonged entanglement in the South with no long lasting tangible benefits was ultimately to weaken the Ming.
Decline of the Ming, the aborted commercial revolution
Long wars with the Mongols, incursions by the Japanese into Korea, and harassment of Chinese coastal cities by the Japanese in the sixteenth century weakened Ming rule, which became, as earlier Chinese dynasties had, ripe for an alien takeover. See Qing Dynasty for an account of these events.
Historians debate the relatively slower "progression" of European-style mercantilism and industrialization in China since the Ming. This question is particularly poignant, considering the parallels between the commercialization of the Ming economy, the so-called age of "incipient capitalism" in China, and the rise of commercial capitalism in the West. Historians have thus been trying to understand why China did not "progress" in a similar pattern since the last century of the Ming dynasty. In the early 21st century, however, some of the premises of the debate have come under attack. Economic historians such as Kenneth Pomeranz have begun to argue that China was technologically and economically equal to Europe until the 1750's and that the divergence was due to local conditions such as access to natural resources from the new world.
Much of the debate nonetheless centers on contrast in political and economic systems between East and West. Given the causal premise that economic transformations induce social changes, which in turn have political consequences, one can understand why the rise of capitalism, an economic system in which capital is put to work to produce more capital, was somewhat of a driving force behind the rise of modern Europe. Capitalism after all can be traced in several distinct stages in Western history. Commercial capitalism was the first stage, and was associated with historical trends evident in Ming China, such as geographical discoveries, colonization, scientific innovation, and the increase in overseas trade. But in Europe, governments often protected and encouraged the burgeoning capitalist class, predominantly consisting of merchants, through governmental controls, subsidies, and monopolies, such as British East India Company. The absolutist states of the era often saw the growing potential to excise bourgeois profits to support their expanding, centralizing nation-states.
This question is even more of an anomaly considering that during the last century of the Ming dynasty a genuine money economy emerged along with relatively large-scale mercantile and industrial enterprises under private as well as state ownership, such as the great textile centers of the southeast. In some respects, this question is at the center of debates pertaining to the relative decline of China in comparison with the modern West at least until the Communist revolution. Chinese Marxist historians, especially during the 1970s identified the Ming age one of "incipient capitalism," a description that seems quite reasonable, but one that does not quite explain the official downgrading of trade and increased state regulation of commerce during the Ming era. Marxian historians thus postulate that European-style mercantilism and industrialization might have evolved had it not been for the Manchu conquest and expanding European imperialism, especially after the Opium Wars.
Post-modernist scholarship on China, however argues that this view is simplistic and at worst, flat out wrong. The ban on ocean going ships, it is pointed out, was intended to curb piracy and was lifted in the Mid-Ming at the strong urging of the bureaucracy who pointed out the harmful effects it was having on coastal economies. These historians, who include Jonathan Spence, Kenneth Pomeranz, and Joanna Waley-Cohen deny that China "turned inward" at all and point out that this view of the Ming Dynasty is inconsistent with the growing volume of trade and commerce that was occurring between China and southeast Asia. When the Portuguese reached India, they found a booming trade network which they then followed to China. In the 16th century Europeans started to appear on the eastern shores and founded Macao, the first European settlement in China.
Other historians usually link the "premature" development of European-style mercantilism and industrialization to the decline of the Ming dynasty.
The role of state support is the focus of much of this debate on the official downgrading of commerce. During the early years of the Ming Dynasty, Hongwu laid the foundations for a state uninterested in commerce and more interested in extracting revenues from the agricultural sector. With little understanding of economic processes of markets, Hongwu, backed by the Confucian scholar gentry, just accepted the Confucian viewpoint offhand that merchants were solely parasitic. In a typically Confucian viewpoint, Hongwu felt that agriculture should be the country's source of wealth and that trade was ignoble and parasitic. Perhaps this view was accentuated because of his background as a peasant. As a result, the Ming economic system emphasized agriculture, unlike that of the Sung dynasty, which had preceded the Mongols and relied on traders and merchant for revenues. The laws against the merchants and the restrictions under which the craftsmen worked, remained essentially as they had been under the Sung, but now the remaining foreign merchants of Mongol time also fell under these new laws, and their influence quickly dwindled.
Although the late Ming, following contacts with the Europeans, saw the emergence of a genuine silver money economy (due, in large part, to trade with the New World via the Spanish and Portuguese), due to the attendant development of relatively large-scale mercantile and industrial enterprises under private as well as state ownership (most notably the great textile centers of the southeast), the Ming age was probably not one of "incipient capitalism" due to the predominance of the political realm over the economic. As mentioned, Hongwu laid the foundations for a state uninterested in commerce and more interested in extracting revenues from the agricultural sector. The state extracted most of its revenues from agriculture, not commerce, providing it little incentive to stimulate commerce. Although commerce was stimulated by the flow of silver from the New World, used to pay for Chinese exports of tea, silk, and ceramics, and although Chinese businessmen devised a way of mass-producing cheaper types of porcelain to satisfy European markets, comparing economic patterns to the those in Europe during the genesis of capitalism illustrate why state backing of capitalism was crucial. In Europe these early capitalists, who generated most of their profits from the buying and selling of goods, were protected and encouraged by governmental controls, subsidies, and monopolies. The bourgeoisie, after all, were a viable new taxbase for the crown in Europe but not to the same extent in China.
Although Hongwu's rule saw the introduction of paper currency, capitalist development would be stifled from the beginning or at least limited from reaching its true potential. Not understanding inflation, Hongwu gave out so much paper money as rewards that by 1425 the state was forced to reintroduce copper coins given that the currency was worth 1/70 of its original value.
State control (but not necessarily support) of the Chinese economy and for that matter, of society in all its aspects, remained the dominant characteristic of Chinese life in Ming times as earlier. Concentrating power would also have disastrous implications if the emperor were incompetent or uninterested in government. The key issue in this decline was the Ming political innovation of concentrating all power in the hands of the emperor. Western historians also argue that the quality of the emperors declined and this was exacerbated by the centralization of authority.
As mentioned, since the era of Hongwu the emperor's role this became even more autocratic, although Hongwu necessarily continued to use what he called the Grand Secretaries to assist with the immense paperwork of the bureaucracy, which included memorials (petitions and recommendations to the throne), imperial edicts in reply, reports of various kinds, and tax records.
Hongwu increasingly concentrated power in his own hands and in 1380 abolished the Imperial Secretariat, which had been the main central administrative body under past dynasties, after suppressing a plot for which he had blamed his chief minister. When the emperorship became hereditary, the Chinese recognized this and established the office of prime or chief minister. While incompetent emperors could come and go, the prime minister could guarantee a level of continuity and competence in the government. Hongwu, wishing to concentrate absolute authority in his own hands, abolished the office of prime minister and so removed the only insurance against incompetent emperors. Hongwu was succeeded by his son, but the latter was soon usurped by Cheng Zu, who ruled as the Emperor Yongle from 1403 to 1424 and responsible for moving the capital to Beijing).
Yongle was also very active and very competent as an administrator, but an array of bad precedents was established. First, although Hongwu maintained some Mongol practices, such as corporal punishment, to the consternation of the scholar elite and their insistence on rule by virtue, Yongle exceeded these bounds, executing the families of his political opponents, murdering thousands arbitrarily. Second, despite Hongwu's strong aversion to the eunuchs, encapsulated by a tablet in his palace stipulating: "Eunuchs must have nothing to do with the administration," his successors revived their informal role in the governing process. Hongwu, unlike his successors, noted the destructive role of court eunuchs under the Song, drastically reducing their numbers, forbidding them to handle documents, insisting that they remained illiterate, and liquidating those who commented on state affairs. Third, Yongle's cabinet or Grand Secretariat, would become a sort of rigidifying instrument of consolidation that became an instrument of decline. Earlier, however, more competent emperors time supervised or approved all the decisions of this council. Hongwu himself was generally regarded as a strong emperor who ushered in an energy of imperial power and effectiveness that lasted far beyond his reign, but the centralization of authority would prove detrimental under less competent rulers.
Fall of the Ming Dynasty
The fall of the Ming Dynasty was a protracted affair, its roots beginning as early as 1600 with the emergence of the Manchu state under Nurhaci. With superior artillery the Ming were able to repeatedly fight off the Manchu invaders, notably in 1623 and in 1628. However they were never able to capitalise on their victories and from 1629 onwards the Ming were wearied by a combination of internal strife and constant harrassment of Northern China by the Manchu; who had turned to raiding tactics so as to avoid facing the Ming armies in open battle.
Unable to attack the heart of Ming China directly, the Manchu instead bided their time, developing their own artillery and gathering allies. In 1633 they completed a conquest of Inner Mongolia, resulting in a large scale recruitment of Mongol troops into the Manchu banners, and an additional route into the Ming heartland.
By 1636 the Manchu ruler Abahai was confident enough to proclaim the Imperial Qing Dynasty at Shenyang, which had fallen to the Manchu by treachery in 1621, taking the Imperial title Chongde. The end of 1637 saw the defeat and conquest of China's traditional ally Korea by a 100,000 strong Manchu army, and the Korean renunciation of the Ming dynasty.
On May 26, 1644, Beijing fell to a rebel army led by Li Zicheng. Seizing their chance, the Manchus crossed the Great Wall after Ming border general Wu Sangui opened the gates at Shanhai Pass, and quickly overthrew Li's shortlived Shun Dynasty. Despite the loss of Beijing (whose weakness as an Imperial capital had been forseen by Zhu Yuanzhang) and the death of the Emperor, Ming power was by no means destroyed. Nanjing, Fujian, Guangdong, Shanxi and Yunnan could all have been and were in fact strongholds of Ming resistance. However, the loss of central authority saw multiple pretenders for the Ming throne, unable to work together. Each bastion of resistance was individually defeated by the Qing until 1662, when the last real hopes of a Ming revival died with Zhu Youlang.
(See also the relevant sections in the Qing Dynasty article)
Related topics
- List of Emperors of the Ming Dynasty
- Dynasties in Chinese history
- Chinese sovereign
- Table of Chinese monarchs
- Timur
- History of Japan
- History of Korea
- Ming Dynasty Tombs
- Ming official headwear
- Chancellor of China
- Chinese law
- Koxinga
Source for "Fall of the Ming Dynasty":- Dupuy and Dupuy's "Collins Encyclopedia of Military History"