Ming dynasty (1368–1644)

Ming 明 Míng
1368–1644
Capital	Nanjing/Beijing
Largest city	Nanjing
Dominant mode of production	Feudalism
Government	Monarchy
History
• Established	23 January 1368
• Dissolution	25 April 1644

The Ming dynasty was a dynasty in Chinese history. It succeeded the Yuan dynasty and preceded the Qing dynasty.

History

Overthrow of the Mongols

Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang (朱元璋) lived as an intinerant ; while not a Buddhist monk per se, he traveled from monastery to monastery to receive shelter and food. There, he eventually started frequenting the peasant rebel groups that also relied on those services. He became involved with such a group called the Red Turbans, where his intelligence and military skills fairly quickly made him a leader in the movement.

By the early 1360s, Zhu Yuanzhang had taken over the movement and softly repositioned it from a mystical motif (the movement saw itself as an apocalyptic upheaval thrown into the chaos of the plague) to using it to found a new dynasty, overthrowing the Yuan Mongols and placing himself at the head. He proclaimed this dynasty in 1368, calling it the Ming (明, Míng, meaning "bright"). However, while the dynasty was proclaimed, he had not defeated the Mongols yet.

Zhu Yuanzhang took his various armies which had been consolidated in the Yangtze valley to the capital at Dadu. Upon their arrival, instead of fighting, the Mongols abandoned the city and retreated to the grasslands further north, letting Zhu Yuanzhang to take control of the empire. He then returned south and established his capital at Nanjing, leaving one of his sons in command of the old capital at Dadu against a possible Mongol invasion.

Reign of Hongwu

The Ming needed to reestablish and recreate institutions for their dynasty, as the ones in place under the Yuan were brought over by the Mongols and slowly eroded over the last years of their rule. To that end, Zhu Yuanzhang adopted the model of the Confucian state and set about putting in place the proper Confucian bureaucracy, along with the right people to run it—the shi.

Zhu Yuangzhang reinstated the imperial examination system just two years after the founding of his dynasty. Immediately, however, he suspended the system as he did not trust the shi, believing they didn't behave very well during the crises of the past decades and Zhu himself not being very educated himself, was afraid of the power they could wield.

In 1380, the emperor reinstated the examinations again (at which point they would run uninterrupted until 1905). Still mistrustful of the shi however, emperor Zhu became convinced one of his close officials, a man by the name of Hu Weiyong (胡惟庸), was plotting against him. Hu Weiyong was executed along with anyone who ever worked with him, members of his family, members of the family of people that worked with Hu, etc. In total, thousands of people were executed.

This began a pattern in emperor Zhu until the end of his rule, leading to the execution of tens of thousands of people. One consequence of these executions is that upon the death of an official, the Emperor would also abolish the office they managed, taking it into his own hands. With an active and dynamic ruler such as Zhu, who took a hands-on approach to governing, taking these functions was not problematic. However, later in the dynasty, this consequence created issues with Emperors who were not so involved or competent in governing.

Reign of Jianwen

Emperor Zhu eventually died in 1398. He was succeeded by one of his grandsons, Zhu Yunwen (朱允炆)—the eldest son of his eldest son. Customarily, the crown would be passed down to the Emperor's eldest son. However, due to his eldest son having died some time earlier, Emperor Zhu decided to pass the crown to his grandson, which made his other sons very resentful.

Zhu Yunwen had grown up in the palace, surrounded by Confucian officials and educated in the same manner—the same officials which his grandfather was distrustful of. On the contrary, Zhu Yunwen considered himself one of them.

This displeased his uncle (and Zhu Yuangzhang's last alive son), Zhu Di (朱棣, Zhū Dì), who not only felt resentful that he was passed up for the throne, but also felt that his nephew was not respecting the political culture the last emperor had put into the court.

Between 1400 and 1402, Zhu Di coordinated a series of political and military actions which were designed to put pressure on his nephew. In 1402, he forced his nephew's forces to the South, attacked the capital at Nanjing, and proclaimed himself emperor, becoming the third emperor of the Ming (although for more than 150 years, his nephew's short rule of 4 years was simply erased from history, making Zhu Di the second emperor).

Reign of Yongle

Upon becoming emperor, Zhu Di faced several problems. He was not considered the legitimate ruler but a usurper, and many of the Confucian officials did not recognize his seizure of power. In particular, he was defied in open court by a Confucian official when he was ordered to make an edict recognizing Zhu Di as emperor, leading to the execution of all members of this faction.

Nonetheless, Zhu Di struck a middle ground with the shi: he enjoyed a much better relationship with the Confucian officials than his father had. In fact, he cultivated a much closer relationship with his officials after they accepted his rule.

In particular, Zhu Di became involved in building the power of the Grand Secretariat (内閣, nèigé) in the empire. Technically, the role of this institution was to process documents such as edicts to be issued, reports coming in, requests for funds, memorials, etc. All of the empire's paperwork passed through the Secretariat. Zhu Di made the Secretariat into a consultative body, reporting to him directly and advising him, making it a very important and powerful institution.

Zhu Di also built up the city of Beijing, which he made into his capital. Several hundred carpenters and crafstmen were moved up north from Nanjing to build this capital.

Mongol raids

Nonetheless, even during this golden age China faced serious challenges. In particular, the Mongols returned a few times and caused serious problems on the Northern frontier: in 1449, Mongol raids along the Great Wall near Beijing had frightened the court, and the emperor, who had come to the throne at 8 years old (but was a young man by then), set out to lead an expedition against the Mongols and prove his skills. This proved to be a disaster: his party was attacked and defeated by the Mongols, with the emperor being captured and held for ransom.

This marked the first case where the Mongols revived as a threat to the empire. A century later, in the late 1540s, Mongol forces once again began to raid across the Great Wall and even came within sight of Beijing. This raised the question of border security once again, and led to vast debates about how to deal with this threat. At the same time, piracy also remained a concern and even grew as one, becoming a major source of insecurity and polarization at the court.

Eventually, the Ming put together a military force which suppressed piracy along the coast, leading to a relaxed policy around the coast giving access to more ports and areas to foreign merchants.

Reign of Wanli

By the end of the 16th century, other problems began to emerge due to the security issues as well as the rapid economic growth that took place in the years prior.

Zhu Yijun's (朱翊鈞) reign, which lasted from 1572 to 1620, was marked by a number of crises that started under him and would deepen with them. His reign started off in a good situation, thanks to the emperor's Grand Secretary who served as his advisor, Zhang Juzheng (张居正). The advisor had wanted to strengthen the power of the central state, allowing the state to more effectively respond to its challenges in governing. To that end, Zhang Juzheng wanted to reform the taxation system and restrain the excesses of both local officials and private wealthy families. The impulse for these proposals was a number of changes in Chinese civil society, specifically due to the monetization and growing commercialization of the economy and the ensuing flow of silver into China.

Reforms

Zhang first carried out a survey across the empire to find out who owned what land, what it could be used for, and what it should be valued at for tax purposes. The last comprehensive survey had been made in 1393, almost two hundred years earlier.

Later, he undertook a series of reforms to make the collection of taxes easier and more efficient for both tax-payers and the State, ultimately making sure that more of the collected taxes actually ended up in the state's coffers. This came to be known as the single whip reforms. The way taxes were traditionally paid in China was in kind—that is, not in money but with items (grain, cloth, etc.). Accordingly, taxes would be collected during the moment of the year when these items were produced and made available; grain, for example, had to be collected in the fall after the harvest came in and cloth were collected in the Spring after the weaving season had been completed.

The tax reform turned the payment of taxes into cash, having taxes be paid out in silver. This made them collectable at the same time of the year for everyone, and also consolidated all tax payments (of which there were more than 100 rates) into one lump sum of money. This was a much more efficient system, which was especially effective in the big commercial centers of the empire that had developed a local economy.

The attempts to survey the land, however, did not go as well; Zhang was confronted by the wealthy land-owning families who benefitted from having the records be inaccurate, as they paid less taxes on this land. This marked an interesting contradiction with the shi: while they served the interests of the empire and worked in high-ranking official positions, they were also issued from the wealthy land-owning families and in that capacity, benefitted from resisting the State.

This resistance was quite effective, so much so that by the end of the 1570s, Zhang Juzheng had made quite a few enemies in government and was occluded from his position by the next decade. At the same time, the tax reform of making payments in cash found itself in a few difficult situations. In developed areas of the empire, which relied on local specialized production and had steady cashflow, the system worked very well. In the rest of the empire however, where silver was not widely in circulation, the reform made the situation worse for peasants. They found themselves having to take their relatively meager (subsistence) crops and sell them for money, which was usually copper in these regions. Thus, peasants had to trade their grain for copper which they converted into silver somewhere else, effectively leaving them with very little silver by the end and burdening them with higher taxes than before the reform.

This burden took several years to take its toll, and was compounded by the gridlock the government found itself in by the end of the 16th century. At that time, the state ceased to function effectively not on the day-to-day level, but on the level of being able to respond to new challenges and problems appearing because of a moralization of political discourse.

Manchu conquest

In the Ming dynasty, the Great Wall represented the frontier between "settled" territory on the inside, and nomadic, loose populations on the outside that may have been governed by the empire, but were not really Chinese. To the far east of the wall, however, in the coastal areas, Chinese settlers had started occupying land beyond the wall in what is now sometimes called Southern Manchuria, more accurately Liaoning Province. When the Manchu set out to conquer China, that area became the first the conquered.

In 1626, the Manchus proclaimed a revived Jin dynasty (the later Jin dynasty). They established a capital city at what is now the city of Shenyang, built in the same layout as the city of Beijing. In 1635, the Manchu language was made the official language of the court. In 1636, the name of the dynasty was changed from Jin to Qing, meaning pure (and from which we derive the name China in English). The symbolism behind the name showed an ambition to do more than simply revive the name of the Jin but also to purify China of the decadence of the Ming dynasty—tying their ambitions to the Mandate of Heaven which the Manchus said the Ming had lost.

In the 1640s, military campaigns against the Ming became more active and larger. In 1641, a Ming garrison was besieged and captured by the Manchus, marking a great victory. Additionally, several of the defeated Ming generals defected and joined the Manchus in their conquest. By early 1644, the Manchus had established their control over all of the northeast right up to the Great Wall, which they had not yet been able to penetrate.

In China, the situation was bleak: the crises that had been building up in years prior had not been addressed due to a factionalized government and the financial problems of the dynasty had began to intensify as well. Silver imports into China from China and Spain decreased drastically, which put a limit on monetization and thus the possible growth of the Chinese economy. Zhu Youjian (朱由檢, Zhū Yóujiǎn), crowned emperor of Ming in 1628, tried to get the economy under control through a series of reforms, but it was too late to save it.

The problems plaguing the empire compounded throughout his reign. For example, dispossessed farmers started organizing themselves in bandit and rebel bands, raiding and attacking small towns, which required the government to deploy troops. However, the lack of revenue and loss of fortune to bandits meant that troops were not paid their wages in time or even at all, leading to them disbanding or even joining the rebels and further compounding the problem.

Throughout the Manchu conquests, a man emerged as a leader: Li Zicheng (李自成). Originally the leader of an independent army in north Shaanxi, he was positioned to attack the capital at Beijing in 1644, entering it in April of that year and occupying it for himself. As the story goes, on the morning that Li's army took Beijing, the emperor Zhu Youjian woke up as usual only to find all his advisors and courtiers had fled, without anyone telling him about the invaders. The emperor then took a piece of silk and walked out of the palace (which was highly unusual for emperors to do) up to a hill surrounding the city. There, he pricked his finger and wrote on the silk 'Son of Heaven' (天子), his official title. He then hanged himself from a tree on the hillside, and thus brought the rule of the Ming to an end.

With Li Zicheng in control of the capital, officials and princes from imperial families fled to Nanjing, the secondary capital of the dynasty. They held there for a while and even proclaimed a successor, none of which saved the Ming. Li Zicheng proclaimed a dynasty of his own as well in Beijing, with himself as the new emperor. He began the process of establishing his rule shortly afterwards: calling officials to introduce themselves at his court, and creating a new government with them. This dynasty was short-lived, however, as the Manchus were still active and so were Ming loyalists. The Manchus had been stopped beyond the Great Wall at its eastern end, and could not get past a Ming fortress no matter their attempts.

When Li Zicheng captured Beijing however, the general of the fortress, Wu Sangui (吳三桂) found himself in a difficult position: he was still a Chinese general charged with protecting the empire, but his dynasty did not really exist anymore. His mistress was also in Beijing, and he was worried she might be recruited into the new emperor's harem. He thus negotiated with the Manchus: he would allow them to bring their army inside through the Great Wall, and both their army and the fortress' garrison would go down to Beijing to drive out the rebels and restore the Ming dynasty.

The Manchus agreed, and the gates of the fortress were opened. The two then went west to Beijing and destroyed Li's nascent dynasty. Unsurprisingly, the Manchus then announced they would not restore the Ming dynasty but put their Qing dynasty in place. Having achieved his real objective—securing his mistress—and understanding the reality of the Manchu conquest, Wu did not object to this turn of events and later became a general under the Qing.

While seizing the capital was a very important step to establish the Qing, there was of course a lot left to do. The Manchus then had to establish their rule over the rest of the empire and have it recognized. Military campaigns continued for the next two years, and as in previous such conquests, the greatest resistance came from the Jiangnan area, in Southern China, which was the wealthiest region in China and thus also the one most producing literate and academic scholars. At the city of Yangzhou, the Manchus met fierce resistance—much stronger than they anticipated. After they took the city, they enacted upon the city ten days of looting and killing, essentially killing any Chinese they found within the city. This, the Manchus hoped, would send a message against further resistance. On the contrary, it strengthened the national identity and those who resisted at Yangzhou were considered to be brave heroes who preferred to choose death over surrender. The story of Yangzhou would play a motif at the end of the Qing dynasty centuries later as an appeal to Chinese patriotism and nationalism.

By the end of the 1640s, most of the resistance against the Manchus had been extinguished. Some loyalist elements did hold out against the Manchus, notably on the island of Taiwan. At the time, the island was part of Fujian province and in a peculiar position: while it was part of the empire, it had become a focal point for activity by Europeans (specifically the Portuguese and the Dutch). Ming loyalists crossed the strait and settled in Taiwan, but never really made an attempt to retake the empire. It was only by the 1680s that the loyalists in Taiwan were suppressed.

In 1660, the last emperor of the Ming (who was in exile in what is now Myanmar, when the royal family fled the Manchu) was returned to China and executed, effectively putting an end to the Ming dynasty. The Qing empire could then properly begin, and would ultimately be the last of China's dynasty.

Foreign relations

Under Zhu Di's reign, great navy fleets were assembled at the beginning of 1405 and sent to sail out as far as the Persian Gulf (as well as Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean and the East coast of Africa) until around 1435.

These voyages involved hundreds of ships, some being several times bigger than the frigates European powers used for their future maritime voyages. What made these voyages special was not the destination—private traders had been sailing those routes for some time already—but the fact that they were organized officially by the government and that we are not entirely sure why they were launched and then stopped. A likely explanation is that Zhu Di wanted to demonstrate the legitimacy of his rule by exploring officially and sending representatives to places that traded with China.

The most likely explanation as to why the voyages were discontinued is that there happened a shift in the imperial court's concerns, redirecting their concerns towards the inner Asian frontier, which had been a challenge for most past dynasties, instead of the sea.

Economy

In turn, that usage contributed to further economic growth as services directed towards the commercial travellers began to spring up along the roads and official stations. Merchants were also allowed to use certain government facilities, such as the barges on the grand canal, which was used to ship grain from the South to Beijing—Beijing at the time was such a large city that it could not entirely feed itself and needed to import its food. When the barges were not in use, merchants could rent them.

We see also during this time, up to the 16th century and beyond, a revival of local manufacturing specialization such as what was seen in the Southern Song; certain areas within China began to develop specialized production, e.g. the textile centers in the Jiang'an region. These centers led to further economic growth: families who had been subsistence farmers for the most part instead became craftsmen, producing tea, porcelain or other goods, and earning a wage. It became necessary to import food to these areas, which travelled through the imperial road system.

This growth was reflected in other ways such as in the development of financial institutions regarding the economy. Paper money, which had been experimented with in the Southern Song, was brought back. Proto-banking institutions began to develop, especially in Shanxi province where private paper money began to circulate.

International trade

While domestic growth was facilitated by government intervention, the international situation was a bit more complex. After the end of the great voyages that had been ordered under the first emperor, other states saw the Ming negatively when it came to trade. The Ming had passed policies and edicts severely limiting foreign trade in China, limiting trading in certain ports and passing the Maritime Interdict, which was an effort to control foreign coastal merchants and commerce. While these policies did not completely ban trading on the coast, it did control it very carefully. This was a problem because the impulse to trade with China was very strong, leading to the rise of piracy: as people were prevented from trading, they instead turned to raiding the Chinese coastline.

China established the Tales Trade system with Japan, where a metal rod would be cut in half, with the Japanese trader having one half and an official in China the other. When the trader came to port, he would match his half of the tales with the official, thus proving he was legally authorized to trade and not a pirate.

This facilitated trade with Japan which was important for China: at that time, Japan had discovered significant deposits of silver. This flow of silver in China allowed for monetization, turning this silver into coins to use as money, rather than barter or credit. That trend to monetization and the encouragement of trade that came with it became more significant as the 16th century progressed.

The Spanish had colonized the Americas and started the mining of silver and gold. This new large supply of precious metals (particularly silver) began to flow into the global economy: in the 1570s, the Spanish acquired a trading post at Manila (Philippines) and very quickly, the Chinese started trading extensively with the Spanish there, leading to even more economic growth in China.

This economic growth translated to a growth in population: at the beginning of the Ming dynasty in 1380, there were about 155 million people living in China. By 1500, that figure had grown to around 230 million. By the end of the Ming dynasty in the middle of the 17th century, that number had risen to 270 million. Standards of living also rose throughout China as the economic growth kept ahead of the population growth.

Philosophy

The roots of the process of moralization are found in the ideas of a man named Wang Yangming (王陽明). Living from 1472 to 1529, he was a philosopher, scholar and state official with a very successful governmental career. In some ways, he proved to be the last great Confucian philosopher in imperial times; much like his precedessor Zhu Xi brought together ideas he formulated into Neo-Confucianism, Wang Yangming took certain elements from that tradition of Confucianism and gave them different interpretations and emphasis. This gave rise to philosophical developments that he himself may not have had anticipated would cause such problems in the late Ming.

The critical idea within Wang Yangming's thought was that everyone had within them an "innate knowledge of the good". This idea was not a novel one and it had been in Confucianism since Confucius himself, but Wang Yangming emphasized it as an explicit law. His interpretation of this rule was that individuals had a responsibility for moral judgment. Prior to this, the tendency for Confucians had been to defer moral judgment to their superiors: the shi had been looked up to as providing the leadership and guidance for other people to follow. Wang Yangming's ideas, instead, suggested that individuals would find this responsibility (and thus agency) within themselves.

Not only was it enough to have a knowledge of the good, it was imperative that one also act on this knowledge. This had also been part of Confucian teachings over the previous 1500 years but, in conjunction with his other teaching, this new interpretation had revolutionary consequences. Indeed, alongside the rise of a commercial economy, this philosophy played a part in the rise of individuality in China.

As the 16th century went on and his followers expanded upon his ideas, a variety of popular movements took place: people from non-literati backgrounds such as peasants and merchants became involved in movements growing from Wang Yangming's ideas, at times defying the power of the emperor based on the idea that it was not necessary to defer to the authority of others.

Unsurprisingly, these ideas also gained traction within the educated elite. This philosophy began to permeate in such a way in government that political discussion became not a matter of seeking out a compromise between two competing (but legitimate) policies, but rather as a conflict between good and evil: if one has an innate knowledge of good, and they believe their idea to be good, then their ideas must be good, which implies that the competitor's idea must be bad by default. Thus, rather than seeking compromise and progress, officials started to seek the victory of their morally pure position.

Disputes developed at the imperial court as well, which created greater problems. In one instance, the emperor, who had a son who was poised to become the heir, had acquired a new concubine with which he had a son as well. He then wanted to replace his wife, the empress, with his concubine and make their son the new heir. The Confucian officials refused, on the grounds of their moral interpretation, but the emperor refused to accept the criticisms, which marked the start of a disconnect between the officials and the emperor, which led to him removing himself from the day-to-day administration and policies, leaving his officials to carry them out.