Ming dynasty

• 1. The Last Emperor's Garden

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  On the 25th of April 1644, the last emperor of the Ming dynasty slipped out of the Forbidden City with a single eunuch servant for company. He hanged himself from a tree in the imperial garden, just outside the palace walls. Behind him, Beijing had fallen to a rebel army whose allies inside the city opened the gates from within.

  The house he lost had ruled China since 1368. It was the last imperial dynasty led by the Han people, the country's majority ethnic group. In its final decades it governed a population estimated at somewhere between 160 and 200 million.

  That dynasty began with a penniless monk. Its rulers sent enormous fleets across the Indian Ocean and later let their navy fall into disrepair. Its economy was remade by silver from the Americas and then broken when that silver stopped flowing. How does a man with no inheritance take an empire from the Mongols? Why do rulers who order great voyages abandon them? And what finally breaks a state this large: its emperors, its eunuchs, its farmers, or the weather?

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• 2. A Monk Becomes Emperor

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  In 1352, a penniless peasant and Buddhist monk named Zhu Yuanzhang joined the Red Turbans, a rebel movement tied to a Buddhist secret society called the White Lotus. The Mongol-led Yuan dynasty was crumbling. Han resentment over ethnic discrimination, heavy taxes in regions hit by inflation, and Yellow River floods had pushed the country toward revolt. The spark came when hundreds of thousands of peasants were summoned to repair the river's levees. Zhu soon made a name for himself by marrying the foster daughter of a rebel commander.

  In 1356 his force captured Nanjing, the city he would later make his capital. Then came Lake Poyang in 1363. There Zhu destroyed his archrival Chen Youliang in what is arguably the largest naval battle in history. His 200,000 sailors, known for their ambitious use of fire ships, faced a Han rebel fleet more than three times their size, claimed to be 650,000 strong. The victory left him in uncontested control of the Yangtze valley.

  When the dynastic head of the Red Turbans died under suspicious circumstances in 1367 while visiting Zhu, no serious rival remained. In 1368 he marched on the Yuan capital Dadu. The last Yuan emperor fled north to Shangdu, and Zhu razed the Yuan palaces before declaring the Ming dynasty. He took the era name Hongwu, which means Vastly Martial.

  By 1380 the new emperor trusted almost no one. He had Chancellor Hu Weiyong executed on suspicion of a plot, abolished the Chancellery, and took over its work himself. He also created the Embroidered Uniform Guard, a secret police drawn from his own palace guard. Some 100,000 people were executed in purges during his reign.

  His plan for the empire was rigid. He imagined self-sufficient rural communities that would support a permanent class of soldiers. The standing army grew past one million troops, and the Nanjing dockyards were the largest in the world. He built a 48 km wall around Nanjing and began drafting a Confucian law code as early as 1364. It was completed by 1397 and repeated certain clauses of the old Tang Code of 653. His many sons were sent across China as princes and guided by a published set of instructions called the Huang-Ming Zuxun.

  Hongwu issued edicts promising to purify China of barbarian influence, yet he borrowed heavily from the Yuan. He kept Mongol-style clothing and hats, hereditary military institutions, and the promotion of archery and horseback riding. Until the late 16th century, Mongols made up one-third of the officers in capital forces such as the Embroidered Uniform Guard. He resettled 100,000 Mongols inside his territory. He also insisted he was no rebel. In his telling, he was a Yuan subject divinely appointed to crush the rebel warlords, and tribute from former Yuan vassals was welcomed at court with music and dance.

  The frontiers grew quickly. In 1381, Ming armies defeated Yuan loyalists holding out in Yunnan, and General Mu Ying became its governor. By the end of the 14th century, some 200,000 military colonists had settled 2,000,000 mu, or about 350,000 acres, in what is now Yunnan and Guizhou. The settlement shifted the region's makeup, since more than half its people had been non-Han. In 1387, a Ming campaign turned on Naghachu, a Uriankhai general of the Northern Yuan whose forces numbered in the hundreds of thousands. His surrender gave the Ming control of Manchuria.

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• 3. A Second Founding

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  In 1398 the Hongwu Emperor died, and his grandson Zhu Yunwen took the throne as the Jianwen Emperor. His uncle Zhu Di, the most powerful of the old emperor's sons, opposed the succession. After the young emperor arrested many of Zhu Di's associates, a rebellion began that grew into a three-year civil war. The palace in Nanjing burned to the ground, and the Jianwen Emperor, his wife, his mother and his courtiers died in the fire. Zhu Di became the Yongle Emperor in 1402. Scholars view his reign as a second founding, because he reversed so many of his father's policies.

  In 1403 Yongle announced that the capital would move to Beijing, his own power base, and Nanjing became secondary. Construction ran from 1407 to 1420 and employed hundreds of thousands of workers every day. At the center of the Imperial City stood the Forbidden City, the palatial home of the emperor and his family. By 1553 an Outer City had been added to the south. Yongle also restored the Grand Canal and returned the imperial examinations to primacy in official appointments.

  In 1405 he entrusted his favored eunuch commander, Zheng He (1371-1433), with a gigantic fleet. Between 1403 and 1419 the Nanjing shipyards built two thousand vessels to serve seven tributary voyages. The treasure ships measured 112 to 134 m in length and 45 to 54 m in width. The voyages carried the fleet across the Indian Ocean as far as Arabia and the eastern coast of Africa. Along the way the Kingdom of Cochin was proclaimed a protectorate. China had sent missions overland since the Han dynasty, but never on this scale.

  The army pushed outward too. Vietnam was occupied from the invasion of 1406 until the Ming withdrawal in 1427, after protracted guerrilla warfare led by Le Loi, founder of the Vietnamese Le dynasty. Yongle also led five major offensives north of the Great Wall against the Mongols and the Oirats.

  In July 1449, the Oirat leader Esen Tayisi invaded Ming China. The chief eunuch Wang Zhen urged the Zhengtong Emperor to lead an army against him in person, and the emperor left his half-brother Zhu Qiyu in charge as temporary regent. On the 8th of September, Esen routed the army and captured the emperor. This disaster is known as the Tumu Crisis. The Oirats hoped to collect a ransom, but Zhu Qiyu took the throne as the Jingtai Emperor, and the defense minister Yu Qian gained control of the armed forces. A captive emperor became a useless bargaining chip, so the Oirats released him. He lived under house arrest until a coup in 1457, called the Wresting the Gate Incident, returned him to power as the Tianshun Emperor.

  On the 7th of August 1461, the general Cao Qin and his Mongol-descended troops rose against the Tianshun Emperor. They feared they were next on his purge-list of those who had helped in the earlier coup. The rebels set fire to two gates of the Imperial City, though rain doused the flames, and they killed several leading ministers. Cao was finally cornered and took his own life.

  The capture of 1449 ended the age of grand expeditions for good. The imperial navy fell into disrepair, while forced labor built the Liaodong palisade and linked the Great Wall into its modern form. John Fairbank wrote that the wall "proved to be a futile military gesture but vividly expressed China's siege mentality." Yet it was not purely a barrier. Its towers served as lit beacons and signalling stations that warned friendly units when enemy troops approached.

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• 4. Scholars and Eunuchs

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  From 1373 to 1384, the Hongwu Emperor staffed his bureaus with officials chosen by recommendation alone. After that, recruits came through an examination system that dated back to the Sui dynasty. The top prize was the jinshi degree, which assured a high-level post. Over 276 years and ninety palace examinations, 24,874 such degrees were granted. Ebrey observes that jinshi numbered only two to four thousand at any given time, "on the order of one out of 10,000 adult males."

  A requirement added in 1487 forced candidates to master the eight-legged essay. The exams were graded without regard to social background. Even so, success demanded years of costly tutoring, which wealthy gentry families specialized in providing to their talented sons. In practice, 90 percent of the population was ineligible for lack of education. Many scholars blame the essay for "China's cultural stagnation and economic backwardness." Benjamin Ellman replies that its structure fostered "abstract thinking, persuasiveness, and prosodic form."

  Officials were graded on their performance every three years, and no one could hold an office for longer than nine years. Beneath them worked a far larger body of lesser functionaries. They outnumbered officials four to one, and Charles Hucker estimates there were perhaps as many as 100,000 across the empire. Because officials were rotated between regions, they had to rely on these local clerks for cooperation.

  The Hongwu Emperor had forbidden eunuchs to learn to read or to engage in politics. Under the Yongle Emperor, 75 eunuchs were put in charge of foreign policy, and they traveled to Annam, Mongolia, the Ryukyu Islands and Tibet. Eunuchs built their own bureaucracy, organized parallel to the civil service and not subject to it. Their secret service, called the Eastern Depot at first and the Western Depot later, answered to the Directorate of Ceremonial. At times the most influential eunuch in that directorate acted as de facto dictator over the state.

  The Wanli Emperor reigned from 1572 to 1620. At first he surrounded himself with able advisors, chief among them Grand Secretary Zhang Juzheng, who served from 1572 to 1582. After Zhang, nobody could hold the alliances together, and officials split into quarreling factions. Wanli retreated behind the walls of the Forbidden City. Eunuchs became the go-betweens, and a senior official had to bribe a powerful eunuch simply to have a message relayed to the emperor. In the 1590s Wanli increased eunuch rights over the civil bureaucracy and gave them power to collect provincial taxes.

  Wei Zhongxian (1568-1627) dominated the court of the Tianqi Emperor. He had rivals tortured to death, mostly vocal critics from the Donglin Society. He ordered temples built in his honor throughout the empire and raised personal palaces with funds meant for the previous emperor's tombs. His friends and family won important posts without qualifications, and he published a history that belittled his opponents. The Chongzhen Emperor dismissed Wei, who later committed suicide. Yet trouble with palace eunuchs persisted until the dynasty fell, less than twenty years afterward.

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• 5. Silver and New Crops

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  Portuguese traders first reached China in 1516. After the Ming banned direct trade with Japan, they stepped in as middlemen, buying Chinese silks and selling them in Japan for silver. In 1557 the Ming court consented to let them settle Macau as a permanent trade base. Spanish and Dutch merchants soon competed for the same business. The result was a massive influx of South American silver, which re-monetized an economy whose paper money had suffered repeated hyperinflation and was no longer trusted.

  Coastal laws called haijin were meant to shield the shoreline from Japanese pirates. Instead they pushed many coastal people into smuggling and piracy of their own.

  By the 16th century, European trade, though confined to islands near Guangzhou such as Macau, was spreading the Columbian exchange of crops, plants and animals into China. Chili peppers entered Sichuan cuisine. Highly productive maize and potatoes eased famines and spurred population growth.

  Counting the people was another matter. Censuses of the entire empire were taken every ten years, but accurate figures stayed out of reach. Households wanted to avoid labor and taxes, and the enormous archives at Nanjing were hard to store and review. Meanwhile farmers vanished from official records, or "donated" their lands to tax-exempt eunuchs or temples. Revenue had to be squeezed out of ever fewer taxpayers.

  The silver supply then began to fail. Philip IV of Spain cracked down on illegal smuggling of silver from New Spain and Peru across the Pacific through the Philippines toward China. He preferred that silver mined in Spanish Latin America travel through Spanish ports. As silver grew scarcer, people hoarded it, and the value of copper against silver fell steeply. In the 1630s a string of one thousand copper coins equaled one ounce of silver. By 1640 that string fetched half an ounce.

  Peasants bore the worst of it, because they paid taxes in silver while selling crops and trading locally in copper. Atwell and others argue that the disrupted silver imports of the 1630s and 1640s were central to the fiscal collapse. By 1643 a string of one thousand copper coins bought only a third of an ounce.

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• 6. Dangerous Ideas, Fine Art

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  Wang Yangming (1472-1529) taught that universal concepts would appear in the mind of anyone. A person of any pedigree or education could therefore grow as wise as Confucius and Mencius. In this view the classic writings were not sources of truth but guides that might contain flaws. A peasant with great experience and intelligence would be wiser than an official who had memorized the Classics. His teachings were attacked in his own lifetime for resembling Chan Buddhism, and officials kept sending him to deal with rebellions far from the capital. Yet his outlook also permitted a more accommodating attitude toward commerce and the newly rich, whom traditional Confucians opposed.

  His followers pushed further. Wang Gen, a salt-mine worker, lectured commoners on pursuing education to improve their lives. He Xinyin challenged the emphasis on family in Chinese society. Li Zhi taught that women were the intellectual equals of men and deserved a better education. Both He and Li died in prison on charges of spreading dangerous ideas.

  The Donglin Academy, re-established in 1604, led the conservative reaction. Gu Xiancheng (1550-1612) argued that innate moral knowledge merely excused greed and personal gain. The two camps hardened into the factionalism that filled the court with impeachments.

  The lower Yangzi valley was prosperous, and it produced a flood of new writing. Women in educated families, merchants and shop clerks formed a large audience for vernacular Chinese, which scholars shaped into mature novels such as Water Margin and Journey to the West. Jin Ping Mei appeared in 1610. Tang Xianzu (1550-1616) wrote the celebrated play The Peony Pavilion, first performed in 1598 at the Pavilion of Prince Teng. The travel writer Xu Xiake (1587-1641) packed everything from local geography to mineralogy into his Travel Diaries, which ran to 404,000 written characters. By 1638 the Peking Gazette had switched from woodblock printing to movable type.

  Art paid well. The painter Qiu Ying, one of the Four Masters alongside Shen Zhou, Tang Yin and Wen Zhengming, was once paid 2.8 kg (100 oz) of silver for a long handscroll. It celebrated the eightieth birthday of a wealthy patron's mother. The imperial kilns at Jingdezhen in Jiangxi became most famous for blue and white porcelain. The Dehua factories in Fujian made export porcelain for European tastes by the late 16th century. Chuimei Ho estimates that about 16% of late Ming ceramic exports went to Europe, with the rest bound for Japan and Southeast Asia.

  Collectors created a market for fakes. The Jesuit Matteo Ricci, staying in Nanjing, wrote that Chinese forgers were ingenious and made huge profits. Liu Tong (died 1637) printed a guide in 1635 to help buyers. He taught that a bronze from the Xuande era (1426-1435) could be authenticated by its sheen, and porcelain from the Yongle era (1402-1424) by its thickness.

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• 7. Faith and Telescopes

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  In the first year of his rule, the Hongwu Emperor declared the eighty-year-old Franciscan missions founded under the Yuan heterodox and illegal. The centuries-old Church of the East in China also disappeared. Islam, which had enjoyed strong official support under the Yuan, lost much of that patronage. Even so, the powerful eunuch Zheng He remained a prominent Muslim in the early Ming court.

  A new wave of Christian missionaries, particularly Jesuits, arrived in the later Ming. St. Paul's College in Macau, founded in 1579, taught them Chinese language and culture. They argued for conversion with the help of Western science and technology. Matteo Ricci was the most influential. His "Map of the Myriad Countries of the World" upended traditional geography across East Asia. With the convert Xu Guangqi, he produced the first Chinese translation of Euclid's Elements in 1607.

  The discovery of the Xi'an Stele in 1625 helped Christianity look like an old faith in China rather than a new and dangerous cult. Arguments still raged over whether converts could keep honoring the emperor, Confucius and their ancestors. Ricci had been highly accommodating, and his successors' attempts to retreat from that policy led to the Nanjing incident of 1616. Four Jesuits were exiled to Macau, and the remaining missionaries were barred from public life for six years.

  While in Beijing, Ricci was contacted by one of the roughly 5,000 Kaifeng Jews, and he introduced their long history in China to Europe. A flood in 1642, caused by Kaifeng's Ming governor, devastated the community. It lost five of its twelve families, its synagogue, and most of its Torah.

  The heavens drew special attention. In 1626 Johann Adam Schall von Bell wrote the first Chinese treatise on the telescope, titled Yuanjingshuo, or Far Seeing Optic Glass. In 1634 the Chongzhen Emperor acquired the telescope of the late Johann Schreck (1576-1630). Jesuits promoted Copernican theory at court while embracing the Ptolemaic system in their own writing. Catholic missionaries in China did not sponsor the heliocentric model until 1865.

  China's own calendar needed repair by the 16th century. The Ming had adopted Guo Shoujing's Shoushi calendar of 1281, which was just as accurate as the Gregorian calendar. But the Directorate of Astronomy never readjusted it. Its offices had become hereditary, and the Statutes of the Ming prohibited private involvement in astronomy. In 1595, Zhu Zaiyu (1536-1611), a sixth-generation descendant of the Hongxi Emperor, submitted a proposal to fix the calendar. The ultra-conservative astronomical commission rejected it.

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• 8. The Fall

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  In the early 1630s, a peasant soldier named Li Zicheng mutinied with his fellow soldiers in western Shaanxi after the government failed to ship much-needed supplies. A Ming general captured him in 1634 and released him on the condition that he return to service. The deal collapsed when a local magistrate executed thirty-six of his fellow rebels. Li's troops killed the officials in retaliation, and by 1635 he was leading a rebellion from Rongyang, Henan. By the 1640s his rival Zhang Xianzhong (1606-1647), another ex-soldier, had founded the Xi dynasty from a base in Chengdu, Sichuan.

  The land itself had turned hostile. Early in the 17th century, unusually dry and cold weather shortened the growing season in northern China. This was part of a larger ecological event now called the Little Ice Age. Famine, higher taxes, military desertions, and floods that the government could not manage brought widespread loss of life. From 1633 to 1644, a plague later known as the Great Plague spread from Zhejiang to Henan and killed a large but unknown number of people. Catastrophe was not new to the Ming. The Shaanxi earthquake of 1556, one of the deadliest in history, had killed approximately 830,000.

  In 1640, masses of starving peasants who could not pay their taxes began forming huge rebel bands. They no longer feared the frequently defeated army. The military was caught between fruitless efforts against Manchu raiders in the north and peasant revolts in the provinces. Unpaid and unfed, it fell apart.

  The Manchus had grown out of the Ming's own border system. Nurhaci, leader of the Jianzhou Jurchens, once regarded himself as a guardian of the Ming border. In the 1590s he offered to lead his armies against the Japanese invasions of Korea. Ming officials declined, but gave him the title of dragon-tiger general. He then unified other Jurchen clans into a new Manchu identity and declared himself Khan in 1616, founding the Later Jin dynasty. In 1618 he renounced Ming overlordship with a list of grievances called the Seven Grievances. In 1636 his son Hong Taiji renamed the dynasty the Great Qing at Mukden, adopted the Chinese imperial title huangdi, and changed the name of his people from Jurchen to Manchu.

  After the capital fell to Li Zicheng, the border general Wu Sangui (1612-1678) weighed his options as a rebel army marched toward him. He chose the Manchus and opened the gates at Shanhai Pass. The Eight Banners under Prince Dorgon (1612-1650) crossed the Great Wall. They destroyed Li's army at Shanhaiguan, and the Prince of Shun's forces fled the capital on the fourth of June. On the 6th of June the Manchus and Wu entered Beijing and proclaimed the young Shunzhi Emperor ruler of China.

  Li Zicheng was chased from Xi'an along the Han River to Wuchang, and then along the northern border of Jiangxi. He died there in the summer of 1645, which ended the Shun dynasty. One report says he killed himself. Another says peasants beat him to death after catching him stealing their food.

  The Ming were not yet finished. Nanjing, Fujian, Guangdong, Shanxi and Yunnan all held out as strongholds, but several rival pretenders divided their forces. Nineteenth-century historians later called these scattered remnants the Southern Ming. The Qing defeated each bastion in turn until 1662, when they captured and executed the last Southern Ming emperor, Zhu Youlang, the Yongli Emperor. One more stronghold remained offshore. Zheng Chenggong had founded the Kingdom of Tungning on Taiwan for those loyal to the Ming. Qing forces conquered it in 1683.

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