A Brief Chronology

Before considering the Ming as an empire, a brief chronology is useful. The man who founded the Ming dynasty in 1368, Zhu Yuanzhang (1328-1398), was born into a family of impoverished tenant farmers, took refuge in a Buddhist temple as an orphaned teenager, and then joined a millenarian organization.

As the Mongol Yuan polity lost control of China and violence intensified in the mid-fourteenth century, Zhu Yuanzhang found ample opportunity to hone his gifts of leadership, developing a group of fiercely loyal followers and gaining military and political experience. By 1368, he severed all remaining ties of allegiance to the millenarians, announced his possession of the Mandate of Heaven, and declared the establishment of the Ming dynasty.^[1374] With fearsome energy and resolve, Zhu Yuanzhang, now known as the Hongwu emperor, restored order to a land wracked for decades by war, famine, epidemic, and political chaos. He revived administrative structures, articulated a moral/ethical vision, enacted social legislation, built a large military, and engaged Asian peoples and polities. During his three decades in power, he established the Ming dynasty as the major power in East Asia and built a strong power base, which involved executing tens of thousands of people he identified as potential threats in campaigns of suppression in the provinces and sanguinary purges in the capital. ^[1375] Even before he died in 1398, Hongwu was uneasy about the future of his family and his dynasty—with good reason. One of his more capable and ambitious sons, Yongle (r. 1403-1424), quickly launched a coup against Hongwu's lawful successor (his nephew), plunging the country into a destructive civil war before consolidating power in 1402.^[1376] For the next two decades, Yongle set a frenetic pace: abroad, he campaigned aggressively against Mongols to the north,

Bayly 2011; Burbank and Cooper 2010; Duindam et al 2011.

Recognized far longer and more widely as an empire than the Qing, the Han dynasty too has figured in recent “empire studies.” See Mutschler and Mittag 2008; Scheidel 2009. occupied parts of present-day Vietnam to the south, and actively cultivated relations with polities through East, South, Central, and Southeast Asia (including the famous Zheng He armada that traveled as far as East Africa); domestically, he rebuilt the capital in Beijing, constructed the Grand Canal, commissioned massive cultural enterprises to order (and control) knowledge, history, and morality, and regularized the civil service examination to secure a stable supply of well-educated, highly driven, and politically loyal men who would staff the imperial bureaucracy, which stretched from the prestigious Hanlin Academy and senior ministerial posts in the capital down to the less glamorous but no less essential county magistrates in the provinces.^{^[1377]} One scholar has estimated that Yongle's vast enterprises increased imperial expenditures two to three times over those of Hongwu.^{^[1378]} Although used less liberally than under Hongwu, violence continued as a vital tool of governance. Yongle killed thousands of politically suspect intellectuals and crushed local rebellions. Later rulers and educated men would refer to Hongwu and Yongle as the founding emperors, whose charisma anchored the dynastic enterprise and whose policies served as legitimating precedents. Scholars sometimes take the repeated genuflections toward Hongwu and Yongle as evidence that their legacy constituted an ideological and institutional straitjacket, but contemporary rulers and officials invoked their precedents to justify a wide variety of policies and perspectives.

Relations between ruler and minister varied from reign to reign, subject to the particulars of individuals and issues, but later emperors yielded considerable initiative and autonomy to senior ministers and local administrators.^[1379] Although they cherished the emperor's support and trust, through virtue of their superior education, practical experience, and proven intelligence, men who passed the grueling civil service examinations (most men did not receive the “presented scholar” degree, the highest level of the exams, until they were 30 years of age), that is, the literati, believed themselves best qualified to formulate policy and administer the realm.

During the latter half of the fifteenth century, they began to articulate such views with greater confidence. Emperors who acquiesced to a diminished role in the polity won praise, but others, like the sixteenth-century rulers Zhengde (r. 1506-1522), Jiajing (1522-1567), and Wanli (1573-1620), fiercely rejected efforts to redefine relations between monarch and minister. The resulting tensions deeply impaired Ming dynastic governance; as rulers refused to fulfill their administrative and ritual duties, paralyzing, sometimes deadly, factionalism blossomed, and critical social, political, and military problems went unaddressed.^[1380]

Despite such daunting difficulties at the center, local administration adapted to new challenges. The central court not only countenanced local experiments in tax collection, labor mobilization, and household registration, but it often adopted them as dynastic policy. Despite a rhetorical mode that stressed unified, uniform, and timeless policies that stretched back in time and across the realm, great regional variation favored a measure of local autonomy and experimentation. As discussed in the following, from the mid-fifteenth century onward, an increasingly commercial and commodified economy facilitated greater physical and social mobility, gave rise to new forms of official corruption, and posed novel administrative questions. Local governance’s quality varied depending on individual magistrates, resident families, economic patterns, and ecological conditions. Some local populations suffered from official neglect or, conversely, from overly aggressive collection of legal and extra-legal taxes and fees, compounded by poor policies and lack of attention from the capital. Rural unrest in places like the northwestern province of Shaanxi, which had grown dangerously entrenched by the 1620s, would eventually contribute to the dynasty’s collapse. Yet, few scholars would now argue that any ideological and institutional straitjacket imposed by Hongwu or Yongle necessitated such an ending.

The remainder of this chapter considers the Ming dynasty as an empire that merits sustained comparison with similar polities from other times and places. The chapter begins by contextualizing early Ming efforts to establish itself in an Asia that still bore the clear imprint of the Mongolian Empire. It considers the Ming’s institutional sinews, its ideological underpinnings, and its military structures. It examines early Ming policies for managing its expansive borders, relations with neighboring peoples and polities, and incorporation of immigrants into society and state institutions. It then turns to the twin challenges of (a) negotiating the demands of competing interests, particularly those of the throne, national elites, and local notables, and (b) responding to new socioeconomic imperatives. Finally, after a review of the Ming’s foreign relations, the chapter concludes with an assessment of the empire, including explanations of its final collapse in 1644.

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

A Brief Chronology

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