Managing the Other

In addition to settling Mongols and Jurchens in the borderlands, the Ming state arranged for migrants to live in the capital and other hinterland regions.^[1422] For nearly a century after 1368, influential Mongols and Jurchens leaders arrived at the head of hundreds, even thousands, of followers; they pledged allegiance to the Ming throne and in turn received residences, regular stipends (in grain and cash), senior military positions, and promotions and rewards for meritorious service.^[1423] Although Mongol and Jurchen leaders often expressed a preference for the capital at Nanjing and later Beijing, they also settled in dozens of sites across North China and elsewhere.^[1424] The court later relocated some Mongol communities southward to garrisons in Huguang and Guangdong.

Although the Ming state did not use the term “martial race,” Mongols and Jurchens were commonly said to be brave and warlike, immune to cold and suffering, tem­pestuous, and skilled in mounted archery. If properly disciplined and directed (again through the military garrisons), they and other martial races could con­tribute importantly to dynastic defenses against domestic rebels and foreign incur- sion.^[1425] During the sixteenth century, the Ming state repeatedly deployed aboriginal “Wolf” troops from Huguang against rebels and coastal marauders. It was hoped their ferocity in battle against dynastic enemies would outweigh their propensity for plundering civilian populations.

Several views of the Mongols and Jurchens in the service of the Ming coexisted uneasily. Although sometimes voicing concerns about the Mongols' alleged greed and uncertain loyalties, early Ming emperors often stressed their role as lord of all men. Just prior to founding the Ming dynasty, Hongwu assured Mongols, Jurchens, and various Central Asians affiliated with the Yuan regime that they had a place in the new order if they conformed to proper social practices.

A similar diversity of perspectives surrounded the place of Mongols and Jurchens in military garrisons located in the hinterlands. On the one hand, Mongols and Jurchens were treated much the same as Chinese military personnel; the state monitored their lives and deaths, promotions and demotions, their posts and their progeny through a series of registers that were periodically updated and that were used to assess taxes, labor obligations, and provide for things like salaries, housing, and welfare.^[1428] However, some distinctions were maintained; Mongol and Jurchen soldiers served under Mongol and Jurchen officers, were generally incor­porated into garrisons as “Tatar” units, and kept distinct as “Tatars” in adminis­trative records.^[1429] Through the first half of the fifteenth century, the state, as part of its recruitment policies, paid Mongols and Tatars slightly more generously (they enjoyed a preferential mix of wages in grain versus wages in silver, susceptible to disadvantageous commutation rates).

Their warnings seemed prescient when in 1449 an army from the western Mongolia steppe captured the reigning emperor, Zhengtong, and some Mongol soldiers stationed in garrisons around the capital exploited the resulting chaos to plunder. Even more Chinese soldiers from the same garrisons also pillaged, but the specter of collusion between steppe Mongols and those in the service of the Ming state catalyzed a decade-long policy of relocating sizable contingents of Mongol units far to the south. At the conclusion of campaigns of suppression in the south, they were not permitted to return north to their home garrisons. The state later relocated the soldiers' families to the south.^[1430] The goal was twofold: to put greater distance between Ming Mongols and their steppe brethren and to break up large concentrations of Mongols within the Ming polity.

Incorporation into the Ming Empire thus entailed profound changes for the Mongols. Within a generation or two, Mongol migrants left the nomadic pasto- ralism of the steppe for north China, where some measure of animal husbandry was still possible, and a portion ended up in the deep south, where environment and local custom strongly favored agricultural pursuits. Simultaneously, they left a political culture of relatively limited centralized political authority to enter the Ming's bureaucratic system of formal household registration, regular paperwork, and highly mediated patronage networks. Imperial bureaucratic categories distin­guished the Mongols (and often Jurchens) from the Chinese subjects; generations of educated men and officials considered them a distinct population, the “Tatars.” In fact, they were such a familiar part of the administrative landscape that in 1531 they appeared in an essay question on the civil service examination for would-be officials and were regularly mentioned in administrative geographies.^[1431]