The Xenophile Historian

1279 to 1644

	The Yuan Dynasty
	The Ming Dynasty
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For his government Kublai divided the land into twelve provinces and the population into the following four classes:

1. Mongols (the aristocrats & tax-exempt landowners)
2. Central Asians, Turks and Europeans (merchants and administrators; Marco Polo fell into this category)
3. Koreans and northern Chinese (lower middle class)
4. Chinese who lived under the Song dynasty ("barbarians" without any rights or permission to trade)

Since most of the country's scholars were kept at the bottom of the social ladder, seditious sentiments were widespread and rebellion was an ever-present menace, as Marco Polo reported. To keep a lid on this problem Mongol garrisons were maintained in major cities to discourage outbreaks; they were regularly rotated before the luxuries of urban life could sap their strength. Unemployed Chinese scholars were forced to turn to cultural pursuits, and they made two significant contributions to Chinese literature, the drama and the novel. Both of these literary forms had been around at least as early as the Tang dynasty, but it was only now that they became popular. The government encouraged the development of the Chinese theater, for this was an art the semi-literate Mongols could understand.

Tolerant of all religions, Kublai allowed Islam to make many converts in the western provinces (Gansu, Ningxia, Xinjiang and Yunnan). He also asked Marco Polo's family to bring a hundred monks so that he could learn about Christianity; the pope, however, was more concerned with matters at home, and only sent two monks, who traveled with the Polos as far as Armenia before bad weather persuaded them to turn back. What an opportunity Catholicism missed there!

After Kublai's death in 1294 the dynasty decayed rapidly; so rapidly, in fact, that it ruled all of China for less time than it took to conquer it. Kublai's degenerate heirs were no warrior-kings--most of them never even saw a battlefield--and they let the maintenance of the country go neglected while they struggled between themselves for power. Between 1294 and 1333 ten emperors rose and fell; after them came a boy of 13, Toghon Temur, who ruled as long as Kublai Khan, though not as effectively. Inflation and high taxes alienated the peasants; the discontented scholars continued to make trouble whenever they saw an opportunity. Strange rumors began to circulate concerning the Mongols' intentions: they would not only ban iron weapons but iron tools; every unmarried boy and girl would be seized for government service; most frightening was a proposal to kill everyone named Zhao, Zhang, Li, Liu, or Wang.⁽¹⁾ Famines, epidemics like the notorious bubonic plague, severe flooding of the Yellow River, and bad land management caused the population to drop from 100 million in the thirteenth century to 60 million by 1393.

In the 1330s, a number of secret religious fraternities became openly political. The most significant of these was the White Lotus Society, which believed that the expulsion of the Mongols would bring about a perfect Buddhist nation. Its members met at night in secret, swore blood brotherhood, took on ritual names, and recruited an army of troops wearing red turbans. When the Yellow River floods severely damaged the Grand Canal, 150,000 laborers were sent to clean up the mess. This played right into the hands of the rebels. Tradition holds that the White Lotus spread a rumor that the end of the evil empire would come shortly after the appearance of a one-eyed giant and then they buried a huge one-eyed statue where the laborers would be sure to uncover it. By 1351 most of the Huai and Yangtze valleys were in revolt. And the Red Turbans were not alone; a pirate named Fang Guozhen made the coast unsafe, while a salt smuggler named Zhang Shicheng proclaimed himself emperor and shut himself up in the city of Gaoyu, blocking the Grand Canal.

The Mongol prime minister, Toghto, responded heroically to the crisis. Accepting that the north would have to feed itself, he organized an emergency program to bring nearly 154,500 square miles of new land under cultivation; he also printed enormous amounts of paper money to boost revenue without raising taxes. During the next few years the government won a string of victories on the battlefield. In the winter of 1354 Toghto led an army in person to besiege Gaoyu. Victory against Zhang Shicheng was in sight, until a letter arrived from Beijing announcing that Toghto had been dismissed from his post. His success had aroused envy at court; soon after that his enemies had him exiled and poisoned. Without him the loyalist army disintegrated, and many of the soldiers joined the rebels. By the end of 1356 the Mongols controlled nothing south of the Yellow River. Meanwhile Zhang pushed north and captured the wealthy city of Suzhou. There, as the ruler of ten million subjects, he began to live a life of luxury beyond what he could have dreamed of when he had rowed illicit cargoes through marshes.

At this point the Red Turbans broke up into four factions, each proclaiming its leader as the next emperor. The smallest but best-organized faction was led by 28-year-old Zhu Yuanzhang, a tall and spectacularly ugly peasant whose beady eyes, pockmarked skin, bulbous nose and jutting chin earned him the nickname of "the pig emperor." As a teenager, Zhu lost his entire family to starvation, and he survived only by joining a monastery. In 1352 he enlisted in the forces raised by a fortuneteller who predicted that the Buddha was about to return to earth, and he started recruiting his own band of followers, starting with twenty-four childhood friends from his native village. By 1355 he commanded 30,000 men, and in that year he captured the city of Nanjing, which became his base of operations afterward. Other faction leaders were as follows:

1. North of the Yangtze: Han Liner, the son of the original White Lotus leader. He now called himself the rightful Song emperor.
2. Hubei: Chen Youliang, a fisherman who called himself the emperor of Han, recalling an even earlier dynasty. He teamed up with an inland pirate fleet whose leader armed himself like a Japanese samurai and was therefore known as Two-Swords Zhao.
3. Sichuan: An isolated army of Manicheans, the last followers of a third-century Persian religion that combined elements of Christianity and Zoroastrianism.

All of the rebels progressed rapidly from bandit leaders to the rulers of organized states, and they modified their desire for revolution accordingly. Zhang and the pirate Fang even made a deal with the Mongol government, and sent it rice from the south. The Mongols survived in the north for twelve more years because the rebels now fought each other in a struggle for supremacy. Zhu fought Zhang and the Han rebels, finally overcoming both and uniting the Yangtze valley under his control. From Nanjing in 1368 he proclaimed himself Hongwu, the first emperor of the Ming, or bright dynasty.

Now Zhu's leading general, a childhood friend named Xu Da, marched north with a quarter of a million men. The Yuan regime had little power to fight back. It printed paper money by the cartload, but the troops this should have paid also existed only on paper.⁽²⁾ The last Yuan emperor hid in his palace and devoted himself to esoteric ceremonies he learned from the Tibetan Buddhist monks he favored--sacrifices of human hearts and livers and Tantric ceremonies that looked a lot like common orgies. Finally he gave up and fled to Mongolia, where he died in 1370. Meanwhile the pirate admiral Fang Guozhen provided the ships to transport Ming troops up and down the coast. The Red Turban state in Sichuan was finally overcome in 1371, when its catapults were shattered with a new invention, the cannon. In 1382 the Ming made one final conquest, the Mongol princedom of Yunnan in the far southwest.

The Ming Dynasty

Now that he was in power, Hongwu dissociated himself from the Red Turban revolutionaries. He protested that he never favored their utopian dreams, that he had become a rebel to stay alive, and that the war to expel the Mongols had done more harm than good. As for his own participation, well, his success meant that Heaven was on his side, didn't it?

Hongwu knew why the Mongols had failed; they and their administration had become lazy, incompetent and avaricious, destroying the weak and forcing law-abiding citizens to become bandits. He would not allow this to happen again, but to prevent it, he resorted to force in ways that resembled the tactics of the Mongols whose legacy he was trying to erase. At the same time, however, he realized that cruel punishments don't always work; the ancient sage Laozi had once said that those who do not fear death cannot be deterred by the death penalty. As a result he often substituted forced labor for executions. But such a policy could not keep the emperor from suspecting that somebody would follow his example as a successful rebel. All secret political and religious societies were suppressed, for as long as the slightest danger of insurrection remained, Hongwu could not feel secure.

In 1380 the emperor's suspicions caused a crisis that permanently affected the Ming dynasty. By this time Hongwu decided that all of his foreign problems (skirmishes with the Mongols, Japanese pirates raiding the coast, merchants who continued to trade abroad despite the emperor's wishes) were part of a massive conspiracy against the throne that was led by Hu Weiyong, an old comrade who had served him since 1355. Whether or not such a plot existed, Hu was executed, and afterwards a Soviet-style purge brought forth a wave of accusations and forced confessions; eventually more than 30,000 officials lost their lives because of their supposed association with the disgraced chancellor. Millions of ordinary people suffered as well; surveillance officers brought reports of treason, whether it existed or not; one survivor remarked that even the sinless Buddha would have been lucky to escape accusation. Court officials were flogged for minor errors, and authors were executed for writing poems about natural calamities, which were seen by the emperor as allusions to his own harsh rule. Ministers made final farewells to their families before answering a summons to the imperial palace and rejoiced if they returned alive.

Afterwards Hongwu trusted nobody. He did away with most of the cabinet, taking their powers for himself or his immediate family; for instance, each of his 26 sons became a provincial governor, though Hongwu retained personal control over all the armies. Never again would a Chinese emperor be restrained by his bureaucracy, as had been the case in earlier dynasties. The result was the same as in other autocratic societies; the system worked under a strong, determined leader like Hongwu, but when a poor leader was in charge it became a recipe for trouble.

The emperor's paranoia encouraged corruption, and his efforts to curb it had only limited success. A granary clerk named Kang Mingyuan was accused of embezzlement, twice branded, hamstrung, and lost both kneecaps, but still he continued to pilfer government supplies. Even corrupt officials in the Board of Punishments could not be flogged into obedience when they were caught. The bewildered emperor wrote that he "hoped to control villains on the idea that if one man is punished, a hundred will take warning. But peoples' minds nowadays aren't like this." He died disillusioned in 1398, after writing this note of despair: "Despite my exhaustive efforts, I can't transform bad people, whether they are clever or stupid. I always think things through completely before imposing them on my subjects, yet after a long time nothing produces any results. Alas, how hard it is!"

The next Ming emperors saw defense of the realm as their first priority; for this reason Yong Le (1403-25), the third and strongest emperor of the dynasty, rebuilt the Great Wall and moved the capital from Nanjing to Beijing, where he could keep a closer watch on the Mongols. It was Buddhist missionaries, however, that brought a more permanent end to the Mongol threat; by 1600 they had turned most of the fierce nomads into peaceful monks.

Another unique event that occurred in the early fifteenth century should be mentioned here. Between 1405 and 1433, seven huge fleets of warships, led by a Moslem eunuch named Zheng He, sailed from China on expeditions into the Indian Ocean. The fleets carried as many as 20,000 soldiers and 8,000 sailors; by comparison, the ill-fated Spanish Armada carried fewer men on a much shorter voyage. These voyages went to Southeast Asia, India, Persia, Arabia, and East Africa. Everywhere they went Zheng He demanded tribute--and got it! He brought back ambassadors from 50 different states, as well as exotic gifts such as zebras and a giraffe.⁽³⁾

Impressive as these expeditions were, they were not done for the purpose of exploration, since most of the lands visited had been trading partners for a long time. Nor was the purpose to establish colonies or even to trade; most Chinese merchants felt little need to look for customers. They already traded on favorable terms for all the products that Asia, Europe and Africa could offer, and Chinese products were in so much demand that they could wait for others to come to them; moreover, China was self-sufficient in everything that was important. The main reason for the expeditions was a political one: China wanted all nations to acknowledge that the Middle Kingdom was still the world's most advanced, most civilized nation. Once this was accomplished, the spectacular and costly voyages came to an end, because the Ming mentality saw no point in pursuing contacts with the rest of the world. The European nations, led by Portugal, started exploring about the time the Chinese expeditions ended, and they were motivated by two things: (1) treasure and profits, which could be translated into warships and armies that would strengthen them in their incessant wars with both European rivals and Moslem adversaries, and (2) the opportunity to convert unlimited numbers of heathens to Christianity. But neither of these desires moved the Chinese.

The scholars of China were actively hostile to the Zheng He expeditions. The voyages strengthened the position of the much-hated eunuchs who vied with the scholars for the emperor's favor and the high posts that went with it. In addition, the scholars saw the voyages as a foolish diversion of resources that the empire could not afford. They believed it would be better to direct the wealth and talents of the empire to building armies and fortifications to keep out the hated Mongols and other nomads; the memory of foreign rule was, after all, quite fresh. The result was that China turned in upon itself and became an isolationist society. It is remarkable that during the Ming era the entire coast was raided by Japanese pirates, but instead of driving off the raiders with China's first class navy, the response was to extend the Grand Canal from the Yellow River to Beijing so that Chinese ships would not have to go out to sea. Meanwhile, the aggressive Europeans exploded outward. It is difficult to exaggerate the magnitude of the consequences for both civilizations and the human race.

For size and majesty the Chinese empire had no rival in the fifteenth century. With more than a hundred million orderly souls, a bureaucracy of indestructible traditions, and a history going back 4,000 years, this was a fact. It was also an attitude; the Ming emperor recognized all other states either as tributary or rebellious members of a world dominion bestowed on him by Heaven. This attitude was not unreasonable so far as east Asians were concerned; Korea and Vietnam had been Chinese provinces in the past and the rulers of both still paid token tribute, to be recognized as legitimate by the Chinese emperor as well as by their own people. Indeed, among China's neighbors only Japan felt it had a national identity of its own; the rest accepted China as the political center of the world and the sole legitimate source of authority. This attitude, however, kept China from keeping up with the rest of the world; the rest of this chapter and the next will how China lost face when Europe pulled ahead in technology.

The Ming dynasty marks the heyday of Chinese architecture; most of the buildings in the Forbidden City were built during this time. In art, literature and other cultural pursuits, however, creativity disappeared. Innovation was replaced with a nostalgic imitation of what had been done before. Some historians believe that this conservatism came from the period of Mongol rule, a permanent shock from which China could not recover. By the time the West arrived the damage was done; the Chinese had become smug and incurious, and their culture began to stagnate. If the Ming rulers were aware of this, they accepted it as a fair price to pay for the return of peace after all the strife of the fourteenth century.

The first Europeans to reach China were the Portuguese, who dropped anchor in the harbor of Canton in 1513. Half a century later the Spanish conquest of the Philippines made Spain a major customer for Chinese products.⁽⁴⁾ Then came the Dutch, who established for themselves a local base of operations by taking over Formosa (Taiwan). The Chinese did not care much for these newcomers; upon meeting these strange-looking people with round eyes, big noses, and hair in many colors, the Chinese asked themselves, "Are these men or devils?" Their uncouth manners did not help good relations either, and that caused more than one violent incident between Chinese and Westerners. Eventually the government realized that the Europeans would not take no for an answer; the tiny Macao peninsula was given to the Portuguese for a permanent trading post, and the Europeans agreed not to spend more than a day in any other part of the country except Canton. There the Europeans remained, causing no more trouble until the nineteenth century.

One group of Westerners did not fall under the restrictions imposed on the merchants: the missionaries of the Society of Jesus, or Jesuits. One of the first Jesuits, Father Matteo Ricci, gained the respect of the Chinese by dressing up as a Chinese scholar and studying the teachings of Buddha and Confucius until he knew them as well as his Chinese counterparts. He made Christianity compatible with Chinese culture by permitting ancestor worship and the observance of the traditional holidays, so that converts could remain a part of the society around them. Eventually Father Ricci even got to preach to the emperor. The Jesuits were among the most highly educated people in Europe, so the late Ming and early Manchu emperors employed them as mathematicians, astronomers, diplomats (to Russia in 1689), and even gun makers (they supervised the casting of cannon); evidently the court wasn't bothered much by the strange religion the barbarian priests taught in their off-duty hours.

This cooperation between east and west ended when the pope found out about the Jesuits compromising Christianity; he declared in no uncertain terms that making sacrifices to one's ancestors or to Confucius is a form of idolatry. The Jesuits were able to remain in the imperial court until 1735, but they made few converts during the last forty years.

The Ming dynasty fell from a combination of the three evils that brought down all Chinese dynasties: invasion, rebellion, and corruption. Of those three, the last one was the worst. As in the Han era, the court eunuchs grew in numbers and power until they became the ones who really ran the country. Gradually the emperors abdicated their political responsibilities; after 1582, they would not conduct court business or even attend meetings with government ministers. When the eunuchs came with something that required a top-level decision, the usual imperial response would be: "Don't bother me with that. Just do what you think is best." And they did! Soon the eunuchs had private armies, secret police, and other agents, with which they terrorized the administration and the common people alike.

At a time when the treasury was depleted from famine, plagues, widespread unemployment, and a costly war against Japan in Korea, the eunuchs saw no limits to their corruption, offering command of the armies to the highest bidder. This was a particularly dangerous action, because in 1606 a barbarian chief named Nurhachi united the tribes of Manchuria into a powerful kingdom. Then the Manchus pushed south; thanks to the incompetence of the leaders picked by the eunuchs, they won again and again.

In 1625 Nurhachi broke through the Willow Palisade, China's first line of defense on the northeastern frontier. He took the city of Shenyang, renamed it Mukden, and made it his new capital. Remembering his twelfth century ancestors, he declared the establishment of a second Jin empire. One year later, he died of wounds suffered at the battle of Ningyuan. He lost that battle because the Manchus did not have guns, so his son and successor, Abahai, got some--Russian arquebuses presented as tribute from a Mongol tribe. He also realized that China was too big to conquer unless he had substantial Chinese help. Since the name Jin alienated the Chinese (it reminded them of an earlier period of foreign domination--see the end of Chapter 4), the name of the dynasty was changed to Qing, meaning "pure"; this made the Manchus look like a clean alternative to decadent Ming rule.

The second to last Ming emperor, Tianqi (1620-27), was a totally controlled puppet, who withdrew entirely from politics to pursue his hobby of carpentry. In his absence, the state was run by the emperor's former nursemaid, Mistress Ke, and a cruel eunuch named Wei Zhongxian. Wei's great influence and fondness for torture and murder silenced most of the critics, except for one brave court officer, who presented the uncaring emperor with a list of Wei's "twenty-four great crimes." "Can your majesty employ as your right-hand man a creature whose flesh the entire empire desires to eat?" the anguished official demanded. He got a clear answer two years later when Wei had him tortured and left to die in prison.

On the death of Tianqi, his seventeen-year-old brother Chongzhen came to the throne. This young man tried to restore integrity to the regime. The eunuch Wei escaped him by committing suicide. His companion in misrule, Mistress Ke, suffered death from slicing, a form of torture in which the victim undergoes amputation over a period of many days, one joint at a time; each wound was cauterized with a hot iron to prevent a quick death from loss of blood. Unfortunately, this was all done too late to save the dynasty. Two major rebellions had broken out in Shaanxi and Sichuan. The Shaanxi rebels captured Beijing in 1644, and the emperor hung himself to avoid falling into their hands; an orgy of looting and murder followed. Appalled at what was happening in the capital, the general commanding the forces on the Great Wall stopped fighting the Manchus and invited them to help him restore order in the country. Amazed at this offer to come into the empire they had been struggling against for a generation, the Manchus agreed. They did clear the rebels out of Beijing, but once they were done, they refused to go home; instead they proclaimed themselves rightful heirs to the Ming. Abahai had died the year before, so now his five-year-old son became the first Qing emperor, taking the name of Shunzhi, meaning "Obedience and Good Order Established."

2. Corrupt commanders were fond of exaggerating the numbers of men under their command, so they could pocket the pay of the non-existent troops.

3. In 2003 Gavin Menzies, a British naval officer, dropped a bombshell of a theory by publishing a book on Zheng He's expeditions; 1421: The Year China Discovered America. Menzies believes that the Chinese didn't stop when they reached Africa, but went on to explore the rest of the world, 71 years before Columbus and a full century before Magellan. According to this theory, the fleet went around Africa to the Cape Verde Islands, and split into three smaller groups. One visited the Caribbean and went around North America, via the "Northwest Passage" and the Bering Sea; one explored the coast of Antarctica and west Australia; one went around South America to enter the Pacific, exploring New Zealand, east Australia, the Philippines, Canada, California and Mexico before returning. Of course a lot of this is conjecture, and depends on rather questionable evidence, such as a claim that the offical records of the expeditions were destroyed after they came home. I'm also suspicious of the courses they took, which suggest that their captains knew a lot more about what lay ahead than the Europeans would know when they went exploring, plus the idea that fifteenth-century junks could successfully navigate in the same part of the Arctic that defeated all wooden ships later on. However, I have a feeling we'll be hearing more about this theory, both pro and con, for some time to come.

4. By the time the Spaniards arrived they already ruled the wealthiest parts of the New World; the Portuguese were pleased to accept them as trading partners, since they always paid with cash. It was Mexican silver that kept Macao viable, long after the Dutch destroyed Portugal's trading network.

© Copyright 2000 Charles Kimball