by John Keay
But by now Annam had been independent under its native Tran dynasty for around four hundred years. It had acknowledged Song suzerainty at its own convenience and Yuan supremacy only under duress. During the Ming Hongwu and Jianwen reigns it had been largely ignored; and it could have been by the Yongle emperor. When in 1404 he was misled into recognising a rebellious pretender as the ruler of Annam, when in 1405 he corrected his mistake by recognising a supposed Tran descendant, and when in 1406 this claimant and his Ming escort were slaughtered the moment they set foot in Annam, the emperor might still have cited his father’s injunction and backed off. Instead he sent an army of 215,000 to invade. Worse still, in 1407, after a comprehensive victory, he annexed Annam, renaming it the Ming province of Jiaozhi. This is what it had been called under the Han, and now as then the Annamese proved anything but agreeable. Drawing on cherished memories of the Trung sisters, those indomitable Boadiceas who had defied the armies of the Later Han, they found inspirational leadership in members of the Tran and Le clans, plus a spirit of unquenchable resistance that freedom fighters of a later age would recognise as pristine nationalism.
The hostilities that followed lasted twenty years. Thrice the country was thought pacified and thrice revolt broke out anew. The Ming forces seldom lost a battle; the Vietnamese never gave up the fight. By land and sea, more and more troops and supplies went south, but it made no difference. Terrain and climate weakened the invader and favoured the guerrilla tactics of the invaded. By the mid-1420s the Vietnamese resistance enjoyed almost universal support under the great Le Loi, a patriot who would one day inspire the young Nguyen Ai Quoc, otherwise Ho Chi Minh. (But the twentieth-century parallels are too numerous for mention.) Ming forces won no hearts and Ming administrators eased no minds. Champa, the Ming support base and ally in the south, became thoroughly disillusioned. And by 1423 a face-saving disengagement was already under consideration in Beijing. It had been the most comprehensive military failure in the history of the early Ming.
Disengagement was not completed until 1427, four years and two emperors after the Yongle emperor’s death; and relations were not formally regularised until ten years, and two more emperors, later. Thereafter, though threatened with another invasion in the 1530s, Vietnam went its own way, overrunning Champa and part of Cambodia to assume its current dimensions, and evading conquest even by the expansionist Qing. But the Chinese cause had effectively been lost back in 1423. In that year the sixth of Zheng He’s voyages returned to China, a moratorium was announced on further sailings, and the Yongle emperor died. Failure in Vietnam had ended the need for propping up Champa and for policing the maritime states of the Malay and Indonesian coastlines. Without this strategic justification, the enormous expense of voyaging farther afield and maintaining the fleet necessary for such prestige exercises could no longer be justified. Confucian opinion had long opposed the voyages. The emperor’s eunuchs, the main supporters and beneficiaries of the whole maritime initiative, fell from favour with the Yongle emperor’s death.
Perhaps ultimately, as the Hong Kong academic Wang Gungwu has noted, the Yongle emperor’s interventionist experiments were allowed to lapse because ‘the traditional tribute system was never meant to support active international politics’. The emperor might appear to have anticipated a European form of power projection, but without adjusting the concepts and conventions on which imperial China’s foreign relations had always been based, it was a wasted exercise. ‘More money, power, and ceremony applied in the same old way was simply bound to fail.’8 From a modern perspective, the whole exercise looks like one of China’s great lost opportunities. Pursued to a logical conclusion, the Zheng He voyages would have made European mastery of the sea lanes problematic and so forestalled that westward tilt in the global equilibrium that is only now, in the twenty-first century, being corrected. But at the time, for a dynasty unsure of its destiny and an emperor in need of legitimacy, it was precisely the ritual nature of traditional diplomacy and its cosmological context which recommended the voyages. Having served that purpose, having exhausted their utility in respect of the Vietnam war, and having failed to discover any other rationale that might justify their expense, they could be terminated.
This tension between tributary tradition and interventionist potential was evident elsewhere. Another reason for abandoning both Vietnam and the voyages was that by 1420 the empire had shouldered heavier commitments in the far north. The expense of constructing the new capital of Beijing, its proximity to Mongolia and a revived Mongol threat relegated south-east Asia and the Western Ocean to the status of distractions. Significantly, Mongolia (which term now comprehended all the peoples of the northern steppe) had not been included in the list of countries that the Hongwu emperor had enjoined his successors on no account to invade. The steppe remained a dangerously open frontier and all the more so now that court and capital had been relocated within easy reach of it. No doubt the Yongle emperor appreciated this. Indeed, the move to Beijing would appear to indicate that the early Ming nursed ambitions of following the example of the Yuan, imposing their authority throughout Mongolia and Manchuria, and so re-creating a dual empire combining the steppe and the sown.
In return for envoys and tribute, the Hongwu and Yongle emperors had extended titles and trading privileges to distant Mongolian, Manchurian and Siberian peoples with a view to neutralising them. Meanwhile diplomatic and military offensives were directed at a nearby confederation of eastern Mongols and the increasingly formidable Oyirat Mongols in the west, both of whom aspired to re-establish the empire of Chinggis Khan. The Ming emperors played one off against the other and either sent or led large expeditions against them. They established supposedly self-sufficient military colonies on the fringes of the steppe and constructed lines of fortified positions and observation posts at strategic locations. Some scholars read these ‘lines’ as ‘walls’. ‘It would probably be incorrect, however, to think of these walls at the passes as constituting either an ancient, or a prototype, “Great Wall”,’ writes the great Wall authority Arthur Waldron. ‘The first mention of the phrase changcheng, “long walls”, in the Ming Veritable Records does not appear until the year 1429.’9 Nor, even then, did the new changcheng resemble the great bastioned and crenellated curtains of brick and stone that had lately been built round cities like Nanjing and the new Beijing. Judging by complaints over the damage caused by rain, frontier walls were still being constructed of hangtu, that compound achieved by tamping earth between timber shutterings; indeed, hangtu’s durable and compacted nature, the product of uncounted blows, might serve as an analogy for the steppe-hammered civilisation that championed it.
As in Vietnam, so in Mongolia – the last years of the Yongle emperor brought a scaling down of operations and a retraction of the outermost defences. Their maintenance had proved a more crippling expense than their establishment; and the emperor, now rheumy-eyed and sixty-something, must have been as exhausted as his treasury. The frontier retrenchment continued under his immediate successors. By 1430 even places within a few days’ march of the capital had been abandoned, among them Kaiping, the renamed city that had been Khubilai’s Shangdu and would live on as Coleridge’s Xanadu. At court the merits of a harder, more manageable and less expensive frontier were championed by Confucian civilians, and there was much to be said for such a policy; but only if the nomadic peoples outside could be mollified by trade-as-tribute arrangements whereby they might dispose of their annual livestock surplus and obtain the Chinese supplies and manufactures on which they had come to rely. Yet markets set up for this purpose were strictly controlled, trade remained an imperial monopoly, and the number and frequency of Mongolian tributary missions, typically two thousand strong, so drained the empire’s hospitality fund that they often had to be turned away.
As in the past, consolidating the frontier had an uncanny way of consolidating those whom it excluded. In the west, as of the 1430s, the Oyirat Mongols under a leader called Esen raided settled region
s from Hami in Xinjiang to Gansu and Shaanxi. By conquest and alliance Esen secured the support of the Eastern Mongols and the Jurchen of northern Manchuria. When in 1448 a horde of his swaggering tribute-bearers was rebuffed by the Ming, he launched simultaneous invasions into Liaodong, Hebei and Shanxi. Beijing responded by fielding an army hopefully estimated at half a million men. It marched forth in early August 1449; and thus the scene was set for the ‘Tumu Incident’, a catastrophe so unincidental as to blight the Ming dynasty’s reputation for the next two centuries.
The Ming Zhengtong emperor (r. 1436–49), great-grandson of the Yongle emperor, was of a mind to emulate his forebear’s example and lead his troops in person. He had succeeded to the throne at the age of eight, had liked playing with soldiers and, now twenty-one, eagerly embraced the chance to do so for real. His advisers were aghast; but Wang Zhen, a eunuch who had been his tutor and was now his all-powerful head of security, dismissed their doubts and personally undertook to accompany the emperor and oversee operations.
The twenty-eight-day campaign that followed has been described as ‘totally frivolous and irresponsible’, which is a fair reflection of the official account.10 Nothing went to plan – if indeed there was a plan. It rained incessantly, the minister of war kept falling off his horse, and eunuch Wang Zhen, inspiring nothing but hatred, was lucky not to be murdered in the first week. Amid reports of Mongol successes right along the frontier, and despite growing disaffection in the ranks, the army trundled west to Datong. Whenever the rain stopped, ominous black clouds kept materialising out of nowhere. Unease spread. After just two days in Datong, and still without sight of the enemy, Wang Zhen abandoned the idea of invading Mongol territory and agreed to the withdrawal for which all had been clamouring. By 30 August the Ming forces, now more a rabble than an army, were back in Hebei and just three days from Beijing. It was then that Esen’s rough-riding bowmen, their horses at their strongest after the summer grazing, caught up with the Ming rearguard.
The rearguard was instantly overwhelmed. So were the 30,000 cavalry sent to take its place – they rode straight into an ambush. Next day the main army reached a post-station called Tumu. The rain had stopped, the wells were already dry, and men and horses were now suffering from thirst. Rations also seem to have run out. A violent debate between eunuch Wang Zhen and the horse-allergic war minister sent the latter limping off to his tent, where he wept all night. He had wanted to send the emperor straight to Beijing for safety; Wang Zhen opposed the idea, supposedly because his personal baggage-train of 1,000 wagons had not yet caught up with them. Next morning was the first of September and the Mid-Autumn Festival, a day of feasting and family reunions. The army awoke parched, hungry and surrounded on all sides. More altercations scuppered any chance of a truce; and when the order to advance was given, the Mongols took it as their signal to attack. Seemingly quite unprepared for this turn of events, the Ming ranks broke at the first onslaught. Thousands reportedly defected; thousands more presumably did not; either way, about half perished.
Meanwhile the emperor, still ringed by his imperial guards, dismounted from his horse and sat on the ground. Arrows rained down around him; the guards were all killed; the emperor somehow survived. He was still sitting there when a Mongol prince, suspecting he was someone special, led him off into captivity. Not until the following day was his identity established. Esen, as surprised as anyone at such an unlikely prize, considered executing him, but was then persuaded to use him as a bargaining counter. In Beijing the court and government were equally at a loss. History offered plenty of precedents for Heaven’s Son being a Mongol but none at all for his being a Mongol hostage. The fallout of the 1449 Tumu Incident would be as instructive as the affair itself.
So much, though, for the details of the battle as extrapolated from the Ming dynastic history. It goes without saying that Wang Zhen was a godsend to the historians. As a eunuch by choice (he had fathered a family before sacrificing sex to advance his career prospects), he was beneath male Confucian contempt; as a notorious oppressor of ministerial remonstrants, he could expect no posthumous favours from the career bureaucrats who doubled as historians; and as a thoroughly incompetent commander, he was the perfect scapegoat for the whole affair. On the other hand, good Confucians, such as the war minister, came out of it well and even got their revenge. Wang Zhen had died on the battlefield, probably at the hands of his own officers; but there remained the need for some exemplary posthumous punishment, including the eradication of his five degrees of relatives.
Accordingly, a week after Tumu, a mass gathering of officials in Beijing attended the palace to demand action from the acting regent. There, in open court, they found themselves opposed by a group of eunuchs – which raises doubts about the extent of Wang Zhen’s unpopularity. Bravely if most unwisely, the eunuchs defended Wang Zhen and argued for clemency. This proved too much for normally deferential bureaucrats. The cream of Ming officialdom rose as one and transformed itself into a lynch mob. Baying for the blood of Wang Zhen’s relatives, male or female, child or crone, whose only crime may have been a claim on his largesse or patronage, these dignitaries and degree-holders, the flower of the Neo-Confucian academies and the pick of the hereditary office-holding families, proceeded to gouge, kick, bite and beat – they were armed with nothing more lethal than their footwear – to such injurious effect that three eunuchs were killed outright, more were seriously wounded, and another palace floor was steeped in blood. Clearly emperors and their eunuch henchmen did not have a monopoly on violence.
Citing this mini-massacre as a triumph for the righteous, the histories, while strangely indifferent to the plight of the hostage emperor, put the best possible gloss on the closing of ranks that followed the Tumu Incident. A brother of the captive Zhengtong emperor was elevated to the throne as the Jingtai emperor (r. 1450–57). The court firmly refused to treat with the Mongol leader Esen. The ranks of the army were rapidly replenished from military reserves elsewhere in the empire. And the city of Beijing, against all expectations, was heroically defended. The Mongols, being unable either to enter the capital or offload the emperor, withdrew within weeks. Esen’s Mongolian confederation then began to unravel, and within the year the Zhengtong ex-emperor was simply returned to China as surplus to requirements. It was as if he had been absent in Mongolia on legitimate business. Handed over with all the ceremony accorded a still-reigning monarch, he re-entered Ming territory unharmed, unransomed and, it has to be said, largely unwanted. For there were now two Sons of Heaven, each legitimately enthroned, which was almost worse than none at all. To the empire, the Tumu Incident had proved no more than a misfortune, but to the dynasty it still had the potential for disaster.
Luckily, after such a shock to the system, neither of the emperors was overconfident. Rather were they conscious of their debt to, and so receptive to the opinions of, a ministerial establishment that had managed the recent crisis so effectively. The Zhengtong emperor was installed in the southern palace and there kept in reserve, as it were, while the Jingtai emperor reigned on for another eight years. Then in 1457, when the latter prevaricated over nominating a successor and appeared to be ailing, the former was simply reinstalled in his stead. In an incident known as the ‘forcing of the palace gate’, a cabal of officials, after securing the support of the Imperial Guard, entered the southern palace, thrust its occupant into a sedan chair, ‘forced the gate’ of the main (northern) palace, and plonked the surprised ex-emperor back on the throne. ‘The coup d’état par excellence of Ming history’, as the Cambridge History has it, this was the gravest possible violation of ritual propriety and one motivated almost entirely by self-seeking opportunism.11 The deposed Jingtai emperor died soon afterwards – suspiciously soon afterwards – and it remained only to think up a name for the new reign period of the reinstated Zhengtong emperor. The title chosen by his ritual advisers, tongues in cheeks surely, was ‘Tianshun’, ‘Obedient to Heaven’; celestial subservience and bureaucratic advantage were
showing a remarkable convergence. Uniquely among the Ming, then, this emperor had two reign periods; or to put it another way, the Zhengtong emperor (r. 1436–49) and the Tianshun emperor (r. 1457–64) in the Ming succession tables are one and the same man.
THE GREAT RITES CONTROVERSY
Most Chinese dynasties conformed to a pattern: they peaked quickly and declined slowly. Vigorous emperors deserving of respectful names (Gaozu, Taizu, Taizong) came early on in the succession; less effective ones with condescending names (Aidi, Pingdi, Shundi) came towards the end. A similar top-heaviness had characterised the Mongol succession and was about to find classic expression in the Mongols’ Indian offshoot, the first of whose six ‘Great Mughals’, Babur (1483–1530), was a fifth-generation descendant of Timur Leng. This is in marked contrast to the ruling houses that were emerging in Europe at around this time. The Habsburgs and Bourbons, Tudors and Stuarts, all took some time to produce their best-known rulers – Maria Theresa, Louis XIV, Elizabeth I, Charles II. European dynasties peaked later and subsided more rapidly. Since both East and West endorsed the principle of succession by primogeniture, it does not appear that genetics can explain these trends; and since exceptions are not too hard to find, it could all be coincidence. But just as the 755 An Lushan rebellion seems to form a dynastic watershed in terms of the calibre of the Tang emperors, so with the 1449 Tumu Incident and the Ming emperors.