by John Keay
After Tumu, the Ming empire did not in fact fragment like the Tang; if anything it stabilised. But the initiative displayed by its later dynasts and the influence they chose to wield would never rival that of the Hongwu and Yongle emperors. On the other hand, for a time the bureaucracy grew in confidence and on occasion relieved emperors of their ruling responsibilities. This did not preclude tension between the two. On the contrary, throne and executive were interminably at cross-purposes, and their disagreements had a way of escalating alarmingly. The executive could usually rely on the support of its bureaucratic cohorts, and the throne on that of its eunuch henchmen, whose numbers grew so vast as to constitute a parallel bureaucracy. Although not always the obvious bone of contention, ritual matters provided an especially fertile field of dispute, and in the 1520s precipitated a head-on collision. Known as the Great Rites Controversy, this would be an affair of titanic proportions that was in no way diminished by the apparently molecular insignificance of the ritual issues themselves.
The bureaucracy at the time was unusually assertive because it had undergone something of a sea-change. In their reports on China, one of the first things noted by Europeans (who began reaching the China coast in the early sixteenth century) was the enormous respect shown to scholar-bureaucrats. As a class, they were unmistakable. They wore ‘cap and girdle. . . conferred by the king’, travelled everywhere in ‘seats of beaten gold’ (gilded sedan chairs) shaded by umbrellas, and were always accompanied by servants who cleared a path for them and by banners proclaiming their rank.12 The Portuguese sometimes called them ‘louteas’, a respectful form of greeting used in Fujian; but borrowing a term commonly in use for officials of Chinese extraction in south-east Asia, they had also begun using the word ‘mandarin’ almost as soon as they took Malacca in 1511.
The word had no Chinese currency and may in fact derive from an Indic language. But as ‘mandarins’ it would become the stock term for China’s scholar-bureaucrats among Europeans, and hence for the language they spoke, which was typically that of the court in Beijing. In other words, the bureaucratically eligible, whether called shi or guan in Chinese and whether translated as ‘gentlemen’, ‘officials’, ‘literati’, ‘louteas’ or ‘mandarins’, now constituted an elite whose distinctive language hinted at its salient feature: access to this elite depended on education, not birth. After centuries of slow encroachment, examination candidates were at last coming into their own as office-holders. Indeed, ‘at no time in China’s premodern history was government in all its aspects more dominated by civil servants recruited and promoted on the basis of merit than in Ming times’.13
The founding Hongwu emperor deserves much of the credit. When, from the humblest origins, he had seized power in 1368 he showed no fondness for scholars but soon discovered a need for civil servants. To improve the lot of the cultivator through an empire-wide system of re-registration and fairer tax assessment, and to entrench his dynasty through a recodified body of law plus his numerous and much-revised ‘ancestral injunctions’, he sought bureaucratic recruits from the widest spectrum of society and of a standard that only the examination system could guarantee. To this end, government-funded Confucian schools were set up in every prefecture, sub-prefecture and county to augment those institutions privately maintained by monasteries, individual tutors and ambitious clans. Four thousand teachers were employed and, though pupil entry depended on adequate means and some prior tuition, the school system was theoretically open to almost anyone.
It was the same with the various exams, all of which required a thorough understanding of Zhu Xi’s ‘Four Books’, and by means of which the successful student might progress up the academic ladder and from locality to provincial capital and eventually the metropolis. There he might continue his studies in one of the unversities and/or try his luck in the three-day-long ordeal – as much an academic endurance test as an exam – that could bring a jinshi, or doctoral, degree and automatic qualification for office. Such at least was the theory, and although there were supplementary streams of privileged advancement and many run-offs for the less ambitious, practice seems to have matched it. By the late sixteenth century, ‘there were between one million and ten million men who had been educated to [the basic examinations] level’, a remarkable figure for a time when elsewhere even basic literacy barely registered. It represented 10–20 per cent of the adult male population, with 1 per cent proceeding to exam-certificated status and 0.01 per cent to jinshi rank.14 For the first time ever, ‘as of the 1440s success in the examinations was the only means to assure the possibility of a first-class civil service career’.15 Entry into the bureaucracy being now based on a rigorous assessment of ability and application, the calibre of officials improved and their sense of self-esteem advanced.
Social as well as professional status was at stake. Successful exam candidates are said to have enjoyed the acclaim nowadays accorded to style gurus and raddled entertainers. The exams were state occasions. Held triennially, the jinshi event constituted a high point in the capital’s calendar with thousands participating, thousands more providing tutorial support, sustenance and encouragement, and yet more working as invigilators, scrutineers and assessors. To preclude cheating, each candidate was installed in his own wooden cubicle. His desk by day served as his couch by night, and for better supervision the lines of cubicles lay open along one side, like a row of latrines. Responsibility for the exam rested not with the Ministry of Personnel but the Ministry of Rites, and jinshi literally meaning ‘presented shi’, it included a final viva in the presence of the emperor himself. Once again, ritual underlay the whole system. Scholars, just like tribute-bearers, supposedly conformed to the cosmic pattern of attraction, being drawn into the imperial orbit by its sheer centrality. Their attendance affirmed its legitimacy and their distinction added lustre to its brilliance.
The Great Rites Controversy of the early 1520s, like the previous ‘forcing of the palace gate’ affair, resulted from an irregularity in the succession. In good order, the son, grandson and great-grandson of the twice-ruling Zhengtong/Tianshun emperor had occupied the throne from 1465 until 1521. None had shown too much ambition, the first being a nonentity, the second a well-meaning scholar and the third a thuggish buffoon. But despite his gargantuan philandering, this last (the Zhengde emperor, r. 1506–21) left no issue. Moreover he had long since consigned the affairs of the realm to senior officials. These dignitaries were therefore in an excellent position to settle the matter of his successor, and in doing so assert their authority to determine ritual issues of the utmost delicacy.
There was no difficulty in deciding who should succeed. Contrary opinions were silenced, and a dictum was invoked that dated back to the pre-imperial Shang and which had recently been reinforced by inclusion among the Hongwu emperor’s ‘ancestral injunctions’. This declared that, assuming there was no direct heir, ‘when the elder brother dies, the younger brother succeeds’. ‘Brother’ being taken to signify all male collaterals directly descended from the same ancestor, it thus endorsed what is called agnatic succession. The way was clear for the accession of the fifteen-year-old prince of Xing, senior grandson of the nonentity emperor and cousin of the thuggish and just-deceased Zhengde emperor. Said to be sober and well educated, the prince was summoned from provincial obscurity and would reign as the Jiajing emperor (r. 1521–66). But even before he reached the capital, unexpected difficulties began to emerge.
The young man evidently had a mind of his own. Instead of entering Beijing by one of the eastern gates as stipulated by the Ministry of Rites, and then residing outside the palace until summoned for the ceremonies of accession, he insisted on entry by the south-facing main gate and immediate assumption of his imperial powers. He was emperor as of right, he protested, ‘and not just an heir apparent’. He also took exception to the reign-period name that was being proposed. It would have made him the Shaozhi emperor, the ‘Carry on Governing’ emperor, a title implying con tinuity and not much else. Jia
jing, his own suggestion, meant ‘Prosperity and Peace’, a less grudging and much more aspirational moniker.16
On both these issues he more or less got his way. But they proved only the opening salvoes in a battle of wills that steadily escalated over the next three years. The points in dispute – changing the colour of the tiles on the roof of his father’s tomb, for instance, or dropping a couple of written characters from the wordy titles awarded to both his parents – might seem insignificant, even mind-numbingly obscurantist. So, to many, do the arguments over clerical attire, devotional formulae and ecclesiastical furnishings that were racking European Christendom at the time. In both cases, lurking within the niceties of ritual wording and liturgical performance lay claims to an authority of transcendent consequence. As with Zheng He’s voyages and the traffic in tribute missions, rites were of the essence for a Celestial Empire. ‘In traditional China’, notes Carney Fisher, an authority on the Great Rites Controversy, ‘ritual was power and the knowledge of ritual brought power.’17 Without overmuch licence, the ritual arena in imperial China might be compared to the constitutional arena in, say, contemporary England. Crises, ritual or constitutional, were emphatically not just about forms and formulae. Arguably the outcome of the rites ‘power struggle’ of 1521–24 would determine the nature of Ming rule during its remaining century and consign both dynasty and bureaucracy to their dismal latter-day showings.
The fundamental issue still concerned the nature of the emperor’s succession. Ritual experts, expressing the views of the Confucian bureaucracy, insisted that the Jiajing emperor’s legitimacy depended on his undergoing posthumous adoption as the son of the deceased Zhengde emperor. That would make him his direct heir, ensure that the lineage remained unbroken, and permit him to reverence all the imperial Ming ancestors as his forebears. But it also meant demoting his real parents. His father must henceforth be acknowledged as his ‘uncle’ or, at best, as merely his ‘natural’ parent.
Precedents for imperial adoption and for these other adjustments to his paternity were not hard to find. Historians and ritualists explored them in mind-boggling detail and memorialised the throne about them remorsely. The Jiajing emperor was unmoved. His objection was based not on historical precedent but on moral principle. If filial piety was the linchpin of Confucian morality, no power on earth could persuade a dutiful son to deprive his natural father of the honours due to him. Heaven, rather than history, was the Jiajing emperor’s judge. In fact as emperor his first duty must be to organise not the demotion of his parents but their promotion to imperial status, with temple-shrines of suitable magnificence and all the honorifics and reverential rituals to which an imperial ancestor was entitled. Agnatic succession was clearly sanctioned in respect of both the emperorship and the dynasty. Adoption was therefore quite unnecessary. He had been emperor from the moment the Zhengde emperor died; he would be beholden to no one for the legitimacy of his accession.
This was spirited talk from a young man who was practically unknown in the capital and as yet lacked either powerful palace support or any constituency in the bureaucracy. He looked sure to be overwhelmed, if not by the sheer weight of scholarship deployed against him then certainly by the machinations of ministers genuinely concerned about ritual propriety and united in their resolve to rein him in. Nor was it easy to dilute this opposition by installing supporters of his own in positions of power. Emperors, ‘fixed and constant as the Northern star’ in their state of wuwei suspension, were expected to read memorials and listen to remon-strants; they could approve or disapprove policy proposals; but they could not appear to initiate them. ‘Emperors disposed only when ministers proposed’ was the age-old custom, and this applied as much to appointments as enactments.18 Naturally, those ambitious of imperial favour or fearful of imperial retribution would somehow divine the emperor’s wishes and memorialise or remonstrate accordingly. That was how autocratic authority operated. But without such promptings, and in the face of unanimous disapproval, the inexperienced Jiajing emperor was vulnerable.
It so happened, though, that in the middle ranks of the administration, and especially in distant Nanjing (‘the southern capital’), there were those who sympathised with his stance. To what extent they did so with a view to advancing their personal careers is hard to say. When their well-argued memorials, expanding on the principles involved and refuting the historical examples offered, began to trickle through to the emperor, he pounced on them gleefully. The missives were relayed to the Ministry of Rites, and their authors would eventually be summoned to Beijing. But as well as ambition, these comparative outsiders shared a common intellectual legacy. Nearly all had either studied under, or been influenced by, Wang Yangming (1472–1529, also known as Wang Shouren), the outstanding philosopher of the Ming period and successor to the great Neo-Confucianist Zhu Xi.
Wang Yangming thought highly of Zhu Xi but was no slave to the orthodoxy of his lixue (‘doctrine of principle’). Taking his cue from Mencius, he taught that man was born with an already fully developed sense of what was right and good rather than with Zhu Xi’s dormant gene waiting to be activated by the bookish ‘investigation of all things’. ‘The sense of right and wrong requires no deliberation to know, nor does it depend on learning to function,’ insisted Wang. ‘It is my nature as endowed by Heaven, the original substance of my mind, naturally intelligent, shining, clear, and understanding.’19 Protestant reformers in Europe might have supposed he was talking about what they called ‘conscience’; and some of his followers would indeed develop this idea to challenge many of the basic tenets of Neo-Confucianism, claim moral equality for all (including women) and espouse radical social agendas. But more than just a moral faculty, Wang Yangming’s ‘innate sense’ had a functional capacity, like that of a muscle; too much study and it would atrophy; it needed to be exercised by living an active public life and helping others. Wang himself set a fine example in this. An admired administrator and military comander as well as a thinker and teacher, he practised what he taught and so demonstrated the unity of thought and action.
Reflecting Wang Yangming’s doctrine of this ‘innate sense’ of what was right, the memorials reaching the Jiajing emperor from Nanjing in late 1521 ‘stressed that human feeling alone provided a guide to the natural order and urged the emperor to follow its lead’.20 Historical precedents were not relevant; each was of its time, and times changed. Only the natural order, discoverable within oneself, was permanent; and if this enjoined reverence for one’s parents above all else, then so be it. The ritual usage and terminology that indicated otherwise must be at fault. Another ‘rectification of names’ was called for.
None of this made any impression on the Ministry of Rites. The first Nanjing official to have broken ranks was simply censured and then removed from office. In 1522 the emperor himself appeared to cave in. Three small palace buildings had caught fire; though not a disaster, it could be a portent of worse to come and a sign of Heaven’s mounting displeasure; clearly the emperor must quickly regularise his position by undergoing adoption. Anxious as well as isolated, the Jiajing ruler now did so. In return for being adopted by a dead emperor, he wrung from the ritualists a few minor concessions in respect of the titles proposed for his natural parents. The crisis seemed to have blown over. But a year later, it was back. Two more disciples of Wang Yangming, both of them highly respected scholars, had circulated memorials in support of the emperor. It is possible even that they were speaking for Wang Yangming himself, he being temporarily in retirement while he observed the customary three years’ mourning following the death of his father.
In 1523 the emperor, reinvigorated by this evidence of influential support, proposed upgrading the status of his natural father’s ancestral shrine so that it was on a par with that of his now adopted father’s shrine. The roof was to have imperial yellow tiles and the number of dancers retained there for ceremonial purposes was to be increased. Howls of protest came from the Ministry of Rites, but they were ignored; th
e re-roofing and the dancers went ahead regardless. Eighteen years old in 1524, the Jiajing emperor was clearly gaining in confidence as the struggle moved rapidly to its climax. In that year the senior Grand Secretary retired; one of three such dignitaries who, ever since the Hongwu emperor had issued one of his ancestral injunctions against the office of chancellor, had headed the executive, it was he who had been largely responsible for organising the opposition to the emperor. At around the same time, more memorials came from Nanjing where support for the emperor’s stance was evidently widespread. A compromise that would elevate the emperor’s real father to ‘Natural Deceased Father Esteemed and Majestic Emperor’ looked possible; but it broke down when the Jiajing emperor took the title to mean parity between his two fathers and the Ministry of Rites took it to mean nothing of the sort.
As if inviting a showdown, the emperor now summoned his supporters from Nanjing. This was construed as a sign that they would soon be given positions of power, and indeed they were; one was nominated to head the Ministry of Rites, others to tenures at the prestigious Hanlin academy. Matters were getting personal. Each side accused the other of misleading the emperor and forming factions, both crimes being tantamount to treason. Threats of impeachment flew back and forth; talk of violence filled the air. The decisive move came from the emperor. In August 1524 he approved a suggestion from the now amenable Ministry of Rites that his mother be awarded an imperial title that did not include the term ‘natural’; she was, in other words, to be acknowledged as the supreme dowager empress and his adopted mother as merely the dowager empress-aunt. Since a similar move in respect of his two fathers looked to be only a matter of time, this announcement was greeted with a new storm of protest.