by John Keay
Dissenting memorials from thirteen of the government’s leading agencies bearing 250 influential signatures, plus entreaties from two of the three Grand Secretaries, left no doubt as to the continuing strength of opposition. It was given tangible expression next day when, after pledging solidarity, a crowd of some two hundred dignitaries converged on the gate giving access to the throne room. There they went down on their knees and began chanting the names of the most respected Ming emperors by way of a pointed reminder to the unworthy incumbent. Orders to disperse were ignored, and arresting the ringleaders failed to quell the tumult. The protesters now pounded on the throne-room door. They kept it up for much of the day until the emperor, his patience exhausted, ordered his fearsome Embroidered Guard to clear the area by force.
No deaths resulted from this operation, but 134 men were taken into custody. All were then heavily sentenced, and of the thirty-seven who were awarded floggings, nineteen died under the lash. It was actually a rod. The offenders were stripped and made to lie on the ground, and the strokes were administered on their bare buttocks, the indignity being exceeded only by the pain, as blood flowed copiously. Officialdom was horrified. Emperors were supposedly too concerned for their future reputations to risk alienating the bureaucratic majority. The Jiajing outrage was considered worse than any of the early Ming purges, and the historians would indeed eventually take their revenge. On the other hand, the young emperor had got his way: his real parents took their place among the imperial ancestors with titles undemeaned by the inclusion of the word ‘natural’; filial piety had triumphed over ritual precedent; agnatic succession was accepted; over-assertive bureaucrats cowed; Wang Yangming’s ideas disseminated; and the seeds sown for a more critical approach to history.
But the casualties were ritual propriety and moral certitude, those twin ideals on whose conjunction depended the dynasty’s right to rule and the government’s ability to govern. If the Tumu Incident had disgraced the dynasty in the eyes of the empire, the Great Rites Controversy disgraced it in the eyes of its own officials. The Jiajing emperor reigned for another twenty-three years – and the dynasty for nine decades after that – but such was the legacy of mistrust and uncertainty engendered by the controversy that little could be expected of the period. The official histories report much unrest, many setbacks, still more ill omens and few successes. Following their lead, a recent writer has diagnosed ‘sclerosis at the heart of the bureaucracy’ under the late Ming. Another, swayed by the official histories, calls the Jiajing emperor ‘one of the most perverse and unpleasant men ever to occupy the Chinese throne’ and an exemplar of ‘the long procession of delinquent Ming emperors’.21
LANDMARKS AND INROADS
Despite such verdicts, and for the most part despite the absence of forceful direction, the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries witnessed great change. It was during the Ming that China’s population growth seems to have taken off; the reasons are obscure, and the percentage rate of growth would tail off in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries, though the net gain would not be significantly slowed until the 1980s. Under the Ming, too, education and publishing broadened the market for cultural productions, prompting a passion for connoisseurship and ensuring the success of new literary forms, most notably the novel. In the far north, new frontier defences were constructed, linked and battlemented to create what, some time before 1610, the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci called ‘an unbroken line of defence with a tremendous wall 405 miles [650 kilometres] long’. The ‘Great Wall’ as we know it today had finally arrived. In the south, ships armed with guns brought Europeans armed with ideas, no less devastating in their way, about the community of nations, the conduct of diplomacy and their own God-given right to dictate the terms of trade and further the spread of Christianity. Throughout the empire, silver superseded paper money as the standard currency, with the domestic economy growing increasingly dependent on the importation of silver, mainly from Japan and mostly by foreigners. Other importations, principally from the New World, such as maize, cassava, groundnuts, tobacco and sweet potatoes, but also cotton and sugar cane, rendered marginal lands much more productive. And in the extensive hilly areas of the south and south-west, where such land was most abundant, Han settlement and the empire’s social and administrative structures made substantial inroads. In short, a China with a more familiar profile was emerging and being slowly integrated into the world economy.
The philosopher Wang Yangming had gained his great insight into man’s ‘innate sense’ of right and wrong as a result of a near-mystical experience while serving in Guizhou in 1508. The posting was only slightly better than exile. Wang had fallen foul of the imperial eunuchs, been jailed and flogged, and had narrowly escaped liquidation. A hardship assignment was the best he could hope for, and the malarial badlands of Guizhou were certainly that. Not one of the original provinces created by the Yuan, Guizhou had been officially constituted in 1413 after an expedition dispatched there by the Yongle emperor had suppressed an uprising. A century later, when Wang Yangming arrived, the region was still far from tranquil following major revolts in neighbouring Guangxi in the 1460s and western Guizhou in 1500–02. In the latter case the insurgents were led by a woman. The latest in a succession of formidable southern matriarchs to challenge Ming supremacy, she belonged to a tribe called the Yi.
At the time, northern Guangdong and all Guangxi, Guizhou and Yunnan were still overwhelmingly populated by non-Han peoples. Though within the empire’s frontiers, these were yet frontier lands, intersected by secure rivers and trails and dotted with administrative centres and military outposts but for the most part suspicious of outsiders, if not downright hostile to them. The forested hills and deep valleys had an ethnic ecology of their own, with many quite different peoples pursuing highly specialised lifestyles. Some, such as the Yao and Miao (Meo, Hmong), practised swidden cultivation in the high hills; they have since spread, or migrated, south to swell the minorities of Laos, Vietnam and northern Thailand. Others, such as the Dai of Yunnan and the Zhuang of Guangxi, belonged to the same ethnolinguistic family as those lowland peoples known elsewhere as Lao, Shan or Thai and, like them, practised wet rice cultivation. Yet others, including the Yi (Lolo), Tujia and Bai of Guizhou and Yunnan, can only be categorised as sui generis. Though numerically insignificant compared with the Han, none of these peoples was subject to registration for tax and service purposes and so they do not figure in estimates of China’s population.
Wang Yangming’s appointment coincided with a renewed effort to pacify and settle these regions. It was a gradual process, sometimes consequent to hostilities, sometimes provocative of them. ‘The Ming used force, appeasement and guile’ – in roughly equal measures. At first a self-governing administration might be encouraged, ‘much as “autonomous status” is given to ethnic minorities in China today’.22 The more amenable clan chiefs and local headmen were organised into a hereditary hierarchy of command with impressive titles – ‘soothing minister’, ‘pacification minister’, ‘conciliation minister’ – plus some unpaid responsibilities. Alongside these tusi (‘native office’) arrangements a basic administrative structure might be set up with the establishment of districts, prefectures and provincial headquarters, the last staffed by officials who were either Han or had, as the term puts it, ‘entered the current [of Chinese acculturation]’. As areas of Han settlement spread, and as, by attraction and intermarriage, more of the native population were deemed to have ‘entered the current’, the full panoply of Ming administrative arrangements inched outwards. Taxation replaced occasional tribute, households were registered, and the needs of defence and labour service came to be supplied from the local population.
The whole process was notoriously open to abuse. Though Wang Yangming proved a model settlement officer and established good relations with the non-Han peoples, others exploited the differences between the various ethnic groups, extorted resources from them and grossly exaggerated their own achievements. The most
infamous case was that of a ‘pacification minister’ in the tusi of Bozhou in what is now north-western Guizhou. This Yang Yinglong, who was evidently of mixed descent, was the subject of repeated complaints yet somehow retained the government’s support for twenty years, during which he built up his own power base among the local Miao and Tujia. Eventually his depredations and vendettas endangered the stability of the whole region. In 1599 it took the best of Ming generals and an expedition of 250,000 men, 70 per cent of them drawn from other tusi, to end his reign of terror and bring Bozhou within the standard system of directly administered prefectures.
Demographic pressures, internal migration and the insatiable demand for cultivable land undoubtedly added urgency to the settlement of such regions, though the statistics afford insufficient corroboration. Extrapolating overall population figures from the Ming registers has taxed great minds without producing much consensus, mainly because the registers themselves show negligible growth; either they could not keep up with the growth or it suited those responsible to under-report, so reducing the tax yield expected by the central government and maximising their own take of it. It seems likely, however, that during the Ming period China’s population grew at 0.3–0.5 per cent per annum and that by the year 1600 the total may have stood at around 275 million. This was from a base of perhaps 85–100 million at the dynasty’s founding in 1368. Having for nearly two and a half millennia hovered within the 40–100 million bracket, during the two and half centuries of the Ming the number of the empire’s subjects nearly trebled. Thereafter, as if having passed some critical threshold, the rate of growth might slow, but such was the base total that the year-on year increment remained astronomical. Staggering natural disasters and catastrophic wars in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries would barely break its stride. By 1800 the total would be around 300 million and by 2000 around 1.3 billion.
This had all sorts of repercussions. According to some, it set China on a trajectory of labour-intensive growth rather than the West’s capital-intensive growth; with no incentive to save on manpower, mechanisation had limited appeal and industrialisation was delayed; mass production came to mean production by the masses rather than the production of a mass of stan-dardised items using minimal labour. Conversely the bureaucracy, which in earlier times had expanded much faster than the population, now failed to respond. Stretched ever thinner, bureaucrats in the provinces, however well educated, fell behind in updating tax assessments and so deprived government of the tax yield from the growth in population.
The area of cultivable land increased, yet the number of cultivable land-holdings may actually have fallen, the result of ever more of them being consolidated into large estates. In this respect, the Ming’s two and a half centuries of internal peace had a downside. The dispossessions and repossessions inherent in wars of conquest did not materialise; land for redistribution was therefore scarce; and to make matters worse, much of what there was went to providing imperial cadets with estates. Since several members of the Ming lineage managed fifty or so children, by the seventeenth century the number of imperial dependants ran to tens of thousands. The stipends they received (in addition to tax revenue from their estates) actually overtook the military budget as the most expensive of the empire’s fixed charges. Exiled to Guangxi province in 1549, Galeote Pereira, one of several Portuguese who had been convicted of smuggling, reported that Guilin, the province’s modest capital, possessed ‘a thousand of the emperor’s kin lodged in great palaces in various parts of the city’. None was entrusted with any responsibility, and they were forbidden to leave the city lest they stir up rebellion. But they lived well enough behind their red-painted walls (red being the dynasty’s colour, since fire was its Phase/Element) and were excellent company; ‘neither did we find, all the time we were in that city, so much honour and good entertainment anywhere as at their hands’, recalled Pereira.
Migration of a more traditional nature took many forms: to the northern frontier regions to form military colonies, to the south and south-west to take up marginal lands, to underpopulated sections of the rugged Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Fujian coastlines, and from there and Guangdong to places overseas. As well as the ports of mainland and island south-east Asia, Chinese commercial interests became established in Taiwan, the Ryukyu Islands between there and Japan, and Luzon in the Philippines, where there was a substantial Chinese community by the 1570s, when, by way of Mexico, the Spanish arrived. But then as now, perhaps the greatest migration was that from the countryside to the cities. Pereira likened the empire’s thirteen provinces – or ‘shires’ in his English translation – to European countries, and on the basis of a brief acquaintance with Fujian, Jiangxi and Guangxi, reckoned each had some seven major cities, ‘all well walled . . . and very gallant, specially near unto the gates, which are marvellously great and covered in iron’.23 A contemporary gazetteer lists sixteen of the empire’s cities as being of the first or second rank, only two of which (Guangzhou and Fuzhou) were in the provinces visited by Pereira. To these sixteen great cities, there might then be added fifty or more of lesser but still ‘gallant’ proportions.
Social historians have noticed how in Ming times the cultural life of the empire was less concentrated in the imperial capital than under previous dynasties. Nanjing, the southern capital with its own metropolitan province, hosted as many scholars and writers as Beijing; Suzhou, the canal city famous for its silk manufacture, and Hangzhou, the capital of the Southern Song, attracted artists and poets; and if Guilin is anything to go by, even lesser cities could provide the court patronage and civilised comforts to make them foci of cultural activity.
Under the Mongol Yuan dynasty, literature had descended from its ivory tower. Dramas written in the vernacular rather than in the classical and often incorporating risqué material had enjoyed both courtly and popular currency. Prose fiction written in the vernacular came with the Ming. Sometimes called ‘unofficial history’, it mostly explored historical themes and is best represented by the swashbuckling Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Several versions of the Romance were in circulation during the Ming period, although the best known today looks to have been composed or revised after the dynasty’s fall. Water Margin, another historically based narrative, this time set among bandits under the Song, had a similar provenance, and like the Romance had been anticipated in Yuan drama. The earliest extant edition of Journey to the West, or Monkey, that fantastic allegory loosely derived from pilgrim Xuanzang’s seventh-century journey to India, dates from 1592; and with Gold Vase Plum (or Plum in a Golden Vase), a domestic saga of sex and power, it completes ‘the four master-works of Ming fiction’.
While to most non-Chinese ‘Ming’ means a vase, it would be wrong to attribute this association entirely to the great porcelain exports of Jingdezhen’s kilns. Drawing heavily on the novel Gold Vase Plum, the art historian Craig Clunas has stressed the visual and material nature of all Ming culture. Things, just like words in the literary tradition, exercised a fascination that transcended their obvious function or aesthetic appeal. Each had its own repertoire of allusion and its own etymology. The Ming connoisseur observed the creative and manufacturing processes closely; artists and craftsmen responded by endowing their creations with contextual clues – dates, signatures, inscriptions, seasonal motifs, suggestive colours, archaic resonances. Objects had something of the instructive potential of portents. ‘It is not surprising that a work like Jing Ping Mei [Gold Vase Plum] should include so many descriptions of looking at things,’ writes Clunas; objects were seen ‘as one of the central pleasures and anxieties of the period’.24
Sadly, in respect of the greatest of all Ming artefacts, the countless millions who created it were not as conscientious as the historian would wish. The ‘Great Wall’ was unquestionably a Ming creation, both in terms of its construction and of its later repute. But plaques recording different stages of its construction are rare and only a few bricks bear an incised indication of their provenance. Moreover, archaeolo
gists, faced with a site 6,000–7,000 kilometres (3,700–4,350 miles) long, remain more concerned about conserving what can be seen than exhuming what cannot.
Disjointed references in the standard Ming history provide the best guide to the wall’s construction. They indicate that most of what remains today was undertaken between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries. Before that, some earthen walls in Liaoning have been identified as Ming work of the 1420s; they may represent a diversion of funds by the Yongle emperor following his suspension of the Zheng He expeditions to the Western Ocean. The defeat and capture of the emperor at the Tumu Incident of 1449 provided a new stimulus. After prolonged debate, and in response to Mongol settlement in the Ordos area within the great northern loop of the Yellow River, in the 1470s walls, often of two or three strands, and still of hangtu construction, were built across the neck of this ‘peninsula’ between Ningxia and Yulin. Only fragments of them are still visible.
Ongoing Mongol raids and the establishment of the Mongol capital at Hohhot in what is now Inner Mongolia exposed the vulnerability of the frontier farther east, especially between Datong and the Beijing area. In the 1540s, as Mongol incursions multiplied, an elaborate system of fortifications, towers and walls was thrown across and around this area of northern Shanxi and Hebei in what the authorities invariably call ‘a lozenge’. Some structures were faced with brick or stone, though not many and probably not till later. The complex nevertheless withstood a major raid in 1550 – or rather, it diverted it. For Altan Khan, another would-be Chinggis, simply led his forces round the eastern edge of the lozenge and straight to Beijing, there to ravage the capital’s farmlands and fire its suburbs within full view of the Jiajing emperor and his dismayed subjects. Only the heavily fortified gates and massive stone walls of Beijing itself went unchallenged.