by John Keay
Ricci observed this phenomenon with dismay. As he understood it, in the past emperors had obtained sufficient in the way of precious metals – principally copper and silver – from mines within the empire. But these mines had long been officially closed because ‘thieves and robbers’ had taken to despoiling them. Now the Wanli emperor, out of dire necessity, had ordered their reopening, had imposed a 2 per cent tax on ‘all merchandise sold in every [mineral-yielding?] province’ and, bypassing the regular officials ‘who always administer the laws with moderation’, had dispatched eunuchs to enforce compliance. These ‘semi-men’, of whom Ricci was as scathing as any unemasculated Confucianist, had then gone berserk, ‘their greed turning them into savages’.
The tax collectors found gold mines, not in the mountains, but in the rich cities. If they were told that a rich man lived here or there, they said he had a silver mine in his house, and immediately decided to ransack and undermine his home . . . Sometimes, in order to secure an exemption from being robbed, the cities and even the provinces bartered with the eunuchs, and paid them a large sum of silver, which they said was taken from the mines for the royal treasury. The result of this unusual spoliation was an increase in the price of all commodities, with a corresponding growth in the general spread of poverty.3
Regular officials protested, even resisted, but to no avail; they were either dismissed or imprisoned. The eunuchcrats had the emperor’s full backing and grew ever ‘more insolent in their attitude and more daring in their depredations’. In the eyes of the inarticulate masses the entire government apparatus was at risk of being discredited by the scandal.
All of which, while attested elsewhere, overlooked the underlying problem: besides inadequate revenue receipts, the Ming faced a serious monetary crisis. Paper money had first run into problems under the Yuan dynasty. Insufficiently backed by silver, copper or even silk, new issues of notes had been declared non-convertible by the Mongol regime. As a result they rapidly lost their face value and were generally shunned; those who could preferred to hoard metals. The Hongwu emperor, founder of the Ming, had persisted with paper and shut down mining operations to cut off the supply of metals. But this merely boosted their value, especially that of silver. By 1400 the purchasing power of silver was higher in China than anywhere else in the world, and would remain so. The country ‘had entered a new monetary age in which unminted silver traded by weight, and copper coins both legal and counterfeit, were the dominant forms of currency’.4
The Ming Yongle emperor – he who championed the Zheng He voyages – continued issuing notes. Salaries were paid in them, and all those foreign tribute missions were plied with them; since they were worthless outside China – and soon worthless within China – recipients did well to spend them quickly. The Yongle emperor also reopened the mines. For a time the supply of precious metals had improved, and in 1436 some taxes became payable in silver, others in copper. This trend away from paper money accelerated in the sixteenth century so that by the 1550s most taxes were payable in silver. Meanwhile, judging by government receipts from mined silver, the yield from domestic sources had either dramatically declined or was being wilfully misrepresented. As of the sixteenth century by far the largest source of silver, and so of China’s money supply, was foreign trade. Against exports, the silver initially came from eastern Europe by way of Indo-Muslim and then Portuguese merchants; as of mid-century, it came from Japan and was shipped mainly by the Portuguese; and after the 1570s, it came substantially from the Americas, carried across the Pacific by Spanish galleon to Manila and thence to the coast of China in Chinese vessels, a development made possible by the 1567 lifting of that ban on Chinese participation in maritime ventures imposed after the Zheng He voyages.
Curiously, though silver was mined in China, it was never minted in China. The only coins in circulation remained copper cash that were strung together through their central hole into ‘strings’. As late as the 1870s overland explorers, such as those of France’s Mekong Exploration Commission, having bartered their way to some remote Chinese frontier with a variety of trade goods and currencies, were amazed to learn that on entering the Celestial Empire they must convert their resources into silver ingots. From these ingots, as from a cheese, chunks were cut or slivers pared, then weighed and essayed, for every substantial cash transaction. Though silver, its weight expressed in terms of liang or taels (37.6 grams, 1.3 ounces), was the standard unit of currency, there were no silver coins and no units of guaranteed weight and purity. In theory the metal retained its original function as a reserve and tax currency, handier to transport and store than copper, silk or grain. It was meant as the medium of the state, of its servants and the financial community, not of the black-haired commoner.
So long as silver was abundant worldwide, its high purchasing power in China acted as a magnet. (An embarrassingly favourable balance of payments is no novelty in China.) But from about 1600 to 1620, and again post-1630, the silver supply was interrupted by a combination of factors – declining production in the New World, ructions in Manila and hiccups on the high seas as Dutch and English shipping challenged the Iberian powers. This seems to have determined the Wanli emperor and his successors to maximise the revenue from domestic mines by imposing the new tax mentioned by Ricci and by entrusting its collection to eunuchcrats, many of whom were already in the provinces as tax overseers in connection with the salt monopoly. ‘Mines’ soon became just a generic euphemism for any enterprise or individual suspected of having large silver reserves. Since local administrations were notoriously ambivalent about this wealth, it could reasonably be assumed that little or no tax had already been levied on it; an equitable redistribution of the fiscal burden was indeed highly desirable and long overdue. But this was not it; and Ricci was right to highlight the abuses and hardships that resulted. Hoodlums were hired to terrorise those targeted; commercial life was interrupted; casual labourers were laid off; with silver in short supply, the silver-to-copper ratio rose in silver’s favour; so did prices; and hardest hit were those who sold their produce for copper but must pay their taxes in silver.
Urban unrest and tensions within the provincial elite were soon widespread. The death of the Wanli emperor in 1620 brought a respite in respect of the mining tax but not of the eunuchcrats, who continued to harry the rich and antagonise the righteous. Resentment was most evident in prosperous Jiangnan, a term denoting the region of ‘the Yangzi south’ and principally applied to the booming Nanjing–Suzhou–Hangzhou corridor. But it was more obvious upheavals within the heavily militarised society along the Great Wall in the far north which heightened these tensions and finally overwhelmed the Ming.
Throughout the empire in the 1620s and ’30s a succession of unusually cold summers brought crop failures and famines. Smallpox and possibly some form of plague were also rampant. As so often, dynastic change would take place against a background of widespread dislocation and hardship that was no less ominous than it was catastrophic. Simultaneously Mongol and Jurchen incursions into Liaodong (now Liaoning), the Ming province in southern Manchuria, necessitated the dispatch of ever more troops beyond the wall’s easternmost extremity. This weakened the garrisons to the west, creaming off their manpower, supplies and even wages. Here, and especially in Shaanxi, goaded by hunger and neglect, deserters formed gangs of roving ‘bandits’ that by 1630 were snowballing into rebellious armies. They coordinated their movements to avoid clashing with one another and roamed ever farther east, west and south (so panicking Jiangnan) to commandeer supplies and recruits. Though amenable to amnesties and occasionally defeated by imperial troops, they displayed remarkable resilience, in part because the imperial forces hastily raised to oppose them often proved no more disciplined – and rather less fair-minded when it came to sharing their spoils with the oppressed.
By 1641 these rebels had gelled into two main armies, one operating principally in Hubei and Sichuan, the other in Shanxi and Henan under a self-styled ‘Prince of Shun’. The ‘da
shing prince’, as he was popularly known, was otherwise Li Zicheng, a man in his mid-thirties with little education or military experience but a commanding personality and soaring expectations. In 1642 Li Zicheng captured Luoyang and then, after flooding it, Kaifeng; millions are said to have drowned, including 10,000 of his own men. He could afford the loss; his forces now supposedly numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Late in 1643 he added to his bag of ancient imperial capitals the city of Xi’an, renaming it Chang’an as in Tang times. In the same year he took Xiangyang, one of the twin cities from which the Southern Song had once defied the advancing Mongols by running their blockade with paddle-boats. There, like the Ming Hongwu emperor at Nanjing in his own pre-imperial days, Li Zicheng began setting up a rudimentary administration with the help of assorted officials attracted as much by his success as by his populist sentiments.
The extent of his ambitions was as yet unclear. The rebels had generally executed members of the extended Ming family along with senior Ming officials; indeed, rumour consistently had it that, in doing so, Li Zicheng was merely asserting his legitimacy, he being none other than the direct descendant of the Ming Jianwen emperor (the grandson of the founding Hongwu emperor who had either disappeared into the Western Ocean, where Zheng He had failed to find him, or been burnt to death when the Yongle emperor stormed Nanjing and usurped the throne). Yet Li Zicheng’s personal propaganda, like that of insurgents in the past, tirelessly stressed his loyalty to the present emperor; he was supposedly intent only on liberating him from self-seeking officials and dependants who abused his authority and frustrated his efforts to deal with the Jurchen-Manchu threat. There was something in this. Not mere rhetoric for once, it tallied with the views of many, including the Jurchen-Manchu themselves, who proclaimed equally loyalist sentiments to justify their own advance from the east, though of course they would rescue the emperor from his rebellious subjects. On the other hand, the weight of unmistakably imperial precedent building up behind Li Zicheng can hardly have gone unnoticed. As with the Qin First Emperor and Han Gaozu, his trail of conquest began in Shaanxi; like Han Gaozu and the Ming Hongwu emperor he had overcome the handicaps of humble birth; and as with the Tang emperors his surname was the auspicious Li. In conscious imitation of the Tang, he had reinstated Chang’an and awarded his officials Tang-style titles. All options were being kept open.
The year 1644 had begun with Li Zicheng’s elevation as ‘Great King of the West’, another ambiguous move, followed by his immediate departure for the east. After storming Taiyuan, the Shanxi capital, half his army had made straight for Beijing, the other half going via Datong to pre-empt attack in the rear from the Great Wall garrisons. Neither encountered much resistance; Manchu incursions into Liaodong had siphoned off the bulk of the imperial troops. By 22 April Li Zicheng was bivouacking among the imperial Ming tombs, singeing their architecture but not actually ransacking them. He was two days’ march from the capital. A Beijing Spring beckoned.
What precisely followed – or which of the several accounts deserves the greater credibility – is uncertain. As the rebel army entered the suburbs, the defenders melted away and the Ming simply bowed to the inevitable. The granaries were bare, the treasury empty, the depleted garrison unpaid and unfed. The government, riven by factional struggles, was as impotent as ever; senior ministers who could well afford to contribute to the defence of the realm turned a deaf ear to appeals for donations; and as for the Chongzhen emperor himself (r. 1628–44) he seemed more cut out for tragedy than heroics. In his early thirties at the time, he was neither an idiot nor an invalid; he worked hard and worried incessantly. But distrustful – he had got through fifty Grand Secretaries in seventeen years – and chronically indecisive – for months he had been havering over a possible retreat to Nanjing – he inspired neither confidence nor respect.
Some accounts have him summoning his ministers to a last-minute audience; no one turned up. Did he then get drunk? Order his empress to commit suicide? And stab to death his other womenfolk to save them from dishonour? Or did he simply put on his ceremonial robes, tramp up Coal Hill and hang himself? Was it in fact called ‘Coal Hill’? Or was it ‘Prospect Hill’, otherwise the ‘Hill of Ten Thousand Years’? And was it really from a beam in the Hat and Girdle pavilion that he hanged himself, or was it from a tree outside? No two accounts agree. ‘For this set of events’, writes Jonathan Spence, the most candid of Ming-Qing chroniclers, ‘the historian can usually decide for himself which are the likeliest versions.’5
Either later that day or the next Li Zicheng’s forces entered the Forbidden City. They were practically unopposed; someone had even left the gates unlocked for them. Over the next few weeks, as the blossom fell and the trees put out new leaf, Li Zicheng could conceivably have made good his usurpation. A horrific purge of officialdom was eventually scaled down, the torture sessions to extract confessions and reveal treasure were stopped, and some senior officials were re-employed. Looting continued, but when, a month after the capture of the city, there came news of a loyalist army preparing to attack from the east, Li Zicheng was still able to extricate the bulk of his forces for a pre-emptive strike against this new threat.
The decisive battle took place on 26 May (1644) near Shanhaiguan. About 300 kilometres (185 miles) from Beijing, Shanhaiguan is the massive gateway in the Great Wall nearest to the sea and commanding the eastward approaches from Liaodong. Before the fall of Beijing, Wu Sangui, Liaodong’s senior Ming general, had been withdrawn there to keep the Jurchen-Manchu forces out; but so dire was the news now coming from Beijing, including word of his own family’s detention by Li Zicheng’s rebels, that General Wu invited the Jurchen-Manchu in; they were to fight alongside his Ming forces to disperse the rebels, reclaim the capital, restore order and bury the deceased emperor.
It was to pre-empt such a hostile conjunction that Li Zicheng had hurriedly marched out of Beijing; and he did indeed reach Shanhaiguan before the arrival of the main Jurchen army. But he had underestimated General Wu Sangui. At the head of his Ming troops, and with or without decisive help from the first Jurchen contingents – this is another set of events about which the historian ‘can decide for himself’ – General Wu prevailed. Thus the first major battle in defence of the Great Wall was fought not against alien attackers from without but against Chinese attackers from within. And when the Manchu-Jurchen arrived in force, they passed through the Shanhaiguan unopposed, in fact keenly welcomed.
Li Zicheng, after defeat at Shanhaiguan, fell back on Beijing. In what was almost an afterthought, he stayed there just long enough to declare himself emperor and torch the palace; then he fled west with what remained of his army. Wu Sangui went after him. As a native of Liaodong himself, General Wu knew and respected the Jurchen; with the death of the Ming emperor and with an imperial heir nowhere to be found, he was ready to serve the newcomers as loyally as were other senior figures, including some of his own family, who had already changed sides – and as countless more soon would. Hence his departure from the scene with orders to pursue and annihilate the rebels; and hence, on 5 June, the Jurchen-Manchu host rode alone and unannounced into the still-smouldering Forbidden City. When their leader announced that they had come to avenge the Ming, a mystified crowd listened in fear and silence. Some supposed the speaker must be the descendant of a child fathered by the Ming Zhengtong emperor while he was in Mongol captivity following the Tumu Incident; few realised they were witnessing a transfer of the Mandate. Though all Chinese dynasties might reasonably be described as conquest dynasties, none had conquered less of China before gaining the throne than the Manchus.
FROM JURCHEN TO MANCHU
Beijing’s new rulers pose something of an enigma. In terms of numbers, economic resources, military technology and governmental experience, the Jurchen of the early seventeenth century appear so disadvantaged as to make their chances of conquering all China seem quixotic. Yet much the same might have been said of the Khitan and Mongols when first they invaded. Under t
heir own Jin dynasty, the Jurchen had already had one bite at the cherry, evicting the Khitan Liao and then the Northern Song from northern China in the twelfth century before themselves succumbing to Mongol conquest in the thirteenth. Some Jurchen had then served under the Mongols, others had trickled back to their homeland, yet others had never left it. They had remained a restless presence in the far north-east, whether within the Yuan empire or later as tributaries of the Ming.
Sin Chung-il, a Korean emissary who in 1595 had visited the Jurchen living north-west of the Yalu River, found a people heavily influenced by their exposure to both Han and Mongol culture. The educated spoke some Chinese as well as their native Tungusic tongue. They used the Mongol script in preference to the Khitan-based script developed by the Jin, and they combined a regard for Confucian values with respect for the devotional Buddhism of Tibet as lately adopted by the Mongols. Above all they retained an abiding attachment to their own traditions of divination and sacrifice; ancestors and deities were regularly consulted through a male or female ‘shaman’, the term itself being ‘the only commonly used English word that is a loan from [the Jurchen] language’.6
Yet they lived in a manner that was little removed from that of their pre-Jin ancestors. Dispersed, along with their livestock, in fortified village settlements, they were grouped under hereditary leaders called beile. These chiefs lorded it over their dependants, distributed land, slaves, brides and arms among them, and often fought with one another. Defensive walls were of mud and wattle with stone foundations; houses were of timber or brick and might be half buried in the ground, a Jurchen concession to the harsh climate of the north-east. It could indeed be cold. The visit of the Korean Sin Chung-il coincided with midwinter, which might explain his taking notice of the Jurchen propensity for strong liquor, impromptu wrestling and vigorous dances. The fields, fallow at the time, produced wheat and millet, the stables were well stocked with horses, and from the forests and uplands came pelts, pine nuts and ginseng root. The Jurchen of the Yalu and Liao basins harvested, herded, hunted and foraged. They were not even semi-nomadic, though other ‘wild’ Jurchen farther north were, and likewise the Mongols of the region.