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dynasty in loosely hanging robes. Likewise, he outlawed all of the fashionable Mongol styles, including hairstyles, men’s narrow sleeves and trousers, and women’s short sleeves and skirts. These decrees clearly demonstrated that Hongwu sought to reinforce Chinese nationalism and orthodox cultural and social values.9 As a result, Ming Chinese men began to prize long and elaborately dressed hair as a sign of masculinity and elegance. And women resumed binding their feet as their men professed that small, crippled feet were sexually more attractive.
While Hongwu was willing to embrace all the “barbarians” within the empire in the arms of Chinese civilization, he was not yet ready to treat them just as he did the majority Han Chinese. That his cultural and ethnic policy, if we can use such a phrase, was one of amalgamation rather than assimilation is evident in his 1370 decree that neither Mongols nor people with “colored eyes”—
Turks, Tibetans, Arab Muslims, and Europeans—would be allowed to change their names to Chinese ones. He was concerned that once they had changed the names, their o¤spring would forget their true identity.10 Assimilation assumes that one group is somehow changed or converted by another group after a military conquest or long peaceful cohabitation. Amalgamation, on the other hand, assumes that the marginal group will adopt the cultural ways of the main group and, while living subserviently in a symbiotic arrangement, will retain its own heritage without disturbing the internal order. By the time Yongle assumed the Ming leadership, he had decided that he wanted to assimilate the Mongols so that they could eventually be treated just as the Chinese.
He saw the assimilation not as an end in itself but as an instrument for converting the Mongols into loyal, productive members of the new society.
In 1403 Yongle complained to his minister of war that most of the Tartars in the military service bore the same first names and had no surnames to distinguish them, and he suggested that the guard o‹cers be given Chinese surnames and be required to wear Chinese clothing. While Yongle tried to make it easier for his military commanders to identify the Mongols in battle, he also took measures to assure that those who had surrendered would feel comfortable and welcome in the new society. Following this line of thinking, he inter-spersed his new Mongol subjects among the Chinese population in various parts of the empire. For instance, hundreds of thousands of Uriyangqad people from Jehol and Liaoning previously under the hegemony of Naghachu, who had surrendered to the Ming forces in 1387, were dispersed to Yunnan, Guangdong, Guangxi, and Fujian. The less ethnically conscious Yongle took one step further to encourage racial comity and civil society when he organized the Mongols into lijia hamlets “in tandem with the Chinese” so that the two peoples 152
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could intermingle. As had happened so many times during previous dynastic changes, a slow and gradual assimilation of the “barbarian” population took place in China proper, and Yongle’s e¤orts to rid Ming society of Tartarism began to see notable results.11
But Tartarism (Chinese: Dadan), which has derogatory and even ribald con-notations in China, meant di¤erent meanings to di¤erent people. After the Mongols retreated to the north, two powerful groups emerged: the Oirat (lit.,
“border area”), a collection of di¤erent peoples in the northwest; and the Dadan in the northeast. This latter name was to be distorted into “Tartar” by Europeans, who then applied it wrongly to the Manchus, a people of Tungusic, not Mongol, extraction and also to the Tartars of Russia, who are of Turkish origin.12 It is believed that the word “Mongol” (Menggu) was first coined by the Chinese in the Tang dynasty (618–907) and that “Dadan” was first used in the Song dynasty (960–1279) to refer to a Turco-Mongol people called the Qidan, who established a powerful empire called Liao (916–1125) in eastern Mongolia and Manchuria. In the year 1004, the Qidan cavalry defeated the Chinese and compelled the latter to pay Liao an annuity of two hundred thousand bolts of silk and one hundred thousand ounces of silver. Indeed, the term
“Tartar” was already in use long before the great Chinggis Khan was born.
In 1324, when the Yuan emperor Taiding (r. 1324–28), also known as Esun Temur, ascended the throne, he issued an amnesty decree, in which he used such phrases as “our grand national land” (Chinese: dada guotu) and “our great people” (Chinese: dada baixing).13 In fact, fourteenth-century playwrights frequently used the term dada in composing colloquial-style drama. Scarcely had the Ming forces driven Toyon Temur out of Beijing than the Ming founder was calling eastern Mongolia—where the Yuan claimant Toyon Temur and his remaining forces stayed—the land of the Tartars. In 1370 the Ming emperor called the Mongols the “Tartar people adjacent to the northern frontiers” ( yibei Dada baixing). An entry in the 1388 Hongwu Veritable Record refers to the Mongol chiefs as the “Tartar princes” ( Dadan wangzi). By the time Yongle was compelled to deal with the Mongol problem, the Chinese had already begun using the term yibei Dazi to refer to their archenemies beyond the Great Wall. Even though they did make distinctions among the Oirat, the Uriyangqad, and the Yugu Mongols, they began referring to the Mongols in general as Dazi or Dadan.14
While Yongle was trying to homogenize the surrendered Tartars in China proper and convert them into his productive and loyal subjects, his policy toward the Mongols beyond the Ming’s northern borders was, first, to keep them dependent on China economically and win their political allegiance if 153
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possible; second, to make known a convincing connection between his political objective and his military assets—including the national will; and finally, to engage the Mongols militarily and launch periodic punitive campaigns into their territory so as to strip the Mongol regime of its o¤ensive capacity. The Ming leadership seems to have decided against attempting to annex Mongolia, probably because most of this area was like a great ocean of sand, in which fighting the Mongols had proven to be too costly in the past. Based upon his many years of dealing with the Mongols, including his few preemptive and debil-itating campaigns, Yongle in particular was cognizant that there was no such thing as total victory in a war against the ever mobile and shifting nomads. His strategy, therefore, was containment—that is, keeping the enemy at arm’s length and protecting China proper by means of a strong defense. Early in the summer of 1409, Yongle revealed such a strategy when he discussed his Mongol policy with the heir apparent.15 Following this strategic thinking, Yongle carefully developed a pattern of incentives and deterrents and varied the emphasis on these as he perceived problems or successes. Incentives, such as granting trade privileges and periodic gifts, encouraged Mongol flaccidity, while deterrents discouraged their aggressiveness. In his seminal booklet Learning from the Sages and the Method of the Mind, Yongle reiterated this thought when he wrote, “A well-prepared defense, not an initiated o¤ense, is the fundamental way to defend against the nomadic barbarians.”16
With the containment strategy in mind, the Ming’s main forces were stationed in a cordon of garrisons around Beijing as well as around nine fortress command posts built along the most strategically crucial frontier areas. The nine fortresses were Liaodong, in what is now Manchuria; Jizhou, in northeastern Beijing; Xuanfu, in northwestern Beijing; Datong, in northern Shanxi; Taiyuan, covering the central and western portions of Shanxi; Yulin, in northern Shaanxi; Guyuan, covering the western and central portions of Shaanxi; Ningxia, outside the Great Wall north of Shaanxi; and Gansu, in the far west.17
These nine garrison commands, “Nine Frontier Fortresses” (Jiubian), were so well constructed that they earned the reputation of possessing “gold cities and soup ponds.” Take Datong, for example: its defense barriers included a brick inner wall with a stone foundation, forty-four watchtowers, and 580 stands for archers, and a suspension bridge across a moat three meters wide and one and a half meters deep. Located along the great northern loop of the Yellow River, Datong was further protected by three small outer walls, about three kilometers in l
ength, facing north, east, and south.18 All eight of the other frontier fortresses were patterned after Datong, with impregnable bulwarks.
Clearly, Yongle was incapable of as well as uninterested in expanding his 154
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territory farther into the Gobi, where farming is impossible and where the tem-perature ranges from +38˚ to -42˚C during the winter. On the other hand, he made sure that the 129 passes peppered along the six-thousand-kilometer Great Wall would be adequately defended against the unpredictable Mongol raiders who often used hit-and-run tactics to pillage the Chinese. Ming national security thus focused on two poles: countering Mongol threats and preparing for inevitable conflicts while simultaneously improving upon benign and cordial relations with the vacillating ethnic groups who lived at the doorsteps of China.
This strategic thinking led the Ming policy-makers to search for a further flank that could provide support to withstand attacks from hostile nomads. Recent artifacts discovered along China’s northern frontiers suggest that some of these nomads were far more enterprising than was previously thought. In order to find nutritious foods to supplement their pastoral diet, they built a long-distance trade network from Central Asia all the way to Siberia.19 Given that policy was not made in isolation from actual events, the Ming policy-makers found trade and gifts to be dynamic means to deepen their political and military relations with the various nomadic peoples in the Taklamakan Desert and along the Great Khingan Mountains (Da Xingan Ling). All told, they established three agro-military colonies between the Great Wall and the Liao River east of Beijing, and seven beyond the western terminal of the Great Wall, and they installed numerous friendly local chiefs as nominal Ming o‹cials in various frontier regions. They expected these agro-military colonies to stabilize food supplies in the region and to establish a firm Ming military presence. Ideally, Ming soldiers and their local allies were to act as self-su‹cient farmers and also function as agents of social control. The stability of such peripheral colonies was expected to bolster the security of China proper.
The cliché that geography is the stage on which historical drama is played out should be taken seriously when one discusses Ming policy toward the Mongols. In this vast region, rivers, mountains, and deserts presented unique problems and solutions for the Ming strategists. In the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, three natural features—the Yellow River, the Great Khingan Mountains, and the immense Taklamakan deserts—were the keys to understanding the Ming security system. Along the middle section of the Yellow River is one important “stage,” where the river has cut a north-south course deeply into the loess plateau that forms a nearly eight-hundred-kilometer-long loop.
This loop begins just north of Lanzhou—a vital link along the Silk Road—where the Yellow River curves in nine bends through Gansu into Ningxia, then makes a tremendous loop through the Mongol grasslands before winding back southward to form the borders of Shaanxi and Shanxi. Within the “great bend” lies 155
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the Ordos region, where the Huns, Toba, and Mongols—all manner of invaders—galloped, and where the Chinese established their first government two thousand years ago. Kevin Sinclair asserts that the word “horde” is a corruption of “Ordos.”20 It is here that the Ming policy-makers drew their line in the sand. While the Ordos natural landscape was mostly the same as other regions in north China, there were few places in Ming China that o¤ered a sharper contrast between the Chinese and Mongol worlds. Across the dry northern regions of Shaanxi and Shanxi, the Ming Chinese reconstructed part of the Great Wall. South of the Wall was the Chinese domain, and the Ming made sure that it was stable, tranquil, and agricultural. North of it was territory that the Chinese believed hostile, dangerous, and pastoral. The loop ends at the fulcrum town of Tongguan, where the Yellow River meets its tributary the Wei River, cuts through the gorges of the Taihang Mountains, and flows into Henan.
The other “stage” where the Ming policy-makers utilized geographical features to arrange their security system was the Great Khingan Mountains, which penetrate through northeastern China and extend all the way to the Amur River in Siberia. West of the Great Khingan Mountains lies the Gobi, the heartland of Mongolia and the home of those who posed the greatest threat to Ming security. Here the Ming policy-makers relied more on deterrents than incentives, and Yongle directed his five punitive campaigns. East of the mountains is the Manchurian Plain, with the Liao River in the south and the Sungari River in the north, where the more submissive Uriyangqad and other Jurchen people lived.21 There, both Yongle and his father used more incentives than deterrents to harness such groups. In 1389 Yongle’s father created three guard units—Duoyan, Taining, and Fuyu—among the Uriyangqad Mongols and allowed their chieftains to lead their own people and to support each other.
The Duoyan Guard, on the west, administered the area from Daning to Xi-fengkuo Pass all the way to the boundary of Xuanfu; the Taining Guard, at the center, covered Jin and Yi Counties and Guangning all the way to the Liao River; and the Fuyu, on the east, controlled the huge territory from Huangniwa to Shenyang and Kaiyuan.22
Even though the three military guard units were led by their own indigenous chiefs, the Ming kept them under the close supervision of a Beiping Branch Regional Military Commission and the Prince of Ning (Zhu Quan), Hongwu’s seventeenth son, who resided at Daning. During the civil war Yongle had sent troops to this region to secure his rear and make them into his “outer feudatories.”23 Since then, the three Uriyangqad guard units had been valuable allies.
After the civil war Yongle transferred the Princedom of Ning to Nanchang and, as a payment for the three guard units’ services, simultaneously granted them 156
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autonomy by withdrawing the Beiping Branch Regional Military Commission to Baoding (in what is now Hebei), within the Great Wall. During the summer of 1403 a delegation of some 290 Uriyangqad Mongols came to Nanjing and basked in the presence of His Majesty. They presented him with a large number of steeds; in return, Yongle awarded them various honors, o‹cial seals, dresses and belts, silver money, and so on. Henceforth, the Uriyangqad pledged their fealty to Yongle, who annually showered their chiefs with substantial and handsome gifts. Because material goods were fungible in the realm of policy, he allowed the Uriyangqad to exchange Mongol horses, furs, and gyrfalcons for Chinese rice, textiles, and manufactured products. These amounted to subsidies, as the Ming o‹cials usually bartered their rice at half price. Even though Yongle’s policy of subsidizing the Uriyangqad bought him peace and security on the east side of Beijing, there would come times—such as in 1406 and 1422—
when these people, who had control of a large portion of the Inner Mongolian steppe and southern Manchuria, would grow rambunctious and join the cause of the claimant Mongols.24
In order to expand his lines of defense and communication beyond the three Uriyangqad territories and possibly also to counter the moves of the Yi (or Chosön) dynasty (1392–1910) of Korea, Yongle decided to develop the Liao River valley and to incorporate Jurchen into his orbit. In 1404 he created three commanderies—Haixi, Jianzhou, and Yeren—in eastern and northern Manchuria, where the distinction between nomads (hunting and fishing peoples) and farmers had by this time become blurred. It is believed that Yongle, when he was still the Prince of Yan, had married (as a concubine) the daughter of a Jianzhou Jurchen chieftain named Aqachu. The marriage was indeed a deft diplomatic maneuver, and, throughout his reign, Yongle paid very close attention to this area, using various schemes to deepen his relationship with his Jurchen in-laws.
According to Henry Serruys, who has made the most thorough study of the subject, Yongle established altogether 178 commanderies in the region, extending from eastern Mongolia to the Amur River valley and maritime Siberia.25
In 1408 Yongle created two communities, Anle (Peace and Joy) and Zizai (Independent and Content), for those Jurchen who wished to settle within or a
djacent to the Ming border. During the next eight years twenty-three Jurchen groups moved into these lands. Yongle used a combination of institutional devices and incentives to bring the Jurchen chieftains under loose Ming suzerainty. After receiving ranks, titles, and gifts of silk, clothing, money, and foodstu¤s, they would help Yongle carry out his peaceful penetration of the vast region.26
As early as 1403 Yongle had already sent a messenger by the name of Xing 157
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Shu to the lower Amur River valley to invite local leaders to come to the Ming court. Six years later the emperor launched three campaigns to shore up Ming influence in the region. The upshot was the establishment of the Nuerkan Regional Military Commission, with several battalions deployed along the Sungari, Ussuri, Urmi, Muling, and Nen Rivers. Its headquarters was located on the east bank of the Amur River, approximately three hundred li from the river’s entrance to the Sea of Okhotsk and 250 li from what is now the Russian town of Nikolayev. Being a special frontier administrative institution, the commission’s authorities paralleled those of the Liaodong Commission; therefore, Yongle permitted its commanding o‹cers—primarily chiefs of local ethnic groups—to transmit their o‹ces to their sons and grandsons without any diminution in rank. Soon after the commission was established, Yongle chose a eunuch named Yishiha to carry the guidon in spreading his will and to vie for the heart and soul of the Jurchen people in the region.
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