Rounding the bend three-quarters of a mile up river from a one-horse town in Arkansas, the raft on which Huckleberry Finn floats is “a most uncommon lively place.” At that point in Huck’s narrative, the makeshift showboat carries on its crowded deck a boy (Huck), a runaway slave (Jim), a “king,” a “duke,” and all their worldly possessions. These include the theatrical prerequisites, human and material, sufficient to rehearse a multitude of roles, which the travelers are prepared to perform for one another as well as for a larger public. The fact that Huck knows the truth about the purported royals – “that these liars warn’t no kings nor dukes, at all” – detracts not at all from their urgent preparations for the forthcoming stage show:

Following the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet, featuring Mr. Garrick as Romeo and Mr. Kean as Juliet, “assisted by the whole strength of the company,” and the “thrilling, masterly, and blood-curdling broad-sword conflict” from Richard III, the playbill promises that the evening will conclude with Mr. Kean’s rendering of “Hamlet’s Immortal Soliloquy.” Adult admission was set at a quarter, a dime for children and slaves (Twain, 141-42).

INTRODUCTION

During the Sung (A.D. 960–1279) and early Yüan (1279–c. 1320) dynasties, China's agricultural and industrial production, its domestic commerce, and its economic contacts with the “outside world” all expanded dramatically, reaching levels that far surpassed anything known in earlier periods of Chinese history. In recent years, William H. McNeill, Janet L. Abu-Lughod, and F.W. Mote have been among those who have argued that these developments not only had a profound effect on Chinese civilization, but on that of much of the rest of Eurasia. As Professor McNeill has put it,

“New wealth arising among a hundred million Chinese began to flow out across the seas [and significantly along caravan routes as well] and added new vigor and scope to market-related activity. Scores, hundreds, and perhaps thousands of vessels began to sail from port to port within the Sea of Japan and the South China Sea, the Indonesian Archipelago and the Indian Ocean. Most voyages were probably relatively short, and goods were reassorted at many different entrepôts along the way from original producer to ultimate consumer … [A]n increasing flow of commodities meant a great number of persons moving to and fro on shipboard or sitting in bazaars, chaffering over prices.”

By the time Marco Polo began his seventeen-year stay in China during the mid-1270s, this “increasing flow of commodities” meant that substantial quantities of Chinese raw silk, silk textiles, porcelains, and other goods were being carried by ship and caravan to other parts of Asia, to East Africa, and the Middle East, to the Mediterranean trading area, and even to the major markets of northwestern Europe.

THE PATTERN OF SINO-KOREAN TRIBUTARY RELATIONS

Korea is often referred to as a model Chinese tributary state. Indeed, it would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of Korea's tributary relations with China in the development of Korean political institutions and higher culture. Beginning in the seventh century, when the Korean kingdom of Silla entered into an alliance with the T'ang, the Koreans became skilled at adapting Chinese institutions to their own needs. Later, the kingdom of Koryŏ (Chinese: Kao-li, A.D. 918–1392) continued this pattern of adaptation, watching closely as the Liao, Chin, and Mongol states rose in succession, and evolving forms of tributary relations with each in turn. Korea came under more direct imperial control with the completion of the Mongol conquest in 1270. Thereafter, Koryŏ princes were reared in Peking and were married to Mongol princesses, and Mongol commanderies were established at P'yŏng-yang and Ssangsŏng. During the decades of Yüan overlordship, as the Koryŏ ruling lineage intermarried with the Yüan imperial family, certain other Korean houses became powerful by marrying daughters to high Yüan officials. Over time, Korean ties to the Yüan became so important that the Koryŏ regime was ill-prepared to cope with the fall of the Yüan in the mid-fourteenth century. In many respects, the fall of Koryŏ and the rise of the state of Chosŏn in 1392 was related to the transition from the Yüan to the Ming dynasty in China, and the evolving relationship between China and Korea during the Ming period is a good example of how the tributary system served each side, both as a political tool and security mechanism, and as a conduit for trade and cultural transmission.

The Ming dynasty is generally known as a period of stable, effective government during which some important new institutions developed. Although in the end the dynasty collapsed under the pressures of domestic rebellions and foreign invasions, it had long seemed the most secure and unchallengeable ruling house the Chinese had known, and its institutions were largely perpetuated with admiration by the succeeding Ch'ing dynasty.

The system of governance that matured in Ming times was the culmination of trends that became evident after the mid-T'ang period, developed markedly in Sung times, and were further stimulated by the Mongol occupation of China during the Yüan dynasty. The emperor was a supreme autocrat. Administration of the empire on his behalf was entrusted to Confucian-indoctrinated scholars who were selected for service on the basis of their scholastic merit as demonstrated in competitive recruitment examinations, who made career progress very largely on the basis of service judged by their peers to be meritorious, and who constituted a civil service that was significantly self-regulating.

The civil service dominated government to an unprecedented degree. It was not seriously challenged by hereditary nobles or military officers, although eunuch agents or manipulators of emperors often disrupted civil service dominance. Society at large was thoroughly integrated into the state to such an extent that, during the final decades of the Ming dynasty, rulers were securely in control of everything they wished to control, and no other group in society rivaled the status of the civil officialdom as the natural leaders of society.

THE TRIBUTE SYSTEM MATRIX

Between 1514 and 1662, the people and government of China were involved in, and affected by, the first stages of the development of a “modern world system.” This involvement was implemented via the sea routes linking all the continents except Antarctica and Australia in exchanges of trade goods, food plants, diseases, people, and ideas. Ming official concepts and formalized institutions of foreign relations offered little guidance to Chinese officials and had little effect on Sino-European relations after the first encounters with the Portuguese, but actual official responses were alert, flexible, and reasonably effective. Chinese merchants, craftsmen, and sailors became extremely vigorous participants in building a new world of trade and settlement around the South China Sea. The rise of Nagasaki and other ports of Kyushu, the beginnings of Chinese settlement of Taiwan, the sudden emergence of Hai-ch'eng and then Amoy, the flourishing of Macao, Manila, Banten, Batavia, Ayudhya, Melaka, and many more centers of commercial and economic growth depended very heavily on the activities of these Chinese entrepreneurs. The silk-silver trades with Japan and Manila had substantial effects on the Ming economy. The Roman Catholic missionary presence and Chinese responses to it, while on a small scale, reached all levels of Chinese society. As we seek to understand the vigor of these private involvements, we need to draw on our growing knowledge of late Ming culture and society, and especially of maritime China as a regional variant in society, economy, and polity. The changes in empire-wide politics so well summarized in Volume 7 frequently help us to understand the changes in official approaches to maritime problems.

The experience of life in China changed remarkably over three centuries of Ming rule. That, at least, is how it seemed to those who lived through the changes and felt obliged to record their surprise and dismay. By the middle of the dynasty, many literate observers were becoming aware that the institutions laid down by the founding Emperor, Hung-wu, were no longer guiding social practices. They credited this lapse variously to the recurrent problems of lax administration, low-level corruption, and a weakening of moral fibre. Writers of the late Ming knew differently. In their view, something more than just dynastic sag had taken hold. Many became obsessed with the extent to which Chinese society had grown away from what they were trained to believe it had originally been: an agrarian realm where superiors knew their responsibilities and inferiors their places. But, they felt, people no longer stayed put: class distinctions had become confusingly fluid; the cultivation of wealth had displaced moral effort as the presiding goal of the age.

The panicked indignation that can be found in writings of the late Ming may not represent the mood that all of that age shared, nor may it speak directly of the actual pressures to which an embattled elite felt vulnerable. But it came close. Some late-Ming writers, for instance, were aware that China was becoming a more crowded place than it had been at the beginning of the Ming, but only the more alarmist insisted that the population had more than doubled between the Hung-wu emperor's reign and the turn of the seventeenth century – as in fact it had. Others were sensitive to the difficulty that cultivators were having in gaining access to enough land to survive, but only a few were aware of the migration that had shifted China's population westward over the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and they tended not to grasp the scale of this movement.

INTRODUCTION

In the absence of a belief in a world-transcending creator and lawgiver to whom human society would have been bound to submit for its own salvation, the Chinese social order was understood by its members to flourish or perish by its harmonious or disharmonious relations with the encompassing cosmos. The cosmic order was experienced as normally life-giving and life-sustaining, and as governed by the known periods of solar, lunar and sidereal time. The importance of astronomy and of time periods defined by astral motion was reflected in Chinese religion in the sovereignty of the astral cult over all others. The polar-equatorial framework of Chinese astronomy located the cosmic sovereignty in the region of the north celestial pole which was viewed as the central palace of the heavens. Earth, as the counterpart of Heaven, was characterized by its fecundity, which worked under the rule of the seasons and was assisted by the cooperation of human communities in agriculture and husbandry. But Earth, as the place of burial, was also the passageway of souls leading from life to death and from death to life. Hence the association of cults of fertility and of the ancestral cult with the earth. The assumed survival of human and animal souls after death permitted the mythopoeic imagination to create and sustain an invisible world of active forces behind the visible phenomena long after the birth of Chinese philosophy in the late Chou period.

The active forces of the unseen world, understood as spirits, were accessible to human contact in the ceremonial settings of sacrifice and prayer; and through them, the cosmos was understood to be responsive.

INTRODUCTION

Many characteristic features of Ming fiscal administration trace their origins to the first Ming emperor's peculiar concept of government. In 1380, the office of the prime minister was abolished, never to be revived. Henceforth, the emperor acted as his own chief executive officer. After a series of bloody purges that lasted from 1376 to 1396, the bureaucracy was virtually reduced to a huge clerical pool, subservient to the sovereign but not empowered to make important decisions. The new system that the first emperor had created called for an omnipresent ruler who exercised personal control over a population officially reported at close to sixty million. The civil government functioned as not much more than a transmitter of imperial wishes.

The situation at the local level was the reverse of the situation at the top of the administrative hierarchy. Villages were organized into self-governing communities. The basis for these group associations was not civil law, but Confucian morality. With intra-community litigations settled by imperial adjudication and unruly persons punished by their own elders, local communities needed little official supervision. In fact, the first Ming emperor even refused to allow his governmental functionaries to enter rural areas. This organizational scheme reveals a curious amalgam of arbitrary, autocratic rules and idealistic notions. Such an administrative system was basically unsound. The success of its operation relied more on the ideological cohesion and administrative discipline that bound the governing as well as the governed than on official administrative procedures. The first Ming emperor, in fact, ran his administration by cowing his subjects with brutal and arbitrary punishments on the one hand and moral exhortations on the other.

APPENDIX

The subject matter of the individual chapters included in this volume is very diverse, and both the extant original sources and the secondary scholarship devoted to them varies greatly in its complexity. All the chapters provide in their footnotes references both to the major sources and to the most important secondary studies. Some of them, however, have an unusually complicated and wide ranging literature, and the authors have provided, in the following bibliographical notes, some guidance to the scholarship available on their field

BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTES

THE MING AND INNER ASIA BY MORRIS ROSSABI

The Ming Shih-lu is still, despite the drawbacks described by Wolfgang Franke and others, the most important primary source on Ming relations with Inner Asia. Japanese scholars have facilitated use of the voluminous records in the Shih-lu by extracting and compiling the materials on Mongolia, Manchuria, Tibet, and the Western Regions, the Chinese designation for Central Asia. They have also extracted the materials on Korea and Manchuria found in the Yijo sillok, the Yi dynasty chronicle. I have provided a preliminary analysis of the value of these sources in my "Ming China's relations with Hami and Central Asia."

INTRODUCTION

The late Ming period is taken here to begin in the 1520s and cover the final six reigns of the dynasty before it collapsed in Peking in the spring of 1644. There were several moments of significant change in what might be called the political standing of those engaged in the sort of intellectual activities which attracted contemporaries' and historians' notice. In the 1520s, the newly enthroned Chia-ching Emperor succeeded in asserting his will over the leadership of the bureaucracy and alienating a significant cohort of officials and literati in the process. In the same decade, Wang Yang-ming gathered large numbers of followers to his new teachings before he died in 1529. Wang's ideas were criticized while he was still alive for deviating from the imperially sanctioned version of Neo-Confucianism. Twenty-five years later, his ideas were being taken more seriously than the official version by thousands of literati. In 1553 and 1554, for the first time in the North, large gatherings of literati and officials in Peking discussed Wang's teachings. The years 1529 to 1554 witnessed continued growth of the influence of the ideas of Wang and his disciples. During the next twenty-five years, from 1554 to 1579, there was a proliferation of versions of ideas stimulated by Wang's teachings. Men who were barely literate, as well as literati and officials, became involved in discussions of these teachings in all provinces, although they were most influential in Chekiang, Kiangsi, and the Southern Metropolitan Area (Nan Chih-li). In 1579, the powerful Grand Secretary, Chang Chü-cheng (1525–82), sought to suppress much of what he disparaged as vain philosophic chatter about morality.

INTRODUCTION

This chapter outlines the general socio-economic development of rural China during the Ming period. Because I use the term “socio-economic” in its precise meaning, I treat only the most salient aspects of social and economic developments insofar as they interact in the countryside. This chapter examines the ways in which economic factors were reflected in, and sometimes contributed to, the changes in social groupings and organizations during the Ming dynasty. Conversely, the ways in which social factors were reflected in, and sometimes contributed to, economic development are also examined. The taxation and corvée structure is portrayed in some detail. The social and institutional foundation of the li-chia system is discussed for two reasons: first, it offers a window through which we can come to understand some idiosyncratic features of the Ming socio-economic landscape; and second, it was in and of itself a significant cause of change. The possibilities for tax and corvee evasion or exemption were a major force behind social and economic developments during Ming times, as was the government's chronic inability to keep land and population records up to date. This shortcoming was recognized by officials at many levels of the government, and Ming officials implemented many reforms aimed at redistributing tax and corvée levies more equally and at facilitating tax collection. As a result of these changes, although the li-chia structure continued to exist well into the Ch'ing dynasty, by the early seventeenth century in many areas it was radically different in content from the institution envisioned by Chu Yüan-chang, the first Ming emperor.

Of the alternatives represented in the intellectual scene in late Ming, the westerners' Learning from Heaven (T'ien hsüeh) was the least well precedented. In spite of efforts to assimilate some of it to vocabulary and concepts in classical texts, the Learning from Heaven could not escape also being labeled as western Learning (Hsi hsüeh). It was foreign, whereas the other main intellectual alternatives to the Learning of the Way (Tao hsüeh), including Buddhism, were only different (i). Although critics of the missionaries cited foreign origins in attempts to discredit the Learning from Heaven, its foreignness remained less an issue in late Ming than it became in the K'ang-hsi period in early Ch'ing. With no obvious detriment to his contemporary reputation, Ricci was well known under the name Li of the Far West (Li Hsi-t'ai). He and his confreres published books about that different part of the world, the Far West, from which they had come. Ricci reported being told in 1599 by a censor in Nanking that, having lived in Kiangsi and other places, he was “no longer a foreigner in China. Can there be any objection to his residing in Nanking, where there are so many Hui-hui [Muslims]?” Ricci had been proceeding since 1595 with the tactic of acting “as though we were men of China” (come uomini già della Cina). Especially in the early phase of the mission, there was a self-conscious effort by a few of the missionaries to be Chinese, but an important aspect of their impact on literati with whom they had contact was that they were from a distant, unknown place.

Law in traditional China derived from the emperor's commands, and codes of law were instructions to the emperor's magistrates instructing them how to impose punishments for behavior that ran counter to the emperor's interests. Ming law came into existence with the first commands issued by the founder of the dynasty when he ascended the throne in 1368. Written law took the form of rules and collections of descriptions of specific punishments for specific crimes. These were promulgated by order of the emperor. Early in his reign, the first Ming emperor was careful to insure that his dynasty would enjoy the benefits of a body of written law known as a lü or code. His close attention to the compilation of a code was a product of his perception that the preceding Yüan dynasty, during which the Mongols ruled China, had been defective in its lack of a formal legal code. The founder of the Ming felt that a code was valuable to a ruler because it assisted him in maintaining bureaucratic discipline, public order, and permanent institutions that centered around his line of descent. A code was, furthermore, a symbol of the legitimacy of his rule.

Because the founder of the Ming devoted a fair amount of attention to compiling formal codes, a number of versions appeared during his reign. The Ming dynasty's first codified laws were promulgated in 1368 under the rubric lü-ling, or code and commands. Although an integrated version of the text has not been found, we do have the 1368 version of the ling or “commands,” sometimes translated “ordinances,” consisting of 145 separate articles. The no longer extant 1368 version of the lü or “statutory code” had 285 articles.

INTRODUCTION

By the time the Ming dynasty was founded, Buddhism had existed in China for more than fourteen centuries. Of the major schools of Buddhism established during the Sui (581–618) and Tang (618–907) dynasties, the T'ien-t'ai, Hua-yen, Wei-shih, Lü, Pure Land, and Ch'an continued to exist in the Ming, just as they had during the Sung (960–1279) and Yüan (1206– 1368) periods. Like all mature world religions, Buddhism is, as W. C. Smith puts it, a “cumulative tradition.” Ming Buddhism shared many characteristics with the Buddhism of earlier dynasties. It is, therefore, not possible to demarcate a clearly defined entity called Ming Buddhism. Furthermore, the task of writing a general history of Buddhism during the Ming dynasty is made harder by the paucity of existing scholarship. Since, for a long time, Buddhist scholars and historians of Chinese Buddhism (with the exception of Japanese scholars) regarded Buddhism after the T'ang, “the golden age of Buddhism,” as a period of decline, they did not devote much energy to its study. Only within the last few decades has Western scholarship on Ming Buddhism begun to appear. Therefore, our knowledge about Ming Buddhism is, in many respects, still preliminary and incomplete.

One can, however, offer several generalizations about Ming Buddhism. First, a close relationship existed between the Buddhist sangha, or monastic communities, and the government. This is evidenced in the government's attempts, from the time of the first Ming emperor, to exert strict administrative control over every aspect of the sangha; in the continuous, and at times, lavish patronage of Buddhism by the imperial court; and in individual monks' involvement with the court and politics.

Ming China, having just endured a century of Mongol rule, sought to avert further occupations by a people or state from Inner Asia. Court policy was, therefore, generally based on restricting relations with foreigners, particularly those from across the northern and northwestern borders. Fear of future invasions conditioned the Ming's attitudes and policies toward Central and Inner Asia. The court was determined to reinstate the Chinese world order so as to maintain control over the conduct of foreign relations. Yet the economic benefits to be garnered from dealings with the peoples north of China could not be discounted. Merchants and some officials who profited from trade naturally attempted to support an increase in commerce. When court restrictions on commerce persisted, these merchants and officials even evaded the regulations and continued to trade with the peoples and tribes across the borders.

The Yung-lo emperor (r. 1403–24), however, often sided with the advocates of trade and increased contact with Inner Asia. His reign nonetheless was unique, and his policies were exceptions. Unlike the other Ming emperors, he actively encouraged an expansion of commerce and attempted to augment the number of embassies arriving in China. His usurpation of the throne and the ensuing questions about his legitimacy may have inspired him to seek such a flow of foreign emissaries, for, in the Confucian view, a good emperor naturally attracted the so-called barbarians to “come and be transformed” (lai-hua) – that is, to acknowledge the superiority of Chinese civilization by becoming increasingly sinicized. The more embassies, the more legitimate the Yung-lo emperor would appear to his own people.

Taoists and Taoist beliefs and activities were present throughout Ming society. Given the present state of scholarship, however, only a fragmentary picture of the role Taoism played during the Ming can be reconstructed. The Tao, or Way, has historically assumed many different forms. Research has uncovered isolated tableaux of Taoism in Ming society at various levels and in various regions. Taken together, these tableaux constitute a picture of Taoism similar to the pictures in a Chinese handscroll, which, as it is unrolled, reveals a succession of clear vistas that fade into long stretches blanketed in mist. However disconnected these Taoist scenes may appear, it would be a mistake to assume that current fragmentary knowledge reflects reality, and that the disparate faces of Ming Taoism are, in fact, unrelated. The Way may indeed have parted during the Six Dynasties, but, by the Ming, the separate paths of Taoism had conflated. Potential patrons or devotees had expectations of “Taoists” based on their perceptions of the powers and roles of Taoism. The expectations and perceptions of all levels of society and the beliefs and practices of trained Taoists interacted to create Ming Taoism.

Nathan Sivin has lamented the ambiguities of the term “Taoist,” warning all who use it to be very specific about its intention in each particular context. To Sivin's admonition must be added the caveat that the Ming Chinese themselves had perspectives on Taoists which complicate neat definitions: they ignored or collapsed fine distinctions between schools and ritual techniques. Research has progressed far enough to provide glimpses of the interrelationships among the various aspects of Taoism.

Volumes 7 and 8 of The Cambridge History of China are devoted to the Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644. Volume 7 provides a narrative account of Ming political history, and Volume 8 collects together various topical studies of that period. Both volumes were planned more than fifteen years ago at two successive summer conferences, generously funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and held in the summers of 1979 and 1980 at Princeton University. These meetings were attended by more than twenty potential authors and senior graduate students. They and the volume editors discussed the field of Ming studies for several weeks in each of those successive summers. A plan for the volumes was drawn up and chapters allocated to authors. It was decided to follow the model of the volumes on Sui and T'ang, the first of which was the only volume on the pre-modern period then published, and to produce a narrative volume followed by a second volume containing a collection of topical studies.

These meetings not only began the process of writing the Cambridge History volumes; they also stimulated a new level of interest in Ming studies among western scholars. And, coming as they did just as Chinese academe was emerging from the dark shadows of the 1960s and 1970s, they also helped lay the foundation for the fruitful collaboration between Chinese, Japanese, and western historians engaged in a common historical enterprise which we now take for granted.

A number of unforeseen circumstances delayed the schedule originally adopted for completing the two Ming volumes. Volume 7 appeared in 1988; an unauthorized Chinese translation appeared from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, in 1992. Now at last Volume 8 has finally made its way through the protracted process of writing, replanning, and editing.