The authors of each chapter and the volume editors provide bibliographic information of a general character here to supplement the limited footnoting of specific points, to inform the reader about the scope of their research, and to acknowledge important scholarly and intellectual debts that have influenced the content of the chapters.

In the preceding chapter, Wolfgang Franke offers an impressive description and seasoned evaluation of historical writing during the Ming, and makes systematic reference to his indispensable work, An introduction to the sources of Ming history (Kuala Lumpur, 1968). A recent publication from China lists 9,400 articles and 600 books on Ming history published everywhere, in Chinese, between 1900 and 1978.' A more selective survey of modern Chinese and Japanese writings on the Ming period published in i960 even then could list over 2,500 articles and books. These bibliographic tools display the vast scope of the field; at the same time, they make the point that the exhaustive documentation expected in monographic studies could not, and indeed need not, be undertaken in the present work. What follows are neither bibliographies nor bibliographic essays, but notes on bibliography conveying the authors' sense of the special problems of scholarship in each of the eleven chapters comprising this narrative of Ming dynasty political history.

THE EMPERORS

Chu Chien-shen, posthumously known as the emperor Hsien-tsung, was born on 9 December 1447 and came to the throne on the death of his father, the restored emperor Ying-tsung, on 23 February 1464; he proclaimed the reign title Ch'eng-hua to begin on the next New Year, almost a full year later. He died on 9 September 1487, three months before his fortieth birthday, having reigned for twenty-three years. His eldest surviving son, Chu Yu-t'ang, then came to the throne at the age of seventeen, having been born 30 July 1470, and under the reign title Hung-chih reigned for eighteen years, dying just a month short of his thirty-fifth birthday, in June 1505. He is known to history by his posthumous temple name of Hsiao-tsung.

Of the sixteen Ming emperors who reigned between 1368 and 1644, only five passed their fortieth birthdays, and none of those occupied the throne in the century from 1425 to 1521. Yet those short-lived rulers did not die in battle or from accidental causes – unless we accept the quite plausible speculation that several Ming emperors accidentally shortened their lives by taking longevity drugs containing such toxic elements as mercury compounds. Whether that can ever be fully proved, an unhealthy atmosphere enveloped the Ming imperial institution through much of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Throughout the middle years of the dynasty China was ruled by feckless young men whose brief lives tended to be dominated by their consorts, their mothers and grandmothers, and their eunuch servants.

INTRODUCTION: SOME GENERAL TRENDS

The nearly three centuries of the Ming dynasty's rule can hardly be considered a homogeneous period, and the changes that took place during this time touched all aspects of Chinese cultural and intellectual life. Historiography in its broadest sense was no exception. Although innovations develop only gradually over a long period, on the whole the historical writing of the last century of the Ming dynasty differed considerably from that of the first century. The difference became evident in quality as well as in quantity. The details of these changes will be elaborated in the course of this chapter. They may be summarized here as a more critical attitude toward source materials, which became gradually evident during the sixteenth century and distinguished the later period from the earlier one.

Economic developments in the sixteenth century, particularly in the lower Yangtze area, made literary education for their offspring affordable to ever more people. Literacy expanded greatly, and the demand for reading materials (including writings on history) increased. One aspect of this general trend was the large increase in the quotas of successful candidates in the official examinations. These men were also the prospective readers of historical writings. The average number of successful candidates in the metropolitan examination (who formed the majority of authors and compilers of publications relevant to history) rose from roughly 150 every three years in the period from 1388 to 1448 to 290 in each triennial examination period between 1451 and 1505, and to 330 between 1508 and 1643.

INTRODUCTION

The character of the Yüan dynasty, through which the Mongol conquerors from Khubilai Khan onward ruled China, has been interpreted in many ways and at present is still much at issue among scholars. Nonetheless, one fact about it is unambiguous. Its ability to govern –to maintain order in society, to administer provincial and local government, and to collect taxes – was eroding well before the middle of the fourteenth century. Chu Yüan-chang (1328–1398), the founder of the Ming dynasty, was born into a family of desperately poor tenant farmers in the Huai River plain of modern Anhwei province on 21 October 1328. He never experienced the normal conditions of China's stable agrarian society until, as emperor forty years later, it fell to him to rule over the empire and to guide its rehabilitation. The Ming dynasty was spawned during a half-century of intensifying chaos, an age of breakdown in which throughout most of the country the conduct of daily life increasingly depended on direct recourse to violence. It provides a classic example of the gradual militarization of Chinese society and, because of that, of the struggle among potent rivals to succeed the Mongol regime by imposing, through military force, a successor regime that could claim the Mandate of Heaven. Despite the traditional Chinese penchant for subsuming this into the stylized pattern of breakdown and regeneration provided by their dynastic cycle theory, the way the Yüan dynasty disintegrated and the Ming dynasty emerged is by no means typical of the dynastic changes that punctuate imperial Chinese history.

Until quite recently, most students of Chinese history tended to regard the last twenty-five years of Ming rule as little more than another production of the old drama of dynastic decline and ultimate collapse that had been performed many times before. Yet to view the T'ai-ch'ang (28 August–26 September 1620), T'ien-ch'i (10 October 1620–30 September 1627), and Ch'ung-chen (2 October 1627–24 April 1644) reigns simply in terms of what is known about the end of the Han, T'ang, or Sung dynasties is to ignore much that is unique and significant about them, for in crucial aspects of economic, social, cultural, and political life, China during the first half of the seventeenth century was a vastly different country from that of previous ages. The changes that had occurred in Chinese society even since the beginning of the sixteenth century were of fundamental importance not only to the period under consideration here, but also to the subsequent development of Chinese civilization. Thus any attempts to pass over late Ming history with facile references to the inexorable workings of the dynastic cycle should be quickly and firmly rejected.

Yet the Ming empire was conquered during the 1640s by vastly outnumbered Manchu invaders and their allies, and one of the purposes of this chapter must be to explore how this momentous military and political event came about. Unfortunately, such an exploration must contend with obstacles that at times seem insurmountable. First, there is the sheer size and diversity of Ming China.

THE FIRST REIGN OF YING-TSUNG, 1435–1449

The centers of power

The death of the Hsüan-te emperor at the early age of thirty-seven sui in January 1435 and his succession by a boy emperor Chu Ch'i-chen (posthumous title Ying-tsung, 1427–64) only eight years old brought into the open many problems implicit in the political institutions established in early Ming. Although the succession was a perfectly regular one and Chu Ch'i-chen, the elder of the Hsüan-te emperor's two sons, had been designated heir apparent, the succession to the Ming throne had already caused problems. There had been one successful usurpation by Chu Ti, and another attempt at a usurpation by Chu Kao-hsü, the uncle of the Hsüan-te emperor, had failed in 1426.

The accession to the throne of a child emperor produced new problems and stresses, for under the system established by the Ming founder, all authority was vested in the emperor, who had himself to decide state affairs with the aid of secretaries and ministers. No formal provisions had been made for the succession of a minor. A child emperor left the absolute monarchy without a head, and although nobody could formally become regent, a de facto regency had to be set up to conduct state affairs. Such a situation, and it was to recur later in the dynasty, could easily lead to the establishment of illegitimate dictatorial powers and inevitably undermined the stability of the central leadership.

The Hsüan-te emperor had died unexpectedly after a short illness, and the de facto regency was led by Lady Chang, the grand empress dowager (t'ai huang t'ai-hou).

INTRODUCTION

The founding of the Ming dynasty was the end product of the anti-Yüan peasant rebellions of the 1350s. The rebellions themselves were the final stage of a long history of Chinese resentment against Mongol rule, expressed at the elite level by reluctance to serve in the government and at the popular level by clandestine sectarian activity. The occasion for the rebellions was the failure of the Yüan regime to cope with widespread famine in the 1340s. By the time those occurred, paradoxically the Yüan ruling elite had largely come to an accommodation with the native Chinese political tradition.

The rebellions inaugurated a period of political flux whose ultimate outcome might have been a divided China rather than a reunified state. The original rebel movement destroyed the foundations of Yüan authority without being able to erect a stable successor regime. The improvised militia armies which then destroyed the main body of the original rebel movement in the North China plain and in the central Yangtze, together with the principal rebel survivors of this destruction, mostly became the nuclei of regional warlord regimes after 1353. Chu Yuan-chang, the future Ming founder, gained a decisive victory in 1363; he exploited his victory by conquering and consolidating his control over the middle and lower Yangtze regions, a process completed by the capture of Soochow in 1367. Afterward Ming military expeditions rapidly conquered the rest of China proper. Szechwan was annexed in 1371.

THE HUNG-KUANG REGIME

As rebel forces overran Shansi, Pei Chihli, and Shantung in the spring of 1644, communications between north and south China were severely disrupted. Confusion, dilatoriness, and lack of direction prevailed among Ming military authorities south of the Yellow River. Most of the regular personnel along the usual postal and transport routes had abandoned their stations, and roads were clogged with refugees who brought southward pestilence, hysteria, enemy agents, and alarming rumors about conditions in the north. On 5 April the Ch'ung-chen emperor had issued a general call for immediate aid from all commands in the empire. But when Peking fell to the rebels three weeks later, the grand adjutant and minister of war for Nanking, Shih K'o-fa, had still not yet mobilized an army. Not until three more weeks had elapsed did reliable word of the Ch'ung-chen emperor's suicide reach Nanking.

This news not only caused great consternation among officials and members of the elite, especially at Nanking and in Nan Chihli, but also, as it spread throughout the south, set in motion new waves on the sea of late Ming social unrest–urban riots, revolts of tenants and indentured persons, strikes by factory and mine workers, outlaw raids, insurrections by local armed groups of various stripes – waves that did not settle in many areas for decades. It was during the consequent general failure in local control and undirected, uncoordinated militarization throughout society that the first Southern Ming court sought to establish a base for recovering the north and restoring the Ming empire.

This volume and the following volume are devoted to the history of the Ming dynasty. The present volume offers a narrative account of political developments from the rebellions of the mid-fourteenth century that ended the Mongol Yuan dynasty's control over China –and from one of which the new Ming dynasty was formed in 1368 –until the last Ming remnant, called the Southern Ming, was extinguished in Burma in 1662. That was almost twenty years after the new Manchu Ch'ing dynasty had proclaimed the success of its conquest of the Mandate of Heaven, and of China, in Peking in the spring of 1644.

That period of roughly three centuries from the 1340s until the 1660s, or more closely defined, the 277 years from 1368 until 1644 during which Ming rule formally prevailed, is the only segment of later imperial history from the fall of the Northern Sung capital to the Jurchen invaders in 1126 until the Revolution of 1911 ended the imperial era during which all of China proper was ruled by a native or Han Chinese dynasty. The actual impact of that alternation of native and conquest dynasties on Chinese life was, to be sure, of varying significance, and at its most destructive it probably never threatened to interrupt the cultural continuity of Chinese development. Nonetheless, the success of the Chinese in regaining control over their own government is an important event in history.

In Ming times and even more so in the recent nationalistic-minded century, the Ming dynasty has been seen as an important era of Chinese resurgence.

INTRODUCTION

The period from 1399 to 1436 spans the reigns of four descendants of the founding emperor. The short Chien-wen reign (1399–1402) which was ended precipitously by usurpation, preceded the Yung-lo reign (1403–25), an era of imperial consolidation and expansion; the Hung-hsi reign (1425– 26), which lasted only nine months, was followed by a period of stability and retrenchment during the Hsüan-te reign (1426–36). There were, then, two short interludes separating the three major reigns of the early Ming.

Despite the disorder brought about by the civil war of 1399–1402, there are more continuities with the past than discontinuities in the political, social, economic, intellectual, and cultural developments that occurred during these thirty-seven years. That is to say, institutional arrangements and policies under these four Ming emperors were largely shaped by the vision of the dynastic founder and by the policies he set in motion to realize it. Changes in earlier policies and systems did occur, particularly during the reign of the Yung-lo emperor; but under his successors certain of these were curtailed or abandoned, and what further changes did occur were for the most part moderate adjustments carried out within the framework of established institutions and traditions. This style of government established a tradition of conservatism at court early in the dynasty; at the same time it fostered dynastic stability and preserved intact both the lands and the spirit bequeathed by the founder of the dynasty.

The transfer of the imperial capital from Nanking to Peking under the Yung-lo emperor remains the most significant institutional change of this period. Although the Hung-hsi emperor attempted to return the court to Nanking, Peking became the imperial capital once again in the following reign, and it remained thereafter the capital of the Ming empire. Another major change occurred in the office of the grand secretaries: to fill the gap that existed between the throne and the imperial bureaucracy – a gap created when the founding emperor did away with the secretariat in 1380 – the grand secretaries began to advise the throne on matters of policy.

INTRODUCTION

When Chu Yüan-chang proclaimed himself emperor of the Middle Kingdom in January 1368, his main advisers and supporters at court included three men whom he had named dukes during the previous year: the generals Hsu Ta and Ch'ang Yü-ch'un, and the civil official Li Shan-ch'ang. Hsü, from Hao-chou, Anhwei, had joined Chu's military camp in 1353. Along with thousands of other displaced persons who faced famine and disease, he began to turn against the established authority of the Yuan regime. Ch'ang Yü-ch'un was another Hao-chou native who became a warrior, and he joined Chu's camp in 1355. Li Shan-ch'ang, a native of Ting-yüan, Anhwei, stemmed from landlord stock and joined Chu in 1354. These three men were Chu's most trusted assistants in the years immediately following the establishment of the new regime. They constituted the core of the Anhwei-based group that put together the new dynasty.

During the years following the formation of this group, Chu Yüan-chang drew under his wing many other individuals, including men of arms and of learning. Among the men of learning, none ever received the recognition, status, and emoluments that Chu accorded to his military men. Although he made an effort to establish a credible civil regime based on traditional rituals and the Mandate of Heaven, during these early years the military retained the greater importance. This came about because the dynasty was the product of military campaigns to drive out the Mongol rulers, to establish a new power structure within China proper, and to unify Han Chinese rule over vast territories inhabited by hostile non-Han peoples in the west, the southwest, and the south.

THE EMPEROR'S SELECTION AND ACCESSION

Chu Hou-ts'ung, the eleventh emperor of the Ming dynasty, was born on 16 September 1507 on his father's estate in An-lu, Hu-kuang province (modern Chung-hsiang hsien in Hupeh). His father, Chu Yu-yüan (1476– 1519), the Prince of Hsing, was the fourth son of the Ch'eng-hua emperor (r. 1465 – 1487) and the eldest of three sons born to the emperor's concubine, Lady Shao. Fond of poetry and calligraphy, he refused to engage in many of the other leisure pursuits of his peers and indulged himself instead in artistic and literary pastimes. Lady Shao, the future emperor's grandmother, had been sold by her father to the eunuch intendant of Hangchow, who trained her to write and recite T'ang dynasty poetry and then presented her as a gift to the Ch'eng-hua emperor. At the time of her grandson's accession in 1521, she was a blind old woman living in retirement in the imperial laundry, a compound outside the Imperial City set aside for retired or disgraced palace women. The future emperor's mother, née Chiang (1477–1538), was the daughter of an officer in the Peking guard. Wed to the prince in 1492, she accompanied him to his estate in An-lu in 1494.

Historians of the reign had to note that the future emperor's birth was attended by the extraordinary and auspicious signs that marked such important people. They wrote, for example, that in the year of his birth the Yellow River remained clear for five days and that roseate clouds filled the skies, because such portents marked the birth of a legitimate emperor.