China in the 16th Century
I figure it might be tough to remember Chinese province names so here’s a handy map
The Ming Dynasty began after the Hongwu Emperor won the civil war which followed the collapse of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty in the 13th century. Hongwu, an impoverished young man who had been raised by Buddhist monks because his parents could not support him, supported a return to an idealized version of the Chinese past, where a man could live and die within a small and supportive rural village. With this in mind, Hongwu created a set of revolutionary laws which disallowed movement between villages and which extracted massive amounts from those who made money via trading. Beyond this, Hongwu and his successors banned ocean travel and chose instead to invest in the Grand Canal which ran from the trading 'center’ around Suzhou and Shanghai to Beijing in order to keep the trading economy under control.
The First Ming Emperor created the Ming dynasty based around a very specific social order which was being broken up by European involvement and the growth of a trade based economy
These controls soon broke down. The official population of China dropped and continued dropping over each Emperors reign. This was not due to drought or famine (though it was partially the fault of drought, famine, and the self imposed autarky which was official Ming policy), but rather due to families dropping under the radar in order to engage in trade. The Ming Dynasty was faced with a massive contradiction--inventions such as the metal printing press, the expansion of the silk trade, trade with foreigners, the massive influx of silver from foreign trade, and the building of the grand canal all created a huge amount of wealth, however the Ming’s ruling ideology, based around Confucianism, could not accept this new wealth.
Late Summer in the palace of Hu Lei Wei. The creation of a nouveu riche aristocracy led to an obsession over the proper way that one could be wealthy
The old aristocrat-scholar class responded to this by creating an intricate array of ways to be ‘properly rich’. Those who were merely rich but did not own the
right kind of plum tree, the
right kind of silk clothing appropriate for the season and period, the
right kind of late Song pottery, were tasteless fools who should be insulted. The nouveau riche, in a desperate play for social standing, bought each and every thing demanded of them, enrolled their children in private lessons of the Confucian classics in order to make their children bureaucrats (and thus put their children at the top of the social ladder). Thus the first journal printed in China was a feudal version of a ‘better living’ magazine, teaching people how to arrange their houses according to the proper principals.
Two centuries after Hongwu’s ascension to Emperorship, Ming China was a very different place. Economic activity, centered around Suzhou, was making still more scholar-aristocrats who were decrying wealth and the immorality of wealth. The decadence of mid-Ming China placed the 16th century into the typical middle period of a Chinese dynasty--soon, many thought, the corruption of the dynasty would reach a peak and the dynasty would collapse, either due to foreigners or internal rebels. While they were right, what replaced the Ming dynasty was very different than what China had experienced before.
Xi Guangqui, one of the most powerful bureaucrats of the Suzhou region, being converted by the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci
Southern China had always been a poorly administered area. Its distance from the capitol and its history of anti-government sentiment were both huge detriments to attempts by any Chinese government to pacify or even tax the area. Widespread tax evasion in the region was common--while excise taxes from the 1540s indicated that Canton had as large a population as Nanjing or Suzhou, the census showed that officially Canton had a population which was only one fourth of those cities. In truth, hundreds of thousands of people migrated south to trade in the lucrative markets of the Tonkin Gulf and the South China Sea, and Malaysia. And while some of those who traded in these areas stayed there (thus the large Chinese populations in Malaysia, the Phillipines, Vietnam etc), many stayed in South China where they remained almost completely unnoticed by their government. This was, of course, until the Scandinavians showed up.
The Scandinavians came to China, first trading wares from the New World (Tobacco, potatoes, peanuts, silver) and from their own East Asian colonies, but soon they started trading in their own knowledge: that is, their knowledge of administration. With the acceptance of the Gonjin Emperor (and with the statement that they would not send any missionaries to China), the Scandinavians began ‘advising’ the governors of Guangzhou and Guangxi provinces in 1578. The Scandinavians created a tax agency (based off of the French innovation of tax farming) wherein men would buy the right to collect taxes in a prefecture. They would get ten percent of the proceed and the Scandinavians would get five. This led to a massive increase in the Ming Dynasty’s tax funds (just as the Mongol hordes to the north were beginning to threaten the border), and the Scandinavians were soon asked to provide their services to all provinces south of the Yangtze river.
Spread of Scandinavian influence. Note that the South China Company was not solely a Scandinavian endeavor--throughout its whole history it was a majority-Chinese operation. Thus we should not see the Four Kingdoms Era as only a product of colonization of riches or an invasion of Europeans into China: it was an invasion of European ideas into China.
While the Scandinavians for the most part stayed true to their promise of not prosthelytizing the Christian faith, the rise of Western-trained tax assessors led to a fundamental change in Chinese society all the same. Because one did not have to hold a degree to gain a tax assessing title, young southern Chinese aristocrats spent their time learning accounting and reading the new Western books which were pouring in by the hundreds of thousands. The mere fact that a generation of Chinese men were being raised not on the idea that their society was the Middle Kingdom between heaven and the rest of the world but rather that China had things to learn from the rest of the world was a revolutionary step in itself. But beyond that, the message of the books being published in the thousands by the mostly Western-dominated printing industry was radically different.
Both Western and Chinese histiography had been primarily cyclical in nature up until the Medieval era. During this time Christian historians attempted to reconcile the pagan belief in cyclical time with their belief in a timeline which moved around one point (the birth of Christ). What they ended up doing was creating a wholly different way of perceiving history--as a linear series of events moving towards the second coming. With the coming of the 17th century Descartes started changing this apocalyptic idea into one oriented around the coming of modernity--just as
before the birth of Christ the world was fundamentally different than afterwards, before the Renaissance the world was pre-modern, afterwards it was modern.
”Wang Yi perceives the plane”. This drawing is incredibly significant because it is the first recorded Chinese drawing which used Renaissance-style perspective
These intellectual shocks over three generations completely remade southern Chinese society. Rather than seeing themselves as the margin of the Ming Dynasty, they started to think of themselves as the vanguard of a new future for China. Rather than wondering openly (as Northern Chinese did) what dynasty would replace the corrupt Ming, several separatist movements began fermenting in the Scandinavian-administered areas. Rather than accepting the newly forming ultra-Confucian ideology of their northern rulers, a syncretic religious movement involving a combination of Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism and Christianity (known as the Four Ways Movement) arose in Canton and Suzhou.
Scandinavian colonialism was not accepted by everyone. In Yunnan province, the creation of a tax assessment firm led to widespread peasant revolts, and the anti-western Ultra-Confucian movement originated from there. Key to the movement was the idea that all foreign concepts (Buddhism, Christianity, ‘modernity’, commerce) occurred cyclically and were the reasons for dynastic change, thus if they were rooted out of Chinese society China would finally achieve eternal peace.
Xunzi, one of the two ‘philosopher kings’ to emerge from the breakup of the Ming Dynasty, believed that all foreign influence was to be expunged from China if the region was to have true enlightenment and peace
While the Ultra-Confucian movement seemed conservative, in fact it was as revolutionary as the Four Ways movement. Both sought a break from the dynastic cycle by a massive change in Chinese society, and both shared a hatred of the current order represented by the backwards, corrupt Ming Emperor.
This conflict could have continued for a century underground and unheard of it weren’t for two related events which occurred in the 1620s: the rise of the Tianqui Emperor to the throne in Beijing, and the unification of the northern hordes under the Manchus.
The Tianqui emperor was only 15 when he became Emperor, his father (who had spent his whole life dealing with court politics in order to become emperor) having died a month after his ascension. Thus the Tianqui emperor was young, naive, and inexperienced in politics, and given this it makes sense that he soon fell under the sway of the courtly philosopher Fung Wei, a scholar-bureaucrat who followed the Ultra-Confucian movement. Fung Wei’s rise to the top of the Ming court led to the enactment of several horrifying and cruel policies, including 100% tax rates on non-peasants and non-bureaucrats and the deportation of centuries old Oriental Christian communities (who for the most part moved south to the areas administered by the Scandinavians). Furthermore Fung Wei’s government led a widespread attack on Chinese Buddhists (who had been the most supportive of the financial boom and Scandinavian administration).
The Tianqui Emperor presided over the last years of the Ming Dynasty’s dominance
Fung Wei was a pragmatist, and though he believed that the end goal of the Emperor should be the destruction of all foreign influence on China, he only made slow moves against the Scandinavians. Instead he brought China into a series of wars against Tibet (which ceased giving tribute during the many purges of Buddhist monasteries), over the period of 1617-1629. These wars led to the annexation of Tibet. They also led to the collapse of the Ming.
This was the period when the French East Indies Company began getting involved in the Chinese trade. Using diamonds mined from their Antartique colony and their own knowledge of administration, the French began entrenching themselves within the Zhejiang and Fujian provinces, and by 1630 the trade in silk worms had become key to the growth of French manufacturing (more on that in the next entry). France’s entry into China also had the effect of further radicalizing the Four Ways movement. The works of Henri II were translated (by St.Chamand and Henri themselves) into Min Chinese and published from the publishing houses in Fuzhou starting in 1627. These works (which were in and of themselves French recontextualizations of Chinese philosophy--which has been missed by Western historians but not by Chinese ones) deeply spoke to their readers throughout Fujian, offering a path by which they could synthesize the Christian thought they had been reading throughout their lives with older Daoist and Confucian philosophy.
Nuhrachi, unifier of the Manchu tribes and first Qing emperor
To the north, the Mongol tribes were united under Nuhraci of the Manchu hordes. Nuhraci, a Manchu who had acted as an officer in the Ming army, came to believe during a series of peasant uprisings that the Ming Dynasty’s time had come to pass. With this belief in mind, he gave up his position and moved back home. From there, he began unifying the tribes through war and diplomacy, enacting reforms along the way such as codifying the Mongol language and creating an elite standing army. By 1628 Nuhraci had united all the hordes and revoked his tributary status with China, thus leading them to war.
This war was short--most of the Ming Army was in Tibet and Nuhrachi’s cavalry based forces swiftly cut off the border garrisons and conquered the northern provinces of the Ming Empire. With the treaty of Liaoning, Nuhrachi was given control over sections of the great wall as well as the northern road to Beijing. Thus Nuhrachi declared himself Qing Emperor in 1629, shortly before his death.
Liu Zongzhou was the other great philosopher king of the age. A disciple of Yong Zicheng (the so called ‘master of the three ways’, who wrote syncretic works which combined Chan Buddhism [Chinese Zen], Daoism, and Confucianism, and who allegedly had also taught Joachim de Saint Chamand), Liu was the progenitor of the Four Ways school, which sought to combine Western philosophy with Yong Zicheng’s synthesis of Chinese thought.
This led to a very rapid destabilization. Fearing that the Scandinavians would assert control over their nominal administrative zone, Yunnan’s provincial governor and prominent ultra-Confucianist Xunzi declared himself the King of Dali in 1630, and before the Ming Empire could defeat this uprising they were attacked again from the north, losing Beijing and much of northern Han China.
Fujian and Zhejiang, the two most tolerant and pro-foreign provinces, were now disconnected from the Ming Emperor. This led to a deep quarrel between the more traditional Eunuch faction and Ming loyalists and the Four Ways students, who varied from French trained administrators and tax farmers to old hands like Liu Zongzhou. Liu and his followers won out, and the Eunuchs were cast out from the new Enlightened Kingdom of Min. Liu, who had been mayor of Fuzhou and had a great many connections with both the French and the Scandinavian East Indies Companies, knew that the Scandinavians would not be able to guard against a final Qing push south, and furthermore had seen the horrific corruption brought about by the Scandinavian’s recent pushes for ever more silver (both to fund a new army they were recruiting to defend their Chinese provinces, which they had increasing control over, and to fund their wars in German). With this thought out, Liu sent a request to Henri II in the year 1640, asking him to accept the Enlightened Kingdom of Min under France for the time being.
This would lead to the Four Kingdoms Era, a time during which China transitioned into open contact with the outside world. It would also, eventually, lead to massive changes in France itself.
The collapse of the Ming Empire, and the situation in China during Qing’s declaration of war against the Scandinavians, French, and Ming in 1643
