The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties

336 Pages·2010·2.82 MB·English

by  Timothy Brook

history of imperial china
TimothyBrook,GeneralEditor

THE
TROUBLED
EMPIRE
china in the yuan and
ming dynasties
Timothy Brook
the belknap press of
harvard university press
Cambridge,Massachusetts
London,England
2010
Copyright©2010bythePresidentandFellowsofHarvardCollege
Allrightsreserved
PrintedintheUnitedStatesofAmerica
LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData
Brook,Timothy,1951-
Thetroubledempire : ChinaintheYuanand
Mingdynasties / TimothyBrook.
p.cm.
Includesbibliographicalreferencesandindex.
ISBN978-0-674-04602-3(alk.paper)
1.China—History—Yuandynasty,1260–1368.
2.China—History—Mingdynasty,1368–1644.
3.China—Environmentalconditions. 4.China—Economicconditions—To1644.
5.SouthChinaSea—Commerce—History. 6.Despotism—China—History.
7.Complexity(Philosophy)—Socialaspects—China—History.
8.Commerce—Socialaspects—China—History.
9.Commerce—Environmentalaspects—China—History.I.Title.
DS752.3.B762010
951′.026—dc22 2010007195
contents
Introduction 1
1 DragonSpotting 6
2 Scale 24
3 TheNineSloughs 50
4 KhanandEmperor 79
5 EconomyandEcology 106
6 Families 134
7 Beliefs 161
8 TheBusinessofThings 186
9 TheSouthChinaSea 213
10 Collapse 238
Conclusion 260
TemperatureandPrecipitationExtremes 269
TheNineSloughs 270
SuccessionofEmperors 271
PronunciationGuide 273
Notes 274
Bibliography 297
Acknowledgments 317
Index 318
maps
1.LandscapeofContemporaryChina 4
2.ProvincesofContemporaryChina 5
3.MingDynastyCourierRoutesandTravelDistances 32
4.TheLowerYangziRegion(Jiangnan) 35
5.ProvincesandCitiesoftheYuanDynasty 40
6.ProvincesandProvincialCapitalsoftheMingDynasty 41
7.MaritimeTradeRoutes 227
figures
1.DragonEmergingbyWangZhao 11
2.PortraitoftheHongzhiEmperor 12
3.ReturningHomethroughtheSnowbyDaiJin 56
4.HeavySnowintheMountainPassesbyWenZhengming 58
5.GuanyinProtectingChildrenfromPestilence 69
6.KhubilaionaHuntbyLiuGuandao 84
7.PortraitofZhuYuanzhang 88
8.DistilleryWorkersGrindingGraintoMakeLiquor 115
9.MagistrateDistributingGrainfromaStateGranary 123
10.TwoWomenHuskingMilletUsingaStoneRoller 139
11.PortraitofShangLu 151
12.PortraitofaMingGentleman 154
13.BuddhistMonkintheGuiseofaLohan 165
14.GeneralMapoftheTerrestrialWorld 175
15.PorcelainJar 192
16.EnjoyingAntiquitiesbyDuJin 195
17.TheSeldenMap 218
18.LohanbyWuBin 265
introduction
two dynastiesruledChinabetweenthemiddleofthethirteenthcentury
and the middle of the seventeenth. The first was the Yuan, founded in
1271notbyaChinesebutbyaMongol,theGreatKhanKhubilai,grand-
son of the world conqueror Chinggis (Genghis) Khan. The second was
the Ming, created by the brilliant and ruthless Zhu Yuanzhang in 1368
andoverthrownin1644bythenextconquerorsfromthenortherngrass-
lands,theManchus.Thisisahistoryoftheirdynasties.
For most Chinese, 1368 is a key moment in the history of these four
centuries, for this is the year in which Zhu’s indigenous rebel regime
droveoutthehatedMongolsandre-establishedChinaastherealmthat
Chinese have learned to call “the fatherland.” Historians outside China
equally attach significance to the year 1368, but as the year that marks
the onset of the late empire and the beginning of China’s long approach
tothemodernworld.Theyear1368playsaroleinthisbooktoo,butdif-
ferently: not as a hinge on which Chinese history turns, but as a brace
connectingtwoparts.TherevoltthatbroughttheMingtopowerdidhalt
a century of Mongol rule, but it also ensured that the Mongol legacy
wouldpassdownthroughthecenturiesthatfollowed.Together,theYuan
and Ming forged Chinese autocracy, reorganized Chinese society as a
congeriesofextendedfamilies,andrestructuredChinesevaluestofacili-
tatetheconcentrationofcommercialwealth.
PicturingChina’stransformationthroughthethirteenthtoseventeenth
centuriesasacoherentarcofhistorywasnotthevisionwithwhichIap-
proached the writing of this book. I started out by assuming that the
Mongol century from 1271 to 1368 was a self-contained unit of time, a
2 the troubled empire
break in continuity from which the Ming recovered to set China on its
course to the present: foreign became indigenous, Mongol became Chi-
nese, black became white, or so I thought. The idea that the Yuan and
Mingdynastiesmightbecomponentpartsofasingleperiodarrivedfrom
anentirelyunexpectedquarter.Inthecourseofreadingthroughthefour
main genres of primary sources for the history of these two dynasties—
the official dynastic histories, the court diaries or Veritable Records,the
gazetteers that county administrations produced to record local affairs,
andthecommonplacebooksofessayists—Ibegantonoticerepeatedref-
erencestonaturaldisasters:famines,floods,droughts,tornados,locusts,
epidemics, even dragon attacks. As I collected these references and ar-
ranged them over time, I found the two dynasties forming a single era
thatcoincidedwithwhatclimatehistoriansworkingonotherpartsofthe
worldhavecalledtheLittleIceAge.
Whathadbeenawarmer,wetterworldbecameacolder,drierone.As
itdid,inChinaasinEurope,muchelsechangedalongwiththeweather.
States and societies strengthened and polarized. Economies linked and
commercialized. People were forced to come up with novel ways to ex-
plain what was happening around them and to them, to legitimize the
new arrangements that contained their lives, and to justify the new
modes of conduct they adopted to make their ways in the world. The
worldbecameglobal,andwithit,China.
No one in the Yuan and Ming understood these changes in this way,
for they experienced them episodically, often disastrously, as they were
unfolding. To find the pattern to these episodes, in Chapter 3 I identify
ninesloughs(rhymeswith“cows”),periodsfromthreetosevenyearsof
intenselybadweatherandlarge-scalehumancatastrophe.Thesesloughs
didnotdecidethecourseofYuan-Minghistory,buttheyshapedlifeand
memoryduringthesedynastiesasstronglyasanyotherfactor.
Buffeted by weather anomalies, troubled by the insistent presence of
foreigntradersintheiroffshorewaters,somepeopleclungtopastprece-
dentsforguidance.Otherscastthoseprecedentsasidetoconceiveofnew
ways to organize the world and find a place for themselves in it. This is
whytheYuan-Mingperiodwasatimeofmuchconfusionandaplaceof
muchdisagreement.
Tocapturethevibrancyandvariabilityofthisage,Ihavetriedasmuch
as possible to narrate this history through the stories, paintings, and
voices of that time. This was not difficult to do, for one thing that sets
this period apart from earlier periods of imperial China’s history is the
introduction 3
sheervolumeofreportage,mostintentional,someaccidental,thatpeople
ofthattimeleftforustofind.Eyewitnessesrarelyseethebiggerpicture,
but they furnish the details through which the past can come alive to us
after a hiatus of so many centuries. Their ideas may not be congruent
withours,buttheirpleasuresandtheirpanicswecanrecognize.
Ishallbeginwithpanics:themomentswhendragonseruptedintotheir
world.