Chinese Empire, Ming Dynasty
State | Defunct
1421 CE to 1662 CE
After the Ming Dynasty moves the imperial Chinese capital to Beijing, the rise of new emperors and new factions diminished such extravagances as Zheng He’s Treasure Voyages of exploration into the Indian Ocean; the capture of the Zhengtong Emperor during the 1449 Tumu Crisis ends them completely.
The imperial navy is allowed to fall into disrepair while forced labor constructs the Liaodong palisade and connects and fortifies the Great Wall of China into its modern form.
Wide-ranging censuses of the entire empire are conducted decennially, but the desire to avoid labor and taxes and the difficulty of storing and reviewing the enormous archives at Nanjing hampera accurate figures.
Estimates for the late-Ming population vary from 160 to 200 million, but necessary revenues are squeezed out of smaller and smaller numbers of farmers as more disappear from the official records or "donate" their lands to tax-exempt eunuchs or temples.
Haijin laws intended to protect the coasts from "Japanese" pirates instead turn many into smugglers and pirates themselves.By the sixteenth century, however, the expansion of European trade – albeit restricted to islands near Guangzhou like Macau – spreads the Columbian Exchange of crops, plants, and animals into China, introducing chili peppers to Sichuan cuisine and highly productive corn and potatoes, which diminish famines and spur population growth.
The growth of Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch trade create new demand for Chinese products and produce a massive influx of Japanese and American silver.
This abundance of specie allows the Ming to finally avoid using paper money, which had sparked hyperinflation during the 1450s.
While traditional Confucians oppose such a prominent role for commerce and the newly rich it creates, the heterodoxy introduced by Wang Yangming permits a more accommodating attitude.
Zhang Juzheng's initially successful reforms prove devastating when a slowdown in agriculture produced by the Little Ice Age is met with Japanese and Spanish policies that quickly cut off the supply of silver now necessary for farmers to be able to pay their taxes.
Combined with crop failure, floods, and epidemic, the dynasty is considered to have lost the Mandate of Heaven and collapses before the rebel leader Li Zicheng and a Manchurian invasion.
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The Chinese alone stand outside this Ayutthayan social structure.
They are not obliged to register for corvée duty, so they are free to move about the kingdom at will and engage in commerce.
By the sixteenth century, the Chinese control Ayutthaya's internal trade and have found important places in the civil and military service.
Most of these men take Thai wives because few women leave China to accompany the men.
The Thai king stands at the apex of a highly stratified social and political hierarchy that extends throughout the society.
In Ayutthayan society the basic unit of social organization is the village community composed of extended family households.
Generally the elected headmen provides leadership for communal projects.
Title to land resides with the headman, who holds it in the name of the community, although peasant proprietors enjoy the use of land as long as they cultivate it.
The viability of the Thai state, with ample reserves of land available for cultivation, depends on the acquisition and control of adequate manpower for farm labor and defense.
The dramatic rise of Ayutthaya had entailed constant warfare and, as none of the parties in the region possess a technological advantage, the outcome of battles is usually determined by the size of the armies.
After each victorious campaign, Ayutthaya carries away a number of conquered people to its own territory, where they are assimilated and added to the labor force.
Every Thai freeman has to be registered as a servant, or phrai, with the local lord, or nai, for military service and corvée labor on public works and on the land of the official to whom he is assigned.
The phrai can also meet his labor obligation by paying a tax.
If he finds the forced labor under his nai repugnant, he can sell himself into slavery to a more attractive nai, who then pays a fee to the government in compensation for the loss of corvée labor.
As much as one-third of the manpower supply into the nineteenth century will be composed of phrai.
Wealth, status, and political influence are interrelated.
The king allotts rice fields to governors, military commanders, and court officials in payment for their services to the crown, according to the sakdi na system.
The size of each official's allotment is determined by the number of persons he can command to work it.
The amount of manpower a particular nai can command determines his status relative to others in the hierarchy and his wealth.
At the apex of the hierarchy, the king, who is the realm's largest landholder, also commands the services of the largest number of phrai, called phrai luang (royal servants), who pay taxes, serve in the royal army, and work on the crown lands.
King Borommatrailokkanat establishes definite allotments of land and phrai for the royal officials at each rung in the hierarchy, thus determining the country's social structure until the introduction of salaries for government officials in the nineteenth century.
The Khmer, following the abandonment of the Angkorian sites, establish a new capital several hundred kilometers to the southeast on the site of what is now Phnom Penh.
This new center of power is located at the confluence of the Mekong and the Tonle Sab rivers.
Thus, it controls the river commerce of the Khmer heartland and the Laotian kingdoms and has access, by way of the Mekong Delta, to the international trade routes that link the China coast, the South China Sea, and the Indian Ocean.
A new kind of state and society emerges, more open to the outside world and more dependent on commerce as a source of wealth than its inland predecessor.
The growth of maritime trade with China during the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) provides lucrative opportunities for members of the Cambodian elite who control royal trading monopolies.
The appearance of Europeans in the region in the sixteenth century also stimulates commerce.
The Korean written alphabet, hangul, is systematized in the fifteenth century under the greatest of Korean kings, Sejong (r. 1418-50), who also greatly increases the use of metal moveable type for book publications of all sorts.
Some scholars consider Korean to be part of the Ural-Altaic group of languages, including Turkish, Hungarian, Finnish, and Japanese; others believe it may be a language isolate.
In spite of the long influence of written Chinese, Korean remains very different in lexicon, phonology, and grammar.
The hangul alphabet will not come into general use until the twentieth century, however; from 1948 the North Koreans will use the Korean alphabet—which they call choson 'gul—exclusively, while South Koreans will retain usage of a mixed Sino-Korean script until the 1990s, at which time Chinese characters will become less used.
The glue holding the Joseon system together is education, meaning socialization into Confucian norms and virtues that begin in early childhood with the reading of the Confucian classics.
The model figure is the so-called true gentleman, the virtuous and learned scholar-official who is equally adept at poetry or statecraft.
Education start very early, as Korean students have to master the extraordinarily difficult classical Chinese language—tens of thousands of written characters and their many meanings; rote memorization is the typical method.
Throughout the Joseon Dynasty, all official records, all formal education, and most written discourse was in classical Chinese.
With Chinese language and philosophy, of course, comes a profound cultural penetration of Korea, such that most Joseon arts and literature come to use Chinese models.
The Ming maritime expeditions stop rather suddenly after 1433, the date of the last voyage.
Historians have given as one of the reasons the great expense of large-scale expeditions at a time of preoccupation with northern defenses against the Mongols.
Opposition at court also may have been a contributing factor, as conservative officials found the concept of expansion and commercial ventures alien to Chinese ideas of government.
Pressure from the powerful Neo-Confucian bureaucracy leads to a revival of strict agrarian-centered society.
The stability of the Ming dynasty, which is without major disruptions of the population (at this time around one hundred million), economy, arts, society, or politics, promotes a belief among the Chinese that they have achieved the most satisfactory civilization on earth and that nothing foreign is needed or welcome.
Rivalry among the Mongol imperial heirs, natural disasters, and numerous peasant uprisings had led to the collapse of the Yuan dynasty.
The Ming dynasty (1368-1644) had been founded by a Han Chinese peasant and former Buddhist monk turned rebel army leader.
Having its capital first at Nanjing (which means Southern Capital) and later at Beijing (Northern Capital), the Ming reach the zenith of power during the first quarter of the fifteenth century.
The Chinese armies reconquer Annam, as northern Vietnam is known at this time, in Southeast Asia and keep back the Mongols, while the Chinese fleet sails the China seas and the Indian Ocean, cruising as far as the east coast of Africa.
The maritime Asian nations send envoys with tribute for the Chinese emperor.
Internally, the Grand Canal is expanded to its farthest limits and proves to be a stimulus to domestic trade.