Ming China and East Asia

The treasure fleets that turned back

In 1405, almost ninety years before Columbus sailed with three small ships, a Chinese fleet of more than two hundred vessels left the Yangzi River. Its commander was Zheng He, a Muslim court official in the service of the Yongle emperor. Over seven voyages (1405 to 1433) his fleets visited Southeast Asia, India, the Persian Gulf, Arabia and the east coast of Africa. Ambassadors came back to Beijing bearing tribute, including a giraffe from East Africa.

Then the voyages stopped. Why would one of the richest states on Earth stop exploring? That question takes us into how Ming China worked.

The Ming state

The Ming dynasty ruled China from 1368 to 1644. Its founder, the Hongwu emperor, had driven out the Mongol Yuan dynasty. The Yongle emperor moved the capital to Beijing, where the palace complex known as the Forbidden City was finished around 1420.

• The emperor ruled as the Son of Heaven, holding the Mandate of Heaven: the belief that Heaven grants the right to rule to a just ruler and can withdraw it if the ruler fails (shown by disasters, famine or rebellion).
• Officials ran the empire through ministries and provinces. Most were chosen by the civil service examinations.
• Neo-Confucianism shaped government and family life: loyalty to the ruler, obedience to parents (filial piety), and proper relationships between superiors and inferiors.
• Population: well over 100 million people by 1600 (estimates vary), far more than any European state.

The examinations and the scholar-officials

The exams tested knowledge of the Confucian classics and the ability to write a strict essay form (the "eight-legged essay"). Candidates passed through county, provincial and metropolitan levels; the very best were ranked by the emperor in a palace examination. Only a tiny fraction passed the highest level.

In principle any man could sit the exams, so they offered social mobility. In practice, years of study cost money, so wealthy landowning families had a large advantage. Women could not sit the exams. The men who succeeded formed the scholar-gentry, an elite defined by education more than by birth or military power. That is a striking difference from much of Europe, where nobles were usually warriors and landowners by birth.

The diagram above shows the ideal order of the "four occupations" (with the emperor at the top). Reality was messier. Many merchants grew rich, bought land and paid for their sons to study for the exams. Soldiers, and groups such as performers and household servants, stood outside the four occupations. Comparing an ideal with what actually happened is a useful habit for any society you study.

Why did the voyages stop?

Historians give several causes. This is a classic cause and consequence problem: no single cause explains it.

• Cost. The fleets were enormous and expensive.
• Politics at court. Many Confucian officials distrusted the court eunuchs who organized the voyages, and saw them as wasteful.
• Security. The main threat came from the Mongols in the north, not from the sea. Money went to the northern frontier. Much of the Great Wall you can visit today was rebuilt in brick and stone under the Ming.
• Self-sufficiency. China produced most of what it needed. The voyages aimed to show power and collect tribute, not to found colonies or seek profit.

The Ming also enforced a sea ban (haijin) that limited private overseas trade. Smuggling and piracy grew along the coast, and in 1567 the court eased the ban and allowed licensed trade from a port in Fujian.

The tribute system

The Ming saw China as the civilized centre of the world. Neighbouring rulers, from Joseon Korea to Southeast Asian kingdoms, sent missions with gifts and performed rituals of respect to the emperor. In return they received valuable gifts and permission to trade. For many partners this was a practical arrangement: they gained trade and security, and kept running their own affairs.

Silver: China and the first global economy

In the 1500s the Ming government increasingly collected taxes in silver. The Single Whip reform, pushed empire-wide by the senior minister Zhang Juzheng around 1581, combined many taxes and labour duties into one payment in silver. China had little silver of its own, so silver flowed in from Japan and, after the Spanish founded Manila in 1571, from the mines of the Americas, carried across the Pacific by the Manila galleons. In return, Chinese silk and porcelain went to Europe and the Americas.

Many historians argue that this silver trade, more than European demand alone, linked the world into a single economy.

Europeans arrive, on Ming terms

Portuguese traders reached south China around 1513. After years of conflict, they were allowed to settle at Macau from 1557. The Jesuit Matteo Ricci arrived in 1582. He learned classical Chinese, dressed as a scholar, and won respect with mathematics, clocks and a world map; he was allowed to live in Beijing from 1601. This was very different from what happened in the Americas: in China, Europeans had to adapt to a strong state's rules.

The Ming also fought a major war abroad: between 1592 and 1598 Japan's ruler Toyotomi Hideyoshi invaded Korea, and Ming armies helped Joseon drive the Japanese out. Korean admiral Yi Sun-sin is still honoured for his naval victories.

Culture and ideas

• Blue-and-white porcelain from the kilns of Jingdezhen was prized from Istanbul to Amsterdam.
• Popular novels such as Journey to the West (published 1592) reached a growing reading public, helped by cheap woodblock printing.
• The philosopher Wang Yangming (1472 to 1529) taught that moral knowledge comes from within each person and must be put into action, a challenge to the more rigid Neo-Confucian teaching of the exams.

The fall of the Ming, 1644

By the 1630s the Ming faced many problems at once: cold years and famines (part of the global cooling historians call the Little Ice Age), epidemics, a strained treasury, unpaid soldiers, peasant rebellions, and the rising Manchu state to the northeast. In 1644 the rebel leader Li Zicheng captured Beijing and the last Ming emperor died. Weeks later a Ming general let the Manchu armies through the Great Wall, and they founded the Qing dynasty, which ruled China until 1912. In the traditional view, the Mandate of Heaven had passed to a new dynasty: a powerful idea of continuity within change.