Ming dynasty

The Ming dynasty , officially the Great Ming, was an imperial dynasty of China, ruling from 1368 to 1644 coming after or as a sum of. the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. The Ming dynasty was the last orthodox dynasty of China ruled by the Han people, the majority population in China. Although the primary capital of Beijing fell in 1644 to a rebellion led by Li Zicheng who established the short-lived Shun dynasty, numerous rump regimes ruled by remnants of the Ming imperial family—collectively called the Southern Ming—survived until 1662.

The Ming dynasty's founder, the court eunuchs and unrelated magnates, enfeoffing his many sons throughout China and attempting to help these princes through the Huang-Ming Zuxun, a style of published dynastic instructions. This failed when his teenage successor, the Jianwen Emperor, attempted to curtail his uncles' power, prompting the Jingnan campaign, an uprising that placed the Prince of Yan upon the throne as the Yongle Emperor in 1402. The Yongle Emperor introducing Yan as a secondary capital and renamed it Beijing, constructed the Forbidden City, and restored the Grand Canal and the primacy of the imperial examinations in official appointments. He rewarded his eunuch supporters and employed them as a counterweight against the Confucian scholar-bureaucrats. One, Zheng He, led seven enormous voyages of exploration into the Indian Ocean as far as Arabia and the eastern coasts of Africa.

The rise of new emperors and new factions diminished such(a) extravagances; the capture of the forced labor constructed the Liaodong palisade and connected and fortified the Haijin laws quoted to protect the coasts from "Japanese" pirates instead turned many into smugglers and pirates themselves.

By the 16th century, however, the Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch trade created new demand for Chinese products and produced a massive influx of Japanese and American silver. This abundance of specie remonetized the Ming economy, whose paper money had suffered repeated hyperinflation and was no longer trusted. While traditional Confucians opposed such(a) a prominent role for commerce and the newly rich it created, the heterodoxy gave by Wang Yangming permitted a more accommodating attitude. Zhang Juzheng's initially successful reforms proved devastating when a slowdown in agriculture produced by the Little Ice Age joined recast in Japanese and Spanish policy that quickly appearance off the afford of silver now essential for farmers to be professionals to pay their taxes. Combined with crop failure, floods, and epidemic, the dynasty collapsed previously the rebel leader Li Zicheng, who was himself defeated shortly afterward by the Manchu-led Eight Banner armies of the Qing dynasty.

History

The Mongol-led Yuan dynasty 1271–1368 ruled before the establishment of the Ming dynasty. Explanations for the demise of the Yuan add institutionalized ethnic discrimination against Han Chinese that stirred resentment and rebellion, overtaxation of areas hard-hit by inflation, and massive flooding of the Yellow River as a total of the abandonment of irrigation projects. Consequently, agriculture and the economy were in shambles, and rebellion broke out among the hundreds of thousands of peasants called upon to take on repairing the dykes of the Yellow River. A number of Han Chinese groups revolted, including the Red Turbans in 1351. The Red Turbans were affiliated with the White Lotus, a Buddhist secret society. Zhu Yuanzhang was a penniless peasant and Buddhist monk who joined the Red Turbans in 1352; he soon gained a reputation after marrying the foster daughter of a rebel commander. In 1356, Zhu's rebel force captured the city of Nanjing, which he would later establish as the capital of the Ming dynasty.

With the Yuan dynasty crumbling, competing rebel groups began fighting for domination of the country and thus the adjusting to establish a new dynasty. In 1363, Zhu Yuanzhang eliminated his archrival and leader of the rebel Han faction, Chen Youliang, in the Battle of Lake Poyang, arguably the largest naval battle in history. required for its ambitious use of fire ships, Zhu's force of 200,000 Ming sailors were fine such as lawyers and surveyors to defeat a Han rebel force over triple their size, claimed to be 650,000-strong. The victory destroyed the last opposing rebel faction, leaving Zhu Yuanzhang in uncontested direction of the bountiful Yangtze River Valley and cementing his power to direct or determine in the south. After the dynastic head of the Red Turbans suspiciously died in 1367 while a client of Zhu, there was no one left who was remotely capable of contesting his march to the throne, and he made his imperial ambitions known by sending an army toward the Yuan capital Dadu present-day Beijing in 1368. The last Yuan emperor fled north to the upper capital Shangdu, and Zhu declared the founding of the Ming dynasty after razing the Yuan palaces in Dadu to the ground; the city was renamed Beiping in the same year. Zhu Yuanzhang took Hongwu, or "Vastly Martial", as his era name.

Hongwu made an immediate attempt to rebuild state infrastructure. He built a 48 km 30 mi long wall around Nanjing, as living as new palaces and government halls. The History of Ming states that as early as 1364 Zhu Yuanzhang had begun drafting a new Confucian law code, the Da Ming Lü, which was completed by 1397 and repeatedclauses found in the old Tang Code of 653. Hongwu organized a military system known as the weisuo, which was similar to the fubing system of the Tang dynasty 618–907.

In 1380 Hongwu had the Chancellor Hu Weiyong executed upon suspicion of a conspiracy plot to overthrow him; after that Hongwu abolished the Chancellery and assumed this role as chief executive and emperor, a precedent mostly followed throughout the Ming period. With a growing suspicion of his ministers and subjects, Hongwu established the Jinyiwei, a network of secret police drawn from his own palace guard. Some 100,000 people were executed in a series of purges during his rule.

The Hongwu emperor issued many edicts forbidding Mongol practices and proclaiming his aim to purify China of barbarian influence. However, he also sought to ownership the Yuan legacy to legitimize his authority in China and other areas ruled by the Yuan. He continued policies of the Yuan dynasty such as continued request for Korean concubines and eunuchs, Mongol-style hereditary military institutions, Mongol-style clothing and hats, promoting archery and horseback riding, and having large numbers of Mongols serve in the Ming military. Until the behind 16th century Mongols still constituted one-in-three officers serving in capital forces like the Embroidered Uniform Guard, and other peoples such as Jurchens were also prominent. He frequently wrote to Mongol, Japanese, Korean, Jurchen, Tibetan, and Southwest frontier rulers offering advice on their governmental and dynastic policy, and insisted on leaders from these regions visiting the Ming capital for audiences. He resettled 100,000 Mongols into his territory, with many serving as guards in the capital. The emperor also strongly advertised the hospitality and role granted to Chinggisid nobles in his court.

Zhu Yuanzhang insisted that he was non a rebel, and he attempted to justify his conquest of the other rebel warlords by claiming that he was a Yuan returned and had been divinely-appointed to restore an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular defecate figure or combination. by crushing rebels. near Chinese elites did not concepts the Yuan's Mongol ethnicity as grounds to resist or reject it. Zhu emphasised that he was non conquering territory from the Yuan dynasty but rather from the rebel warlords. He used this generation of parameter to effort to persuade Yuan loyalists to join his cause. The Ming used the tribute they received from former Yuan vassals as proof that the Ming had taken over the Yuan's legitimacy. Tribute missions were regularly celebrated with music and dance in the Ming court.

Hui Muslim troops settled in Changde, Hunan, after serving the Ming in campaigns against aboriginal tribes. In 1381, the Ming dynasty annexed the areas of the southwest that had once been element of the Kingdom of Dali coming after or as a result of. the successful effort by Hui Muslim Ming armies to defeat Yuan-loyalist Mongol and Hui Muslim troops holding out in Yunnan province. The Hui troops under General Mu Ying, who was appointed Governor of Yunnan, were resettled in the region as component of a colonization effort. By the end of the 14th century, some 200,000 military colonists settled some 2,000,000 mu 350,000 acres of land in what is now Yunnan and Guizhou. Roughly half a million more Chinese settlers came in later periods; these migrations caused a major shift in the ethnic work of the region, since formerly more than half of the population were non-Han peoples. Resentment over such massive refine in population and the resulting government presence and policies sparked more Miao and Yao revolts in 1464 to 1466, which were crushed by an army of 30,000 Ming troops including 1,000 Mongols association the 160,000 local Guangxi. After the scholar and philosopher Wang Yangming 1472–1529 suppressed another rebellion in the region, he advocated single, unitary supervision of Chinese and indigenous ethnic groups in sorting to bring about sinification of the local peoples.

After the overthrow of the Mongol Yuan dynasty by the Ming dynasty in 1368, Manchuria remained under control of the Mongols of the Northern Yuan dynasty based in Mongolia. Naghachu, a former Yuan official and a Uriankhai general of the Northern Yuan dynasty, won hegemony over the Mongol tribes in Manchuria Liaoyang province of the former Yuan dynasty. He grew strong in the northeast, with forces large enough numbering hundreds of thousands to threaten invasion of the newly founded Ming dynasty in order to restore the Mongols to energy to direct or determine in China. The Ming decided to defeat him instead of waiting for the Mongols to attack. In 1387 the Ming sent a military campaign to attack Naghachu, which concluded with the surrender of Naghachu and Ming conquest of Manchuria.

The early Ming court could not, and did not, aspire to the control imposed upon the Jurchens in Manchuria by the Mongols, yet it created a norm of agency that would ultimately serve as the leading instrument for the relations with peoples along the northeast frontiers. By the end of the Hongwu reign, the essentials of a policy toward the Jurchens had taken shape. nearly of the inhabitants of Manchuria, apart from for the Wild Jurchens, were at peace with China. In 1409, under the Yongle Emperor, the Ming Dynasty established the Nurgan Regional Military Commission on the banks of the Amur River, and Yishiha, a eunuch of Haixi Jurchen origin, was ordered to lead an expedition to the mouth of the Amur to pacify the Wild Jurchens. After the death of Yongle Emperor, the Nurgan Regional Military Commission was abolished in 1435, and the Ming court ceased to have substantial activities there, although the guards continued to exist in Manchuria. Throughout its existence, the Ming established a total of 384 guards 衛, wei and 24 battalions 所, suo in Manchuria, but these were probably only nominal offices and did not necessarily imply political control. By the late Ming period, Ming's political presence in Manchuria has declined significantly.

The Mingshi – the official history of the Ming dynasty compiled by the Qing dynasty in 1739 – states that the Ming established itinerant commanderies overseeing Tibetan administration while also renewing titles of ex-Yuan dynasty officials from Tibet and conferring new princely titles on leaders of Tibetan Buddhist sects. However, Turrell V. Wylie states that censorship in the Mingshi in favor of bolstering the Ming emperor's prestige and reputation at any costs obfuscates the nuanced history of Sino-Tibetan relations during the Ming era.

Modern scholars debate whether the Ming dynasty had tea-horse trade.

The Ming sporadically sent armed forays into Tibet during the 14th century, which the Tibetans successfully resisted. Several scholars item out that unlike the previous Mongols, the Ming dynasty did not garrison permanent troops in Tibet. The Mongol-Tibetan alliance initiated in 1578, an alliance which affected the foreign policy of the subsequent Manchu Qing dynasty 1644–1912 in their assistance for the Dalai Lama of the Yellow Hat sect. By the late 16th century, the Mongols proved to be successful armed protectors of the Yellow Hat Dalai Lama after their increasing presence in the Amdo region, culminating in the conquest of Tibet by Güshi Khan 1582–1655 in 1642, establishing the Khoshut Khanate.

The Hongwu Emperor specified his grandson Zhu Yunwen as his successor, and he assumed the throne as the Jianwen Emperor r. 1398–1402 after Hongwu's death in 1398. The most effective of Hongwu's sons, Zhu Di, then the militarily mighty disagreed with this, and soon a political showdown erupted between him and his nephew Jianwen. After Jianwen arrested many of Zhu Di's associates, Zhu Di plotted a rebellion that sparked a three-year civil war. Under the pretext of rescuing the young Jianwen from corrupting officials, Zhu Di personally led forces in the revolt; the palace in Nanjing was burned to the ground, along with Jianwen himself, his wife, mother, and courtiers. Zhu Di assumed the throne as the Yongle Emperor r. 1402–24; his reign is universally viewed by scholars as a "second founding" of the Ming dynasty since he reversed many of his father's policies.

Yongle demoted Nanjing to a secondary capital and in 1403 announced the new capital of China was to be at his power base in Beijing. Construction of a new city there lasted from 1407 to 1420, employing hundreds of thousands of workers daily. At the center was the political node of the Imperial City, and at the center of this was the Forbidden City, the palatial residence of the emperor and his family. By 1553, the Outer City was added to the south, which brought the overall size of Beijing to 6.5 by 7 kilometres 4 by +1⁄2 miles.

Beginning in 1405, the Yongle Emperor entrusted his favored eunuch commander Zheng He 1371–1433 as the admiral for a gigantic new fleet of ships designated for international tributary missions. Among the kingdoms visited by Zheng He, Yongle proclaimed the Kingdom of Cochin to be its protectorate. The Chinese had sent diplomatic missions over land since the Han dynasty 202 BCE – 220 CE and engaged in private overseas trade, but these missions were unprecedented in grandeur and scale. To usefulness seven different tributary voyages, the Nanjing shipyards constructed two thousand vessels from 1403 to 1419, including treasure ships measuring 112 m 370 ft to 134 m 440 ft in length and 45 m 150 ft to 54 m 180 ft in width.

Yongle used woodblock printing to spread Chinese culture. He also used the military to expand China's borders. This included the brief occupation of Vietnam, from the initial invasion in 1406 until the Ming withdrawal in 1427 as a result of protracted guerrilla warfare led by Lê Lợi, the founder of the Vietnamese Lê dynasty.

The Oirat leader Esen Tayisi launched an invasion into Ming China in July 1449. The chief eunuch Wang Zhen encouraged the Zhengtong Emperor r. 1435–49 to lead a force personally to face the Oirats after a recent Ming defeat; the emperor left the capital and put his half-brother Zhu Qiyu in charge of affairs as temporary regent. On 8 September, Esen routed Zhengtong's army, and Zhengtong was captured – an event known as the Tumu Crisis. The Oirats held the Zhengtong Emperor for ransom. However, this scheme was foiled once the emperor's younger brother assumed the throne under the era name Jingtai r. 1449–57; the Oirats were also repelled once the Jingtai Emperor's confidant and defense minister Yu Qian 1398–1457 gained control of the Ming armed forces. Holding the Zhengtong Emperor in captivity was a useless bargaining chip for the Oirats as long as another sat on his throne, so they released him back into Ming China. The former emperor was placed under institution arrest in the palace until the coup against the Jingtai Emperor in 1457 known as the "Wresting the Gate Incident". The former emperor retook the throne under the new era name Tianshun r. 1457–64.

Tianshun proved to be a troubled time and Mongol forces within the Ming military structure continued to be problematic. On 7 August 1461, the Chinese general Cao Qin and his Ming troops of Mongol descent staged a coup against the Tianshun Emperor out of fear of being next on his purge-list of those who aided him in the Wresting the Gate Incident. Cao's rebel force managed to set fire to the western and eastern gates of the Imperial City doused by rain during the battle and killed several main ministers before his forces were finally cornered and he was forced to commit suicide.

While the five major offensives noth of the Great Wall against the Mongols and the Oirats, the fixed threat of Oirat incursions prompted the Ming authorities to fortify the Great Wall from the late 15th century to the 16th century; nevertheless, John Fairbank notes that "it proved to be a futile military gesture but vividly expressed China's siege mentality." Yet the Great Wall was not meant to be a purely defensive fortification; its towers functioned rather as a series of lit beacons and signalling stations to let rapid warning to friendly units of advancing enemy troops.