The Downside of Prosperity
China's Ming Dynasty
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In the West, the casual mention of Ming brings to mind fine porcelain. To historians, it means a long, relatively prosperous period in China’s history noted for its long-lived emperors, and its porcelain. Unfortunately, these images came at a considerable price, because, like other Chinese empires, it began in violence and ended in a violent flurry, unable to overcome the problems that beset all Chinese regimes.
Ming China came about amid the chaos and collapse of Mongol China.
The Ming (“brilliant”) seized power from the Song dynasty—itself collapsed from internal strife—in 1366. We know very little of the first Ming emperor, other than he apparently possessed great natural ability and that he came from peasant stock from the southern Song Empire. In just over two centuries, the Mings added to and merged China from Yunnan to Vietnam to Korea to the Ussuri River, more or less defining modern China's borders. The Ming lost control of parts of Manchuria to the Mongols and their Manchu cousins, but exercised significant influence over the area right to the very end.
Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.
Friedrich Nietzsche
The Ming may have restored Chinese arts and learning to where it had been 200 years before, but took it no further. Their great strides in learning led to expansive technical progress, but it was a part of the progress of Chinese artistry and technology begun by the Tang, developed by the Sung, and suppressed by the Mongols…and now restored by the Ming. The porcelain industry became an important feature under the Mings, but they could only point to a few original achievements.
The Ming could never solve fundamental problems that still haunt China.
Urbanization advanced during the Ming but industrialization did not. The much-vaunted naval expeditions under Zheng He in the 15th Century, regardless of how big the ships may have been, had no commercial purpose and were only following established trade routes. But they sapped China’s treasury, and a little more of her vitality went with it. Without substantial trade or new markets, these ventures were too expensive to be sustained for long. It is hard to see what would have halted Chinese naval expeditions now so vaunted. In the West, it is now said to have been bureaucratic rivalry, but this explanation would not be satisfactory or even forwarded if the big treasure ships had paid for themselves. Climate change and subsequent famine are more logical explanations. China’s long-term goals have infrequently matched her means to achieve them.
The whole history of civilization is strewn with creeds and institutions which were invaluable at first, and deadly afterwards.
Walter Bagehot
The Ming was the first Chinese dynasty to feel population pressure. By the late 15th Century, China counted over 200 million souls; France, the most populous state in Europe, barely had 15 million. Maize, sweet potatoes and peanuts arrived from Europe in the late 16th Century but did little to ease periodic famines. Population growth late in the dynasty was a serious problem. So was the prosperity that added to population pressure and increased job scarcity without technological improvement to accommodate either. The capital and skilled labor tied up in the multitude of civic projects further stressed the economy. The Mings revamped the tax system, but it was never good enough to make the system sustainable.
The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave.
Ronald Reagan
Long-lived Ming monarchs provided stability, but their heirs, being older by the time they were finally on the throne, died off after a few years…if they survived at all. Shorter lived emperors and younger ones lent to instability, with older kinsmen not willing to serve a child emperor and taking the throne themselves at least twice. Imperial life spans were also an important factor in the growth of the palace eunuchs power. The emperors knew of the eunuch influence as high-ranking civil servants, but could not stop it. Eunuchs sometimes became virtual dictators of China.
If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.
Orson Welles
Like all Chinese empires before 1949, the Ming emperors suffered from a fundamental inability to actually control the entire country. As influential as any dynasty or government ever became before or after them, China’s immense size, diverse geography and perilously long borders resisted effective administration. No Chinese empire before the communists ever successfully addressed the vast space and the hostile neighbors around the huge circumference of the geographic idea that is China. Tamerlane, the “Iron Limp,” died before he and his conquering hordes reached China, but speculations abound about just how he might have conquered and ruled vast Cathay—a European term for China dating from the 13th Century.
Under the most rigorously controlled conditions of pressure, temperature, volume, humidity, and other variables, the organism will do as it damn well pleases.
Murphy
The war against the invading samurai of Japan on the Korean peninsula in 1592 wore down the Ming’s northern treasuries and sapped the will of China to resist consistent Mongol incursions. The war in Korea, although “won” by the Mings and their Korean clients, exhausted both the throne and ate even further the treasury, opening the way to general revolt in 1640, with Annam and Burma joining in. Climate change in the 1620s caused famines and depressed silk prices. Coastal piracy and outlawry were endemic throughout the Ming dynasty, and peasant revolts were common.
Defense has often failed to catch up in time to save armies and navies, and the countries they are intended to protect.
BH Liddell-Hart
Large civic projects such as walls, forts, palaces, pleasure gardens, elaborate bridges and works of art also drained the treasury. The war in Korea cost 33.8 million silver ounces; Emperor Wanli's tomb cost 10.4 million. Global depression of 1620s and again in the '40s made the financial situation even worse when political unrest in the Philippines and Indonesia reduced exports to a trickle.
The Great Wall itself was only possible because of the relative prosperity under the Mings. Just in terms of sheer material cost and labor, it was a huge logistical feat equivalent to building a 16th Century London every three years. Its construction may have depressed the economy enough to make skilled labor so expensive that storage structures for grain and defensive structures other than the Wall were nearly impossible to get and late Ming funding dried up and facilities crumbled. In addition, the Ming's vast geographic holdings required a hereditary military class and a permanent militarization of the country, a great expense that even further sapped the treasury.
A fool and his money are soon parted. So are money and its fool.
Anonymous
Even after the Ming built the Great Wall, the northern tribes remained a menace. By 1629, the Manchus (Manchurians) had advanced as far as Peking but retreated in the face of its formidable fortifications. With smallpox ravaging the country, tax receipts fell to nearly nothing. The empire, relying on plunder like Europe did, had not paid the army for months at a time and there was no mechanism for paying them. Without wealthy opponents, the vast standing army sucked up revenues faster than fortifications did.
Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.
John Wooden
What little remained of the Ming empire wasted away to nearly nothing by graft and corruption. Soon, graft and greed became more important than service and protection. The eunuchs became nearly commercial about their graft and blackmail. By 1644, China had stopped functioning as a single political unit, and the empire literally disintegrated. On New Year's Day 1644, Li Zicheng, the leader of a large peasant rebellion, proclaimed himself the Shun emperor in Chang'an before moving to Beijing. The last Ming emperor, abandoned by all but a single retainer, hanged himself on a promontory called Coal Hill.
All's well that ends.
Murphy
The Ming Emperors did at as well as any might have at ruling a large and heterogeneous state like China. The grand irony is that their own prosperity doomed them, for it proceeded with no restraint, no infrastructure, and no large buffer zones to protect against marauding enemies.
Why The Samurai Lost Japan: A Study In Miscalculation And Folly
Japan wanted to avoid the meltdown the Ming suffered, even if they didn’t have the same issues to suffer. However, their solution was to go to war with the entire world.
Coming Up…
Unknown Gettysburg
Remember Wampoanag
And Finally...
On 26 April:
1607: The Jamestown Colony begins when 104 English men and boys arrived on Virginia’s Cape Henry to start a settlement. They named their fortress Jamestown after their new king, James I, who was already king of Scotland.
1937: Both German and Italian aircraft destroy the town of Guernica, Spain, in an incendiary-heavy attack that killed an unclear number (estimates vary widely) of civilians. Labeled the first indiscriminate air attack in history, it opened the road to Bilbao for Franco’s Nationalist forces in Basque country.
And today is NATIONAL RICHTER SCALE DAY, observing the birth of Charles T. Richter on this day in Overpeck, Ohio. The logarithmic Richter Scale, a mathematical device to compare the size of earthquakes, has been in use since the 1930s.