It has sometimes been suggested that in China death, even premature and violent death, was not viewed with the awesome finality accorded it by other societies. From early times, dying is said to have been ‘unproblematic’ and ‘simply not the issue it was for the Mesopotamians or the ancient Greeks’; the trappings of tragedy and extreme regret did not attend it.26 Ideally the Confucian emphasis on social harmony and the subordinate relationships proper to this harmony overrode personality and its selfish concerns. Group identity with family, clan, locality or trade was supposedly dearer than individual identity. With the living located in a continuum of deceased ancestors and extant family, the transition from one to the other was simply a biological inevitability. The survival of the group transcended that of its individual members, and thus death was denied something of its awful dominion.
Such observations are found mainly in non-Chinese writings and no doubt derive from revulsion over the extreme violence and disregard for life that punctuates the Standard Histories and is taken as typical of China’s historical record. The last decades of the Yuan and the first of the Ming furnish particularly compelling evidence. But whether, after allowing for its size and density, China’s society was really more violent, or its rulers more bloodthirsty, than, say, ancient Rome’s or Reformation England’s is doubtful. One might wonder, too, whether that sense of group identity was any more consoling to an about-to-be-deceased Confucian than the promise of resurrection to a dying Christian.
It could, though, make matters worse. Instead of the individual being held solely responsible for his actions, it was presumed that his entire group shared responsibility and was therefore equally liable. ‘Execution to the fifth degree’ as stipulated for a variety of heinous offences in the much-copied Tang Legal Code meant not a cocktail of slow-death experiences, such as hanging, drawing and quartering, but the extension of the individual’s sentence to all his relatives as far as the fifth degree of consanguinity. Associates, dependants and exhumed ancestors might also be included, so turning an execution into a purge, even a pogrom. Under the first Ming emperor one such case involving a disgraced minister famously resulted in the deaths of an estimated 30,000–40,000 persons. Admittedly this was exceptional, the circumstances being as peculiar as the emperor’s temperament. Tumultuous times called for draconian deterrents, and none were more tumultuous than the transition from Yuan to Ming. China in the mid- to late-fourteenth century was again teetering on the brink of disunion. Another long period of multi-state fragmentation like those which followed the collapse of the Han and of the Tang looked a real possibility.
The troubles had built up slowly as the hardships and shortcomings of Mongol rule became more apparent. From the 1340s a higher than usual level of rural distress and populist resentment had acquired added militancy from an upsurge in sectarian activity. Miracles and apparitions were reported, an imminent new age of universal redemption was preached, and in cells and secret societies adherents armed and organised themselves for action. Various strands of belief were involved – Manichaean ideas of a purificatory transformation, traditional Buddhist expectations associated with the Maitreya or ‘Future Buddha’, Tibetan Tantric practices supposedly affording instant enlightenment, various Daoist disciplines and predictions, and the usual credulous response to freakish weather patterns, epidemics and other natural visitations. A ‘White Lotus Society’ provided direction, plus a certain cohesion, and its followers’ adoption of red headgear afforded easy recognition. As the ‘Red Turbans’ (not to be confused with the ‘Red Eyebrows’ or ‘Yellow Turbans’ of the Later Han period) the movement spread in both the south and the north, attracting the disaffected, succouring the afflicted, providing cover for the downright criminal, and exciting expectations of a new social order that specifically excluded Mongol rule.
On to this agrarian and millenarian rootstock in the 1350s were grafted other elements of righteous protest and opportunist aspiration. In the north the discovery of a supposed descendant of the Southern Song provided a focus for legitimist sentiment; in Sichuan and the south, regional warlords reasserted local autonomy and adopted the usual nomenclature – Chu, Wu, Shu and even Xia, Zhou and Han; rural distress and the demand for forced labour triggered uprisings like those of 1351/52 over the rechannelling of the Yellow River; and in response to this growing lawlessness, local interests everywhere – provincial administrations, landed gentry and regional commanders, some of them Mongol – mobilised their own militias and, while declaring loyalty to the Yuan government, often acted unilaterally. Only in the north, within and around the great metropolitan province, could imperial troops be counted on. Military contingents stationed elsewhere were notoriously lax, ill paid and open to offers.
From this mêlée of conflicting local movements there emerged along the Yangzi in the early 1360s three or four contenders for a much wider dominion. Zhu Yuanzhang was not untypical. A penniless orphan from Anhui who had barely survived famine, plague and the grimmest of childhoods to acquire some basic literacy as a Buddhist monk, Zhu had joined the Red Turbans in 1352. Gathering a growing band of followers that included a few scholars as well as ever more troops, he moved south, crossed the Yangzi in 1355, and in the following year captured Nanjing. Nestling between the river and the wooded slopes of Mount Zijin, the city would remain Zhu Yuanzhang’s base and, massively rewalled, his stronghold for the rest of his career; much of the 33-kilometre (20-mile) wall he built is still the most impressive city fortification in China. Ten years later Nanjing would become his imperial capital and, thirty years after that, his resting place when he was interred in a great tomb on Mount Zijin. In adopting Nanjing, Zhu Yuanzhang, the Ming founder, would be the first to rule all China from a southern city.
By nature a firm disciplinarian and fearless leader, the young Zhu Yuanzhang possessed few other imperial attributes. He was ugly to behold, woefully ignorant and without that most basic unit of support, a family. But he was a good listener and a quick learner. Literary proficiency plus a knowledge of history, strategy and governance were acquired along the way; the steep curve of his learning experience mirrored that of his rise to power and seemed to validate it. So did the example of the founding emperor of the Han dynasty. Liu Bang (Han Gaozu) had risen from among the ranks of the ‘black-haired commoners’ to become emperor of all China; it was a noble precedent, and comparisons with the Han founder were encouraged. But whereas Liu Bang’s upbringing had been remarkable for frequent signs of heavenly favour, Zhu Yuanzhang’s had been about as unpropitious as possible. Self-made emperors were rare, and none had more ground to make up than Zhu.
Following an epic four-day battle with a neighbouring warlord in 1363, ground in the form of territory was quickly won, while ever more armies and navies transferred to his victorious banner. The battle itself had been waged on Lake Boyang, one of the vast Yangzi spillover reservoirs, in northern Jiangxi; if Zhu Yuanzhang really deployed ‘a thousand ships and 100,000 men’ – and his opponent still more men and still taller ships – it may have been the greatest lake-battle ever fought. Hunan and Hubei then fell to the Nanjing regime, followed by Zhejiang and Jiangsu. By 1366 Zhu Yuanzhang controlled the entire Yangzi basin below the Gorges and ‘had emerged as the obvious heir to the Yuan empire’.27
Increasingly conscious of his destiny, Zhu now withdrew from active campaigning. Heaven seemed to be taking his side; and his generals, some being companions of many years and others erstwhile opponents who had been allowed to retain the services of their own troops, were genuinely attached to him. Moreover, the army he sent north by way of Shandong and Henan in 1367 scarcely needed him. During the early 1360s most of the Yuan forces in the north had been siphoned off by rival warlords who preferred war among themselves for the privilege of defending the emperor – it was still Toghon Temur or Yuan Shundi – to actually defending the emperor. As Zhu Yuanzhang’s 1367 proclamation put it, the Yuan, though initially legitimate, had ‘deserted the norms of conduct’ and ‘the time had come when Heaven despised them and no longer sustained their rule’.28 In January 1368 Zhu followed this up with a formal declaration of his own dynasty. It was to be called ‘the Great Ming’, ‘Ming’ meaning ‘brilliant’ or ‘effulgent’. Nine months later Ming forces entered Dadu (Beijing) almost unopposed. Yuan Shundi had fled north into Inner Mongolia. For the first time in centuries China had a Chinese emperor, and for only the seond time ever, he was a man of the people.
Zhu renamed the great city ‘Beiping’ – not a misprint of its current name but a Pinyin rendering of the two characters signifying ‘North Pacified’ or ‘Northern Pacification’. Meanwhile the deep south had also been pacifiied, Fujian being taken by land, Guangdong by sea and Guangxi by river. In the north-west, Shanxi, Shaanxi and most of Gansu were cleared of Yuan loyalists over the next two years. Sichuan was reclaimed in 1371, and only Yunnan held out under a Mongol commander. When it was finally overrun by the Ming in 1381/82, among those captured was an intelligent eleven-year-old Muslim called Ma He. Castrated, dispatched to Beiping and taken on to the household staff of one of the first Ming emperor’s sons, Ma He would be renamed Zheng He. As such, he grew to become the most trusted confidant of the prince; the prince eventually became emperor; and thus would a Yunnanese Muslim eunuch find himself entrusted with the command of China’s greatest maritime enterprise.
After a century of Mongol rule, all of what was regarded as China had now been reconquered. It was back under the rule of a dynasty whose indigenous origins were beyond dispute; and for the first time the initiative for reunification had welled up from the south, not been imposed from the north. The credentials of the Ming dynasty (r. 1368–1644) were so impressive that later nationalists would hail Zhu Yuanzhang’s achievement as a triumphant reassertion of Han Chinese identity after centuries of ‘alien rule’. In the process the south had come into its own, with the empire being officially realigned in accordance with demographic and economic realities. In effect, the Yangzi had supplanted the Yellow River as its lifeblood, and Nanjing, the river’s northernmost city, had ousted Dadu/Beiping as the centre of power. At the heart of this reconfigured and re-sinified China, Nanjing would hold a strong appeal as the spiritual home of later Chinese nationalism. In 1925 Dr Sun Yat-sen, the first president of the republic, would be buried hard by the first Ming emperor on Mount Zijin. Soon after, General Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) would make the city the capital of the Nationalist republic.
But the triumph of indigenous culture and identity was not so obvious at the time. For one thing, the Mongol menace, though removed, was far from eliminated. Following their triumphs in the north, in the 1370s Ming armies struck deep into Mongolia, but with dwindling success. Mongol cavalry still enjoyed supremacy on the steppe. The Yuan and their adherents soon reclaimed what is now Inner Mongolia and would show themselves more than capable of striking back into northern China. The Mongol threat would dangle over the Ming for another two centuries, to be nullified only when the Jurchen, reincarnated as the Manchu, replaced it with a still greater menace.
Nor were the Ming quick to learn from the misadventures of the Mongols while ruling China. Though piously claiming to be restoring the institutions and rituals of the Tang and the Song, in practice Zhu Yuanzhang seemed bent on reconstituting the empire he had just toppled. Khubilai’s division of the country into provinces was retained, with modifications; and both in the provinces and in Nanjing ‘the formal structure of governmental institutions . . . began by imitating the Yuan almost exactly’. It was the same with the military. Zhu’s genuine determination to improve the lot of the cultivator, a legacy of his dreadful childhood, meant holding down taxation and giving a high priority to agricultural development, including military colonies. But with this proviso, the challenge of demobilising and resettling his armies was not dissimilar to that faced by the Yuan. Thus, like the Yuan, ‘the emperor made his army into a distinct occupational caste within the population, created a hereditary officer class to govern it, [and] gave the military officers a clearly superior status compared to their civil equivalents’. Edward Dreyer actually calls them ‘a new conquering horde, but this time Chinese in origin’. Generals became nobles with hereditary titles and fiefs; and imperial offspring became princes with supervisory responsibilities at the apex of this great military structure.29
Such change as there was revealed itself most clearly in the tone of government and the increasingly paranoid conduct of the emperor. Compared to the Song, the Mongol Yuan emperors had seemed beyond Confucian remonstrance, autocratic in their exercise of power and arbitrary in their judgements. But compared to the Mongol Yuan, Zhu Yuanzhang was even worse. Courtiers and ministers were beaten in his presence, sometimes to death, and as of the great purge of 1380 that accounted for those 30,000–40,000 lives, scarcely a day passed without mass executions. No reign of terror in Chinese history can compare with it. Obsessed with controlling every aspect of government and deeply suspicious of any who might ridicule his deficiencies of birth and education, the emperor dispensed with the office of chancellor and himself took on the executive role in government. The examination system was eventually reinstated but only with a view to improving the supply of bureaucrats, not to restoring their influence. In the 1390s it was the military hierarchy, the emperor’s own creation, which became the target of his suspicions. A word of complaint from a long-serving general in 1393 brought his immediate execution, followed by that of his supposed associates to the tune of four marquises, an earl, a minister, ten other nobles, sixteen chief commissioners and an unspecified number of junior officials, plus the extended families of all of them, giving a grand total of over fifteen thousand.
When in 1398 the emperor himself died, the empire heaved an almighty sigh of relief. The enthronement of his eldest grandson (the son of his designated, but lately deceased, heir) seemed to represent a return to Chinese norms of succession and to herald an era of civilian government. In fact, the empire was almost immediately plunged into a bloody civil war (1399–1402). By the end of it the young emperor had disappeared, his civilian policies had been rejected and his bellicose uncle, the prince of Yan, had swept to power. In retrospect the struggle thus closely resembled that which accompanied most Mongol successions. As if to reinforce the point, the new emperor’s forces had pushed down from his power base in the north, conquering the south and capturing its capital, just like Khubilai.
Nanjing never entirely recovered. The imperial palace had caught fire in the fighting and the new emperor would spend little time there. He preferred Beiping, which he immediately renamed Beijing (‘Northern Capital’), and which in 1424 he would adopt as the supreme Ming capital. Nanjing meanwhile acquired a different distinction. In 1403 the new emperor announced his intention of dispatching a fleet to ‘the countries of the Western Ocean’. The largest vessels in this fleet, indeed in the world at that time, were constructed on the Qinhuai river where it meets the Yangzi at Nanjing. Others would follow, making Nanjing, for the next three decades, the shipbuilding capital of the world’s greatest maritime power. For with the 1405 departure of Admiral Zheng He in command of China’s first world armada, the Ming were poised not just to emulate Khubilai Khan’s overseas adventures but sensationally to upstage them.