‘The emperor is far away’

Ming Dynasty China left us copious texts, but these veil the lives of the vast majority of its people from our view

by Craig Clunas  BIO

Detail from the handscroll The Ordination of Empress Zhang (1493) showing the Jade Maiden of Dingsi (丁巳玉女), the Jade Maiden of Dingwei (丁未玉女) and the Jade Maiden of Dingyou (丁酉玉女), from left to right. Courtesy the San Diego Museum of Art/Wikipedia

is professor emeritus of the history of art at Trinity College, University of Oxford. His books include Ming: 50 Years That Changed China (2014), Ming China: Courts and Contacts, 1400-1450 (2016), Chinese Painting and Its Audiences (2017) and Sons of Heaven: Family and Dynasty in Ming China (2026).

Every historian knows that most of the past is lost to us. We just don’t know what most people in the past thought or did, and neither are their names known to us. How much knowledge do we have, in fact? Is it 10 per cent, or 1 per cent, or 0.1 per cent? Perhaps less often acknowledged is the fact that we don’t have even 10 per cent (or 1 per cent, or 0.1 per cent) of everything there once was, across the board. Instead, we might have 10 per cent of some realms of history and 0.1 per cent – or more likely 0 per cent – of others.

This disparity of surviving historical evidence privileges the elite, and is particularly the case with regard to art, or what scholars like to call ‘material culture’, and everyday language just calls ‘stuff’. By and large, what survives from the past is the stuff of wealthy people.

I confronted this problem of ‘survivorship bias’ of historical evidence more than 10 years ago, in 2014, when I was co-curating an exhibition at the British Museum about the China of the early Ming period. The vast Ming dynasty ruled from 1368 to 1644, and the director of the museum was insistent that we show the lives of ‘ordinary people’ at the time. We tried. We looked long and hard for an example of the kinds of agricultural tools that must have once existed in their tens of tens of millions. Nowhere could we find one, not a spade nor a plough (never mind the straw raincoats or shoes of the people who wielded them). By comparison, finding the gold and bejewelled hairpins of aristocratic ladies, even the things used by emperors and empresses at the top of the social pyramid, was relatively easy.

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In its day, Ming China was the largest state on the planet, probably one of the most populous in history. With some 150 million subjects in the 16th century (specialists argue over the numbers, and the shaky statistics they are based on), it had a population larger than the whole of Europe combined. Ming China was also larger than any contemporary European state, only the great empires of the Mughals in India or the Ottomans in the Middle East, North Africa and the Balkans rivalled its size. It had numerous cities with populations far in excess of any European capitals.

Like most empires in history, the Ming came into being in warfare and violence and confusion. Its founder, an extraordinary man named Zhu Yuanzhang (1328-98), was born at a time when China was ruled – from the city that is now Beijing – by the Mongols, the descendants of the great world conqueror Genghis (Chinggis) Khan (c1155-1227), and of his grandson Kublai (Khubilai) Khan (1215-94). When Zhu was a child, he entered a Buddhist monastery after the death of his impoverished peasant parents. At the time, the Mongol grip on power was weakening, undermined by uprisings and by the violent feuds among members of the ruling family.

In 1352, Zhu left the monastery and embraced life as a fighting man, rising through the ranks of warlord armies until he was a significant commander in his own right. Eventually, he became one of several contenders trying to seize supreme power from the Mongols. After decades of devastating warfare, this extraordinary figure from the lowest stratum of Chinese society came out on top, establishing the Ming dynasty in 1368 and driving the Mongol ruling house from their capital back into the northern steppes from which they had come.

The Ming founder used the many marriages to consolidate alliances with his generals

Zhu vociferously condemned the Mongols as uncivilised outsiders. (‘Stinking of mutton’ was a common put-down.) He also adopted many aspects of Mongol statecraft in the creation of the new polity. He placed his capital in the most economically advanced and prosperous part of China, the valley of the Yangtze River, in the great city now called Nanjing. Zhu now stood at the head not only of a vast empire but of a very large imperial family. China had always been a polygynous society, in which powerful men had the right to a number of partners, but the Ming founder took this to almost unprecedented lengths. In addition to a principal consort, who alone bore the title of empress, he also had some 20 consorts and concubines. The English word makes this sound less legitimate or respectable than it actually was in China. These consorts bore him 26 acknowledged sons, 24 of whom lived to adulthood, and 16 daughters who lived long enough to be married. There was probably also a number of children of both sexes who died in infancy and don’t make it into the historical record.

In such a patriarchal society, any child of the emperor was legitimate, regardless of their mother’s status. So the issue of the rights of illegitimate children that so troubled medieval European ruling houses did not arise. The Ming founder used the many marriages to consolidate alliances with his generals, and with the elite civilian advisers who would govern the dynasty with him. When his sons were old enough, they were sent away from the imperial court to command armies of their own ‘as a hedge and fence’ to the capital. Several of Zhu’s sons accumulated their own distinguished records as war leaders, as fighting continued to ensure the definitive defeat of the Mongols, and to subdue still-existing other contenders for the throne.

When Zhu Yuanzhang died in 1398, aged 69, the throne passed to his grandson, the eldest son of his eldest son Zhu Biao (1355-92), who had died six years earlier. This second emperor of the Ming, Zhu Yunwen (1377-1402), had been formed under very different circumstances than his ferocious grandfather, circumstances that stressed the arts of peace over those of war. The existence of a cohort of powerful uncles made the position of the new Jianwen-era emperor precarious. It was his attempt to trim their power that led the eldest – and the most militarily effective – of Zhu Yuanzhang’s surviving sons to mount a challenge to his nephew’s grip on the imperial position. The ensuing civil war lasted for years and involved enormous armies.

Everything........

© Aeon