Abstract
Building upon his decades of experience in teaching and researching on the Ming dynasty, John W. Dardess offers in his latest publication Ming China, 1368–1644: A Concise History of a Resilient Empire, as the title itself suggests, a succinct recounting of a durable and crucial empire in Chinese late medieval and early modern history. As the latest volume of the series ‘Critical Issues in World and International History’, which aims to tackle major events in world history for survey courses for university students, this book aims to fit China into a broader realm by providing a concise yet in-depth explanation of the durability and vitality of the Ming within merely 150 pages. It is certainly no easy task to cover the 276 years of the Ming dynasty and to examine such a complex issue within a volume as slim as this is. But Dardess ingeniously incorporates this challenge by choosing five approaches and economically arranges them in five lively chapters, beginning with the frontiers of the Ming and proceeding to the emperors, to the officials, to the literati, and finally to the outlaws and rebels who in conjunction with the Manchu eventually brought the dynasty to its end.
The first chapter is taken up with an observation of the border regions of the Ming empire. Dardess charts the conflicts between the Ming and its neighbours along Ming’s long frontiers clockwise from the south (to Vietnam), out to the west (to Tibet), and swinging through the north (Gansu Corridor, Mongolian steppe, Manchuria) and finally to the coastal border. Whereas in the early decades of the Ming many diplomatic envoys and trade missions were sent out to surrounding countries, including the spectacular voyages of Zheng He (1371–1433), most of these activities were stopped by the first half of the fifteenth century. Dardess acknowledges that the Ming system of frontier management secured China relatively effectively for nearly two centuries, but he also forcefully notes that the Ming withdraw from its surrounding areas ‘was expensive’ while the Qing solution, by using the resources of China to control the thinly populated regions around China, created ‘a huge buffer’ which was ‘on the whole cheaper for the taxpayers of China to bear than the Ming system had required’ (p. 24).
The second chapter, also the longest one, is devoted to the rulers of the Ming. Challenging the conventional notion that the dynastic founder Emperor Taizu (r. 1368–98) bequeathed an ironbound set of institutions to his successors, Dardess considers Taizu’s reign as rather experimental and inconsistent. Therefore, newly enthroned emperors ‘regularly used the occasion to announce major policy reversals’ (p. 30). Indeed, there is an important turning point in Ming’s political history, namely the Tumu incident (1449). Before Tumu the policy reversals were mostly directly initiated by the emperors themselves, while after that more often by factions of scholar-officials or palace functionaries. Interestingly, although Dardess recognised that the emperors were ‘the ultimate decision-makers’ (p. 25), he seriously doubts ‘what sort of contribution the Ming emperors overall made to the endurance of the Ming system’ (p. 59). Finally, he reaches the conclusion that Ming’s success actually had little to do with its emperors.
What then holds the secret of Ming’s durability as being the second-longest dynasty in Chinese history? Certainly Dardess is aware that the lack of strategic and powerful neighbours (p. 61) and the ‘sheer size of Ming China’s military army’ (p. 66) had been significant factors, but the most compelling part of his answer is to be found in the machinery of Ming civil government, the topic of the third chapter. Through a probe into the internal ordering of Ming bureaucracy and an assessment of the quality of the officials’ contribution to the success of the system, Dardess cogently argues that the Ming intelligentsia, through the wide spread civil service examination, became passionately interested and also actively involved in the governance. This resonates with his earlier note that ‘the overriding concern of most people in the upper social echelons was to preserve it and sustain it by all available means’ (p. xiv). In fact, the scholar-officials were the system, often creating ad hoc methods and plans in lieu of the whole central administration. Without these scholar-officials, one may well wonder how the whole empire could have functioned during the twenty years when the Wanli Emperor (r. 1572–1620) locked himself in the Forbidden City and refused to meet any of his ministers. This idea is reinforced in the following chapter, in which the evolution of Ming Neo-Confucianism is briefly narrated. Dardess moves in the final chapter to the rebellious groups in the Ming empire and eventually concludes that very few literati, notwithstanding their dissatisfaction with the social mores and their disagreement in philosophical and literary views, ‘ever joined efforts with any of the unhappy and rebellious masses’.
To facilitate a more comprehensive understanding of the narrative of this book, a short list of suggestions for further reading that underscore various aspects of the Ming is appended at the end. Readers better versed in Chinese may expect the original Chinese characters to be seen in the text or in the notes, in particular for personal and place names; for others who have not had substantial exposure to the history of the Ming, the mass of names and dates giving in the first two chapters may be confusing, but Dardess has probably little choice given the primary target readership and the page limits he is working with. Throughout the whole book, Dardess succeeded in coping with the difficulty of his object: ‘To analyze a collapse is a fairly straightforward challenge. To explain how a system such as the Ming survived for close to three centuries is not so easy’ (p. 61). Although readers with more time available or a stronger interest in the Ming would find The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010) by Timothy Brook a more detailed volume, Dardess’s focus on the reasons behind the endurance and resilience of the Ming, rather than its flaws and faults, is both refreshing and essential. All who are interested in the secrets of the endurance and longevity of the Chinese empire in general may turn to Yuri Pine’s The Everlasting Empire: The Political Culture of Ancient China and Its Imperial Legacy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). Enlightening and thought-provoking as it is, this new book by Dardess will definitely inspire more future studies on the topic. Thus, it is not only recommended for experts and students in the history of China, but also for readers generally interested in late medieval history and early modern history will ultimately find much of value in Ming China, 1368–1644: A Concise History of a Resilient Empire.