HIST 270 · Chinese History · Chapter 14 · Lecture 1
From Beggar Monk to Autocrat: Hongwu, Yongle, and a Throne Built for Giants
Background for the lecture "From Beggar Monk to Autocrat": Zhu Yuanzhang and the Red Turbans, the founding of 1368, registers, law and purges, the Yongle emperor and Beijing, and the emperors who could not fill the throne · 1328–1620
Act I: The Beggar Who Became Emperor (Review Question 1)
Textbook anchor: Ebrey, Chapter 14, "The Founding of the Ming Dynasty," pp. 228–229. Reading-guide question: how did Zhu Yuanzhang's impoverished background and rise through the Red Turbans shape his approach to governing and his treatment of the educated elite?
Famine, the monastery and the road
Zhu Yuanzhang (1328–1398) was born in Zhongli, in the Huai River country of what is now northern Anhui, to a family of tenant farmers who moved often to find work and to dodge rent collectors (slides B, C, E). In 1344 drought, locusts and epidemic disease struck the region. Within weeks his father, his eldest brother and that brother's wife were dead, and Zhu, at sixteen by Chinese count, and a surviving brother had three bodies and no coffins. A neighbor let them bury the dead in his field. Zhu then entered a small Buddhist monastery as a novice, a lay servant with a shaved head rather than an ordained monk, and within two months the monastery, whose own tenants could not pay rent, sent him out with a begging bowl. For three or four years he walked the roads of the Huai and Yangzi country. He learned to read only after he returned (Ebrey, p. 228).
These are the facts that make Review Question 1 work. Ebrey does not say that poverty "caused" his policies, and students should not either. What the record shows is a man who had seen how rent collectors and tax runners treated the poor, who had no stake in the scholar-gentry world, and who came to literacy late and with suspicion. Each of those threads turns up again in his reign.1
The Red Turbans
In 1351 the Yuan court conscripted laborers to repair the Yellow River dikes, and rebellion broke out among them (slide D). The rebels wore red cloths and were called the Red Turbans. Ebrey ties them to the White Lotus tradition, which mixed two strands: Manichaean dualism, the cosmic struggle of light and darkness, and the cult of Maitreya, the future Buddha who would descend to end suffering. Their leaders proclaimed the restoration of the Song house. When Yuan troops burned Zhu's monastery in 1352, he joined a Red Turban band at Haozhou led by Guo Zixing. He rose fast, and Guo gave him his foster daughter in marriage. She was the future Empress Ma, the one person who could later calm him (slides E, O).2
Ebrey's chronology is careful: Zhu joined at twenty-four, and within a couple of years he commanded 20,000 to 30,000 men. The more important point for the review question is the next one. Educated men began to join him because they judged that he might win, and they urged him to put distance between himself and the millenarian sect. In 1356 he took Nanjing (then Jiqing), made it his base and kept his soldiers from looting (slide F). His advisers included Li Shanchang, Liu Ji and Song Lian, men of the Zhejiang literati who drafted his proclamations and later his institutions. The Ming state was built by a former beggar and a team of scholars, and the tension between the two never went away.
1368: a dynasty proclaimed, a capital taken
Through the 1360s Zhu's generals destroyed the rival rebel regimes of Chen Youliang on the middle Yangzi (at the battle of Lake Poyang in 1363) and Zhang Shicheng at Suzhou (1367). On 23 January 1368 Zhu proclaimed the Ming dynasty at Nanjing and took the reign name Hongwu, "abundantly martial" in Ebrey's translation, "vast military power" in others. His general Xu Da then marched north, and in September, as the Ming army approached, the Yuan emperor Toghon Temür fled into Inner Mongolia and Xu Da entered Dadu (slide G).3
The sequence matters because the textbook's wording reverses it. Ebrey writes that "in 1368 his armies took the Yuan capital" and then that Zhu "declared himself emperor of the Ming Dynasty" (p. 228). The proclamation came first, in January, and the capture of Dadu in September. Slide G now puts the proclamation first and the fall of Dadu "later that year," and its notes record the textbook's order.
Three names are a recurring stumbling block, and slide G's box handles them well. Zhu Yuanzhang is the personal name; Hongwu is the reign name, which he never changed, so that from his time on Ming and Qing emperors are usually known by a single era name; Taizu ("grand progenitor") is the temple name given after death. His son is Zhu Di by personal name, Yongle by reign name and Chengzu by temple name; these essays and slides call him the Yongle emperor, while Ebrey calls him Chengzu. The word ming, "bright," echoed the light-against-darkness language of the Red Turbans, as Ebrey notes.
Registers, laws and inherited duties
Taizu's domestic program shows the founder at his most constructive (slides H, I, J, K). He ordered a full registration of households and land so that taxes and labor service could be shared out fairly. The household registers, called Yellow Registers from the color of their covers, were compiled in 1381 together with the lijia village system that Lecture 3 discusses; the land surveys produced the "fish-scale" maps, completed in much of the south by 1387. The law code went through repeated revisions under the emperor's eye and was promulgated in final form in 1397. Taizu also issued the Grand Pronouncements (Da gao, 1385–1387), case collections full of lurid punishments that every household was supposed to own, and the Six Maxims, read aloud in villages, which told people to be filial, respect elders, live in harmony with neighbors, teach their children and do no wrong.4
Two Yuan habits survived: strong provinces, which Ebrey rightly treats as a tool of central supervision rather than decentralization, and hereditary service households. Military households owed one soldier in perpetuity; artisan households owed craft work. The army reached about a million men, with garrisons along the northern border and around the capital that were supposed to farm their own land. Ebrey's verdict on the garrison farms is blunt: they were rarely self-sufficient, conscripted men fought poorly, and desertion could not be stopped (p. 229). Edward Farmer's phrase for the whole design is "a fixed and stable social order": everyone registered, everyone in place, everyone owing a known duty to the state.
The emperor and the scholars
The second half of Review Question 1 is about the educated elite, and here the deck's despotism slide (NN) frames the evidence. Ebrey says Taizu took the divine "emperors" of Daoist temples as his model, required officials to kneel when they addressed him, and had them beaten in open court (slides NN, N). In 1376, in the "prestamped documents" case, he executed officials who had used blank forms carrying seals to reconcile grain-tax accounts with the capital, a common shortcut (slide L). Historians still argue about whether the case belongs to 1376 or 1382 and about how many died; Ebrey's "thousands" is a reasonable round figure.
In 1380 Taizu accused his chancellor, Hu Weiyong, of plotting to assassinate him, executed him and abolished both the chancellorship and the Secretariat (slide M). From then on the six ministries reported directly to the emperor. The investigations went on for years. In 1390 Taizu reopened the case and forced the suicide of the elder statesman Li Shanchang. Ebrey's "as many as fifteen thousand" (p. 229) is Taizu's own figure for the Hu purge, and the Cambridge History repeats it. John Langlois adds that more than 40,000 people may have died in all the purges of 1380–1394, a span that includes the Lan Yu case of 1393, in which a general and much of the military nobility died. Many historians doubt that Hu's plot was what the emperor said it was.5
Slide O reports two famous stories: that Taizu hunted for hidden insults in memorials, puns on words like "bandit" (zei) or "monk" (seng), and that he made refusing office a crime. The second is real; it appears in the Grand Pronouncements. The first needs care. Hok-lam Chan found no solid contemporary evidence for most of the celebrated "literary inquisition" cases attributed to Taizu and concluded that many were probably invented by later writers.6 The founder was feared, and he did kill scholars, but students should present the pun stories as traditions, not facts. Ebrey's remark that his behavior was so erratic that he "most likely" suffered from mental illness (p. 229) is her own judgment, not a consensus; other historians read the terror as calculated. Slide N now attributes it: "some historians suspect" mental illness.
A strong answer to Review Question 1 therefore links specific experiences to specific policies: the rent collectors to the registers and the village maxims; the Red Turban army to a state that inherited soldiers and craftsmen; and the late, uneasy literacy and the dependence on scholars to a reign that both employed and terrorized the educated. It should also note the limits. Taizu welcomed Mongols who submitted, kept Mongol units in his army and acknowledged that the Yuan had held the Mandate (slide KK), which complicates any picture of a simple anti-Mongol crusade.
Act II: The Usurper Who Built Beijing (Review Question 2)
Textbook anchor: Ebrey, Chapter 14, "Chengzu, the Yongle Emperor," pp. 229–230. Reading-guide question: evaluate the monumental domestic achievements and ruthless political tactics of the Yongle emperor, and explain how moving the capital to Beijing altered the empire's infrastructure.
The succession of 1398 and the civil war
Taizu's heir, Zhu Biao, died in 1392, and the emperor named Zhu Biao's son, Zhu Yunwen, as heir (slide Q). When Taizu died in June 1398 the grandson took the throne with the reign name Jianwen; Ebrey calls him Huidi. He was twenty-one by Chinese count, twenty by Western reckoning. His advisers moved at once to strip the princes, his uncles, of their fiefs and troops. The most dangerous of them, Zhu Di, Prince of Yan, held Beijing and had fought the Mongols for years. In August 1399 he rebelled, claiming to rescue the throne from evil ministers, and after three years of fighting he took Nanjing in July 1402 (slide R). The palace burned; whether Jianwen died in the fire or escaped became one of the great mysteries of Chinese history.
The new emperor claimed to be the eldest surviving son of Empress Ma, and Ebrey repeats the claim (p. 229). Many historians doubt it: the official genealogy was revised under Yongle, and other evidence suggests that his mother was a consort, possibly of Korean or Mongol origin. The claim mattered because it was the basis of his legitimacy under Taizu's own succession rule. Slide R now presents it as his claim, and Chan's chapter in the Cambridge History (p. 193) concludes that he was probably born to a lesser consort.7
A note on dates: Ebrey gives the reign as 1403–1425 (p. 229) and his death as 1424 (p. 233). He took the throne in 1402 and died in August 1424; the Yongle era ran from 1403 to 1424. The deck's notes already say this.
Fang Xiaoru and the purge
Slide S tells the story of Fang Xiaoru, the leading Confucian scholar at Jianwen's court, who refused to draft Zhu Di's accession edict. He was executed by slicing, and tradition says that his kin "to the tenth degree," including his students as a tenth category, were wiped out. Ebrey's "tens of thousands" (p. 230) describes the whole purge of Jianwen's loyalists, in which ministers such as Qi Tai, Huang Zicheng and Jing Qing died with their kin, and Hok-lam Chan's chapter in the Cambridge History says the same: "tens of thousands of innocent people" related to the former officials were executed, imprisoned or banished (p. 202). The vivid details of the "ten degrees" come from later unofficial histories and are best told as tradition. Slide S follows Ebrey, and the sources checked support it.
Patronage, war and diplomacy
Ebrey's turn is a single word, "Yet." The same emperor commissioned the great compendium now called the Yongle dadian, completed at the end of 1407 by a large team of scholars (slide T). Chan gives about 22,900 chapters (juan), including 60 for the table of contents, close to Ebrey's count. It was never printed and survived only in manuscript sets; a copy was made in the 1560s, and only a small fraction, some 700 chapters in Chan's count, survives today.8 Yongle also ordered the Great Compendia of the Four Books, the Five Classics and Nature and Principle (1415), which fixed the Cheng-Zhu commentaries for examination candidates; Lecture 3 picks up that story.
He was also a soldier (slide U). He led five campaigns into Mongolia, in 1410, 1414, 1422, 1423 and 1424, and died on the way back from the last. In 1406 he sent armies into Vietnam, which became the Ming province of Jiaozhi in 1407, and was lost to the Lê rebellion in 1427. And he sent the eunuch Zheng He on the first six of his seven voyages, the subject of Lecture 2.
Beijing and the Grand Canal
The move to Beijing is the second half of Review Question 2 (slides V, W, X). Beijing had been Zhu Di's princely base and the Yuan capital. Construction ran from 1407 to 1420, and the court formally moved in 1421. Ebrey describes the city well: a planned capital of boxes within boxes, with walls about forty feet high and nearly fifteen miles around, pierced by nine gates, enclosing the Imperial City and, at the center, the Forbidden City with its audience halls on a north–south axis. Two cautions for teaching. First, the walls Ebrey describes are those of what later became the Inner City; the southern "Outer City" was added in 1553, so "outer walls" on slide V and "the outer city" on slide W are best avoided. Second, the halls standing today were largely rebuilt after fires, most famously the Hall of Supreme Harmony in 1695, though the layout is fifteenth-century.
Moving the capital north put it close to the frontier and far from the grain fields of the south. The answer was the Grand Canal. In 1411–1415 engineers rebuilt the summit section in Shandong, with new reservoirs and locks, so that grain could move north by inland water and the dangerous sea route could be abandoned. Ebrey gives fifteen thousand boats and 160,000 soldiers of the transport army; Ray Huang's study of the canal gives a standard establishment, fixed later in the fifteenth century, of about 11,775 boats and 121,500 men. Either way the point holds: the dynasty's survival now depended on a long, expensive waterway, and Ming statecraft for two centuries revolved around keeping it open.9
A strong evaluation of the Yongle emperor weighs these together and draws a judgment: a usurper who needed to prove that Heaven had chosen him, and who did so through spectacle, scholarship, war and building, at enormous cost in lives and silver.
Act III: A Throne for Giants (Review Question 3)
Textbook anchor: Ebrey, Chapter 14, "Weaknesses of the Imperial Institution," p. 230, and the Summary, p. 245. Reading-guide question: analyze the structural weaknesses of the Ming imperial institution after the abolition of the chancellorship, and explain how the changing nature of later emperors contributed to the rise of eunuch power.
Grand secretaries and eunuchs
Taizu's successors could not run six ministries personally, so they turned to the Hanlin Academy (slide Z). Junior scholars served as secretaries, and under Yongle and his successors this became the Grand Secretariat, a cabinet whose members drafted the emperor's responses to memorials. They held concurrent titles as ministers to raise their rank, but, as Ebrey notes, they lacked an executive office of their own and had to work with the palace eunuchs who controlled the flow of documents (slide AA). By the mid-fifteenth century the eunuch-run Directorate of Ceremonial wrote the emperor's endorsements in vermilion on the grand secretaries' drafts. Eunuchs also ran the secret police (the Eastern Depot, founded in 1420), supervised armies, collected some taxes and managed imperial workshops. Ebrey's summary is that they "came to rival the civil service in numbers and power" (p. 245).10
The deck's diagram of the chain of command before and after 1380 is the right tool for the review question. The weakness was structural: decisions had to come from the emperor, the men who helped him sat inside the palace, and the regular bureaucracy had no head who could act when the emperor would not.
Succession by birth order
Taizu's Ancestral Injunctions fixed succession on the eldest son of the empress (slide BB). Ebrey's point is that earlier dynasties had generally followed the principle but bent it when necessary; the Ming made it rigid, and one "mediocre, obtuse, or erratic emperor followed another" (p. 230). The rule was not absolute in practice. Yongle broke it by force, and in 1521 the childless Zhengde emperor was succeeded by a cousin, the Jiajing emperor. But it did mean that child emperors and unwilling rulers were common, and that the court had no lawful way to choose ability.
Tumu, 1449
Yingzong, the Zhengtong emperor, came to the throne at eight in 1435 (slide CC). In 1449, at twenty-one, urged on by his favorite eunuch Wang Zhen, he led an army against the Oirat (Western Mongol) leader Esen. At Tumu, northwest of Beijing, the army was trapped and destroyed, Wang Zhen was killed and the emperor captured. Two details in Ebrey need correcting. The Cambridge History describes a huge army, said by some to number half a million (p. 322); whatever the true number, it was far larger than the "fifty-thousand-man army" in the textbook (p. 230), and slide CC now follows the Cambridge History. And Esen was not then khan: he was the Oirat taishi, ruling through a Chinggisid puppet khan, and claimed the title of khan himself only in 1453 (Ebrey, p. 233, calls him "the khan of the Western Mongols"). He was murdered in 1455.11
The aftermath is part of the lesson. The minister of war Yu Qian refused to pay ransom, put the emperor's brother on the throne as the Jingtai emperor and defended Beijing. Esen released Yingzong in 1450, and in 1457 a palace coup restored him; Yu Qian was executed. A captured emperor, a rival on the throne and a coup: the succession rule could not prevent any of it.
Favorites, drink and rage
Ebrey's next three cases are drawn quickly (slide DD). The Chenghua emperor, Xianzong (r. 1464–1487), was devoted to Lady Wan, his former nurse and seventeen years his senior. The Cambridge History reports, following the Ming records, that she tried to stop other palace women from bearing him sons, and that the boy who became the next emperor survived only because he was hidden (Mote, pp. 346–348); slide DD follows Ebrey. The Zhengde emperor, Wuzong (r. 1505–1521), lived in a pleasure compound, called himself a general and went on campaigns that alarmed his officials. The Jiajing emperor, Shizong (r. 1521–1567), plunged the court into the Great Rites controversy by insisting on honoring his own father rather than being treated as the adopted son of his predecessor, and later withdrew into Daoist ritual; in 1542 a group of palace women tried to strangle him.
Hai Rui, 1565
Hai Rui, a minor official famous for incorruptibility, bought a coffin, said goodbye to his family and submitted a memorial telling Jiajing that he had failed as a ruler and that the people said "Jiajing" meant "every household clean broke" (slide EE). Ebrey dates it 1565 (p. 230), and the Dictionary of Ming Biography agrees: the memorial went in in November 1565, and Hai Rui was jailed in 1566 and freed only on the emperor's death.12
The Wanli emperor
The last case is the most important (slide FF). The Wanli emperor (r. 1572–1620) took the throne at eight. For his first decade the senior grand secretary Zhang Juzheng ran the government with remarkable energy, auditing land, cutting costs and spreading the Single Whip tax reform. After Zhang died in 1582 the emperor turned on his memory. Then, in a long quarrel with his officials over the succession, Wanli withdrew. From about 1589 he rarely held audience, left memorials unanswered and posts unfilled, and by the 1600s whole ministries were short-staffed. Ray Huang's 1587 remains the best introduction to the problem. The deck's inference that without a chancellor no one could act in the emperor's place is fair as an inference, but it should not suggest that no one could run the government, because Zhang Juzheng did exactly that for ten years; slide FF now names his decade, 1572–1582 (Ray Huang, Cambridge History, vol. 7, p. 522). The more precise point is that the grand secretaries could draft but not decide: appointments and major policy still needed the emperor's endorsement.
A strong answer to Review Question 3 traces a chain: abolition of the chancellor (1380), a palace-based cabinet that had to work with eunuchs, a rigid succession rule that produced weak or absent rulers, and eunuchs who filled the space. It should name cases and separate what Ebrey states from what the student infers.
Pierian Spring: The Founder's Family and the Southwest
The deck's Pierian Spring slides add two threads. Taizu had twenty-six sons. He enfeoffed them as princes in strategic cities, barred them from office and examinations, and gave the northern princes command of frontier troops (slide JJ). That arrangement made Zhu Di's rebellion possible. Over two centuries the imperial clan grew into a fiscal burden; by the late sixteenth century the stipends owed to tens of thousands of clansmen exceeded the revenue of some provinces, one of the costs Lecture 4 meets in the dynasty's last years.
Taizu also pushed into the southwest. Ming armies took Yunnan from its Mongol prince in 1381–1382, and garrisons, settlers and native chieftains were bound into a new order there. Ebrey says that in the 1380s the Ming "created the new province of Guizhou" (p. 229). Guizhou was made a province only in 1413, under Yongle, after the suppression of two native chieftaincies; slide JJ now gives 1413, with the textbook's wording recorded in its notes.13 The Mongol thread (slide KK) is well handled: Taizu's statement that Mongols and other Inner Asians in his realm were "our children," quoted by Ebrey from Mote, is a good primary text for discussing legitimacy.
Two further Pierian Spring slides carry Act III forward. The first (slide OO) follows Zhang Juzheng's decade, 1572–1582. He governed in alliance with the eunuch Feng Bao, head of the Directorate of Ceremonial, and with the emperor's mother, Empress Dowager Li, not against the eunuchs, as older summaries sometimes say. His program was fiscal and administrative: a system for checking officials' performance against deadlines (1573), a survey of farmland ordered in 1578 that put concealed land back on the registers, the empire-wide extension of the Single Whip method in 1581, cuts to officials' free use of the postal relay, and support for Pan Jixun's work on the Yellow River and the Grand Canal. Hai Rui had made his name differently, as governor of the Yingtian region in 1569–1570, by forcing great landlords, among them the retired grand secretary Xu Jie, to return land; he was soon removed, and Zhang left him in retirement. After Zhang's death his enemies persuaded the emperor that he had abused his power, and in 1584 his family's property was confiscated.14
The second (slide PP) reconsiders the eunuchs. The founder's restrictions are attested in his own regulations, which capped eunuch rank and kept them out of official business; the famous iron tablet warning eunuchs not to meddle in government is reported in the Ming History and other later sources, so the deck presents it as a story. The Yongle emperor reversed the policy: eunuchs served as envoys (Zheng He, Hou Xian), as army supervisors and, from 1420, as directors of the Eastern Depot. Numbers are uncertain; late-Ming estimates of 70,000 to 100,000 should be treated as rough. Shih-shan Henry Tsai argues against the Confucian historians' picture of eunuchs as simple villains and treats them as an instrument of imperial power, which explains why emperors kept enlarging their role. The living shrines built to Wei Zhongxian in 1626–1627 show how far that power could go.15
Corrections and Cautions
Corrections and Sources Behind the Slide Notes
The deck's speaker notes are written for students. The instructor-level detail behind them, where a slide departs from Ebrey and the scholarship it relies on, is collected here, slide by slide.
Notes
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The best biography in English is still the long chapter by Edward L. Dreyer, Early Ming China: A Political History, 1355–1435 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), with F. W. Mote, "The Rise of the Ming Dynasty, 1330–1367," in Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett, eds., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 7, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Sarah Schneewind, Long Live the Emperor! Uses of the Ming Founder across Six Centuries of East Asian History (Minneapolis: Society for Ming Studies, 2006), collects later images of Zhu and is useful for showing how the beggar story was retold. ↩
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On the Red Turbans and the White Lotus, see Barend J. ter Haar, The White Lotus Teachings in Chinese Religious History (Leiden: Brill, 1992), which warns that "White Lotus" became a label applied by officials to many unrelated groups. For Empress Ma as Guo Zixing's adopted daughter, see her biography in the Ming shi, ch. 113, and Mote, Imperial China, 900–1800 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999), ch. 23. ↩
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Edward L. Dreyer, "Military Origins of Ming China," in Cambridge History of China, vol. 7, pp. 58–106, at pp. 97–98, gives the acclamation on 23 January 1368 and the capture of Dadu in September; see also Dreyer, Early Ming China, pp. 62–65, and Mote, Imperial China, pp. 557–561. Ebrey (p. 228) narrates the capture of the Yuan capital first and then says Zhu "declared himself emperor," which reverses the order. ↩
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On the codes and the Grand Pronouncements, see Edward L. Farmer, Zhu Yuanzhang and Early Ming Legislation: The Reordering of Chinese Society Following the Era of Mongol Rule (Leiden: Brill, 1995), which translates key texts. On the registers, see Ray Huang, Taxation and Governmental Finance in Sixteenth-Century Ming China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), ch. 2. ↩
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John D. Langlois Jr., "The Hung-wu Reign, 1368–1398," in Cambridge History of China, vol. 7, pp. 107–181, at p. 140, for Taizu's figure of 15,000 and the estimate of more than 40,000 for 1380–1394. See also Dreyer, Early Ming China, pp. 100–104, 145–148. ↩
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Hok-lam Chan, "Ming T'ai-tsu's Manipulation of Letters: Myth and Reality of Literary Persecution," Journal of Asian History 29, no. 1 (1995): 1–60. ↩
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Hok-lam Chan, "The Chien-wen, Yung-lo, Hung-hsi, and Hsüan-te Reigns, 1399–1435," in Cambridge History of China, vol. 7, pp. 182–304; Shih-shan Henry Tsai, Perpetual Happiness: The Ming Emperor Yongle (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001), ch. 1. ↩
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Chan, "The Chien-wen, Yung-lo ... Reigns," pp. 220–221, and Tsai, Perpetual Happiness, ch. 6. ↩
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Ray Huang, "The Grand Canal during the Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644" (Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1964), summarized in Huang, Taxation and Governmental Finance, pp. 277–284. ↩
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Shih-shan Henry Tsai, The Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), is the standard study. On the Grand Secretariat, see Charles O. Hucker, "Ming Government," in Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote, eds., The Cambridge History of China, vol. 8, The Ming Dynasty, 1368–1644, Part 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 9–105. ↩
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F. W. Mote, "The T'u-mu Incident of 1449," in Frank A. Kierman Jr. and John K. Fairbank, eds., Chinese Ways in Warfare (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), pp. 243–272; Denis Twitchett and Tilemann Grimm, "The Cheng-t'ung, Ching-t'ai, and T'ien-shun Reigns, 1436–1464," in Cambridge History of China, vol. 7. ↩
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"Hai Jui," in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang, eds., Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), vol. 1, pp. 474–479; Ray Huang, 1587, a Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), ch. 5. ↩
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John E. Herman, Amid the Clouds and Mist: China's Colonization of Guizhou, 1200–1700 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Asia Center, 2007), chs. 3–4. ↩
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Ray Huang, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); Huang, "The Lung-ch'ing and Wan-li Reigns, 1567–1620," in Cambridge History of China, vol. 7, pp. 511–584; Robert B. Crawford, "Chang Chü-cheng's Confucian Legalism," in Wm. Theodore de Bary, ed., Self and Society in Ming Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970); on Hai Rui, the entry "Hai Jui" in Dictionary of Ming Biography. ↩
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Tsai, The Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty, chs. 1–5; Ming shi, juan 304 (the iron tablet); John W. Dardess, Blood and History in China: The Donglin Faction and Its Repression, 1620–1627 (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002), on Wei Zhongxian's shrines. ↩
Suggested Reading for Deeper Preparation
Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (2010). The best one-volume history for students, organized around climate, commerce and the state; short chapters suit lecture preparation.
F. W. Mote, Imperial China, 900–1800 (1999). Long, authoritative chapters on the founding, Yongle and the mid-Ming emperors; the source Ebrey quotes on Taizu and the Mongols.
Edward L. Dreyer, Early Ming China: A Political History, 1355–1435 (1982). The clearest narrative of the founding, the civil war and Yongle's campaigns.
John W. Dardess, Ming China, 1368–1644: A Concise History of a Resilient Empire (2012). A brief, opinionated synthesis that argues the Ming was more resilient than its reputation.
Edward L. Farmer, Zhu Yuanzhang and Early Ming Legislation (1995). The founder's legal program, with translations of the codes and the Grand Pronouncements.
Shih-shan Henry Tsai, Perpetual Happiness: The Ming Emperor Yongle (2001). A readable biography of the Yongle emperor, good on the usurpation and on Beijing.
Ray Huang, 1587, a Year of No Significance (1981). The Wanli court, Zhang Juzheng, Hai Rui and the limits of the Ming system, told through six lives; ideal for Review Question 3.
Shih-shan Henry Tsai, The Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty (1996). What eunuchs actually did, and why officials hated them.