Global Crisis
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All this formed part of the Manchus’ ambitious programme to challenge the Ming for mastery of China, known as ‘The Great Enterprise’ (Da ye). In 1627 Hong Taiji issued a list of ‘seven grievances’ not only against the Ming but also against Korea: both documents presented the Manchu state as an independent political entity that dealt with its neighbours as a sovereign power. He also established a chancery and six administrative Boards, modelled on the Chinese system; devised a new script to communicate his orders in Manchu; and commanded scholars to search historical works for accounts of previous conquests of China by northerners, and of Chinese who switched allegiance to the conquerors at an early stage, as well as examples of bad Chinese rulers whose overthrow had been justified. Hong Taiji also moved to a new capital (present-day Shenyang), named both Shengjing (‘Flourishing Capital’ in Chinese) and Mukden (from the Manchu word ‘to arise’), where his court combined Manchu, Mongol and Chinese imperial protocol. In 1636 he proclaimed himself the founder of a new multi-ethnic state called Da Qing (‘Great Qing’). He also received from Tibetan lamas consecration with the powers of Mahakala, the warlike deity who protected Buddhist Law, and he claimed that the ‘mind of Heaven’ now guided his actions.25
Equally innovative, Hong Taiji decreed how his subjects should look and dress. An edict of 1636 required that ‘All Han [Chinese] people – be they official or commoner, male or female – [in] their clothes and adornment will have to conform to Manchu styles … Males are not allowed to fashion wide collars and sleeves; females are not allowed to comb up their hair or bind their feet’. Above all, males must shave the front part of their head and wear the rest in a long pigtail or queue like the Manchus. Two years later, a further decree specified that ‘all those who imitate’ Ming customs ‘in clothes, headgear, hair-bundling and foot-binding are to be severely punished’. Hong Taiji's legislation thus reconfigured both attire (clothes) and the body itself (hair and feet) to proclaim political allegiance and cultural identity; and it construed failure to conform as treason.26
The Little Ice Age Strikes
Just as Nurhaci's decision to invade China in 1618 reflected climatic imperatives – global cooling affected Manchuria more severely than more temperate areas – so the cool and wet weather that ruined several harvests in the 1630s made it imperative for the Manchus to seize as much food as possible from their neighbours. Hong Taiji therefore launched another raid deep into China and also invaded Korea, the most important tributary state of the Ming; but, as in 1618, expansion brought only short-lived relief. Even the expanded lands under Qing rule no longer sufficed to feed those who lived there, and in 1638 some of Hong Taiji's advisers recommended that he seek a peace treaty with the Ming.27
Extreme weather conditions also afflicted China. The laconic entries in the section on ‘famines’ in the Veritable Records of the Ming, compiled from provincial reports to the Chongzhen emperor, are eloquent:
In the ninth year [of the reign: 1636] severe famine affected Nanyang [Henan province] during which mothers killed and cooked their daughters [for food]. That year there was also a famine in Jiangxi province. In the tenth year [1637], there was a severe famine in Zhejiang province during which fathers and children, siblings and husbands resorted to cannibalism. In the twelfth year [1639], there was a famine in the Northern and Southern Metropolitan regions and in Shandong, Shanxi, Shaanxi and Jiangxi provinces. In Henan there was a severe famine during which people resorted to cannibalism … In the thirteenth year [1640], there were famine conditions in the Northern Metropolitan Region, Shandong, Henan, Shaanxi, Shanxi, Zhejiang, and the lower Yangzi delta.28
Recent climatic reconstructions reveal that in 1640 – a year of extreme El Niño and volcanic activity (see chapter 1 above) – north China experienced the worst drought recorded during the last five centuries. According to a magistrate in Henan province, ‘there have been eleven months without rain. In the past year people have suffered from floods, locusts and drought. The drought was so bad that people could not plant the wheat, and what little was planted was eaten by locusts … The people all have yellow jaws and swollen cheeks; their eyes are like pig's gall.’ He commissioned 16 sketches of famine conditions, regretting that the pictures could not transmit ‘the screams from hunger and the howls from the cold’ that he had witnessed.29 The year 1641, which also saw extreme El Niño and volcanic activity, proved even worse. Jiangnan experienced severe frost and heavy snow, followed by the second driest year recorded during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A telegraphic entry in the Shanghai county gazetteer is eloquent:
Massive drought.
Locusts.
The price of millet soared.
The corpses of the starved lay in the streets.
In July the Grand Canal dried up in Shandong province, cutting off the supply of rice to the imperial capital, and smallpox halved the population of some villages. The gazetteer of Yizhou county (Shandong) noted sadly: ‘Among all the past occurrences of disaster and rebellion, there had never been anything worse than this'(Fig. 17; Plate 7).30 Even subtropical Lingnan reported snow and ice four or five inches deep on the fish ponds in 1642, so that all the fish died; while the colder weather made it impossible to gather two annual rice harvests as before, dramatically reducing the yield of the south's staple crop both for local consumers and for export. At one point a tiger – the first one seen in the area for over a century – stalked its prey right outside the walls of Canton, no doubt driven from its normal haunts by the famine.31
Confucian doctrine saw flood and droughts as ‘heaven-sent disasters’ (tianzai) and an increased incidence of natural disasters as a cosmic portent that a ‘Change in the Mandate [of Heaven]’ was imminent. The failure of so many harvests in the Chongzhen reign therefore led his ministers to propose drastic remedies. A complete treatise on agricultural administration, composed in the 1620s and published in 1637, devoted one-third of its text to famine control, explaining not only how to build and manage granaries but also how to cultivate crops capable of withstanding adverse weather, and which wild plants one could safely eat. By then, however, lack of funds and central direction had left many (if not most) of the public granaries empty and the run of poor harvests made it impossible to replenish them.32
Lacking assistance from the central government, individual county magistrates searched for other ways to ‘nourish the people’ during the worst crisis to afflict East Asia in early modern times. Since the central government devoted all available resources to resisting the Qing, many pinned their hopes on charity to feed the hungry – but this also produced too little, too late. Thus when the magistrate of Shanghai county, faced by famine and disease in 1641–2, persuaded some gentry and merchants to ‘contribute rice to cook gruel’ for communal kitchens, starving people came ‘in unbroken streams, leading their elders and bearing their children on their backs. In extreme cases, they fell down dead on the roads before reaching the gruel kitchens; or else, having eaten their fill, they died by the wayside just as they were returning … Outside the city, from winter till the following summer, on the roads the corpses lay on top of one another.’ The spring brought no relief. The same source described ‘the joy that lit up the faces of those able to obtain a few pecks of husks by borrowing; the rush of the starving people to clear the countryside of green vegetation indiscriminately as it appeared in spring 1642; unbroken lines of beggars; sale of child slaves and women; abandonment of little children; active infanticide; cannibalism’.33 Others reported that ‘the human price of a peck of rice – barely enough to feed one person for a week – was two children’. Lu Shiyi, a young scholar so poor that he had to beg, recorded in his diary the ‘red dust skies’, the drought and locusts, the bandit and pirate attacks of 1641, and concluded ‘Jiangnan has never had this kind of disaster’. But then came 1642, when ‘an especially severe food shortage, coupled with freezing weather, caused an unknown number of people to die of starvation; in villages and alleyways, no sign of life could be fo
und,’ he wrote, adding: ‘I have heard of many cases in which women let themselves be violated in order to survive.’ He himself watched a woman eating her own child outside the office of the sub-prefect. Many years later, Yao Tinglin, a minor official who had been a teenager in Shanghai at the time, wrote that ever since then ‘I am not afraid of seeing dead people: that is because I saw so many of them’ during the famine of 1641–2.34
17. Disasters and diseases cripple Ming China, 1641.
Over 100 County Gazetteers from the provinces of Henan, Hubei, Shandong and Jiangsu recorded a major natural disaster – drought, flood, famine, locusts – in the year 1641. At the same time, a sudden dearth of silver coins dislocated the economic hub of Ming China.
Thus, just as the Manchu and bandit threats reached a crescendo in north China, the Little Ice Age struck the south. The fertile soil and benign climate of Jiangnan, which had allowed enterprising farmers to harvest double and even triple rice crops, had produced by the 1620s an overall population density of 1,200 per square mile – one of the highest on the planet. In 1637 the Jesuit missionary Alvaro Semedo, who had lived for two decades in Jiangnan, correctly concluded that the region was ‘overpopulated’: since the number of ‘people is infinite, they cannot create a capital or stock sufficient for so many, or money to fill so many purses’. He therefore deduced, also correctly, ‘hence it comes to pass that the partition [of resources] among them is such that a few get a lot, not many get enough, and almost everyone gets [too] little.‘35 Many Ming officials shared Semedo's view. One noted that the ‘population has grown so much that it is entirely without parallel in history’ and worried about the consequences. Another estimated that the population of Jiangnan had quintupled over the previous 250 years so that the province's arable land could no longer support it. Such prodigious population growth, coupled with the habit of dividing farms among all sons, had by the 1630s reduced some holdings to half an acre (two mou) – insufficient to provide enough rice to sustain even a small family – but many farmers still managed to survive by raising cash crops such as cotton (which could grow on higher land than wet-rice) or tea (which thrived on hillsides), or by switching from rice cultivation to raising silkworms.36
This shift created a new source of vulnerability, however. Farmers who raised cash crops needed to produce and sell enough both to buy a year's food and to pay their taxes – but, unfortunately for them, climatic adversity coincided with a drastic reduction in the silver coins in circulation. In 1639, no doubt because the changing Pacific wind system made navigation more hazardous (see chapter 1 above), two galleons laden with silver from Mexico foundered with the loss of their entire cargoes. The Chinese merchants therefore could not sell their silk in the Philippines in exchange for Mexican silver as usual. In normal times, increased trade with Japan might have filled this shortfall because the archipelago (like Mexico) both produced silver and craved silk; but in the late 1630s, fearful of foreign influence, the Japanese government restricted all overseas trade, and so little silver left the country. Overall, China's silver imports fell from almost 600 metric tons in 1636–40 to under 250 metric tons in 1641–5, disrupting the trade and production of those who normally used silver, just as the central government increased its tax demands (payable in silver) to unprecedented levels. The farmers of southeast China could scarcely have picked a worse time to rely on cash crops.37
Under the cumulative pressure of so many catastrophes in so many areas, the social fabric of Ming China began to unravel. Many towns became battlegrounds where ‘fighters guilds’ would, for a fee, ‘bully, beat, maim or even kill as directed'; and gangs with names like ‘The 36 Heavenly Scourges’ and ‘The 72 Earthly Plagues’ terrorized the streets. In Suzhou, ‘the most populous, and most prosperous, non-capital city on the face of the earth’, a run of drought-induced harvest failures, rent strikes and food riots had by 1642 brought the city to its knees. According to the autobiography kept by the retired magistrate Ye Shaoyuan, ‘Most of the residences in the city are empty and they are falling into ruins. Fertile farms and beautiful estates are for sale but there is no one to buy them.’ He added, ‘It is natural that after a period of prosperity a period of depression should follow; but I never dreamed that I should have to witness these misfortunes in the days of my [own] life.‘38 Ye also reported that ‘everywhere in hamlets and villages, people came shouting at the door, breaking down gates to enter’ and loot. Many men and women committed suicide to escape agonizing choices or dishonourable fates; others migrated in desperation, like the couple who pushed their ‘little cart’ hoping in vain to find food, shelter and jobs elsewhere (see chapter 4 above); while others sold themselves into slavery. Rural rebellions multiplied as bondservants rebelled against their masters, while peasants attacked their landlords, defaulted on their rent, abandoned their homes – and, in many cases, joined the outlaws.39
Many contemporary writers commented on the link between the rise of the ‘roving bandits’ and the weather. Manuals on statecraft stressed that ‘hunger and cold make a bandit’ and that ‘in famine years, if there is no government relief, and tax collection is not relaxed … those who did not die of famine will rise to become bandits'; while books of advice for merchants warned that ‘there are bandits along the small rivers in bad years’ and ‘bandits roam among the lakes, especially in famine years’. Officials of the central government concurred. According to Ming ministers, ‘Famine breeds banditry’ and ‘There will be more banditry when we have successive years of famine'; while a Qing official later observed that ‘When people are suffering, they can either risk death by flouting the law and becoming bandits, or face starvation if they do not; so the weak starve and the strong become bandits.‘40 Instead of taking strong measures, however, many Ming ministers exacerbated the problem by selling pardons to captured bandits in order to raise revenue. When in 1642 officials in Shandong captured and then ransomed a bandit leader, a local aristocrat (whose men had participated in the capture) pointed out reproachfully: ‘If you release plundering and homicidal rebels like this, without question there will be more people who, seeing this, will imitate it.’ Yet the officials had little choice, as even the Qing had to admit, because the bandit gangs were different:
Rural rebels never go beyond flocking like crows and scattering like beasts, but these types set up encampments and build forts. Local rebels never go beyond blocking the roads and stealing goods, but these types attack cities and seize land. Local rebels never go beyond cutting spears and making staves, but these types train soldiers to use firearms, and come completely equipped.41
The Alienated Intellectuals of Ming China
In the mid-eighteenth century Qin Huitian, a senior government official, summarized the problem in two lapidary sentences: ‘The demise of the Ming was due to banditry. The rise of banditry was due to famine.‘42 Qin's explanation nevertheless omitted one other critical factor in the ‘demise of the Ming’: the role of an alienated academic proletariat whose influence far exceeded their numbers. Throughout China, tens of thousands of male children learned to read, write and memorize a set of classical works on ethics and history, and then took a formal examination in the county town under the personal supervision of the district magistrate, who also graded their papers. Those who passed this examination became eligible to take a more advanced test in the prefectural capital, once again under strict supervision, and all who passed achieved the rank of shengyuan (‘licenciate’). Gaining shengyuan status brought numerous rewards: a modest stipend; exemption from labour services, physical punishments and certain taxes; the right to wear a special ‘scholar's uniform’ and to take precedence in all public places over other men, however senior, who lacked the degree. In a famine, they also received government relief before others. All shengyuan were expected to prepare for a further round of rigorous examinations, held triennially, which required them to write essays on assigned topics from the classics set by, and supervised by, a team of senior officials who left Beijing
in a carefully calibrated sequence so that students sat the same examination on the same day over the entire state. Those who passed became juren (‘elevated candidate’). They could then proceed to take a final set of exams held once every three years in the huge examination halls of Nanjing and Beijing, followed (for the successful) by an additional test administered by the emperor himself. Those who passed gained the coveted status of jinshi (‘advanced scholar’): a passport to the highest offices in the state.43
This sophisticated system provided a strong administrative backbone for imperial China, and in many ways it served the state well. First, since it was open to most males able to memorize the classical curriculum and write literary Chinese, the central government mobilized its human resources for public service to an extent unequalled in the early modern world. Second, the existence of a ‘common curriculum’ in a single language and script provided remarkable cultural and linguistic uniformity across the state, despite its immense size and diverse population. Finally, the civil service never completely succumbed to either corruption or absolutism because, however incompetent, capricious or lazy the emperor at the apex of the system, every three years a new cohort of articulate and classically literate men in their prime began their measured progress up China's ‘ladder of success’. Anyone who hoped to become a senior minister had to climb it.44
Nevertheless, the size of each successful triennial cohort remained very small: seldom more than 500 juren candidates and 300 jinshi. With such long odds, few candidates passed on their first attempt and some graduated only after many failures, long past their prime. Indeed, the combination of relatively easy access to shengyuan status with very strict quotas on higher degrees meant that 99 per cent of the men who competed in each triennial juren competition failed, as did 90 per cent of those who took each jinshi examination.45 Accordingly, the number of shengyuan holders without government jobs soared from perhaps 30,000 in the early fifteenth century to over 500,000 in the early seventeenth – one in every 60 adult males – and below them lurked those who had devoted years of study at the county schools but still failed to pass any of their examinations.46