China
Page 49
Many of the troubles confronting Yuan Shundi stemmed from another feature of steppe rule that Khubilai had unwisely applied to China. For administrative and military purposes he famously divided the country into a dozen large provinces; somewhat fragmented and with their borders often redrawn, they remain the basis of today’s provincial structure. But instead of then integrating these provinces into the central administration and subordinating them to its agencies, he tended to endow each province with a replica of the central administration. Each acquired a secretariat and civil and military bureaux, while the activities of the central government were largely restricted to Zhongshu, its own metropolitan province comprising Hebei and neighbouring areas of Shanxi, Henan and Liaoning. Thus ‘[the imperial government’s] engagement in empire-wide administration was at best transitory or limited to very restricted activities’. The provincial secretariats, on the other hand, ‘were not organs of local government like the circuit bureaus of Song times, but governments of external territories, separate vassal states surrounding a nuclear state – the emperor’s metropolitan domain’.21 In effect China had no sooner been reunited than it was being parcelled up into the equivalent of the steppe’s interdependent khanates, each with considerable potential for autonomy.
Various safeguards enabled a strong central government to fend off this danger. The emperor retained the right to appoint all officials; a parallel censorate kept a close watch on all aspects of government and reported direct to the centre; and what was probably the most efficient post-relay service in the world ensured rapid communication (350 kilometres – 215 miles – a day seems to have been standard) between the court and the provinces. But under a weakened administration, when senior positions and fiefdoms were doled out as favours and could become hereditary, and when local disturbances demanded a prompt local response, provincial administrations would have no compunction about taking independent action.
Containing the two imperial capitals (Dadu and Shangdu), acting as a conduit to the Mongolian fatherland and yet boasting no agricultural surplus, the metropolitan area undoubtedly required special consideration. Yuan attempts to increase agricultural production were concentrated there and may have had some effect. But the region remained heavily dependent on rice imports from the south via a canal system badly disrupted by the flood-prone Yellow River. Khubilai, after witnessing the utility of coastal shipping in the pursuit of the last Song emperors, was persuaded to try maritime transport. This meant accepting the services of two notorious pirates who were well supplied with vessels and familiar with the treacherous navigation round the Shandong peninsula. The first shipments were a success; but when a convoy was wiped out by a storm, the court turned again to inland waterways.
A scheme was adopted to augment the Grand Canal with a new section connecting the Yellow River to another river that debouched into the sea near Dadu. ‘About three million labourers took part in its construction, for which the government expended vast sums of money.’22 It was completed in 1289, though like the Sui sections of the canal, it still required expensive maintenance. Nor did it put the pirates out of business. The sea route remained in use and, by occasionally holding the court to ransom, the pirates accrued a fortune. Repeatedly frustrating government efforts to control the coast, they were still all-powerful in the 1350s and happily contributed to the then general subversion of Yuan authority.
If the maritime route continued in use, it was because the Grand Canal was still more often inoperable than not. Come the 1340s this was because the Yellow River was on the move again. Having veered south in the 1290s, it was now inclined to head back north, flooding part of the Grand Canal and debouching into the Gulf of Bohai. In ‘one of the greatest hydraulic projects ever undertaken in China in pre-modern times’, 200,000 local labourers were dragooned into digging and dredging a new channel to the south. Completed in late 1351, the scheme was a success, though, as predicted, the coercive methods used to get it dug were not. Spontaneous uprisings marked its progress, and in mid-1351 ‘the first action in a rebellion soon to involve almost all of China’ saw the seizure of Yingzhou in Anhui.23 The trouble quickly engulfed sections of the Grand Canal, spread far beyond the Yellow River basin and, becoming vastly complicated by all manner of other revolts, threatened to overwhelm the dynasty. Meanwhile traffic on the canal, while no longer impeded by flooding and siltation, was blocked by the insurgents. In a final bid to outwit both canal ‘bandits’ and maritime ‘pirates’, a novel attempt was made to introduce the cultivation of rice in the north. Two thousand paddy farmers from the south were brought to the region north of Dadu/Beijing as instructors, and the cost of acquiring and terracing the land is said to have exceeded that of taming the Yellow River. But though well intentioned, the scheme seems not to have realised its expected potential and was overtaken by other events when, as of 1354, localised defiance flared into all-out war.
No less disastrous for the economy, and perhaps more damaging for Mongol repute, had been Khubilai’s foreign adventures. Unable to construe success in other than the expansionist terms of his Mongol antecedents, between 1274 and 1294 Khubilai had mounted an almost continuous series of assaults by land and sea on his neighbours. Some of these exploits may best be described as quixotic, nearly all ended in failure, and only a long-fought struggle with Mongol rivals in and around Mongolia can be accounted necessary. Elsewhere, Burma was invaded repeatedly: Marco Polo describes an epic encounter with an elephant corps in 1279; eight years later Pagan, the capital, was taken and its king overthrown; and in 1301–03 further expeditions were vainly mounted in support of the Yuan candidate there. It was a similar story with Annam and Champa in what is now Vietnam. By sea and then land, Annam was cowed in 1281 and the Cham kingdom assailed in 1285. But the Mongol forces, though mostly Chinese, fared poorly in the heat and were no match for the Chams in jungle warfare. They eventually withdrew with little more than a token acknowledgement of Yuan suzerainty.
Meanwhile further Mongol demands for submission had been lodged with the Khmer kingdom of Angkhor and the expanding Javanese kingdom of Singosari (later Majapahit). Both repudiated the Mongol envoys. Angkhor was spared invasion, thanks no doubt to the stiff resistance offered by its Cham neighbours; but in 1292 Khubilai excelled himself by unleashing an armada of 1,000 ships and 20,000 men on east Java. By now such was the Chinese familiarity with the south seas that these reached their destination at Kediri on the north coast of the island without difficulty. Adopting the cause of the lately overthrown Singosari dynasty in return for its vassalage, the Mongol forces duly defeated the incumbent usurper but were then, in the hour of victory, themselves treacherously assaulted by their supposed ally. Three thousand men were lost; the Mongol commander barely made it back to his fleet; and the fleet, after much deliberation, sailed home to China.
A pattern was by now discernible, and it was identical to that pursued by Chinggis and his immediate successors in Inner Asia. The Mongols opened relations by dispatching envoys to demand submission in the form of tribute plus a personal attendance at the imperial court by the king so targeted. He, the king, perhaps assuming this was just another pro forma approach typical of traditional Chinese diplomacy, prevaricated. The Mongols then sent a second mission whose insistence and insults usually provoked their hosts into retaliation (the Burmese beheaded a Mongol mission, the Javanese ‘defaced’ its leader). And since to a universal emperor such affronts were totally unacceptable, war followed.
The prelude to Khubilai’s two most celebrated invasions, both of Japan and both catastrophic, ran true to form. Apart from occasional trouble between Korean shipping and Japanese ‘pirates’, the only justification for intervention in Japan lay in the aggressive diplomacy that preceded it. The first assault force sailed from a reluctant Korea in 1274 and reached the coast of Kyushu. Too small for the task in hand, it would probably have been annihilated anyway. Instead a storm sent the Mongol forces rushing back to their ships, and while riding out the tempest, 13,000 lives
were lost and the bulk of the fleet was sunk. In 1275 and 1279 follow-up diplomatic missions to the Japanese emperor – Khubilai insisted on designating him ‘the king of a little country’ – got the reception they deserved; the staffs of both were executed. The second invasion of 1281 was by way of response.
This time Khubilai did not underestimate his foe, sending two fleets, one from Korea and the other from Zhejiang, with a total complement of perhaps 140,000 men. The Japanese were prepared. A wall had been built on the Kyushu coast that prevented the forces from southern China joining up with those from Korea. But as in 1274 it was the intervention of the gods which proved decisive. Another storm, this time a typhoon, bore down on Kyushu. Again there was a rush for the boats and again there was panic in the Sino-Mongol ranks. ‘One-third of the 40,000 Northern soldiers perished,’ says Khubilai’s modern biographer, ‘and more than half of the 100,000 Southern troops died while trying to escape.’ This certainly ‘shattered the mantle of Mongol invincibility’; in terms of fatalities and expenditure, it was probably the costliest defeat in Mongol history.24 In seeking to validate Mongol rule with a string of easy victories, Khubilai had merely discredited it, leaving his sucessors with a legacy of tarnished valour and chronic insolvency.
Thus his reputation as a ruler who abandoned steppe traditions to accommodate himself to Chinese norms of imperial conduct and bureaucratic government may need revision. Despite concessions such as building a traditional capital, indulging Confucian scholarship and observing (if not often personally performing) the imperial rites, he never learned to read and write Chinese. Nor did many of his successors. The laborious transcription of official papers from Chinese to Mongol and back again, though it provided employment for an army of clerks, must have distanced the Yuan emperors from the minutiae of government.
Nor was the employment of Chinese advisers and officials any indication of imperial preference. Grading the population into a four-tier hierarchy ensured that Mongols and other non-Chinese enjoyed positive discrimination in respect of office and privilege. Under this system, first came those of Mongol birth, then the ‘coloured-eye people’ (mainly Uighurs, central Asian Muslims and oddities like the Polo family, who might or might not have eyes that were other than brown), then, well behind in terms of privileges, the ‘Han people’ (northern Chinese plus Khitans, Jurchen and Koreans), and finally the ‘Southern people’ (ex-subjects of the Song). Directives were issued against Mongols adopting Chinese dress or marrying Chinese girls, though these were little honoured, and against Chinese wearing Mongol dress or learning the Mongol language. When in 1313–15 the examination system was reintroduced by the scholarship-loving Ayurbarwada or Yuan Renzong (r. 1311–20), it was effectively ‘dumbed down’ to give the less-educated Mongols and their ‘coloured-eyed’ henchmen a better chance. Literary composition was excluded altogether; Zhu Xi’s Neo-Confucian ‘Four Books’ distillation became the basic syllabus; degrees were awarded in accordance with preset ethnic quotas; and lest Han scholars still outshine their non-Han competitors, the latter were encouraged with simplified papers and lower pass marks.
Since far more official appointments were made on the basis of hereditary privilege and recommendation than scholarly attainment, this weighting may not have made much difference to the composition of the bureaucracy. But it did reflect social and political realities under the Yuan. Mongolians, Uighurs, Tibetan lamas, Nestorian Christians and central Asian Muslims enjoyed an influence at court, in government and in the armed forces that was quite disproportionate to their numbers. Religious and ethnic diversity was not just tolerated but positively encouraged as a counterweight to Chinese numerical and educational preponderance.
Ever on the lookout for knowledgeable foreigners, in the 1260s Khubilai had asked the Venetian merchants Maffeo and Niccolo Polo to bring ‘a hundred Christian men of learning’ back to China on their next visit; instead they had brought young Marco. But there were already Latin as well as Orthodox Christians enjoying Mongol hospitality. In 1307 John of Monte Corvino, long resident in Dadu, was appointed its first archbishop, while ‘Zayton’s last bishop’ was reportedly among those massacred by anti-Yuan forces in 1362.25 (‘Zayton’ was the great port of Quanzhou in Fujian.) Muslims, mostly from central Asia, were much more prominent. It was under Mongol patronage that close-knit Islamic communities became established in most of the cities and formed settled colonies in some outlying areas. As merchants and moneylenders, then as tax farmers, monopoly contractors and financial administrators, Muslims were particularly associated with the economy. They may, too, have been useful to the Yuan emperors as a foil for Chinese wrath over new fiscal impositions and the inflation that resulted from the irresponsible issue of ever more paper money. Certainly, if Polo is to be believed, they were unpopular and occasionally suffered reprisals. The only province actually run by a Muslim was Yunnan. There, under several governors of the same Bukharan family, overt proselytisation was rare, though many of the indigenous people were attracted to the faith and several waves of Muslim colonists were settled in Yunnan. From among the descendants of its ruling clan, in this backward and largely non-Han province as remote from the sea as anywhere in the empire, would come the greatest of all China’s maritime commanders.
TRIUMPH OF THE MING
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. F
rom 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.