1492: The Year Our World Began (25 page)

Ch’oe Pu approved of this principle, and, in general, of the well-regulated nature of the state. Western historians have long engaged in pointless conflict in an attempt to identify the “first modern state”—some locating it in England, others in France or the Spanish empire, or the Netherlands or even Lithuania. China had already exhibited the key characteristics for centuries: internal sovereignty; central government; centrally appointed administrators; a uniform system of administration; uniform laws, currency, weights, and measures; rapid internal
communications; and a bureaucracy, chosen by merit, that made it unnecessary to devolve power locally or regionally into aristocratic hands. Candidates for provincial magistracies—the officials who represented the emperor and dispensed justice, enforced law, collected taxes, and supervised security measures—were selected by examination in knowledge of the Confucian classics, writing essays that tested their powers of marshaling arguments for and against various propositions and choosing between them on moral and practical grounds. In the late fifteenth century, officials had to send in self-evaluations every six years, and the lower ranks were winnowed by inspection by their superiors, who collected complaints from any subject who claimed to have been unfairly treated.

Above all, the wealth of China impressed Ch’oe Pu. Even in the jungly, malarial region he first had to cross, he found that “the people were thriving and the houses splendid.” His description of Suzhou exudes the envy of a goggle-eyed window-shopper, awed by “all the treasures of the land and sea, such as thin silks, gauzes, gold, silver, jewels, crafts, arts, and great and rich merchants.” Markets multiplied like stars; ships billowed like clouds. Life was luxurious. South of the Yangtze, where “towers look out on other towers, and boats ply stem to stern,” Ch’oe Pu found incomparable wealth and a model civilization, where “even village children, ferrymen, and sailors can read.”
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Parts of the north and west of the country seemed less prosperous, with many low, thatched dwellings and thinner settlement. To Ch’oe Pu’s prejudiced eyes, there was more barbarian influence in those zones, detectable in the violent dispositions of some of the inhabitants. Overall, however, China fulfilled the visitor’s hopes: his picture is of a land prospering under the benign rule of an altruistic Confucian elite.

He was right about the power of the bureaucracy. China was already a modern state, with an official class recruited—in theory—from all ranks of society, on merit tested by examination in knowledge of the Confucian classics. The emperor could not do without them. At intervals in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, emperors tried to
dispense with them, ignore them, or replace them with rival elites: eunuch courtiers, for instance; army top brass; or Buddhist or Taoist clergy. But the mandarins won every contest for power. Sometimes they went on strike; sometimes they intimidated emperors with their sheer intellectual superiority. They emerged from every crisis with a reinforced sense of their own indispensability.

Despite the power of the bureaucracy, other sources show that the state was not easily able to tax China’s wealth efficiently or turn that wealth into effective military power. No province ever fulfilled its tax quota. In the late fifteenth century, some provinces could not raise enough revenue to pay their garrisons. From 1490 a series of famines struck the tea-producing region of Xenzi, and the farmers devoted their wares to the purchase of grain. By the 1490s, many military units were at less than 15 percent of their nominal strength. While the army wilted for lack of money, shortage of horses rendered it relatively immobile.

By long-standing custom, the state traded tea for horses with herdsmen in central Asia. The finest specimens came from beyond the deserts and mountains, from the land of Fergana, now spread across Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan beyond the deserts and mountains. Meanwhile, wars in central Asia for control of Fergana interrupted the horse trade and threatened the security of China itself. In 1492 the Chinese thought they had brokered peace between the warring states, but the Chinese-nominated candidate for Fergana’s disputed throne was kidnapped en route to take up his position. Laboriously, China had to muster strength for a punitive expedition. By 1497 they had installed their candidate, but the warfare rumbled on, and China’s capacity for effective intervention slowly dwindled.

On the southern frontier, too, Ming imperialism faltered: early in the history of the dynasty, China had not hesitated to intervene in the politics of southeastern Asian states to ensure that power stayed in the hands of regimes the Chinese approved of. But in the 1480s, when the ruler of Vietnam launched an effort to turn Southeast Asia into an empire of his own, China did no more than issue a mild admonition to uphold Confu
cian values, respect countries that paid tribute to China, care for his own people, and “act righteously.” Military show played an important role in compensating for real strength. Ch’oe Pu was treated to “thousands of arms and shields” lining the walls of Yueh-ch’i (Xunjiang) with “masses of pennants” and the rumble of gongs and drums.
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Reading between the lines, moreover, we see that the political system Ch’oe Pu described had glaring imperfections. On the face of it, China looked like an exemplary modern state, with a bureaucracy and judiciary selected by merit, qualified by education and examination, and appointed and salaried by the government. In practice, there was never enough money to finance the system. The imperial family was a terrible burden on the exchequer. Every living descendant of the founder of the dynasty, by wives and official concubines who were often numerous, lived on a pension from the state, and the first Ming emperor had twenty-six sons. The numbers of imperial dependants grew exponentially. One prince had ninety-four children. Officials were paid in grain, and by the time shortfalls and conversion costs turned their appropriations into cash, they rarely received more than a tiny proportion—sometimes as little as 5 percent of their nominal entitlement. Not that the salaries were fixed at generous rates anyway. In practice, officials had to be rich or corrupt or both. Ch’oe Pu sometimes had to bribe his way out of police custody. His diary shows how officials manipulated the reports they transmitted to court in order to spare the emperor from bad news. Data on piracy, banditry, and rural unrest and bureaucratic negligence were all edited out of documents the Korean saw compiled. Some officials deliberately misrepresented castaways as Japanese pirates in order to get the bounty money.

So the Chinese ideal of keeping political power out of the hands of the rich was unrealized in practice. Moreover, although the Confucian elite was supposedly a meritocracy, it had many of the pockmarks with which vices scar aristocracies. The examination system ensured that officials shared the same formation and outlook. The fact that most of them had to ascend through the same categories of service to the throne
gave them a strong esprit de corps. They were united in veneration of Confucian values. They shared a conviction that the conduct of state business was their privilege as well as their responsibility. They joined in defense of their traditional social and economic advantages, which the emperors periodically tried to limit—especially exemption for themselves and their families from some forms of taxation. They formed a class, ten thousand strong, with a remarkably uniform set of self-perceptions and a profound jealousy of any outsiders who presumed to contend for power. They particularly resented the religious minorities who contended for power and influence at court: Buddhists, whom they suspected of amassing wealth in order to seize power, and Taoists, whose ancient religion they despised as magical mumbo-jumbo.

There were philosophical issues at stake: For Confucians, the gods were a remote and unintrusive influence, as long as the emperor performed the rites that supposedly kept heaven and earth in harmony. Buddhists and Taoists did not believe that the universe was so easily manageable, struggling for virtue and even for survival against a natural world that teemed with contentious spirits. Islam, which had arrived in China soon after the death of the prophet Muhammad, was still numerically insignificant, but it had a relatively large following among the court eunuchs. Eunuchs rivaled the bureaucratic mandarins for powerful posts at court, because they were dependants of the emperor and had none of the conflicts of interest that posterity brings.

Although eunuchs, Buddhists, and Taoists remained at loggerheads with the Confucian establishment, other parts of the elite were collaborating in exceptional ways. In the past, merchants and mandarins had often been at odds because of the scholars’ contempt for commercial values. Now, however, there were signs of rapprochement. Strictly speaking, merchants were not allowed commemorative inscriptions on their tombs, because they constituted the lowest class of society, below peasants and artisans. “The gentry,” according to a maxim of the early sixteenth century, “know how to orient themselves to study, the peas
antry know to devote themselves to agriculture, and the merchants, while adept at trading, do not go beyond their station.”
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But wealth circumvents conventions, as the case of Wang Zheng shows. He was one of the richest men in China, who inherited a fortune and made another of his own in the grain business. He had the privilege of a long and adulatory—but still informative—epitaph when he died, seventy years old, in 1495. To designate him as a merchant would be opprobrious, so he went down as “unemployed scholar,” since he had studious habits from childhood. “His most cherished matters of heart,” said the tombstone, “were ancient and contemporary calligraphy and paintings in ink.” Though he claimed to detest his calling, and to have deserted it when he could for altruistic duties—philanthropic work or official employment as a magistrate’s clerk—he was deft enough in business to acquire an art collection in which “the top paintings were truly priceless.” His aspirations were focused on his sons, all of whom took civil-service examinations and pursued official careers.
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Similar cases are known among salt merchants in Yangzhou. When one of the most successful of them, Fan Yenfu, retired in the mid-1490s, local officials presented him with a collection of scholarly writings—a sign of equality of eminence in the values that they all thought stamped the elite.

In some ways, confronting the Confucian establishment, the emperors of the Ming dynasty had long been the foremost outsiders. As they strove to balance the contending religious factions, the ruling dynasty chose to be called “Ming” in defiance of Confucianism, for the name was a Buddhist epithet. It denoted the “Brightness” anticipated in the fabled deity Lord Maitreya, who, according to one strand in Buddhism, would preside over the end of the world. Although successive emperors could hardly escape Confucian values during their education at court, the tension present at the foundation of the Ming dynasty remained. Emperors frequently tried to break the hold of the official class on power, but always failed. At different times, they tried empowering Buddhist or Taoist clergy to offset the influence of the mandarins. By 1486 there were 1,120 monks in official positions at court.

Emperors employed thousands of eunuchs, to the disgust of the official class; there were as many eunuchs as mandarins in the service of the empire by the 1480s. Ch’oe Pu expressed surprise at eunuchs in power; in his country, he protested, they would be allowed only to sweep the palace and carry messages.
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In China, they ran many departments of government, including the dreaded internal security agency, the so-called Western Depot, established in 1477 to seize and punish suspected traitors. But reliance on the mandarins to staff the provincial administration and the courts of law proved inescapable. Generally in the fifteenth century, moreover, emperors tended to be short-lived, and inherited “greybeard” mandarin counselors from their fathers and grandfathers.

In the late fifteenth century, the Chinese imperial court was in the grip of a reaction in favor of the political power of the mandarin class—something like a Confucian revolution. In large part, this was because of a change of power at the top: the accession of an emperor thoroughly educated in Confucian pieties and deep in cahoots with the Confucian elite. Partly, however, it was a reaction against the spectacular growth, in preceding reigns, of the numbers, wealth, and power of the Confucians’ enemies. Confucians traded hatred with Buddhists and Taoists. A judge who denounced the previous emperor’s favorite monk as “a good-for-nothing vagabond from the marketplace” was beaten, demoted, and exiled. Other Confucian critics of the monks got the same treatment. A hundred thousand Buddhist and Taoist clergy were ordained in 1476. The following year, the emperor decreed that in the future, ordination ceremonies would take place only once every twenty years. The government also tried to tighten the qualifications for ordination in the Buddhist and Taoist hierarchies. Scandal broke out over the sale of ordination certificates—ten thousand of them, for instance, to raise money for famine relief in Shaanxi in 1484—inflating the numbers. The certificates were blank; purchasers simply wrote in their names. “Unless we take timely measures,” reported a concerned official in 1479, “in the worst situations they might gather together in the mountains and for
ests to plan criminal acts; and in less serious situations they might manufacture rumours to alarm people’s minds. In any event, the harm they do is never small.”
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The inflation of the Buddhist priesthood continued with another two hundred thousand ordinations in 1486. That very year, however, a new emperor came to the throne. Zhu Yutang, the Hongxi emperor, aspired to be a Confucian perfect prince. He ordered the death or expulsion of the sorcerers who thronged the previous emperor, and expelled over a thousand Buddhist and Taoist monks from court. He restored neglected rites, the reading of Confucian texts, the study of law, and the reform of judicial institutions. He embellished the Temple of Confucius in Qufu with a literary pavilion. When fire destroyed some Taoist institutions in Beijing in 1497, one of the emperor’s chief ministers gloated unfeignedly: “If they had possessed numinous power, would they not have been protected by it? Heaven despises such filth.”
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Qixao, the Buddhist monk who occupied the informal position of favorite in the previous reign, was accused of peculation from state funds and dealing in aphrodisiacs. His head was chopped off in 1488.