Ming Empire

The mendicant

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 7: The Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644, Part 1 (1988)formation

Zhu Yuanzhang was born to a tenant farming family in Anhui in 1328. In 1344 plague and famine killed his parents and his eldest brother inside a month; he was sixteen, and buried them, the accounts say, in a strip of ground a neighbour gave him because the family owned none. He entered a monastery because it fed him, and when the monastery ran out of food he was sent out to beg.

Nobody else in Chinese history goes from that to the throne. Liu Bang, the founder of the Han, was a village headman — minor, but an official. This is the only Chinese dynasty founded by a man who had been a begging monk.

What he joined

The Red Turbans were one of several risings in the collapsing Yuan south, and they were millenarian: White Lotus devotion, the coming of the Buddha Maitreya, and a claimant descended from the Song imperial house. Zhu joined in 1352, rose through the movement, married the commander's adopted daughter, and by the 1360s had his own base at Nanjing.

Then he stopped being a Red Turban. He beat the other rebel leaders one at a time — the largest battle, on Lake Poyang in 1363, was a naval action of several hundred thousand men on a fresh-water lake — took the movement's figurehead under his protection, and had him drowned in a river crossing in 1366.

In 1368 he declared the Ming dynasty and sent an army north. The Yuan court left Dadu without a siege and rode back to Mongolia.

What he did with it

The Hongwu reign is thirty years of a man who trusted nobody, and the institutions reflect it exactly.

He abolished the Central Secretariat and the office of chancellor in 1380, after executing the incumbent for treason, and never replaced them: from that point the six ministries reported to the emperor directly, with no coordinating layer between them. That is a workload no ordinary ruler could carry, and later Ming emperors dealt with it by not carrying it — which is how the Grand Secretaries and then the eunuch bureaucracy filled the gap.

The purge that followed that execution ran for years and is reckoned in tens of thousands of deaths. A second one in 1393 killed a comparable number. The people who had won him the empire were, by the end, almost all dead.

He also rebuilt the countryside on paper: the lijia system organising households into groups of a hundred and ten for tax and labour, the Yellow Registers of population, the Fish-Scale Registers of land, and hereditary occupational categories — military, artisan, civilian — that a household could not leave.

The instructions

The most revealing thing he left is a set of ancestral injunctions for his descendants, in which he told them what not to change.

Among them: never restore the chancellorship. Never invade a list of named neighbouring countries, which he enumerated, because they were poor, distant, and not worth the men. Keep the tribute embassies limited.

A man who had begged for food set out to build a state that would never need to be adaptable, and told his heirs in writing that it was finished. Most of what happened to the dynasty afterwards is what happens when a design like that meets three centuries.

The third son

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 7: The Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644, Part 1 (1988)expansion

The founder's grandson was on the throne for four years. His fourth son took it from him in a civil war, moved the capital, invaded Vietnam, campaigned into Mongolia five times, and sent the fleets — and did all of it in twenty-two years.

The usurpation

Hongwu had given his sons military commands on the frontier. When he died in 1398 the throne went to a grandson, who began reducing the princes' power immediately; the Prince of Yan, holding the northern command at Beiping, revolted.

The war took three years. He won it, entered Nanjing in 1402, and the palace burned; the reigning emperor's body was never satisfactorily identified, which produced a rumour that he had escaped in disguise that outlasted the dynasty.

What followed the victory is worth stating because it is the least discussed part. The senior official who refused to draft the accession announcement, Fang Xiaoru, was executed along with — by the traditional account — his relatives to the tenth degree, a category invented for the occasion by adding his students and friends to the nine degrees of kin. The figure usually given is over eight hundred people.

Then the Yongle emperor had the records of the preceding reign rewritten so that his nephew's four years were absorbed into his father's, and his own succession followed directly from the founder.

Moving the capital

He moved the capital from Nanjing to Beiping, renamed Beijing, and the move is the most consequential decision of the reign.

The logic was military: the threat was the Mongols, the emperor should be where the armies were, and he had spent his adult life on that frontier. The consequence was economic. Beijing cannot feed itself; the grain came up the Grand Canal from the Yangtze, and the canal had to be rebuilt and dredged and then maintained for ever, with a hereditary transport service of tens of thousands of men, as a permanent charge on the state.

Every later Ming and Qing government paid that bill. The capital of China has been in the north ever since, next to the frontier, at the end of a supply line.

Everything at once

The scale of the Yongle reign is hard to convey without a list, so here is one.

Five personal campaigns into Mongolia, the last of which he died on. The invasion and annexation of Vietnam in 1406 and a twenty-year occupation that never stopped fighting insurgents. Seven maritime expeditions under Zheng He, reaching Hormuz, Aden, Mecca and the East African coast. The rebuilding of the Grand Canal. The construction of the Forbidden City. The Yongle Encyclopedia, over eleven thousand volumes, copied by more than two thousand scholars, the largest compilation of its kind before the twentieth century — never printed, because printing it was beyond even this reign, and now surviving in about four hundred scattered volumes.

What it cost

Vietnam was abandoned in 1427, two years after his death, after a guerrilla war that had bled the army continuously.

The fleets stopped in 1433 and the shipyards were shut down; the court reasoned that the northern frontier was the real threat and that the voyages returned prestige rather than revenue, which was true.

The Mongol campaigns achieved nothing durable. The Mongols dispersed when a large army came and returned when it left, which is the permanent problem of campaigning on a steppe, and in 1449 a Ming emperor took an army out to settle it and lost both the army and himself.

What survived was the capital, the canal and the Forbidden City. A reign that spent everything on projecting force in four directions left behind the three things that faced inward.

Seven fleets, and then none

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 7: The Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644, Part 1 (1988)peak

The Ming were founded by a peasant who had been a mendicant monk, expelled the Mongols from China, and set about restoring what they understood as the proper Chinese order — the examinations restored, the Yuan legal categories abolished, the capital eventually at Beijing facing the steppe the threat still came from.

Between 1405 and 1433 the Yongle emperor and his successor sent seven fleets into the Indian Ocean under the admiral Zheng He, a Muslim eunuch from Yunnan. They reached Sumatra, Ceylon, Calicut, Hormuz and the East African coast, carried tens of thousands of men in ships larger than anything Europe would build for centuries, installed and deposed rulers, and brought back tribute and a giraffe.

Then the programme stopped. The court decided the expense was not justified, the records were reportedly destroyed, and the shipyards fell out of use. Sixty years later Portuguese ships entered the same ocean from the other direction.

It is worth being careful about what that comparison proves. The voyages were tribute-system diplomacy, not commerce or colonisation, and they achieved what they were designed to achieve. The Ming did not fail at something they were attempting; they stopped doing something they had chosen to do, for reasons that were internal and, in fiscal terms, defensible. The retrospective drama belongs to people who know what happened next.

Tumu

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 7: The Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644, Part 1 (1988)contraction

In 1449 a Ming field army was destroyed at Tumu, sixty miles north-west of Beijing, and the emperor was captured alive by an Oirat Mongol force perhaps a tenth its size.

The court did not pay. It enthroned his brother, declared the captive a retired emperor, and declined to negotiate — after which the Mongols, holding a prisoner of no value, sent him home. He spent seven years under house arrest in his own palace, then deposed his brother in a coup and reigned again.

What it settled

The early Ming had gone onto the steppe. The Yongle emperor led five campaigns into Mongolia in person and died on the last of them, and the capital had been moved to Beijing partly in order to run that war from close up.

After 1449 none of that happened again. The strategy became the one the next second chapter describes: a line of walls, garrisoned, paid for out of the salt monopoly through the kaizhong system, under which merchants who delivered grain to the frontier were paid in salt certificates rather than cash.

That is worth stating as an institutional fact rather than a military one. The Ming financed its northern frontier by issuing licences to sell a commodity it monopolised. The salt monopoly was not simply a source of revenue; it was the instrument through which the northern defence was paid for, which meant that anything that disturbed the salt administration disturbed the frontier.

The counterpart

The Yuan court had not been destroyed in 1368. It withdrew to the steppe with the seals and the archives and went on issuing the dynasty's reign titles for two more centuries, as the Northern Yuan.

Tumu is what that claim looked like from the Ming side, eighty-one years after the withdrawal. The two states are one argument seen from both ends: a dynasty that says it is still the dynasty, and a dynasty that has to keep an army in the field about it.

The almshouse

Drafted from Pereira, Reprinted in the introduction to Mendoza's History of the Great and Mighty Kingdom of China, Hakluyt Society (1853)aside?What aside means

Galeote Pereira went to China as a smuggler and stayed as a prisoner, and what he wrote down about the system that held him is the most detailed outside account of Ming local government that exists from the sixteenth century.

How he got there

He was one of a party of Portuguese traders caught by the coastguard off the Fujian coast in 1549, in a period when direct trade was illegal and everyone did it anyway. He and his companions were marched inland, tried, and held — first as prisoners under sentence, then, when the sentence was never carried out, as a kind of permanent registered population, for years, before he finally got home and wrote it up.

He had every reason to hate the country that held him and instead wrote an account that is admiring in places to the point of astonishment.

The whipping

He watched punishment carried out and described the instrument precisely, because he had reason to look closely at it.

Their whips be certain pieces of canes, cleft in the middle, in such sort that they seem rather plain than sharp. He that is to be whipped lieth grovelong on the ground. Upon his thighs the hangman layeth on blows mightily with these canes, that the standers by tremble at their cruelty. Ten strypes draw a great deal of blood, twenty or thirty spoil the flesh altogether, fifty or threescore will require long time to be healed, and if they come to the number of one hundred, then are they incurable.

Thieves taken near the coast, he says, were whipped first and then cast in prison, where they died of hunger and cold — at that time when we were in prison, there died of them above threescore and ten.

The almshouse

Then, in the same breath, the thing that made him marvel.

They have moreover one thing very good, and that which made us all to marvel at them, being Gentiles: namely, that there be hospitals in all their cities, always full of people; we never saw any poor body beg.

He asked why, and was told: in every city there is a great enclosure containing houses for the blind, the lame, and the old who cannot work and have no other means to live. They are admitted on a written petition to the provincial authority, proving their condition, and once admitted they have rice for as long as they live — nothing else, but that for life. The houses also keep swine and hens, so that the poor are provided for without going out to beg.

A state that whipped a man to permanent injury for theft and fed every blind and crippled pauper in its cities for the rest of their lives, as a matter of ordinary administration, and did both without apparent contradiction. Pereira records the two facts one after the other because that is the order he encountered them in, and does not try to reconcile them.

The post

He also describes, from the inside, the machine that kept the court in Beijing informed of a country too large to see.

Every province sends monthly intelligence of everything of note — war, the state of the country, the king's revenues — to the capital, and it is done, he says, without fault: a post five hundred leagues from court still keeps its appointed day. Riders carry a horn or a belt of bells so the next post-house can have a fresh horse ready before they arrive; where the road is water, the boatmen have their barks ready the same way. Those whose news must travel the furthest send their couriers first, so that reports converge on the capital together rather than in the order the news occurred.

A prisoner with every reason to want this government to fail is describing, in close technical detail, an information system more reliable than anything in the Portugal or the Spain he had come from.

The cormorants

And, because he was a curious man and had a great deal of enforced leisure, the detail that has nothing to do with government at all.

The king kept barges on the rivers stocked with tame sea-crows — cormorants — bred, fed, and kept in cages, allotted a monthly ration of rice, and given out to the greatest magistrates, two or three birds to a man, to fish with. At the appointed hour the barges gather in a ring in shallow water; the birds, tied loosely under the wing, are let down; each fisherman empties his bird's throat into his own barge as it fills and lets it dive again; when enough is taken, the birds are freed to fish for their own pleasure.

There were twenty such barges, he says, in the city where he was held, and he went almost daily to watch them, and was never satisfied he had seen enough of so strange a way of fishing.

Why a prisoner's account is worth more than an ambassador's

Because he had no audience to perform for and no host to flatter.

An envoy sees what he is shown. Pereira saw what happened to a man the system had no further use for — the whip, the prison, the seventy dead of cold and hunger in a single term — and also saw, because he was left with nothing to do but look, the almshouses, the post riders and the fishing birds that nobody had arranged for his benefit. Both halves of the account come from the same pen and neither softens the other.

Loytia

Drafted from Mendoza, The History of the Great and Mighty Kingdom of China and the Situation Thereof (1853)aside?What aside means

In 1575 an Augustinian friar named Martín de Rada led a Spanish embassy into Fujian and happened to be in Fuzhou for the annual provincial graduation, and what he watched is the fullest eyewitness account of a Ming examination ceremony that survives from anyone who was not Chinese.

The examination

The provincial inspector, having finished touring his circuit — punishing wrongdoers, rewarding the deserving — proclaims in the chief city that any student who judges himself ready may present himself to be examined for the degree of juren, which Mendoza's translator renders Loytia: among the Chinese reckoned the making of a gentleman, among Europeans understood as a doctorate.

All the candidates give their names; a day is set; on it, every graduate already holding the degree in that city joins the inspector to examine the new candidates together, with great rigour, favouring above all those skilled in the laws of the country, by which they do govern all other faculties whatsoever — and requiring, besides the learning, that a man be good and virtuous. Those who pass are entered in a second register and a day is appointed for their commencement.

The oath

Before anything is given to them, they swear.

That in all offices committed unto them, they shall with all care and diligence do justice equally unto all men, and that they shall not receive any bribes or presents whatsoever: that they shall be true and loyal unto the king, and that they shall not conspire in any confederacy or treason against him.

Only after the oath does the inspector — standing, in the ceremony, for the person of the king himself — invest each man with the sash and the cap of his new rank, and embrace him.

The procession

Then the city turns out, and Mendoza's account of it runs for a page because Rada's party watched the whole eight hours of it.

Soldiers march first with drums and trumpets; then maces are borne; then the established graduates, some on horseback, some in litters; then the sponsors; then the new men themselves, bare of any upper garment as the custom required, mounted on white horses draped in cloth of gold, each with a tippet on his shoulder and a cap trailing two small tippets behind, in the manner — the friars could not help noticing — of a bishop's mitre. Before each new graduate go six frames of satin, each carried by four men, on which are written in gold letters his subject, his degree, and his family's arms.

The whole procession takes eight hours to pass. The city keeps the day as a festival, with dancing and games, and for three or four days afterward the better families take turns feasting the new graduates and courting their goodwill, because from that day forward any of them is qualified to hold office, and every family in the city has a reason to want to be remembered by one.

What it bought the state

An officer class recruited on a written law rather than on blood, sworn in public under oath before it received a single privilege, whose qualification a foreign friar — with no stake in the outcome and no access to the examination room — could nonetheless watch being tested, in front of the whole city, by men who had already passed it themselves.

Mendoza's own comment, filtered through Rada's report, is that no Christian kingdom examines its magistrates so rigorously before trusting them with office. It was not, on the evidence of the rest of his book, a comment he made carelessly: the same government that produced this ceremony also produced the whip Pereira watched used on thieves a generation earlier, in the same province, under men raised by exactly this process.

Five hundred years before

Drafted from Mendoza, The History of the Great and Mighty Kingdom of China and the Situation Thereof (1853)aside?What aside means

Mendoza wrote a whole chapter arguing that China had printing before Europe did, and got the reason for it right without knowing any of the details that would later prove him correct.

The claim

He states the European case first and fairly: printing is generally held to have begun at Mainz around 1458, credited to a German called Johann Gutenberg, and the first printed book was Augustine's City of God.

Then he sets the Chinese claim against it.

The Chinos do affirm, that the first beginning was in their country, and the inventor was a man whom they reverence for a saint... at this day there are found amongst them many books printed 500 years before the invention began in Germany.

His evidence is not argument but objects. Martín de Rada and his companions, on their way back from Fujian to the Philippines, brought a chest of printed Chinese books bought in Fuzhou — Mendoza says he owns one himself, and has seen others in Spain, Italy and the Indies. They would have brought many more, he adds, but the provincial governor grew suspicious that the books might teach foreigners the secrets of his country, and sent word that he would give them books for nothing rather than have them buy more — a promise, Mendoza notes drily, that was never kept.

What the editor could add three centuries later

The Hakluyt Society edition footnotes Mendoza's chapter with the scholarship available in 1853, and it is worth setting beside the friar's claim because it confirms the shape of it while correcting the specifics.

Printing without movable type in China does not go back past the early tenth century — the Confucian classics were block-printed in Sichuan between about 890 and 925. Movable type, the editor notes citing Stanislas Julien's research, was used far earlier than Gutenberg by a Chinese blacksmith named Bi Sheng, who worked with baked clay characters between 1041 and 1048 — very nearly four hundred years before Mainz. The technique was not widely adopted; Chinese printing settled instead on carved wooden blocks, one per page, which suited a language of thousands of characters far better than a case of movable type ever could.

The editor also records an actual surviving specimen: a copy of the Thousand Character Classic, printed in 1348, examined in the British Museum's collection — printed a full century before the Mainz Bible, in parallel columns of standard and cursive script, meant to teach students to read both hands from the same page.

Why Mendoza's version is worth keeping despite being wrong in the details

Because he had the causation right and the Europeans he was arguing against did not.

His own guess at the mechanism — that the technique travelled from China to Germany by way of Russia and Muscovy, or by sea and the Red Sea and Arabia — is wrong, and he says so tentatively, offering it as the best account available to him rather than as certainty. What he got right, on the evidence of a chest of books and nothing else, was the conclusion every later scholar confirmed: that a government run for six centuries on written examinations, published law codes and a bureaucracy that had to be supplied with a canon of texts had built the means of reproducing text at scale long before the country that would eventually claim the invention as its own.

A friar who never went to China argued, from a box of books somebody else brought back, against the settled opinion of his own continent — and turned out to be righter than wrong.

A million soldiers, free

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 7: The Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644, Part 1 (1988)contraction

The Hongwu emperor built the army out of hereditary military households — the weisuo — settled on state land in self-supporting garrisons. A household supplied a soldier in every generation, in perpetuity, and farmed the land that fed him. He is supposed to have said he could keep a million soldiers without spending a grain of the people's rice.

For about a century it did roughly what it was meant to. Then it did what every hereditary land-for-service arrangement everywhere does.

The failure everyone could see

The garrison households lost their land — to officers, to civilian landlords, to debt — and once the land was gone the service was an unfunded obligation on people who could not meet it. Desertion ran at rates the Ming's own inspectors recorded and could not fix. By the sixteenth century a Ming campaign was fought with hired troops, paid in silver.

Some version of that story attaches to almost every land-for-service army there has ever been, from the Roman frontier settlements to the Ottoman timars. What makes the Ming instance worth a chapter is that the state had the diagnosis in writing and kept the institution anyway, for two hundred more years, because Hongwu's Ancestral Injunctions forbade changing what he had set up.

Which is also the succession rule

Most dynasties have a succession custom that historians infer from what happened. The Ming had one written down as law: the same Ancestral Injunctions fixed the throne on the eldest son of the empress.

The Wanli emperor spent fifteen years trying to get round it in favour of a younger son he preferred. The bureaucracy refused, citing the text. He lost, and his response was to stop appearing at court — for something over two decades, during which memorials went unanswered and vacant offices went unfilled because only he could fill them.

A codified succession rule produced a constitutional crisis by being obeyed, and the crisis is generally reckoned to have done more damage to the late Ming government than any of its wars.

A wall, and other people's silver

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 7: The Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644, Part 1 (1988)contraction

The Ming built the Great Wall — not the earlier rammed-earth works, but the brick-and-stone construction most people picture, put up mainly in the sixteenth century after repeated failures to settle the steppe frontier by campaign or by trade agreement. It was expensive, and it was an admission: the dynasty could neither destroy the Mongol confederations nor buy them off the way the Song had bought the Liao.

The other defining pressure came by sea. Ming China ran on silver, taxed increasingly in silver after the sixteenth-century fiscal reforms, and did not produce much. It came from Japan and then, in enormous quantity, from Spanish mines in the Americas via Manila. For roughly a century the Chinese fiscal system depended on a supply it did not control and could not see.

When the flow contracted in the 1630s — for reasons in Japan, Manila and Europe — Chinese silver prices moved, tax obligations became crushing in real terms, and the resulting distress met a run of failed harvests and an epidemic. The rebellion that took Beijing in 1644 opened the way for the Manchus.

This is about the earliest state anywhere whose fate turns visibly on a global economy rather than on its own frontier. No ordinary measure of a state's strength — its territory, its army, its revenue on paper — registers exposure to a monetary system it does not control, and that exposure is arguably the most important fact about the late Ming.

The silver, and the hill

Drafted from (eds), The Cambridge History of China, Volume 7: The Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644, Part 1 (1988)end

Zhang Juzheng's reform of 1581 consolidated the accumulated tangle of land taxes, labour services and surcharges into a single payment, assessed on land and collected in silver. It is called the single whip, and it is the last major fiscal reform of imperial China before the twentieth century.

It also made the Ming state's revenue depend on a metal China did not mine.

The silver came from Japan, and then Spanish America by way of Manila, in quantities large enough that the price of silver in China and the output of a mine in Peru were connected facts. A government that collects in silver is fine while the silver arrives. In the 1630s the flow was interrupted — the Tokugawa restricted Japanese exports, the Manila trade was disrupted — at the same time as the coldest decades of the period, crop failure across the north-west, and epidemic.

Taxes assessed in silver in a country where silver had become scarce are a tax increase nobody voted for.

1644

A rebel army out of the famine districts took Beijing in April. The last Ming emperor walked up the hill behind the palace and hanged himself from a tree.

The general holding Shanhai pass against the Manchus then opened it and invited them through to destroy the rebels, which they did, and then stayed for two hundred and sixty-eight years.

What the Ming had already lost

The dynasty was declared over in 1644, and the state had stopped working some years before that. The soldiers who let the rebels into Beijing had not been paid. The silver that paid them had stopped arriving. The grain that fed the capital came up a canal from a countryside that had been in famine and epidemic for a decade.

What the Manchus took over in 1644 was not a functioning empire that they defeated. It was an administrative machine whose fuel had run out, and their first and most consequential decision was to fill it up again rather than build a different one.

Southern resistance went on for forty years — a succession of Ming princes, each proclaimed and each hunted down, the last killed in Burma in 1662, and a sea-based regime on Taiwan that held out until 1683. The dynasty took a very long time to actually end, and almost none of that fighting was about the throne in Beijing, which had been settled in a fortnight.

The man who opened the pass

Drafted from Mendoza, The History of the Conquest of China by the Tartars (1854)afterlife

In April 1644 a rebel army took Beijing and the last Ming emperor hanged himself on the hill behind the palace. The Ming had a general still in the field: Wu Sangui, commanding the frontier army at the Shanhai pass, the gate in the Great Wall where it meets the sea.

He was between a rebel who had killed his emperor and a Manchu army on the other side of the wall. He opened the gate to the Manchus, and together they destroyed the rebel and took Beijing.

The Qing then kept it, and Wu Sangui spent the next thirty years conquering southern China for them.

The manifesto

In 1673 he rebelled against the dynasty he had let in, and published a statement of his reasons. Palafox's continuator prints it from a Jesuit manuscript, and whatever its exact wording owes to translation through three languages, its argument is the thing itself:

When I summoned the Tartars to the assistance of the emperor my master, against the rebels who attacked him, and who endeavoured to usurp the monarchy, I gave an opportunity without intending it to these nations to seize upon it themselves. It now causes me the most painful regret, and my conscience reproaches me continually for the evil I have brought down upon my country, by reducing it beneath this tyrannical yoke. I am afraid that heaven will be irritated against me, and will punish me severely, if I do not make every effort to repair my fault.

The account is careful to record the price. The court held his only son and two grandchildren as hostages against exactly this, and he knew what raising the standard would do to them. He raised it anyway, and the narrator does not let him off: the liberty of his country, he writes, served as a decent pretext for saving his own life in preference to those of his children.

The revolt failed. It took eight years, ruined the south a second time, and ended with Wu Sangui dead and the Qing more securely in possession than before.

What the Qing kept

Almost everything.

They kept the six ministries, the provincial structure, the county magistrates, the tax registers, the Grand Canal and its grain fleet, the capital at Beijing and the palace in it. They kept the examinations, on the same canon, and expanded them. They kept the Ming law code with amendments. They compiled the Ming History, at enormous length, as every Chinese dynasty compiles its predecessor's — which is itself the strongest statement of continuity a Chinese state can make.

What they added was the thing the Liao had invented and the Yuan had used: a separate structure for the conquerors. The banner system, Manchu and Mongol and Chinese-martial, sat alongside the civil administration; senior posts were doubled between a Manchu and a Chinese holder; Manchuria and Mongolia and later Tibet and Xinjiang were governed through a different office entirely.

That is the northern frontier's oldest administrative idea, arriving at the capital for the last time, and it held the largest Chinese empire there has ever been for two hundred and fifty years.

The queue

The one thing the Qing did not take over was appearance. In 1645 they ordered every Chinese man to shave the front of his head and wear the Manchu queue, on a deadline, on pain of death.

It was resisted more fiercely than the conquest itself in some places — Jiangyin held out for eighty-one days over it — and it was enforced, and within two generations it was simply what Chinese men looked like. When the Qing fell in 1912, cutting the queue was the act by which people announced that the dynasty was over.

A hairstyle imposed by a conquering minority in a single edict became, in three hundred years, the thing Chinese men had to cut off to be modern. Wu Sangui, who had shaved his own head in 1644 before he rode through the pass, would have understood the arithmetic exactly.