HIST 270 · Chinese History · Chapter 14 · Lecture 2
Two Frontiers: Zheng He, the Great Wall, and the Silver That Came In Anyway
Background for the lecture "Two Frontiers": the tribute order and Zheng He's voyages, the Mongols from the founders to Altan Khan, the Ming walls, the sea ban and the wokou, and Japanese and American silver · 1371–1600
Act I: The Treasure Fleet (Review Question 4)
Textbook anchor: Ebrey, Chapter 14, "Relations with Other Countries," pp. 230–233 (pp. 231–232 missing from the course copy). Reading-guide question: what were the goals of Zheng He's maritime expeditions, and what factors led the Ming court to abruptly halt them?
The tribute order
The Ming founders inherited an old idea and made it rigid (slide B). Foreign rulers who wished to deal with China were to send envoys bearing gifts, acknowledge the emperor's superiority, receive gifts in return and, often, a seal and a calendar. Taizu announced his accession to neighboring courts in 1369 and received missions from Korea, Annam, Champa, Japan, Ryukyu and others. In 1374 he abolished the maritime trade superintendencies that had taxed private overseas commerce under the Song and Yuan. From then on, foreign trade was legal only as part of a tribute mission, at assigned ports, on an assigned schedule. Historians call the whole arrangement the tribute system, a term coined by John K. Fairbank, and now use it with caution: it describes the court's ideal more than the practice, which was flexible and full of private dealing.1
The ritual made the ranking visible. Envoys performed the ketou (kowtow, "knocking the head"), kneeling and touching their foreheads to the floor, and the court spoke of the emperor as a parent and of tributary rulers as his children. Historians describe the relationship as one of suzerain and vassal. What the system asked for was recognition, not territory; in that sense it was defensive, a way of keeping neighbors in their place rather than a program of conquest.
Behind the ritual lay a way of seeing the world (slide DD). Joseph Levenson and John K. Fairbank called it culturalism: loyalty to a civilization, its classics, rituals and written language, rather than to a nation-state. The emperor claimed to rule tianxia, "all under Heaven," and outsiders were judged by how far they had taken up Chinese ways; good change meant a return to the sages rather than progress toward something new. Levenson argued that modern Chinese history was in part a painful passage "from culturalism to nationalism," from tianxia to one state among many. The concept is useful but should not be pushed too far. Ming writers could voice sharp ethnic feeling, especially against the Mongols, and the Yongle court was curious enough about distant lands to send Zheng He to see them. Culturalism describes an ideal held by the educated elite, not the whole of Ming attitudes.
Zheng He
The Yongle emperor chose a eunuch to lead his fleets (slide C). Zheng He (1371–1433), born Ma He in a Muslim family of Yunnan, was captured as a boy when Ming armies conquered the province in 1381–1382, castrated and assigned to the household of the Prince of Yan. He served the prince in the civil war and rose to be a director of palace eunuchs; the surname Zheng was a reward. A Muslim commander suited a fleet bound for ports where Muslim merchants dominated trade, and a eunuch was a palace servant whose loyalty belonged to the emperor alone.
Between 1405 and 1433 the fleets made seven voyages (slide D). The first, in 1405–1407, numbered 62 large "treasure ships" and over two hundred support vessels, with some 27,800 men, according to the official Ming History; another Ming source gives 63 ships and 27,870 men. A later writer's figure of 255 additional ships, for a total of 317, is often quoted, but Dreyer thinks it double-counts and puts the whole fleet at about 250 ships. Even so, it was one of the largest fleets of its age. The early voyages sailed to Champa, Java, Sumatra, Malacca, Ceylon and Calicut on the Malabar coast of India; the fourth (1413–1415) and later voyages went on to Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, Aden and the Swahili coast of East Africa, with detachments reaching Mogadishu, Malindi and the ports of the Red Sea. The size of the largest ships is still argued. The official history gives dimensions that would make them more than 120 meters long, which many naval historians think impossible for a wooden ship; estimates of 60 to 75 meters are more widely accepted. The Pierian Spring slide on the treasure ships (slide GG) sets out the evidence, including an 11-meter rudder post dug up at the old Nanjing shipyard in 1957.2
What were the voyages for?
Review Question 4 asks about goals, and a good answer gives several. The first was display: to show the reach and wealth of a new emperor who had taken the throne by force and to bring foreign rulers into the tribute order. The second was diplomacy backed by force. The fleet carried soldiers, and it used them: in 1407 it destroyed the pirate fleet of Chen Zuyi at Palembang, and in 1411 it defeated and captured the king of Kotte in Ceylon and took him to Nanjing. It also supported the new port-state of Malacca against Siam. Zheng He's own inscription of 1431 at Liujiagang counts "more than thirty countries" reached (slide FF). Yet the fleets founded no colonies; the one Yongle attempt to annex territory, in Vietnam, was made by land. Historians differ on how to weigh the force. Many follow the textbook in seeing the voyages as an effort "to enroll more countries in the Ming tribute system" (p. 244); Geoff Wade calls them a form of early maritime colonialism, coercive in purpose if not in lasting results. The third was trade, conducted by the state: the ships carried silk, porcelain and copper coins and brought back pepper, spices, gems, aromatic woods and exotic animals. The official history adds a fourth, that the Yongle emperor wanted to find out whether his nephew Jianwen had escaped overseas. Most historians treat that as at most a minor motive.
Exotic gifts were part of the display (slide E). In 1414 envoys from Bengal brought a giraffe, which court poets identified with the qilin, an auspicious beast that appears in times of sage rule; a second giraffe came from Malindi the next year. The famous painting of the tribute giraffe on slide E records that celebration. Ma Huan, a Muslim interpreter who sailed on three of the voyages, wrote a sober account of the places the fleet visited, The Overall Survey of the Ocean's Shores (1433), and his descriptions of Calicut's markets and religious life are among the best primary sources for teaching the voyages (slide F).3
Why did they stop?
The critics won quickly (slide G). Civil officials argued that the voyages cost a great deal and brought back luxuries rather than revenue, and that the money was needed elsewhere: for the Mongol campaigns, for the war in Vietnam, for the new capital at Beijing and for the Grand Canal. Eunuch leadership itself made the fleets suspect to the bureaucracy. When the Yongle emperor died in 1424, his son, the Hongxi emperor, halted the voyages at once. His successor, the Xuande emperor, sent one more fleet in 1431–1433, perhaps to restore the flow of tribute. Zheng He died on or soon after that voyage; the date and place are uncertain (slide H).
The ending was more gradual than a single dramatic decision. Shipbuilding for the fleet stopped, the dockyards declined and the large ships rotted. A famous story says that the war ministry's records of the voyages were destroyed in the 1470s so that no one could revive them; it is a story, not a documented decision. The deck's date of 1474 for "breaking up" the great ships (slides H and AA) could not be confirmed in the sources checked for this revision, so the deck keeps its wording. What matters for the review question is the structural reason: the Ming state's priorities lay in the north, and the fleets served no interest that the bureaucracy wished to defend. Chinese merchants, meanwhile, kept sailing, in defiance of the law.
It helps to sort the deeper causes into four groups (slide EE). The first is economic: the Ming state lived on land taxes from farmers, not on customs revenue, so the fleets cost the treasury far more than they returned. The second is institutional: the officials who ran the government came from landowning families and the examinations, and the state kept merchants in a lower place. The third is ideological: culturalism and the Confucian distaste for profit made the voyages look needless, and the fact that eunuchs ran them made the scholar-officials, their rivals at court, even more hostile. The fourth is strategic: the Mongol frontier and the new capital at Beijing pulled money and attention north. None of this means Ming society was against trade; private commerce flourished. It means the state saw no reason to pay for trade at sea.
Comparisons with Columbus and da Gama (slide AA) are tempting but need care. The Ming fleets were not exploring; they sailed known routes with Arab and Indian pilots to ports long visited by Chinese traders. The real contrast is political: no European state could close Europe's sea trade as the Ming court tried to do.
Act II: The Steppe and the Wall (Review Question 5)
Textbook anchor: Ebrey, Chapter 14, "The Mongols and the Great Wall," p. 233. Reading-guide question: how did Ming policies toward the Mongols evolve from the early offensive campaigns to the defensive strategy that produced the Great Wall?
The founders' campaigns
The Ming drove the Yuan court out of China in 1368, but the Mongols remained a power on the steppe, and the early Ming took the offensive (slide J). The Hongwu emperor did not lead those campaigns himself. He sent his generals: Xu Da's great expedition of 1372 was defeated in the Orkhon valley, while Lan Yu's campaign of 1388 crushed the Mongol court near Lake Buir. The Yongle emperor, by contrast, did campaign in person, five times, in 1410, 1414, 1422, 1423 and 1424, and died on the march home from the last. The textbook says that both emperors "led armies into Mongolia" (p. 233); slide J now says the founders "sent" huge armies, and its notes record the slip.4
The campaigns cost a great deal and won little (slide K). Mongol horsemen could retreat across the steppe faster than a Ming army could follow, and the army had to carry its own grain. After the Yongle emperor, the Ming pulled back its forward garrisons, abandoning the outer posts beyond the line of the mountains north of Beijing. The deck's original statement that the Mongols "never formed a united federation" was too strong, and slide K now says that they rarely stayed united for long. They were often divided, but Esen united the Oirats and much of the eastern Mongols in the 1440s and early 1450s, and Dayan Khan reunited the eastern Mongols around 1500. The more accurate generalization is that unity rarely lasted long.
Tumu and after
The disaster of 1449 (slide L, already met in Lecture 1) belongs here too. The Oirat leader Esen, angered by Ming limits on tribute and trade, attacked the frontier, and the young emperor marched out against him and was captured at Tumu. Ebrey calls Esen "the khan of the Western Mongols" (p. 233); slide L now calls him a Mongol leader. In 1449 Esen held the title of taishi, a commander, and ruled through a Chinggisid khan; he claimed the khanship himself only in 1453 and was murdered in 1455 (Cambridge History of China, vol. 7, pp. 322, 331). The point matters because it was precisely the Chinggisid principle, that only descendants of Chinggis could be khan, that undid him.
The lesson the court drew from Tumu was defensive. The capital's own garrisons were rebuilt, and the frontier became a line to be held rather than a base for offensives.
Trade or war?
The heart of Review Question 5 is the trade deadlock (slide M). Mongol leaders said again and again that the raids would stop if they could trade, especially at regular horse markets on the frontier, where they could sell horses and buy grain, cloth, tea and iron goods. The court refused most of the time. Officials argued that trade fed the enemy, that tribute embassies cost the treasury dearly, and that bargaining with raiders was humiliating. The most dangerous of the later leaders, Altan Khan of the Tümed (1507–1582), raided almost every year in the 1540s, and in 1550 his horsemen rode to the outskirts of Beijing and plundered the suburbs for days. The court opened horse markets briefly in 1551 and closed them again the next year.
The deadlock broke by accident. In late 1570 Altan's grandson, Daiching Ejei (Bagha Ejei), quarrelled with his grandfather and fled to the Ming. The governor-general Wang Chonggu and the grand secretaries Gao Gong and Zhang Juzheng used him as a bargaining chip. In 1571 Altan accepted the title Shunyi Wang, "Obedient and Righteous Prince," sent tribute, and the court opened licensed horse markets along the border. Raiding fell off sharply, and the settlement held for decades. The textbook says the court agreed to trade with Altan "in 1570" (p. 233); 1570 was the defection and 1571 the agreement.5
Why walls?
Ebrey presents the wall as the outcome of the court's argument: neither trade nor war, but defense (slide N). Arthur Waldron's book, which remains the standard account, sharpens the picture. The first long Ming walls were built in the 1470s, when the governor Yu Zijun built about a thousand kilometers of rammed-earth wall along the edge of the Ordos to hold off Mongols who had moved into the great loop of the Yellow River. In the 1540s the court debated recovering the Ordos by force; its leading advocate, Zeng Xian, was executed in 1548 when the emperor turned against the plan. After that, and above all after Altan's raid of 1550, wall-building became the policy by default. The brick-faced walls, watchtowers and gates north of Beijing that visitors see today were built mostly from the 1560s to the 1580s, under commanders such as Qi Jiguang. Walls were a compromise, not a settlement: the argument between hawks and those who favored trade went on until 1571.6
The figures on slide O need updating. Ebrey says the Ming wall "runs about 1,500 miles" (p. 233). A national survey completed in 2009 measured the Ming walls at 8,851.8 kilometers, about 5,500 miles, of which 6,259 kilometers are walls proper and the rest trenches and natural barriers; the line runs from the Yalu River and Shanhaiguan in the east to Jiayuguan in Gansu. The "1,500 miles" is the straight-line distance between the ends. The textbook's "thirty-five feet high" is a maximum rather than an average; most sections are lower. Ebrey's best point survives the corrections: what tourists see as "the Great Wall" is overwhelmingly a Ming structure, built in the sixteenth century, not the wall of the First Emperor.
A strong answer to Review Question 5 tells the story as an evolution: offensives (1370s–1424), retreat and the shock of Tumu (1449), a long deadlock over trade with walls as the expedient (1470s–1560s), and the trade settlement of 1571, which did more than the walls to quiet the frontier.
Act III: The Sea and the Silver (Review Question 6)
Textbook anchor: Ebrey, Chapter 14, "Relations with Other Countries," pp. 233–235. Reading-guide question: how did the Ming Dynasty's restrictive maritime trade policies inadvertently fuel coastal piracy, and how did China eventually integrate into the new global trading networks?
The sea ban
The deck's title promises that the Ming "closed the sea," and the first step is to explain how. From 1371 Taizu issued a series of bans on private overseas voyages, known collectively as the haijin or sea prohibition, partly to cut off remnants of his coastal rivals and partly to stop raiders. Chinese were forbidden to sail abroad to trade; foreigners could come only with tribute missions (slide Q). Each partner was assigned a port: Ningbo for Japan, Fujian for the Ryukyu kingdom (at Quanzhou, later at Fuzhou), and Guangzhou for the kingdoms of Southeast Asia. Japan's missions were limited to one every ten years, with a fixed number of ships and men. The deck's notes mention envoys "from the Philippines" through Fuzhou; Fujian's tribute partner was Ryukyu.7
Smugglers and wokou
Trade went on anyway, as Ebrey stresses (slide R). Coastal families in Fujian and Zhejiang had sailed for centuries, the profits from silk and porcelain were enormous, and local officials and gentry often took a share. In the sixteenth century the Portuguese arrived (they reached Guangdong in 1513–1514) and joined the illicit trade from offshore islands such as Shuangyu near Ningbo, and Japanese merchants came with silver. Spanish traders came via Manila after 1571. The Dutch, whom the textbook lists alongside them, reached the China coast only about 1600 (Cambridge History of China, vol. 8, p. 349), so they belong to the next century; slide R now says so.
When the court tried to enforce the ban, trade turned violent (slide S). In 1523 two rival Japanese embassies fought each other in the streets of Ningbo, and the court closed the port's trade office. In 1548 the coastal commander Zhu Wan destroyed the smugglers' base at Shuangyu and executed captured traders, and was himself driven to suicide by the protests of coastal gentry who profited from the trade. The great wokou ("Japanese pirate") raids of the 1550s followed. The name misleads: Chinese sources of the time admit that most raiders were Chinese, with Japanese and others among them, and their best-known leader, Wang Zhi, was a merchant from Huizhou based in Japan.8
Ebrey writes that the Ming did not build a navy and instead moved coastal people inland (p. 234), and slide S repeats it; a new bullet on that slide now adds the armies of Qi Jiguang (CHC 7, pp. 502–504). That describes the early Ming, when Taizu evacuated some offshore islands, better than the 1550s. The raids of that decade were defeated by soldiers and ships: the supreme commander Hu Zongxian accepted the surrender of the smuggler chief Wang Zhi in 1557 (CHC 7, p. 502) and had him executed in 1559, and generals such as Qi Jiguang and Yu Dayou trained new armies and fleets that broke the raiders by the mid-1560s. (The great forced evacuation of the coast came later, under the Qing, in 1661.)
Opening the door
Ebrey's argument is that the raids eased only when trade was legalized (slide U), and that is right. The decisive step came in 1567, when the new Longqing emperor's court allowed Chinese merchants to sail, under license, from the port of Yuegang (later Haicheng) in southern Fujian to Southeast Asia; trade with Japan remained banned. The Portuguese settlement at Macao, which the slide once placed "under the new policies" and now dates to about 1557, came earlier, around 1557, as a local arrangement with Guangdong officials, who let the Portuguese stay in return for fees and help against pirates. Portugal held Macao until 1999. The timeline for students should run: Macao about 1557, wokou defeated by the mid-1560s, Yuegang opened in 1567, Manila founded by the Spanish in 1571.
Silver
Chinese silk, porcelain and other goods were wanted everywhere; what China wanted from the world was silver (slide T). Since the failure of Ming paper money in the fifteenth century, uncoined silver had become the currency of large transactions, and the government increasingly took taxes in silver, a change carried through by the Single Whip reforms, which spread piecemeal from the 1530s and were extended to the whole empire in 1581 (slide II). Two sources supplied it. The first was Japan, where new mines and a new refining technique, introduced in 1533, multiplied output; Portuguese ships from Macao and Chinese smugglers carried Japanese silver to China, and through most of the sixteenth century Japan was the larger supplier. The second was Spanish America. From 1571 the Manila galleons carried silver from Mexico and Peru across the Pacific, and Chinese junks from Yuegang carried it home. The deck's slide T and notes emphasize American silver; a fuller version adds Japan, and dates the Pacific route from 1571.9
Flynn and Giráldez dated the birth of global trade to 1571 for exactly this reason: for the first time, all the inhabited continents were linked by a continuous exchange, and silver was its medium. The point is a good one for students, because it reverses the usual image of a closed China. The Ming was the economy that drew silver from the rest of the world.
Slide II follows the silver into the county tax office. Under Taizu's system households paid the land tax largely in grain and cloth and owed unpaid labor service through the lijia, which students meet in Lecture 3. From the 1530s reforming officials in the Yangzi delta and the southeast began to fold the labor dues and many miscellaneous levies into a single assessment, levied mostly on land and paid in silver; the name "single whip" (yi tiao bian) is a pun on "one combined item." Adoption was uneven and often reversed until Zhang Juzheng, after the land survey of 1578–1581, ordered it everywhere in 1581, and even then remote regions came late. The effect was to tie the state's own revenue to the silver supply, which is why the interruptions of 1639 mattered so much in Lecture 4.
New crops
The same ships brought American plants (slide V). Maize appears in Chinese records by the mid-sixteenth century; the sweet potato was brought from Luzon to Fujian in 1594 by the merchant Chen Zhenlong and was promoted during a famine; peanuts, chili peppers and tobacco followed. These crops could grow on sandy soils and hillsides unsuited to rice or wheat. Their great impact on China's population, however, came mostly in the eighteenth century, under the Qing, when migrants cleared highland land in the interior. For the Ming, "introduced" is more accurate than the slide's "quickly spread."10
A strong answer to Review Question 6 traces cause and effect: the ban made legal trade scarce and illicit trade profitable; attempts to enforce it produced violence; the raids ended through military force and, more lastingly, through licensed trade; and once trade was open, China's demand for silver linked it to Japan, the Americas and Europe.
Pierian Spring: The Dalai Lama and the Wall
The settlement of 1571 had a religious sequel (slide Z). Altan Khan invited the head of the Gelug ("Yellow Hat") order of Tibetan Buddhism, Sonam Gyatso, to Mongolia. The invitation went out in the 1570s, and the two met in 1578 near Lake Kokonor (Qinghai), where Altan gave him the title Dalai Lama, dalai being the Mongol word for "ocean," and Sonam Gyatso recognized Altan as a reincarnation of Khubilai Khan. Two earlier heads of the order were named Dalai Lamas retroactively, so Sonam Gyatso became the third. The fourth Dalai Lama was identified as Altan's great-grandson. Ebrey dates the meeting to 1577 (p. 233); slide Z now gives 1578, following the Dictionary of Ming Biography entry on Altan (vol. 1, pp. 6–10). The alliance of Mongol khans and Gelug lamas would shape Inner Asian politics until the Qing.11
The other Pierian Spring slide (BB) lets students look at the wall's construction: brick facing over earth and rubble, towers at intervals, and garrisons quartered behind. The wall at Jinshanling in the photograph was built in the 1560s–1570s under Qi Jiguang, which is a good chance to connect the wokou wars on the coast with the northern frontier.
Two further Pierian Spring slides take up questions students often ask. The first (slide GG) asks how big the treasure ships really were. The Ming History gives the largest as 44 zhang 4 chi, about 137 meters (450 feet); Sally Church has shown that the figure may come from a novel of 1597 and argues that wooden ships of that size could not have sailed, and modern estimates run from under 60 meters to the full official length. The full-size replica at Nanjing, 63.25 meters long, takes a middle view. The second (slide HH) asks why China, so rich and inventive, did not industrialize first. Mark Elvin argued in 1973 that late imperial China fell into a "high-level equilibrium trap": farming was so efficient and labor so cheap that labor-saving machines did not pay. Kenneth Pomeranz answered in 2000 that the Yangzi delta was about as prosperous as England until about 1750 and that Europe's later lead owed much to coal and colonies; R. Bin Wong made a related argument. The debate is open, and students should treat Elvin's trap as one hypothesis, not a settled finding.12
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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John E. Wills Jr., "Relations with Maritime Europeans, 1514–1662," in Cambridge History of China, vol. 8, pp. 333–375, and Wang Gungwu, "Ming Foreign Relations: Southeast Asia," in the same volume, pp. 301–332. On the term "tribute system," see Wills, ed., Past and Present in China's Foreign Policy: From "Tribute System" to "Peaceful Rise" (Portland: MerwinAsia, 2010). On culturalism, see Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1958–1965), and John K. Fairbank, ed., The Chinese World Order (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968); for a critique, James Townsend, "Chinese Nationalism," Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs 27 (1992): 97–130. ↩
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Edward L. Dreyer, Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty, 1405–1433 (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007), the standard scholarly account, discusses fleet sizes and ship dimensions in ch. 4. Louise Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), is a readable popular history. Geoff Wade, "The Zheng He Voyages: A Reassessment," Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 78, no. 1 (2005): 37–58, argues the coercive view. Claims that the fleet reached the Americas have no scholarly support. ↩
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Ma Huan, Ying-yai sheng-lan: "The Overall Survey of the Ocean's Shores" [1433], trans. J. V. G. Mills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Hakluyt Society, 1970), with the Mao Kun navigation map in an appendix. ↩
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Cambridge History of China, vol. 7, pp. 99, 159, 223; Dreyer, Early Ming China, pp. 70–72, 138–143, 173–194; Morris Rossabi, "The Ming and Inner Asia," in Cambridge History of China, vol. 8, pp. 221–271. ↩
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Henry Serruys, Sino-Mongol Relations during the Ming, vol. 2, The Tribute System and Diplomatic Missions (1400–1600) (Brussels: Institut Belge des Hautes Études Chinoises, 1967), and vol. 3, Trade Relations: The Horse Fairs (1400–1600) (1975); Arthur Waldron, The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), ch. 9. ↩
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Waldron, The Great Wall of China, chs. 6–9; Julia Lovell, The Great Wall: China against the World, 1000 BC–AD 2000 (London: Atlantic Books, 2006), chs. 8–10. ↩
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Li Kangying, The Ming Maritime Trade Policy in Transition, 1368 to 1567 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2010), chs. 1–2; Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), ch. 10. ↩
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Kwan-wai So, Japanese Piracy in Ming China during the 16th Century (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1975); James Geiss, "The Chia-ching Reign, 1522–1566," in Cambridge History of China, vol. 7, pp. 490–505. ↩
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Ray Huang, Taxation and Governmental Finance in Sixteenth-Century Ming China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), ch. 4, and Liang Fang-chung, The Single-Whip Method of Taxation in China (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), on the Single Whip. Richard von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune: Money and Monetary Policy in China, 1000–1700 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), ch. 4; Dennis O. Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, "Born with a 'Silver Spoon': The Origin of World Trade in 1571," Journal of World History 6, no. 2 (1995): 201–221. ↩
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Ping-ti Ho, "The Introduction of American Food Plants into China," American Anthropologist 57, no. 2 (1955): 191–201, and Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1959), ch. 8. ↩
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Johan Elverskog, The Jewel Translucent Sūtra: Altan Khan and the Mongols in the Sixteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2003), translates the Mongol chronicle of Altan's reign; see also Matthew T. Kapstein, The Tibetans (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), ch. 5. ↩
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Sally K. Church, "Zheng He: An Investigation into the Plausibility of 450-ft Treasure Ships," Monumenta Serica 53 (2005): 1–43; Mark Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1973), ch. 17; Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); R. Bin Wong, China Transformed: Historical Change and the Limits of European Experience (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). ↩
Suggested Reading for Deeper Preparation
Edward L. Dreyer, Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty, 1405–1433 (2007). The scholarly account of the voyages, voyage by voyage, with sober estimates of ships and men.
Ma Huan, The Overall Survey of the Ocean's Shores, trans. J. V. G. Mills (1970). The interpreter's own account; short passages on Calicut or Hormuz make excellent primary-source exercises.
Arthur Waldron, The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth (1990). The book that showed the Great Wall as a Ming policy choice and traced the debates behind it.
Julia Lovell, The Great Wall: China against the World (2006). A lively popular history of all the walls, good for students.
Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire (2010). Chapters on the sea, the steppe and the silver economy, written for nonspecialists.
Richard von Glahn, Fountain of Fortune (1996). The definitive study of Ming money and silver imports; also the best guide to the debate over 1639 that Lecture 4 meets.
Kwan-wai So, Japanese Piracy in Ming China during the 16th Century (1975). The classic study of the wokou wars.
Timothy Brook, Vermeer's Hat: The Seventeenth Century and the Dawn of the Global World (2008). Seven paintings, seven stories of global trade, several of them about Chinese porcelain and silver; ideal for students.