HIST 270 · Chinese History · Chapter 14 · Lecture 4
The Garden and the Flood: Late-Ming City Culture and the Fall of 1644
Background for the lecture "The Garden and the Flood": gardens, publishers, novels and The Peony Pavilion, then the empty treasury, the Manchu war, factions, cold, rebels, silver and the flood of Kaifeng · 1550–1644
Act I: The Garden (Review Question 10)
Textbook anchor: Ebrey, Chapter 14, "Urban Culture," pp. 241–244, with Material Culture: "Gardens of Suzhou," p. 241, and Documents: "Scene from The Peony Pavilion," pp. 242–243. Reading-guide question: describe the flourishing of urban culture in the Ming Dynasty and how it was reflected in the rise of vernacular literature and drama.
Literati in the cities
Ebrey begins with a choice (slide B). Many educated men with means chose to live in cities, especially in Jiangnan, the region of the lower Yangzi around Suzhou, Hangzhou, Nanjing and Yangzhou, where they could pursue an elegant life of collecting, painting, poetry and friendship. They were not alone. Merchants, many of them from Huizhou and Shanxi, had money to spend, and so did a broad urban middle stratum of shopkeepers, clerks, artisans and students. The urban culture of the late Ming belonged to all of them, and its markets in books, art and entertainment blurred the line between gentleman and merchant. Craig Clunas's studies of the period show how much anxiety that blurring caused: writers produced guides to good taste precisely because money could now buy the trappings of refinement.1
Gardens
Gardens were the most admired of these creations (slides C, CC). Inside the walls of their homes, well-off families built gardens as works of art, arranging rocks, water, bamboo and twisted pines in the way a landscape painter composed a scroll. Pavilions, windows, moon gates and winding paths framed small views and revealed them in sequence. The Humble Administrator's Garden in Suzhou, built in the early sixteenth century by a retired official, Wang Xianchen, is the most famous; its name, from a line about a man too clumsy for office who grows vegetables instead, is a joke about retirement. The painter Wen Zhengming made two albums of its views, in 1533 and 1551; slide C shows a leaf from the second. About twenty Ming gardens survive in Suzhou, though all have been rebuilt many times. Clunas's point is worth giving students: Ming gardens were also property, often with orchards and fishponds that produced income, and their aesthetic of retreat was bought with commercial wealth.
Books for everyone
Commercial printing boomed in the sixteenth century (slide D). Publishers in Jianyang in Fujian, in Nanjing and in Suzhou printed cheap books for readers with only basic schooling: almanacs, household encyclopedias, guides to letter-writing and to the examinations, medical handbooks, religious tracts and "ledgers of merit and demerit," which let readers keep account of their good and bad deeds. Illustrations sold books, and publishers hired artists to make them; the world map on slide D comes from the illustrated encyclopedia Sancai tuhui, printed in 1609. Cynthia Brokaw's work on merit ledgers shows how these tracts married Buddhist ideas of retribution to the Confucian ethic of self-cultivation, and how merchant readers found them useful.2
Vernacular fiction and the novels
Writers increasingly used the vernacular, a written form close to the spoken language, rather than classical Chinese (slide E). Vernacular short stories, collected and polished in the 1620s by Feng Menglong, were full of shop clerks, merchants, monks, students and matchmakers, people very like their readers. The first full-length novels drew on story cycles that oral storytellers had developed over centuries (slide F). Romance of the Three Kingdoms, about the generals and statesmen who fought over the remains of the Han, appeared in print in 1522 in its earliest surviving edition; Water Margin, about a band of 108 outlaws at the end of the Northern Song, circulated in editions from the mid-sixteenth century.
Two more novels followed in the 1590s and after (slide G). Journey to the West, printed in 1592, turns the pilgrimage of the Tang monk Xuanzang to India into a fantasy, with the irrepressible Monkey and the greedy Pigsy as his companions; its attribution to Wu Cheng'en is a twentieth-century conjecture. The Plum in the Golden Vase, which circulated in manuscript in the 1590s and was printed around 1617, is a novel of manners about a lustful merchant, Ximen Qing, his wife and five concubines; its author's pseudonym, the "Scoffing Scholar of Lanling," has never been identified. Ebrey's point that little is known about the authors matters: novels were not yet respectable, and gentlemen who wrote them hid their names, while competing publishers rushed illustrated editions into print.3
Plays and banquets
Drama was the most social of the arts (slides H, I). The Jesuit Matteo Ricci, in China from 1583 until his death in Beijing in 1610, saw troupes of actors everywhere, in cities and traveling the roads, and complained that their leaders bought young children to train as performers. At banquets, he wrote, guests enjoyed the plays so much that "the banquet at times may last for ten hours." The dominant style was kunqu, a refined musical drama from the Suzhou region. Play scripts were largely poetry, and people bought them to read as well as to stage. Playwrights were less shy of their names than novelists.
The greatest of them was Tang Xianzu (1550–1616) (slides J, K). The Peony Pavilion (1598) tells of Du Liniang, the sheltered daughter of an official, who falls in love with a young man she meets in a dream, pines away and dies; the young man, Liu Mengmei, finds the self-portrait she left buried in the garden, and his love brings her back to life. Ebrey's Documents feature includes the comic tutoring scene, in which the pedant Chen Zuiliang lectures on the Book of Songs and insists that a woman should be screened from view at every step, while his pupil hears in the poems only the call of love. Tang's preface states the theme: love that can make the living die and the dead live. The Dream of Handan (1601), which Ebrey spells Han Tan, satirizes official ambition through a man who lives an entire career, triumph, disgrace, death sentence and rehabilitation, in a dream that lasts no longer than it takes to cook a pot of millet.4
The cult of feeling
Fiction changed how educated people judged real life (slide L). Readers began to measure themselves and others by the pure feelings of literary characters, and intense, even obsessive attachments, to a lover, a friend, a rock or a flower, came to be admired as signs of authenticity. Young women readers of The Peony Pavilion wrote commentaries on it, and stories circulated of girls who died of longing after reading it. The courtesan culture of Nanjing's Qinhuai quarter flourished, and writers compared frustrated officials to talented women waiting to be appreciated. Historians often link this "cult of qing" (feeling) to the ideas of Wang Yangming's radical followers, especially Li Zhi, whom students met in Lecture 3.
Women readers and writers
Ebrey notes that educated men and women judged themselves by the feelings of literary characters (p. 244), and slide GG follows the women. In well-off Jiangnan families daughters were often taught the classics and poetry at home, and from the later sixteenth century commercial publishers issued anthologies of women's verse. Dorothy Ko's "teachers of the inner chambers" formed networks of kin and friends who wrote to and for one another. The household of Shen Yixiu (1590–1635) of Wujiang is the classic case: after her daughter Ye Xiaoluan died in 1632, days before her wedding, the family printed the women's collected writings. The same decades brought tighter limits. Footbinding spread from elite families to many ordinary ones and became a mark of respectability; Ko stresses that mothers bound their daughters' feet as part of a proper upbringing, which is why the custom proved so durable. The state rewarded widow chastity from 1368, honoring a widow widowed before thirty who stayed unmarried past fifty with a commemorative arch and relief from labor service, and Katherine Carlitz has shown how mid-Ming lineages and local elites used such honors to display their status. Susan Mann's work traces the sequel under the Qing; claims about Ming women's lives should not borrow its eighteenth-century evidence.5
A strong answer to Review Question 10 connects the culture to its economic base: commercial wealth, a large literate public, a publishing industry, and audiences who wanted stories about people like themselves. It then names specific works and the values they expressed.
Act II: The Flood (Review Question 11)
Textbook anchor: Ebrey, Chapter 14, "The Fall of the Ming Dynasty," pp. 244–245, and the Summary, p. 246. Reading-guide question: what combination of fiscal, environmental, and military crises culminated in the collapse of the Ming dynasty in 1644?
The empty treasury
The recap slide (N) is a good place to begin, because the problems that broke the Ming were old: a throne with no buffer, a costly frontier, dependence on silver from abroad and a village tax system that had decayed. By 1600 the government was nearly bankrupt (slide O). The Wanli emperor's "three great campaigns" of the 1590s, against a mutiny at Ningxia in 1592, against the Japanese invasion of Korea in 1592–1598, and against the rebel chieftain Yang Yinglong at Bozhou in the southwest in 1599–1600, cost well over ten million taels of silver. The imperial clan, which Taizu had endowed with stipends, numbered tens of thousands, and in some provinces the stipends owed exceeded the tax revenue retained to pay them. Disaster relief drained the rest. The emperor himself, unwilling to work with his officials, sent eunuch commissioners to the provinces from 1596 to collect mining and commercial taxes directly, provoking riots in several cities.6
The Manchu war
One crisis is missing from Ebrey's account: the war with the Manchus. The deck meets it on slide O and on slide AA, which now introduces Nurhaci, the Later Jin (1616) and the Qing (1636). In 1618 Nurhaci, the Jurchen leader whom students meet in Chapter 16, attacked the Ming frontier town of Fushun. In 1619 a large Ming expedition was destroyed at Sarhu, and by 1621–1622 the Ming had lost almost all of Liaodong, the region east of the Liao River. To pay for the war, the court imposed a surcharge on the land tax, the "Liaodong levy," from 1618, and later added surcharges for suppressing the rebels and for training troops (1637 and 1639). Together they added millions of taels a year to the land tax, borne largely by the same farmers who were facing famine. The northeastern war tied down the dynasty's best troops for twenty-five years, and it was a Ming general on that frontier, Wu Sangui, who would open the gate to the Manchus in 1644. A full answer to Review Question 11 needs it.7
Factions
Ebrey's diagnosis of court politics is moral (slides P, Q). Officials saw the dynasty's problems as the work of immoral men, so the cure was to remove them, and politics became a war of accusation and counteraccusation. Former officials gathered at the Donglin Academy in Wuxi, revived in 1604 by Gu Xiancheng and Gao Panlong, called for a return to orthodox ethics and blamed the followers of Wang Yangming for teaching people to follow their own innate knowledge, which in practice, they said, meant their own advantage. The deck needs one more name here. Under the Tianqi emperor (r. 1620–1627) the eunuch Wei Zhongxian took control of the court and in 1625–1626 purged the Donglin party: leading officials such as Yang Lian and Zuo Guangdou died under torture in prison, and Gao Panlong drowned himself. The new Chongzhen emperor removed Wei in 1627, but the factional hatreds outlived him. "Nothing could be settled" (slide P notes) overstates the paralysis; the problem was rather that every policy became a factional weapon.8
The cold
Nature turned against the dynasty (slide R). The Little Ice Age, a period of cooler temperatures across much of the Northern Hemisphere, began well before 1600, but the 1630s and early 1640s were among its harshest decades in China. Timothy Brook describes the last Ming reign as a sequence of "sloughs," periods of cold, drought and disaster; between 1637 and 1641 north China suffered drought on a scale not seen for centuries, with locusts and epidemics in its wake. Geoffrey Parker's Global Crisis sets China's collapse in a worldwide pattern of climate shock, war and revolt in the mid-seventeenth century.9
Shaanxi, 1628, and the rebels
The rebellions began in northern Shaanxi (slide S), a poor, dry frontier province with many soldiers. In 1627–1628 famine became desperate. Army deserters and soldiers who had not been paid formed bands to look for food, and farmers whose grain had been seized joined them. In 1629 the court, looking for savings, cut the postal relay system and dismissed thousands of relay workers. One of them was Li Zicheng (1606–1645), a former shepherd, who rose to lead the rebels in the north. Zhang Xianzhong (1606–1647), a former soldier, led bands between the Yellow and Yangzi rivers (slide T). By 1632 the bands had spread into four more provinces. The government's response, raising taxes to pay for suppression, was, as the slide says, the last thing hungry people needed. Li in particular learned to win support, promising to equalize land and abolish taxes, and he recruited educated advisers.
Silver, 1639
The deck's silver slide (U) makes a strong claim that historians have debated for forty years. In 1639 the Tokugawa shogunate expelled the Portuguese from Japan, closing the Macao–Nagasaki route; in late 1639 the Spanish in Manila massacred thousands of Chinese residents after a revolt, disrupting the galleon trade. William Atwell argued that silver imports fell sharply as a result, that deflation raised the real burden of rents and taxes, and that hoarding made matters worse. Richard von Glahn, using Japanese and Spanish trade data, found that imports stayed high into the early 1640s, since Dutch and Chinese traders took over much of the Japan trade, and argued that the late-Ming monetary crisis was a domestic one of hoarding and falling confidence, not a sudden cut in supply. Brian Moloughney and Xia Weizhong reached similar conclusions. The safe statement for students is that the trade disruptions of 1639 sharpened a monetary crisis already under way; "suddenly dropped" is too strong.10
Even rich Jiangnan was not spared (slide V). In the 1640s tenants rose against landlords, bondservants against masters, and urban workers rioted. These risings were local and uncoordinated, but they show that the crisis was not confined to the poor north.
Kaifeng, 1642
The most terrible single event was the flood of Kaifeng (slide W). Li Zicheng besieged the city, the old Song capital on the Yellow River, three times in 1641–1642. During the third siege, in October 1642, the river dikes were breached and the Yellow River poured into the city. Several hundred thousand people in the city died, of hunger, disease and the flood, and excavations have found the inner city buried under meters of silt. Ebrey says the rebels cut the dikes (p. 245), and William Atwell's chapter in the Cambridge History of China says the same: the flood came "when the rebels cut key dikes on the Yellow River early in October" (vol. 7, p. 635). Some later writers blame the Ming defenders instead, but this revision found no reliable source that overturns the textbook, so slide W follows Ebrey and the Cambridge History. Ebrey adds that smallpox followed the flood.11
Beijing, 1644
Li proclaimed his own dynasty, the Shun, at Xi'an in early 1644 and marched on Beijing (slide X). The capital fell on 25 April. The Chongzhen emperor rang the bell for an audience that no officials attended, then hanged himself on the hill behind the palace. Zhang Xianzhong turned west and set up his own regime at Chengdu, where his rule became a byword for slaughter (slide DD); Qing-era sources exaggerate the numbers, though Sichuan's population clearly collapsed in these decades. Ebrey's conclusion, that rebels, not foreign invaders, brought down the Ming, is correct as far as it goes. Within six weeks, however, Wu Sangui and the Manchu regent Dorgon defeated Li at Shanhaiguan, and the Qing took Beijing, which is where Chapter 16 begins. Slide AA adds why Li failed to hold the capital: his men extorted silver from captured officials by torture rather than recruiting them, and Wu Sangui, caught between Li and the Manchus, chose the Manchus. The battle at Shanhai Pass was fought on 27 May 1644, and Qing troops entered Beijing on 6 June. Slides S and T add two causes in their notes: land and granaries lost to the state over the dynasty, and the 1628–1629 cuts to the postal relay that put men like Li Zicheng out of work.
A strong answer to Review Question 11 does what slide Y does: it groups the crises (fiscal and political, environmental, economic, military) and shows how each made the others worse. The best answers add the Manchu war, which joins the fiscal and military threads, and are careful about the contested claims: the silver shock and the Kaifeng dikes.
Pierian Spring: The Ming World in 1600
The deck's last Pierian Spring slide (EE) uses Ebrey's summary to look back. By 1600 the population had reached perhaps 175 million; more books aimed to entertain; Jiangnan stayed several steps ahead of other regions; thinkers criticized inherited ideas more sharply; and the Great Wall remained a trace of old fears of the Mongols. It is worth ending the chapter with the question Ebrey's summary invites: if so much was flourishing in 1600, why did the state fall in 1644? The answer the four lectures build is that society and state had grown apart. Commercial wealth stayed in private hands and in the cities, while a state built by Taizu for a fixed agrarian order could not tax that wealth, could not govern without an active emperor and could not meet a climate crisis and two wars at once.
Two new Pierian Spring slides fill gaps in Ebrey's account. Slide HH follows the merchants. The four occupations ranked merchants last, but from 1450, short of money after Tumu, the court sold titles as students of the Imperial Academy, and merchant families bought them; Huizhou merchants above all paid for schools, tutors and lineage halls, and their sons entered the examination elite. Wang Yangming's epitaph of 1525 for the merchant Fang Lin, with its line that the four kinds of people "had different occupations but the same Way," is the best-known sign of the shift in attitudes that Yü Ying-shih traced. The resulting gentry, degree-holders who led local society, is the class whose wealth paid for this lecture's gardens, books and plays.12
Slide II tells the war that Ebrey mentions in one line (p. 244). In 1592 Toyotomi Hideyoshi, having unified Japan, sent about 158,000 men into Korea, armed with muskets made in Japan on Portuguese models introduced in 1543. Seoul fell within three weeks and Pyongyang by summer. Admiral Yi Sun-sin's victories at sea, with a few armored turtle ships in his fleet, cut Japanese supply lines, and a Ming army under Li Rusong retook Pyongyang in early 1593. Negotiations failed, Japan invaded again in 1597, and after Hideyoshi's death in September 1598 the Japanese withdrew; Yi was killed in the last battle, at Noryang, in December. Chinese historians count the war among the Wanli emperor's "three great campaigns," and its cost fed the near-bankruptcy of slide O.13
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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Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Cambridge: Polity, 1991; repr. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004), and Clunas, Fruitful Sites: Garden Culture in Ming Dynasty China (London: Reaktion, 1996). ↩
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Cynthia J. Brokaw, The Ledgers of Merit and Demerit: Social Change and Moral Order in Late Imperial China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991); Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow, eds., Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). ↩
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Andrew H. Plaks, The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), is the standard study. Translations: Anthony C. Yu, trans., The Journey to the West, rev. ed., 4 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012); David Tod Roy, trans., The Plum in the Golden Vase, 5 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993–2013). ↩
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Tang Xianzu, The Peony Pavilion (Mudan ting), trans. Cyril Birch, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002); on readers and the play, see Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), ch. 2. ↩
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Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994); Ko, Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Katherine Carlitz, "Shrines, Governing-Class Identity, and the Cult of Widow Fidelity in Mid-Ming Jiangnan," Journal of Asian Studies 56, no. 3 (1997): 612–640; Mark Elvin, "Female Virtue and the State in China," Past and Present 104 (1984): 111–152; T'ien Ju-k'ang, Male Anxiety and Female Chastity (Leiden: Brill, 1988); Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China's Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). ↩
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Ray Huang, "The Lung-ch'ing and Wan-li Reigns, 1567–1620," in Cambridge History of China, vol. 7, pp. 511–584; Kenneth M. Swope, A Dragon's Head and a Serpent's Tail: Ming China and the First Great East Asian War, 1592–1598 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009). ↩
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Kenneth M. Swope, The Military Collapse of China's Ming Dynasty, 1618–44 (London: Routledge, 2014); Frederic Wakeman Jr., The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), chs. 1–3. ↩
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John W. Dardess, Blood and History in China: The Donglin Faction and Its Repression, 1620–1627 (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2002). ↩
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Timothy Brook, The Troubled Empire, chs. 3 and 11; Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013), ch. 5. ↩
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William S. Atwell, "International Bullion Flows and the Chinese Economy circa 1530–1650," Past and Present 95 (1982): 68–90; Brian Moloughney and Xia Weizhong, "Silver and the Fall of the Ming: A Reassessment," Papers on Far Eastern History 40 (1989): 51–78; Richard von Glahn, "Myth and Reality of China's Seventeenth-Century Monetary Crisis," Journal of Economic History 56, no. 2 (1996): 429–454. ↩
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Roger V. Des Forges, Cultural Centrality and Political Change in Chinese History: Northeast Henan in the Fall of the Ming (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), ch. 6; William S. Atwell, "The T'ai-ch'ang, T'ien-ch'i, and Ch'ung-chen Reigns, 1620–1644," in Cambridge History of China, vol. 7, pp. 585–640, at p. 635; Michael Storozum et al., "Geoarchaeological Evidence of the AD 1642 Yellow River Flood That Destroyed Kaifeng, a Former Capital of Dynastic China," Scientific Reports 10 (2020): 3765, which confirms that silt entombed the inner city and that the walls trapped the floodwater. ↩
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Ping-ti Ho, The Ladder of Success in Imperial China: Aspects of Social Mobility, 1368–1911 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), on purchased studentships; Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Yü Ying-shih, Zhongguo jinshi zongjiao lunli yu shangren jingshen (Taipei: Lianjing, 1987). ↩
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Kenneth M. Swope, A Dragon's Head and a Serpent's Tail: Ming China and the First Great East Asian War, 1592–1598 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009); Samuel Hawley, The Imjin War: Japan's Sixteenth-Century Invasion of Korea and Attempt to Conquer China (Seoul: Royal Asiatic Society, Korea Branch, 2005). ↩
Suggested Reading for Deeper Preparation
Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (1998). The best single book on late-Ming commercial culture.
Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things (1991) and Fruitful Sites (1996). Taste, luxury and gardens as property and status.
Tang Xianzu, The Peony Pavilion, trans. Cyril Birch (2nd ed., 2002). The full play; scenes 7 and 10 (the tutor and the dream) work well in class.
Andrew H. Plaks, The Four Masterworks of the Ming Novel (1987). The standard interpretive study of the four novels.
Kenneth M. Swope, The Military Collapse of China's Ming Dynasty, 1618–44 (2014). The military history the textbook omits: the Manchu war, the rebels and the generals.
Frederic Wakeman Jr., The Great Enterprise (1985). The first chapters give the fullest account in English of the late-Ming crisis; the bridge to Chapter 16.
Geoffrey Parker, Global Crisis (2013). The fall of the Ming as part of a worldwide seventeenth-century crisis.
Lynn A. Struve, ed., Voices from the Ming-Qing Cataclysm (1993). Eyewitness accounts of 1644 and after, for primary-source teaching.