Over the past thirty years, a remarkable transformation has been taking place in the study of Chinese social history. New interpretations challenge both the conventional wisdom about pre-modern Chinese society and much existing scholarship. One group of scholars that is at the forefront of these changes is known as the South China school (Hua’nan xuepai). The school is distinguished less by new theoretical approaches than by new research methods, including the choices its scholars make about where they work. A growing number of historians of China now believe that they need to do their research not just in the kinds of places usually associated with the historical profession – the library and archive – but also in the Chinese countryside. This book explores one aspect of this transformation in the study of Chinese history. It shows how innovative research approaches are changing our understanding of China’s past, and helping us rewrite Chinese history from the ground up.
The origins of the South China school approach can be traced back to a group of scholars who discovered – or perhaps recognized is the better term – a corpus of historical materials that had previously been mostly ignored by professional historians. A vast quantity of historical documents is preserved today not in specialized collections but rather in the homes of ordinary rural people, and in their temples and other public spaces. These materials include genealogies, stone inscriptions, contracts and deeds, account books, ritual texts, diaries, letters, and the literary collections and notebooks of local scholars whose reputations never went beyond their locality and whose works were therefore never published. The collection, interpretation, and analysis of these materials, combined with observations and interviews in the places where the materials are found, has become a major methodological focus for these scholars.
At roughly the same time, a second group of historians, significantly overlapping with the first, began to consider the use of the living ritual and religious traditions of rural people as a valuable historical source. Rather than dismissing the temples and temple festivals that were being revived across China since the 1980s as timeless relics of an unchanging traditional culture or the purely instrumental recycling of fragments from the past, with little to tell us about history, these scholars ask how temples and rituals can be used to learn about the communities in which they are embedded. Documenting and analyzing these traditions and their histories has, likewise, become central to how these scholars do their work.
The research coming out of these two approaches has led to the emergence of the South China school, also known as the school of historical anthropology (lishi renleixue). It offers new understandings of historical change in Chinese society, understandings that are significantly different from the version recorded in official histories and official archives and analyzed by previous generations of historians. Scholars using these research methods have made contributions in fields as diverse as the history of kinship, ethnic identity, and economic development.1
This book focuses on one specific area of Ming history, and indeed in a sense on a specific discovery. Working independently in different parts of China, each of the contributors to this volume found compelling evidence that the military institutions of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) had a powerful impact on the communities they studied. More surprisingly, the impact of these institutions endured well beyond the temporal limits of the Ming – they shaped local society not just in the Ming, but also in the Qing (1644–1911) and even beyond the Qing to the twentieth century and the present. All of the essays in the volume explore this one issue from different perspectives and in different places.
In hindsight, evidence of the significance of the Ming military should have been plain to see. For example, the Ming military has left a legacy that survives in China’s administrative geography today. One can find villages in many parts of China that bear the name of the Ming-era military unit that was stationed there long ago. It has left a legacy that survives in popular historical memory. Across China today countless families preserve and transmit collective memories of ancestors who served as Ming soldiers. References to family military service in the Ming are also extraordinarily abundant in non-official documents, especially genealogies. In many places in rural China, the legacy of Ming military institutions is far more visible today than that of the Manchu Eight Banners, the institution that has been justifiably central to much recent historical scholarship on the Qing. These are just a few of the many indications that the institutions of the Ming military have played a significant and enduring role in Chinese society from the late imperial period to the present.
But this legacy has barely registered in much of the previous scholarship on the Ming military, which has stressed other concerns. When the editors of the Ming dynasty volumes of the Cambridge History of China surveyed the field in 1998, they acknowledged the inadequacy of the coverage of military topics: “The Ming military still needs a broad study touching on its management, its social composition, its training and specialized skills, its employment on the battlefield, and its role in preserving civil order.”2 This is not to say that military topics were neglected completely; in fact the Cambridge history covered military matters in more detail than did many Chinese-language studies. But at the time the editors presumably thought that the topic was of interest mainly to specialists.
Today the situation is very different. A recent article by David Robinson makes a detailed and persuasive case for “Why military institutions matter for Ming history.” Robinson argues that attention to military institutions can help us to better understand the Ming state and to place Ming history in a broader, comparative, and global perspective.3
One reason for greater attention to the history of the Ming military recently is recognition of its connections to the preceding dynasty, the Mongol Yuan. The administrative methods of the last great Eurasian nomadic empire conditioned the subsequent history of many lands that came under Mongol sway, including China. Many elements of the Ming military system were inherited from the Mongols. The adoption and transformation of these institutions from the steppe would have long-term consequences; so too would the subsequent reaction in the Ming to issues that had been created by the period of Mongol rule. For example, in the time of Genghis Khan large numbers of Muslims, known as Huihui, were brought from Central Asia to China. In the self-consciously multi-ethnic Yuan empire, these Huihui were simply incorporated into local administrative systems. But in the Ming administrative structure their descendants were an anomaly. In order to administer them, the Ming conscripted the Huihui’s descendants and assigned them to the jurisdiction of the military garrisons nearest to where they lived. Knowledge of this policy helps us to better understand the current pattern of residential distribution of Hui Muslims, with small communities widely distributed across China. The Ming approach to administering the Hui prompted new expressions of communal identity. For example, residential concentration stimulated the construction of mosques in many communities. The Hui’s non-Hui neighbors reacted to these expressions with their own innovations in the practices and representations of identity. Thus Ming policies indirectly affected not only the small population of Muslims but the broader population as well. Our understanding of China’s ethnic history over the past 500 years would be incomplete without taking this into account.
An appreciation of the Ming military is also helpful to a better understanding of the Ming role in global economic history. If we think of the early modern period as defined in part by growing levels of interaction across human communities around the globe, the early Ming restrictions on trade seem like an interruption of the Eurasian integration under the pax Mongolica. Some scholars argue that the lifting of the Ming maritime trade ban in 1567 was pivotal to the emergence of a new era of global trade.4 At roughly the same time, the stabilization of relations between the Ming and the Mongols stimulated continental trade just as the lifting of the maritime ban stimulated overseas trade. Ming garrisons and their soldiers had always been pivotal actors in China’s foreign trade. They played a dual role as enforcers and frequent subverters of more restrictive trade policies in the Ming, and were equally important in taking advantage of the more liberal policies after the 1570s. These changes might be fruitfully compared to contemporaneous developments elsewhere in the world and seen as part of a common trend towards integration (They also bear some striking similarities to the policies of reform and opening up associated with the Deng Xiaoping era.) The role of the military is thus crucial to fully understanding these changes and thereby situating the Ming in global history.
The focus of this book is on a different question: the impact and interaction of Ming military institutions with Chinese local society, and the long-term consequences of the relationship. Specialized historians of the Ming military have already described these institutions and their historical evolution, detailing their operation, military effectiveness, fiscal impact, and many other topics besides.5 But does this research tell the whole story? Two vignettes – drawn from the chapters in this book – suggest some of the ways in which it does not.
One of the garrisons established in the early Ming was Ningfan in Sichuan. Official sources from the period describe an indigenous group living in the surrounding areas. The sources call these peoples Western Aboriginals or Western Barbarians (Xifan); we would call them Tibetan. These people subsequently disappear from the historical record. There are no people identified as Xifan living in the area today. On the basis of the surviving official documents, one might conclude that the Xifan were killed off, died out, or moved away. But if we look closely at evidence from the region – the genealogies of local lineages and their contemporary ritual practices – a different explanation emerges. As Long Sheng shows in his chapter, over the course of the Ming, the Xifan of Ningfan were recruited into hereditary military service in the Ming army. Through a complicated process, they gradually shed their original identity and adopted the markers of Han Chinese identity. Through their interaction with the military institution, the descendants of the former Xifan came to self-identify and be identified by others as Han Chinese. Similar processes occurred in places like Qinghai, Gansu, and Yunnan. Military garrisons were an important nexus for ethnic change in Ming-Qing China.
The early Ming state also established a frontier garrison at Yuzhou in Hebei, at the foot of Great Wall, facing the Mongols. After the fall of the Ming and the establishment of the more territorially expansive Qing, Hebei ceased to be the imperial frontier. The garrison was dissolved, and its population integrated into the existing civilian government administrative system. This was part of an empire-wide process of military reorganization in the wake of the Qing conquest, a process that has been well studied at the national level. But surviving sources from Yuzhou itself tell a very different and more complicated story. Deng Qingping explains in her chapter that the descendants of the garrison officers and soldiers resisted the dissolution of the military garrison. To strengthen their arguments, they retrospectively forged a new identity based on their ancestors’ former connection to military defense, an identity that emerged only after the military institutions of Yuzhou had been dissolved. A full understanding of the historical significance of Ming military institutions requires that we shift our attention beyond the Ming itself.
These two anecdotes suggest that to understand the Ming military and its consequences for ordinary people, for the subsequent history of China, and for topics such as ethnic identity and political legitimacy, we need to go well beyond the usual scope of military history studies. Perhaps because many historians have treated Ming military institutions only in military terms they have assumed it had little connection to the lives of ordinary people. But Gu Cheng pointed out long ago that the Ming military was never a purely military institution, and cannot be understood only in those terms.6 It was also a system of territorial administration that operated in parallel to the more widespread and better-known civilian administrative system of counties and prefectures. In many parts of China, military units were located inside the territorial jurisdiction of civilian administrative units, and managing problems that spanned overlapping jurisdictions was an issue that vexed countless Ming officials. In some border regions, the Ming never established a civilian administration, so military units in effect were the local arm of Ming government, with sole jurisdiction over population and over territory. In other parts of Ming China, military units co-existed with native chieftaincies (tusi) in the same territory, with the commanders of military units supervising local rulers who had been enfeoffed by the Ming emperors. If we think of native chieftaincies as a form of indirect rule, then native chieftaincies under military supervision can be seen as an intermediate political form between indirect and direct rule.
Because we are interested in the Ming military institution not for the topics of traditional military history – war-making, command and control, strategy, and so on – but for its interaction with and impact on local society, there are at least four key components of the Ming military about which we need a basic understanding: Guards and Battalions, military households, military colonies, and the tribute grain system.
Guards (wei) were the main peacetime operational units of the Ming military. The Guards were where soldiers were stationed, where they lived and trained. By the end of the Ming there were about five hundred Guards distributed across the realm. Each Guard was divided into several Battalions (suo), and so the garrisons of the Ming are often collectively referred to as Guards and Battalions (weisuo). Because the Guards were part of the larger system of territorial administration, like civilian administrative units they administered population, including both serving officers and soldiers and others. Within the walled Guards, just as in county and prefectural towns, there were government schools with quotas of registered students, who registered for the civil-service examinations on the basis of their status in the Guard. The Guard also administered territory. Where there was no civilian administration, the Guard was responsible for all military and civilian administrative matters. But even where the Guard co-existed with a civilian jurisdiction, the Guard was also responsible for the administration of agricultural lands under its control, known as military colonies.
Each Guard had a nominal size of 5600 soldiers and officers, and each Battalion 1120. In principle, these soldiers and officers were drawn from the ranks of a subset of the Ming population that was registered as military households (junhu). Despite the Ming founder’s claim to be reviving indigenous institutions and rejecting the influence of the preceding Mongol Yuan dynasty, the system of military households borrowed heavily from Yuan precedents. Roughly 10–20% of all households in early Ming (and as many as half in some regions) were registered as military households.7 The original military households were descended from some of Zhu Yuanzhang’s early followers and the forces of his vanquished rivals. Later, families might become registered as military households through conscription, or as criminal punishment. Every military household was responsible for providing one able-bodied male for military service at all times. This responsibility was hereditary and permanent.
The Yuan, on which the Ming system was based, was not the first Chinese dynasty to classify households according to the labor obligations assigned to them. But the Yuan went further than its predecessors by constructing formal systems of social control on the basis of these assignments. The Ming developed the policy even further, establishing elaborate systems to track military households and ensure that they were fulfilling their responsibilities. Because each military household was required to provide a single able-bodied soldier at all times, not all members of the household actually provided military service. Some relatives of a serving soldier might accompany him to duty in the Guard; they were known as supernumeraries (junyu). Others remained behind; scholars refer to these as “military households residing in the original native place” (yuanji junhu). They were responsible for providing logistical support to their military brethren. They were administered separately and differently from the ordinary civilian population. Both in the Guard and in their original native place, military households thus represented a distinct category of the population, with distinct obligations, distinct rights, and therefore a distinct history. For example, immediate family members of the serving soldier in the garrison, the supernumeraries, were exempt from the corvee obligations of ordinary...
