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beliefs, and the initiation of a large-scale, long-distance not attested in China until Wu Jing’s volume of 1450. This
coercive and racialised trade in slaves. This should not would seem to indicate that it was not just lions, fine stallions
necessarily be read as meaning that early Ming China was and courtly trinkets which made their way from the
therefore a nicer or a more civilised place (as a number of Islamicate world to China in the early Ming, and here we
chapters in this volume show in graphic detail). might want to think further about the actual mechanisms of
The years from the Yongle to Zhengtong reigns were ones connectedness, through such poorly documented activities as
in which China was only beginning to recover from the involvement of Ming subjects in the Hajj pilgrimage, and
centuries of devastation, centuries in which it has been any periods of study they may have undertaken in the learned
argued that the years from 1200–1400 see the population institutions of the Arab and Persian-speaking worlds.
decline in every major region of the empire except Jiangnan, Consideration of shared rather than connected histories
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the delta of the lower Yangtze River. However, it has also would require attention to the shared ecological history
been argued that in the very early Ming, and in particular in across Eurasia at the relevant period, an area of scholarship
the reign of its founder, government policies still: opened up by William Atwell, Mark Elvin and Timothy
had a devastating impact on the market towns of the Yangzi Brook. This would see the deep recession across Eurasia in
Delta. Not until the late fifteenth century did the market towns the middle of the 15th century, certainly from the late 1440s
of the Yangzi Delta, reinvigorated by expanding national to mid-1460s, and the extremely cool summers in 1446, 1448
markets for cotton and silk textiles, begin to emerge from the and 1453, coupled with possible volcanic activity, as potential
torpor into which they had sunk in the early Ming. 13 underlying causes of the bullion famine and social unrest
In addition to moving the capital of the empire, another which affected not only the Ming but a number of other
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of his father’s policies which the Yongle emperor states as well. Major rebellion which convulsed large parts
immediately reversed was the prohibition on having more of Fujian, Jiangxi and Zhejiang provinces in the years
than one Buddhist and one Daoist temple in each county, yet 1448–9 certainly originated with silver miners, always at the
many temples never recovered their pre-Ming vitality. abject base of the Ming social heap. The recent monumental
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Historians continue to hold very differing interpretations of work of Geoffrey Parker has reinvigorated debate about a
the activist power of the Yuan and early Ming states; were global 17th-century crisis by focusing on environmental
they essentially effective or were they in fact rather feeble factors which were no respecter of political or cultural
apparatuses for the enforcement of imperial policies and boundaries. While the documentation for the 15th century
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will? ‘Heaven is high and the emperor far away’, is the may not be sufficiently fine grained to allow an account of
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still-proverbial piece of folk wisdom cited in one early Ming this complexity, it is certain that any future accounts of
account of the Yuan dynasty as being essentially a weak large-scale historical movements in Eurasia will omit this
government, one which Zhu Yuanzhang’s activist goal of a aspect of the planet’s history only at the cost of reduced
more tightly controlled society was designed to replace. But effectiveness and a loss of analytical force.
it has been argued that in the decades following the reign of This present volume does not seek to present a totally
the Ming founder, ‘succession crises and princely comprehensive account of all facets of early Ming culture,
usurpations quickly drained the luster from imperial and there are many aspects of the period that require further
authority’. There is much further work to be done to study. The growing field of environmental history just
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ascertain the degree to which this interpretation is in fact referred to will no doubt continue to want to examine early
correct, given that the ‘lustre of imperial authority’ is the Ming landscape management practices, for example at the
central concern of so many of the written sources on which major drainage project completed in 1403 which, by taking
we must depend. The material culture, with its ability to water from the Wusong river into the Yangtze, coped with
indicate lines of enquiry independent of the textual record, the fluctuating level of Lake Tai and thus ‘reduced the
has great possibilities here. incidence of floods in the region’. Major figures of the
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This then is the background against which it is necessary dynasty like Xia Yuanji (1366–1430) worked on such water-
to examine both early Ming connected histories, and shared control projects, which absorbed huge amounts of state
histories, which are not exactly the same thing. The rubric of revenue, but have been little studied by comparison with the
connected histories, as well as accounting for the many more glamorous voyages of Zheng He, or diplomatic
examples covered in this book, might also explain one piece contacts with Timurid West Asia. In casting aside an older
of evidence of a continued inflow of Islamic intellectual and model of an isolated and hermetic Ming dynasty, it is
technical ideas after the fall of the Yuan. In 1450 the important that we do not overcompensate by coming to see
mathematician Wu Jing 吳敬 from Hangzhou published his only those parts of its history which are ‘connected’, as being
‘Complete Book on the Classification of the Mathematical worthy of intensive study.
Arts in Nine Sections’ (Jiu zhang xiang zhu suan fa bi lei da quan Even within histories of connections, this one volume,
九章詳注算法比類大全). This contains the first known standing as the record of a single scholarly gathering, cannot
description in Chinese of lattice (or ‘gelosia’) multiplication, attain comprehensiveness. The broad themes under which
in which a grid is used to multiply two multi-digit numbers; the 29 chapters are organised – ‘Rulership and war’, ‘Sites,
Wu calls this novel technique xie suan 寫算, ‘written images and objects of power’, ‘Objects, images and sites of
arithmetic’. This technique, like so many mathematical belief’, ‘Rules, regulations and material culture’, and ‘Global
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ideas, was developed in the Arab world, where its earliest Ming’ – are to be read here as neither mutually exclusive,
documented use is by the Moroccan writer Ibn al-Bannā’ in nor as attaining coverage of all facets of the theme. The
the late 13th century. It was in Europe by about 1300, but is all-important visual and material practice of calligraphy is
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Introduction | 3