A History of China (52 page)

Emperor Yongle’s deviation from his father’s foreign policy may also have stemmed from an attempt to justify his ascendance to the throne. He reversed his father’s efforts to reduce contact with the outside world, partly to support his own claims to legitimacy. A good Confucian emperor would, in theory, induce foreign rulers to come and transform themselves (
laihua
) – that is, to become sinicized. The more virtuous the emperor, the more foreign potentates would arrive. Conversely, the greater the number of foreign rulers and envoys arriving in China, the more legitimate the ruler. Thus, it was in Emperor Yongle’s best interests to stimulate the arrival of foreign embassies at court. On the other hand, the court, having experienced a century of Mongolian rule, may not have had the same traditional self-confidence about its cultural superiority. The old system may have been maintained as a ritual, and it is possible that the court no longer believed in the underlying principles of this paradigm. Indeed, as China weakened in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, it allowed deviation from the formulas of the traditional system.

No doubt Emperor Yongle’s most grandiose attempt to promote the arrival of foreign officials was the dispatch of the embassies of the Muslim eunuch Zheng He (1371–1433). Leading an enormous flotilla of ships and transporting substantial gifts for foreign rulers, Zheng undertook seven journeys, traveling to Southeast Asia, India, Persia, and west Asia and becoming the first attested Chinese to reach the east coast of Africa. He commanded as many as sixty large vessels with thirty thousand men on several of the expeditions. His ­mission fulfilled the goal of eliciting foreign delegations to travel to the Chinese court. Leaders from as near as Champa (in modern Vietnam) and as far away as modern Mogadishu (in Somalia) sent embassies to Yongle. Other motives – the goal of affirming China’s power, the desire to obtain foreign products, and the objective of increasing China’s knowledge of the outside world – may also have spurred the dispatch of the missions, which turned out to be the most impressive expeditions in world history until the journeys of Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama, and other European explorers of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. Another objective may have been to ferret out information about the emperor’s missing and presumed dead nephew, but this goal, if intended, was not fulfilled.

The missions, nonetheless, resulted in exchanges of goods, which ­stimulated trade. Zheng He presented gifts of silk, porcelains, and other commodities to the rulers of the various regions he visited, and generated a market for these products. Foreign potentates, in turn, sent the emperor, via Zheng, exotic animals, including lions, leopards, and giraffes. Even more important, they provided so-called tribute of spices and medicines, which appealed to many Chinese. Southeast Asian merchants continued to bring spices to China even after the cessation of the expeditions.

After Emperor Yongle’s death, the court sanctioned only one more mission for Zheng. The climate of opinion about such foreign expeditions altered upon the demise of the leading patron, Emperor Yongle. Court officials complained of the tremendous expense entailed in outfitting and manning such missions. Yongle’s successors also reverted to the foreign policies of the Ming’s founder, policies that did not jibe with the expansiveness and perhaps expansionism of the Zheng He explorations. Later courts focused on domestic policies and sought to limit foreign relations.

Emperor Yongle dispatched still other emissaries to elicit tribute ­embassies from other states. He sent Chen Cheng (d. 1457) to the central Asian centers at Herat and Samarkand, which had previously been hostile. Temür (or Tamerlane, 1336–1405), the conqueror and ruler of central Asia, was, in fact, mounting an invasion of China when he died in February of 1405. His son and successor, Shahrukh (1377–1447), was less bellicose and sent an embassy to establish relations with the Ming court. Elated by what he dubbed a ­tribute mission, Emperor Yongle dispatched Chen Cheng on at least three occasions to generate even closer contacts. Chen returned to China with a valuable record of the customs, products, and conditions in the states and regions through which he traveled. Shahrukh, in turn, dispatched an embassy, one of whose officials, Ghiyath al-Din Naqqash, wrote a revealing account of Ming China, principally about the court. This account yields a unique glimpse of an emperor at work and at leisure. The Chinese court, in attempting to convey an image of emperors as divine beings, rarely in its histories permitted views of the emperors as flesh-and-blood creatures. Shahrukh’s envoys, however, accompanied Emperor Yongle on a hunt, dined with him, and observed his listening to appeals for those condemned to death. Ghiyath al-Din Naqqash’s report thus depicts Emperor Yongle as a real human being rather than as a shadowy, omnipotent, and semidivine decision maker and dispenser of justice. These exchanges of missions ensured continued ­tributary and trade relations between the Ming and central Asia and buttressed the emperor’s claim to legitimacy.

Yongle was similarly successful with other embassies. The mission of the eunuch Isiha (fl. 1409–1451) led to the arrival at court of the leaders of the Jurchen peoples of Manchuria. Yongle’s embassies to Tibet resulted in reci­procal missions of Buddhist monks. Although Tsong-kha-pa (1357–1419), the renowned founder of the dGelugs-pa (or Yellow Sect) of Tibetan Buddhism, parried the Chinese emperor’s invitation to come personally to court, he sent a leading religious dignitary to pay his respects. The Tibetan missions ­presented lavish tribute goods, and the court rewarded the envoys with elaborate gifts of silk robes, banners, and wearing apparel. By the end of Yongle’s reign, a number of Tibetan Buddhist sects had exchanged missions with the court. Similarly, Yongle’s embassy to the Korean king led almost directly to the arrival of a mission from the Choson dynasty’s ruler and to regular exchanges of envoys and goods. Finally, the Japanese shogun began to send tribute missions to the Chinese court.

But Emperor Yongle could not secure the acquiescence of other foreigners. Here he deviated from his father’s policies in initiating military expeditions to impose the Chinese world order on neighboring states and rulers. His father had cautioned his successors not to seek territories beyond the Chinese ­cultural sphere, noting that rule over restive non-Chinese peoples would require enormous military expenditures for a standing army in newly acquired territories. He also had asserted that such an occupation force would face ­continuous resistance.

However, his son Yongle personally led five campaigns into the Mongol steppe lands to coerce the Mongols into halting their raids along the frontiers. The campaigns were unsuccessful because they did not take into account the Mongols’ underlying motivations. The Mongols needed and coveted Chinese products, and, if the court did not grant them sufficient opportunities for trade and tribute, raids were their only recourse. Chinese restrictions on tribute or trade along the frontiers often provoked conflicts, and the Mongols had a ­tactical military advantage. After a raid or a skirmish, they could simply flee farther and farther away and thus elude Chinese armies, which did not have effective supply lines to enable pursuit of the Mongol cavalrymen for long periods of time. Thus Yongle’s campaigns, which are often portrayed in the Ming dynastic history as great successes, did not quell disturbances along the Ming frontiers. The emperor’s bellicose policy offered no relief for the border. Divide and rule, another tactic he employed, also failed. Providing benefits, gifts, and titles or offering additional opportunities for trade to one group of Mongols in hopes that such favoritism would cause rifts among them and deflect attacks on China scarcely ensured peace along the frontiers.

Yongle’s policy in Annam was even less successful. Learning of the overthrow of the Tran dynasty by a usurper, he sent a force not only to crush the rebels but also to institute Ming rule, a disastrous error because this effort ­antagonized patriotic Annamese. A war flared up, and Chinese troops would be bogged down in fighting for the next two decades. In 1427, China finally withdrew, admitting its mistake in seeking to annex Annam. However, considerable ­damage had been done to the Ming army and economy.

Despite such resounding achievements as the Zheng He missions, Yongle’s foreign policy was extremely expensive. Although the arrival of ­tribute ­embassies from a diverse array of foreign lands bolstered Yongle’s claim to legitimacy, the expansionism evinced in the Mongolia and Annam campaigns was a costly failure. Ignoring the conventional wisdom, as well as his father’s injunctions, Yongle sought to subjugate and incorporate lands beyond China, a policy that most traditional Chinese officials would have considered to be misguided. The expeditions imposed financial burdens on his successors, which contributed to the dynasty’s fiscal problems.

Other grandiose policies of Emperor Yongle would also create difficulties, both dynastic and financial. His fabrication of texts to denigrate his nephew and bolster his own claims to the throne set a poor precedent for later ­historical record keeping. His abandonment of his father’s capital in Nanjing and his ­construction of a new capital in Beijing, though eminently reasonable from his perspective, turned out to generate additional burdens on China. Because the area around Beijing was his center, he would naturally want to set up his seat of government there. Moreover, he recognized the need for a capital city that lay close to and thus could more readily defend the northern frontiers. This reasoning was sound, but his other motivation – building a majestic and awe-inspiring capital city to bolster his legitimacy – was more problematic. The capital was planned on a grand scale and wound up ­consuming vast resources of manpower and funds. Hundreds of thousands of laborers toiled on its construction, which was intended to be much more impressive than even the capital of Khubilai Khan. The large scale of Beijing presumed a large population, which could not be maintained from local sources. The court needed to devise a costly system of transporting grain and other provisions from its economic heartland in south China along the Grand Canal to Beijing. It had to increase the tax burdens on the peasantry in order to supply the burgeoning population in the capital.

Figure 8.1
Tian Tan, the Temple of Heaven, one of the grandiose structures built by Yongle in Beijing. © eye35.pix / Alamy

In sum, although Yongle expanded China’s contacts with the outside world and constructed an imposing capital city, his legacy was ambiguous. China began to trade with a wide variety of regions, states, and peoples, and the Ming had an impressive administrative center. Yet these successes were accompanied by insidious problems that would repeatedly plague the Ming. Later courts would have to contend with the sizable debts and the heavy taxes required to provide revenues for Yongle’s embassies to foreign lands and his construction projects. In addition, his choice of eunuchs to head some of the foreign ­missions accorded them great authority and was the first step toward the ­overwhelming power eunuchs eventually garnered during the Ming.

It is no accident that a decade after Yongle’s death a eunuch named Wang Zhen (d. 1449) began a rise to power that would propel him to one of the most important positions in government. Gaining the support of a child emperor enthroned in 1435, he overcame the resistance of court officials through clever maneuvering. This extralegal seizure of power exacerbated other government abuses. Excessive corvée labor and tax demands, together with devastating floods and droughts in various regions of the country, contributed to disarray and popular discontent, but the court managed to crush the minor uprisings that erupted during this time.

The court and Wang Zhen were less successful in dealing with the Mongols. A Mongol ruler named Esen had, in the 1440 s, expanded his area of control to include Hami and other towns and oases along the traditional Silk Roads. Even more irritating to the court was the ever-increasing frequency of his ­tribute missions and the larger number of men in each, which increased the Ming’s costs in transporting, feeding, and offering gifts to the emissaries. Such rising expenditures caused Chinese officials to limit the number of Esen’s embassies and to reduce the presents and products granted them in trade. Esen’s reaction was predictable. Accusing the Chinese of unfair ­commercial practices and of exploitation and mistreatment of his envoys, Esen prepared for a confrontation with the Ming court. These tensions over tribute and trade finally erupted into warfare. In July of 1449, Esen initiated an assault on China. Wang Zhen persuaded the emperor to personally ­command the Ming army to resist the incursions. Chinese accounts castigate Wang for encouraging the emperor to join the expedition and convey the impression that such imperial-led campaigns were unusual. Yet, only three decades earlier Emperor Yongle had commanded five expeditions against the Mongols. Wang simply followed the precedent established by an earlier Ming emperor.