David M. Robinson is a historian of early modern East Asia, most especially China and Korea. His most recent works include Shadow of the Mongol Empire: Ming China and Eurasia (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Ming China and Its Allies: Imperial Rulership in Eurasia (Cambridge University Press, 2020), and Korea and the Fall of the Mongol Empire: Alliance, Upheaval, and the Rise of a New East Asian Order (Cambridge University Press, 2022). His current project, Eight Generations of Service to the Throne: A Short History of Ability and Difference in the Ming Dynasty, explores ability and difference in the realm of war and military institutions in early modern China.
The State and Early Modern China’s Northern Border
The paper examines three issues, 1) Ming state’s investment in its northern border, 2) state control at the northern border, and 3) limits of the state and related issues of Interpretation.
Section One begins with a brief historical overview of the location the Ming capital and its geopolitical implications, especially as they relate to the dynasty’s northern border. The Ming founder, the Hongwu emperor, established his capital in today’s Nanjing in 1368, and early in the fifteenth century, one of his successors, the Yongle emperor, relocated the primary capital to today’s Beijing, which is located along the northern edge of northern Chinese plains and was far more vulnerable to direct military strikes and sustained pressure from the steppe than had been true for Nanjing. One of the most distinctive features of the Ming period was the state’s decision to construct a massive series of fortifications along China’s northern border which stretched for approximately 2700 km. Those fortifications, which were constructed over more than a century, included walls of tamped earth faced with fired bricks, signal towers, barracks, and deep trenches. It was the greatest state-driven construction project in the world at the time. Defending those fortification were scores of garrisons, which in turn were supported by hundreds of smaller forts. Those fortifications and garrisons in turn were connected by a dense transportation network comprised of imperial highways and fortified postal relay stations, which stretched along the length of the northern border. That massive infrastructure was manned by approximately 600,000 imperial troops, who were stationed on a semi-permanent basis with their families (and additional 3 million people) in a region with relatively low productive capacity. In response, the state implemented a series of policies to transport food, supplies, and eventually silver to the northern border. The sustained influx of such resources transformed the northern border into a single massive military consumption zone. One appreciates the astounding scale of that flow of resources, which included the delivery of between 100 and 150 tons of silver per annum, when one remembers that between 1/3 and 2/5 of world silver production flowed into China, and the bulk of that silver makes its way to the northern border. China was world’s silver sink, and the northern border was China’s silver sink. The Ming’s northern border was not driving the global economy, but it certainly was one the world’s primary consumption zones.
Section Two examines Ming state control along the norther border, where all resources and people were in principle subject to close government control and regulation. Household register, land-holding registers, registers for military offices and more recorded imperial subjects’ names, ages, occupations, sexes, ranks and performance of duties. Registers were regularly updated, copied, and delivered to the capital, where one copy was held permanently in dynastic archives and other versions circulated among relevant offices in Beijing. To meet the demand for trade from the steppe, the state also maintained border markets,
where approved steppe leaders were allowed to trade under imperial regulations. The state dictated when, where, and what might be traded. Border garrisons oversaw the entry of steppe envoy missions into the Ming polity, registering the names, ranks, and numbers of envoy members, dictating arrangements for lodging and food, providing translation and interpretation services, and monitoring envoy members’ behavior. In sum, the northern border was evidence of the power and the resources of one of the world’s most affluent and advanced state.
Section Three addresses the limits of the state and briefly touches on issues of interpretation. The sustained and enormous flow of people, goods, and silver into the northern borderlands often produced paradoxical consequences. The high concentration of financial, material, and personnel resources represented irresistible opportunities for wealth and power. Military officers illegally seized farm lands, exploited soldiers as an illicit labor force, seized soldiers’ salaries, and extracted bribes from their subordinates. In many cases, military officers and their subordinates colluded with civil officials, conspiring against the court in Beijing for instance to engage in Illicit and lucrative border trade. How to evaluate the flouting of dynastic authority is an open question. In some ways, James Scott’s work on evading the state or resisting the state offers useful insights, but in other ways, Michael Szonyi’s argument about how people exploited rather than evaded state institutions to access resources seems more productive. Finally, one might highlight diachronic elements, such as the transformative impact of the northern border of the Ming in the emergence of the succeeding Qing dynasty, which created the borders of today’s China, or one might contextualize it in synchronic terms, for instance, in the complex interplay of global networks of borders and borderlands, that linked silver production in Potosí and Japan to the Spanish Philippines, with its large Chinese population grew (30,000 by 1600 or so), which facilitated the flow of silver into the Ming economy, and its delivery to northern border.
In conclusion, the paper characterizes the Ming dynasty as a large, sophisticated, affluent and relatively ambitious early modern state, which created the greatest border regime of the day and which was intricately tied to regional and even global networks. The paper argues, however, that from beginning to end, the northern border exceeded Ming state control.