Dan Snow's History Hit - The Rise and Fall of the Ming Dynasty

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

At its height, Ming China was one of the most powerful states on Earth. Its cities bustled with merchants and scholars, its goods travelled across continents, and its treasure fleets sailed as far as East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. At the heart of this vast empire stood the Forbidden City- a spectacular symbol of imperial authority.But prosperity bred corruption, power created enemies, and rebellion threatened the dynasty from within. In this episode, Dan heads to Beijing to explore how an impoverished peasant founded a dynasty that ruled China for nearly three centuries and how war, political crisis, rebellion and environmental catastrophe ultimately brought it down. Warning: this episode refers to suicide. Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal PatmoreYou can check out our documentary on Youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHBTevu_eTcIf you want more of Jeremiah on Dan Snow's History Hit, check out these episodes on any podcast player:The Opium Wars at https://open.spotify.com/episode/4GYkpTToitfmACR6RX9yGaThe Forbidden City at https://open.spotify.com/episode/5FdOolMSttL4aIXlMniMUjThe Terracotta Warriors at https://podcasts.apple.com/au/podcast/the-terracotta-warriors/id1042631089?i=1000666138627Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail] Snow's History Hit is a History Hit podcast.History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit history hit.com slash subscribe. in the early 15th century would have been something to behold. Behind the immense city walls lay the capital of one of the most powerful empires on earth. Its streets teeming with merchants, soldiers, scholars, officials, carts bringing grain and goods into the city from across China.

Silk, porcelain, teal, flowing around from an empire which was in turn connected to markets which stretched across Asia and all the way to the Middle East and Europe. And at the centre was something. extraordinary, the forbidden city. A vast imperial world of vermilion walls and yellow-tiled roofs. Formidable gates, enormous courtyards, and ornate ceremonial halls, all arranged along the great north-south axis.

Architecture designed to convey hierarchy, order, the overwhelming, the unshakable authority of the emperor. To the north, that emperor's armies campaign against the Mongols, to the east of China's coast, great treasure fleets sailed through the South China seas, to the Indian Ocean, to East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. This was Ming China at its imperial height, and it seemed unstoppable. But of course, everything changes. Prosperity bred corruption.

Power creates enemies, and dominion brings forth rebellion. Your list of Dan Snow's history hit, and in this episode we're heading to Beijing to tell the extraordinary story of the Ming. How an impoverished peasant rose up to have found a dynasty that would rule China for nearly three centuries. And how this state, one of the most powerful on earth, if not the most powerful, eventually unraveled through rebellion, war, crisis, and environmental catastrophe. The forbidden city did not offer much protection. It was meant to be forbidden. but not a fortress. China has long been a land of extraordinary ethnic diversity. Over the centuries, dynasties rose and fell,

and different people have seized and relinquished power, or had it prized from them. You might be familiar with some of the groups, like the Manchus, the Jurchans, the Catans, and you get this pattern throughout history since ancient times, alternating between periods of political unification and fragmentation. But for the purposes of our story, what you need to know is that throughout much of its history,

the great majority of people living in China's densely populated heartlands were from the ethnic group, the Han Chinese, and that's still the dominant ethnic group today. But in the early 13th century, that ethnic dominance did not mean political power. In 1279, Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, did what no one else could do. He united a disparate China under Mongol rule.

He declared his dynasty as the Yuan dynasty, and it prospered for a time. He moved his capital city to the site of modern-day Beijing, which became the heart of his vast, powerful empire. And there, Yuan elites and horsemen mingled with Persian astronomers and Venetian merchants and Chinese mandarins and diplomats. He created a powerful combination, the rugged military virtues of the steppe. with the philosophy of the Chinese court. His realm was a meeting of worlds, a center of innovation, trade and exchange. The Silk Road hummed with life as goods and ideas and even faiths flowed across continents. Caravans and missionaries and artisans and diplomats moving between China, the Islamic world, and beyond. But as is often the case, the benefits, the rewards fell unevenly. The Khan's governments,

The elites did very well. But for the Han Chinese population across those vast heartlands in what we might now call eastern and southern China, while they didn't benefit quite as much, in fact they often shoulder the burden for this prosperity. There was heavy taxation, which funded the Khan's extravagant new capital city. There was the force labour required to build it. The Han Chinese and other ethnic groups suffered persecution

under a rigid social hierarchy. Corruption was rife and much of China's social. saw little to no benefit from the boom in trade. And so it's not hugely surprising that within a century of Kublai Khan's death, the Yuan dynasty was crumbling. By the 1330s, Han Chinese rebels were exploiting these cracks. They were determined to establish a new Han-ruled empire. And the man who had become their leader,

the founder and the first great Ming emperor, has a very, very unlikely origin story. He was a peasant called Zhu Yuan Zhong, born on the agricultural plain between the Yellow River and the Yangtze River in 1328. To tell his story I'm meeting Dr. Jeremiah, Jenny, an expert in Chinese history, who you'll have heard many times on this podcast before. Well, I think one of the challenges for the Mongolians is it's the old story of you can conquer a country on horseback, but can you rule it from the back of a horse?

And like often happens with these dynasties, these conquest dynasties, where you have people from outside of China taking over. First couple of generations, they have that martial vigor. They're fresh off the step. They're fresh off the horses. They know how to fight. But their sons, maybe they get a little used to life in the capital. They get a little used to life in the palace.

And so they lose that thing that makes them special, that things that makes them fearsome. And without that fear, without that idea that we're this distinctive, powerful enemy that's come in and subjugated as people, well, you lose a lot of the mystique that's keeping your power. And when things start to really fall apart,

whether it's infrastructure failures, floods, famines, what have you, you have people rising up, and you no longer have the power to crush these rebellions. Let's check in with the story of Jiu and Jung. Why does this peasant turn into a figure of destiny? Where is he in the sort of mid-14th century?

So he's one of many commoners who are suffering in this period because of all the instability that's happening towards the end of the Mongol rule. And like a lot of people, he's just trying to make his way as best he can. He is from a poor family. It was not unusual at the time if you have kids and you're not able to feed them. One of them might become a eunuch, one of them might become a soldier, one of them might become a monk. or if you have girl children, sometimes it could be even worse outcomes. And Zhu and Zhang

has been turned over to a monastery or becomes part of this monastery. He's an apprentice monk, but that doesn't necessarily mean like he's going to seminary classes. It means here's your beggars bowl, go out and make the best of it, and if you survive this,

perhaps there'll be a place for you, a bed here for you later on. It's amazing. So this guy who's destined to become an emperor ruler of all under the heavens, he's begging. When we look at his later career, some of the aspects of his role, a distrust of elites, a belief in his own ability, because if you come up from the beggars bowl to the palace, you develop an immense faith in your own instincts because they haven't led you astray yet.

And I think that certainly is part of his legacy when we look back at this era. So he's begging, traveling around begging, he's on the road. What's next for him? Well, at this time, there are many groups that are starting to come together in opposition to Mongol rule. And as is the case in other historical context, one of the best ways to do that, right, is through religion. And so many of these rebellious societies, rebel groups, they often have at their core some kind of religious belief that holds them together. Eventually goes from being a monk to being a soldier member of one of these rebellious societies

and ultimately one of the leaders of one of these rebellious societies. The Red Turban Militia. Yeah, this is one of these groups that emerges in the late Mongolian period that fights against the Mongols, one of the largest and most powerful of these groups. And one of the reasons why you have these groups that are identified by turbans, for example, because in the battlefield, that's one of the ways, or on the street even, it's one of the ways of different societies

would differentiate each other, kind of like patches in a motorcycle club. You'd have different turbines, different uniforms that would help to distinguish them from their rebel brethren. So that's the context in which his natural charisma, his skill, is, it just comes out. You know, it does seem that there are certain people

who are able to, in times of chaos and strife, emerge as leaders. He's just that much smarter, just that much more ruthless, that much more cunning. I mean, fighting the Mongols is mind-blowing. And these sort of peasant militias? Is it hit-and-run attacks? Are the Mongols pretty stretched to sort of keep this mighty empire garrisoned? One of the challenges the Mongols always have is that there are so few Mongols.

And the other challenge they have is that their style of warfare is particularly suited to the step, to planes. That works great in North China, where there are open. spaces. What do you do when you get down to southern China where it's mountains and rivers and gorges and lakes? They don't always prove as successful in those situations. So what do they do? Well, like many aspects of their rule, they staff it out. One of the great things about the Mongols, one of the things that makes the Mongols so special, not just in China but throughout Asia, is their willingness to bring in people from all over, all different face, all different cultures, and put them to work. And they do that in China too. They bring in people from central

Asia to man garrisons. There's a whole Muslim community, for example, that gets stationed in the far south. But the challenge with staffing out your soldiers is that you don't always have all of their allegiance. You don't always have the ability to coordinate them quite as well as if they're all your own people. And as a result, when these rebellions emerge,

the Mongols find themselves on the back foot in a way that they really haven't found themselves in China before. And so really, less than 100 years. after they completed their conquest of China, they're already being shown the door. Nationalism is obviously anachronistic phrase, but is there a sense that they don't like the Mongols

because they are foreign and they are, if their foreigners are so objecting to, or are they just saying there is chaos, the government is not good enough, we are going to emerge in our local area as an alternative power structure and they keep sort of growing outwards from there? That's such a fascinating question, Dan,

because it really gets the heart of like how do people understand different difference before we start having all these terms like nationalism, race, ethnicity. And it is certainly anachronistic to apply some of these terms back to the 13th or the 14th century. On the other hand, people knew that they were different. For example, one of the things that the Mongols did, even at the elite levels that just the Chinese could not abide by, was the leveret marriage. The idea that a widow would marry the brother of their husband, which was quite common among the Mongols.

but for the Chinese is incest. And they were just horrified by this. And then they were more practical things. Like, again, there aren't that many Mongols. So how do they raise taxes? Tax farming. Bid on this province, raise the taxes you want, keep your profit and give us whatever your bid was.

Well, it's effective if you're the person on top of this pyramid scheme, but if you're the person on the bottom of the pyramid, you're just getting crushed. And so is it the cultural differences? Maybe. Certainly among the elite they might use it as a record. The rallying cry among the common people, it's the same thing as it always was. It's I'm being overtaxed, the infrastructure is failing, I'm being oppressed, the economy

is failing. I am poor, I am desperate. What else is there left to do but to rise up or at least follow somebody who claims they have a better world in this world or the next? Zhu Yuanzhong's rebellion captured the southern city of Nanjing in 1356 and he built a power base around the wealthy Yangtze region. He spent the next decade or so defeating rival rebel leaders. When he felt strong enough, he declared himself emperor.

He took name Hong Wu and proclaimed the Ming dynasty. He then turned north and sent his armies towards the Yuan capital, Dardu, where modern Beijing stands. It's a formidable operation, and the UN court sees it coming. They know that the garrison's morale is shaky. They know grain stores are running. low. So rather than risk a devastating siege, they decide to abandon their capital and retreat into the steppe, hoping they can regroup in their native grasslands. The Ming take Dadu under their control with ease, but they then decide to establish their own capital in the southern

city of Nanjing. The Ming era has begun. There's a moment when he turns from a sort of a rebel, local warlord, into a figure who is, he looks like. an alternative center of political power, starts doing things with bureaucracy. How's that transition go? Well, I think once he establishes himself as he's going to be the emperor. So when he becomes the emperor in 1368, he knows he has all the obligations of an incoming emperor, which is, okay, we need to get control of the taxes. We need to get control of the armies. We need to get control of the officialdom. He has that on his mind. At the same time, time, he's also, I think, in some ways more aware of the challenges of ruling China than

perhaps many of his predecessors, at least for the last 1,000 or so years, because he has come up from the bottom. And one of the greatest challenges that he faces is himself. He's so used to being the person who makes the decisions. He's so used to trusting his own instincts. He's so used to being right. A lot of the strategies you use when you're commanding rebel armies in the field don't always work with civil bureaucrats and the kind of motivating techniques

you use to get people to do what you want as a general in the field don't always work when you're then the person who is actually representing the power as opposed to fighting against it he claims the mandates of heaven which what's that going to mean he says I'm the empire I am now the interlocuta between the heavens and and humanity at some point it would be easier if they could just simply stand up and say listen, heaven has chosen me. Like, that's it. And to the large extent, that's how it works. You want. Of course, it's not that simple. He has to fulfill certain ritual obligations. He has to do things that indicate that he both is worthy of the mandate and that the mandate truly has chosen him. So, for example, doing the rituals at an altar of heaven, building a palace

that's worthy of an emperor, carrying out the obligations of ritual, carrying out the obligations as a ruler, and doing it in a way that accords with a long tradition of political culture that he's not born into. He hasn't been raised in this political tradition, this Confucian tradition. And so I can imagine it could have been difficult for this person. It's funny because it's the most radical thing imaginable an emperor emerging from the peasant classes.

And yet when he's in power, he sounds like he's been quite conservative. He's keen to identify as a traditionalist. He's bringing back these more ancient orders. I think there's a sense, too, that there's, we need to reassert. And again, this gets us in some very perhaps anachronistic waters, but reassert a certain Chinese quality to what we're doing. The irony, of course, is that much of his court life has very strong influences from the Mongols. terms of how much the emperor is above his attendance, how the officials should treat him,

how he carries out punishments at court, which was not something that didn't always occur in earlier dynasties. He's a very ruthless emperor. It's one of the things people know about him is that he brought it all together and he needed to be tough to do it and he was not afraid to turn on his friends, turn on his allies if he felt it served his purposes or if he felt there was a threat to him. The Hongwu emperor ruled for three decades from Nanjing in the south until 1398. On his death, the Ming dynasty was secure, but the succession, well, that was up for grabs. His chosen heir was his young grandson, Ji Yang Wen, which didn't get down particularly well with his surviving sons who were scattered across the empire. They were powerful princes

of policing the empire with their own private armies. Now, the most formidable of those sons was Prince Zhu Di. He was stationed in the north, in Beijing, guarding the frontier against the Mongols, as you can imagine, a pretty important job. He was furious when discovered he'd been skipped in the line of succession. So he sent his own army to, as he put it, rectify the court to rescue the dynasty from corrupt advisors. For three brutal years, uncle and nephew clashed in a bloody civil war. Finally, in 1402, Zhu Di's troops arrived at the gates of Nanjing. They stormed the place, burned the palace, and the young emperor vanished. His fate still remains one of Chinese history's greatest unsolved mysteries. Judee then seized the throne of his father and took the title

Yong Le, meaning perpetual happiness. The usurper, now emperor, began constructing his capital in Beijing. And to signal that he held the mandate of heaven, the divine right to rule, he started building a series of imperial complexes to convey the mighty cosmic power that he held. He was the mediator now between the heavens and the people. And one of those complexes was the gobsmacking, the jaw-dropping palace, the forbidden city. Another one of them is the beautifully ornate Temple of Heaven. So Jeremiah, why do we hear so much about the mandate of heaven? What's it actually mean?

You know, the mandate of heaven is one of the older political concepts in China. This idea that unlike a divine right of kings, heaven bestowed a mandate to rule on the emperors, but that mandate could always be removed if the emperor did not rule accordingly or do not fulfill their ritual obligations. This idea that a king is a king in Europe, but here if, for example, somebody rose up and toppled you as a ruler, well, that could be just a sign the mandate was removed and you deserve to go. So the mandate could be passed and the idea is if you were, say like the first emperor of the Ming dynasty, come to power as part of a rebellion, well, it's clear that mandate

has been given to you. So it's something that reinforces success. If you can seize the throne, if you can make it work, then well, maybe heaven wants you there. If you've got the throne, it's a good chance that heaven has mandated it. If you lose it, well, that's how the game works. So managing that relationship with heaven must be very important to the emperors. And how is that reflected and where we are now? If you think about Chinese cosmology, you have three constituent forces of the universe. Heaven, earth, and man. And then in the center of it is the emperor.

It has a ritual obligation to keep these things in balance. And if he performs the ritual carefully, then all things are balanced. If, for example, he's a poor emperor or doesn't fulfill his ritual obligations, well, something could go out of whack. There could be a comet in the sky, an earthquake in the ground, or rebellion among the people. So this was very important that he maintains his rituals here. We just come to what's called the Temple of Heaven,

but looks to me like a sort of a complex. Is this the ritual center of Beijing effectively? There's loads of different buildings here. What are we looking at? Yeah, it's true. A lot of tourists come to the Temple of Heaven and they're like, where's the temple? But the reality is it's not really a temple,

it's more of an altar complex. And this has to do with the Chinese language. There's lots of words in Chinese that we translate all of them into temple, but in Chinese mean different things. In this case, it's more about an altar space, a place under heaven for the worship and veneration of those forces. And the emperor has to come here and perform rituals to keep it all in bounds?

He does. The idea is once a year on the winter solstice, the emperor would go to the main altar of heaven. There was a very specific set of rituals. It was a three, sometimes four day affair that he would come here, purify himself. They would have the ritual, then they would all go back to the forbidden city. So the emperor is not just the political and military

head of this empire. He is the supreme religious figure too. Yeah, he himself plays a cosmologic role as the son of heaven. He is, again, that pivot point, that connecting point. And this goes all the way back to the earliest days that we think of as kingship in Chinese civilization. Even before they were emperors, the kings of, say, the Shang dynasty, this is going back to Neolithic times almost, they were the only person who could communicate between this world and the ancestors on high. It's a lot of pressure. It was a tough job. And in some of the In some ways, that cosmologic, that ritual role, was almost the more important part of their title, part of their position than it was the day-to-day running of an empire.

So I remember what we're seeing here. Is this Ming or is this later? So the original complex in Beijing was laid out in the Ming dynasty, but like many places in Beijing, it's undergone transformations over time. There was a major renovation in the middle of the Ming dynasty that gave the complex its current shape. And then the Emperor Qianlong, who was in the 18th century, If there was an architectural digest subscription

in the Forbidden City, he would have been its editor. Okay. There is nothing in Beijing he did not touch, and he completely renovated this establishment then. These blues of these roofs are absolutely beautiful, aren't they? Many of the blue that you see here are the blue rooftops are from the Qing Dynasty. It's one of the few places, at least in Beijing,

that you see this amazing color. When it was set, I'm trying to think to myself, like the Yongle Emperor, did he think he was divine himself? It's so interesting because he was a usurper, his dad was a usurper, founded the dynasty. By engaging in the ceremony, I suppose this is just a way of legitimizing their rule, of convincing everyone that they, well, they've got the mandate of heaven. Right, and the way you keep the mandate of heaven, the way you demonstrate that you have received

this mandate is you perform the rituals and therefore it shows to everybody. Here's the thing, when I say everybody, I mean the people that matter to the emperor, the officials, the bureaucracy, that you're part of this system, that you respect this system, and if it all goes right, the system and the mandate in heaven respect you. So this is religion and politics just inextricably linked. You're listening to Dan Snow's history here. There's more to come. The Temple of Heaven wasn't just the site of worship.

It was a statement. Here, the Emperor stood between heaven and earth, performing the rituals necessary to assure the promise of harmony and abundance. And for much of the Ming dynasty, well, that promise held true. From the reign of Yongleur onwards, China flourished. Its cities expanded, trade thrived. workshops hummed with the production of things like porcelain and silk. And he does more than almost any person other than perhaps Kublai Khan.

He is responsible for the Beijing that we see today. In fact, I would say he's the person most responsible for it. The city walls that stood to the 20th century, the Jungla emperor. The forbidden city, as we know it today, constructed under the Yongla emperor. The forbidden city, as we know it today, constructed under the Jungla emperor. The temple of heaven, as we know it today, constructed under the Yongla emperor. the Temple of Heaven, as we know it today, constructed by the Yongla Emperor.

The Ming have this reputation for building, obviously here in Beijing, but really across China, right? I mean, his energy is replicated in other cities. They utilize Corvay labor and conscription on a massive scale that allows them to build these fortifications, to build cities, and of course the Great Wall. I mean, it's impossible to talk about the Ming Dynasty without talking about the wall. I know the first emperor of Qin, Chin Shur Huang, gets the credit for building the wall. But what we see today with the crenellated walls, with the towers, faced with brick, this is very much Ming Dynasty creation. It starts a bit with the Yongle emperor, but it's something that's

carried out by his successors as well. And just not for nothing, he keeps the Mongolians on their heels. Yeah, that's obviously important given recent history. What about, dare we ask, of any normal people benefited from this? I mean, as well as the grandiose building projects, irrigation canal building, would normal people in the countryside have noticed a difference in his reign? I find it hard to answer that question

when we go by emperor by emperor, because it's not as easy to quantify as when we think of administrations in modern politics. But looking over the long term of the Ming dynasty, one of the things about the Ming state is that despite the fact that it does use a lot of corvay labor conscription, it actually doesn't take, absorb as much of the wealth from the society as

it possibly could, particularly because under the Ming Dynasty, and this is because of the infrastructure, for example, the society is becoming more sophisticated urban, is coming to a flourishing in terms of its economics and the sophistication of the economy that I think does benefit a lot of people. So technological innovations, printing, for example, new forms of agriculture, industrial production. It's an era that's famous for its paintings, its philosophy, its culture. The rise of printing gives way to this incredible industry in how-to-manuals. You're not a member of the elite. You can learn how to paint like one. And of course, the Ming dynasty is perhaps famous for having some of the best novels. I think when you get to the middle of the Ming, especially, you start to have weaker emperors, the fact that society is rather humming along, almost regardless of the political drama and intrigue that's going on at the court. Things are going okay. We have these great cities with great entertainment quarters. We have markets that are full.

The granaries most of the time, not always, are full. The waters from the rivers, most of the time, not always, but most of the times they go where we want them to, at least in the beginning and in the middle periods. The Yongleur's empire's ambition for the Ming stretched far beyond China's borders. From 1405 onwards, he dispatched the great treasure fleets of Admiral Jean Ho. vast diplomatic missions carrying Chinese goods and imperial gifts across Southeast Asia, India, and Arabia, reaching as far as the coast of East Africa. This was decades before the grand voyages of Vasco da Gama or Francis Drake. It's one of my favorite periods of maritime

history, so I couldn't possibly do an episode on the Ming without mentioning it. This is Professor Craig Clunis from the University of Oxford. He was a eunuch, and that is a castrated male. Unuchs have existed in China for thousands of years by this point, and they are particularly associated with close personal service to emperors. Of course, one of the ideas about eunuchs, and a number of civilisations have used them, is that as castrated males,

they are the safest guards for the women of the imperial family. But eunuchs are used for all kinds of other purposes. Of course, they don't have any progeny of their own. They don't have any children of their own. So the idea is that, again, their loyalty is unshakable. And Zhang He came from the extreme southwest of China, from what is now Yunnan province. His family were Muslims. They probably originally came from Bukhara, which is now in Uzbekistan, because in the period of the Mongol hegemony,

there's a great deal of personnel exchange back and forwards across Eurasia. China at that point under the Mongols is more in touch with the Islamic world than it has been at other points. So, Jong He is captured as a small boy. He's castrated, horrible, cruel, but this gives him the possibility of ascending an imperial service. And he becomes a servant early on in his life of Judee, the future member, when he is still Prince of Yen. And he fights in the civil war on the emperor's side. So this is somebody that the emperor knows he can trust. And somebody who's got a proven track record as a leader of men, as a military leader, as a decisive figure. And so he's the choice for this extraordinary series of voyages into the oceans.

I've just been reading David Abilathia's history of the sea. And we should say it's not quite like Christopher Columbus is heading out into the middle of nowhere on a wing in a prayer. There were quite established networks of trade and diplomacy stretching right. The Indian Ocean, the world of South China Sea was more coherent, more connected than the Atlantic world at the time. That's absolutely right. The Jong-ho voyages, these are not voyages of discovery or exploration or boldly going where no one has gone before. China has been trading into the Indian Ocean for centuries and centuries. And he knew where he was going.

They're tapping into existing trade routes, and they're joining up existing trade routes. So there are places in Southeast Asia on Sumatra and Java and so on, which form the hinges between bodies of trading networks. So by making in some of the later voyages, voyages as far as the coast of Africa, that is something new. But people had been sailing to Sumatra and Java, and then people had been sailing from Sumatra to Africa. So you're quite right. Zhang He is not an explorer. He knows where he's going. The people he has with him who are navigating these ships, they know these routes.

They know these seas. They know the winds. They know what they're doing and where they're going. And they have a pretty good idea, I suspect, of what they might find there. What is unusual about these voyages is the scale of them and the scope and the number of ships and the number of heavily armed men involved. These have been trade routes. They have never been routes that have seen great armadas of armed men coming from China before.

That's something new. Right, Craig, you got that. That was going to be my next question. So tell me, why do we remember these and regard them as some of the most extraordinary maritime expeditions of all time? Tell me about the scale, the size of the ships apart from anything else, and the number of them. Well, they are very big expeditions. There's a whole academic sub-industry in kind of arguing about the size of these ships, and I'm not a naval archaeology or kind of naval architecture specialist.

The ships were very big. It now seems that they're maybe not quite as big as some of the written Chinese sources give them, but they were very big. So the biggest of the ships, the so-called Balchuan, which are treasure ships, which are the kind of flagships of the fleet, the best estimate from people like Sally Church who've really kind of looked into this and thought about it

is that they were 250 feet long. And as a comparison that people might be able to grasp, if you've been to Portsmouth and seen the victory, a top-rated British naval warship of the 18th century, the victory, I believe, is 186 feet long. So a 250-foot-long ship is a good deal bigger than that, and there are more than one of them. People are pretty confident, not all the ships were that big.

So we're talking about fleets of ships that have these great flagships in the middle, and troop carriers of all kinds, but they carry very substantial military forces. So their forces of kind of 25, 36, 27,000 men, the aim is absolute kind of shock and awe that where these fleets show up, you are meant to be overawed by the scale and the power and the majesty that they could deploy against you, and therefore it's not a good idea to think. about standing up against them. And indeed, the few people who try are quite quickly overwhelmed, because these are not also peaceful trading voyages. They are very much about overawing the Southeast Asian and Indian Ocean worlds with the power of the Ming Emperor.

There are seven of them. They extend initial to Southeast Asia in 1404, 08, 09. By the 20s, they're going to Africa. They're going to the, what we'd now call the Reds, see, the Arabia. It is just extraordinary the scale of it. It is amazing. Again, these are routes. So, of course, you know, they touch Southeast Asia. Southeast Asia's connected to India. They go to India. India is connected very extensively by trade networks to the Persian Gulf and to the East Coast of Africa. But to do this in one go. So the first trip to Africa is actually the fifth voyage, which is 1417 to 19. They are usually away for about two years because, of course, These are sailing ships.

They're dependent on monsoon winds. You can only sail in one direction in one season and then another direction in another. So they have to take up years doing this. But yes, they do reach, you know, remarkably distant parts of the world. They touch Bengal. They touch Java. They touch a whole number of port cities in southern India, Catalas, Sri Lanka, and of course Africa and the Persian Gulf, as you say.

They go to what is now Somalia Mogadishu, Zanzibar, they bring back, the animals I always think must be extraordinary. How did they imagine transporting those camels, those rhinos all the way back from there to China? Yeah, we're not quite sure. We're sure about giraffes that we are about rhinos, because the seventh and the last mission brings back a giraffe. It's not the first giraffe that the imperial court have ever seen. In fact, the first giraffe that the imperial court have ever seen comes to China in 1414. and it's a gift from the Sultan of Bengal. Now, of course, giraffes don't live in Bengal,

and that reminds us that, you know, the Chinese have these connections, but other people have these connections too. So the Sultan of Bengal could get hold of giraffes from Africa. But as you say, how you keep a giraffe alive, of course, there are a lot of things we don't know about the Jum Hill of Voyages, and one of the things we have absolutely no idea about

is how many kind of unfortunately dead giraffes or lions or whatever they had to, heave over the side of the ship on the way home. We only know about the ones that made it. We don't know about the ones that didn't make it. Why do they come to an end? Why do the Chinese retreat from these and don't build, what, the kind of European trading and then colonial empire that does emerge shortly after that? Well, it seems to me that in a way the voyages end because they don't need to go on, you know, because they've done what they need to do. And these things are extraordinarily costly, these voyages, at a time when the imperial state has

plenty of other things it wants to spend money on. So the Yonle emperor, as well as these voyages, he had decided to move the entire imperial capital from Nanjing to Beijing and to build a whole new imperial city. He wants to reinstate the Grand Canal, which rebuilds the economy of China, which is a huge, huge civil engineering project. there is the whole issue of kind of ongoing war with the Mongols. The Mongols may have been driven out of China, but they certainly haven't gone away. There's a war going on with Vietnam. There's an ongoing attempt, failed attempt by the Chinese to kind of incorporate Vietnam into their empire. So you can imagine debates within the imperial ruling group about, you know, what are we going to spend our money on, even though we are an enormous empire with enormous wealth, there are limits, and what are our priorities? And actually, these voyages, is they've done what they needed to do. You know, they were a success.

So I think words like retreat, that's very much in hindsight. I think if you look at it from their point of view, they've been a success, they've done what they were meant to do, and they just don't need to go on. We could use 28,000 troops to do something else. Well, Ming Power might have seemed absolutely unstoppable on these distant shores. Cracks were beginning to show within the palace walls, even in the decades just after the death of the Yongleur Emperor in 1420.

The Imperial Court became increasingly consumed by political intrigue. Officials and powerful palace eunuchs competed for influence. Rival factions grew more and more suspicious of one another. But the Ming did survive these early crises. In fact, it would endure for another two centuries. But as the 15th century gave way to the 16th and the 16th, the 17th, those pressures would mount. The political fighting continued at court. while powerful enemies rose to threaten China's frontiers.

Wars would place great pressure on imperial finances. By the early 1600s, the Ming faced a really very dangerous combination of all these crises. Financial instability, harvest failure, an increasingly hostile climate. External enemies, after nearly three centuries in power, the Ming dynasty was entering its final and most dangerous chapter. Jeremiah, at the dawn of the 17th century, the Ming are not super effective anymore and they get smashed with real world events. Yeah, in some ways they have two events that are out of their control coming together in the worst possible way.

The first one is this period of climate change, what we think of as the little ice age, it leads to famines, it leads to all kinds of disruptions in the local economies. And what you start having are people that the palace call bandits and rebels, but you and I might call people who are so hungry, they will do anything for for their next meal, including following a charismatic figure who says, I will take you there. And that's going on inside of China. So you have these massive bands of rebellious armies marching around throughout the country. And the problem is the more rebels rise up, the more soldiers you need to fight them, the more conscription you need, the more people try to escape conscription by joining the rebel bands.

And then outside of the frontier, just beyond the Great Wall, you have a new thing. threat, not the Mongols anymore, but another group that has emerged in the forests and mountains of Manchuria, which today the border between China and North Korea. And they eventually will call themselves the Manchus. And they put together their own state that they will then brand as the Qing state. And when you call yourself a new state rivaling the Ming Dynasty, well, you're going to get their attention in a hurry. And in 1644, these rebellious groups, these outside forces, will come together in a way that will spell the demise for the Ming Dynasty.

In 1627, a new emperor took the throne. At just 16 years old, the Chongjun emperor inherited a dynasty in serious trouble. He attempted to restore order. He tried purging those powerful figures at court. He replaced officials. He tried to strengthen the government. but the crises were coming faster than the Ming state could deal with them. There was chaos across China, and a rebel leader emerged,

a man who had set in motion the collapse of the Ming. His name was Li Zhur Chung. He was a postal worker turned rebel commander. Lee gathered an army which grew ever stronger. He captured cities, he swept across northern China. In 1644, his forces advanced on the Ming capital itself. inside Beijing, the Chongjun Emperor was running out of options. His treasury was empty, his armies were defeated and scattered.

One of his most important generals, Wu Sang Wei, was in the northeast, guarding the frontier against a new external enemy, the Manchu's. If General Wu stripped the garrisons on the frontier to save the dynasty, well, it might open the gates to foreign invasion. In April 1644, all this came to a head. Li Zhong's rebel army reached Beijing. The city fell pretty quickly, and as rebel soldiers poured into the capital, the last Ming Emperor left the Forbidden City and climbed the hill immediately behind it,

what is now Jingshan Park. It was originally the Imperial Gardens. It was once the refuge of the Ming emperors. Now it became the site of their final demise. because it was here that the story of the Ming reached its tragic, extraordinary conclusion. So, Jeremiah, we've come to Ching Shan Park. I mean, in many ways, this park is essential to the start of the Ming. And tragically, it is intimately connected with their downfall as well.

Absolutely. At the very last days of the Ming, you have the rebels' army of Liza Chong crashing through the gates of the city. And why that's important is that Beijing's defenses, rested on these immense city walls that surrounded the capital. Once you're inside those walls, the forbidden city did not offer much protection. It was meant to be forbidden, but not a fortress. And so unlike in medieval cities where you could pull your troops back into the keep or castle and continue to the defense, once the walls of Beijing were down,

the last emperor of the Ming dynasty to rule from this capital knew it was only a matter of time before the rebels entered the power. and took him and his family. So this is the spring of 1644? That's right. And so when the armies of Leza Chung burst into the city, the emperor knows that his time is limited. And so according to a couple versions of the story,

he tries to sneak out of the palace and sneak away, and he's restrained by his officials. And so now he knows that things could not possibly get worse. When the rebels approach the Forbidden City, he finally rings a bell, summoning his officials, to ask them what to do next, and nobody shows up. shows up and if you're an emperor this is a very bad sign and so in some versions of the story he sneaks out the back door of the forbidden city preparing to kill himself and other more grotesque

versions of the story he slaughters his whole family to spare them the indignities of being captured by the bandits but either way he ultimately makes his way to this garden to this park and in this park somewhere on this hill possibly in the spot marked by the sign probably not not, he hanged himself from a tree here. And so ended the Ming dynasty's control over the capital. The rebels are in firm control and like rebels had before, they start their own dynasty, the loyalty dynasty, the Shun dynasty. But that wouldn't last very long either. I was going to say, I've never heard of the Shun dynasty. No. And you wouldn't because it didn't last very long because up at the Great Wall, hearing with great distress what was happening the

capital was the last truly good general of the Ming dynasty, Wu Sangui. And so General Wu hearing what's happening has a dilemma on his hands. He's up there to guard against the manchus on the other side, but now he knows the capital needs his help. And according to some versions of the story, they've taken hostages, General Wu's father and possibly even his girlfriend. And so General Wu has to make a faithful decision. And so Wu Sangui goes across the border or goes across

the frontier to the armies of the Qing. Perhaps he goes to the Qing Emperor and says, Qing Emperor, will you help me save Beijing from the rebels? And the Qing Emperor at the time, the Schoenger Emperor, is seven years old. But fortunately, the Emperor's uncles, Dorgon, Jurgalong, Dodo are there commanding the armies, and they are very receptive to General Wu's pitch,

which is something they've been waiting for for years. They listen to him, ask, Are you serious? You want us to take our army? through the past that you've been guarding and march on your capital that you've been trying to keep us out of? Yeah, I think we can do that.

And so the armies of Gen. Wu, the armies of the Qing, proceed to march on Beijing to reclaim the city from the rebels Liza Chong and his new, although short-lived Shun Dynasty. And so do they take the city unopposed as well, like the rebels? Well, of course, the rebels are not going to go without a fight. And so the armies of Liza Chung march east. March East to meet the armies of the Qing and Wu Sangui, and they fight a battle near

a place called Shahai Guan. And this battle in 1644 is one of these terrible 17th century battles with rudimentary cannons and swords and spears. And at first it's contested mostly between the Chinese armies, so the armies of the rebels and Wu Sangui's forces. The leaders of the Qing, Dorgan, Dodo, they're holding their troops back a little bit from the battle. That's very small. They're going to let the Chinese fight it out. Yeah.

But towards the end of the day, according to legend, a sandstorm envelopes the battlefield. And anyone who knows anything about North China immediately thinks, okay, this is definitely plausible. And as the sandstorm blinds the combatants, that's when Dorgon and the Qing leaders unleash the armies of the Qing on the battlefield. And it's not just Manchus, it's Mongol cavalry. It's Manchu Bowman. It's even Han Chinese foot soldiers who have joined the other side. And you can imagine these poor rebels.

At least the soldiers of General Wu's army knew this might be coming. The poor rebels look up, rubbing their eyes from the sand and see coming at them. This army marching, riding at them with these haircuts where they shave the fronts of their heads, braid their hair long in the back. It's all very metal. And of course, that's really where it gets put to route. And Lisa Chung, this Shun dynasty, gives way to the armies of the Qing. They reach the city of Beijing.

And the people of Beijing, I'm sure we're up with the city walls looking out, and they see General Wu's standard coming at them. And they're like, we're saying, what is this? Because with General Wu, our Dorgon and the Qing leaders. And they also notice that General Wu has a fascinating new hairstyle as well, where he has shaved the front of his head. And so the Qing armies come in here. It's a peacekeeping mission, but one that will last from 1644 until 1912.

State building. State building, exactly. So the Qing take Beijing, and how soon do they put their own stamp on it? How soon does this turn into a Qing capital? So at first, the Qing aren't entirely sure what they want to do. There is a debate among their leaders as to whether they should now retreat, whether they should do what some of their predecessors, predecessors of conquest aniancy set down and just rule North China or whether they should take

the whole thing. And it seems that actually some of the Chinese officials who are defected to their cause encouraged them to complete the conquest, saying, if you're going to do this, you must do it all the way. And so the Qing begin to prepare for a much larger enterprise, which is to conquer all of Ming China. And this is not going to be easy. It's large. And also we say that the last Ming Emperor to rule from Beijing? Well, he has cousins all over the country. And the minute his death is announced, you have cousins down in Nanjing who raised their hand.

They're like, well, I'm the new emperor. And the Qing armies are like, well, General Wu, you've been so helpful so far, kill this guy. And then another guy says, I'm the new Ming emperor. And so General Wu is sent on a multi-year quest finally chasing the last Ming dynasty claimant into Burma. And at that point, he makes the Burmese king. or the court of Ava a deal, turn him over or become the southernmost province of the new Qing

Empire. Burma came like one fugitive sovereign away from becoming an inevitable and integral part of the Chinese Empire. With that too, they had to put their own stamp on the capital. When they came in, one of the things they were very afraid of was smallpox. So they encouraged, forced many of the Han Chinese to move out of the areas around the palace to the southern part of the city, making the areas around the palace, the preserve of the Qing armies, their banners. And while they didn't necessarily impose their cultural values, at least directly on their subject people, the one thing they did make people do was get a haircut. And part of this is because there were so many loyalists to the old Ming order, they had to know who was on Team Ching and who wasn't.

One of the easiest ways was to force every Han Chinese male to adopt the Manchu hairstyle or the which is that shaved in the front braid in the back. So the Ming, they win the dragon thrown by the sword and they lose it by the sword. But their legacy, as we can see all around us today, their legacy ensures. Absolutely. I think particularly as you're walking around the city of Beijing, the layout of the city, the way the city was designed, the way the city, the old city of Beijing remains today, would be familiar to the Ming emperors. Many of the buildings and some of the structures perhaps are newer.

But if the Yongla emperor were to be dropped today in the city of Beijing or in the forbidden city, there would be much that would be unfamiliar to him, but he could probably find his way around quite easily. The era of the Ming was over. The age of the Qing had begun. But China's new Manchu rulers didn't simply sweep the Ming world away. They took possession of it. They tried to use it.

From Beijing, they continued to rule from the forbidden city. They maintained and built onto the great palaces and temples of the Ming capital. They co-opted many of the institutions that had governed China under the Ming, and it worked. The Qing were initially, certainly, extremely successful. Under their leadership, China entered another extraordinary period of imperial expansion, economic growth and cultural achievement. But they were the last. great dynasty. They were finally toppled in 1912 after a century of humiliations, but that is another

story, and that brought to an end more than 2,000 years of Chinese imperial rule. Jeremiah, I'm most struck by one thing that seems to be several different golden ages. No one can quite work out when the golden age. People say, oh, the tongue was a golden age, the hand was a golden age, the Ming, and I'm sure some people would argue that today is a golden age. So why do you think the Ming looms so large, perhaps in the European mind? That's an interesting question. I think there's a couple reasons for it. One is some of the best early writing about China from Westerners actually living in China occurs at the end of the Ming.

And for this, we have the Jesuits who arrive in China. At the end of the 16th century, in fact, it's around 1600 or so that one of these Jesuits, Mateo Ricci and some of his compatriots actually make it to Beijing. They ingratiate themselves with the elite at court because they, Matea Ricci especially speaks a wonderful Chinese. While they never meet the emperor, they have these scholarly communications and connections. They translate Confucius into Latin. They translate Euclid's geometry into Chinese.

And because of this, they're sending back these rather glowing reports of this civilization in China. And so some of the earliest, other than say like Marco Polo, you're getting this whole body of information about China coming back from a group of people who are actually living in China. And what they're saying is intriguing because it's so positive. This is a real civilization out here. I think that may be part of the mystique of the Ming, if you will. And the other part of it, too, if I may, they leave behind such a fabulous body of literature and painting and art. And in terms of things from like industrial production like porcelain to some of the great paintings.

to some of the great novels. One of the great novels of Chinese history is a book called the Jin Pingmei, which is like the Lady Chatterley's lover, but way better written. It's the kind of thing, if you read it on the subway, you'd be blushing.

But at the same time, it's an example of the kind of artistry that was going on. And even today, people who study literature in China, they really love looking at the late Ming. You know, political basket case, though it was, but culturally, just such a wonderful era to talk about. Thank you so much for joining me on this deep dive on the rise and fall of the Ming.

I urge you to go to our YouTube channel, History Hits, where you can watch the TV documentary we made in Beijing as whilst we were filming and recording this podcast. And you can see that incredible city built by the Ming. We go inside the forbidden city. We go inside the Temple of Heaven, all sorts of amazing places. I would really recommend it if you want to get a better idea of the majesty of that imperial city. We'll put a handy link in the show notes, folks.

Big thank you to all our contributors, Dr. Jeremiah Jenny and Professor Craig Clurice. and the folks at CICC. If you want more Chinese history of Jeremiah, we've got a whole bunch of episodes waiting for you. We've got one on the Fibodin City itself. Or on the Opium Wars, Terracotta Warriors, too. Just search your podcast player for Dan Snow's History and those topics, or just check the link in the show notes.

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