The History of China - #224 - Ming 15: The Tumu Fiasco

Episode Date: October 1, 2021

A child sits the throne of Great Ming, which goes surprisingly alright… at least for a while. But when the old guard of the imperial regency starts dying off, a combination of naive youthful exuberance and pure political ambition from the power behind the throne will throw everything into chaos on the plains north of Beijing. Time Period Covered: 1435-1449 CE Major Historical Figures: Great Ming: Zhu Qizhen (Emperor Yingzong, the Zhengtong/Tianshun Emperor) [r. 1335-1449, 1457-1464] Grand Empress Dowager Chen [d. 1442] Wang Zhen, Eunuch Lord [d. 1449] Mongol Tribes: Esen, Taishi of the Oirat [d. 1455] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 224, The Qumu Fiasco Last time, we went over the decade of rule under Zhu Zhanji, the Xuanda Emperor, until his own tragically early death at 36 in the year 1435. Likewise, we charted the last great voyage of the mighty Ming treasure fleet, which would consign its Grand Admiral, Zheng He, to the bosom of the sea before its return into Chinese waters. Today, then, we press resolutely on, and alongside the whole imperial apparatus of Great Ming itself, confront a sort of crisis that hadn't occurred in living memory. A child sitting atop the dragon throne. Zhu Qizhen had acceded his father at just eight years old, with his enthronement marking the inauguration of the Zhengtong Era, meaning the

Era of Right Governance. Now, right off the bat, we've got some naming confusion that happens here with Zhu Qizhen, in terms of what we officially call him in English. As I've explained before, the Ming and Qing emperors are most typically referred to by the era names in English in order to avoid needless overlapping of their temple names with the prior dynastic rulers, i.e. all of the Taizongs, Xuanzongs, and Wuzongs, etc. We get to do that because, nearly universally, the last two imperial dynasties stick to a one-era-per-monarch rule. Well, today we get to deal with the exception to that rule, Zhu Qizhen, who will, because of a rather spectacularly epic fail, will wind up getting himself captured by the Mongols,

held as hostage, and forced to abdicate in favor of his younger brother for a period of eight years before finally getting his throne back. Upon retaking power, he got, that's right, a whole new reign era, Tianshun, marking him out as the only Ming or Qing emperor with an interrupted period of rule. Now we're going to get to all that in due course, but for ease of memory, Zhu Qizhen is also the only emperor of Ming or Qing commonly called by his temple name in English, Yingzong, the heroic ancestor. So that's what we'll do. Emperor Yingzong, he shall be. As the child emperor, the very first of the whole Ming, in fact, it was clear to all that Yingzong would require an extended regency,

no doubt in anyone's mind there. Just how that would be dealt with, on the other hand, would prove to be rather more up in the air, at least at first. There was, after all, no established or legally enshrined framework to deal with a regency in the Ming Codex. The idea that the imperial chancellors even had some modicum of power whatsoever had only recently been reintroduced to the government decades after the Hongwu Emperor had stripped them of any such responsibility. As it stood then, the de facto regent became the young emperor's grandmother, the Grand Empress Dowager Chang. Lady Chang was doubly effective in this particular role, since she not only held the most venerable and respected title in the court due to her status as the wife of Hongxi and the mother of Shen De, thereby representing the maintenance of some semblance of dynastic continuity and

legitimacy, but also she was herself a shrewd and experienced political decision-maker in her own right. Lady Chang would spend the next seven years or so guiding and protecting her grandson, remaining the central influence and policy bastion for the Zhengtong era until her death near 60 in 1442. Formidable though she was, the Grand Impostor certainly did not manage the realm all by herself. She was joined by six key figures in the court to oversee the imperial regency, three grand secretaries, and three great eunuchs. The three secretaries, much like the empress herself, represented continuity within the government, having been carried over from previous reigns.

Though unrelated, all three shared the same surname, Yang Shiqi, Yang Rong, and Yang Pu, and therefore became known as the Three Yangs. Dennis Twitchett writes, They had served together since the accession of the Xuanda Emperor in 1426, and Yang Siqi and Yangrong had served successive emperors since the beginning of the Yongle Emperor's reign. They were experienced, highly competent, and extremely powerful. The Three Eunuchs, meanwhile, came from the highest echelons of the powerful Directorate of Ceremonies,

the most prestigious office within the palace eunuchs, meanwhile, came from the highest echelons of the powerful Directorate of Ceremonies, the most prestigious office within the palace eunuch hierarchy. For our purposes here, however, the one worth noting down would be the man who quickly rose to dominate the emperor's mind, and with it the whole regency itself, Wang Zhen, appointed to the Director of Ceremonies just that year, but one of the earliest graduates of the palace school for eunuchs that had been established a decade earlier, which Twitchit reiterates had been established in direct contravention of the palace school for eunuchs that had been established a decade earlier, which Twitchit reiterates had been established in direct contravention of the founding emperor's policy of keeping eunuch servants uneducated and thereby out of politics. According to at least one source, written late in the dynasty, Wang was apparently among the cadre of young men who had voluntarily joined the eunuch corps and undergone the subsequent castration procedure, having been

persuaded by the Yongle emperor in order to secure a position within the inner court instructing the palace ladies. This apparently gave him a significant competitive advantage and fast-tracked his career in meteoric rise, and well, jeez, I guess he must have thought the trade-off worth it, but that'd been a big ol' no from me. In any event, Wang Zhen was decades younger than any other member of the regency as it was formed in 1435. In his mid-thirties, while the next nearest in age, the Grand Empress Dowager herself, was already in her early 50s. This would mean, in the years to come, that as the other members of the regency waned and died off, Wang Zhen would only grow more into his political prime.

He also served as a child emperor's first teacher, using that closeness and authority to establish a powerful personal dominance over the monarch, an influence that would be reinforced rather than diminished as time went on. For the first seven or so years of Yingzong's regency, this was pretty much how things sat. The boy king sat playing with his toys, while grandma helmed the ship of state, flanked by the three yangs and the three eunuch directors in a stable power septum virate. Yet as the years ticked on, the advancing ages of most of those power brokers began to take their inevitable toll. In 1440, the first of the Yongs dropped dead, Yongrong at age 69, leaving the other two Yongs to pick up the slack at the oh-so-spry ages of 70 and 75, respectively. But the real shift in the political winds wouldn't come for another two years,

until the death of the Grand Empress Dowager on November 20th, 1442. The Emperor was by this point 15, marking his age of majority and him beginning to formally assume at least some of the duties of state. He'd just married the previous June, and only two days before his grandmother's death had attended to the business of court himself for the very first time. The baby bird was just learning to flap his wings, but suddenly faced a hundred-foot do-or-die drop. Into such an uncertain, precipitous moment, who should step forth but, of course, the emperor's oldest teacher and closest mentor, none other than the eunuch lord Wang Zhen, now about forty and in the prime of his life, while his rivals were dropping like flies. It seems that the Empress Dowager had realized

the rather dangerously powerful position Wang had finagled his way into about five years before her death, all the way back in 1437. Late that year, she had apparently given serious consideration to the idea of ordering Wang Zhen to commit suicide rather than risk leaving him as the effective last man standing over the emperor. In the end, though, she was talked out of such a course of action by the young emperor and several other officials, who apparently really liked the guy. Wang still held considerable mental dominance over Yingzong, who tellingly and shockingly continued to refer to his old teacher by the style of xiansheng, meaning teacher, master, or elder. As a quick aside here, the honorific in modern Chinese has been democratized to simply mean

mister, but its rendering in Japanese, the rather more familiar sense Chinese has been democratized to simply mean Mr., but its rendering in Japanese, the rather more familiar Sensei, still conveys much of the initial honorific qualities. Long story short, that is definitely not how a sovereign ought to be referring to his subject, regardless of their past relationship. Wang Zhen played his part to perfection, remaining circumspect and deferred while the old Empress Dowager remained alive, yet persuasive and charismatic enough to draw many into his orbit. Following the death of the Empress then, there was little indeed to stand in the way for Wang Jun becoming the effective dictator of the Ming government,

which he absolutely did. Quote, The court paid him homage, obeisance, and flattery, largely because the young emperor continued to admire and defer to his erstwhile teacher. But the older court officials also must have respected him as a competent official, if lacking in experience. He is said to have been clever, alert, and a man of considerable personal charm. After a time, they also must have feared him as a political manipulator.

Certainly, by the mid-1440s, he clearly began to develop a certain megalomania, hardly avoidable in the circumstances, thinking of himself to be a second Duke of Zhou, arbitrarily deciding great issues of state, overriding criticism, and even wantonly killing adversaries, end quote. Longzhen would therefore chart out the path that would become the disturbingly frequent norm over the lifespan of the Ming Dynasty. A eunuch on a meteoric career path would come to use the imperial power as his own, at times even seeming

to forget that his own position hung ever so precariously by the whim of the emperor himself. This alliance between the son of heaven himself, his eunuch assistants and counselors, and the imperial bodyguard, which was to become a typical alignment of power during the Ming, was now brought into existence for the very first time. If the regency itself seemed to hold relatively stable through the latter half of the 1430s and into the 1440s, it was a very different story indeed for the realm as a whole. Natural disasters, plagues, and widespread social unrest wracked the empire, some of which was unavoidable, but much of which was due to poor policy decisions.

In terms of natural disasters, as ever, it's worth mentioning that such things really do happen all the time, and it really comes down to just how effectively the government is willing or able to respond to them. In this instance, it was not great. The northwestern provinces of Shanxi and Shanxi, for instance, endured a repeated annual series of droughts from 1437, finally culminating in a massive regional famine in 1444. The region north of the Yangtze River, Jiangbei, all the way north to the Huai Valley, also suffered devastating famines in 1434. This was followed by flooding in

1436, 1437, and 1444, with another famine in 1447. The North China Plains were likewise afflicted, with droughts and plagues of locusts devastating the region in 1435, followed by both the Yellow River itself and the connected Grand Canal bursting through their dikes first in 1436 and then again in 1439, 40, and 41, all to much death, destruction, and sorrow. Even the regions typically considered the ever-fertile breadbaskets of the empire were impacted. The central Yangtze Valley suffered droughts almost annually from 1436 to 1448, and even ever-verdant Zhejiang witnessed widespread famines in 1440 and 41, then again in 1445 alongside an epidemic of what very likely was yet another outbreak of the Black Death,

resulting in horrific death tolls. In the face of such natural devastation, to its credit, the Ming government did not stand idly by. Rather, it authorized sweeping regional tax permissions on those areas affected, to the tune of 1.7 million dan of grain taxes absolved in just Jiangnan alone in the year 1447. It also strove to move quickly to directly relieve the victims of such catastrophes when and where it could, especially during the period before the death of the Grand Empress Dowager, who took particular concerns in such matters. Even so, the Ming government just as often did itself no favors and squandered any possible goodwill regarding its relief efforts through other, far more ten-year policies during this

period. From Twitchit, quote, One of the major causes of unrest was the way in which the system of corvée labor was implemented. Corvée labor was primarily needed in Nanjing, where much construction continued, but especially in Beijing, where building on a massive scale continued as the city was transformed into the center of the world. Moreover, corvée labor provided a wide range of goods and objects needed by the government and the palace and the manpower for many essential services. The implementation of such services was not simply burdensome, they were often applied so harshly as to provoke resentment that could easily have been avoided by an administration more effective and more sensitive to popular feeling. End quote. Who could possibly have guessed that in the middle of

empire-wide devastation, people might be rather less willing than usual to work for free while their families starved? The result of such onerous burdens placed on the populace was, predictably, evasion and resistance in turn. Where the government could, it attempted to round up artisans and laborers who sought to escape their assigned duties. Far more often, however, the government simply did not have the reach or the manpower to track down those who wished to evade their summons. Regional reports from across the empire during this period are replete with examples of imperial census takers and other officials reporting that localities were basically emptied out almost overnight, rather than being round up for their corvée duties. Quote, in 1438, more than half the registered population of Fanzhe in Shanxi province simply disappeared, while in Yicheng in

the same province, it was reported that more than a thousand had absconded, leaving their lands to grow wild. Localities like Wenan and Fuping reported detailing that doors were closed and houses shut up, while people had disappeared in search of food. Jin Hua in southern Zhejiang reported that 40% of its population had gone missing as of 1441, while in neighboring Tanzhou, more than two-thirds had vanished. Where had they all gone? Why, they'd done what they'd always done in the face of ruinous government policies and natural disasters. They'd headed off to the woods and hills and mountains to take up lives as vagrants, foragers, and bandits by the hundreds and the thousands. Quote, camping along the roads, trying to sustain themselves on wild plants and the bark of trees, end quote. It's rather striking

to consider that so many considered this horrid, near-animalistic existence to be preferable to facing the government mandates for corvée service, and speaks to the pervasive sense of desperation and despair these people must have felt. Either path likely led to deprivation, suffering, and speaks to the pervasive sense of desperation and despair these people must have felt. Either path likely led to deprivation, suffering, and potentially death, and their choice had been boiled down to either meeting it on their own terms or those of the imperial government. The year 1448 would prove to be, rather literally, the high watermark of this era of natural disasters and human suffering. The Yellow River reached its bounds yet again, this time just to the north of Kaifeng, and flooded eastward into the Yellow Sea near modern Donghai. The following year saw another catastrophic breach of the river's dikes, resulting in massive flows into the Guo River,

a tributary of the Huai. Quote, apart from the inundation of great areas, widespread destruction, heavy mortality, and displacement of population, this flood also seriously affected the Shandong region of the Grand Canal. There were successive breaches of the Shahan Dikes, where the Yellow River and the canal met in western Shandong, and the canal lost much of its water supply, end quote. This, even beyond the devastation wreaked upon the wider populace, threatened Beijing directly, as the capital vitally depended on the Grand Canal network to supply it with necessary grain and goods year round. Running across the 1440s then, and well into the 1450s, the government was forced to devote massive energy and manpower,

and needless to say, cost, to conservation and restoration work on the Yellow River and Grand Canal's courses to restore and maintain that vital arterial link. What would any of this be, though, without a goodly dose of the thing that inevitably results from widespread suffering over taxation, death, and discontent. I'm talking, of course, about rebel movements and peasant uprisings. In this case, two separate movements would foment in the Fujian-Zhejiang border regions and Jiangxi province, respectively. The Fujianese rebellion was touched off by disputes between the local government and a group of disaffected silver miners. Vital as silver was to the Ming economy, its mining operations were strictly monopolized and regulated by the imperial government. At the local level, such

operations were overseen by officials who, as is often the case, demanded unreasonably high quotas and threatened death for those who failed to meet them or were found to have stolen from the mines. Around about 1440, a former miner officiant called Ye Zhonglio got together a cabal of disaffected silver miners and led them in quote-unquote liberating silver from several mines across the region without government permission or oversight. After some three years of this extra-legal mining operation, the group at last openly rebelled against the government in 1447, attracting quote, a considerable following from among the miners and villagers of the surrounding district,

and began to organize and train them militarily, end quote. Meanwhile, as of March 1448, a group of tenant farmers along the Fujian-Jiangxi borders had grown weary of the exploitation they faced at the hands of their landlords, quote, who obliged them to make seasonal gifts in addition to their regular rents, end quote. Here, two brothers, Teng Maoqi and Mao Ba, finally had enough and led their fellow farmers in refusing to pay up. This resulted in clashes with the local militia, resulting in a number of early successes and access to arsenals and weapon caches for the developing rebel sect. By early 1449, both rebel groups' leaders had declared themselves kings and begun circulation of heretical scriptural texts and taken blood oaths. The rebel groups, operating in their own home regions with intimate knowledge and connections of their locales, proved very effective against the provincial police forces initially sent to stop them after their leader

was killed, though sources are unclear as to whether it was at the hands of government troops or in an altercation with his own men that Yeh met his demise. They would be pursued and finally crushed half a year later. In the meantime, the Tang's farmer rebels were soundly defeated in battle in January 1449, and after being betrayed to the Ming forces by a defector, the Tang brothers were ambushed and captured that February, then taken to Beijing and publicly executed. In spite of this, bands of rebels, at least nominally loyal to either of these causes, by now clearly lost causes, continued to predate northwestern Fujian until at least 1452. Interestingly, in spite of the widespread disaffection with the

government policies and general suffering, and in spite of both rebellions' early successes, neither ever claimed anywhere close to a mass following or anything more than being a regional nuisance. The insurgents never reached to stages of controlling territory or capturing towns, and in spite of their grandiose titles claimed by their leaders, there remained a pack of roving bandits stuck out in the countryside. One of the major reasons behind this lack of popular support, more broadly, was that the local officials rather quickly moved to placate the population with promises to exempt them from all corvée labor duties for three years, and in the case of the silver miners of Fujian, lowering the quotas and abolishing the death penalty for theft.

This showed just how simple the pacification of such rural unrest could be if only official corruption and mismanagement were eliminated and harsh government policies ameliorated. It would be an important lesson, and one that would be quickly and repeatedly forgotten for centuries to come. Shifting gears here, let's now move north to the borderlands of China to once again look at the perennial thorn in the empire's side. That's right, wait for it, the Mongols. As you recall, the Yongle Emperor had conducted five great raids against the ever-present threat from the steppes,

indeed riding himself into the grave during his final outing. In spite of the general dispersal of any sizable Mongol threat in the region, their menace, at least in theoretical terms, remained heavily on the minds of virtually every foreign policy official and general during this era, and lasting all the way until the late 1500s. Among the Mongols themselves, both those who rode across the Altai grasslands and those now residing within Chinese borders as Ming subjects and soldiers, the memories of the past glories and vague hopes that somehow the great Khanate of the Mongols might be re-established continued to burn brightly. Jack Weatherford puts it, quote, The Mongols believed that they could not be completely defeated.

Even after being driven back north of the Gobi, they still pretended to be the rightful rulers of China and much of the rest of the world. The Mongol royal court was just waiting for a shift in the will of heaven that would propel them back to their rightful place as the rulers of the most extensive empire on earth, end quote. History isn't black and white, yet too often it's presented as such. Grey History, the French Revolution, is a long-form history podcast dedicated to exploring the ambiguities and nuances of the past. By contrasting both the experiences of contemporaries and the conclusions of historians, Grey History dives into the detail and unpacks one of the most important and disputed events in human history. From a revolution based on hope and liberty, to its descent into the infamous reign of terror, there's plenty to discuss, and plenty of grey to explore.

One can't understand the modern world without understanding the French Revolution. So if you're looking for your next long-form, binge-worthy history podcast, one recommended by universities and loved by enthusiasts, then check out Grey History, The French Revolution today. Or simply search for The French Revolution. These included campfire stories told among the fur-clad raiders and traitors of especially clever Mongol concubines, impotent Ming emperors and oversexed decadent empresses, had managed to secretly install a Mongol as the Ming emperor in secret. Quote, thus the Mongols had never been truly defeated or chased out of

China, merely replaced by some of their Mongol kinsmen in another guise. End quote. But the present reality was far from any such grandiose vision. The men chuckled over such stories and then headed out to hunt another marmot or gather some dried cow dung to build a fire. In the wake of the Yongle Emperor's death, three significant factions of Mongols had come to more or less settle along or near the de facto Chinese borders. To the northeast were the Uriyankad. To the center, the Tartars, as in the actual tribe known as Tartars, not the broad application of the term to all Mongols by Europeans, also known as the Eastern Mongols. and to the far northwest were the Oirats.

These factions were in near constant strife with one another, and though the chieftain Aruk-Tai, he who Yongle had died in a failed bid to subjugate, had been able to keep them in check during his lifetime by sheer force of personal will, upon his death in 1434, in battle as it were against the Oirats, that would spell the end of that rough, loose quasi-alliance of the clans. Thereafter, his son soon surrendered to the Ming, leaving the Oirats to become the most powerful faction. The leader of the Oirats, Togon, had unified his tribes and forged an alliance with the Tartars by marrying his daughter to their young Khan. He thereafter sought to further unify the Mongols under his command and make real his people's long-held conceit of supremacy once again.

Togon would die with that dream still unrealized sometime prior to 1444, leaving the work to his son and heir, Essen. As the Taishi of the Oirat, officially like the Chancellor to the Great Khan, but much like in the Shogunate of Japan, the actual power behind the royal conceit at this point, Essen moved against the Hami region of Ming territory, and by 1448 had the area under his effective control. It is important to note here that in spite of the fact that their relationship often did remain adversarial and Mongols militaristically hostile, the Sino-Mongol relationship was significantly more complex than a simple us-them dynamic. After all, they had by this point some two centuries or more of widespread intercourse,

both in terms of trade and culture, but also in the more intimate personal sense. The vast majority of Mongols now lived within the borders of Great Ming, with Chinese names and families as tax-paying, more or less law-abiding citizens. They occupied many positions of power and importance throughout the echelons of the Ming army. Even more than that, though, the Ming government was compelled to interact with the horsemen of the steppes for vital economic reasons. Reasons of national security, in fact. The greatest of these needs to be met by the steppe riders will surely come as no surprise. A sufficient and stable supply of horses for the massive Ming armies. While this need had been met in short bursts through military capture of Mongol herds in the north and bartering

with the people of the southwest in places like Sichuan and Yunnan, such means were unsustainable in the long run. Instead, where the majority of Ming warhorses would come from was through the official tea horse market, conducted at three sites in Gansu, Xining, Hezhou, and Taozhou. The trade was conducted once every three years, with a quota of one million din of tea, which is about one and a half million pounds, exchanged for 14,000 horses. For their part, the Mongols who took part in such trades sought more than just the tea on offer. Many other luxury goods that only the southern empire could provide, and they also increasingly relied on Chinese agricultural production to meet their own basic survival needs. As the Sino-Mongol

trading relationship trended towards stabilization, the Ming government's wariness toward their steppe neighbors began to wane. Perhaps the Mongols had, in their own way, mellowed out a bit, becoming culturally more in line with the standards and practices of China itself. This, you may remember, had long been the standard operating procedure for powerful Chinese dynasties regarding its neighbors. Take the raw barbarians and then simmer them in Chinese gifts, clothes, education, and customs until they were sufficiently cooked. This process of cultural imperialism and colonization was often so subtle, some might even term it insidious, that the targeted people might not even quite realize what was happening, and were eventually simply amalgamated into the broad cultural hotpot of the Han Chinese ethno-national identity. In this particular

instance, however, the Ming would find that they had rather seriously misjudged the degree to which their Mongol neighbors had been cooked. It was assumed, on the heels of many northern campaigns, prosecuted by first the Honglu Emperor and then the Yongle Emperor, that the threat from the steppe had been effectively broken forever, and that the Mongols were now little more than scattered tribes that could be dealt with one at a time at Chinese leisure. As such, over the course of the 1430s and 40s, the Ming military stance became seriously deficient. Quote, perhaps most dangerously, was a quite unrealistic complacency over what had actually been accomplished. Already before the death of the Yongle Emperor, the government had begun to concentrate border garrisons around the new

northern capital of Beijing, as if the military had some forebodings of further danger. After the Yongle Emperor's death, both the frontier generals and members of the Grand Secretariat warned of the shortcomings of the frontier defenses, but their protests went unregarded, end quote. Not only was the border situation beset by an acute lack of forward strategic thinking, but at the local command level, often what had once been functional military readiness had long since given way to self-serving profiteering from the so-called commanders over their so-called troops. Quote, the wage-o-garrison system of territorial armies had, by 1438, lost half of its original manpower of about two and a half

million men. A million and a quarter soldiers had fled the hereditary ranks and had not been replaced. At the same time, the whole system of military colonies, tuan tian, along the border and designed to support the armies, had been allowed to deteriorate. The grain was sold off privately, and the lands themselves misappropriated or sold off. The officers tended to become landowners, and their soldiers became farm laborers, end quote. As such, by the middle of the 15th century, what had once been an effective and self-sufficient military border defense command had devolved into an understaffed logistical nightmare in which no one could even remember what they were even supposed to be doing there. This could be easy to take as a sign of

impending Ming imperial collapse, but that's actually not the case. Rather, as Twitchit puts it, "...it was the result of an age-old Chinese tradition, rooted in the agrarian structure of the state, of a peculiar type of army, a peasant army, whose troops were treated more as corvée laborers than as professional soldiers, as conscripts rather than volunteers, and which included even criminals sentenced to military service as a punishment, end quote. An army of the unwilling, commanded by the incompetent, and treated like the scum of the earth. It's little wonder that under such conditions, very few troops held any real desire or will to fight for king and country. Instead, they'd much

rather take any available opportunity to slink out of camp and return to their homes and families. More of that were impossible, perhaps disappear to their homes and families. Or if that were impossible, perhaps disappear to the south and create a new identity, or even seek refuge among the so-called barbarian Mongols who, for all their own peculiarities, seem to at least hold their own troops in much higher regard and care than their own deviant Ming commanders did. Their officers were little better. They were quite happy to draw the pay and provisions due to the soldiers who deserted or absconded, and make a handsome personal profit from the situation. The whole military setup derived from a fundamentally bureaucratic attitude to the army.

End quote. As the old saying went, one does not waste good steel to make nails. One does not waste good men making soldiers. In terms of the borderlands themselves, it must be pointed out that it was, as of this time, literally nothing more than a line of beacon fires, none of which had been lit since the reign of Yongle, and was now only intermittently patrolled by cavalry units. So yeah, no impenetrable Great Wall, just a line in the sand. The Great Wall megastructure that you can visit today would be re-re-reconstructed from its centuries of disrepair and irrelevance by the 1470s. As of the 1440s, where the Great Wall even still existed at all, it was little more than a pile of forgotten, useless debris out in the middle of nowhere.

Quote, The only solidly built wall protecting Beijing was the brick-faced city wall itself, with its nine fortified gates, and which had only been completed in 1445, end quote. Rather, the main points of any defense against northern aggression were the two great garrison cities north of the capital, Xuanfu and Datong. Xuanfu served as the primary garrison, housing some 90,000 troops, 35,000 on active duty, with another 55,000 trainees. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of these troops, 25 of the 35,000 active duty, were cavalry units. In addition to this step-ready, highly mobile force, the garrison boasted some 3,000 heavy mortars, light guns, and signal flares. Additionally, it had some 90,000 light hand rockets. It stood as a fixture out against the infinite wastes beyond,

daring anyone to move against it. Comparatively then, the secondary garrison at Datong was a much less intimidating affair, at least at first glance. In terms of natural defenses, it sat far more exposed than its sister city. Yet that seeming exposure belied the fact that behind its walls were more than 35,000 mounted cavalry troops organized under two generals as yuzhejiangjun, or mobile attack forces. The third leg of the defensive triangle of the northern border then was mighty Beijing itself. In its vicinity was a near-unbelievable 160,000 troops, with even further garrisons kept in reserve further south in case of dire need. Under such a defensive posturing, the first line consisted of the frontier guard battalions tasked with holding and delaying any enemy advance until a mobile strike force could be dispatched to disrupt and break up the barbarian advance.

Yet since the era of Zhongwei, those frontline forces, once invaluable as both defenders and as advanced scouts and intelligence, have been pulled back far deeper into Chinese territory, thus leaving the Ming army far blinder to Mongol undertakings and movements than it once had been. As such, the effective border region was by the 1440s a measly 100 miles from Beijing itself. The whole system was predicated on the assumption that, when and if an attack came, it would be met with quick and efficient counter-strikes from those forward operating bases, and with a competent command structure to carry it out. Yet in 1449, when just such an attack finally came, both of those assumptions would disastrously fail. By this point, Essen had managed to successfully unify the Mongol banners under his command, in a near unbroken line along the whole Chinese northern frontier, from Manchuria in the east to the desert outposts of

Hami in the west. Though its own agents and contacts must surely have known and reported the reforming Mongol hordes as a unified force, rather than moving to counter such a rising threat, the Ming government had opted to more or less sit on its hands. This seems to have largely been of a predictably fatal combination of laziness and hubris. Quote, the Ming court had taken no effective measures against Essen and certainly underestimated both his authority among the Mongols and his military power, still treating In misreading the realities of the power structures of the North, the Ming court thereby fundamentally misunderstood how best to not really, really tick off the guy truly in charge.

The first incident, it seems, was based far more on simple personal greed than of misidentifying the correct Khan to appease. In 1448, an Oirat tribute emissary was turned away from the court when the powerful eunuch lord behind the throne, Wang Zhen, scoffed at the idea of paying more than the going market rate for the horses the Mongols had brought. So already, things were on rather thin ice. That was only compounded when Essen tried to bring up the prospect of marrying his own son to the Ming royal family via one of the Chinese princesses. When the subject was broached in an official capacity, the court, having heard nothing yet of the unofficial suggestions that had been

floated and piqued the Mongol Taishi's interests, flatly refused Essen to his great anger and embarrassment. Tartarus hath no fury like a Mongol Khan scorned. And so it was that Essen returned to Mongolia, rallying his banners, and in July of 1449 launched a full-scale invasion of the Ming Empire. His would be a three-pronged strike, with the Uriyang Khads under their chief, Togtobuka, riding down to Liaodong in the northwest to raid and plunder all across the countryside. Essen's right-hand man, known as his Ziyuan, Ala, was ordered to surround the garrison at Xuanfu and commit it to a siege, while Essen himself advanced against the other great northern bastion at Datong. Essen's army began their campaign by smashing a poorly supplied and badly led Chinese

army at Yanghe, just north of Datong, and then continued its southward push toward the garrison city. At this point, the advisors to the Ming Emperor somehow got it into their collective heads that the thing to do would be to have the Emperor himself, the 22 years young Yingzong, mount up and personally lead his troops against this resurgent Mongol threat. The eunuch lord, Wang Zhen, was apparently the driving force behind this extraordinarily and totally illogical decision, likely vastly overestimating the strength of the Ming armies in the wake of reports of recent victories in the south. Tujit writes, quote, Perhaps the emperor himself, who had been encouraged to play at military exercises with

his own guard as a child, believed himself capable of commanding an army in the field. Perhaps Wang Jun, whose reputation had been enhanced by the southern campaigns, believed the Ming armies would be invincible. End quote. Not everyone within the court was so gung-ho about strapping the emperor to a horse and having him ride northward to face off against the most dangerous Khan this side of Mongke. The vast majority of the ministers, in fact, protested vigorously against such a nutty decision. Their totally rational, completely correct assessments, however, went totally, completely ignored by the throne. And on August 3rd, 1449, young, inexperienced, near-shut-in emperor Yingzong appointed his half-brother, the 21-year-old Zhu Tiyu, as his acting regent while he was off playing at being

great-granddad Yongle in the north. Yingzong would ride out at the head of a truly massive army, with some, quite possibly inflated accounts, numbering it at a half million men. Under the nominal command of the emperor, of course, was an entire panoply of military minds deemed to be the empire's creme de la creme. Longzheng acted, as ever, as the second-in-command pulling all the strings as field marshal, overseeing 20 experienced generals and a huge entourage of civil officials. It was to be a walkover, a display of force so vast and overpowering that the Mongol brutes would have no choice but to simply turn and flee back to whatever quasi-animalistic hovels they called residences off at the ass-end of the fringes of the world. Instead, it would quickly

devolve into an ill-prepared, ill-equipped, and ill-led mass of shaky, green troops blundering themselves into the greatest military fiasco of the entire Ming dynasty. Yingzong and his half-million army departed Beijing on August 4th, making northwest through the Zhuyong Pass of the Great Wall, and turning more due west to make for first Xuanfu and then Datang to relieve the besieged garrisons in each, in turn, before turning south and marching back to the capital via a different route in order to avoid twice devastating a single region during a single campaign season. The army departed with a scant provision of one month's rations, meaning that the campaign was to be brief and decisive.

It all immediately went wrong. Heavy rains bogged down the Ming army constantly, exacerbated by near-constant whining and dissent from both the civil staff and the generals who wanted to slow down, to stop at the Zhiyong Gate, and then to stop at Xuanfu, to return the emperor to Beijing. Oh wait, someone forgot their dictatorial rage at this army that was quite frankly not listening to or respecting him. Apparently, ideas were secretly floated to maybe make sure that a knife found its way into the arrogant eunuch's back some night, but no one proved brave enough to actually carry out such an assassination. On August 16th, the Ming Imperial Army arrived at Yonghe and discovered, to their collective horror, the strewn remains of the Chinese army that had encountered SN step-riders there. Such a grisly sight must have done little to improve the morale of the already cranky Ming army. So much so that by the time the force did arrive at Datong on August 18th, just two weeks

into their month-long excursion, even Wang Jun had decided that it was time to just declare victory and go home. Two days later, the army did just that, turning about and moving out back towards Beijing. But a key change had been implemented in their route by Wang Zhen. Understanding that the very, very restless and undisciplined troops were about a hair's breadth away from outright mutiny, Wang decided that he'd rather not have them traipsing through the southern route back home, as that was where many of his own estates and properties were, and he didn't want them damaged. So instead, they would return to the capital via the same northern route that they'd taken to get there, and consequences for those property owners be damned. This, of course, exposed their flanks to any Mongol force in the north who

might be watching and waiting. After a week of totally disordered and unorganized marching, the Ming army arrived back at Xuanfu on the 27th. Only three days later, Essen's force struck at the Ming rearguard east of the garrison, wiping it out. A cavalry force was dispatched to specifically guard the imperial entourage, but it was led by the doddering and incompetent General Zhu Yong, who led his force straight into an ambush where it too was annihilated. The Ming Mongol force now closely pursued the main host of the Ming troops at a distance of just 15 miles, easy striking range.

On August 31st, the army encamped at Tumu, a tiny indefensible post relay station. Though many of the Ming generals urged the emperor and the army to press on, just eight more miles to the walled and defensible county town of Huai Lai. Wang Jun vetoed this decision, citing that such a push would leave his, I mean their, baggage trains behind for the Mongol pursuers to pillage. Instead, the Ming army set up their camp, incomprehensibly, on a site without direct access to water for the men or horses. Immediately assessing this error upon his arrival, Essen ordered his men to cut off the Chinese access to the river while the rest of his army moved to encircle them that night.

As dawn broke on September 1st, the Chinese forces woke to find themselves in a truly dire situation. Essen sent emissaries to negotiate with the Ming sovereign, but Wang Jun ignored their overtures and attempted to rally his disordered and utterly confused men to advance toward the river and its water supply. At this, the eager and well-disciplined Mongol troops were ordered to attack in force, causing the Chinese soldiers to fly into a near-immediate panic. Quote, The army was destroyed. In all, about half of the original force was lost, and enormous amounts of arms, armor, and war material were abandoned on the battlefield. All the high-ranking Chinese generals and court officials, including the veteran Marshal Zhang Fu and two grand secretaries, Cao Nai and Zhang Yi, were killed. Wang Zhen,

according to some accounts, was killed by his own officers. But even more devastating than all that, and most embarrassing of all, the emperor himself had been taken captive by the Mongol riders and delivered as a POW to Essen's main camp near Xuanfu on September 3rd. And that is where we're going to end off today. The Ming's kingpiece has been captured, and the gates to the capital lay open and all but unguarded to the Mongol chiefs and Essen's forces. Next time, we'll see what he chooses to do with this unexpected gift, and what the Ming will do with this terrible hand they've just been dealt. Thanks for listening. The French Revolution set Europe ablaze. It was an age of enlightenment and progress, but also of tyranny and oppression. It was an age of glory and an age of tragedy.

One man stood above it all. This was the Age of Napoleon. I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast. Join me as I examine the life and times of one of the most fascinating and enigmatic characters in modern history. Look for the Age of Napoleon wherever you find your podcasts.