The History of China - #230 - Ming 19: A Futile & Stupid Barrier

Episode Date: January 31, 2022

Happy Year of the Tiger! Great Ming decides that it's going to (re-)(re-)Build a Great, Great, Great Wall...and MAKE THE MONGOLS PAY FOR IT!* (*claim disputed by Mongolia) Major Work Cited: Fairbanks, John King. China: A New History, 2nd Edition. Mote, Frederick W. “The Ch’eng-hua and Hung-chih Reigns, 1465-1505” in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 7: The Ming Dynasty, Part I. Waldron, Arthur. The Great Wall of China: From History to Myth. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. 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. From a revolution of hope and liberty to the infamous Reign of terror. You can't understand the modern world without understanding the French Revolution. So search for the French Revolution today. Hello and welcome to the History of China. Episode 230, A Feudal and Stupid Barrier.

The art of war teaches us to rely not on the likelihood of the enemies not attacking, but rather on the fact that we have made our position unassailable. Civilization VI, attributed to Sun Tzu. All in all, you're just another brick in the wall. Pink Floyd. I've been to the Great Wall of China twice in 15 years. The first time was on my very first trip to the Middle Kingdom in July of 2007. I was then a junior in college and was in year three of having taken an almost inexplicable interest in a country that I, as a 20-year-old from Cowtown, Montana, had no

clear or obvious business with whatsoever. For my first three years of high school, I'd gone down the path of least resistance in terms of foreign language studies offered by my local Montana city's high school, or so it seemed at the time, by taking French. It was either that, Spanish, or German. And all the cutest girls seemed to be taking French, so therefore... Yet come my freshman year of university, in a new state, with a new perspective, it seemed like a new language fit the bill. Apart from the typical Euro fare, my new school's position on the Pacific Rim just outside of Portland, Oregon afforded it two alternate options, Japanese and Chinese. Almost on a lark, and also in a misguided attempt to avoid association with what I thought at the time

was the nerdiest of interests, anime, Mandarin 101 became the basis of an odyssey that would come to define much of the rest of my life. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life, distributed by Public Radio International, I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us. Act 1 In that class, at least, I was always a student who was middling at best, C pluses if I was lucky. Still, I stuck with it for three subsequent years. Unfortunately, I'd enrolled in the university the year after admin had cut Mandarin as a major,

so I could only opt in for it as a minor. But as such things go, I fumbled my way through the basics of the language, and I came to have a broader interest in the culture and country it came from. As luck would have it, I was able to wrangle myself a spot in a quote-unquote academic tour with a professor from my hometown, who was, truth be told, using it as little more than a chance to fly home, visit his relatives, and be able to write it off as a quote-unquote academic expense. On that trip, we visited Beijing, Xi'an, Guiyang, and Shanghai, and it was absolutely incredible. Life-changing, even. That first stop in Beijing afforded me my first trip to the Great Wall. In the high heat of North China's early summer, having already braved the expanse that was the

Forbidden City at high noon, and seen the still-under-construction Bird's Nest Stadium for the upcoming Summer Olympics, we piled into a tour bus and seen the still-under-construction Bird's Nest Stadium for the upcoming Summer Olympics, we piled into a tour bus and made the hour-and-a-half trek to the closest and most famous part of the megastructure, called Ba Da Ling, or the Eight Ascents. Photos were taken. Overpriced but still ridiculously cheap T-shirts and hats were bought, all proclaiming in caps,

I climbed the Great Wall. It was a great time. It was there that I first wondered just what, how, why was this phenomenal thing, atop which I was traversing but a tiny part, as the rest of it stretched off into the distance until it was consumed by the ever-present smog that clung all around the nation's capital. It was something that was utterly alien to my comprehension, and in many ways still is. In time, and with the utter glut of experiences and newness that I experienced on that trip, I largely set such questions aside and put them behind me. Flash forward almost a decade later, to May 2017, and I was taking a group of students of my own to Beijing and the Wall. This time, we hiked the considerably more distant Jinshanling, or Gold Mountain section of the Wall, about 125 kilometers outside of the capital. Though by this point,

almost nine years into my stay in China and about four years into this podcast, I knew considerably more than my first visit. It was still incredible to read about, and of course see and experience, the tremendous history present in real life. The aspect I came to more fully appreciate on that trip was the iterative nature of the Great Wall. That it was not, and had never been, a single structure or even concept, but was instead a rebuild of a rebuild of a rebuild of an ad hoc network of fortifications and defensive structures. Likewise, I came to more fully realize and comprehend its true purpose. Not as a wall, like we might typically think of, as being designed to flatly

refuse entry, but instead a highly complex network designed to funnel would-be migrants, be they friendly or hostile, into manageable entry and defense points, and at least as important to serve as a rapid alert system of potential border problems via beacon fires. Yes, exactly like the Lord of the Rings. Just as much as that, though, if not even more, it was and remains a potent symbol to peoples on both sides of it. Here is the barrier between civilization and the barbarous wilds beyond. And to those outside seeking entrance, watch yourself, because you're certainly being watched. There has long been a sense of mystery and awe surrounding the Great Wall, like so many other ancient megastructures, such as the Great Pyramids of Egypt or the Roman Aqueducts.

It can feel like something superhuman, and to an extent it certainly is. It's certainly far beyond anything that any one person could hope to build. No surprise, therefore, that especially in the Western literary imagination, there's been quite a lot of romance associated with such projects, which often blends a fair bit of fact and fiction. Take, for instance, this description from 1737 from the Jesuit French historian Jean-Baptiste Duhald. Quote, As soon as he had determined on this grand design, he grew a third part of the laboring men out of every province, and in order to lay the foundations of it on the sea coast, he commanded several vessels loaded with iron to be sunk, as likewise large stones upon which the work was caused to be

erected, with so much nicety and exactness, that if the workmen left the least chasm to be discoverable between the stones, it was at the forfeit of their lives." To be perfectly clear, Jean-Baptiste had been misinformed or misunderstood. Having been there myself, I can tell you that it is a structure of stone, brick, mortar, dirt, earth, and mountain. And there are many chasms in it. Moreover, having never been to China himself, but instead having just collected and collated the reports of other Jesuit missionaries, how could he possibly have known that the structure that he described was definitely not the Wall of Qin Shouhuang two centuries before Christ? That initial iteration, constructed of rammed

earth and timbers, had long since been consumed utterly by the ravages of time. Nor was it the second version of the long northern wall, as expanded and built by the Han dynasty, or those of northern Wei, northern Qi, and Sui, two to four hundred years after that, nor was it part of the fortification lines constructed well to the north of the quote-unquote main Great Wall by the Jin and Liao dynasties in the 11th and 12th centuries, respectively. All those had long since crumbled to dust or been taken apart piecemeal by people wanting to build other, more useful structures, or simply been forgotten and overgrown by nature, centuries before European eyes ever surveyed the region at all. That is

almost certainly why, for instance, when Marco Polo traveled to China in the 13th century, in spite of his well-known panache for talking up even to the point of absurdity all the crazy possible things he might have seen, he never once so much as mentions having heard of a supposed Great Northern Wall. Stories do show up in some Western tales, most frequently in Arabic stories, such as those told by Rashid al-Din and Ibn Battuta, which refers to the biblical story of the demonic creatures that lay within the unearthly nations of Gog and Magog, which were sealed away by none other than Alexander the Great

to keep them out of the civilized world. Time-wise, these seem to be closest to perhaps describing the walls once constructed by the Qin dynasty a thousand years prior, but any actual connection is purely conjectural. When looking at a wall, either actually or historically, the question is going to inevitably come up, why? And that means more than just who or what were they trying to keep out. It means more like, why build it here?

Why now? A wall is, by definition, a permanent, fixed fortification. It is a sunk cost, as much a statement as a functional piece of equipment. In deciding to build a wall, you are drawing, in a very literal sense, a line between what is yours and what you're willing to commit massive resources and time to defend, and that which you're willing to write off and essentially abandon to the other. Expanding empires don't tend to concern themselves too much with permanent walls. Rome, in its early expansionistic phase, was far more interested in building bridges and roads. The Eternal City itself famously had no fixed walls for centuries.

Walls such as Hadrian's were typically only built once the Romans had discovered that it wasn't terribly profitable to go much further up into Scotland. The Mongols, first of Genghis and then the Yuan and Kublai and his successors, were famously almost entirely against the concept of walls in general. They had to be rather heavily convinced by the settled societies that they conquered that even something as permanent as a city had an actual reason to exist. When it came to the early Ming, as we've come to know and love, they were as aggressively expansionistic as anyone. Hongwu and Yongle loved little more than the idea of completing the subjugation and annexation of the northern wilds into the fold of their empire, an obsession that had been inherited by almost every subsequent Ming monarch until the disaster at Tumu Fort in 1449, which had caused a significant, oh let's call it re-evaluation of such an aggressive northern policy. In line with that early posturing,

the northern border of Great Ming had been little more than a loose line of watchtowers and defensive zones patrolled regularly by garrisons of troops. Certain especially strategic passes did have permanent fortifications such as ditches and, yes, even walls constructed during the Yongle era. In the early 1440s, certain additional segments of area and regional wall structures were erected in Liaodong, but they remained relatively small-scale projects until, again, 1449. The Tuma Fiasco, you'll remember, goes down in history as the single greatest military disaster in virtually all of Chinese history,

spawning a crisis that would last for the next decade and beyond. A half-million-man army, annihilated nearly to a man by a force of just 20,000 or so step-riders, and more than that, the emperor himself taken hostage by those same barbarians. This single moment instigated the total collapse of the early Ming's northern defense policy, and a permanent and quite literal retrenchment toward a far more static, defensive posture. The gradual realization of such a necessity and adoption of such a policy, one that would, in time, see the re-reconstruction of one of the greatest architectural and control systems of all time, would largely begin during the reign of the Hongzhe Emperor, personal name Zhu Youcheng. As you may remember from last time, Zhu Youcheng had a rather

unusual childhood. Raised at first in secret and in hiding by his mother, and then under the watchful protection of his grandmother, in fear of the murderous vindictiveness of his father's favorite consort, Lady Wan, the heir apparent was rigorously schooled by the finest Confucian scholars in the classics and proper ethics. Markedly unlike his father, young Prince Zhu Youcheng would actually take such lessons to heart. Following the death of the Chenghua Emperor on September 9th, 1487, just a week later, the 17-year-old Zhu Youcheng would formally accede as the Ming Emperor. In both manner and appearance, this new emperor was strikingly different than his ponderous, slow-witted, and heavy-set father. He was, quote,

a small, bright-eyed mouse of a man with a drooping mustache and a wispy beard. The imperial portraits show a different, more southern-appearing succession of emperors from Zhu Youcheng onwards. Psychologically, he was, quote, everything his father was not, end quote. Whereas the late Chenghua emperor had, much like his four bears, taken up with an entire harem of consorts, concubines, and just about any girl or woman who took his fancy, just a few months before his enthronement, Crown Prince Zhu Youcheng had fallen utterly in love with, and then married,

a 16-year-old girl named Zhang. She would be created upon her husband's succession, Empress Xiao Chengjing. What made this particular marriage special, however, is that, apparently alone in the entire history of China, the Hongzhi Emperor was entirely monogamous to his Empress Zhang for his whole life. That becomes rather less surprising when looking back on his formative years. He'd been surrounded, after all, by difficult women his entire life, raised by his severe and aggressive grandmother, and forever looking over his shoulder for Lady Wan's omnicidal shadow, whom his own mother had, of course, been a victim. Perhaps, having found one woman that he was actually happy being around, he decided that that was quite enough, and decided against rolling those particular dice ever again. Intellectually, as noted earlier, Hongzhi took to his early teachings in Confucian ethics very much to heart and worked diligently to implement them across his reign era.

Mote posits, No other emperor of the Ming, and perhaps no other emperor in history, accepted that tradition's teachings about the heavy responsibilities of emperorship as sincerely as he did. None strove so hard to live up to those demanding obligations. He was punctilious about his meetings, and performing all of the prescribed ritual acts, about having the classics Matt lectures reinstated and faithfully conducted, and especially about appointing worthy exemplars of Confucian conduct to his court and heeding their advice. He was deeply concerned about the welfare of his people, end quote. It can be of little surprise, then, that the Confucian ministers and historians who wrote about him, both

contemporaneously and in the decades and centuries to follow, came to uphold his period of rule as little less than a paragon of good governance. He was, after all, the golden boy of model Confucian thought and action. As such, these scholars and officials did what they so often do best. They maximized his virtuous qualities while minimizing his less desirable ones. To the point where Hongzhi has often been written about as on par with the likes of the dynastic founder Hongwu, or his son, Yongle. It is only natural, and we can't hold our feet to the fire too much for having done so. Nevertheless, a more distant and perhaps sober analysis of the Hongzhe period

reveals that, while certainly leaps and bounds better than his father, Hongzhe wasn't quite the paragon that his proponents claimed. He was attentive to the empire's problems, yes, but his was a reactive reign rather than proactive. Quote, he contributed neither in a large division nor grand leadership to the state. Moreover, his grateful Confucian bureaucrats, understandably enough, concealed his lapses, including his excessive devotion to and dependence on his Empress Zhang. End quote. For all that Hongzhe saw in her, to the dependence on his Empress Zhang, end quote. For all that Hongzhe saw in her, to the exclusion of all other women, there is little to be said for this his one and only wife.

She's widely understood as having been a foolish and demanding woman, capable of no more than petty faults, including a constant desire for expensive objects. This vice was compounded by her naive credulity when it came to snake oil salesmen and shysters of the religious nature, especially when it came to Buddhist and Taoist self-styled masters. She was likewise utterly devoted to the furtherance of her own family, often securing for them favors and positions which they had neither earned nor deserved. Frederick Mote writes, quote, The young Hongzhi emperor's first acts reflect the urgent sense of need to clean out the defiled court and to repudiate the personal characteristics

of his father, who had tolerated, even contributed to, that defilement, end quote. Rapacious, disreputable, depraved, and avaricious officials, Buddhist monks, Taoist sorcerers, and even, perhaps especially, ranking family members of the late Lady Wen, were dismissed, demoted, Buddhist monks, Taoist sorcerers, and even, perhaps especially, ranking family members of the late Lady Wen were dismissed, demoted, banished, and in some cases even executed in this widespread housecleaning of the imperial palace. In all, it amounted to more than 2,000 officials and almost 1,000 clerics who faced dismissal from their ill-gotten posts. In this attitude, at least, his officialdom could rest easy knowing that Hongzhi truly believed in and was devoted to such a right path. His actual enacting of it, especially when it came to his in-laws, on the other hand,

still left something to be desired. Quote, no matter how severely his critics criticized current affairs, and by clear implication him, he would patiently hear them out and respond, And truly, let's just take a moment to marvel at the kind of singular personality that tells us Hongzi had. Let's pause and think back on his predecessors, such as, say, great-great-great-great-grandfather Hongwu, who routinely had his officials beaten half to death for saying anything he didn't want to hear. Or the Yongle Emperor, who cut people in half for sending 15th century mean tweets about him. Is it any wonder that the court officials were sort of head over heels for this guy who would listen to their complaints and then give them a little pat on the head and say good job Skippy? Of course it's understandable. Yet for all that deeply held Confucian piety, or indeed perhaps because of it,

the 18-year reign of the Hongzi Emperor seems to have been marked with an unusually high number and frequency of natural disasters. This is, we will all recall, quite at odds with the typical Confucian worldview, which holds that a right-minded sovereign in sync with the mandate of heaven and the needs of his people would find his rule in harmony with the natural world rather than facing down increasing numbers of crises and disasters. But to pull back from that mindset, was it that more disasters were occurring or was it that his courtiers and officials felt that they had a much more receptive ear to vent the negative things going on across the empire and that they were unlikely to receive negative feedback from the throne for having voiced such

complaints. Again, from Mote, quote, Officials throughout the Empire unfailingly used their own reports on the disasters and those of others as excuses for charging this most receptive and conscientious of rulers with responsibility to reform some aspect of his governing in order to And surely, most of us are familiar with this same paradox in our own lives, and maybe careers. The more open and receptive one is to criticism, the more people tend to feel like they can and should criticize any and everything. When driving the donkey cart of state, all carrot and no stick, it turns out, leads to behavior just as bad as all stick and no carrot. Yet of all the reported disasters, at least one of them was real enough. Beginning in the late 1480s, the Yellow River began to

annually flood in such a violent capacity that it would yearly break through its dikes and barriers in the lower course through Shandong, where it intersected with the Grand Canal. This was, of course, a tremendous concern to the court, as not only the capital itself, but the northern portion of the empire as a whole was deeply dependent on regular access to the agriculture of the south in order to survive. The Yellow River, being the reigning champion of the biggest jerk in China ever title, was nothing new, obviously. But by the 1490s, it was decided that the large-scale repair projects of the 1450s were no longer sufficient, and that a more fundamental attack on the problem was called for. To that end, Liu Daxia was tapped to head up the operation to fix the river in 1493. No specialized engineer himself, rather just an experienced administrator of the court,

Liu approached this task with a respectable degree of modesty and humbleness. A literatus and generalist in his own training and career, he never thought that his own mind could solve the problem by itself, but instead sought out answers from others, both past and present. Quote, he studied the history of river conservancy projects, recruited the best local experience and skill to be found, and adopted the techniques that had been used by his notable predecessors, end quote. In all, the project would block the mighty Yellow River as far inland as the ancient capital of Kaifeng in Henan, ultimately diverting the entire river hundreds of miles to the southeast towards Suzhou in Jiangsu province into the Huai River's course, a diversion

that would last until the 1800s. As many as 120,000 men at a time labored for over two years on this stupendous task of blocking, channeling, and diking the river. The Odasha's success in planning and managing the project gained him fame in history and the high favor of the emperor. Suffice it to say, internally there were concerns that merited focus more than ongoing military campaigns to the northern expanses. This is not to say that there was some great lull in the border conflicts between the Ming and the Mongols. If anything, we can say that the standard operating procedure along the northern frontier was one of constant, if continually lower-level, threats of raids and raiders. Hongzhe, in particular, marks probably the nadir of Ming imperial militancy, as he was throughout the entirety of his eighteen years in power steadfastly the most pacifistic ruler of the entire dynasty.

It was to the amazement and disbelief of his officials, then, that when, in what was to be the penultimate year of his reign, 1504, that the emperor, responding to the annihilation of a regional military commissioner and his battalion in a heroic last stand against a Mongol raiding force, called his war council. Napoleon Bonaparte rose from obscurity to become the most powerful and significant figure in modern history. Over 200 years after his death, people are still debating his legacy. He was a man of contradictions, a tyrant and a reformer, a liberator and an oppressor, a revolutionary and a reactionary. His biography reads like a novel, and his influence is almost beyond measure.

I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast, and every month I delve into the turbulent life and times of one of the greatest characters in podcast, and every month I delve into the turbulent life and times of one of the greatest characters in history, and explore the world that shaped him in all its glory and tragedy. It's a story of great battles and campaigns, political intrigue, and massive social and economic change, but it's also a story about people, populated with remarkable characters. I hope you'll join me as I examine this fascinating era of history. Find The Age of Napoleon wherever you get your podcasts. Having assembled them, after a long pause, he put forth,

Our dynasty's emperor Taizong, the Yongle Emperor, often led campaigns beyond the Great Wall. Is there any reason why we cannot now do the same? To this, the Secretary of War, at the point of being totally dumbfounded at this suggestion that the gentlest emperor who ever lived was suddenly proposing personally leading a Ming army against the Mongols like Yongle of old, paused, collected his thoughts, and then replied, Your Majesty's godlike military qualities certainly are in no way inferior to those of the Emperor Taizong. But now our generals, and their foot and mounted forces are far inferior. In my judgment, the best policy for now would be to maintain a defensive stance. Smooth as silk, Minister. Nicely done. The fact of the matter was that by the 1490s,

the Ming military establishment was in steep decline as an organization. Neither the throne nor the military command structure itself was occupied by men of actual martial comportment or competence, but instead hereditary officials who were written off as being bumbling incompetents. Yet it wasn't even those at the top that truly stymied any designs of the Ming military apparatus at the turn of the 16th century, but the underlying organization's structure itself. On paper, it looked fine, and indeed had not been substantially altered since the time of Yongle. Quote, Its basic element was the more or less 500 guards, or wei, and their battalions, so, located throughout the empire, each guard nominally numbering 5,600 soldiers and officers, all, in theory, supplied by hereditary military households, but in fact often by hired replacements.

The nominal strength of the empire's guards should have been close to 3 million officers and soldiers, but probably numbered somewhat less than half that by mid-Ming times. These were supplemented nominally by some 70 Special Imperial Guard units stationed mostly around Beijing, which, at full strength, would have numbered another million troops. But they too had long since been bled off of their actual manpower. More to the point, these supposed soldiers had long since, as a matter of fact, ceased to be trained warfighters so much as they were menial laborers, overseen by officers and officiants with little interest in military affairs and even less in actual experience. To this institutional-scale decay, both Hongzhe and his father Chenghua

could do little more than offer up patchwork improvements and stopgap measures, neither of which could come anywhere close to making receiving a long and detailed memorial from his minister of war, exhaustively outlining the endemic problems of the Ming military, and thereafter calling for the emperor to seek out those across the empire who had a real talent for generalship, Hongzhi jumped at the idea. Ordering local officials to seek out such individuals and recommend them for special appointment, the emperor was dismayed when no one of sufficient quality was found. Going a step further, he ordered that those found with exceptional martial talents be directly summoned to court by imperial writ, but no one ever so much as bothered to reply to such summons. It was widely understood that

accepting such an assignment, even with the promise of great rewards, was something akin to agreeing to captain the Titanic after it hit the iceberg. In terms of inducements, the Ming military likewise ran on a system that many understood to be deeply imperfect at best and outright abusive at worst. Soldiers and commanders were rewarded and ranked based on their performance in battle, that is to say, either the capture of enemies or, much more common and convenient, taking their heads. Barbarian heads collected among the northern and northeastern frontier zones were the most valuable, as it was understood that conditions there were the most dangerous. Heads from the Tibetan and southwestern aborigines of the Yunnan borderlands were second, and ranking last were heads taken from fellow Chinese during

the course of rebel or bandit suppression campaigns. The system, it was widely noted even at the time, was rife with abuse. Mote writes, quote, That system had many critics, especially Confucian, pacifist-minded statesmen, who recognized it as an encouragement to victimize the innocent. Ruthless commanders were often accused of beheading unfortunate non-combatants in the war zone, or even far behind the lines in order to magnify their records. But though often criticized, the system was not changed. In short, the Chinese military system underwent no substantial structural changes during the Changhua and Hongzhi reigns, despite a growing awareness of its failings. This organizational malaise seems to have developed, at least in part, because the huge, massed, clunky nature of the Ming war machine was fundamentally out of step with many of the threats it faced, both within and without.

It was a blunt instrument, facing problems that far better might have been solved with a limited directed response. A cudgel with no saber-tooth to beat now being asked to function as a surgeon's scalpel. Of course, to the north, there was the ever-looming problem of the horse lords, who remained far more mobile and quick than the ponderous Chinese military could hope to respond. But that wasn't the only issue. In the south, the borderlands were frequently plagued by aboriginal rebellions and uprisings of often intense violence, but limited in scale and scope and geography. Two of the most dominant native forces in the south, both of which

had a long history of harrying and harassing the Chinese regional military governor of the day, 80, 99, 1500, 1501, 02, and 03, and that is just to name a few. Each of these brought about a terrible swift wrath of the Ming commanders and their overwhelming numbers, swarming through the jungles to hunt down the small number of rebels and countless thousands of non-combatants, it must be said, at great cost to both Ming material and manpower. And, as the dates mentioned already show, they declare the region pacified, withdraw, and then basically start counting down the days until the next band of native insurgents renewed their rebellious efforts, using the memory of the last as martyrs to the cause.

Quote, Genuine hardships forced on the Aborigines by the Chinese, though not by the intent of the central government, appear to have incited many of the disturbances. Some, however, were simply the product of the Aborigines' more violent way of life. A most interesting example of the latter occurred in southern Guizhou, on the Yunnan border near the end of the Hongzhi Reign. Many of the southwestern tribal peoples had female leaders. The main court fully recognized the legitimacy of that idea

for those societies and confirmed a number of them in their hereditary leadership rights. One of those, a woman named Milu of Puan Prefecture in Guizhou, led a notorious rebellion in the years 1499-1502. It spread over into Yunnan's Chuching Prefecture, a stronghold of the Lolo Nation, to which she may have belonged. She murdered a number of her husband's family members, who might have competed with her for leadership, and then took up with one of her husband's subordinates, leading him into both matrimony and open rebellion. Her following grew, and threatened important prefectural cities in the two provinces, and at last, a large government force was formed to put down her rebellion.

It required government forces from four provinces, plus 80,000 local troops, probably mostly tribal soldiers, one of whom, after five months of pursuing her, finally captured and beheaded her. This fighting caused the destruction of hundreds of the tribal stockades and thousands of deaths. Unlike many tribal rebellions, there seems in this case to have been very little of political-minded rebellion for a cause, and nothing more than extraordinary lawlessness in her career. Still further problems cropped up internally, the greatest of which must surely have been the Jingxiang Rebellion that plagued the northwestern mountains and plains of Hebei for more than a decade, between 1465 and 1476. Taking its name from the regions it occurred across, namely the prefectures of Jingzhou and Xiangyang, as well as a newly created prefecture called Yunyang, from which

the other uncommon name of this rebellion derives, it covered an area about the size, as curiously paired by Frederick Mote, of New Hampshire, Vermont, and Scotland, respectively, put together. During both the Tang and Song periods, it had been very close to the heart of the empire, and was heavily populated and highly ordered. Yet, the ravages of first the Song-Jin Wars, then followed by the Mongol invasions and their apocalyptic occupation of the region, had turned it, by the 14th century, into a virtually uninhabited, ungoverned wasteland, owned a little more than desperate refugees and, especially once the Yuan was forced out of northern China, squatters.

Though certain measures had been taken by the early Ming to try to clear out these unregistered and disorderly population from the region, their attempts had been half-hearted at best and outright inexplicably and self-defeating at other times. As the 15th century wended on, further natural disasters and famines only further encouraged the disaffected and displaced to seek out the perceived haven of Jingxiang, further swelling the numbers therein to the hundreds of thousands. Into this chaotic situation, as so often is the case, a charismatic leader emerged. His name was Liu Tong, but came to be known as Thousand Caddy Liu, thanks to a popular tale that

he had once lifted a carved stone statue of a lion that weighed a thousand caddies, or about 1,300 pounds. In time, the bandit leaders of the region began banding together under this Thousand Caddy Liu, and by the mid-1460s decided that they should set their energies on an even grander cause than simply eking out a bare existence at the edge of the civilized world. And so, they seized control of a small city, raised a yellow banner, and declared themselves a new imperial line, acclaiming Liu as the Prince of Han, and announcing his new reign era as De Sheng, meaning Victorious Virtue.

Titles were created and handed out to the bandits-turned-rebel lords, while Liu's two sons were given the command of the left and right imperial armies, supposedly numbering into the tens of thousands. And for a time, it seemed like everyone was having a very nice time playing at kingdom. Until, that is, word made its way to Beijing of this treasonous affair. And after some months of delay, the real imperial throne at last moved against this pretender Liu in force. A large Ming garrison force was mustered under a seasoned commander, and it set out from the capital in late 1465, smashing through the rebels' defenses with apparent ease by the summer of 1466 and taking the so-called Prince of Han and more than 40 of his top-ranking associates

into custody, whereafter they were sent to the capital for execution. The rest of the rebel company broke and fled, although they were hotly pursued by imperial forces into the wilds of Sichuan for the rest of the year. Some got away, some didn't. Yet, once this acute military situation had been oh-so-bloodily dealt with, much as with the indigenous rebels of the south or the ongoing Mongol raids of the north, the Ming court was largely content to simply withdraw and leave the remaining and underlying problems unaddressed. Who could be really surprised, then, when just four years later, 1470, under a fresh deluge of natural disasters, the Jingxiang region filled with hundreds of

thousands more displaced persons. In due course, the remaining former associates of the Otong came out of hiding and renewed their rebellion. A new leader was promoted, this time calling himself Taipingwang, or the Prince of Great Peace, which, yes, is the exact same name that would later be taken up by Hong Xiuquan nearly four centuries later, and in both cases serving as an appealing response to the calamitous conditions of the times. Once again, within a year, the ill-conceived rebellion was suppressed in the face of an overwhelming Ming military response, and with the principal parties either slain on the field of battle or else dragged off

in chains to Beijing to face their executions. For the second time, the region had been quote-unquote pacified, and yet even official sources had good cause to question such claims. Quote, immediately following the conclusion of the campaign, Commander Xiang Zhong's victory claims were subject to question, and he was charged with indiscriminate killing of the innocent. True or not, the charges reflected current court politics. He and Li Zhen were probably no more wanton in their wasting of human life than were other commanders,

and their harsh treatment of the refugees was not contrary to established politics. He submitted an ably argued defense of his actions, and the emperor, ignoring the impeachment charges against him, promoted him. End quote. So it goes. Yet, by mid-1476, the population of Jingxiang, receiving little further aid but heavily increased policing, drifted back towards open revolt. It was only now, more than a decade into trying to deal with this regional problem, that the Ming court at last considered anything other than a purely military punitive response. The official, Zhou Hengmo, a long-time advocate of the rights and needs of the social underclasses within Great Ming, wrote once again in a work called the Liu Minshuo, or the Discussion of Refugees, aptly arguing that a better solution to the problem than simply killing the refugees and protesters en masse must surely be attempting to settle them and establish a more sympathetic and complete local governments. The court, realizing, it seems, that a purely military response had failed twice before

and likely would again, was swayed. And so it was that the civil official, Yuan Jie, was dispatched to attempt to find a peaceable solution to the Jinxiang problem, thereby, quote, giving the Confucian-minded statesmen the opportunity to demonstrate the truth of their basic tenet that what is good for the common people is traveled around the region, met with its populace, and tirelessly worked out a solution that would bring order and stability to the chaotic prefectures. In this, he largely succeeded, but by 1477 was so exhausted by the effort that he was transferred out of the area altogether for a less strenuous post.

He would, as a matter of fact, die at a post station on his way to his new posting later in 1477, apparently from sheer exhaustion, prompting traditional historians to proclaim that, quote, When the ordinary people of Jingxiang heard that news, there were none who did not weep, end quote. Maybe, or maybe not. Regardless, his efforts did mark at least a nominal end to the Jingxiang rebellions as of 1477, though that word, nominal, must be emphasized, for it would be some decades before rebellious activity actually could be said to have died off completely. This episode, I acknowledge, has meandered a bit from here to there, starting at the Great Wall and making a circuit almost completely around the Empire. It's fair to ask, why?

I do have a reason. It's to show that, as I hope you will agree, there was quite a lot of strife and problems going on in the Ming Empire toward the close of the 15th century. Even without taking the Tuma disaster into account, the empire had its hands full in the southern and northwestern borders, as well as internal discontent. And we haven't even brought up, yet, its issues to the far west with Tibet and the regions controlled by the Uyghurs beyond Lanzhou. What I hope I've at least been able to lay out here, then, is the fact that the Ming dynasty of the late 15th century felt itself to be a kingdom under siege from all sides. Internal rebellion, natural disasters, and external threats

seemed to loom in every shadow and around every corner. And in a world where an army of a half million could be annihilated by maybe as few as 20,000 horsemen, and even an emperor himself taken captive, such realities did not engender much boldness in the hearts of men. So, this serves to explain why such a project as walling off the northern border didn't seem quite so insane and wasteful an option as it, in retrospect, quite obviously was. I mean, there had been a reason, a good reason, why the prior iterations of the Long Wall had been abandoned for centuries and consigned back to the elements. It's just not a particularly effective strategy.

Even beyond the fact that you're effectively ceding some of the most valuable territory in the Empire, the Ordos Loop, great for breeding warhorses, to the steppe barbarians, the Great Wall can only be seen in the wholeness of its design and construction as a tacit admission of an empire shoved back on its heels and facing a slow but steady decline. It's certainly not the only sign of such a reversal. If anything, it's only a reinforcement of what the mothballing of the once mighty treasure fleet had served as an exclamation to mark, that Great Ming had breached its apex, territorially, civilizationally, and militarily, and it had decided that a defensive, xenophobic, exclusionary posturing was more affordable. As John Fairbanks put it, quote, After 1474 and during the 16th century, the building of brick-and-stone-faced long walls and their many hundreds of watchtowers created today's Great Wall.

It proved to be a futile military gesture, but vividly expressed China's siege mentality. End quote. The century and a half to come would serve to demonstrate that an empire in decline invites enemies, even those once cowed and servile, to start looking for weak points yet again. And where better to start than by knocking against a vast, indefensible, immobile wall? Next time, we'll really break into the 16th century. As the Hongzhi Emperor dies, young as usual,

the wall continues to go up, and great Ming continues to shrink irreversibly into both its own territories and its own mediocrity altogether. Thanks for listening. Hi everyone, this is Scott. If you want to learn about the world's oldest civilizations, find out how they were rediscovered, follow the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra's descendants over ten generations, or take a deep dive into the Iron Age or the Hellenistic era, then check out the Ancient World Podcast.

Available on all podcasting platforms or go to ancientworldpodcast.com. That's the Ancient World Podcast.