Ming dynasty

In January 1368 Zhu Yuanzhang (朱元璋), the son of poor peasants who had risen to become one of the Red Turban leaders, proclaimed himself emperor in Nanjing. He named his dynasty the Great Ming (大明), "Great Radiance", and his reign era Hongwu (洪武), "Vastly Martial", the name by which he is known. That same year his armies drove the Mongols out of Dadu. The Ming were the last imperial dynasty ruled by the Han.

Hongwu ruled from Nanjing (南京), "the southern capital", where he extended the city walls and built a palace. He wanted a stable, almost immobile rural society of self-sufficient village communities. Military colonies, the weisuo system, fed the army, and a new law code, the Great Ming Code (大明律), was completed by 1397. He gave his many sons princely fiefs across the country.

Suspicious by nature, he concentrated power in his own hands. In 1380 he had his grand chancellor, Hu Weiyong (胡惟庸), executed for treason, abolished the office of chancellor and placed the six ministries directly under his own authority; purges followed. When he died in 1398, the throne passed to his grandson, the Jianwen emperor.

The young Jianwen emperor set out to curb the power of his uncles. One of them, Zhu Di, Prince of Yan, who held Beiping (the former Dadu), rebelled in 1399. After three years of war he took Nanjing in July 1402 and ascended the throne as the Yongle emperor (永乐, r. 1402–1424). He had a vast encyclopedia compiled, the Yongle dadian (永乐大典), which employed some two thousand scholars, and had the Grand Canal restored.

Yongle moved the capital to his northern fief, renamed Beijing (北京), "the northern capital". The building works employed hundreds of thousands of workers. At the heart of the city, from 1406 to 1420, rose the imperial palace, the Forbidden City (紫禁城); the court's move was completed early in 1421. The Chinese name means "Purple Forbidden City": purple refers to the North Star, and ordinary people were forbidden to enter.

The palace covers 72 hectares. Twenty-four emperors, fourteen Ming and ten Qing, lived there. In 1421, a few months after it was finished, a fire started by lightning destroyed its three great halls, which had to be rebuilt. The Forbidden City has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987.

For his sea expeditions Yongle chose a trusted man, the eunuch Zheng He (郑和, 1371–1433). Born Ma into a Muslim (Hui) family in Yunnan, he was captured as a child when the Ming conquered the province, castrated and placed in the service of Zhu Di, whom he helped in the war of 1399–1402. Once emperor, Zhu Di gave him the surname Zheng. He is also known as Sanbao (三保 or 三宝).

From 1405 to 1433 Zheng He led seven expeditions, six under Yongle and the last under the Xuande emperor. The first three went as far as Calicut in India; the fourth reached Hormuz in the Persian Gulf; the last ones reached Arabia and East Africa. For the first voyage, the History of Ming (明史), compiled later under the Qing, speaks of nearly 28,000 men and 62 great ships 44 zhang long; the real size of these "treasure ships" (宝船) is still debated.

The fleets displayed Ming power and brought back envoys whose rulers declared themselves tributaries of China. Among the gifts were giraffes, which the court identified with the qilin (麒麟), an auspicious mythical beast. The History of Ming adds that Yongle wanted to find his nephew Jianwen, whom he suspected of having fled overseas; historians now consider this motive very unlikely. The voyages stopped after 1433, for reasons that are not exactly known; the civil officials, who opposed them, then gained the upper hand at court. Zheng He died in 1433 (in 1435 according to some historians).

Walls had protected northern China since the 7th century BCE, and the Qin joined several of them together; but the Great Wall (长城) that people visit today is mostly the work of the Ming. In 1449, at Tumu, the emperor was taken prisoner by the Oirat Mongols. Rather than try to win back the lost territory, the dynasty chose to fortify its border.

Ming walls were stronger than earlier ones: the best-known sections, around Beijing, are built of brick and stone, although rammed earth still makes up most of the line. From the late 1560s the general Qi Jiguang (戚继光) had sections of the earthen wall between Shanhaiguan and the approaches to Beijing faced with brick, and more than a thousand watchtowers built.

According to official Chinese surveys, the Ming wall measures about 8,850 km, of which some 6,260 km are actual walls, the rest being trenches and natural barriers. It starts at Jiayuguan (嘉峪关) in Gansu and reaches the sea at Shanhaiguan (山海关), its traditional eastern end; recent surveys extend it to the Yalu River in Liaoning. In Chinese it is also called 万里长城, "the long wall of ten thousand li". It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987.

In the 16th century Europeans arrived by sea. The Portuguese traded with China from 1516 and in 1557 obtained permission to settle in Macau. Through them, and then the Spanish and the Dutch, silver from the Americas flowed in and became the standard currency of the Chinese economy; maize, potatoes and chili peppers also arrived from the New World.

Among the missionaries, the Italian Jesuit Matteo Ricci (利玛窦, 1552–1610) reached Macau in 1582 and settled the next year in Zhaoqing, in Guangdong. He learned Chinese and the classical written language. In 1601 he became the first European invited to the court in Beijing, where his gifts included clocks and a map of the world; yet he never met the Wanli emperor. With the scholar Xu Guangqi (徐光启) he translated the first six books of Euclid's Elements into Chinese, and in 1602 he published a large map of the world in Chinese characters.

Ricci was also one of the first to write Chinese in Latin letters. With his fellow Jesuit Michele Ruggieri he is thought to have compiled a Portuguese-Chinese dictionary with a system of transcription; a second dictionary, now lost, marked the tones with accents, as pinyin, adopted in 1958, does today. He died in Beijing in 1610, where the emperor granted him a burial plot.

Under the Ming the growth of printing created a real book market. Long novels appeared that mix classical Chinese with the vernacular (白话, baihua), the written form closest to speech, which some use almost throughout:

• Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三国演义), attributed to Luo Guanzhong;

• Water Margin (水浒传);

• Journey to the West (西游记), the adventures of the Monkey King Sun Wukong, whose earliest surviving edition dates from 1592;

• Jin Ping Mei (金瓶梅), banned for much of its history for its explicit sex scenes.
They were grouped together as the "four extraordinary books" (四大奇书). The first three belong to today's "Four Great Classical Novels" (四大名著), together with Dream of the Red Chamber, written under the Qing.

The other great product of the age was blue-and-white porcelain (青花瓷), painted with cobalt blue imported from Persia. Born under the Yuan at Jingdezhen (景德镇), in Jiangxi, it was mass-produced there under the Ming; an imperial factory made porcelain for the court and destroyed flawed pieces on the spot. Widely exported, it inspired imitations in the Islamic world, Japan and Europe, such as Delftware.

In the early 17th century unusually dry and cold weather, linked to the Little Ice Age, brought famine to northern China, and a great epidemic raged from 1633 to 1644. In the north-east, the Jurchen chief Nurhaci founded the Later Jin in 1616, which his son Hong Taiji renamed Qing (清) in 1636.

Peasant revolts broke out from 1628, first in Shaanxi. One of their leaders, Li Zicheng (李自成, 1606–1645), the son of poor farmers, had worked as a courier in the imperial postal service. Early in 1644 he proclaimed his own dynasty, the Shun (顺), and marched on Beijing, which fell on 25 April. That day the last Ming emperor, Chongzhen (崇祯, r. 1627–1644), hanged himself on Coal Hill (煤山), now in Jingshan Park, just outside the Forbidden City. By some accounts he left a note asking that the people be spared; a servant said he found only the words "Son of Heaven".

The general Wu Sangui (吴三桂), who guarded the Shanhaiguan pass, then sided with the Manchus. Defeated at Shanhaiguan, Li Zicheng abandoned Beijing on 4 June, setting fire to part of the Forbidden City; on 6 June the Manchus and Wu Sangui entered the capital and proclaimed the young Shunzhi emperor. Li Zicheng died in 1645. In the south, Ming princes, the Southern Ming, held out until 1662.