state vs. gentry in late ming china

State versus Gentry in Late Ming Dynasty China, 1572–1644

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State versus Gentry in Late Ming Dynasty China, 1572–1644

Harry Miller

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STATE VERSUS GENTRY IN LATE MING DYNASTY CHINA, 1572–1644Copyright © Harry Miller, 2009.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2009 byPALGRAVE MACMILLAN®in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world.

Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.

ISBN-13: 978–0–230–61134–4ISBN-10: 0–230–61134–6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Miller, Harry, 1966– State versus gentry in late Ming Dynasty China, 1572–1644 /

Harry Miller. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–230–61134–6 1. Elite (Social sciences)—China—History. 2. Gentry—China—History.

3. China—History—Ming dynasty, 1368–1644. 4. China—Social conditions. I. Title.

HN740.Z9E462 2008951�.026—dc22 2008017169

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.

First edition: January 2009

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America.

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For Yuka

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CONTENTS

List of Tables ix

Acknowledgments xi

Conventions Followed in the Book xiii

Introduction: The Problem of Sovereignty in Traditional China 1

I Zhang Juzheng, 1572–1582 31

II The Righteous Circles, 1582–1596 55

III The Wanli Emperor, 1596–1606 75

IV The Donglin Faction, 1606–1626 95

V Wei Zhongxian, 1626–1628 125

VI The Restoration Society, 1628–1644 139

Notes 165

Bibliography 195

Index 213

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TABLES

1.1 Table of Revenue versus Expenditure, 1577–1578 (Taels) 452.1 Table of Revenue versus Expenditure, 1580–1592 (Taels) 662.2 Table of Accumulated Reserves, 1583–1590 (Taels) 663.1 Table of Revenue versus Expenditure, 1596–1606(Taels) 924.1 Table of Revenue versus Expenditure, 1607–1626 (Taels) 1225.1 Table of Revenue versus Expenditure, 1626–1628 (Taels) 1376.1 Table of Revenue versus Expenditure, 1629–1644 (Taels) 156

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Madeleine Zelin and Robert Hymes inspired and supported this project during my graduate career at Columbia University. Richard Lufrano, Wu Pei-yi, Peter Bol, Paul

Smith, and Murray Rubinstein provided generous encouragement, at all stages of this project.

I was fortunate to have received a Fulbright grant and a grant from the American Council of Learned Societies, to support research overseas. I am also grateful for the scholarly guidance I received from Chuang Chi-fa, Lin Li-yueh, and Cheng Wing-cheong, while in Taiwan, and from Gao Wangling, Wei Qingyuan, Zhu Wenjie, and Zhu Shuyuan while in mainland China. In Japan, Ono Kazuko and Kishimoto Mio helped me find an extremely rare source.

I would like to thank my colleagues at the University of South Alabama, especially Clarence Mohr and Leonard Macaluso, for their support, and Matthew Johnson, for the cover image. I am grateful to Chris Chappell, of Palgrave Macmillan, for his interest and assistance. Of course, all flaws in the book are my own responsibility.

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CONVENTIONS FOLLOWED IN THE BOOK

This book uses the Pinyin system of Romanization to transcribe Chinese sounds into English. The only exceptions to this rule include the spelling of Taipei, Taiwan, in the bibliography, as

well as the names of various Taiwanese people (Pinyin is not used in Taiwan).

I have converted Chinese dates to the Christian calendar following Zheng Hesheng’s Jinshi zhongxi shiri duizhao biao. Official titles have been rendered in English according to Charles Hucker’s A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China. (See the bibliography for both of these reference works.)

The most important fiscal unit used in this book is the tael (in Chinese, liang), or ounce of silver, which actually weighed approximately 1.3 ounces (or 37.3 grams, metric). Taxes were also paid in grain, according to the following measurements: a sheng was about a quart; a dou was 10 sheng; and a shi was 10 dou. As for land measurement, a mu was 0.14 acre (or 5.803 acres, metric), and a qing was 100 mu (or 5.803 hectares, metric). All these conversion rates are listed on page R 19 in Edward Farmer, Romeyn Taylor, Ann Waltner, and Jiang Yonglin (comps.), Ming History: An Introductory Guide to Research, which also cautions that the numbers are approximated as closely as possible.

Administrative geography during the Ming dynasty consisted of (from smallest to largest) the county (xian), the prefecture (fu), and the province (sheng), though the subprefecture (zhou) sometimes interposed between, or took the place of, the first two. The county was administered by the magistrate (zhi xian), and the prefecture by the prefect (zhi fu). Regional officials called grand coordinators (xun fu) were in charge of several prefectures, and supreme commanders

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xiv Conventions Followed in the Book

(zong du) supervised affairs in two or more provinces. The central government in Beijing was dominated by the Six Ministries (liu bu): Personnel (li bu), Rites (li bu—using a different Chinese character than the one meaning Personnel), War (bing bu), Revenue (hu bu), Punishments (xing bu), and Works (gong bu). Administration was coordinated by the Grand Secretariat (nei ge), though only informally. A Censorate (yu shi tai) was supposed to monitor government at all levels. Above these offices, there was the emperor (tian zi [son of heaven]).

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INTRODUCTION: THE PROBLEM OF SOVEREIGNTY IN TRADITIONAL CHINA

King Xuan of Qi received Yan Chu in court. “Come forward, Chu!” the King ordered, but Chu likewise said, “You come forward, King!”

King Xuan was displeased.

The King’s attendants said, “The King is your lord (jun), Chu, and you are his subject (chen). The King calls you forward. How can you call him forward?”

Yan Chu replied, “Now, if I went forward, it would mean I was trying to curry favor with the powerful. If you, King, came forward, it would mean you sought worthy gentlemen (shi). Rather than for me to be drawn to your power, it would be better if you, King, were drawn to the gentlemen (shi).” 1

This droll exchange was taken from the book Intrigues of the Warring States (Zhan guo ce), which was compiled in the second century BCE. At first glance, a simple, almost

silly contradiction on a question of precedence, it actually signifies a profound disagreement on the proper locus or origin of authority. Should Yan Chu bow to King Xuan’s monarchial power, or should King Xuan be swayed by Yan Chu’s gentlemanly influence? Who, in other words, is supposed to be working for whom? King Xuan and Yan Chu seem most unlikely to meet each other halfway, each, rather, believing himself to be the rightful master of the other. Their standoff is a poignant vignette of political impasse, containing much potential for rupture and violence.

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2 State versus Gentry—Ming Dynasty China

Although China had certainly come a long way since the days of King Xuan and Yan Chu, one can almost detect reverberations of their stubborn exchange, nearly two millennia later, in the closing decades of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), as the following pair of statements should show:

I daresay that such a promulgation of virtue and beneficence [as the waiving of tax arrears] had better come from the court (chu zi chaoting). If local officials ask for and receive such waivers, then gratitude will remain below with the said local officials, and resentment will be directed upward at the court. (Zhang Juzheng [1525–1582])

When insufficiencies caused by flood or drought are reported, the court will naturally order tax relief. But once the court above waives its taxes, can landlords (zhu) continue to collect full rents from those below? No, they are forced to be lenient, and the imperative comes not just from their feelings but also from considerations of power. Now, the tenants who work the lands are cunning and stubborn people. If the government proclaims a tax amnesty, the tenants have leverage over the landlords. They can coerce the landlords into being lenient about the rent, and being coerced into making a gesture of magnanimity rather defeats the purpose. It is much more appropriate for the local government to call together a committee of gentry and the rich (shen/fu) and for the resulting tax amnesty edict simply to follow the opinion of the committee. This will make the tax relief come from the landlords (chu yu tianzhu). The tenants will enjoy real benefits, and the way of maintaining proper relationships between rich and poor will be preserved. (Qi Biaojia [1602–1645])2

Once again, the issue seems to be a simple question of precedence, a difference of opinion on the legitimate origin of policy and power. Did it “come from the court” or “come from the landlords?” The Japanese Sinologist Mizoguchi Yuzo, who has juxtaposed these two statements, is quite correct to point out the utter lack of policy difference per se, for Zhang Juzheng and Qi Biaojia were in perfect agreement on the need for tax relief. It is also interesting to note the absence of any class boundary separating Zhang and Qi. Both men were educated landowners from southern China who were qualified to serve in the imperial bureaucracy. Both were landlords, then, and both were officers of the Ming court. Thus, their interest in the struggle for authority between the landlords and the court was largely philosophical. The abstract nature of the issue, however, made it no less contentious, for the idea of the proper locus and origin of authority, evidenced in these examples, would seem to answer for a definition of sovereignty, which, though an abstraction, is obviously of


Introduction 3

vital importance. From 1572, when Zhang Juzheng became de facto prime minister of China, to 1644, when the Ming capital fell to roving bandits, China’s political elite became engulfed in a bitter dispute over sovereignty. They sparred with each other in controversy after con-troversy, over such issues as education, court ritual, and bureaucratic appointments. As with tax policy, the question of sovereignty—where authority in these matters came from—was the underlying point of contention, far more important than the details or even the merits of any question in particular. The factional conflict surrounding this dis-agreement severely weakened the dynasty. By 1644, when the rebel army of Li Zicheng (1605?–1645) entered Beijing and forced the Chongzhen emperor (r. 1627–1644) to hang himself, the Ming empire had already been convulsed by generations of strife, at the heart of which lay the two prepositional phrases “from the court” and “from the landlords.” This book is about the struggle for sovereignty between the two objects of the preposition.

The book is titled State versus Gentry (two variants of “court” and “landlords”), because these terms are the best translations of the Chinese words most often used by the historical actors themselves to indicate where they thought sovereignty resided. The words meaning “state” were guo or guojia, and since the Ming state was a monarchy, chaoting, or “court,” would seem to be synonymous. The Chinese words read here as “gentry” include shi, shidafu, shen, shenshi, shenjin, jinshen, xiangguan, and tianzhu, and the rationale for translating these seman-tically nuanced terms as the single word “gentry” will be given below. It is extremely important to emphasize that the battle for sovereignty between state and gentry was theoretical and symbolic. No actual combat between state and gentry was really possible—although the Wanli emperor (r. 1572–1620) would nearly realize it—because state and gentry were not discreet entities. Aside from the emperors and palace functionaries such as eunuchs, who can be treated as organic parts of the state, most of the characters in this book are people like Zhang Juzheng and Qi Biaojia, who were both gentry and officers of the state. It was the achievement of China’s civil service examina-tion system to have co-opted state and gentry in this manner, for the academic degrees it awarded served simultaneously as the bases of gentry status and the keys to bureaucratic office. Graduates of this system are often called, in English, “scholar-officials” or “gentry-bureaucrats,” terms that effectively capture their somewhat bifur-cated nature. Only a very forced mental effort, an especially artificial and academic self-consciousness, would induce a minority of Ming China’s “gentry-bureaucrats” to choose one affiliation over the other.



Indeed, the chauvinism that necessarily accompanied this choice no doubt added to the bitterness toward those who were inclined the other way. State versus gentry was a subjective and not an objective dichotomy, an idea rather than a reality. Its chief product, in this context, was a bitterly fratricidal partisanship, and its chief by- product was the fall of the dynasty. Narrating a largely symbolic conflict, this book should perhaps have been entitled State-ism versus Gentry-ism or State Sovereignty versus Gentry Sovereignty, but in the interest of brevity, and to avoid mutilating the language, State versus Gentry, hopefully, will do.

The next few pages will explain how the symbolic struggle for sovereignty, discernable in the dialogue between King Xuan and Yan Chu in the Warring States period (453–221 BCE), should appear also in the late Ming. Was it a constant in Chinese political life, or did it undergo periods of dormancy and eruption? Also requiring elucidation is the process by which King Xuan’s role came to be played with such enthusiasm by Zhang Juzheng (who spoke for the throne but was not a king), as well as the relationship between Yan Chu’s “gentlemen” and Qi Biaojia’s “landlords.” If Qi’s landlords were simply economic creatures, how was Qi claiming for them, as Yan Chu had claimed for himself, a certain authority over the court? A quick survey of Chinese history and political thought, focusing on the evolution of the ideas of state and gentry sovereignty, seems in order.

The Issue of Sovereignty in Classical Chinese Philosophy

There is no doubt that the question of the proper locus of authority, in other words sovereignty, is elemental to Chinese political philosophy, as it developed through the formative Spring and Autumn (772–453 BCE) and Warring States periods. Both the Confucianists (ru jia) and the Legalists (fa jia) posited mythical archetypes of authority known collectively as Sage Kings (xian wang). They differed, however, as to what sort of authority the Sage Kings wielded. The Confucianists believed that the Sage Kings’ power was moral in nature—based on such virtues as humaneness (ren), ritual decorum (li), and filial piety (xiao)—and, as Herbert Fingarette has observed, magical in effect. The revolutionary corollary of this theorem was that this sort of magic power could be had by anyone, not just a king, provided he learned the sagely Way (dao). Indeed, one of Confucianism’s most important ideas—or conceits—later came to be known as the


Introduction 5

“succession to the Way” (dao tong), which maintained that the Way of the Sage Kings was no longer in the possession of kings at all but had been transferred to the itinerant scholar Confucius (551?–479? BCE) and from him to his disciples. It was a philosophical usurpation, earn-ing Confucius the informal sobriquet su wang, or “Throneless King.” In his own time, Confucius appropriated for himself the title junzi, which had literally meant “son of a ruler,” but which now connoted a morally “superior man,” “noble man,” or “gentleman.” He did so, on one occasion, in response to his students’ warning to stay away from the supposedly rude people known as the Nine Yi (the “various foreigners”). “Where a noble person (junzi) dwells,” Confucius asked rhetorically, “what rudeness can there be?” The implication was that Confucius could single-handedly civilize the Nine Yi, or anyone else, through the magic power of the Way. Mencius (385?–312? BCE) likewise transformed the meaning of the word shi (used by Yan Chu, above) from “warrior-official” to a moral superman capable of maintaining “a constant heart (xin) in spite of a lack of constant means of support.” This moralistic conception implied that the shi (“gentleman,” in this context), and not necessarily the king, was the natural lord over the common people, who, unlike him, were unable to control their animal instincts and thus needed his nurturing moral influence. Reprising one of Confucius’s analogies, Mencius likened the influence of the gentleman (junzi) over the common people to that of the wind over the grass. He also said that “absent the gentlemen (junzi), there would be no one to rule the common people, and absent the common people, there would be no one to feed the gentlemen.” In case there was any doubt about who had power over whom, Mencius on another occasion said, “The great man (da ren) alone can rectify the evils in the prince’s heart.” In sum, the Confucian gentleman (shi or junzi), armed with the Sages’ magic powers, ruled over the common people and the kings as well.3

The Legalists, on the other hand, never believed in any sort of authority that could be alienated from the throne. Both Shang Yang (d. 338 BCE) and Han Fei (d. 223 BCE) conceived of the Sages, not as moralists, but as legislators. “The ancient kings,” Han Fei said, “allowed law to be supreme and did not give in to their tearful long-ings. Hence it is obvious that humaneness cannot be used to achieve order in the state.” In place of a mysterious corpus of ancient rites, which would be subject to interpretation (and exploitation) by self-interested scholars, Shang and Han proposed a system of laws, to be promulgated by the ruler. While some recent writers, such as



Karen Turner, have suggested that the Legalists’ scheme for rule by law might have included the idea that the monarch was himself bound by the law and ought not to rule arbitrarily, Yongping Liu strongly asserts that the Legalists’ ideal ruler was the only rightful source of the law, which “should not only be set up by the ruler but also altered in accordance with his will.” For this reason, Liu believes that “totalitarian” is technically a better description of Shang’s and Han’s philosophy than “rule of law” or “Legalist.” The rewards and punishments envisaged by both Shang Yang and Han Fei as the keys of good government, Han called the “two handles,” which, though they might, conceivably, be used ineptly, could be used by none other than the king. The “unification of punishments,” which might again suggest an equality before the law encompassing also the king, was actu-ally but another tool of the king. “What I mean by the unification of punishments,” Shang Yang said, “is that punishments should know no degree or grade, but that from ministers of state and generals down to great officers and ordinary folk, whosoever does not obey the king’s commands, violates the interdicts of the state, or rebels against the statutes fixed by the ruler, should be guilty of death and should not be pardoned.” This last clause implicitly equates the king with the state, a tendency noted by Liu and by Xiao Gongquan (Kung-chuan Hsiao). So whereas the Confucianists made sagely authority moral, claimed it, and wielded it over kings, the Legalists made sagely authority legal, kept it firmly in the grasp of kings, and urged that it be wielded, exclusively and relentlessly, for the good of the state.4

Of course, Shang Yang and Han Fei—like Zhang Juzheng—were not kings but ministers. Their proposing to reform the laws on behalf of the king was thus technically at variance with their contention that the king was the master of the law. Indeed, both Confucianists and Legalists could easily fall under the suspicion that they improperly wielded borrowed powers, with the former presuming to speak with the moral authority of the Sage Kings, and the latter presuming to speak with the legal authority of their own kings. In spite of this shared boldness, however, Legalists and Confucianists naturally tended to operate on different planes. For the Legalists, satisfaction of their ambitions necessitated the attainment of ministerial positions, which often proved dangerous or fatal, because they became subject to the draconian laws they trumpeted but could not rightly control. (Neither Shang Yang nor Han Fei met with a good end.) As for the Confucians, though they also tried to secure ministerial employment, they were not as necessarily dependant upon it as the Legalists were.


Introduction 7

The relative independence of the Confucians from the state would have some bearing on their relations with the state—especially when the state was dominated by hostile Legalists.5

When they were not employed by the state, it stands to reason that Confucian scholars had to find ways to support themselves. Confucius himself was known to have accepted compensation from his students, but otherwise, both he and Mencius were quite cagey about their eco-nomic interests and never identified themselves with any socioeco-nomic class or practical profession. In one imponderable exception to this rule, Mencius said, “To govern isn’t difficult. Just don’t offend the great houses (ju shi). Whatever the great houses value, the state will value. Whatever the state values, all under Heaven will value, until moral teaching spreads to the four seas.” In this formulation, Mencius used the term ju shi exactly as he would have used shi or junzi, to designate the wielder of a civilizing moral force. The problem is that ju shi was not as easily transformed in meaning as the other two terms. It never came to denote moral perfection and remained a rather amoral expression meaning aristocratic or leading family. When Confucius and Mencius transformed shi and junzi into moral leaders, they were clearly recom-mending themselves for the positions, but “great house” seems a little beyond Mencius’s reach in this way. The relationship of Confucianism to aristocracy and landed wealth is very unclear, especially at this early stage, but Mencius seems to have been serving at least as its advocate, if not as a reasonable pretender to it. Whatever his interest in the project, Mencius, in positing a sagely magic as emanating from the great houses, was foreshadowing Qi Biaojia’s schema by which legitimate authority came from the landlords.6

This speculation on the early Confucianists’ socioeconomic proclivities, based, admittedly, on one quotation, is somewhat confirmed by Legalist criticism. Although the Legalists found Confucian advice pedantic and hoped to shield their kings from it, they seemed even more alarmed that the Confucians were often all too ready to take their leave from court and pursue their interests elsewhere. “At court, they deceive their ruler,” warned Shang Yang, “and, retiring from court, they think of nothing but of how to realize their selfish interests.” In fact, the entire Confucian program of expropriating authority from the state and wielding it at some lower level is discernable in another indictment from Shang Yang:

Those people who form parties with others do not need us for obtaining success, and, if superiors pull one way with the people, then



the latter will turn their backs on the ruler’s position and will turn toward private (si) connections. When this is the case, the prince will be weak and his ministers (chen) strong.7

Like the advisors of King Xuan, Shang Yang used the word chen to mean “minister,” with the implication that the minister was supposed to be unconditionally committed to the throne, which remained the only true sovereignty. The fact that the minister was, on the contrary, economically independent, adept at fomenting faction, and in posses-sion of his own constituency, clearly drove Shang Yang to distraction. This perceived insubordination, the direct result, as they deduced, of the Confucianists’ appropriation of authority, moved Shang Yang and Han Fei to view the relationship between the state and these slippery elites as basically antagonistic. Whenever they wrote of “lord and minister” (jun and chen), “above and below” (shang and xia), and “public and private” (gong and si), they were almost invariably expressing the idea of this antagonism. Thus did Han Fei warn that “the wealth of the ministers (chen) is the undoing of the ruler (jun),” and “the state’s (guo) territory will contract as the private (si) houses get rich.” Armed with this Legalist logic, the state of Qin conquered all of China in 221 BCE and proceeded to level society beneath it. Especially singled out were at least two Confucian texts, which were burned; and anyone, especially a Confucian scholar, who “used the past to criticize the present,” was threatened with execution.8

The Early Triumph of the StateThe Qin dynasty (221–207 BCE) ushered in the imperial system, which, for a time, reaffirmed the sovereignty of the state and denied the claim to sovereignty made by its gentlemanly rivals. Although Qin absolutism proved unsustainable—partly because Qin’s laws were too harsh but also because they could not be applied consistently to the greater empire—the succeeding Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE) offered no real challenge to the imperial thesis. Legalism was perma-nently discredited, but a new generation of Confucianists, of which Dong Zhongshu (195?–105? BCE) was the most prominent spokesman, fortified the theoretical basis of the imperial state by describing it in cosmological terms. Reprising the idea of the Mandate of Heaven (tian ming) from the Western Zhou (1027?–771 BCE), Dong theorized that the legitimate state was patterned after Heaven (roughly defined as an impersonal collection of natural forces, not a deity). It was the


Introduction 9

job of the ruler, the Son of Heaven, to do the patterning. “Only the Son of Heaven receives the Mandate of Heaven,” Dong wrote, “and all the empire (tian xia) [in turn then] accepts the mandates of the Son of Heaven.” True, Dong Zhongshu was subordinating the ruler to Heaven, but he was positing no competing sovereignty on Earth, certainly not the gentlemen or great houses extolled by Confucius and Mencius. Under Heaven, “The ruler is the origin of the state. He speaks and he acts, and all things find their pivot in him.” As Xiao notes, Dong assigned to the ruler the same transforming power illustrated in Confucius’s metaphor of the wind and the grass. Mencius’s attempt to uncouple this power from both the ruler and the state was discontinued.9

During the next great dynasty, the Tang (617–907 CE), Confucian literati were employed in various central government institutions, compiling dynastic histories and other works on statecraft, researching state ritual, and organizing the education system. David McMullen has described their outlook as “court-centered,” with their work tending “to emphasize the role of the emperor,” according to the models of cosmological legitimacy inherited from the Han. To be sure, Wei Zheng (580–643) earned lasting fame with his severe criticisms of an early Tang emperor and by vetoing many of his policies, but at no time did he question the ruler’s sovereignty, and he certainly never claimed a moral sovereignty of his own. On the contrary, Wei often wrote of the emperor as a Sage or a potential Sage, which would seem to have been a definitive confirmation of the emperor’s sovereign status. Of course, no simple rubric can com-fortably apply to the Han, Tang, and the other very diverse polities, which ruled over all or part of China from the third century BCE to the tenth century CE. The point to be emphasized, however, is that the Confucian scholars of the era generally refrained from claiming sovereignty for themselves. For that matter, the “conquer or die” mentality of the Legalists, vis-à-vis the Confucian scholars, was also little in evidence. The bitter debate on the nature of sovereignty having been pretty much decided in favor of the state, a certain philosophical accord seems to have prevailed.10

The Rise of the Gentry and Neo-ConfucianismThe disinclination to challenge directly the idea of imperial sovereignty was finally overcome during the next major dynasty, the Song (960–1279), owing to institutional innovation, demographic



change, controversial reforms, and enemy invasion. The result was the revival of the idea of a sovereignty outside the state, a fundamentalist version of Confucianism, known in Chinese as daoxue or Song ru—“Neo-Confucianism” or “Song Confucianism” in English.

Robert Hartwell has written authoritatively about the tran-sition. On the institutional level, the Song made the civil ser-vice examination (in which the Confucian canon played a small but growing part of the curriculum) the single most important method of filling government posts. This innovation did not immediately signal the weakening of what Hartwell calls the “professional elite,” a group claiming prestigious Tang ances-try that continued to monopolize examination degrees and to stress government service. However, new men, locally wealthy residents of south China, finally began to enter the elite by win-ning (through the exam system) lower level bureaucratic offices and by intermarrying with the professionals, exchanging their wealth for the older elite’s prestige and superior political position. This southern nouveau riche, called “gentry” by Hartwell, repre-sented the new demographic development. They briefly inherited the preoccupation with government office that had marked the professional elite, but in the 1070s, the controversial reforms of Wang Anshi (1021–1086) led to bureaucratic factionalism and purges that dramatically lessened the appeal of the central gov-ernment bureaucracy as the best place to realize career ambitions. Philosophical disenchantment accompanied the professional, for the frustration brought about by Wang’s reforms, coupled with the loss of the north to Khitan and Jurchen invaders, dissuaded Confucian scholars from viewing the state as the proper platform from which to “put the world in order” (jingshi). Confucianists of the Southern Song survivor regime (1127–1279) turned away from the state and resolved instead to order the world from their local communities.11

The modus operandi of this “localist strategy” has been detailed by Robert Hymes. The new Southern Song elite eschewed the national marriage alliances that had prevailed during the preinvasion Northern Song (960–1127) and began instead to marry and consolidate power locally. They continued to compete for aca-demic degrees but now viewed them chiefly as a component of local importance, rather than as the basis for a lifetime of service to the state. They also developed a repertoire of community leadership and service, designing improvements to irrigation, providing for famine


Introduction 11

relief, organizing the militia, overseeing religious life, and so on. In some of these projects, they cooperated with local government, but in most cases, they remained the prime movers.12

Neo-Confucianism was the ideology of the Southern Song gentry. It justified, as it sanctified, the economic and political indepen-dence and leadership of this newly ascendant class. Conceptually complex, its rather straightforward propaganda value was based on the “succession to the Way,” the old Confucian conceit that the Way of the Sage Kings had been lost by kings and recovered by scholars. Zhu Xi (1130–1200) extended the conceit by speculating that after Mencius, the Way remained lost for about fifteen hundred years before being recovered by Song scholars like himself. In asserting that the Way had been lost, Zhu effectively delegitimized all the regimes of the imperial system. In asserting that the Way had been found, that he had “connected up with the tradition from Mencius,” Zhu was claiming for Neo-Confucians like himself nothing less than the Mandate of Heaven, or the right to rule, as Peter Bol rightly asserts. A bolder claim to sovereignty could not have been made.13

As might be imagined, this rediscovered idea of localized moral sovereignty spelled trouble. The Song dynasty itself may have been its first victim. Separate studies by Herbert Franke and Paul Smith both cite the Song survivor Zhou Mi (1232–1308), who blamed both an aggressive state and recalcitrant Neo-Confucians for the loss of the dynasty. On the one hand, the activist chief councilor Jia Sidao (1213–1275), by nationalizing great estates in 1263 in order to boost Song’s revenue, alienated big landowners from the Song cause and made them less reluctant to welcome the invading Mongols. Jia’s actions cost the Song “the affection of the people,” in Zhou’s words. On the other hand, Zhou also believed that the Song bureaucracy was overrun by Neo-Confucian scholars who scorned the business of government and pedantically philosophized, even as the fron-tier collapsed. The affair of Jia Sidao and his combined landlord-philosopher opposition in the late Song dynasty may be seen as a close antecedent to the following narrative of the late Ming, which features likewise a set of uncompromising statists and a similarly uncompromising opposition.14

Raised Stakes in the Yuan and the MingAdmittedly, placing the events of 1572–1644 within the background of the Song-Yuan-Ming transition incurs the risk that they will fade



into it. With the Neo-Confucian gentry fully formed and contending for sovereignty with the state in the thirteenth century, it might well be asked what was so special about a similar conflict during the turn of the seventeenth century. The answer is that the late Ming debacle was much more intense and prolonged than the Song version, because the intervening Yuan or Mongol dynasty (1279–1368) added new dimensions of absolutism to both sides of the sovereignty debate.

John Dardess has recently highlighted the importance of the Yuan era. The Mongols introduced to China a monarchy bounded neither by culture nor by geography. The Confucian mind was revolted, but it was also tempted to appropriate this enhanced power for its own purposes. When Khubilai Khan (1215–1294) patronized the Confucian scholars of north China and used them to spread propaganda and encourage Song defections as he gradually conquered the south, the scholars did not view themselves as pawns at all but, on the contrary, saw Khubilai as their creature. Since he possessed a vast empire, the scholars could use him to “sinify barbarian ways.” No doubt the product of denial and wishful thinking, this project of civilizing the world through an imperial patron (or puppet) was nonetheless vastly more ambitious than the “localist strategy” of the Southern Song. In its grand imperial scope, it aimed even higher than Mencius, who had set his civilizing sights only on minor princes. The Mongol experience, by raising the stakes across the board, made the all-important question of “Who’s working for whom?” an especially contentious and weighty one.15

Indeed, the essential fact about the Ming dynasty, which would have the most disastrous implications for the generations active in 1572–1644, was the set of absolutist and absolutely contradictory assumptions upon which it was founded, surrounding precisely this question. Both the monarchial state and the Neo-Confucian gentry, as much as the Legalists and Confucians of old, expected the total submission of the other. Significantly, it was the decentralization of the Yuan, as well as the loss of patronage to “magnates, clerks, and local bullies,” after the death of Khubilai, that turned Neo-Confucians against Mongol rule. They did not withdraw into their own vil-lages but, on the contrary, cast about for a more effective autocrat. Ultimately, as Dardess shows, the gentlemen of south China lent their support to the rebel chieftain Zhu Yuanzhang (1328–1398), in the hope that he would lead them (or they would lead him) on a grand campaign to expel the alien Mongols, chastise their Chinese lackeys, and effect the moral regeneration of all China.16


Introduction 13

Unsurprisingly, the ensuing transition from the Yuan to the Ming dynasty saw many of these expectations violently shattered. It was not that Zhu Yuanzhang and his Neo-Confucian supporters really disagreed as to the substance of China’s hoped-for regeneration. They simply differed as to who should take the active and who should take the passive role in the project. “Far from becoming the tool of the scholars and their ideology,” writes Edward Farmer, “[Zhu Yuanzhang] saw the scholars as his tools.” However, Zhu Yuanzhang’s ideal polity, one that would be both completely responsive to him and free of corruption, was difficult to realize. Studies by Edward Dreyer and John Langlois Jr. have narrated Zhu’s reign as a protracted search for a governing apparatus he could trust. Armed by what Dreyer has called a “quasi-Legalistic managerial despotism,” Zhu consecutively embraced and violently abandoned a variety of alternative elites and bureaucratic institutions of both Mongol and Chinese origin, purging (and executing) thousands while concentrating more power in his own hands. Brave remonstrators risked imprisonment or execution by criticizing the founder’s policies and the incredibly severe discipline he brought to bear on the supposedly disloyal. Langlois suggests that service to the Ming in the founding genera-tion was such a thankless and dangerous prospect that many literati prudently opted out.17

Zhu Yuanzhang, also known as the Hongwu emperor, ruled from 1368 to 1398. His grandson and designated heir, Zhu Yunwen, or the Jianwen emperor, ruled only until 1402, before being overthrown by the founder’s son, Zhu Di, who ruled as the Yongle emperor through 1424. Yongle’s status as usurper was problematic from the Confucian standpoint. When the scholar Fang Xiaoru (1357–1402), who had endeavored to make the Jianwen administration a better embodiment of Confucian values, rebuffed and denounced Yongle, the latter had him executed, along with a great many others. As was the case during the founder’s tenure, the Yongle reign saw only a very limited role played by Confucian scholars. Like his father, the Yongle emperor favored military men (as well as eunuchs and other individuals personally attached to him), and also like his father, he promulgated the idea of his own sagehood.18

It was the Yongle emperor, however, who unwittingly laid the groundwork for the Confucian literati’s resurgence. Although eager to have his way in matters of personal interest (mostly military), he did not undertake, as his father had, to bend the entire empire to his will, and he tried to conciliate all social classes, even as he occasionally



punished individuals who stood in his way. Grand literary projects, by which he hoped to legitimize his rule, effectively elevated the status of Neo-Confucianism in general, and the commentaries of Zhu Xi in particular. The resulting orthodox ideology became the approved course of study for young scholars as they prepared for the civil service examinations, which (after the uncertain Hongwu years, when the exams were haltingly reinstated) were again the chief avenues to bureaucratic office. Furthermore, Yongle delegated routine adminis-trative tasks to the small department of senior scholars known as the Grand Secretariat, which became a sort of informal cabinet, especially during the emperor’s prolonged absences while on military campaign. So while the emperor continued to be absorbed in military matters, a Confucian-dominated bureaucracy gradually found itself in a posi-tion to oppose such expansive initiatives. After Yongle’s death in 1424, the new Hongxi emperor (Zhu Gaozhi, r. 1424–1426) became the champion of the Confucian echelon. Assisted by a group of grand secretaries who outlived his brief reign, Hongxi envisaged an imperial government that would allow greater input from Confucian advisors. This vision was mostly realized by the mid-1400s, by which time, civil officials were favored over other elites (with the occasional, ominous exception of palace eunuchs), and imperial military and maritime expeditions (including the voyages of Zheng He [1371–1433]) were finally discontinued. “Thereafter,” Dreyer writes, “Confucian offi-cials routinely dominated the political process.” Despite the cruelly frustrated hopes of the Hongwu and Jianwen periods, Confucian scholars thus emerged from the tumultuous Yuan-Ming transition with the leading role, after all.19

The Ming GentryConfucian domination of the state applied also to society. The civil service degrees, which steered candidates toward government office, also granted significant social and economic privileges. An intelli-gent and ambitious young man, whose family could both spare his labor and invest resources in his education, would typically enter the recruitment system by becoming, after passing an exam, a shengyuan (stipend-supported student, attached to a state school). Alternative credentials were available too, such as jiansheng (student at the guozijian, or Imperial Academy), and gongsheng (tributary student); but the next big step was to sit for the provincial exam, which awarded successful candidates with the juren (elevated man) degree. Finally,


Introduction 15

there was the metropolitan exam, which conferred the superlative jinshi (presented scholar) degree. After the founding generation, only the winners of the latter degree could reasonably expect a significant official posting. However, the possession of any of these degrees (or credentials, since shengyuan did not technically hold degrees) was the key to what will be called “gentry” status in this book.20

The word “gentry” is serviceable and familiar but by no means universally accepted by modern Sinologists. Even if a more general English word such as “elite” were to be used, however, all the perennial difficulties attendant to defining the elite would remain, and no definition would prove completely airtight. One basic question is whether or not shengyuan should count as gentry. Although Chang Chung-li, Frederic Wakeman Jr., and other scholars drew a distinction between the jinshi- and juren-holding “upper gentry” and the shengyuan, this book will follow the modern Chinese writer Chen Baoliang in treating the shengyuan as gentry, albeit a lower order of gentry.21

Moving from the question of whether a given individual should be considered a member of the gentry to the question of whether a given family should be considered a gentry family obviously introduces even more uncertainty. In general, it seems fairly uncontroversial to say that a family that produced a degree holder (or shengyuan) could be considered a gentry family; but it is not explicitly clear how far gentry status effectively extended from the individual degree holder. Timothy Brook roughly draws the line at “degree holders and their larger circle of male agnates, affines, and associates,” but this boundary is somewhat indistinct. A further obscuring factor is the tendency of Ming families to maintain their statuses for several generations without producing any degree holders. Perhaps these families could rely on a few occasional shengyuan to tide them over, but they also, according to Martin Heijdra, could draw on other tangible and intangible resources such as “wealth, position in the community, or social benefactions.” These latter, intangible assets exemplify how much reputation and behavior effectively helped to determine class status—as much as they blurred it by making it at least a little subjective. However, the more tangible aspect of this survival strategy, wealth, suggests yet another important component of gentry status, namely, land. As Heijdra and, especially, Hilary Beattie clearly demonstrate, landowning was both a prerequisite to gentry status (because it supplied the wealth and leisure necessary for education) and a very important means to maintain status during



those generations that failed to achieve examination success. In sum, the Ming gentry seem to have based their status on a set of interre-lated criteria, of which civil service examination performance, with the attendant possibility of government office, was perhaps primary, but which also included landholding and conventional behavior patterns.22

All three of these class markers—official degrees, land, and behavior—figured in the process by which the Ming gentry, and the Ming dynasty, matured. Of obvious importance is the question of whether or not the basic pool of degree holders grew larger, both in aggregate numbers and as a proportion of the population, over time. In fact, jinshi and juren degrees were awarded on a quota system, and as these quotas remained nearly fixed, no remarkable growth in the numbers of individual “upper gentry” took place. For a variety of reasons, however, the numbers of shengyuan skyrocketed. Ho Ping-ti describes this increase as approaching twentyfold, far outstripping the not-quite threefold increase of China’s population, during the Ming. The competition among the continually growing shengyuan cohort, for the limited number of juren degrees, created the chief bottleneck in the education system. Soon, frustrated shengyuan were turning to local government clerking, freelance litigating, tax farming, or more disruptive activities, simply to make a living.23

If only the shengyuan, and not the jinshi and juren, increased in number, however, the privileges enjoyed by latter two groups did greatly expand. Jinshi, juren, and shengyuan were granted an exemption, for themselves and some family members, from that part of their tax obligation originally derived from manual labor. (The fact that shengyuan enjoyed these exemptions is, perhaps, the best reason to place them in the larger gentry group.) This Ming system was an innovation, for, in the past, only office holders, not degree holders, received these exemptions, which dramatically increased over the course of the dynasty. Heijdra reports that jinshi exemptions increased tenfold, juren exemptions twenty- or even thirtyfold. Shengyuan exemptions increased hardly at all (though again, the shengyuan population did). These mushrooming tax exemp-tions, known generally as youmian, created opportunities for fraud. A common chicanery involved the commendation of other people’s lands to those holding exemptions, to share the benefit of the tax shelter. As a result, the degree holders (and shengyuan) thus became big landlords, sometimes with a number of serf-like dependents. It would appear, then, that if large landholdings sometimes enabled


Introduction 17

gentry status, they could sometimes richly reward it, too. Taking into account not only the growth of the gentry population but also the gentry’s privileges, especially its youmian tax exemptions, establishes a clear trend of rising gentry influence. Since land is more finite than population, the gentry’s progressive consolidation of the former was probably the key to its increasing domination of the latter. As Gao Shouxian reports, the gentry, by their increasing numbers and also by their economic influence, were able to dominate rural society, after the middle of the fifteenth century.24

The proliferation of the gentry and their tax-sheltered estates came also at the expense of the Ming treasury, making Han Fei’s warnings about the wealth of the ministers undoing the ruler seem rather prophetic in this respect. Somewhat more recently, in the 1960s, Joseph Levenson and Franz Schurmann also theorized about the parasitic nature of Confucian landholders, vis-à-vis the various dynasties. Although their work may, perhaps, be showing its age by now, it might still be used as a point of departure in this context. In Levenson’s and Schurmann’s view, private encroachments on the state’s interests were inexorable, because China’s “landlord-officials” could hardly be expected to support bureaucratic crackdowns on their own gentry interests. “And so,” they wrote, “the concentration of land ensued, the growth of ominous private interests, threatening the state that sought ideally to fragmentize private interest, but whose bureaucracy was staffed by the very people who had to be most controlled.” This description indeed suggests the operation of a “dynastic cycle,” by which Chinese states were, as Levenson elsewhere suggested, “eaten away recurrently” by private power. So was the Ming dynasty simply a victim of the dynastic cycle, along these lines?25

The answer is yes and no. As is well known, the Ming dynasty died not only of fiscal insufficiency but also from partisan strife, and the dynastic cycle scenario outlined by Levenson explains only the former but not the latter. In fact, by explaining the former, it cannot account for the latter, because the primacy of selfish economic interests assumed by Levenson, which supposedly compelled China’s landlord-officials to devour their dynasties unquestioningly, would seem to have left them little to fight about. In other words, if Ming landlord-officials were as inherently incapable of private restraint for the public good as Levenson implied, then the Ming should have died without a word of genuine protest. Obviously, Levenson’s assumptions about the economic selfishness of the elite were



somewhat overdrawn, and late Ming faction must have had other than purely economic roots.

Psychological Origins of the ConflictIndeed, the true origins of late Ming faction may be found, not in the wanton pursuit of private interest, but rather in the widespread acceptance of the need to restrain it. This basic acceptance became the prerequisite for general dissolution, because of the disputed nature of sovereignty that is the theme of this book; for once it was agreed that the gentry’s private interests should be restrained, the next question was: Where should the restraining power come from? Should it come from the gentry itself, or should it come from the state? That was a question with no easy answer and one that came with a rich heritage of reinforced prejudices, bitter disagreement, and, especially since the Yuan and early Ming, absolutely contradictory assumptions.

Evidence seems to suggest that the problem of excessive economic engrossment on the part of the gentry was first recognized by the gentry itself, not because it was threatening to the state, but because it was threatening to the gentry’s own self-image (as well as to a more enlightened sense of self-interest than Levenson was willing to concede). If this interpretation seems to stray a bit into the realm of psychology, it should be stressed that psychological factors can be historically important, especially if one is dealing with historical characters as complex as China’s elite. Historians, it bears repeating, are often reduced to adopting a variety of hyphenated terms, such as “gentry-literati-officials” or “gentry-literati-Confucianists”—both from the pen of the otherwise elegant wordsmith Levenson—as the only way to capture, in English, the Chinese elite’s inescap-ably hybrid nature. These hyphenated personalities are what make Chinese history so psychologically interesting in general, and they would seem to have had great bearing on the unraveling of the Ming elite in particular. Perhaps the elite’s most fundamental multiformity stemmed from its dual occupations of landowning and bureaucratic ser-vice. The conflict of interests between government and private power, which occupies many pages in the histories of other civilizations, was in China’s case an internal, personal conflict. Levenson was definitely on the right track when he explored the psychological implications of this situation, and one of his treatments of the subject, subtitled “The Landlord-Officials against Themselves,” certainly anticipates the present study of state versus gentry as first a psychological and then a


Introduction 19

fratricidal conflict. Again, however, Levenson rather hastily resolved the “landlord-official” psychological conflict of interest in favor of the landlord psyche (with private interest, in other words, trumping public interest), leaving the causes of Ming faction unexplained. The problem is that the elite’s “landlord-official” bipolarity, perhaps obvious in the final debacle of the Ming, was not the fault line along which the Ming elite initially divided. The original break in tension, rather, occurred along the “Confucian landlord” or “Confucian gentry” duality. It was the elite’s moral, Confucian persona that first revolted against its eco-nomic, gentry persona, and it was this revolt, or revulsion, that led to the acceptance of the need for the gentry to be restrained. This acceptance, again, would prove fatally divisive in the long term, for the Confucian-motivated self-reform of the gentry led ultimately to the Legalist-motivated bureaucratic suppression of the gentry. Here, then, is the current study’s hypothesis concerning the origin of late Ming faction: gentry versus gentry was the initial spark; state versus gentry was the resulting explosion.26

The Confucian gentry may inevitably have rebelled against its own economic success in general terms, but the crisis seems to have been made more acute by the fabulously commercial nature of the Ming economy. The era was witness to a mushrooming population, an increase in urbanization and literacy, an expansion of agricultural markets, a greater use of silver as money, and a spreading of trade networks. While the state adjusted itself very slowly to these new realities—commercial taxes were low and haphazardly enacted, and the Ming revenue remained firmly based on farm income, even more so than the revenue of the Tang or Song—the gentry improved every opportunity afforded by commerce. As Timothy Brook recounts, the gentry effectively merged with the merchant class and absorbed its values and survival skills, and Cynthia Brokaw confirms that late Ming merchants began acting very much like gentry, and vice versa. Writing about this trend in Chinese, Xu Min uses the term shi-shang, meaning “gentleman-merchant” and cites a number of late Ming commentators, including Gui Youguang (1507–1571), who wrote that the gentry (shi) had become “mixed together” with the merchant class and also the agricultural class. So not only did the Confucian gentry embarrass itself through the un-Confucian pur-suit of profit, it also embarrassed itself by the very act of class amal-gamation, blurring the social boundaries upon which Confucianism depended. Even if the gentry themselves had not partaken of the commercial life, the increasing complexity of society in general, with



its socially confusing proliferation of luxuries and new occupations, was quite threatening. In this mutating world, therefore, the gen-try became very ironically hypocritical, complaining bitterly about the social mobility to which many of them owed their prominence; and they also became quite reactionary, waxing nostalgic about a pastoral world they had never really known. During the early six-teenth century, many of them concluded that the dynasty was in decline, corrupted by the same ingots of silver upon which they themselves depended. In their feeling that “the world is grown so bad,” they echoed the discontent of Richard III: “Since every Jack became a gentleman/There’s many a gentle person made a Jack.” The Confucian gentlemen’s lament, however, was really that they were once (and were still) Jacks themselves. Since Confucian gentlemen needed to think of themselves as morally evolved and not merely economically successful, many of them were compelled to reinvent themselves along moralistic lines. Evidence of this complex process would include the “ledgers of merit and demerit” studied by Brokaw. Using these merchants’ balance sheets to post net gains of good deeds, the upwardly mobile could claim to have won gentry status via moral rigor, not merely economic windfall. Though condemned as a vulgar threat to academic and philosophical orthodoxy, the ledgers ultimately fortified the idea of Confucian moral distinctions by perpetuating “the belief that only virtuous men were fit to rule.” 27

Sixteenth-century zeal in distinguishing virtuous from unvirtuous gentry has produced some lasting historiographical reverberations. It is, in fact, precisely because there was so much confusion about what it meant to be a member of the gentry in the sixteenth century that there is so much confusion about the term today. Martin Heijdra has found that many Sinologists view the Ming gentry in a “normative” sense, as a class of people who “behaved the way the elite was supposed to behave.” According to this view, the gentry were “morally, intellectually, ideologically, and culturally the ‘leaders of the people,’ politically and economically influential solely as a result of this, and for this reason forming the axis about which the social order revolved.” The problem, as Heijdra and Mori Masao separately explain, was that a more pejorative view actually prevailed in the sixteenth century, in which the gentry were depicted as a mostly economic and utterly self-interested class of strongmen and bullies.28

It would be a great mistake to try to determine which of these views of the gentry, the normative or the pejorative, was “correct,” and it would be equally wrong to try to separate the “moral leaders” from the


Introduction 21

“strongmen” in any objective way. The contradiction between these two views of the gentry is simply a subjective expression of the psychological tension described by Levenson, the confusion described by Brook, and the need for justification described by Brokaw. It was clearly an issue in the sixteenth century, with the normative view reflect-ing the Ming gentry’s idealized self-image, and the pejorative view reflecting a more jaundiced self-image. Taken together, they suggest a sort of Jekyll-Hyde fantasy, with commerce as the transforming poison. Furthermore, the gentry’s contrasting (self-) images had to be mutually reinforcing, since only a self-supposed “moral leader” would object to, and would undertake to reform, the allegedly corrupted behavior of his cousins. Emphatically, how-ever, even though some gentry were no doubt more moral and less acquisitive than others, and even though some gentry would use morality to justify their politics for the rest of the dynasty, the moral distance separating “good gentry” from “bad gentry” was relative or subjective. One man’s “moral leader” was another man’s “evil landlord,” in other words, and it remains very difficult to qualify these terms empirically.29

The present work will not, therefore, adopt the morally specific translations of Chinese gentry terms discussed by Heijdra, such as “moral elite” for shidafu and “officials” for shenjin, which create the false impression that the Chinese elite can be conveniently separated into discrete moral categories. Furthermore, just as the gentry’s moral identity was ambiguous, its sociopolitical roles were likewise interchangeable. Wu Han (1909–1969) wrote that officials (guanliao), intellectuals (zhishi fenzi), “moral elite” (shidafu), gentry (shenshi), and landlords (dizhu) were pretty much the same. To dispense, finally, with the recurring and complicated issue of nomenclature, this book will follow Wu Han in referring to the elite, when necessary, by whatever role they might have been playing at the time (such as “official”), but otherwise, they will be referred to as “gentry.” “Gentry,” according to Wu, corresponded to their permanent social identity (as opposed to their temporary political identity) and would thus seem to take precedence. To classify the Chinese elite more rig-idly would be to ignore its fundamentally multifarious nature. Also, as will be seen, the historical actors themselves used the various terms rather haphazardly.30

In any case, the gentry’s reform of itself was underway. First, a “subgroup of the gentry” (Heijdra’s phrase), morally animated but also calculatingly fearful that their own excesses invited backlash



from their local communities (or even divine retribution), resolved to play a more positive role in them. They resurrected the whole repertoire of benevolent gentry leadership that Hymes has studied for the Southern Song, funding irrigation projects, overseeing famine relief, and organizing local security. They also, according to Brook, patronized Buddhist religious institutions, publicly distinguishing themselves with “lofty gentry-sounding titles” and thus differentiating themselves from those merchants who were still making the initial investments in education by which they hoped to attain gentry status.31

Viewing the gentry in the normative sense, once more, necessitated condemning the gentry in the pejorative sense. Once the reformers recovered the moral high ground, they began enforcing discipline over their allegedly corrupted neighbors. Serving in their bureaucratic guises as county magistrates and other local or regional officials, but significantly without central direction and in some cases responding to local initiatives, they worked to equalize the tax burden between rich and poor, in effect cracking down on the more blatant cases of tax evasion by members of their own class. Perhaps the most noteworthy of these tax adjustments was the Single Whip Reform (yi tiao bian), which began in the 1530s and prorated onerous ser-vice levies (shouldered mostly by the poor) onto the land tax (thus redistributing the burden onto the rich).32

Emergence of the State versus Gentry ParadigmOne episode involving the Single Whip can shed a great deal of light on this preliminary period of gentry self-reform as well as illustrate how the reform process escalated beyond the gentry’s control and came to be carried out under the auspices of the state. Hai Rui (1513–1587) was grand coordinator of Songjiang prefecture and other southern territories, from the middle of 1569 to the early spring of 1570. While carrying out the Single Whip, Hai undertook to restore to poor families various lands that had been expropriated from them by engrossers. This policy brought him famously into conflict with Xu Jie (1503–1583), a former grand secretary in the central government, who had amassed a large estate in Songjiang. The ensuing battle between the two men attests to the preponderance of relative or subjective factors distinguishing the reformers from the reformed. Hai Rui was animated by a Confucian ideology that could well be described as fundamentalist, since he believed its tenets should be


Introduction 23

followed literally. From this fundamentalism, however, it does not follow that Hai Rui was more moral (or even more Confucian) than Xu Jie, any more than a religious fanatic is more moral than a modest believer. In fact, both men were committed to moral governance and both had nearly lost their lives by chastising the Jiajing emperor (r. 1521–1567) for his dissolute behavior. Strictly speaking, neither man could escape the gentry label, were it pejorative, and with two jinshi among them, Hai’s family may actually have enjoyed more gentry privileges than Xu’s. Both men were rich, and Hai’s affected austerity and Xu’s claims that his estates were a benefit to the community should be seen simply as two different justifications for great wealth. When Hai condemned half of Xu’s property, he claimed he was only helping Xu to enjoy the remaining half in peace, without fear of the even harsher lawsuits that Xu would surely bring on himself for his excessive acquisitiveness. This reasoning might not have convinced Xu at the time, but it perfectly supports Heijdra’s contention that the reformers believed they were serving the gentry’s long-term interests by moderating its behavior. It is also the sort of thing that one would expect from a brotherly quarrel, with one brother acting as the self-appointed conscience of the other. These mid-century reforms, of, by, and for the gentry, should be seen just so: as a family affair, as a cleaning of dirty laundry, as a makeover of self-image from evil landlord to pillar of the local community.33

As the gentry tried to keep house, there was a basic agreement that the state should not get directly involved (which it didn’t; through the 1560s, it merely endorsed the various reform efforts that were initiated throughout the country at the local level). John Meskill has reported that the local gentlemen of Songjiang (who, while self-consciously gentlemanly, were mostly examination failures) took the incompetence of the central government as a given. Beijing’s inaction during the Sino-Japanese pirate attacks earlier in the century made a lasting impression on these men and habituated them to look to their own devices for community defense. They also grew very suspicious at the prospect of any attempt to remove the iniquities from the tax system that was not undertaken by informed local men, and thus they tended to side with Xu Jie, while pronouncing Hai Rui a zealot and troublemaker who could only make things worse. In their view, then, the reform movement had already gone too far, and their attitude makes it clear that even a relatively modest gentleman would, when push came to shove, sympathize with a big landlord rather than a reform-minded bureaucrat, even one who acted on his own initiative.



Indeed, gentlemanly impatience with outside meddling seemed vindicated when Beijing did get involved in the Xu Jie affair, with predictably complicated results. Of greater interest here, though, are the radically different values and assumptions underlying Hai Rui’s and Beijing’s interests in the same case.34

Dovetailing with Hai Rui’s prosecution of Xu Jie was an attack on the latter by the grand secretaries Gao Gong (1512–1578) and Zhang Juzheng. Gao had ousted Xu as chief grand secretary (shou fu) in 1568 and continued to harass him in his retirement. With Gao Gong’s star on the rise, more Songjiang plaintiffs were encouraged to file claims against Xu Jie. Beyond these court politics and land disputes, however, was a deeper issue, which the historian Wei Qingyuan has described as an academic or philosophical revolution at the center of power. Gao Gong and Zhang Juzheng were closet Legalists whose overthrow of Xu Jie was part of a coordinated campaign to neutralize the influence of Neo-Confucian philosophers in the bureaucracy. Xu Jie was a notorious devotee of jiangxue, or Neo-Confucian speculative lecturing and discussion. This activity was not merely academic but was, in modern parlance, a networking tool, by which Neo-Confucian philosophers amassed prestige, followers, and considerable political and economic power. Gao Gong and Zhang Juzheng despised the practice, as it encouraged impracti-cal, empty talk, and as Legalists, they were surely as alarmed as Shang Yang at the prospect of scholarly network building. In 1570, Gao and Zhang prohibited serving bureaucrats from engaging in jiangxue, as part of their campaign to rationalize the bureaucracy, making it more a instrument of government and less a forum for philosophical discussion. Though Xu Jie was already gone (as was Hai Rui, by that time), his successors’ banning of jiangxue might have been intended as a parting shot.35

The episode of Hai Rui versus Xu Jie versus Gao Gong and Zhang Juzheng is treated here as a transitional case of gentry versus gentry versus state, in the course of which the former conflict gave way to the latter. Taken as a whole, the affair contains a portentous irony: while Hai Rui believed that Xu Jie was a wayward landlord whose faults could be corrected by a healthy dose of Confucianism, the grand secretaries believed that Xu was a wayward bureaucrat whose faults were the natural outgrowth of Confucianism. Here is further evidence that the historian’s difficulty in nailing down the Chinese elite (“landlord-bureaucrat-Confucians”) was anticipated, with a great deal more at stake, in the sixteenth century. It is also another


Introduction 25

important illustration, following Mizoguchi, of how essentially the same policy (the prosecution of Xu Jie, in this case) could contain much potential disagreement, depending on whether it came from the gentry or came from the state. Perhaps by carrying out their program in the lower reaches of the bureaucracy—that gray area claimed by both state and gentry—the gentry were, like the would-be handlers of Zhu Yuanzhang, presuming to borrow the power of the state to serve the interests of the gentry. As was the case in Zhu’s day, the Ming state would react very sharply against the presumption.

Zhang Juzheng, representing the new Legalism, was the man to make sure the gentry worked for the state and not vice versa (Gao Gong would have less of a historical impact, as will be discussed below). The enthusiasm he brought to the project had the same origins as the Confucian reformist impulse of the gentry, for he had passed through the same confusing identity crisis, brought on by the role of commerce in Chinese elite life. According to Robert Crawford, Zhang too believed that the Ming dynasty was in decline, and he wrote on one occasion that “merchants held power” during the mid-sixteenth century. However, just as some sought to restore the gentry to its normative greatness, Zhang sought to do the same for the state. His standard, in fact, was the early Ming government of Zhu Yuanzhang, and centralized authority and discipline thus became his watchwords. It may be hypothesized that Zhang, like every other concerned person in the sixteenth century, simply assimilated the point of view fate chose for him during those decades. For example, whereas coastal piracy persuaded Meskill’s non–degree-holding Songjiang gentlemen to write the state off, the Mongol raid on Beijing in 1550 convinced Zhang Juzheng, then serving as an official there, to come to the state’s rescue. Still, this hypothesis cannot account for the fact that not every o fficial in Beijing in 1550 reacted with Zhang’s statist fervor. It might also be pointed out that Zhang came from an old military family, greatly declined in for-tune, with no previous scholarly achievement. Perhaps his infiltration of the scholarly elite was personally awkward, and perhaps this unease caused him to find comfort in Legalist texts promising revenge on the type of smug scholar with whom he found himself in competition. The problem with this line of reasoning, though, is that similarly obscure beginnings would lead other young men to aspire even more self-consciously to a gentry identity and Confucian values. In the end, there is really no avoiding the conclusion that Zhang’s statist outlook



was determined chiefly by his subjective temperament, rather than by any formative event or other objective factor.36

If subjectivity is an unsatisfying explanation for historical phenomena, it should be remembered that subjectivity was an especially important characteristic of Ming intellectual life, after Wang Yangming (1472–1529), the dynasty’s most eminent and influential philosopher, emphasized the role of private intuition in the search for truth. While this development might seem to have heralded a revolution in Chinese thought, Ray Huang suggested that the rather unprogressive effect of this innovation was simply to individualize each thinker’s path to the Confucian truths he was eventually supposed to believe anyway. At the same time, Crawford has surmised that Yangming subjectivism might also have opened the door for nominal Confucians like Zhang Juzheng to rediscover Legalist authoritarianism. In either case, the philosophy of Wang Yangming, by encouraging the formation of personalized, often fundamentalist beliefs, may indeed have contributed to the resumed dispute between Confucianism and Legalism, as well as added to its fratricidal ferocity.37

As the Confucian reformists were attempting to advance and protect the gentry interest, as it were, from the bottom up, Gao Gong and Zhang Juzheng were contemplating the reform of the gentry from the top down. One of their two chief goals, as they led the government during the Longqing reign (1567–1572), was to ratio-nalize the bureaucracy, making it more responsive to central control than to local influences. Gao Gong was concerned that bureaucratic postings had become little better than sinecures. “When the country (guojia) employs someone,” he declared, “it is with the expecta-tion that he will assist the government. Giving out official salaries is not like slopping the farm animals.” Zhang Juzheng, writing with a more heroic (and Legalistic) air, complained, “Everyone is talking about real responsibility, but without a clear reward and punishment system for encouragement, who is going to risk life and hardship for the country (guojia)?” Zhang’s remarks allude to the idea of bureaucratic performance evaluations by which he hoped (and would succeed in doing, after 1572) to improve government efficiency. The grand secretaries’ other major policy objective was to stabilize the frontiers, against both the Mongols in the north and the Sino-Japanese pirates in the south. To this end, they promoted and protected two fighting generals, Qi Jiguang (1528–1587) and Yin Zhengmao (1513–1592), though the solution to the Mongol problem was mostly diplomatic.38


Introduction 27

The junior partner in these Longqing reforms, Zhang Juzheng, was clearly more eager than his boss, Gao Gong, and his writings from this time, furthermore, betray a palpable self-importance and combativeness. In a letter of encouragement to General Yin (who was the target of frequent criticism), Zhang wrote, “People these days haven’t the brains to go beyond the prevailing trend. They just love to join in controversies. Like jealous prostitutes, they rush to embrace the opinion of the unthinking mob, mindful only of personal benefit (si) and ignoring the effect on the country (guojia).” Fortunately, Zhang’s own resolve, as well as his selfless patriotism, would save the day, as he went on:

My policies were completely at odds with universal opinion, and yet, all alone, I acted as was necessary for the task at hand. His Majesty adopted my measures, and fortunately, they were both timely and successful. Meanwhile, the dissenters were still bent on sabotage and obstruction, to further their selfish (si) goals. Alas! For us ministers laboring faithfully for the country (guojia)—that it should come to this!39

Referring in another letter to opposition to the peace initiative with the Mongols, Zhang continued to use two of his favorite words, gong and si, to point to the public spirit embodied by himself and the treasonable selfishness of all who were against him. “They think only of the injury to their private (si) families and forget the benefit to the public (gong) weal,” he said. “In wanting to let slip this opportunity, they are not thinking of their country (guojia). In my view, they are not only disloyal but also unintelligent in the extreme.”40

In yet another letter, Zhang took sole credit for the peace with the Mongols, and he invested the controversy with a definite historical and philosophical context:

I burdened not a single officer. I deployed not a single soldier. I merely sat back and was rewarded, for Heaven was with me. What a pity that people should take the tone of the Song Confucianists (Song ru) and gladden their own hearts with the sound of each other’s voices, like a bevy of cawing crows. Their clamorous bickering gives me a feeling akin to vertigo.41

Plainly, Zhang Juzheng saw himself as the protagonist in an epic struggle to save the Ming from garrulous Song Confucianists (or Neo-Confucianists), and he fancied that Heaven itself was on his



side. Perhaps he was right. The Longqing emperor died on July 5, 1572, and the deceased monarch’s favorite, Gao Gong, who lacked Zhang’s political savvy as well as his zeal, alienated chief eunuch Fang Bao (1530–1582) and so was forced into retirement. Zhang thus emerged as senior grand secretary, a uniquely powerful position, especially considering that the new Wanli emperor was an eight-year-old boy (for whom Zhang continued to act as guardian). Zhang, the self-supposing hero, finally found himself with tremendous power.42

Although Zhang Juzheng has the reputation of being a reformer, his true historical significance derives not from his initiating new reforms but from his centralization of existing reforms, and that is why the narrative of this book begins in 1572, the year of Zhang’s ascension to power. It was Zhang Juzheng, in fact, who turned reform on itself, and the elite with it, by positing a different reforming agency, the state, in place of the prevailing agency of the gentry. This subtle distinction—the question of agency—ignited the new struggle for sovereignty.

Zhang’s ten-year hold on power was the first of six alternating regimes (or subregimes, since they tended to be shorter than the reigns of the various emperors), in which either the Legalist idea of the sovereignty of the state or the Confucian idea of the sovereignty of the gentry prevailed. These alternating ideological regimes have suggested the chapter organization for this book, the synopsis of which is as follows:

Chapter I—Zhang Juzheng, 1572–1582: Ruling as de facto prime minister during the minority of the Wanli emperor, Zhang endeavors to subordinate the gentry to the state. His efforts are mostly symbolic, and his actual policies differ little in substance from initiatives heretofore popular among the gentry themselves, but they are provocative enough to incite a permanent opposition, which survives Zhang’s natural death in 1582.

Chapter II—The Righteous Circles, 1582–1596: The anti-Zhang opposition, led by the Neo-Confucian scholar Gu Xiancheng (1550–1612), achieves Zhang’s posthumous disgrace and demolishes the remnants of his political machine. Augmenting their bureaucratic representation, Gu’s righteous elements engage in numerous controversies, often challenging the authority of the emperor, in order to prevent any subsequent reappearance of an activist centralizing regime. The state’s control over the countryside, accordingly, grows weaker.

Chapter III—The Wanli Emperor, 1596–1606: Alarmed by fiscal insufficiency and by the unresponsiveness of the righteous- dominated bureaucracy, the Wanli emperor launches an unprecedented


Introduction 29

economic and political attack on the gentry. He dispatches eunuch-led “mine tax commissioners” into the countryside, ostensibly to open silver mines, but actually to extort wealth from the gentry, even as he under-mines the gentry’s political power in the bureaucracy. Violent protests and the commissioners’ own tendency toward embezzlement compel Wanli to abandon the policy.

Chapter IV—The Donglin Faction, 1606–1626: Using the Neo-Confucian Donglin Academy as his base and Mencius as his guide, Gu Xiancheng seeks to unite the gentry class and rule China through it. Gu’s clumsy cooperation with the ambitious politician Li Sancai (d. 1623) illustrates the difficulty in applying philosophy to politics and creates bitter opposition to the Donglin in the bureaucracy. As the Donglin pursue their obstructionist tactics in the bureaucracy, gentry tax evasion in the countryside grows out of control.

Chapter V—Wei Zhongxian, 1626–1628: Targets of Donglin purges organize under the protection of the court eunuch Wei Zhongxian (1568–1628). Although excoriated by posterity for its violent suppression of the Donglin group (which it often identifies as “gentry”), Wei’s faction of self-styled patriots provides reasonably competent administration, even in the face of the growing frontier problem in Manchuria. The regime perishes shortly after the death of the Tianqi emperor (r. 1620–1627).

Chapter VI—The Restoration Society, 1628–1644: As the Chongzhen emperor (r. 1627–1644) calls for unity, Zhang Pu (1602–1641) and Zhang Cai (1596–1648) organize a complex federation of scholars called the Restoration Society, which attempts to dominate and neutralize the bureaucracy, leaving the country to be run locally by the gentry. With the fiscal situation unimproved, more voices complain of gentry recalcitrance, while the Restoration Society members accuse the state of avarice. Higher taxes, levied by the state and evaded by the gentry, lead to popular uprisings, which destroy the dynasty. Many Restoration Society members appear to sacrifice themselves for the Ming lost cause, but this heroism is in itself yet another claim of sovereignty.

It is hoped that this narrative, describing the six alternating phases of ascendancy of two philosophically demarcated factions, might lend some much-needed structure to the history of late Ming faction, which often appears as a formless, chaotic melee. A better understanding of late Ming faction might, in turn, shed some more light on the general subject of Ming decline. The issue of sovereignty, finally, has an obvious appeal, transcending the Ming dynasty and China as well.


CHAPTER 1

ZHANG JUZHENG, 1572–1582

Zhang Juzheng became the most powerful man in China on August 4, 1572. On that date, he began to direct affairs of state on behalf of Zhu Yijun (1563–1620), also known as

the Wanli emperor, who was then only a boy. This rather unusual political arrangement lasted about ten years and turned out to be momentous enough to merit its own special phrase in Chinese historiography, Jiangling bingzheng, which best translates as “Zhang Juzheng’s administration.” The single-minded purpose of Zhang’s administration, in the words of Ming dynasty survivor and chronicler Tan Qian (1594–1658), was “to build respect for the sovereign power” (zhuan zun zhuquan).1

It is hard to determine precisely how Zhang himself had acquired the respect for the sovereign power (meaning, specifically, the state’s sovereign power) that he was so eager to impose on his peers, for his background and early career were largely indistinguishable from theirs. Like many of them, Zhang had climbed from humble origins by immersing himself in the Confucian classics and passing a series of civil service examinations based on their contents. As an ambitious young official in Beijing, Zhang was said to have shunned literary gatherings and parties and to have focused instead on dynastic histories and practical statecraft, but neither his ambition nor his pragmatism radically set him apart from his colleagues. He had expressed indignation at the Mongol raid on Beijing in 1550, but this indignation, too, must have been quite common. Pleading illness, he left his post in Beijing and returned to his ancestral home county of Jiangling in Huguang province (in what is now Hubei province). There, he might have continued to follow the example of many of his contemporaries, by abandoning his official career and living the life of a country gentleman.2

At this point, however, Zhang’s course diverged from such a path, for he did not evidently see himself as a country gentleman but rather as an officer of the state. He soon made his way back to Beijing and



remained there until reaching his position of supremacy. Although Zhang later claimed that selfless patriotism fueled his determination, his rise owed as much to his political skill as to anything else. Making effective use of the timely retreat, he was able to keep a low profile while more powerful senior ministers destroyed each other and themselves. With the last of his superiors, Gao Gong, out of the picture in that summer of 1572, Zhang had emerged as the government’s first grand secretary, a position, though only semiofficial, that gave him a commanding access to the young Wanli.3

On August 23, 1572, Zhang had the young emperor issue a “warning edict” (jie yu), directed at China’s bureaucracy. It was full of references to gong and si, or public and private interests, with the implication that officialdom had become demoralized and had forsaken the former in favor of the latter. “From now on,” the edict read, “you will be pure in your hearts and scrupulous in your work. You will not harbor private (si) designs and deceive your sovereign . . . You will not complicate debates and disconcert the gov-ernment.” The edict further suggested that good government would prevail as long as top ministers were resolute in the administration of the empire and the more minor officials were selflessly devoted to the public (gong). Following the release of this warning edict, Tan Qian noted, the various officials became “very guarded and circumspect.”4

This alert state lasted about a year, as Zhang consolidated his position and continued to stabilize the frontier, but the other shoe finally dropped on July 26, 1573, when the First Grand Secretary promulgated new rules designed to restore discipline and improve bureaucratic performance. The Regulation for Evaluating Achievements (kao cheng fa) was the administrative centerpiece of Zhang’s regime. It simply assigned time limits for following government directives and made officials responsible for any lapses. Such a reform was necessary, because government in sixteenth century China was often little more than a formality, a circulation of memoranda throughout the empire, with no follow-up. “In the affairs of the Empire,” Zhang wrote in his request for the reform, “it is not difficult to erect laws, but it is difficult to see they are enforced.” With this new measure, Zhang was able to monitor bureaucratic efficiency and direct a more centralized administration. That the new rules were not themselves ignored attests to Zhang’s basic success in making the bureaucracy work for the state.5

Who else would the bureaucracy be working for? Zhang’s fears in this regard were outlined in a 1574 letter to Song Yiwang


Zhang Juzheng, 1572–1582 33

(a jinshi of 1547), who was a grand coordinator, or regional official, based in Yingtian prefecture (which includes the city of Nanjing), in the economic heart of the empire. Zhang’s letter was subtitled “On Equalizing Taxes and Succoring the People,” and in it, Zhang postulated that a “laxity” (guxi) or partiality of local officials toward powerful local interests was responsible for abuses in tax collection, which hurt both the common people and the Ming state. According to Zhang, the local officials watched while the “powerful and influential” (quan hao) dodged their own taxes, pocketed revenue while serving as tax farmers, concealed their property on tax reg-isters, and seized land from defenseless neighbors—land that would become shielded from taxation, as the state’s revenue contracted yet further. The result of this malfeasance was that the fixed revenue quotas for each county were being deflected onto the poor, impov-erishing them (and in extreme cases turning them to banditry) and yielding only arrears in place of revenue for the state. The task at hand was clear: “For every corrupt official we punish, the people in the villages will be that much freer from exploitation and will be able to remain peacefully right where they are.”6

According to Robert Crawford, the problem of “laxity” or leniency was one in which Zhang invested a great deal of historical import. Together with its positive counterpart, “firmness” (gang), it suggested a Legalist dynastic cycle, with firmness characterizing the vigorous, disciplined, first days of a dynasty, and leniency describing its lawless, demoralized final days. Obviously, laxity needed to be prevented at all costs, but the remedial firmness Zhang demanded—for local officials to be firm with local gentry—was conceptually a very tall order. In making this demand, Zhang ran into a significant stumbling block, namely, the dualistic nature of the Chinese elite.7

Just as the impromptu reforms of the mid-1500s suggested a false distinction between moral and economic gentry (see introduction), Zhang’s letter to Song Yiwang made a distinction between local officials and local gentry that was at best only technically or tempo-rarily valid. Rather than representing two distinct groups or classes, local officials and local gentry were really members of the same social class at different stages of their careers. The most common road to success in imperial China, the road Zhang himself had followed up to a point, was to pass the civil service examinations, serve in a few bureaucratic posts, and then parlay the honor into local prestige and power in one’s home village. Even when employed as a local official, then, he was more likely to identify personally with the local gentry



(who did, after all, share with him the same Confucian “examination culture”) than to conform to impersonal bureaucratic discipline (a conformity discouraged by that same culture). Furthermore, the prohibition against a local bureaucrat’s serving in his home area placed him in an alien environment where, if anything, he probably craved the familiar companionship of the elite even more; and since he was an outsider, his administrative effectiveness became rather dependant upon the gentry’s local influence. The natural and indispensable consultation and compromise between local officials and the local elite, therefore, would seem to render nearly meaning-less any distinction between the two. The historian Wu Han made no such distinction, writing that the local official who alienated the local gentry, in fact, did so at great peril.8

In fact, it doesn’t seem that Zhang Juzheng himself was really able to separate the local officials from the local gentry after all, for, in the space of writing his 1574 letter to Song Yiwang, his focus, and his ire, seamlessly shifted from “lax” officials to the powerful local interests they failed to restrain. As he warmed to the subject, Zhang began to use phrases nearly identical in structure to those used by the Legalist Han Fei nearly two thousand years before, such as “Private families (si jia) are becoming daily richer, while the public house (gong shi, or the government) is daily poorer.” Elsewhere, he identified the ideal result of his policies as “Private interests (si men) being cut off, the public house (gong shi) will be strong.” Aside from reprising this explicit Legalist statement of the irreconcilable conflict between private (si) and public (gong) interests, Zhang invested the terms with an absolute moral quality, rendering gong the essence of a saintly public spiritedness and si close to pure treason. In fact, Zhang sought to canonize himself along these lines, saying, “In another time, a prime minister might feel no loyalty to the state (guojia) and instead indulge his desire for private gain (si) . . . Now, with our sovereign but a youth, I bear on my own shoulders the weight of all under Heaven. I will not spite the destruction of my own family, as long as I might benefit the state.”9

The Philosophical ConflictWas Zhang Juzheng aware that he was using Legalist language and adhering to the classical Legalist position? If he was, he could not have admitted it, since it was taboo to show anything but rev-erence for Confucius and Mencius, at least on the surface. Rather



than defend his views explicitly as Legalism, in fact, he defended them as Confucianism, but he seems always to have had his fingers crossed when he did so. Early in his letter to Song Yiwang about equalizing the tax burden and succoring the people, he stated that Confucius himself put the adequate supply of food (and by extension, a functioning economy) at the top of his priorities for government. He also quoted another philosopher, Guanzi (seventh century BCE), to the effect that ritual and rightness (the Confucian concerns) were both born of wealth and plenty (the alleged Legalist ideals). Zhang’s focus on the economy and fiscal matters was therefore perfectly justifiable, on the highest Confucian authority. Then, unable to leave well enough alone, he added, provocatively, “Supposing Confucius were prime minister today . . . I’m afraid he would do no more than I.”10

The sense of philosophical discord became more ominous when Zhang unveiled his educational policy in a memorial to the throne during the summer of 1575. This rather extensive treatise was addressed to the problem of lax standards in the cultivation of talent by the empire’s education officials. It alleged that the bureaucracy’s recruitment system had deviated from its past practices of encouraging the pursuit of practical knowledge for the good of the country and was now used more commonly to advance cronies and establish scholarly networks. The solution Zhang proposed was a firming up of all regulations pertaining to the lowest-ranking members of the academic and professional hierarchy: the state-supported students known as shengyuan. Zhang wanted tightened restrictions on their selection, academic regimen, behavior, and political activity. Zhang was also concerned about shengyuan privileges, especially the partial exemption from taxation called youmian, which Zhang believed to lie at the heart of tax evasion. For this reason, Zhang was eager simply to control the aggregate numbers of shengyuan and thus close as many tax loopholes as possible. Education policy, therefore, had an economic coloring. The administrative language of the memorial was couched in terms of the earlier Regulation for Evaluating Achievements in that education officials were faced with demotion if they did not adhere actively to the guidelines put forth in Zhang’s memorial (which the emperor approved).11

It is important to note that, in principle, Zhang’s attempt to curb the shengyuan should have met with much approbation, for this class of petty elite seemed to be almost universally disliked. The writings of the theoretician Wang Wenlu (1503–1586), for example, contained the basic idea of shengyuan control. He felt that education officers



in charge of the examination system should try to develop “true” shengyuan (as well as other degree holders), and he warned these officers in general that they should be careful and discriminating in selecting talent. A passionate advocate of tax reform, Wang was also conscious that the shengyuan were abusers of the youmian tax exemption, and he urged that local tax officials keep the shengyuan within the limits of their actual privileges. While he might have put two and two together and concluded that the simple reduction of the numbers of shengyuan would reduce youmian, Wang seems to have been more concerned with regulating their moral quality. A few generations later, though, the Ming survivor Gu Yanwu (1613–1682) did object to the superabundance of shengyuan, and he was able to make the connection between their numbers and the resulting disruption of the political economy. He said that the bulk of the shengyuan were hopelessly untalented, and they were unwilling to be productively employed in any case, taking their privileges simply as a practical advantage for themselves and their families. The system, Gu concluded, was corrupted beyond recognition and should have been abolished and replaced with another method of recruiting talent.12

So given the support that certainly existed for reform of the shengyuan system, it is a bit ironic that Zhang Juzheng’s proposals were rather unpopular. Tan Qian, after encapsulating Zhang’s suggestions in his dynastic chronicle, pronounced this policy to be a serious lapse in Zhang’s otherwise sensible and respectable effort to instill discipline and practical knowledge. As soon as it became known that the path of political, social, and economic advancement was being drastically narrowed, there was an empire-wide howl of indignation, and even young boys were filled with disappointment and resentment. Why was Zhang (as Tan summarized public opinion) so anxious to weed out talent when he should have been cultivating more of it? Apparently, attitudes concerning the shengyuan were rather conflicted, as many individuals seemed now to be taking sides with them and against Zhang. The chorus continued to carp on this theme as a reservoir of scorn began to accumulate.13

The problem was that Zhang seemed, in ways that must have appeared gratuitously jarring to some practitioners of Confucian statecraft, to link his education policy to the idea of loyalty to the state. While Confucian scholars would no doubt profess to be against nepotism in the recruitment of students, they probably would not have invested it with treasonable intent as Zhang did,



when he accused overly generous education officials of being “willing to resist the edicts of the Court but unwilling to resist peer pressure, willing to violate the laws of the government (gong jia) but unwilling to refuse a private (si men) request.” Later in Zhang’s memorial, he referred specifically to retired or off-duty officials residing in the countryside (xianghuan), warning them against interfering in low-level exams so as to yield a favorable outcome for their progeny and extended families. Surrounded by all these fighting words, Zhang’s attack on youmian tax exemptions may have been read as a declaration of economic war thrown into the bargain. Finally, when Zhang moved to prohibit the establishment of private academies (shuyuan), it must have seemed that Zhang was trying to discourage country scholars from organizing politically—which he was. In sum, Zhang Juzheng’s 1575 education program, while containing nothing intrinsically inimical to the Confucian agenda, was, as he framed it, extremely offensive.14

Likewise, Zhang Juzheng created discord even while proposing—and what could be more Confucian?—tax relief. Far from being a tax-hungry minister, Zhang tried rather to limit the state’s expenditures as much as possible, and he truly wanted to lessen the tax burden on the common people. Again, however, style trumped substance, and benevolent policies became in Zhang’s hands frighten-ing schemes. In a memorial of July 31, 1576, Zhang repeated the adage from the Confucian classic known as the Book of Documents (Shu jing) that the people were the foundation of the state. He next asserted that it was a large part of a local official’s responsibility—as a repre-sentative of the state—to remain sensitive to the needs of the people and keep them from hardship. Then, with a sweep of his ministerial hand, he urged that most of the accumulated tax arrears dating back to the end of the emperor Jiajing’s reign be summarily waived. The Heavenly gallery of antitax statesmen going back to Confucius and Mencius would surely have smiled down on Zhang, and the political world of 1576 would have greeted Zhang’s benevolence with universal acclaim—had not Zhang gone on in his peculiar fashion and made a few additional remarks.

Zhang made it quite clear that he was not trying to make Confucian advocates of low taxes happy, and he really was not even trying to make the people happy for their own sake alone. He was only trying to make them happy with the state. Furthermore, he seemed to be engaged rather obviously in damage control, trying to counteract one unfortunate consequence of his own Regulation for



Evaluating Achievements, namely, that local officials, fearful of the new discipline if they proved ineffectual at collecting current or past tax quotas, were going about tax collection somewhat too energeti-cally, so that Zhang was afraid the people would think the state too grasping. Using the terms above (shang) and below (xia) to refer to (and to emphasize the proper relationship between) the throne and the people, Zhang explained:

It is a matter of the people’s responsibility to submit their taxes to the Emperor. It is a matter of the Emperor’s grace if he should feel pity for the people’s suffering and grant a tax amnesty. And as for that portion of the revenue that cannot simply be waived, if the Emperor should condescend to obtain it from another source, then that is grace within grace. Today there are still some people who do not understand grati-tude and harbor resentment against the Emperor, and that is simply the fault of local officials who do not carry out the Emperor’s gracious intentions. Furthermore, the ignorant also do not understand that by paying their taxes to the Emperor, they are benefiting themselves.15

And how were the good people of China enjoying the benefits of paying taxes? In a letter written sometime during 1576, nearly contemporary with his memorial recommending such imperious charity, Zhang wrote again to the regional official Song Yiwang, saying that he believed the latter’s efforts to equalize the tax burden were starting to have some effect on alleviating the local people’s hardship. A note of impatience, however, was becoming discern-able through this encouragement. Song had indeed harmonized the relations between gong and si (public and private) when he could, and his recent effort to reform a particularly burdensome tax paid in cloth, for example, was especially praiseworthy. And yet somehow, the decisive blow against fiscal abuses had yet to fall. Zhang singled out the youmian tax exemption for shengyuan and higher academic degree holders as the key issue, for youmian led to a phenomenon known as toukao, in which crafty or desperate people sought tax protection under exempted scholar-gentry. The abuse of youmian, then, was the origin of the vicious cycle by which the state was forced to seek its revenue only from the poor. Telling Song how to do his job, Zhang wrote, “When you investigate youmian, the problem of toukao will naturally ease; and then when toukao declines, the tax burden will naturally become more evenly distributed. We have exhausted all talk on the subject . . . It is time for you to submit the appropriate memorials and then move forward with your proposals.”16



Zhang soon tried to take back these harsh words by redirecting his anger at Song’s constituency. Song was grand coordinator of the southern prefectures that together comprised the region known as “Jiangnan,” meaning “south of the (Yangzi) River.” The Ming state depended on Jiangnan for much of its revenue, but the area was also home to many of China’s wealthiest, and most powerful, families. Maybe, therefore, it wasn’t Song’s fault that the region was slow to be fiscally pacified. Zhang wrote Song again in 1576, on the subject of Song’s frustrating jurisdiction, saying, “The gentry (shifu) . . . do not pay their taxes.” Song’s constituents were in fact “the most unprincipled in the empire,” and Jiangnan was the “land of devils” (gui guo). The place was almost ungovernable, for “the orders of the Court have no force there,” and Zhang felt certain that future crises affecting the Ming state would emanate from Jiangnan. The only thing Song could do was to keep to the righteous path and do his best.17

Song Yiwang, however, had completed his assignment in the land of devils. On November 12, 1576, he was promoted to another post. Three days later, he was replaced by Hu Zhili.18

Independent evaluation of Song Yiwang’s performance may help explain Zhang Juzheng’s frustration. A local history of Zhenjiang, one of the prefectures under Song’s jurisdiction, painted a bleak picture of conditions before Song’s arrival. “Powerful families became adept at concealing their holdings,” reads one passage, “with the result that the rich had land but paid no taxes and the poor paid taxes but had no land.” In 1575, though, Grand Coordinator Song managed to ascertain each landholder’s total acreage and levied thereon a universal land tax, prorating onto it the various regressive head taxes that had hitherto oppressed the poor. This procedure was the essence of the Single Whip reform (see introduction).19

Equalizing the tax burden was exactly what Zhang wanted Song to do, and incorporating regressive head taxes into a universal land tax amounted to a curbing of youmian privilege (since youmian granted exemption only to the former), which was also in perfect conformity with Zhang’s wishes. Apparently, however, what the Grand Coordinator did was not as important as how he did it. Song Yiwang, while equalizing taxes and stimulating revenue, had done so without the glorious frontal assault on the gentry that Zhang was really spoiling for. According to a contemporary tribute, Song did encounter some opposition to his local tax reform effort at first, but the powerful families (hao jia) apparently respected him, and on the strength of this respect, they no longer insisted on the right to avoid



paying their entire tax. Escaping a portion of it was good enough. Song Yiwang, in other words, had relied on the Confucian art of moral suasion, developing his tax reforms in consultation with the powerful families in his jurisdiction. Compromising with the gentry, while an inevitable part of the modus operandi for any local official, was for Zhang a sign of “laxity,” the dangers of which he had already explained to Song. While Zhang should have been happy that more gentry were paying more taxes, he positively hated the fact that they had merely condescended, and had not been compelled, to do so. In no small part, then, the reforms in Song Yiwang’s jurisdiction had come “from the gentry,” and the forfeiture of the state’s sovereignty implied by this prepositional phrase was, in Zhang’s eyes, abominable.20

The condescending gentry of Jiangnan still having possession of the field, Zhang’s attitude toward them developed into an even more palpable bigotry. In 1577, Zhang wrote to Hu Zhili, the new grand coordinator, a letter subtitled “Strict Control Is Loving Kindness.” “Strict control” (yan zhi) was Zhang’s antidote for “laxity,” but whatever loving kindness might have informed Zhang’s advocacy of strictness, it seems in this letter to have been superseded by personal resentment. He called the Jiangnan elite “these people” (shi ren), and opined that they simply did not understand their own interests. The state was their only protector from banditry. All they had to do was to render to the state some small hundredth part of their wealth, and they could continue to enjoy undisturbed the sizable hoard that remained. Alluding directly to an adage from Han Fei, Zhang said that a good mother was not squeamish about lancing her son’s boils. If the people of Jiangnan would, like the wise mother’s child, submit to a little pain, they would enjoy lasting health and happiness. It was meanwhile up to Mr. Hu, as the new grand coordinator, to apply the lance.21

The Duoqing ControversyUnfortunately, “these people” regarded Zhang Juzheng with as much suspicion as he regarded them, and the opportunity now came for them to put Zhang on the defensive. On November 5, 1577, Zhang Juzheng learned that his father, Zhang Wenming, had passed away at the ancestral home in Jiangling. This sad event quickly became a political powder keg, owing to the ritual peculiarities of Ming customs. In case of the death of an official’s mother or father, he was generally expected to take leave of his post, return home, and



observe a three-year mourning period. Some exceptions to this rule were permitted, especially if a higher official was expressly retained by the emperor to deal with some special crisis. In Zhang’s case, while he does not appear to have wanted to return home, he did not go so far as to compel the fifteen-year-old emperor to order him to stay. Instead, he dutifully and repeatedly requested leave to go, biding his time until, at length, the emperor, as well as the other grand secretaries, began to press him to stay. To remain at one’s post without following the usual morning ritual was known as duoqing, or “putting aside one’s feelings,” and this name came to denote the major political crisis of the Zhang Juzheng administration.22

The motion against Zhang Juzheng evolved gradually, beginning as a series of friendly suggestions to return home and developing into bitter acrimony and revealing caricature. One of the attacks of the latter description was launched by a man named Ai Mu, who said, “Juzheng lacks the public spirit and cleverness of Shang Yang, though he has Shang’s cruelty; and he lacks both the theoretical and practical ability of Wang Anshi, though he is as controlling.” Shang Yang was one of the founding fathers of Legalism, and Wang Anshi was the ultrastatist reformer of the famously factious Song dynasty. In this one short sentence, Ai Mu recalled China’s ancient political divide and identified Zhang not merely as a political opponent under the present circumstances but as a representative of the rival political tradition since antiquity. Zhang was not just an enemy; he was the enemy.23

The promising young scholar Zou Yuanbiao (1551–1624) also went way beyond the question of duoqing to complain about Zhang’s shengyuan policy, and then he added the seemingly gratuitous remark that Zhang’s academic views were biased, which pointed to more fun-damental differences between Zhang and his opposition. The First Grand Secretary dealt with this criticism in ways that justified it: he repressed the dissent harshly and violently, just as a stereotypically cruel Legalist would. A group including Zou Yuanbiao was flogged in court, and more were dismissed from official service. In an escalating chain reaction, people pleading for justice on behalf of those already punished were themselves punished. The most noteworthy sort of this latter group of martyrs were in fact shengyuan themselves, who traveled about the southern provinces denouncing Zhang. Two of them were arrested and taken to Nanjing by officials eager to curry favor with Zhang. With Zhang’s apparent approval, the shengyuan were tortured to death.24



With the opposition taking shape in the crucible of beatings, dismissal, and exile, Zhang’s sympathizers also justified their position in terms of historical antecedents and philosophical antagonisms. During the continuing unfolding of duoqing, Minister of Works Li Youzi found himself being lectured by a court compiler on how it was only proper for a junior minister (Li) to persuade his senior minister (Zhang) to do the right thing and return home to mourn his father. Li dismissed this learned rebuke by saying, “Song Confucianist pedantry (Song ru yu lun)! This is why the Song could not last. The sagely thing now is if Zhang does not return home.” The ease with which the antagonists in the duoqing affair identified a dichotomous philosophical dynamic is quite remarkable. They seem almost to have been following a script, as though they were players in a well-known political thriller in which the “mean Shang Yangs” were fighting the “pedantic Song Confucianists.” All these assigned roles, as they seem to have known, were drawn from China’s long history of disputed sovereignty.25

Eviction of the Lian Hu SquattersMeanwhile, as the philosophical battle between Shang Yang’s statists and pedantic Song Confucianist (or Neo-Confucianist) gentlemen was being reprised in the capital, a real battle was taking place in the vicinity of Lian Hu, or the “lake for drilling troops,” in Danyang county, Zhenjiang prefecture (in the Jiangnan region). In 1576, two successive regional inspectors (xun an) memorialized to explain that the lake was the scene of a serious conflict of interests. As the inspectors recounted, the government was accustomed to use Lian Hu as a reliable reservoir of water that could be channeled into the nearby Grand Canal to aid transportation of official grain ship-ments during dry weather. Otherwise, the Lian Hu reservoir was used to irrigate fields nearby. Recently, however, powerful families had moved their tenant farmers into dried out portions of the lake, damming up feeder streams to keep their fertile new lands from becoming reflooded. These powerful families apparently had enough political influence to advance the argument that they were opening up new farmland and thus enlarging the government’s tax base, but the regional inspectors were unconvinced. These officials main-tained that the inconvenience to grain transport far outweighed any benefit of new cultivation, which could be found just as conveniently elsewhere in the county. They moved that the lake be dredged and



refilled, and the next year, 1577, a censor named Lin Yingxun was ordered to move forward with these projects, as part of a general Grand Canal renovation.26

When Lin Yingxun arrived on the scene, he was himself deluged by a flock of petitioners who had long complained about the local strongmen and their land grabbing in Lian Hu. Mr. Lin thereupon summoned up the prerequisite righteous indignation and took the case in hand. Perhaps acting under the authority of grand coordina-tor Hu Zhili, who had memorialized on August 9, 1577 that the Lian Hu tenants be removed, Lin ordered the local officials to draft sev-eral thousand deputies, and he put these men to work demolishing the illegal dikes and embankments, thus effecting the eviction of the squatters. Lin went on to imprison the former landlords until they in effect bailed themselves out of jail by remitting to the government the equivalent of their ill-gotten rents, though some apparently died in prison. This repatriated (or restolen) wealth was applied toward the costs of the larger Grand Canal renovation project, so that the latter did not represent any additional burden on the national treasury or the taxpayers. Despite the tremendous obstacles stemming from the project’s powerful enemies, the work was started on April 26, 1578 and completed exactly one month later.27

As might be imagined, Lin Yingxun’s aggressive (and economical) performance at Lian Hu endeared him splendidly to Zhang Juzheng. Sometime in 1578, Zhang wrote Lin a gushing letter of support. He said, “I am unaware of anyone engaged in such work as dedicated and conscientious as you have been recently. You have my greatest respect! You have my greatest encouragement!” What is most noteworthy about Zhang’s response to the Lian Hu evictions, however, is its strange blend of combativeness and self-pity. Zhang might have focused on the positive, noting that the lake restora-tion had necessitated no new taxes. He might, then, have claimed happily that the results had benefited the state and the people equally, perhaps using the words “zu guo yu min” (sufficiency for the state and plenty for the people), a phrase he employed on other occasions. Lin Yingxun had, after all, used his public office for the benefit of the many private citizens who had complained about the squatters, so both public and private seemed to be winners. Instead, however, Zhang took the opportunity only to reemphasize the conflict between public and private, veritably reeking with the zero-sum logic of the Legalists. “That which benefits the public (gong) will certainly not benefit the private (si),” he said, capturing



this logic in the starkest possible terms. Zhang assumed that Lin’s actions would elicit not gratitude but complaint and calumny, and in this assumption, it is quite clear that he was projecting his own experience onto Lin. After a few sentences, in fact, Zhang gave up encouraging Lin and began praising himself. The passage is worth studying in its entirety.

That which benefits the public will certainly not benefit the private. It is inevitable that the level of discontent will rise. What need is there to fear criticism, though, with our enlightened sovereign on the throne, promulgating the law to rule our land, rewarding merit and punishing malfeasance, in accord with Heaven’s will? For several years now, more than a few complaints have been circulating about me. Evil people have formed vicious factions, attacking me indirectly via their henchmen. When have they ever let up? I have in any case resolved to put the state before my own family, as well as everything else. Though the path ahead be strewn with snares and a million arrows be pointed at me, I am not afraid.28

In Zhang’s mind, duoqing and Lian Hu were parts of the same battle. The pedantic critics in the capital were the same enemy as the brazen strongmen in the lakebed. Moreover, even as he ruled China through the young emperor, and even as his man Lin Yingxun evicted and imprisoned the Lian Hu trespassers, Zhang saw himself as the underdog.

Zhang’s Land SurveyPerhaps Zhang was daunted by the next task he had set for himself, something that had not been attempted since 1393 and that would define the success or failure of his regime: a general cadastral survey. Toward the end of 1577, Beijing ordered local officials to “measure the lands of the whole empire.” This ambitious policy’s rationale was that the total reported acreage in the empire had declined since the earlier survey and was continuing to fall every year. The cause, of course, was the concealing of holdings by powerful people (hao min), which had left poor peasants with most of the tax burden. The land survey was intended to uncover these concealed holdings and thus equalize taxes, undertaking formally and on a national scale what had been tried informally in selected areas, such as in Jiangnan, during the regional administration of Song Yiwang. The next year, Zhang



issued a supplementary order, this one following the pattern of the Regulation for Evaluating Achievements by giving a three-year limit for the survey’s completion.29

Since it would take three years for the cadastral survey to be completed, Zhang had plenty of time to worry about the fiscal crisis that the survey was supposed to alleviate. On April 19, 1578, the Ministry of Revenue memorialized with some budgetary figures. The army, it was stated, needed about 2.6 million taels of silver a year, and the salaries of the various officials in the capital took an-other seven or eight hundred thousand. The writer claimed that rev-enue was (barely) sufficient but was still adamant that the meager surplus was unacceptable. He applied to silver the ancient truism that a full nine years worth of stored grain in the imperial granaries was necessary to provide for the unforeseen, and he insisted that the present arrangement fell far short of this standard.30

If anything, Zhang himself was even less sanguine and was convinced that China was flirting with genuine fiscal imbalance. On April 18, 1579, Zhang memorialized the throne and compared in-come and outgoes, as per table 1.1.

Although more and more of the state’s revenue was being com-muted to silver, as part of the continuing Single Whip reform, Zhang was in no way referring here to the entire budget, which was still computed mostly in kind, not as silver. As a frame of reference, Ray Huang estimated that the average yearly revenue for the Ming was about 26.6 million piculs (shi) of grain, which was worth about 21 million taels of silver. However the revenue was being measured, Zhang claimed that the people were too exhausted to sustain any additional extractions and recommended instead simple frugality on the part of officials at all levels of government. He moved also that the emperor waive yet more arrears, as humane statecraft dic-tated. While Zhang said nothing about increasing revenue, his land survey, then in progress, was quietly extended to the ancestral lands

Table 1.1 Table of Revenue versus Expenditure, 1577–1578 (Taels)31

Year Revenue (Taels) Expenditure (Taels)

1577 4,359,400 3,494,2001578 3,559,800 3,888,400



of the imperial family and meritorious officials a few months later, on July 10, 1579.32

This book is not a fiscal history, but the competition for economic resources between the state and the gentry was an important component of their overall struggle for sovereignty. What sovereignty, after all, could be more significant than the sovereignty over wealth? Although the state claimed this sovereignty every time it collected taxes, the gentry denied this claim every time they evaded taxes. The fiscal statistics that appear occasionally in this book, therefore, are simply intended to provide a very abstract picture of whether or not the state’s claim to revenue was respected by the gentry—or the gentry’s claim to wealth was respected by the state—at any given time. It needs to be emphasized, however, that even when revenue questions were at stake, state and gentry were not so much fighting for wealth as they were fighting for the right to manage it. As has been shown, Zhang Juzheng was perfectly willing to waive taxes, as long as it was clear that the state, and not the gentry, had the author-ity to do so. The issue was symbolic, not economic; but it was, in any case, played out in the realm of fiscal policy, and it would remain a constant theme in the prolonged conflict of 1572–1644.

As far as Zhang Juzheng was concerned, establishing the state’s symbolic precedence in fiscal issues continued to be the prime directive in Jiangnan (a.k.a. the “land of devils”), where grand coordinator Hu Zhili, the man who had replaced Song Yiwang, was showing the same disappointing tendency toward leniency that Zhang had deplored in his predecessor. Hu seemed, in a very familiar way, to be ceding the state’s prerogatives to the gentry. Flooding in Jiangnan in 1579 had brought Hu under pressure (from the local gentry, officials in the capital, and other regional officials) to permit some sort of tax amnesty. In a letter, Zhang called upon Hu to ignore the pressure, assuring him that Beijing was watching the situation carefully and would authorize tax relief if necessary. In the mean-time, Hu was to stick to his guns and beware of the “crafty ways of Wu,” an ancient name for Jiangnan.33

Soon, however, Hu admitted that he had requested a tax amnesty anyway. Zhang replied that the court was able to grant some but not all of the tax relief Hu had requested, and he proceeded to lecture Hu about how tax amnesties should work. Zhang maintained that tax amnesty was for the state to grant and for no one else even to discuss. If some-one knew in advance of the court’s intention to allow a tax amnesty, they might use this information to usurp some of the public gratitude



the court expected for itself. Hu, in fact, had unwisely discussed the question of tax relief in public, causing the “gentry and commoners” (shimin) of “that place” to await the issue in anticipation. In the event, though, the court had been unable to offer as much tax relief as Hu and the local elite had projected, so that now, “beneficence will seem to be coming from those below (en chu yu xia), and complaint and dis-satisfaction will be directed toward those above (yuan gui yu shang).” By ignoring the prepositional aspects of the situation, Hu had thus lost a crucial public relations battle. Zhang urged him to salvage the situ-ation as best he could by carrying out the compromised tax amnesty while proclaiming the beneficent intentions of the emperor.34

By October 21, 1580, the land survey in Fujian province was completed, and the central government used the Fujian experience to promulgate survey guidelines for other provinces later that year. The most noteworthy of the guidelines called for harsh punishments to be handed to land grabbers and those who concealed their holdings. Otherwise, Zhang’s sights were set uncharacteristically low, for he directed that new surveys were necessary only in districts where reg-istered acreage did not equal or exceed the reported totals from the beginning of the dynasty. For China in the 1580s to be trying to re-store the tax base of the 1390s was very conservative indeed.35

The story of the implementation of the land survey on the local level reveals both sanguine and paltry expectations, as well as a wide range of results. The optimistic Jiao Hong (1541–1620), for example, felt that all the project needed for success was the right man with the right meth-ods. To illustrate, he used the case of Duan Xu, who, as magistrate of Qi county in Kaifeng prefecture, Henan province, during an earlier attempt at tax equalization in the Jiajing reign, simply asked landown-ers to report their total acreage to him and to mark the boundaries of their fields with placards. Duan next subdivided the county into sev-eral smaller territories, representing the holdings of each landowner on a chart for each one. Armed with these charts, it was an easy mat-ter to refer to a given family’s total holdings and thus compute its tax obligation. The goal of equalizing the tax burden for the whole county was thus reached. According to Jiao Hong’s account, Duan got the full cooperation of all the people in the county, including the landowners, who dutifully reported to him all their holdings. Roger Des Forges, who has studied Qi county, reports that Duan Xu encountered a bit more resistance from landowners than Jiao Hong saw fit to mention. Still, however, Duan was justly renowned as an effective reformer, and Qi county served as a model of tax equality for the surrounding



area. It is thus easy to understand how Jiao Hong, with the example of magistrate Duan in his mind, would have imagined land surveying to be a relatively simple undertaking.36

At the other end of the spectrum was Fang Yang (1540–1583), prefect of Hangzhou in Zhejiang province. He seems to have been more skeptical of the land survey’s success than Jiao Hong was. In fact, Mr. Fang hoped to enlist the aid of the gods, perhaps figuring he needed all the help he could get. In his “Prayer to the City God on the Occasion of the Land Survey,” Fang candidly revealed what he thought he would be up against:

From now on, the Spirit will find out anyone who dares to cheat the public cause (qi gong) and misuse the law, anyone who dares to disguise rich as poor, alter units of land measure, increase or reduce acreage amounts or tax rates, keep the poor in misery, or let the rich evade the law. The Spirit will strip them of their positions, ruin their farms and houses, disperse their families, and abolish their posterity. Conversely, all those who undertake the public good and maintain the laws, apply their full strength and spirit, are unafraid of bullies, and do not cheat the poor and distressed, all those who measure land accurately and apportion taxes fairly, all those who audit and adjust cases of untaxed land and tax without land . . . all who help make the state’s revenue collectable and the people’s livelihood sustainable, all these will be rightly known as good clerks, worthy gentry (shifu), or righteous commoners, as the case may be. The Spirit will be looking out for them as well.37

Now that his subordinate officials and clerks had the fear of gods in them, to what end did Fang propose to direct their efforts? The answer is contained in his “Instructions for Land Surveying,” which was also reprinted in Fang’s collected works. Although this docu-ment offers no supernatural content a la the prayer to the city god, it is in fact even more mysterious, since it reveals the supernatural complexity of the Ming tax system. What is quite certain, however, is that Fang’s goal was the restoration of the original land and tax levels, specifically those from the beginning of the dynasty. With this fourteenth century tax quota as the fixed objective, all that remained was to apportion it evenly to the sixteenth-century com-munity, and this process was necessarily one of averaging, prorating, and abstraction, so that one wonders whether or not a true survey of anything really took place. Fang was anxious to see the tax burden



redistributed fairly and evenly—if a bit haphazardly: at one point he advised, “If there is not enough land in one place, then there must be too much land in some other place. Use the overages to make up for the shortages.” Another regulation, ordering that the land occupied by public buildings be treated as taxable farmland, further testifies to the prevalence of abstracted accounting techniques. If there was any actual surveying at all, it must have been on the lowest possible level, where unofficial tax farmers were often in charge of taxation anyway. Even so, Fang made it a point to have tax rates inscribed for public inspection so that everyone could understand them (though what would happen if everybody paid taxes based on these rates, and the result was greater or less than the fixed quota?).38

Another account, this one from the heart of Jiangnan (Hangzhou, the jurisdiction of Fang Yang described above, is a little peripheral to Jiangnan), also suggests that creative accounting was used in the survey, and it also sheds light on the question of whether or not the survey would yield new revenue. A Zhou Xuanwei wrote:

Zhang Juzheng, with his harsh methods, turned next to a survey of lands. He ordered that the regular officials of each subprefecture and county suspend their routine affairs and [without being assigned any temporary help] personally take to the fields, and there was none among the poor villagers who did not look up and stare. In the seven counties of my Suzhou prefecture, there were cases of raising the tax base by several ten thousands of acres; and some commoner families resorted to forging obituaries before their numbers were reassessed, just to escape having their taxes increased. Only in Taicang sub-prefecture, though, did the authorities really put any new land in the register that had never been taxed before. It was newly cleared acreage that, for purposes of generosity, had been treated as land occupied by the government, not to be taxed. The officials were in a dilemma: they wanted the additional revenue, but they didn’t want a windfall that would attract too much attention, relative to the other counties. They put the matter to a man of the local gentry (xiangshen), Mr. Wang Fengzhou, who suggested making a formal request to assess taxes on newly opened land at a special, lower rate. Then, the difference between the low rate and the normal rate could be prorated evenly as a tax reduction throughout the sub-prefecture, so that the owners of both new land and old land would benefit. Application was accordingly made to the supreme commander and grand coordinator and duly granted. Taicang’s tax rate thus dropped from 3 dou, 3 sheng per mu to 2 dou, 9 sheng. Hence, no other county



has yet to enjoy any benefit from the land survey. Only Taicang has been so fortunate.39

The effect of the land survey in Taicang subprefecture was thus an increase in acreage, balanced by a reduction in the tax rate. The equalization of the tax burden was indeed a stated goal of the tax survey (although usually such equalization was supposed to occur between rich and poor people, not old and new land); but even the most conservatively phrased advocacy of the land survey, with its modest objective of restoring original acreage, implied that revenue would likewise be brought up to previous levels. In Taicang, this increase in revenue was either moderated or negated, because the officials there would have been embarrassed by it. With help from a leader of the gentry, they counteracted the effects of “Zhang Juzheng’s harsh methods.” It is also apparent that officials in the nearby counties were either discovering or dreaming up new acreage and prorating the tax burden thereof onto the old tax base—at least the poor families. The only other conclusion to be made here concerns the tone and the bias of the account itself, which was obviously written from the perspective of the gentry. Protecting the poor was accomplished by deflecting the state’s attempt to raise revenue, not by making the rich pay their fair share.

The fact that Zhang’s land survey was for the bulk of officialdom simply a sanction for more creative accounting indicates that even if local officials did in fact uncover more land, their basic relationship to the taxpayer was still indirect or nonexistent, and thus, their power to regulate the relationships between rich and poor was quite limited. An account by Zou Yuanbiao (who was flogged during the duoqing affair) tends to confirm the view that the land survey presented in some cases an opportunity for even greater exploitation. “The influ-ential families (hao jia) are so much more powerful than the local officials,” Zou said, “that the latter are afraid of them and are easily moved to make concessions. They not only agree not to survey the large estates but also give their owners part of the additional revenue they derive from surveys in other areas.” If such gratuitous tribute payments (or refunds or other adjustments) were really being made, they meant that any recovered revenue the state was extracting from the poor was not actually being delivered to the state but was instead being transferred to the rich. The state’s land survey was thus being hijacked and perverted into a sort of charity in reverse, brokered by the state, which kept little or nothing. Zou’s general remark, that the



influential families were much stronger than local officials, spoke volumes.40

Did the land survey ever manage to hit the mark and recover hidden estates from the people who had actually hidden them? Some evidence answering this question in the affirmative comes from Shanxi province. According to the official record of the Shanxi survey (one of the few such sources still extant), a group of men led by a Zheng Jingfang was found by investigators to have concealed holdings totaling 5182 qing, which were reclaimed as taxable land by the government. It is not reported what happened to Mr. Zheng and the other perpetrators, though in theory, they could have been executed. In at least one county in Shanxi province, the survey procedure was designed to encourage the reregistration of con-cealed property. Initially, landholders were made to survey their own land and report the results to the local government, those revealing concealed holdings at that time escaping punishment. When these self-surveys were subsequently audited by a team of appointed local citizens and the magistrate, inconsistencies were supposed to warrant the death penalty. Furthermore, the newly registered lands in this particular county (Quwo county, in Pingyang prefecture) were taxed at the full rate, so that those honest (or unlucky) taxpayers who had been paying extra to make the regional quota were fully relieved of the additional burden of the tax evaders’ unpaid taxes. This scenario represented the true spirit of equalizing taxes.41

However, there is also evidence that Shanxi, too, was the scene of regressive prorating and continued immunity for the powerful that was more characteristic of Jiangnan. A Ding Yuanjian wrote in his Shanxi Diary (Shanxi riji) that local officials simply treated mountain land as arable farmland and apportioned the new, bogus acreage onto the current taxpayers. In the process, Ding noted explicitly, the rich were allowed to escape, and the poor ended up with the tax hike.42

The last anecdote concerning Zhang Juzheng’s land survey comes from Li Le (Li Yue? [1532–1618]), who included the following passage in his notebook:

When debating the merits of Zhang’s land survey, one really should not say Zhang was wrong. His intentions were good. It is just that the local officers who handled the matter were for the most part indiscriminate and ended up hurting the common people. If one wants to investigate excessive taxation . . . all one has to do is make



sure of the basic quota, and as long as a given place is making the quota, there is no need to measure anything. Not only was all the surveying a complete waste of energy, but powerful villains and great houses went rampant with various frauds, which the government surveyors and scribes merely served to formalize. How can all that be blamed on Zhang Juzheng?43

Martin Heijdra, citing Japanese studies, has asserted that Zhang Juzheng’s land survey was remarkably successful at generating “detailed landholding maps,” which set a new standard for accuracy and were used by local administrators for generations to come. This upbeat appraisal is quite uncorroborated by the preceding anec-dotal evidence, with its repeated references to abstract measures and creative accounting. An additional frame of reference comes from Hilary Beattie, who has written about Tongcheng county, Anqing prefecture, Nanjing province, and has suggested that Zhang’s land survey there was a failure. Whatever the accuracy of the new land registers, their significance for fiscal operations would seem to have been limited, and if their impact on tax collection was limited, then the state had lost this important battle with the gentry.44

Perhaps no one was more aware of this fact than Zhang Juzheng himself. As the project drew to a close in 1581–1582, the acreage registered by all the provinces totaled 7,013,976 qing. Although this figure was less than the 8,507,623 qing listed in the survey of 1393, it was more than the 4,238,058 qing in the books as of 1502. (According to the counterintuitive logic of the Ming dynasty, the effect of peace and prosperity was to decrease, not increase, the amount of officially registered acreage, owing to the concealment of landholdings by gentry already described, as well as to a difficulty in grading different qualities of land.) Zhang might, therefore, have congratulated himself for recording an additional three million qing, which, all things con-sidered, was no mean feat. But these numbers were no cause for cel-ebration, for the land survey brought Zhang no closer to his goal of breaking gentry power in the countryside. The gentry would continue to escape taxation, no matter how accurate the land registers were.45

In the last major memorial of his life, submitted on March 2, 1582, Zhang unequivocally conceded this particular defeat. The key passage reads:

Taxes have always been very high in that place [meaning Jiangnan]; therefore the burden of arrears is exceptionally heavy. Moreover, there



are to be found powerful bullies and crafty villains who stubbornly refuse to pay their taxes, as well as poor families who are really unable to pay. The authority of local government practically extends only to the common people and not to the strongmen (hao you), with the result that only the poor are really pressed to pay their taxes at all.

Realizing that the just completed survey would be of no benefit to tax collection, Zhang was forced to waive more than one million taels of silver, representing the accumulated arrears from 1567 to 1579, of which more than 700,000 taels originated in the two Jiangnan prefectures of Suzhou and Songjiang. Even as he granted this amnesty, though, Zhang continued to insist that only the state had the sole prerogative to grant it:

I have said before that such a promulgation of virtue and beneficence [as the waiving of arrears] had better come from the Court (chu zi chaoting). If local officials ask for and receive such waivers, then gratitude will remain below with the said local officials, and resentment will be directed upward at the Court . . . Even if these arrears are waived, it will not immediately harm the state’s revenue, and the common people will be so full of gratitude that their chorus of thanks will be heard throughout the universe. Popular sentiment will be firm [in the state’s favor], and the root of the state (bang ben) will be pacified.46

In Zhang’s struggle against the gentry, even a concession of failure could be used as a weapon.

Meanwhile, in the gentry’s struggle against Zhang Juzheng, a snub could be used as a weapon. On April 1, 1582, Zhang Juzheng fell ill. While the various officials attended a Buddhist ceremony to pray for the first grand secretary’s recovery, a man named Gu Xiancheng refused to join them. Then, when someone else placed Gu’s name on a list of contributors for the same ceremony, Gu made it a point to remove it. It is unknown how much Zhang Juzheng was hurt by this demonstration, but for whatever reason, he never recovered. Having received permission to handle administrative business at his Beijing residence, he pleaded in vain to be allowed to return home to Jiangling. On July 9, 1582, Zhang Juzheng died, leaving Gu Xiancheng unpunished for his rather unusual vote of no confidence.47

The young man’s demonstration of defiance augured poorly for the days ahead. Zhang Juzheng had not only failed to equalize



taxes, but he had failed in his larger goal of building up respect for the sovereign power. Gu Xiancheng, representing the succeeding political generation, resented rather than respected the “sovereign power” and he also, as will be explored in following chapters, subscribed to an entirely different sovereignty. This disaffection was Zhang Juzheng’s chief legacy. “After Zhang Juzheng,” wrote an associate of Gu named Miao Changqi (1562–1626), “there arose a war of words among the gentry (shidafu) that lasted decades.” Indeed, it would last until the end of the dynasty.48


CHAPTER II

THE RIGHTEOUS CIRCLES, 1582–1596

When Gu Xiancheng removed his name from the list of the ailing Zhang Juzheng’s well-wishers, he was, in a sense, using an eraser, rather than a pen, to compose

a declaration of war. This negative gesture appropriately marked the beginning of a new political movement, one that was determined to negate or reverse the statist trend of Zhang Juzheng’s administration. While tirelessly engaged in nullifying Zhang’s policies, however, Gu and his friends were also quietly pursuing a positive goal. Ray Huang wrote that “The effectiveness of the rural elite in leading the illiterate masses to pursue their lives within the limits of social custom was essential to the success of . . . minimal governing.” It was the inverse of this proposition, that a minimal government was needed to realize normative gentry leadership, that inspired the rather subversive policies of Gu’s newly ascendant faction.1

Gu’s group of antistatists will be called here the Righteous Circles (qing liu in Chinese), which is admittedly a vague name, applicable to any faction of moralistic critics from any period in Chinese history. However, this nomenclature conveniently describes a basically consistent political faction that had yet to acquire the name Donglin Faction (Donglin dang). In their subsequent incarnation, described in chapter IV, their objec-tives were articulated a bit more clearly, yet even now in this formative stage, their ultimate goal of gentry rule is occasionally discernable in their immediate effort to neutralize the government.2

The Righteous Circles’ first order of business was to set in motion a great revolving door by which Zhang Juzheng’s former adherents were removed and his critics restored. In this effort, they were greatly aided by the Wanli emperor, who tacitly condoned the posthumous denunciations of Zhang that began in the winter of 1582–1583. These indictments fell under the general heading of corruption, and once Wanli’s disinclination to defend Zhang became known, they increased in stridency and grew to encompass an ever-widening



circle of Zhang’s confederates and protégés. While Ray Huang has studied the psychological aspects of Wanli’s belated disenchantment with Zhang, it is also possible that Wanli’s interest in the demoli-tion of Zhang’s regime was at least partly economic, for he seemed especially eager to confiscate Zhang’s property and that of his alleged conspirators. While this acquisitiveness hinted at the continued insufficiency of the Ming revenue and foreshadowed more desper-ate attempts on Wanli’s part to address it, the emperor found that even confiscated revenue had a way of disappearing into the pock-ets of the confiscators (another foreshadowing), and he also came to fear that the attacks on Zhang’s remnant had spun out of his con-trol. It was, in fact, too late for him to stop the avalanche, for, having already admitted the guilt of the accused, Wanli could not reign in the attacks. In this way, the throne lost the political initiative and would not get it back for over a decade.3

Thus unleashed, the Righteous Circles were unsparing in their purge of Zhang’s friends. Their rampage did not stop with civil officials but extended also to military personnel associated with Zhang, including the famously effective general Qi Jiguang (perhaps mindful of his record, Qi’s enemies merely transferred him to a backwater). Simultaneously, the Righteous Circles advanced members of their own faction into the spaces they created. On January 11, 1583, just four days after Wanli had warned officialdom not to try to settle old accounts, a Sichuan censor moved that the righteous officials from the 1577 duoqing affair, a group including Ai Mu and Zou Yuanbiao, be together restored to their former honors. Wanli could only concede, claiming that he had been tricked into punishing the heroes. In an astonishingly short amount of time, the revolving door had spun, the ins were out, and the outs were in.4

Having realized their power in the central government, the Righteous Circles dedicated themselves to their only true policy, which was to prevent another activist, centralizing regime like Zhang Juzheng’s from ever again taking shape. To this end, they launched attack after attack on Zhang’s institutional power base, the Grand Secretariat, which was an easy target, for its power was largely informal. Technically just a clerical pool for the emperor, the Grand Secretariat had come to advise the throne on policy, but this prerogative, never explicitly codified, could always be challenged. The first grand secretary, in particular, was simply the most senior of the four or five grand secretaries and was not recognized as prime minister—in fact, the mature Ming had no such office. Zhang


The Righteous Circles, 1582–1596 57

Juzheng had relied on his connection to the young emperor (and to Wanli’s family and eunuchs) to maintain his power. With Zhang gone and Wanli now grown, it was a simple matter for the Righteous Circles to keep the grand secretaries off balance.5

The first righteous attack on the Grand Secretariat was launched in 1583, when the examination for the highest civil service degree, the “presented scholar” (jinshi), was to be held. Gu Xiancheng applied to junior grand secretary Xu Guo (1527–1596), requesting that sons of grand secretaries be excluded from the exam. Such a request was justified, Gu explained, by the great potential for mischief by senior ministers. If they were not kept within bounds, they could “ruin everything in the world” with their nepotism and favoritism, for their small-minded sycophants would crowd out the upright gentlemen (zheng shi) and wreck their good work. The Ming dynasty, Gu continued, was especially infamous for this sort of abuse. It had produced no sages of anywhere near classical caliber, and had seen, on the contrary, no shortage of evil ministers, the most egregious of which was Zhang Juzheng, whom Gu pronounced guilty of “supernatural treachery and devilish machinations.” It was time for such ministerial tyranny to end. If Xu Guo acceded to his entreaty, Gu concluded, he would be breaking the cycle of nepotism and cronyism and recreating an environment in which the country’s system of promoting worthies and nurturing talent could be salvaged from its current corrupt state. In the event, however, Xu Guo ignored Gu’s request, and sons of two grand secretaries sat for (and passed) the jinshi exam. Several Righteous Circles leaders cried foul (including Li Sancai, who will figure prominently in succeeding chapters) and earned sundry punishments that increased their prestige at the expense of the Grand Secretariat’s. Incidentally, Gu Xiancheng’s younger brother, Gu Yuncheng, passed the exam too.6

Getting back for a moment to Gu’s petition to Xu Guo, it is worthwhile to point out that Gu used the terms gong (public) and si (private or selfish) almost as frequently as Zhang Juzheng did, but he used them in very different ways. Whereas Zhang had used gong and si to denote the Legalist (in other words, the inversely proportional) relationship between public and private, Gu did not really place si in the private sector at all. Instead, he used it to describe a selfish abuse of power or position on the part of central government officials. Indeed, Joseph Levenson commented on the agility with which the Confucian mind could hurl the charge of si right back at imperious ministers or even emperors, with the claim that the latter personages



treated the empire as their own private estates. Furthermore, Confucians were not about to leave to the state the idea of “public” (gong). As Timothy Brook has observed, “Every claim to representing gong was potentially open to contest.” Representing the public was what the struggle for sovereignty was all about.7

As for the pejorative si, it cut in interestingly divergent ways. Nepotism (a common species of si), which to Zhang Juzheng was a sort of treason against the state, Gu Xiancheng believed to be a more general evil almost naturally facilitated by the state. Zhang’s answer to the problem was to limit the number of stipend-receiving students (shengyuan) entering the education system at the local level. Gu’s answer was to limit the power of the grand secretaries controlling the education system at the state level. Once again, common ground on a certain issue (nepotism, in this case) was reached from opposite directions. The different philosophical or ideological assumptions brought to bear on the issues tended to eclipse them, ensuring that they would not be addressed on their merits but would become subsumed in the larger philosophical struggle. Who was guilty of nepotism, and by whom should the guilty ones be restrained? Zhang Juzheng and Gu Xiancheng offered contrasting answers. For Gu, it is clear, the state was part of the problem, certainly not part of the solution.

Indeed, the problem seemed to be going away. By the middle of the year 1583, the Grand Secretariat was definitely getting weaker. On May 27, Zhang Siwei (1526–1585), the successor of Zhang Juzheng, though not a relative, left his post to observe the mourning ritual for his father. Zhang Siwei had tried to appease the Righteous Circles by promoting their members and by relaxing much of the discipline that had been established by Zhang Juzheng. As administration grew lax again, Shen Shixing (1535–1614) took over as first grand secretary, but he was generally unable to meet the continued Righteous attacks on his office.8

Gu Xiancheng’s Activities at HomeWhile the Grand Secretariat continued to lose its influence, the Righteous Circles leadership continued to organize, both within and without the government. In the autumn of 1583, Gu Xiancheng took leave and returned to his home in Wuxi county, Changzhou prefecture, Nanjing province. According to Gu’s nianpu, or career chronology, he traveled part of the way home with Wei Yunzhong



(whose brother was punished in the outcry surrounding the 1583 exam). The two friends stopped off at the residence of a gentleman named Meng Qiu, where they “discoursed on learning” for two days and nights. Finally arriving home, Gu was visited by An Xifan (1562–1621), who “asked about learning.” This An Xifan, while not yet famous nationally, was a scion of an extremely powerful gentry family of Wuxi. His grandfather, An Guo (1481–1534), was himself the fourth generation descendent of a local merchant family, and had, during his lifetime, become a colossal magnate. An Guo’s resume was typical of the Chinese gentry. He had financed troops and city walls to help defend against Sino-Japanese pirates, rebuilt and maintained a shrine by establishing a corporate estate using part of his lands, and constructed huge pleasure gardens while providing (from his private granaries) famine relief to the workers who built them. He was an art connoisseur, and he had steered his offspring toward official service, though he himself was never an official. The An family was one of Mencius’s “great houses” if there ever was one. Now, An Guo’s grandson, by asking Gu Xiancheng about learning, had put himself under the latter’s scholarly wing, thus formally joining the Righteous Circles and conferring upon his new patron even more status as the champion of the gentry interest.9

Beyond this scholarly link to a great gentry family, did Gu Xiancheng qualify for gentry status in his own right? He obviously possessed sufficient academic credentials to warrant gentry status for himself and his extended family, and the Gu’s seem also to have owned a great deal of land. Xia Weizhong reports that, upon the division of his father’s holdings, Gu Xiancheng received some several thousand mu (hundreds of English acres), placing him solidly in the “big landlord” rank. (One was doing quite well to possess over two thousand mu.) It may truthfully be said, though, that the Gu’s attained this eminence via a rather low road. Gu Xiancheng’s ances-tors were in fact small-scale merchants, not established magnates like the An’s, and in spite of a vague claim of past greatness, they seem fairly described as new wealth. Gu Xiancheng’s father, Gu Xue, despite his scholarly name, was a busy peddler, who lived on very thin margins. With each of several bankruptcies, he moved his family to a new village in the county and soon recovered through the sale of beans, spirits, and so on. The two oldest sons assisted with the family business, thus enabling the two youngest sons, Xiancheng and Yuncheng, to train for the civil service exams. No one else in the family had ever been an official before them.10



This success story does not read radically differently from that of any other member of the gentry, and in his rising from a fallen family, Gu Xiancheng actually had a lot in common with the man whose memory he hated most, Zhang Juzheng. Though both were newcomers to the gentry’s milieu, Gu embraced it as self-consciously as Zhang rejected it, and it would seem that only subjective fac-tors could account for this divergence. To be more specific, since the Chinese gentry was a complex economic, academic, political, and moral entity, each man could adopt a view that stressed some of these aspects over others. Zhang had focused on the relatively negative components, viewing the gentry economically as strongmen, academically as pedants, politically as lax bureaucrats, and morally not at all, in keeping with his Legalist denial of any morality outside the state. Gu, on the other hand, largely ignored the economic and political and focused instead on the academic and, especially, the moral.

Gu having taken what Martin Heijdra called the normative view of the gentry (see introduction), his literary remains, likewise, are very well stocked with conventional descriptions of normative gentry behavior. The academic shades of the gentry repertoire are the most obvious. During his 1583–1586 leave of absence, for example, Gu made a study of the Book of Changes (Yi jing) and Confucius’s Spring and Autumn Annals (Chunqiu). He named his studio Xiaoxin zhai, or “Careful Studio,” which referred to the scholarly debate concerning deliberate versus spontaneous action. As a well-known literatus, he wrote large numbers of funerary or memorial inscriptions, including one for the foster mother of Gao Panlong (1562–1626), another native of Wuxi who was becoming the chief philosopher in Gu’s circle, and one for Wei Yunzhong (d. 1585), who had been Gu’s recent political ally and travel companion. He also wrote prefaces for the collected works of other scholars. On another level, he was moderately active in famine relief, albeit not on the same scale as An Xifan’s family. Although he may, of course, have done many other interesting things too, this list of activities, preserved in his nianpu (career chronicle), is a conventional and conscious recitation of credentials for membership in the gentry, normatively conceived. Notably absent from Gu’s nianpu is any obsessing about affairs of state, which was allegedly all Zhang Juzheng ever did while he was at home. Looking at the record of Gu’s home leave, he does not seem to have given the state or even current events any thought at all. Far more common, rather, was the academic networking that Zhang Juzheng had hated



so much. A nianpu entry from 1586 reveals that Gu participated in a large lecture session at the behest of the county magistrate, who had invited the gentry (shenshi) to attend. These gentlemen, it is reported, dutifully participated in large numbers, and Gu emerged as the most influential personage among them.11

Continued Demolition of Zhang Juzheng’s RemnantWhile Gu Xiancheng was building his gentry association in Wuxi, the Righteous Circles continued to dismantle Zhang Juzheng’s legacy in Beijing. The official chronicle of the Ming dynasty, the Veritable Records (Shilu), covering this general time period, contains unceasing denunciations of the late first grand secretary and his former associates, making the emperor’s earlier injunction against raising old business seem like a pathetic joke. On March 24, 1584, a censor from Henan brought charges against Zhang Juzheng dating back to the latter’s conduct during the Longqing reign. The charge was cronyism, and Zhang’s accuser, interestingly, believed he spoke for his class, saying, “The gentry (jinshen) cannot abide this sort of behavior.” The hapless Wanli emperor ordered one of Zhang’s supposed protégés sent home in retirement, another sent home a commoner. On March 31, Lin Yingxun, Zhang’s champion in the eviction of the Lian Hu squatters, was charged with accepting bribes and dismissed from his post.12

On April 23, 1584, a group of officials complained that Zhang’s land survey had inflated the tax quotas artificially and were a burden on the common people. (As was related in the previous chapter, perhaps they were right.) Wanli endorsed this complaint, and the results of the recent land survey, such as they were, were thus swept away at the stroke of a brush.13

Later in the spring of 1584, a censor named Zhang Wenxi memorialized the throne, stating his belief that the Grand Secretariat simply had too much power. Specifically, Zhang thought that the Grand Secretariat should not be shown reports from other branches of the government, should not govern certain appointments to various ministries, should not communicate with or instruct regional officials such as grand coordinators, and should not allow one of their number (in other words, the first grand secretary) to draft rescripts on behalf of the emperor without discussing the matter with the other grand secretaries. The contents of Zhang’s memorial may have been common knowledge by May 2, 1584, on which date the Wanli



emperor, at his morning lecture, issued an edict that read, “Since We cannot at once be cognizant of all the affairs in the empire, We often rely on consultation with the grand secretaries. If the grand secretaries, therefore, are not themselves fully informed of the various affairs, how, then, can they be expected to serve Us?” Wanli ultimately rejected Zhang Wenxi’s radical suggestions. Commenting on the continued attacks on his office, first grand secretary Shen Shixing complained that “Among the gentry (jinshen), all the talk is about Zhang Juzheng, but they do not know how much practical control he had over the emperor. . . . Today’s [Grand Secretariat] simply does not compare.” The gentry kept attacking, though, just the same.14

There is evidence that the central government’s control over the countryside began to decline accordingly. A land dispute in Jiaxing prefecture, Zhejiang province may serve to illustrate how the balance of power on the local level had shifted away from government officials and toward the powerful gentry. The origins of the dispute were quite complex, but the catalyst was the recently repudiated Zhang Juzheng land survey, which was conducted in this area in 1581. The officials in charge of the survey had been especially determined to show an increase in registered acreage for their counties, so determined, in fact, that they not only recovered lands that had been hidden by gentry and other strongmen but also manufactured new acreage by making units of land measurement smaller. This expediency was unpleasant enough, but the high-tax Jiashan county faced the addi-tional problem of having its actual tax base drifting fraudulently across its borders to the neighboring low-tax counties of Jiaxing and Xiushui, where enterprising taxpayers preferred to pay their taxes. In 1585, therefore, Jiashan county initiated the first of several law-suits designed to reclaim its genuine tax base. Initially, the affair was successfully managed by county and prefectural government, but over time, more and more gentry took the opportunity to prevail upon local officials to reduce the reported sizes of their holdings for tax purposes. If, under Zhang Juzheng, local officials had exagger-ated the amount of land under cultivation in their counties in order to appease him, now that the wind was blowing the other way, they underrepresented the amount of land in their jurisdiction in order to appease landowners. As far as land registration and taxation were concerned, then, the pendulum seemed to be swinging from one extreme of counterfeit to the other.15

There will be more from Jiaxing prefecture later. Meanwhile, back in Beijing, a new trouble was starting to brew. The emperor invested



his favorite consort, a lady surnamed Zheng, with the title Senior Consort (gui fei), alerting many righteous officials to the dangerous possibility that improper imperial favor would soon be bestowed on her family and offspring. In the spring of 1586, as Gu Xiancheng was returning to Beijing from his leave, his younger brother, Yuncheng, memorialized to rebuke the emperor for his conduct. He claimed that by favoring Ms. Zheng, the emperor was “burying the public under the private” and “burying the empire under the self.” After reprising the Confucian version of the gong and si dichotomy in a style very similar to that used by his brother in the case of the 1583 metropolitan exam, Gu Yuncheng, too, went on to attack the grand secretaries, accusing them of monopolizing power by indulging the emperor, much as Zhang Juzheng had done. Gu Yuncheng was relieved of his duties, even as his brother was discoursing on philosophy during his journey back north.16

Upon reaching the capital, Gu Xiancheng was soon given a post in the Ministry of Personnel, just in time for another clash between the Righteous Circles and the Grand Secretariat. The conflict began when a Righteous attack on the pro-Zhang Juzheng Minister of Works backfired, and the grand secretaries convinced the emperor to cashier the attackers. Riding to the rescue, Gu Xiancheng memorialized the throne on April 17, 1587 to ask the emperor to reconsider approving the actions against his confederates. In addi-tion, Gu was provoked by something Wanli had said. When Wanli sentenced the righteous ones, he claimed, “Decisions on the use of personnel come from the Court” (yongren chu zi chaoting). Now, in his memorial, Gu Xiancheng seized on this incendiary preposi-tional phrase and threw it right back in Wanli’s face. “Your Majesty claims that personnel matters come from the Court,” Gu wrote, “but does Your Majesty not regularly consult with the ministers in charge of administration? Do they not always manage to convey to Your Majesty their advice, and has Your Majesty ever man-aged not to listen to it? This whole affair is simply a matter of their influence on Your Majesty.” That Gu should pounce on Wanli’s prepositional phrase and refute it so aggressively attests to how thoroughly he resented the claim to sovereignty implied therein. Clearly, Gu’s point was that nothing came from the court and that everything came from the advisors to the court. Gu expressed his belief that the emperor’s advisors should be gentlemen (junzi) rather than “mean people” (xiaoren, literally “little people,” the moral opposite of junzi), and it was clear that by the former, he meant the



Righteous Circles and by the latter, he meant the grand secretaries. Whomever the emperor listened to, he was a passive figure. All he could do was to choose whose advice to adopt. If he made the correct choice, then decisions in personnel matters, as well as all other matters, would come from the gentlemen.17

Gu’s Further Activities in the CountrysideGu’s tangle with the emperor earned him a demotion to the provinces. As before, his career chronicle and other sources are replete with examples of normative gentry behavior, stressing the scholarly or the moral, and in some cases emphasizing the nearly magical ability of the Confucian gentleman to put the local community in order. While serving in Guiyang subprefecture, Hunan province, in the fall of 1587, his only two recorded acts were to share in the inspiration of the drawing of a taiji (yin-yang) symbol during a moon-viewing excursion with a local notable and to write an inscription about the former residence of past Confucian worthies. The last line of Gu’s nianpu (career chronicle) entry from his tenure in Guiyang implies much about the sort of information it was intended to impart: “No further details of Gu’s educational and civilizing (jiao yu) activities while stationed here are available.” At the end of the year, he was permitted to return home while still collecting pay.18

Arriving back at Wuxi in the beginning of 1588, Gu spent most of the year editing the Great Learning (Daxue), a Confucian text, and then he and his brothers contributed some millet to help relieve a famine that had afflicted the area. At length posted to a judgeship (tui guan) in Chuzhou prefecture, Zhejiang province, Gu “concentrated on the task of moral proselytizing” (de hua). He seems to have been quite effective at this task: two brothers had brought suit against each other, but Gu shamed them to tears (and to dropping the case) with a lesson on the Confucian virtue of brotherhood. Gu was granted leave to return home again after only two months, but the death of his mother on July 8, 1589 determined that he remain in Wuxi, serving out the three-year mourning ritual.19

Gu’s provincial career thus passed with no expenditure of his tal-ent on problems of local fiscal policy or infrastructure, at least none that he or his heirs thought worth mentioning. This sublime indif-ference to government, especially fiscal government, was rather ex-treme, for many Confucian officials continued to be very concerned about the equalization of tax burdens and other administrative



reforms. One of them, Shen Bang (active from 1550 to 1596), was actu-ally a member of the Righteous Circles. His tenure as magistrate of Wanping county (which included the western half of Beijing) during the early 1590s is described in his Wan shu za ji, which is such a metic-ulous local gazetteer that it reads as an administrative manual, very different from anything written by Gu Xiancheng. The work of Shen Bang represents an important, practical aspect of Neo-Confucian thought that had helped initiate the Single Whip reforms in the mid-1500s and would develop into the statecraft (jingshi) school of the late Ming and beyond.20

The problem is that Gu Xiancheng, and not Shen Bang, was in charge of the Righteous movement. As Ray Huang explained, the key to the reformist thinking of the time was not that its practitioners were unaware of institutional approaches but that they had decisively rejected them. In fact, Righteous Circles heavyweights Gu Xiancheng, Zhao Nanxing (1550–1628), and Li Sancai were all alumni of the Ministry of Revenue, where they had helped to compile the Wanli kuaiji lu, “the most thorough fiscal compendium of the empire’s resources to date.” However, the experience was negative. China’s fiscal complexity and diversity seemed to disallow rational management, so that the righteous three became “convinced that the empire’s interests could be better served through abstract moral exhortations than by auditing accounts at all levels.” As devoted as Shen Bang’s magisterial performance might have been, it simply could not overbalance the righteous disdain for such matters. Gu’s circle more closely resembled the Neo-Confucianists of the Southern Song, who, according to Zhou Mi, “viewed anyone who managed economic resources as a [fiscalist], anyone who led troops to defend the frontiers as vulgar . . . and anyone who put his heart into governing affairs as a common clerk.” It was this aggressively detached attitude, rather than Shen’s penchant for management, that now set the tone in Beijing.21

Strains on the TreasuryThe righteous disparagement of “fiscalism” may be reflected in table 2.1 depicting fiscal conditions during this general time period (including the last few years of Zhang Juzheng’s administration).

From this admittedly somewhat unreliable data, it can nonetheless be plausibly inferred that China was operating generally on a deficit during this decade or so. From this supposition, the next conclusion



is that some form of accumulated reserve was being tapped in order to meet expenses. The Ming Veritable Records (Shi lu) provide hints as to the silver reserves in various parts of the state treasury at select moments during this period, as shown in table 2.2.

The various memorialists from whose writings these figures are culled were sometimes a little ambiguous about which sort of silver reserve they were mentioning. Probably, taicang and waiku represented the same thing, namely, the accumulated store that was most frequently utilized to pay out expenses. The jiaofang and laoku were separate reserves not generally tapped to pay out expenses and maintained as a type of emergency stash. Over most of the 1580s, then, it seems that the “open” portion of the treasury, the waiku, was considerably depleted; and the “closed” portion of the treasury, the laoku, as well as the separate jiaofang, was apparently being accessed as well (the laoku was considered “filled” with around eight million taels in the early part of the dynasty). The Ming state seems to have been in the red for at least a generation. Fan Shuzhi has brought together some of the relevant fiscal statistics (the ultimate source of which is in almost all cases the Veritable Records) to show that


Year Revenue Expenditure

1580 2,845,483 Not Available1581 3,704,281 4,424,7301583 3,720,000 5,650,0001585 3,700,000 Not Available1586 3,890,000 5,920,0001589 3,270,000 4,390,0001590 3,740,500 4,065,0001592 4,512,000 5,465,000

Table 2.2 Table of Accumulated Reserves, 1583–1590 (Taels)23

Year Taicang Waiku Jiaofang Laoku

1583 3,000,000 – ? ?1586 – 984,231 Included 6,008,769 in laoku1589 ? ? 2,240,000 ?1590 400,000 – 1,170,000 ?



during the Jiajing reign (1522–1567), deficits ranged between one and five million taels every year. While Zhang Juzheng may have helped increase revenues by about a million taels per annum, he was prob-ably able to balance the budget only once, in 1577. In the 1580s, appar-ently, the state was continuing to experience fiscal insufficiencies. It is difficult, given these figures, to see how the Ming state was not completely bankrupt well before the 1580s. Probably, the figures are not very reliable; and it is important to consider also that Ming emperors always managed to produce emergency funds from their private stashes, which was to be the only way the Ming would survive fiscally in the years ahead. In any case, by the beginning of the 1590s, the deficit situation certainly had not improved, and the country may finally have reached the end of its formal silver reserves.24

While Righteous Circles affiliates may or may not have contributed to this growing fiscal imbalance, they certainly did little or nothing to correct it. In fact, the budgetary crisis was treated with an indifference that was noted by others at the time. In 1584, Minister of Revenue Wang Lin, while lamenting in a memorial the continued deficits, lamented also that his prior invitation to discuss the problem had induced not a single proposal from any official in four months. First grand secretary Shen Shixing expressed great anxiety about the looming fiscal crisis, and he also was very bitter that political realities were extremely unlikely to allow for a solu-tion. As he wrote during this period, “The deficit of military pay and provisions for the frontiers is reaching two million [taels], and yet the day doesn’t pass without word of some crisis in collecting taxes. What is to be done?” Shen was forced to concede, as Zhang Juzheng had done before him, that the state was powerless to prevent the rich from foisting their taxes onto the poor, and thus he was opposed to a general surtax or any raising of the revenue quotas. The Righteous Circles’ barrage of the Grand Secretariat was not making Shen’s job any easier. “If all is lost,” Shen complained, “then blame will revert to whoever is serving the state at the highest level. The gentry (shidafu) all enjoy their wealth and prestige and strive always to increase their own advantages as a group, but the immortal notoriety of failure will be mine and mine alone.”25

In the event, Shen Shixing escaped most of the blame when he retired in 1591, but he would have been dismayed to know that China’s fiscal woes were shortly to get much worse, for China was about to embark on a major war with a foreign power. In the spring of 1592, Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–1598), the de facto ruler of Japan, ordered



his armies to invade Korea. The campaign was born of Toyotomi’s dream of unifying Asia under Japanese rule, and was ultimately aimed at China (an earlier diplomatic effort to persuade Korea to join in the attack or at least permit the passage of Japanese troops to China had failed). On May 23, 1592, the Japanese landed at Pusan with 200,000 men. They advanced straightaway to Seoul and put the Korean king Yi Yon to flight. Yi Yon finally stopped at Uiju on the Yalu river on July 30 and applied to Beijing for reinforcements.26

In response, Wanli undertook to rescue the Korean king and authorized a relief expedition for the peninsula. The Ministry of War, not fully heeding the size of the enemy army, dispatched a small reconnaissance force of three thousand men, which broke itself in an attack on the Japanese at Pyongyang on August 23. In the wake of this defeat, Wanli personally expanded the scale of the operation. He appointed vigorous commanders, protected them from the inevitable political attacks, and reaped the fruits of victory in a battle of February 6–7, 1593, when his generals recaptured Pyongyang from the Japanese. Protracted peace negotiations ensued, with most of the fighting being taken up by Korean units as the Chinese retired.27

The “Trunk of the State” and Other ControversiesWanli’s vigorous leadership of the country in war meant nothing to Gu Xiancheng, who, reinstated in the Ministry of Personnel in Beijing, attacked the emperor for his slowness in designating an heir (Ms. Zheng had given birth to a son, and Wanli was favoring him while delaying a formal choice). On March 9, 1593, Gu wrote a sarcastic and lecturing memorial, in which he insinuated, “Surely there is some part of Your Majesty’s heart that does not dare be arbitrary; and this being the case, Your Majesty will certainly conform to dynastic precedent in this matter.” As before, Gu seemed especially eager to mock Wanli’s assertions of imperial authority. To Wanli’s recent claim that “We are the lord of all under Heaven,” Gu Xiancheng re-plied, “I can understand that Your Majesty has already found much to regret and that surely you are not entirely pleased with yourself; so you will certainly conform to the will of the empire.” Some historians have written extensively about this succession dispute, which be-came known as the “trunk of the state” (guo ben) controversy and touched on such issues as dynastic precedent, the smooth succession and education of imperial heirs, and the role of imperial consorts. As far as this book is concerned, however, the main point was that



Wanli believed that no one could tell the emperor what to do and Gu Xiancheng believed the emperor was there only to be told what to do. While this view of the guo ben affair may seem a bit reductive, F.W. Mote also identified “deeper issues” informing a similar contro-versy earlier in the dynasty, which he, likewise, reduced to a simple “game” of preeminence between the throne and the scholar-officials. Indeed, it would seem that the model for both these “constitutional” disputes was the basic disagreement concerning precedence between King Xuan of Qi and Yan Chu, explored on the first pages of the introduction. Wanli, who, “as a matter of principle,” according to Ray Huang, “refused to do what he was told,” was a fine King Xuan. Meanwhile, playing the part of Yan Chu in the current crisis, Gu Xiancheng admonished the first grand secretary, Wang Xijue, that it was the minister’s job to restrain the ruler, and he quoted Confucius and Mencius to the effect that only the morality of the minister could correct the emperor’s faults.28

To make sure there were as many moral ministers on hand as possible, the Righteous Circles continued to secure government posts for its own members at the expense of outsiders. During the 1593 evaluation of central government officials (jing cha), Minister of Personnel Sun Long (1525–1594) and his subordinate, Director of Evaluations and Righteous Circles leader Zhao Nanxing—Zhao, like Gu Xiancheng, had refused to pray for the ailing Zhang Juzheng in 1582—ignored the advice of the Grand Secretariat and recommended a series of demotions that favored the righteous interest. First grand secretary Wang Xijue objected to this circumvention of his depart-ment, and the emperor accused Sun and Zhao of “monopolizing power and fomenting cliques.” Responding on behalf of his comrades,

Gu Xiancheng reprised an old argument that had first been voiced by Ouyang Xiu (1007–1070) of the factious Song dynasty: though cliques formed by mean people (xiaoren) were evil, those formed by gentlemen (junzi) were good. Armed with this logic, Gu proudly pleaded guilty to the charge of fomenting a clique, since he was so patently working with the best people for a noble cause. The more Gu Xiancheng (and others) defended Sun Long and Zhao Nanxing, the more these two were punished. At the end of a long round of denunciations, Sun and Zhao were cashiered.29

Now China needed a new minister of personnel, and the Righteous bureaucrats in that ministry fought with the grand secretaries over the power to fill the office. In the thick of this skirmish, Gu Xiancheng offered an interesting institutional history of the dynasty.



He claimed that the Grand Secretariat was bucking the dynastic trend of decentralization. With increasingly abstract reasoning, Gu hypothesized that

Our Great Ancestor [i.e., Zhu Yuanzhang] abolished the old Secretariat (zhong shu sheng) and set up the Six Ministries (liu bu). The only fear then was that power had not been dispersed, and great pains were then taken to do so. Afterward, the Grand Secretariat [the present nei ge] came to coordinate and control the Six Ministries; and the fear then was that power was not concentrated enough. When power is decentralized, it is checked and balanced (hu qian); one man cannot prosecute any selfish designs (si). This situation is advantageous for the country (guojia) and greatly disadvantageous for powerful officials (quan chen). When power is centralized, it is monopolized; it then becomes impossible for officials, as individuals, to keep their jobs. This situation is advantageous for powerful officials and greatly disadvantageous for the country.30

The Question of Incipient DemocracyThere is much in this passage that has contributed to Gu Xiancheng’s reputation as a protodemocrat in China. Zhang Xianbo has cited it in his recent study, which argues extensively that Gu and his associates, in their opposition to autocracy, were advocates of democracy. One of the chapters in Zhang Anqi and Bu Jinzhi’s book about Gu and his fellow philosopher Gao Panlong, is entitled “Opposition to Feudal Autocracy and the Roots of Primitive Democratic Thought,” which further exemplifies this general argument. It will not be denied in this book that members of the Righteous-Donglin group, very occasion-ally, made antiautocratic statements that were also protodemocratic, in that they seemed to place some authority, theoretically, in the hands of the people. Li Sancai wrote, “The people (min) are the sovereign’s sovereign (jun zhi zhu),” and “the commoners (bai xing) are the time-honored sovereigns (zhu) of he who is the sovereign of the people (ren zhu),” in what may count as the boldest statements along these lines. However, aside from these exceptional passages, the mere negation of imperial authority does not automatically imply the assertion of popular authority. Gu Xiancheng’s above-cited discourse on checks and balances is a good case in point. With twisted logic, Gu implied that Zhu Yuanzhang’s abolition of the Secretariat, part of an extremely violent campaign to concentrate more power in his own hands, was somehow an attempt at decentralization. That



the ostensibly protodemocratic Gu could find common cause with the Ming’s decidedly autocratic founder, drives home the point that a weakened government might be as easily dominated by a faction of righteous gentlemen below as by the emperor above. Domination, rather than democracy, was Gu’s goal.31

Likewise, a remark by Gao Panlong, also cited by Zhang Xianbo, seems to convey a certain democratic and even an egalitarian potential:

Whatever the gentleman (junzi) does, he must achieve a connection (tong) with the people of the world (tian xia ren), before his plans will reach fruition. If he holds only to his own view, then even if he be true-heartedly for the state (zhen xin wei guo) and for the world, his plans will come to naught. If he does not follow the masses (zhong ren), then even among his own comrades (tongzhi), he will not be followed. As a rule, [the gentleman] must connect with all the people of the world—the worthy (xian), the wise (zhi), the ignorant, and the degenerate (bu xiao)—before he may proceed.32

Again, however, in spite of Gao’s conviction that the gentleman needed to be responsive to all sorts of people, the fact is that he still believed the gentleman were the prime movers of society. Moreover, making the common people such an important part of the gentleman’s constituency implicitly denied that they were part of the emperor’s or the state’s constituency. Just as the emperor or the state was the implied loser in Gao’s gentlemanly expression of populism, the gentlemen were the implied winners in the Righteous Circles’ critiques of imperial power. Indeed, the Righteous Circles’ (and the later Donglin’s) opposition to “feudal autocracy” was based on what might be called “gentry power” (shen quan), which, while it may have been antiauthoritarian vis-à-vis the “imperial power” (huang quan), is really best described as alternately authoritarian.

Wu Han and Fei Xiaotong (1910–2005) coined the terms gentry power and imperial power in the 1940s. If anything, Wu and Fei may have overstated the imperial power’s theoretical dominance over the gentry, as Wu did when he wrote that the gentry were servants of the throne but masters of the people—Gu Xiancheng might have taken issue with the “servant” part. Cataloguing the formidable powers and privileges the gentry wielded over the common people, Wu profoundly doubted that gentry power could ever have led to people power (min quan), and he explicitly denied that the Righteous-Donglin maneuvering against their rivals in the central government had



anything to do with the people. Fei Xiaotong paid a bit more atten-tion to the Neo-Confucian doctrine of the “succession to the Way” (dao tong), which allowed for a wielding of authority independent of the throne. No matter what the government power might do, Fei wrote, the affairs of the various localities were in the effective domain of the Throneless King (su wang), in other words, Confucius.33

Taking up the subject in a more recent study, Zhao Yuan pays yet more attention to how gentry power was justified by Neo-Confucianism. He cites Gu Yanwu’s claim that “The civilizing power (jiao hua zhi quan) is ordinarily [wielded] not from above but rather from below.” While Gu Yanwu lived a generation after Gu Xiancheng, it is evident from the career chronicle passages excerpted in this chapter that Gu Xiancheng exercised this civilizing power freely and fully (though it was called by variant names, jiao yu and de hua). Zhao also includes a passage from another Ming survivor, Zhang Lüxiang (1611–1674): “When one gathers the people, there is no one there who is not a child of the court (chaoting). When one manages the land, there is no [produce] that cannot be counted as the court’s revenue. However, the same principle applies to those of us who act out here in the countryside.” In community affairs, Zhao concludes, the gentry (jinshen) were both executives and legislators.34

The assumption of these prerogatives by Gu and Zhang points to the defining quality of the Neo-Confucian gentry. Comparing the Chinese with the English gentry, there was probably more similarity than difference in their elitist attitudes, privileged statuses, and propensities for economic exploitation. In their struggles against their respective thrones, furthermore, the Chinese and English gentry were no doubt equally self-interested. However, the English gentry’s resistance to kingly authority was based on principles that were ultimately appropriated by the people in their quest to rule themselves, while the Chinese gentry’s resistance to imperial authority was informed chiefly by the “succession to the Way” (dao tong) principle, the idea that the Confucian gentleman was himself a throneless king. It was probably this claim to civilizing power that distinguished the Chinese from the English gentry and greatly inhibited the evolution of people power from gentry power in the Chinese case. In some ways, the Chinese gentry may actually have had a more positive influence on their local communities than the English. Zhao Yuan’s work cites many examples of energetic relief effort and profound concern for the common people, on the part of Chinese gentlemen such as Qi Biaojia. However, Qi Biaojia’s



proprietary—indeed, sovereign—interest in such matters has already been revealed in the first few pages of this book. In general, it can quite reasonably be asked how a class of people, who fundamentally believed Mencius’s statement, “Without the gentleman, there would be no one to rule the country people, and without the country people, there would be no one to feed the gentleman,” could ever conceive of the country people ruling (and feeding) themselves. Although it might have appeared in the late Ming that a new philosophy of freedom was contending with an old philosophy of authority, it is the assertion of this book, rather, that two old philosophies of authority were contending with each other. Both imperial power and gentry power claimed to rule the people, and in this dispute, the people could never be the victors; they could only be the prize.35

Gu’s Final Ejection from BeijingAt any rate, the last point in Gu’s remarks about checks and balances, that a decentralized bureaucracy made for better job security, was positively hypocritical, for Gu’s gentry-based tyranny was just then conducting a grand sweep of its own. The Righteous Circles successfully blocked the Grand Secretariat’s nominee for personnel minister, and then they forced the resignation of first grand secretary Wang Xijue. They overplayed their hand, though, when next they tried to advance their own partisans into the Grand Secretariat. They rejected numerous compromises, until the Wanli emperor lost all patience with them. He selected for the Grand Secretariat two of his own favorites and demoted Gu Xiancheng. When too many people spoke up, righteously, on Gu’s behalf, Wanli decided that demotion was too good for him and had him cashiered instead, on July 1, 1594.36

Naturally, Gu Xiancheng left Beijing with a heroic and prodigious send-off and summered on the way home at Zhangjiawan, where he held a sort of court, meeting various notables who came to solicit his opinions concerning the mean people (xiaoren) who continued to infest the government. When he reached Wuxi in the autumn, he became ill, but he still had enough energy to begin keeping a philosophical diary. Gu did not seem to regret his loss of office in the slightest, and he would never formally serve the Ming state again.37

Had Gu Xiancheng really served the state at all? The very question might in fact have baffled him, for he believed the state was there to serve, and not to be served by, gentlemen of education and merit.



Every aspect of Gu Xiancheng’s official career from 1582 to 1594 con-firms that, to him, the state merely provided a slightly raised platform from which he and his associates could discourse on learning, pro-vide famine relief, and keep brothers living in harmony. Great danger arose when the state employed persons unknown to the Righteous Circles—Gu invariably called them mean people—whose pursuit of any agenda beyond that of encouraging village leadership confirmed their depravity. At that point, the state became in his eyes the wanton party, corrupt, gouging, wasting, and as Mencius said, “ruining all our endeavors.” To Gu and his Righteous Circles, the state was the perennial bully and aggressor, even as they thwarted and gutted it.38

Gu Xiancheng would continue to strengthen his faction as a civilian, and China had certainly not heard the last of him. As he was being feted after his sacking, the Ming state drifted toward the precipice of severe fiscal crisis. The Wanli emperor both received and issued rather hopeful pronouncements on the value of thrift, and such optimism appeared to have been rewarded when, on March 18, 1595, Toyotomi Hideyoshi was invested as tributary King of Japan by Wanli’s edict, and it seemed that China’s expensive foreign interven-tion was finally over. However, on August 22, it was announced that none of the provinces and metropolitan districts had collected their quotas of taxes in silver, and then, on April 5, 1596, several buildings of the imperial palace were destroyed by fire. The emperor claimed that the conflagration was caused by his lack of virtue, but inwardly, he must have been thinking that he had another big bill on his hands. The means he devised to pay for new palace buildings and for government itself, all at a time when the state was starving for funds, would push China into nearly total chaos.39


CHAPTER III

THE WANLI EMPEROR, 1596–1606

On August 13, 1596, the Wanli emperor ordered a special team of officials into the countryside to open up silver mines. The team was composed of a palace eunuch, a

bureau director from the Ministry of Revenue, and a member of the Embroidered Uniform Guard (jin yi, the imperial bodyguard), and it was dispatched to the environs outside Beijing. The next day, another officer from the Embroidered Uniform Guard was sent to open mines in Henan Province. Within the month, more eunuchs and palace guards were sent out to mine silver, to places as far away as Shandong, Shaanxi, Zhejiang, and Shanxi provinces. There is evidence that Wanli was acting in response to a memorial by a lowly officer named Zhong Chun (himself perhaps a eunuch) suggesting that the measure was necessary to make good the treasury depletions resulting from the Korean war and the rebuilding of the burned palace structures. Such recommendations in favor of silver mining had been made before, and they had always been resisted; but this time, Wanli decided to accept the recommendations. Thus, by the summer of 1596, under the orders of the Wanli emperor, the state’s desperate search for silver had begun.1

Officialdom objected immediately. On August 17, two days after the miners were sent out around Beijing, the local grand coordinator asked that mining in the capital area be called off. His memorial was ignored. On September 2, another official stationed in Beijing claimed that mining in the area would spoil the hilly countryside in which the imperial tombs were located. The emperor ordered that miners keep their distance from the tombs. On September 7, it was reported (presumably, from the site of the Beijing mining operations) that renegade diggers who had long been mining the area illegally were being recruited by the official work teams. Much worse, wealthy residents were being conscripted to serve as the “heads” (kuang tou)



of the mines, meaning that they were forced to put up the initial investment in equipment and property purchases in order to start operations. If Wanli had anything to say on this last point, it was unrecorded.2

The Mine Commissioner ScourgeIt is impossible to overstate the triple threat posed by Wanli’s new policy. Eunuchs, laughable exotics to the modern reader, were terrifying bogeymen to the Confucian gentry. By hoary tradition the only nonimperial males allowed to reside within the palace, eunuchs enjoyed a special access to the emperor and became in many circum-stances his trusted henchmen, often employed as spies or, as in this case, revenue collectors. In the Confucian view, the eunuch wielded power out of proportion to his education, an arm of the emperor that could not be tied. Mining, furthermore, was just about the most disreputable activity in traditional China. Official mining proj-ects, especially, showed the state at its acquisitive worst, violating the Confucian injunction that the state should not “compete with the people for profit” (yu min zheng li). During the Ming dynasty, the government usually refrained from large-scale mining projects, in part due to the generally accepted untrustworthiness of the miners themselves, who were often known by the term “mine bandit” (kuang dao). As recently as 1594, the Wanli emperor himself listed miners as among the plagues afflicting the common people, but now, two years later, the emperor had on second thought unleashed this plague on his people. Economic warfare, finally, was implicit in Wanli’s new policy, for his mining teams were indeed conscripting rich persons to serve as guarantors for the mines.3

The combination of eunuchs, mining, and economic warfare was a very natural one. In the first place, the eunuch supervisors of the mining teams were not as likely as conventional bureaucrats to be sympathetic to local gentry interests. Furthermore, the alleged business of Wanli’s work teams, mining, was in reality a subterfuge. True mining operations require a great deal of technology, expertise, and capital, certainly at a level beyond a sixteenth-century eunuch or other official dispatched from the palace. The Ming dynasty silver mine was, more often than not, simply a place where there was alleged to be silver, though there wasn’t necessarily any way to get it out of the ground. The eunuchs or other officials in charge of the project, reasonably anticipating failure, would indeed force rich people living


The Wanli Emperor, 1596–1606 77

nearby to act as the “heads” or guarantors of the mine, and these unfortunates were compelled to make up for the operating expenses, as well as for the inevitable short or nonexistent yield of the mine. In this way, mining, so called, was really a very roundabout way of implementing a tax on the wealthy. Disguised as a method to harvest silver from out of the ground, it was in practice nothing but a way to harvest silver from out of the pockets of the rich. If this method of taxation smacks of “Oriental” indirection, it should be pointed out that the operators of Spanish mines in South America also often collected payments from individuals in lieu of their coerced labor in the mines, so that Spanish colonial mines, too, realized their profits at least partly from taxing people. As will be seen in Wanli’s case, he gradually abandoned all pretense of mining and spoke of his policy simply as a tax. He did so, even as he continued to authorize tax relief for troubled areas. Plainly, he was trying to focus the extraordinary new taxes on the wealthy, since conventional taxes, he realized, were deflected by them onto the poor. The “mine tax” (kuang shui), therefore, while denounced in traditional histories as wantonly indiscriminate, was actually a desperate attempt at precision.4

When Wanli decided to declare economic war on the rich, he seems to have decided also not to mince words with them. Censor Wei Yunzhen, who had recently been held up as an example of thrifty administration (and who continued to be rewarded by the emperor for it) begged in a memorial of October 26, 1596 that mining operations be stopped, but Wanli did not even answer his memorial. He had already made up his mind and was not about to be dissuaded from his course, certainly not by gentry bureaucrats who were part of the problem, if not the source of it. Former first grand secretary Shen Shixing, writing a little later from his retirement, observed that

The Emperor lacks neither intelligence nor spiritedness. In affairs, he is determined, resolute, and accustomed to making up his own mind, and he seldom shows any doubt or hesitation. Oftentimes, a profusion of memorials on a given subject, or an inordinately complicated debate, will make him exceedingly vexed, resulting in disaffection and stalemate. At such times, any further memorials that may arrive are like pebbles being thrown into the ocean. In the recent case of designating an heir apparent, the entire bureaucracy demanded it, and yet he would not suffer it to happen. As for the current mining tax, no matter how many are those who speak of its disadvantages, he will never abolish it.5



Events overseas would confirm Wanli yet further in his determination. On October 21, 1596, Chinese envoys bearing Wanli’s edict investing Toyotomi Hideyoshi as king of Japan were finally received in Osaka. For some reason, perhaps because of the Chinese demand that the Japanese withdraw all their troops from Korea (they still held Pusan), Hideyoshi became enraged and canceled his own investiture ceremony. Negotiations were discontinued, and by the spring of 1597, Hideyoshi had sent another 140,000 men to Korea. The Chinese countered with a second expedition of their own, and the fighting was thus rejoined, to last another year.6

With an added sense of urgency, therefore, Wanli redoubled his efforts. He invested his mine tax agents with more official author-ity in such a way as to place them beyond the supervisory control of conventional local officials such as magistrates, prefects, and even grand coordinators. Now, in the event of a dispute between a mining commissioner and another local official, the mining commissioner would enjoy the benefit of all doubt, and the commissioners lost no time telling local officials what to do. One eunuch who had been sent out in the first wave of mine commissioners, Chen Zeng, wrote, “All matters should proceed as I wish. I will delegate tasks to the various civil and military officials and grand coordinators, manag-ing them in such a way as to provide both clear encouragement and punishment.” Another eunuch, Lu Kun, memorialized that “Since the various officials answer to me, I should have a formal sphere of authority.” The historian Wen Bing (1609–1669), after paraphrasing these memorials, commented that “There were now some matters that were off limits to the gentry” (jinshen). Sure enough, in the fall of 1597, Chen Zeng charged that Wei Guoxian, the magistrate of Fushan county, Dengzhou prefecture, Shandong province was obstructing mining operations. Wei was jailed, and a grand coordinator who got involved in the case, Wan Xiangchun, was fined.7

It is important to note that, just as Wanli gave his commissioners favorable consideration in any dispute with conventional officials, he also gave them more attention in general. Even as Wanli ignored the complaints of the scholar officials, he responded to the memo-randa of his mining officers quite promptly, often within the day they were received. This selective diligence belies the historical por-trait of Wanli as an inattentive emperor, a portrait first painted by the members of the gentry bureaucracy, who claimed that he did not give enough attention to their official correspondence. Really, the problem was that the emperor gave too much attention to the wrong



people’s correspondence. In the late 1590s, gentry bureaucrats would gladly have traded Wanli for ten inattentive emperors. A censor named Zhang Yangmeng complained around this time that Wanli was actively approving too many requests for more mines, and he seemed as bitter as a spurned lover that the emperor now sought council from other sources and not from people like himself, “as if these palace guards were all selflessly devoted to their sovereign and the court gentry (chao shen) were all hindrances to the state.”

Zhang was trying to be sarcastic, but he represented the emperor’s thinking quite accurately. Wanli, who was as intelligent as he was attentive, no longer trusted the gentry to be of any service to him or to the state. He was, therefore, circumventing them in the bureaucracy and attacking them in the countryside. The gentry-dominated government was essentially overthrown, and a new apparatus, composed of minor palace functionaries responsible only to the emperor, was put in its place.8

The gentry were quite aware of their catastrophe. On December 2, 1598, a censor named Xu Wenzao memorialized the throne to describe what he saw of the provinces during a trip to take up a new post. River transportation was severely limited, Xu said, owing not only to drought but also to “bandits,” meaning mine commissioners. The evils wrought by mining from Henan to northern Nanjing province far outweighed the benefits. The miners were “levying heavy taxes on great families” (pou ke yu dahu) and had given up on digging altogether. “Your Majesty sent these people to obtain wealth from nature,” Xu naïvely (or sarcastically) informed the emperor, “but really they’re getting it from the villages.” He closed his memorial by linking the miners’ depredations cosmologically to the drought that paralyzed river traffic: “With a seizure of Heaven’s power like this, it is no wonder the rains have not come.” Xu’s memorial was, of course, ignored.9

Soon, all the exactions carried out by “miners” were classed broadly as kuang shui or “mine tax,” and the so-called mine tax commissioners (kuang shi) were given more and more control over the empire’s regular tax portfolios. This fine-tuning developed by stages, as the emperor took pains in late 1598 and early 1599 to grant imperial sanction to commissioners’ various activities and thus make them seem more legitimate. In the autumn of 1598, a Beijing memorialist charged that “false officials” were collecting taxes in the suburbs. In response, the court invented formal-sounding names for what the commissioners were taking, such as “boat taxes” (chuan shui), “shop taxes” (dian shui),



and so on. Naturally, this haphazard search for revenue began to interfere with the tax operations of the conventional gentry-officials. Conflicts erupted violently in the spring of 1599, when a eunuch commissioner named Li Dao accused a prefect and a magistrate in his area of embezzling the state’s taxes. The prefect, Wu Baoxiu, had tried to restrain some of Li Dao’s more unsubtle activities, but the eunuch had the greater effective power. He ordered that Wu and the magistrate be arrested, causing Wu’s wife to commit suicide. Before a month passed (perhaps to prevent further misunderstandings in the future), the regular tax portfolios of every province in the empire were formally transferred to the mine commissioners.10

Chen FengOne particularly obnoxious mine commissioner was a eunuch named Chen Feng, who had worked in the imperial stables before being appointed in March 1599 as a commercial tax and mining supervi-sor in Huguang province. There, he epitomized the new experiment in direct control by imperial henchmen and was perhaps the most ruthless gatherer of wealth under the new order, as the following account of his operations shows:

As soon as the eunuch commissioners arrived in the town of Shipai, they seized a local resident, Hou Tianjue, and through illegal beatings, forced him to deliver up the various precious metals in Daye county. They also seized Hou Tianming and some seven others. The next day, they entered Chengtian prefecture, where they hoped to open up the jade tombs from the Song dynasty that were rumored to be on the property of a Liu Canjiang. They took Mr. Liu into custody but were not able to find what they were looking for [meaning the jade]. The day after that, the eunuchs traveled many miles by boat to Zhongxiang county, where they arrested a rich man, Li Qinqin, who lived on the border with the next prefecture. This Mr. Li had about a thousand servants and another thousand tenant farmers, and thus the eunuchs were fearful of provoking a riot in the county. They therefore dispatched soldiers and designated officials to watch them [before bringing Li in]. [Subsequently], they moved again by boat to Jinhuatan, where they captured and began beating the twelve members of the family of Mao Tingbo. They forced the Mao’s to lead them to all the precious metal produced in Longwangzhou.11



Ultimately, Chen Feng and company tried to appropriate the revenue of Zhongxiang county. To leverage this demand, they simply kidnapped a county official.12

Other accounts of Chen Feng’s operations follow closely this pattern of focused violence against the rich. A Wu Zhongming asserted that Chen Feng oppressed both gentry and common-ers in Wuchang and Hanyang prefectures, though the eunuch seemed clearly to single out the former group. Chen approached individual gentry (here the word is xiangchen, meaning “officials residing in the countryside”) and claimed to be in the process of obtaining imperial authorization to confiscate their prop-erty. These gentlemen evidently believed Chen’s threats, for they paid him large sums to escape the promised persecution. Minor officials working for Chen visited other likely sources of revenue such as students and merchants, with similar results. This tactic of extortion only turned violent, according to Wu’s account, when it was extended to “poor families who could not respond to the pressure.” In such cases, women were searched for jewelry in their bedrooms, a process that seems to have led the excitable searchers to the act of rape. The wives and daughters of students (shengyuan) were raped as well.13

It is not the goal of this book either to elaborate on the depravity of Chen Feng or to exonerate him. The business at hand, rather, is simply to shed light on this most intense phase of the battle between state and gentry. It is quite certain, first and foremost, that Chen Feng focused his attacks on the local elite, though he certainly may have injured others as well. “The rich and influential were espe-cially marked by Chen Feng,” reads yet another source, and this statement seems irrefutable. Second, although Chen’s methods may have been excessive, his general actions were fully in accord with the Wanli emperor’s policy, and he was basically following orders. Chen Feng was duly authorized to take over the tax portfolio of Zhongxiang county, for example, and even his brazen request to dig in a wealthy family’s tomb was speedily approved by the emperor. As has been noted, the local gentry allowed themselves to be shaken down by Chen Feng because they believed the emperor was behind him. Finally, the fact that there were local officials helping Chen Feng would suggest that this statist assault on the gentry, though carried out by infamous eunuchs and palace guards, was at least passively supported by some members of the amalgamated gentry-official class. The struggle between state and gentry thus retained



its fratricidal character, even as the two sides might have seemed, at last, to be so easy to differentiate.14

Chen Feng’s commissioners often faced mobs of angry people who objected to their activities, and some of these confrontations grew into large demonstrations and violent riots. Since it is very clear that Chen Feng was engaged in a focused assault on the gentry, can it not therefore be hypothesized that the riots against Chen were orchestrated by the gentry, as a response?15

In his preface to the Ying shi ji lue, a collection of documents concerning the Wuchang events, a gentleman named Hong Wenheng wrote, “The gentry (shi) here are resolute, the people (min) simple. Resolute means difficult to bend; simple means prone to alarm.” This cryptic style appears also in an account by prefect Wang Yusheng (the editor of the Ying shi ji lue) of one of the uprisings against Chen, in which he wrote, “In the countryside, the common people (xiaomin) are shutting their doors and hiding themselves, while in town, the gentry (shimin) are so agitated that the situation might get out of hand.” Wang asked his superiors to “Write Chen Feng and hold him responsible for the agitation and the injury. Issue an edit to the gentry (shimin) and order them to let Chen Feng go. Memorialize the throne and urge the abolition of all the silver shops (jinchang).” It is hard to keep track of the uprisings the people of Wuchang launched against Chen Feng. The incident described by Prefect Wang had broken out on July 6, 1599 and was occasioned by Chen Feng’s abduction of the Zhongxiang county official and several shengyuan (students). Perhaps Chen was besieged inside some government buildings, hence Wang’s desire that the gentry let him go. On or about January 17, 1600, there was a separate incident in which Chen Feng found himself trapped in a government office again, facing another set of rock-throwing shengyuan, who were seeking revenge for the outrages committed against their women, described above.16

Most of the rioting against Chen Feng in Wuchang thus seems to have been carried out by shengyuan, and the scholars Wang Chunyu and Du Wanyan confirm that shengyuan were the usual suspects in most cases of anti–mine tax riots. As members of the gentry fighting for their own protection, the shengyuan certainly cannot be discounted, but it still seems a bit surprising that the more influen-tial, upper gentry did not bring out heavier guns. David Robinson has studied the well-known “resources of violence” available to the local elite, and many powerful gentry, such as Xu Jie (see introduction) and the art connoisseur Dong Qichang (1555–1636), were notorious



for employing large gangs of intimidating henchmen to protect their interests. It is certainly quite reasonable to assume that gentry of this sort, coming under the attack of tax commissioners like Chen Feng, would simply turn their henchmen loose on their attackers. Chen Feng himself, according to one of the above-mentioned accounts, made just this type of assumption when dealing with the rich man (fu min) Li Qinqin and his thousands of house servants (jia tong) and tenants (zhuang dian). Chen chose on that occasion to exercise cau-tion; but in other cases, if the sources are to be believed, the gentry seem to have submitted very meekly, ransoming their persons in lieu of counterattacking with their own thugs. What happened to the gentry’s vaunted power?17

The simplest answer is that the mine tax commissioners had nullified it, by usurping the gentry’s imperial protection. Wanli’s commissioners, marauders though they may have been, operated under imperial sanction and thus could command the resources of local government. Confronting Li Qinqin’s henchmen, Chen Feng needed only to “dispatch soldiers (bing) and designate officials (guan) to watch them,” and the words used to describe these personnel denote public operatives rather than private henchmen. Furthermore, Chen Feng did, after all, escape the numerous uprisings against him, behind defensive screens of government officers. During the January 17 riot, grand coordinator Zhi Keda and other regional officials manned the gates of the location where Chen Feng was barricaded, and they also posted additional soldiers to stand guard. These government forces made the difference between life and death for Chen Feng, and they enabled him to return immediately to his depredations.18

Wang Chunyu and Du Wanyan have brought to light evidence concerning anti–mine tax disturbances elsewhere, which is among the scant handful of accounts that do in fact describe the resistance of higher-level gentry, not merely shengyuan. Even these higher-level gentry counterattacks, though, were easily suppressed by government forces called in by the eunuchs, which would probably explain why they were so unusual. Somewhere in Shandong province in the spring of 1600, the eunuch mine tax commissioner Li Feng memorialized that gentry (xiangguan, or officials residing in the countryside) had conspired to launch an uprising. The ringleaders were local strongman (tu hao) Li Yunyi, together with Wu Yinghong, a former assistant prefect (tong pan), Lao Yangkui, who held the intermedi-ate academic degree (juren), and several other people of name, and they had, indeed, organized a gang numbering over one thousand



people. However, it just wasn’t strong enough. Responding swiftly to Li Feng’s memorial, the Wanli emperor dispatched the Embroidered Uniform Guard, with orders to take the leaders into custody and bring them back to Beijing for interrogation. In the fall of 1601, in Raochuan prefecture, Jiangxi province, the local mine eunuch (kuang jian), Pan Xiang, similarly complained that a local strongman named Yang Xinsan had led a gang of over ten thousand on a rampage of the imperial kilns at Jingdezhen, while assistant prefect Chen Qike looked the other way. On Wanli’s orders, these two men were also taken away by the Embroidered Uniform Guard. For better or worse, Wanli’s unconventional revenue machine had decisively broken the local power of the gentry.19

With Wanli and his commissioners holding all the powerful cards, as it were, it simply wasn’t prudent for most gentry to put up an active resistance. Instead, the gentry contrived an indirect response to Wanli’s attack. On the one hand, they would defend their interests at the local level by leaving the muscle work to the shengyuan, egging them on in some cases but refraining from supporting them too overtly. On the other hand, they would act in their official, bureaucratic capaci-ties to continue to remonstrate with the emperor, while at the same time stealthily maneuvering to undermine his henchmen.20

This September 3, 1600 memorial on the subject of Chen Feng, written by Minister of Personnel Li Dai (1531–1607), highlights all the major components of this strategy.

Since even Your Majesty’s officials (guan) and gentry (shi) can offer no effective resistance to the palace officials’ lackeys, one can only imagine how hard it is for the common people. Therefore, while offi-cials and gentry merely file their reports on the mine tax excesses, the common people, for their part, are compelled to take matters into their own hands to eradicate the problem. Their homes are being searched, their property confiscated, their very lives being thrown away in an orgy of profit seeking, as if they were caught in the middle of a war. They are selling off their wives and children as though they were livestock. They cannot work the land or engage in commerce. The mournful sound of their lament reaches heavenward, and the righteous fury of their anger is likewise boiling over. Alas that Your Majesty cannot hear them! . . . The militia that has been called out by Chen Feng now numbers several hundred. His people do not go out unless they are armed and armored and able to protect themselves. The situation cannot last long like this. Your Majesty has been observing the situation



carefully, in lieu of accepting the hasty conclusions of others. Very well, I presume only to ask Your Majesty: if Chen Feng were not injuring the people so severely, why are they so opposed to him? If the people did not all want to kill Chen Feng, why would he require a guard? A militia several hundred strong must be costing Chen Feng at least ten thousand teals. Would he willingly part with such a sum if he were not plundering some ten times that amount from the people?21

The very truthful claim that local gentry were no match for Wanli’s commissioners, the doubtful assertion that the common people were suffering more, the half-disguised glee at the commoners supposedly taking matters into their own hands (allegedly with no gentry insti-gation), the general appeal for sympathy—all are well in evidence. In addition, Li Dai charged Chen Feng with embezzlement, playing on Wanli’s preoccupation with revenue, should the emperor prove unresponsive to moral suasion. Accusing the mine commission-ers of holding out—of keeping some of the plunder for themselves, rather than remitting it to the treasury—was a clever way to erode Wanli’s support for them. Many officials besides Li Dai came to rely on this tactic. Sometime in 1600, another official complained about Chen Feng along similar lines, saying, “Your Majesty is under the impression that the mine tax is being used to the advantage of the state finances. In fact, owing to every species of selfish (si) embezzle-ment, only the dregs are left for the state. The rest has been spent on debauchery and jewelry.”22

The reason Wanli failed immediately to respond to the gentry’s remonstrance was not that he was insensitive to popular discontent or that he was unconcerned about the embezzlement of revenue but that he continued to distrust the source of the information. Categorically rejecting anything the gentry had to say, Wanli ended up categorically accepting the intelligence provided by his mine commissioners, for it was one party’s word against the other’s, and without knowing the situation first hand, Wanli’s trust, either way, could only be blind. Accusations against Wanli’s mine commission-ers, therefore, were only effective if they were corroborated by other mine commissioners. It was, in fact, only the testimony of another eunuch that finally convicted Chen Feng. That Wanli would listen to a eunuch after he had ignored the two gentlemen cited above is yet further evidence that Wanli’s supposed inattentiveness was in real-ity a selective (and from the point of view of the gentry, incorrect) attentiveness.



It was the eunuch Li Dao, a supervisor of local boat taxes, who wrote that Chen Feng was stopping merchant boats, condemning their cargoes, and remitting to the state one quarter of the proceeds, while keeping the rest. Li declared this practice to be “injuring the state and exploiting the people.” Immediately, Wanli rescripted that “Chen Feng is levying heavy taxes on the people and forwarding small revenues to the treasury. His collections on land and water have harassed merchants and common people, and he has falsely withheld portions of the state’s taxes. Despicable!” Chen Feng was recalled to Beijing, where the emperor, in spite of everything, continued to pro-tect him from his accusers. Chen Feng’s ultimate fate is unknown.23

Chen Zeng Meets Li SancaiThe efficaciousness of the gentry’s sophisticated antieunuch strategy would be tested again in the prefectures immediately north of the Yangzi River, in the province of Nanjing, where the eunuch Chen Zeng (not to be confused with Chen Feng) was active. Chen Zeng was among the first eunuchs dispatched to open mines in 1596. One secondary source claims that Chen Zeng was really an informed advocate of actual mining operations, but the authoritative primary source for such a claim is unclear. It is much more certain, however, that Chen Zeng was even less popular than Chen Feng (if such a thing were possible). In fact, Chen Zeng was the most notorious eunuch among Wanli’s mine tax corps. He had already caused the removal of several local officials (including Wei Guoxian, magistrate of Fushan county, as related above) and had developed a considerable reputa-tion for plunder. Like Chen Feng, Chen Zeng employed a number of shady accomplices. In Chen Zeng’s case, his chief collaborator was a man named Cheng Shouxun, and this lackey added greatly to the infamy of his boss. In the early days of 1600, an official named Liu Yuewu had the following report to make concerning Chen Zeng’s and Cheng Shouxun’s activities:

I had recently taken ill in the Yizhen/Yangzhou region and was there awaiting orders. A rumor was then circulating to the effect that Assistant Secretary of the Hall of Military Glory Cheng Shouxun, on the authority of some secret edict, was visiting the rich merchants of every town and was searching these households for rare jewels. I scoffed at the rumor, giving it no credence, but in fact, this Cheng Shouxun did soon arrive. He and his entourage traveled in horse-drawn carriages, flying banners and pennants and blocking all other traffic.



At the head of this procession, a mounted soldier in full military rega-lia held aloft a placard on which was written in golden characters, “ATTENTION TO ORDERS!” Following him were two similarly attired mounted officers. One carried a placard directing all rich merchants, great families, and those with illegal wealth to fall in behind him. The other carried a placard ordering all officials and civilians concealing precious stones to fall in behind him. The rest of the group, includ-ing halberd bearers, horses, and footmen, could not be counted. I was made speechless by the sight. Over the next few days, Cheng Shouxun promulgated several directives, each enforced by some hulking, rootless, goon. One day, someone could be told he was “rich in violation of the law” and thus beaten. The next day, someone else could be told, “Your family is concealing precious jewelry,” and likewise beaten. Cheng Shouxun also had a copy of a memorial by Chen Zeng [which contained a list of names]. He would refer to this memorial and point people out, saying, “You must be Mr. A. You must be Mr. B. You are Mr. Zhao. You are Mr. Qian.” All these individuals were from families of some influence and were identified in order and treated as a group. They were arrested without being immediately interrogated, shackled together, and dragged about in groups of three. Cheng Shouxun ordered that they be paraded around the wards and marketplaces, and all who saw this spectacle were outraged. Finally, they were interrogated, and then they were placed on prison barges that had been prepared for the purpose. They were confined on the barges day and night, forced to remain standing, and deprived of all food and water. Those who man-aged to sneak to shore were met on the bank by the usual crowd of hoodlums and hounded back aboard; and soon they were put under even heavier guard on the barges themselves. It was a completely illegal detainment, shameful and odious. The persons held had no means to stay alive, nor could they wish for an early and merciful death. Their hapless families bankrupted themselves to come up with tribute and ransom, which could total ten thousand taels in some cases and was rarely below several taels in any case. The Yizhen student Li Lianglin, the Nanjing salt merchant Wang Maoji, and other leading salt merchants of Huaian and Yangzhou such as the Gao’s, Wangs, Fangs, and Quans, all were completely wiped out in this affair, and many soon died. Public opinion was greatly agitated for a time, and the people closed up and abandoned their homes, scattering as far away as they could. Presently, Cheng Shouxun exhausted Yizhen and Yangzhou, and moved off to Nanjing, Taiping, Wuzhou, and Weizhou. His reputation has spread as far as Suzhou and Hangzhou. In feasting and revelry, he throws away money like it was dirt, and he pays his prostitutes and singing girls in the hundreds of taels . . . He often calls



out to people, saying, “I am the Emperor’s protégé. I report to no one else!” and, “I carry a secret edict; the censors cannot impeach me.” I have heard that in his home village, he has erected . . . above his gate an inscription reading, “Built by Special Grace of the Emperor” . . . He is somehow supposed to be an in-law of Chen Zeng, and he relies a great deal on the protection this status affords him. Now, Cheng Shouxun does not have the qualifications to engage in these activities. He was never subject to the normal evaluations of worthiness and faults. It is simply that the Emperor gives too much consideration to Chen Zeng’s requests and carelessly assigned Cheng Shouxun some empty titles and honors . . . As a result, Cheng Shouxun is emboldened to act brazenly, manufacture offices, insult good people, wantonly cause damage, cultivate a host of other evils, demoralize the gentry (shishen), wrong the common people—is there a limit to his lawlessness and immorality? . . . Chen Zeng is mine commissioner in Shandong, and since Cheng Shouxun is his running dog, his semi-authority should be limited to that place. I have recently heard him say, “I have already delivered several ten thousands of taels. Heaven is happy, and the Emperor has already sent his thanks.” I do not know if this is true or not, but assuming it is, the amount he men-tioned is a mere day’s take for him in the form of high taxes (pou ke). Furthermore, people are saying that he must have amassed some hun-dred thousand taels in the years he has been in operation. He might, therefore, be embezzling millions for every hundred he remits to the government. Will Your Majesty be cheated by Cheng Shouxun? If your Majesty arrests him and confiscates his holdings, in a few days, the yield would be several hundred thousand taels, which would allow Your Majesty to waive a corresponding amount of the mine tax. If this is not so, I am prepared to face charges of speaking improperly.24

The main points of this memorial speak for themselves, and they basically conform to what was alleged against Chen Feng.

Whereas Chen Feng was often attacked by gangs of shengyuan, Chen Zeng faced opposition from a powerful regional official. Li Sancai was a friend of Righteous Circles leader Gu Xiancheng who had lost his job in the Ministry of Revenue in the controversy sur-rounding the 1583 civil service examination. Since his departure from Beijing, Li Sancai had served in several provincial posts, cultivating an aggressive and flamboyant administrative style. On July 1, 1599, Li Sancai was made junior assistant censor in chief, concurrently to serve as Director General of Grain Transport (cao yun zong du) and grand coordinator of Yangzhou, Huaian, and Fengyang prefectures in Nanjing province. Li Sancai probably had the highest remaining



authority still held by conventional, degree-holding officials in the provinces. He would use every ounce of his amazing political talent to disenthrall Wanli from Chen Zeng by simultaneous appeal to his humanity and his concern for revenue. In other words, Li and Chen would play a long game of cat and mouse, with the emperor acting as referee.25

On one front, Li Sancai kept up a steady barrage of memorials, in which he diplomatically acknowledged Wanli’s fiscal concerns while highlighting the excesses of his policy. Noting in a memorial of November 17, 1699, for example, that additional revenue had been a legitimate objective during the war with Hideyoshi, Li maintained that since hostilities were finally drawing to a close, increased extractions from the economy were no longer necessary. In a subsequent memorial, dated February 29, 1600, Li began elaborating on the mine commissioners’ abuses, though he was careful to present the problem as one in which Wanli’s honorable intentions had been subverted by thugs. Even if Wanli, with his impeccable judgment, had selected decent officers to put his policy into effect, Li submitted, there was no guarantee that these officers would select good people, in their turn. It was these villainous underlings of Wanli’s mine commissioners who were wreaking havoc wherever they went, such that “the rich are no longer immune to their depredations.” Here Li singled out Cheng Shouxun, who was terrorizing and extorting money from the wealthy students of Xuzhou.26

When Wanli responded evasively, Li Sancai’s memorials became less diplomatic and more accusatory, causing Wanli to give up replying at all. Li’s repeated denunciations of Wanli’s mine commissioner policy, made throughout the turn of the seventeenth century, became celebrated in their own day and are still frequently cited by historians. One harsh passage of this correspondence was paraphrased in the official dynastic history, the Ming shi. It reads,

Your Majesty is enamoured of jewels and riches; the people want only to be warm and fed. Your Majesty cares about his future descendents; the people love their wives and children. What is to be done if Your Majesty seeks to pile his riches as high as the stars and yet does not allow the people to store up a few extra grains of rice?27

Hyperbole failing, Li tried sarcasm. Playing on the term “grand coordinator” (xun fu), he suggested that officers of the new revenue regime be dubbed “grand agitators” (xun rao) or “grand despoilers” (xun



hai), and he invented another office, which might best translate as “taxistrate” (zhi shui), a pun based on “magistrate” (zhi xian). Sarcasm failing, he tried to manipulate the emperor’s vanity, writing, “History will convey to unborn generations in big characters how, in Wanli 28 [1600], the Emperor listened to the advice of censor Li Sancai and abolished the mine tax, ushering in a golden age of profound virtue and inspiring beneficence.” Flattery failing, he turned to ominous predictions of the fall of the dynasty. Stocking the imperial coffers meant nothing, Li warned, if the people were alienated in the process.

“When the people’s sentiment is lost,” he wrote, “the Mandate of Heaven goes with it.” This tactic failed too.28

As was the case with Chen Feng, the problem was that Wanli still trusted his mine commissioners more than his conventional officials. Li Sancai continued to fight a losing battle, as even more taxation responsibilities, including those related to the Grand Canal (Li’s nominal responsibility) were transferred to Chen Zeng. Li mockingly impugned the competence of Wanli’s henchmen in dealing with such matters. “These people have no idea what they are doing or what they are talking about, and they seem to think they are playing children’s games,” Li complained. “They do not care about the important business of the Court, and their only real talent is that of enticing the Emperor and exploiting the people. Fortunately, Your All-Knowingness (sheng ming) fully understands how to handle this mob.”29

Wanli only understood enough to accuse the conventional administrators of obstructing his mine commissioners. In a rare defense of his policy, Wanli claimed that recent military campaigns and palace ceremonies had created a fiscal crisis. The usual methods of taxation, however, left both the state (guan) and the people (min) poor, while corrupt officials ended up with most of the wealth. Wanli had, therefore, resolved to open up mines “to extract wealth from the excess bounty of nature,” but officialdom thwarted this effort as well. “Why,” Wanli asked, “have the regional officials uniformly forsaken the state’s (guo) cause and failed to cultivate a public (gong) spirit to meet the crisis? They have, rather, sought only to augment their own reputations by obstructing Our policy, while seeking also to cover up their own faults. Is it their duty to sit back and watch taxes go unpaid or past due? They are hampering the state’s revenue, and it is extremely despicable for them to do so.” The emperor made the regional officials responsible for meeting the tax quotas that were then under the control of the mine commissioners. In other words, if the commissioners didn’t meet their quotas, the regional



officials would be punished by forfeiture of salary. Li Sancai had no choice but to comply, and he settled into a rather uneasy working relationship with Chen Zeng.30

As it turned out, it was precisely by keeping his enemy so close that Li Sancai was able ultimately to destroy him. Continuing to question Chen Zeng’s competence, Li portrayed the eunuch as illiterate, untrained in politics, and a pawn of local ruffians. He charged that Cheng Shouxun was embezzling revenue right under Chen’s nose, and, not expecting Wanli to believe him, he invited the emperor to ask other eunuchs if any of his representations were untrue. “Your Majesty may have my head if they are,” Li swore. Soon, however, Li realized that Chen Zeng’s gullibility was an asset, not a liability, and he began playing Chen like a Stradivarius violin. To alienate Chen Zeng from his underlings, he issued an arrest order for some miscreants who he claimed to be impersonating or acting falsely on the authority of palace eunuchs. Continuing to monitor renegades and other impostors who were harassing local people by claiming some connection to the mine tax corps, Li claimed to be acting in Chen’s interest.31

At length earning Chen Zeng’s confidence in this campaign against naughty underlings, Li Sancai got Chen to cut off his own legs by impeaching Cheng Shouxun. Persuading the mine commissioner that his henchman was marring his otherwise sterling reputation, Li suggested that Chen should turn Cheng over to Wanli. Besides, Li said, Cheng’s extortion was enabling him to live in greater luxury than his boss, and perhaps he was even plotting rebellion. If Chen Zeng exposed this threat, Li promised, the emperor would certainly, out of sheer gratitude, promote him to Chief Eunuch. So swayed, Chen Zeng did in fact report Cheng Shouxun to Wanli, and the emperor promptly ordered Li Sancai to place Cheng under arrest. With Cheng gone, and with Chen’s remaining subordinates keeping their distance from Li Sancai, the eunuch was distressed to find that he was not raising as much revenue as before. Moreover, Wanli seemed more suspicious than grateful, in light of the recent allegations of embez-zlement. Now that revenue had dropped off in Chen Zeng’s district, the emperor was said to be wondering if Chen himself were not also on the take. As Chen became increasingly panicked, the intriguing Li came to “warn” him that mounted guards had been seen leaving the capital and were heading their way. Without waiting to see what business they had with him, Chen Zeng hanged himself, sometime in 1605.32



Wanli Backs DownThe mine tax policy of which Chen was chief agent did not long outlive him. The allegations of embezzlement surrounding Chen Feng, Chen Zeng, and other mine commissioners may have broken the protective spell that Wanli had cast over his policy. Wanli had gambled that palace eunuchs directly supervised by the throne were more trustworthy than gentry bureaucrats. The gamble had failed to pay off, and after about nine years, Wanli was ready to call it quits. In the autumn of 1605, a gentleman named Feng Qi became perhaps the zillionth civil official to memorialize against the mine tax. He asserted that the emperor could not hope to enrich the state if the people were injured in the process. The emperor gave Feng’s memo-rial the customary pocket veto, but perhaps it was finally clear that officials like Feng were right and the mine tax had done more harm than good, even to the state itself. On January 10, 1606, Wanli issued an edict ordering the cessation of all mining and the return of all tax portfolios to the conventional officials. Twelve shengyuan held as prisoners in Chengtian prefecture (Chen Feng’s old territory) were also ordered released. Wanli’s desperate attack was over. The state’s charge against the gentry had been called back.33

Did Wanli’s attack bring back the expected loot? The results were noticeable but unspectacular, as table 3.1 suggests.

A slight increase in revenue is perceivable, relative to past years (as is an improbable balance of revenue and expenditure in 1604 and 1605 that the modern statisticians Quan Hansheng and Li Longhua attribute to the Ministry of Revenue’s adopting a primitive budget system to control expenses during those years). This increase seems to have barely balanced the budget. Just the same, the big question during this stretch of time is not how much revenue was delivered



1596–1599 Not Available Not Available1600 4,000,000 4,500,0001602 4,700,000 4,500,0001604 4,582,000 4,582,0001605 3,549,000 3,549,0001606 4,000,000 Not Available



to the state but rather how much treasure was extorted from the countryside. Wang Chunyu and Du Wanyan, experts on the eunuch system during the Ming dynasty, have estimated that the mine tax generated some three million extra taels of silver for the Ming state but that eight or nine times that amount had been kept by tax commissioners. Fan Shuzhi has likewise quoted the complaints of several regional officials who served during Wanli’s mine tax gambit and has noted how they all claimed that the tax eunuchs were giving to the state much less than what they extracted from society. Compiling aggregate statistics from these reports, Fan gives his own conservative estimate that between 1597 and 1606, eunuch mine tax commissioners delivered to the central government treasury some 5.69 million taels of silver and kept for themselves between forty and fifty million taels. In other words, the commissioners turned over to the state only 10 to 20 percent of their total haul.35

This level of embezzlement seems quite excessive, yet some perspective is in order. It was certainly not unknown for civil officials of the Ming to profit handsomely from their government positions. The basic problem was that since official salaries were unrealisti-cally low, almost the entire body of officialdom was compelled to resort to at least some amount of squeeze to meet their public operating expenses, as well as to provide a more comfortable living standard for their families. Some officials rewarded themselves at the public’s expense more lavishly than others. Though it might be too relativistic to say that everyone was as corrupt as everyone else, one might say more accurately that the eunuchs were being held to a double standard if they were expected to turn the entirety of their extractions over to the central government. One can really only conclude that they probably stole more than everyone else was stealing.36

A more important issue than whether or not the eunuchs withheld revenue from the government was the question of where they obtained the revenue in the first place. The stories of the two Chens, replete with tomb raiding and prison barges for the wealthy, make it quite clear that Wanli’s tax eunuchs singled out wealthy gentry for heavy taxation. Obviously, gentry-officials in the bureaucracy were unlikely to appreciate this sort of attention. Less obviously, and getting back to the question of official squeeze, gentry-officials were also unlikely to appreciate having lost their tax portfolios, with their attendant opportunities for graft, to the commissioners. Li Sancai, in particular, was in a position of significant regional importance



as director general of grain transport. Presumably, without Chen Zeng’s having taken over the Grand Canal and setting up tax stations there, Li would have been able to skim from the Canal tolls himself. It is interesting to consider also how the officials who memorialized about the embezzlements of the mine commissioners were able to enumerate in such precise detail how much they had stolen.

What happened to this money after the mine taxes were abandoned, given the fact that Wanli apparently wanted it delivered to him? It was rumored that Li Sancai, for one, simply repocketed most of what the dead Chen Zeng had pocketed, and the sympathetic Shen Defu (1578–1642), narrating the affair in his notebook, seemed more than willing to excuse him. Perhaps Li and his fellow officials felt they were entitled to it all along, certainly more than any lowly eunuch or servant to a eunuch. It is also interesting to recall from Liu Yuewu’s exposé on Cheng Shouxun that the latter was unqualified to behave as he did. In sum, it would seem that the shrill denunciations of Wanli’s mine commissioners were tinged with a bit of envy.37

Wanli had, after all, picked a fight with a privileged class, which was insulted even more than it was injured. Feng Qi, one of the last to memorialize against the commissioners, highlighted this point when he wrote,

The most harmful thing about the mine tax was the considerable authority vested in the palace officials . . . When the pearl collectors were dispatched on their missions of plunder, the gentry ceased to be lords of the people (shidafu ji bu neng wei baixing zuo zhu) . . . This reality was outrageously shameful for the gentry (jinshen), with their Confucian tenets, and it also violated Heaven’s principle and the law of kingship.38

Thus, even at the height of economic warfare between state and gentry, the point of contention remained the abstract question of sovereignty, whether the state or the gentry were lords of the people. Now, in 1606, with the state’s attempt at direct rule thwarted, the gentry were poised to reestablish their dominion, not only over their own villages, but over the state as well.


CHAPTER IV

THE DONGLIN FACTION, 1606–1626

During the hot summer of 1594, following his righteous ousting from the Ministry of Personnel, Gu Xiancheng returned home to Wuxi. On the way, he was questioned at

nearly every town by other concerned scholar-officials, who inquired into the moral state of the empire. In answer to these queries, Gu called for patience and resolution. Arriving home in the fall, he fell sick but nonetheless had enough energy to begin work on his philosophical and political journal, the Xiaoxin zhai zha ji. There is a noteworthy entry in this work, made in 1595, that sheds some light on Gu’s thinking under the current circumstances. Apparently, Gu Xiancheng was anxious to cultivate, in addition to patience and resolution, a sense of indignation (fen). “The first prerequisite for learning is indignation,” he wrote. “As is said in the Analects, ‘One who is indignant even forgets to eat.’ All that is necessary to understand is the single word, ‘indignation,’ and then one may become a Confucius.”1

Comparing Gu Xiancheng’s own brand of indignation with the anger that was cultivated by Zhang Juzheng during a leave of absence earlier in his career, it is easy to imagine that both these individuals were simply experiencing a common sort of professional frustration. However, Zhang’s indignation compelled him to become a vigorous minister in order to save the state, while Gu’s compelled him to become a Confucius in order to save the world. For both men, indignation was the prerequisite for bringing all under the sway of their sovereign, be it state or sage. The only difference was that, while the state was singular, the Confucian gentry were plural: the sovereignty Gu espoused was not that of one gentleman but all gentlemen.

Thus, once Gu Xiancheng had transformed himself through indignation into a sage, step two was to increase the number of sages and bring them together. Gu described such a gathering in almost



cosmological terms, as a sort of harmonic convergence of sages that would bring about, as though by nuclear reaction or magic, a veritable explosion of civilization.

Indeed, we should endeavor to gather all the good gentlemen (shi) of a single village together to investigate knowledge. In so doing, all the goodness of this village becomes ours, and the whole village is made ample in spirit. When we gather together all the good gentlemen of a single state (guo) to investigate knowledge, then all the goodness of that state becomes ours, and that whole state is made ample in spirit. When we gather together all the good gentlemen under Heaven, then all the goodness under Heaven becomes ours, and all under Heaven becomes ample in spirit.2

This consecutive progression of enlightenment and goodness, from lower to higher levels of social organization, does indeed mention the state (guo), but it is merely an intermediate step on the way to a universal transformation, without any intrinsic civilizing power of its own. Gu’s scheme followed the example of Mencius, who had postulated that the moral values of the “great houses” would likewise spread progressively until they reached the four seas. Gu’s version used the word shi, which seems here best translated as gentlemen, although other renderings would include scholars and gentry. In any case, the point for both Mencius and Gu Xiancheng was that the gentleman/scholar/great house was the source from which all goodness flowed. The goodness, emphatically, flowed upward, from the massed gentry of the local community, not down from the state or any higher plane. Describing this vision on another occasion, Gu wrote of the practice of philosophical discussion and inquiry (jiangxue), ascribing to it a world-ordering potential that followed various progressions: “From childhood to adulthood to old age, a scholar will not pass one day without jiangxue. From the family to the village to the nation to all under Heaven, there will be no place without jiangxue. From the gentry (jinshen), no farmer, artisan, or merchant shall not receive jiangxue.” Here is perhaps the best example of a clinical, supposedly pejorative term for gentry (jinshen) becoming invested with a moral aura. Indeed, the essential preposition “from” (zi jinshen) implies that the jinshen were the sources of jiangxue, the engines of civilization itself.3

Where did Gu wish to begin this process of massing gentry, spreading goodness, discoursing, and transforming and nurturing society? Naturally, in Jiangnan, the place Zhang Juzheng called the “land of devils.” Around 1598, Gu remarked at how impressed he was with the philosophical discourse originating in the area. Elaborating


The Donglin Faction, 1606–1626 97

upon this potential, he said, “Here in Wu [Jiangnan], there are a great many gentlemen (junzi). If they were to be united as one, mutually supporting and cooperating, then the springs of goodness would flow from Heaven and Earth without limit. Would that not be a great achievement!” Gu met the philosopher Guan Zhidao (1536–1608) during this time and gently chided him for living alone while trying to develop an amalgam of Confucian, Buddhist, and Daoist teachings. This seemingly esoteric discussion was actually one means by which Gu Xiancheng not only facilitated the grand gathering he envisioned but also established his leadership over it. Philosophical associations by nature seem ready-made for political hierarchy and leadership, since they place some in the position of telling others what to think and do. Sure enough, a subsequent entry in Gu’s nianpu (career chronicle) reports how the local gentlemen energetically took up Gu’s line, after the contents of his recent debate with Guan Zhidao were publicized.4

Gu was careful that his growing following was always seen as a spontaneous gathering of worthies, rather than as a simple clique. At the same gentlemen’s meeting in the summer of 1599, in which many applauded Gu’s stance in his discussion with Guan Zhidao, some-one asked Gu a rather weighty question: Because “village paragons” (xiangyuan; ever since Confucius called the village paragon the thief of virtue, the term was synonymous with “hypocrite”) simply set and followed bad examples for each other, what would become of the true virtues of loyalty, faith, incorruptibility, and purity? Gu replied to his bold questioner that he was not promoting base, calculating cliqu-ishness in the hypocritical style of the village paragon. He said that wherever there was loyalty or faith or any of the other virtues, ipso facto, there were bound to be gentlemen (junzi). They would gather together spontaneously without employing the sort of conspiratorial artifice adopted by village paragons. The mean people (xiaoren), on the other hand, were organized on the principle of village hypocrisy first. Any loyalty or faith that they might invoke was patently counter-feit. This argument was simply a reprise of Gu’s earlier statement that political factions formed by gentlemen were good and those formed by mean people were evil. Like all true believers, Gu Xiancheng felt that the goodness of his intentions justified his actions.5

The Founding of the Donglin AcademyAfter lecturing and networking throughout Jiangnan over the next few years, continuing to debate and discourse with Guan Zhidao and



others and authoring commentaries on the Neo-Confucian canon, Gu Xiancheng began to desire a more permanent base of operations. Following consultations with his friend Gao Panlong, Gu undertook, in the spring of 1604, the restoration of the Donglin Academy (Donglin shuyuan) in his hometown of Wuxi. Zhang Juzheng had banned such private academies during his administration, fearing just the sort of scholarly organization Gu now championed. Although Zhang’s ban had never been fully enforced in the Jiangnan region, Gu’s proposi-tion was still a dicey one, especially since public funds, with strings attached, were made available to supplement private donations in some cases. The private donations, at any rate, came from far and wide, and this fact, coupled with the moral and financial support of local officials and the building plan’s having been drawn up in advance, allowed the Donglin Academy to be completed before the year was out.6

A full discussion of the philosophical activity at the Donglin Academy is beyond the present topic. In this space it is appropriate to say that, while Donglin philosophers were strongly inclined toward Zhu Xi’s interpretation of Confucianism and rather skeptical about the implications of Wang Yangming’s subjective morality, their main effort seems to have been to circumscribe, broadly but defini-tively, the range of acceptable inquiry. Those who questioned the essential truth or superiority of Confucianism, such as the above-mentioned Guan Zhidao or the more flamboyant Li Zhi (1527–1602), were criticized, but otherwise the field of philosophical speculation and practice was relatively open and almost eclectic. In a nutshell, the Academicians sought to define and keep the faith (Confucianism), while leaving the individual’s form of belief pretty much up to him. The result was a continuation of the trend already seen in the recent Gu Xiancheng-Guan Zhidao debates: the investiture of Gu Xiancheng with a basic leadership status and the prerogative to wield mild discipline. Indeed, from November 29 to December 1, 1604, at the first great gathering at the Academy, “comrades” (tongzhi) came together from as far away as Zhejiang and Beijing. In addition to an inner circle consisting of Gu Yuncheng, Gao Panlong, and the magnate An Xifan, there were also other gentry (shenshi) from near and far, as well as a collection of eager local onlookers from Wuxi. The confluence of worthy and curious personages, concludes Gu’s career chronicle, was unprecedented, even for Jiangnan. At this first great meeting, the Academicians initiated the custom of compiling discussion minutes called the Donglin shangyu, where one may still



ponder the analyses of quotations from Mencius and other sages, with one of the main themes being the rather self-conscious one of world salvation through gentlemanly gatherings.7

The Question of the Public SphereWith saving the world as their mission, Donglin academicians were not, of course, confining themselves to a purely academic, philosophical agenda. “They made no pretense,” wrote Ray Huang, “that the issues they were addressing were apolitical,” and commentary on public affairs, as well as evaluations of public officials, proceeded apace with the philosophical discussion. Some modern scholars have hypothesized that a phenomenon of this sort, public discourse by private individuals, suggests the existence of a “public sphere” in late imperial China, and indeed, Huang referred to the Academy as a “public forum,” along these lines.8

The search for the public sphere in China was inspired by the writings of Jürgen Habermas, who studied the evolution of the public sphere in Europe. The public sphere has been defined by Timothy Brook as “a public realm of political communication in which pri-vate interests are expressed and negotiated,” and he asserts that the “core dynamic of the public sphere—private people relating to each other as a public—was present in [Ming] gentry society.” “Public opinion,” a phenomenon noted also by Ray Huang, was the result. He Zongmei seems to be describing something similar, although he calls it xiang ping, or “the criticism of the countryside.” With the pertinent terminology so defined, Brook suggests that the Donglin Academy was indeed the stage upon which private individuals, the gentry, engaged in a type of public discourse that had previously been the exclusive province of the state. The historical achievement of the Donglin, in Brook’s words, was “the empowerment of the gentry as legitimate representatives of the public interests of local society,” a development that is obviously central to the theme of this book.9

As was the case with “incipient democracy,” however, the gentry’s claim over the “public sphere” was alternately authoritarian, relative to the state’s claim, and thus its liberalizing potential was somewhat limited. The Chinese and European contexts of the evolution of the public sphere were thus rather dissimilar. Brook seems to admit this difference, when he says, “The critical public sphere in Europe claimed that it was open to all, whereas gentry society [in China] excluded both nonelites and competing nongentry elites.” (It also



would exclude the gentry elites unaffiliated with the Donglin.) The supposed openness of the European public sphere was claimed by Habermas to have been traceable to bourgeois values, which also included individuality, equality, and rationality. Although China’s late Ming gentry may indeed have shared many commercial proclivities with the European bourgeoisie, it is clear from the pronouncements of Gu Xiancheng that his Donglin partisans were contesting the public sphere, not as merchants, but as Confucian gentlemen, and extremely self-conscious ones at that. Indeed, so far from embracing anything like Habermas’s bourgeois values, Gu, in his Mencian fundamentalism and moral (really magical or religious) conception of the gentry, seems to have been reacting strongly against them. At any rate, it seems quite proper for Brook to substitute the phrase “gentry society” for “public sphere,” the revised nomenclature better accounting for “the exclusive character of gentry activism in the late Ming.”10

Another problem is that the Donglin Academicians’ qualifications as private individuals are as debatable as their claim to speak for the public. Frederic Wakeman cast doubt on whether even the Donglin Academy can be considered a fully private entity, because the Academy, in his view, was simply acting as the headquarters for a bureaucratic faction, not as a place where private individuals could comment, legitimately or otherwise, on public affairs from a distance. Indeed, work began on basic organization of the Dongin faction even before the buildings of the Donglin Academy were finished.11

The Donglin Faction Takes ShapeDuring the summer of 1604, Gu Xiancheng stole away from the first great marshalling of gentry-philosophers at the Donglin Academy and headed up to Huaian for a meeting with Li Sancai. Gu’s nianpu does not say definitely what the two old friends discussed, but it does strongly imply that they briefed each other on the eunuch mine commissioner problem. They would have had a lot to talk about, for Li’s showdown with Chen Zeng was fast approaching and Gu himself had thrown his weight into the antieunuch struggle as well. Earlier in the year, in Jiangyin county in Gu’s own Changzhou prefecture, a man of property named Zhao Huan was accused of evading taxes and murdered by Yu Yu and Jin Yang, who were henchmen of the local eunuch mine commissioner. The local civil officials seemed slow to administer justice, forcing Zhao’s son, Zhao Xixian, to come



forward himself with a risky lawsuit (risky because Yu and Jin now determined to kill him). Gu wrote to the local officials to make sure they stayed on the right side of the issue. “You are all beneficent men, not to be hoodwinked from your duty by tax commissioners,” Gu wrote, hopefully. Endeavoring also to persuade (and perhaps threaten) with class consciousness, Gu remarked, “All the gentry (shishen) in the vicinity know about the affair as though by a silent understanding and are profoundly enraged.”12

The relationship between Gu Xiancheng and Li Sancai is of capital importance. An alliance with Li Sancai would provide Gu’s philosophical gathering at Wuxi with protection from marauding mine commissioners, as well as an aggressive ally if the opportunity presented itself to take the offensive. It also proves that Gu Xiancheng, for all his utopian philosophizing, was still a worldly politician. Although he believed thoroughly and sincerely that the gathering of worthies at the Donglin Academy would lead to a spontaneous combustion of moral goodness, he was, at the same time, practical enough to enlist the aid of a master political intriguer, just in case moral renaissance proved not so spontaneous. According to his nianpu, “Gu often said that Li Sancai was a man of outstanding talent and a superb individual, fully capable of taking on the responsibility of saving the world from its current straits.” Really, Gu’s recruitment of Li Sancai was basically in accord with his larger mission of saving the world through the massing of gentry person-ages, though Li would bring to the project a rather different set of qualities than purely moral ones.13

Significantly, around the time Gu met with Li, he became even less reluctant to refer to his association as a clique or faction. One of the Donglin Academy’s circle, Liu Boxian, complained righteously about the generally unacceptable state of the world, in a memorial written sometime in 1605. Liu’s remonstrance prompted Gu Xiancheng to comment “[Liu Boxian’s] memorial is in harmony with Heaven and Earth, fully in keeping with our obligation to transform and nurture society (hua yu). That such greatness originated from my county (chu yu wu yi), from my faction (chu yu wu dang), fills me with almost a mad pleasure.” The second of these two all-important prepositional phrases was all the more remarkable, since it described a transform-ing moral force as emanating from a “faction” (dang), a term that has as negative a connotation in Chinese as it has in English. Gu’s embracing this faction with a possessive (wu dang, or “my faction”) seems even bolder, though Gu’s basic, unapologetic attitude toward



faction (at least his own faction) was established long before, and as Zhang Xianbo suggests, many other Donglin adherents also came to use the term without taboo. As Gu explicitly avowed that his fellow-ship was indeed a faction, it began behaving as one. A group led by three men—Yu Yuli, Huang Zhengbin, and Wang Wenyan—offered to act as emissaries between the Donglin Academy and its friends in Beijing and elsewhere. Through the efforts of these unofficial whips, and through Gu’s considerable correspondence, the reputation of the Academy continued to spread, and many officials in the capital began to express sympathy and support.14

After the repeal of Wanli’s mine tax in January of 1606 signaled a loss of imperial initiative, Gu’s faction launched into vigorous action. Pursuing the customary strategy of undermining the Grand Secretariat, Li Sancai denounced first grand secretary Shen Yiguan (1531–1615) from his post on the Grand Canal, and Yu Yuli, one of the Donglin whips, acted openly on behalf of the Donglin academicians to organize a coterie that drove Shen from office by summertime. According to Ray Huang, Shen Yiguan was “independent, but not independent enough to defy the emperor to the degree that [Donglin] partisans wanted. Hence, he was considered an enemy.” With almost nobody left in the Grand Secretariat, the Wanli emperor begged Gu Xiancheng’s old nemesis, Wang Xijue, to come out of retirement and assume his old post. At this point, Gu published two allegorical stories, “Words of One Awake” (Wu yan) and “Words of One Asleep” (Mei yan), which were basically open letters to Wang, admonishing him either to effect a complete turnaround in the country’s fortunes or to stay out of the way. Gu Xiancheng’s persuading a senior minister to ignore his sovereign’s call may seem rather presump-tuous, though of course it was fully in keeping with his belief that Wanli was sovereign of nothing and that people should listen to him (Gu, a Confucius, after all), rather than the impostor on the throne. Awed by Gu’s presumption, or perhaps just sick of it, the aging Wang decided to remain home in retirement.15

The Donglin group’s strategic objective was to place Li Sancai in the Grand Secretariat, hence the need to make room by getting rid of Shen and keeping Wang out. Li himself had been agitating for such a promotion for a long time, and his ambition dovetailed with Gu Xiancheng’s resolve to employ his friend as the political embodiment of his moral crusade. Indeed, the politician Li was in some ways the moralist Gu’s alter ego. In their correspondence, Gu dropped his utopian persona and spoke the more pragmatic language



of his interlocutor. Sometime in 1608, for example, on the occasion of severe flooding that afflicted the Yangzi area, Gu referred to the place, for once, not as the holy land of China’s gentry but as the fiscal heart of the empire. He even used a favorite phrase of Zhang Juzheng (whom he still considered the archfiend of recent memory), claiming that getting the region back on a safe footing would “bring gains both to the state and to the people.” Almost nowhere else in Gu’s writings can such vulgar fiscal language be found. It was a side of himself he showed only to Li Sancai.16

Indeed, only the desire for power could propel Gu Xiancheng across such a great gulf to such an unlikely alter ego, for Li Sancai was as imperious as he was ruthless. As a powerful regional official, he had suppressed shengyuan students as energetically as he had mine com-missioners. On one occasion, Li issued a specific prohibition against shengyuan of the Taizhou philosophical school. “It is ordered that everyone in this jurisdiction,” Li proclaimed, “from distinguished officials, to imperial clansmen, to gentry (jinshen) on down, everyone will be investigated for acts against the public and against the law.” A few lines later, referring to the Taizhou shengyuan, he said, “They are biased and care only for their own scholarly reputations. They know no respect for the laws of the Court or for the protective intentions of this office.” The Donglin philosophers were in fact philosophically opposed to the Taizhou school, because they thought it encouraged moral subjectivity. Li’s prohibition, on the other hand, was nearly Legalistic. He was especially concerned that shengyuan might become political lobbyists, and he warned them explicitly against forming crowds of over ten people. The contrast between this prohibition and Gu’s dream of marshalling large numbers of scholar-gentry is rather striking, and Li’s general injunction that students should stay out of politics was greatly at odds with much that was going on at the Donglin Academy itself.17

However, even if Li Sancai was a Legalist, a statist, and antigentry, Gu Xiancheng still thought he could control him, just as he thought he could control the emperor. Accordingly, Gu provided Li with much in the nature of free advice, with the general reform of Li’s character as the object. Li was still rumored to have kept most of the plunder that he liberated from Chen Zeng and Cheng Shouxun. Without commenting on these allegations specifically, Gu did nonetheless write Li in the summer of 1609 to warn him against obsessing over his vast collection of rare antiques. Their value, Gu explained, was accidental and arbitrary. Preoccupation with them distracted one



from the important things. It is possible that this philosophical discourse on the meaning of antique collecting was Gu’s roundabout way of rebuking Li for amassing secondhand plunder. Elsewhere, Gu elaborated on Li’s defects more fully, and he pulled no punches.

You perform your official duties a bit too boldly. When you are in disagreement, you are too profoundly so. Your sense of righteous indigna-tion is too categorical. Your application of the law is too relentless. Your concept of distinctions is too sharp . . . Your social intercourse is too hap-hazard. Your receiving of visitors is too indiscriminate—furthermore, you are too trusting. Your address is too direct, your manner too curt, your movements and expressions too stingy.18

Others besides Gu knew what Li Sancai was really like. The notebook of Shen Defu records another friend’s rebuke of Li for his flamboyant extravagance. This affair grew out of a practical joke Li Sancai played on his friend, Li Hualong (1554–1612). It was actually to mock Hualong for his austerity that Sancai sent him a gift of one hundred jin (taels of silver) worth of makeup intended for concubines. Hualong told the messenger that, based on the reputed magnificence of Sancai’s pleasure quarters, one hundred jin worth of makeup was surely a pittance. He gave the messenger another hundred jin to double the amount of the stuff and take the whole shebang back to Sancai, who surely could make better and fuller use of it. Shen Defu claimed that Sancai was chastened and put the makeup aside.19

This one act of contrition notwithstanding, Li Sancai generally failed to cultivate an austere image. He would associate with almost anyone and was not known to refuse gifts. He also was fully conscious of his reputation following his victory over the mine commissioners, and he hoped to ride it all the way to the Grand Secretariat, with the help of his copious contacts at the Donglin Academy and elsewhere.

Gu Xiancheng cultivated Li’s ambition and tried to live with his various flaws. Others, however, outside the Donglin orbit, were not disposed to be so forgiving. In fact, before Li Sancai had a chance to be promoted to a higher office of any kind, he was attacked on all sides, and the resulting debacle would see the Donglin group completely exposed.20

Emergence of the Anti-Donglin OppositionOn January 12, 1610, a bureaucrat in the Ministry of Works named Shao Fuzhong launched the first denunciation of Li Sancai. He



charged that Li had placed his cronies in offices all over the empire and was as ambitious as the usurping Wang Mang of the Han dynasty, certainly a cause for great alarm. Shao maintained that Li exhibited four great flaws, namely, greed (tan), cunning (xian), duplicity (jia), and lack of restraint (heng), and he went on to say that Li had

pretended an interest in Neo-Confucianism (daoxue) in order to estab-lish a power base among the influential. Through excessive lamenta-tion or gratuitous indignation, he has swept into his own camp all the gentry (shi) of the empire. Some of these are calculating and wish to advance on his shoulders. Some are naïve and are duped into his circle through their own concern for saving the world. In this way, Li Sancai has supplanted the Emperor in the hearts and minds of the people.21

Although Shao Fuzhong launched the attack, the idea of placing Li at the heart of a broad conspiracy came from none other than Shen Yiguan, who was still licking his wounds (and nursing his resentment against Li, Yu Yuli, and the rest of the Donglin gang) in his native Zhejiang. Shen may have directly inspired his fellow Zhejiang native Shao to attack Li as a way of getting at the Donglin itself: “Attack Li Sancai,” Shen wrote, “and the Donglin will defend him. It will be like spreading a big net and trapping the lot of them.” Sure enough, the biggest fish of them all, Gu Xiancheng, obligingly swam forward. All through the current crisis, Gu had been writing his associates, rather disingenuously vouching for Li Sancai’s character. In the spring of 1610, Gu wrote to reassure grand secretary Ye Xianggao (1562–1627) that Li Sancai was “supremely incorruptible, plain, free from worldly desire, and diligent in study and behavior—deservedly recognized as a pure Confucian (chun ru) for the ages.” Someone overzealously published Gu’s letter in the Peking Gazette (Dichao), and there was the smoking gun that Li’s and the Donglin’s enemies needed to show a collusion between the two. The continuing attacks on the former were now extended to the latter, and the pejorative phrase (pejora-tive because it was now coming from across the aisle) Donglin dang (Donglin faction) was born.22

In one of these attacks, another official from Zhejiang, Xu Zhaokui, claimed that, on the local level, the Donglin Academy commonly seized custom duties to help meet expenses and, on the national level, employed Huang Zhengbin to manufacture consensus on a number of issues by the use of bribes. The official Ming History (Ming shi) agrees that Yu Yuli and Huang Zhengbin had attached



themselves to the Gu-Li faction and were going to great lengths to stir up controversies and make names for themselves. It was a little later, on the occasion of the 1611 evaluation of metropolitan officials, that Xu Zhaokui again memorialized, saying, “Gu Xiancheng, while discoursing at the Donglin Academy, is trying to control court policies from afar. He has conspired with grand coordinator Li Sancai and created much agitation . . . Now, the deciding control over the metropolitan examinations has fallen into the hands of their faction.” In fact, Li Sancai had been dismissed by that time (some say he simply quit his post). He left behind him a bureaucracy divided against itself.23

Organizing Principles of the FactionsHistorians ever since have been endeavoring to determine why the various elements of the bureaucracy chose sides as they did. Geography has been one perennially suggested solution to the puzzle. Wu Han, citing Tan Qian (the author of the Guo que chronicle), has assembled a comprehensive system of home counties into which he has placed all the leading partisans of the day. However, this geographical scheme simply makes the bipolar needlessly multipolar. For instance, if the so-called Zhe[jiang], Kun[shan], and Xuan[cheng] factions, named for the home counties or provinces of certain people, were all united against the Donglin, did they really form three factions or just one? Certainly, no geographic logic emerges from this approach, as the Donglin faction did not even speak for all of Jiangnan, it is shown.24

Charles Hucker concurs that the Donglin faction lacked geographic cohesion, and he deconstructs the movement in many related ways. Comparing the educational and institutional backgrounds of some 380 pro-Donglin and anti-Donglin partisans, Hucker notes more similarity than difference, observing that both sides “were equally members of the civil service bureaucracy, and the leading antagonists . . . were men who had entered the service through the highest-level civil ser-vice examinations, with status as [jinshi].” While some might con-tend that this uniformity of the partisans’ individual backgrounds concealed a deeper conflict between old and new wealth, Hucker discounts this possibility as well. Simply considering the family backgrounds of Gu Xiancheng and Gao Panlong (in which Gu was the first in his family to win a major degree and Gao was continuing an ancestral tradition of civil service performance), he judges that



the Donglin party “cannot be considered either an ‘old family’ group or a ‘new family’ group.” If one were to add the examples of the hereditary magnate An Xifan and the young upstarts Yu Yuli, Huang Zhengbin, and Wang Wenyan, then Hucker’s assessment is certainly confirmed.25

Marxist scholars, of course, identify the Donglin faction with the interests of a rising urban bourgeoisie. Their search for what is called the Chinese “buds of capitalism” has by now attracted several critics, among them Frederick Mote, who refuted this agenda in his recent work. The Taiwanese historian Lin Li-yueh has challenged the specific notion that the Donglin faction represented the aspirations of “urban classes” (shimin jieji), by calling attention to the promerchant, anti–mine tax sentiments expressed also by the Donglin’s enemies. The Donglin did not monopolize this supposedly protobourgeois position, in other words. Like Hucker, Lin also nixes the idea that the factional division at the turn of the seventeenth century mirrored any discernable social conflict between old and new families. One is thus forced to conclude, with Hucker, that “there is no evidence that the [partisan] controversies represented any kind of class struggle.”26

Given this paucity of empirical organizing principles governing the factional order of battle circa 1611, therefore, the use of party labels would seem to be almost meaningless. Concerning the Donglin, in fact, Hucker asserts that “even to speak of them as a party at all, though convenient for narrative purposes, is to perpetu-ate a slander originated by their enemies.” Again, it is important to consider that the Donglin did not reject the faction or party label, but Hucker’s point about loose organization is well taken. Though some coordination is evident in the activities of Gu Xiancheng and the Donglin whips Yu and Wang, what is supposed to be the overall Donglin movement contained such a myriad of tactical disagree-ments and personality conflicts that the reality of group identity must have been very tenuous indeed. Still, however, one can’t quite dismiss the feeling that “the name [Donglin] seems to have stood for something.” The question, therefore, in lieu of a consistent class makeup, political program, or group coordination, is what this symbolic significance was. Hucker has declared that this intangible aspect of Donglin identity was based on a “fundamental uniformity of moral views. Whether conscious partisans or not, they must have recognized one another as men of good will, men of honor, and gentlemen.”27



Caution and precision are imperative here. Just as speaking of the Donglin as a “party” is, to reprise Hucker’s words, to “perpetuate a slander originated by their enemies,” speaking of them as a fellowship of goodness is merely to disseminate their propaganda. Although Hucker (together with almost all the other historians of this subject) occasionally admits that the anti-Donglin cannot sim-ply be dismissed as immoral, the use of the terms “morality,” or even “moralism” with reference to the Donglin nonetheless implies that their opponents were somehow deficient in behavior. However, the morality that did in fact distinguish the Donglin was not one of behavior but of worldview. It would, accordingly, be very profitable to substitute the more specific term “Neo-Confucianism” for the vague term “morality,” because the Donglin can really only be said to have claimed the former, and not the latter, as its exclusive property. Once the identifying trait of the Donglin is rendered in this more specific way, it can be seen that Hucker’s speaking of the Donglin’s “morality,” if anything, understates the case, for it was not precisely morality that distinguished the Donglin partisans but rather the Neo-Confucian presumption that they were the sources of it. The problem was not merely that the Donglin believed in certain gods and their opponents did not. The problem was that the Donglin believed that they were the gods themselves. It is vividly clear from the writings of Gu Xiancheng that he conceived of the gentry (shi, jinshen, etc.) as the moral prime movers of the universe and that he felt it was his job, as an indignant Confucius, to concentrate these points of light into a new sovereign sun, around which all else would revolve. Across the aisle from the Donglin were the agnostics, who, as Hucker is right to point out, were technically gentry as well, but who nonetheless entertained a much more down-to-earth, even jaundiced view of what the idea of “gentry” meant.

Granted, it is difficult to know precisely what motivated the anti-Donglin, for their literary remains have generally not survived the unpopularity of their political position, among literati philologists who have overwhelmingly favored the Donglin. The student is thus forced to extrapolate a bit, treating scattered anti-Donglin voices as representative samples of the whole. One of these voices belonged to Tang Binyin (b. 1569), whose collected and edited works are among the very few anti-Donglin sources still extant. Tang was a native of Xuancheng county, Ningguo prefecture, Nanjing province. Having earned the highest academic degree (jinshi) in 1595, Tang advanced rapidly though the central bureaucracy, and by 1610 was chancellor



of the National University in Nanjing. He became at that time a leading strategist of the anti-Donglin cause.28

True to Hucker’s analysis of the factions, it is hard to deduce simply from Tang Binyin’s background why he opposed the Donglin. Like Gu Xiancheng, he was a southerner and the first in his family to become an official. Furthermore, as a perusal of his collected works reveals, he was sympathetic toward merchants, praising them on one occasion as “loyal and industrious people” and lamenting their burdensome tax obligations. Also, he condemned Wanli’s mine tax policy and praised resistance to it. The promerchant, anti–mine tax advocacy of the Donglin, claimed by Marxist historians to be one of their defining features, was thus in reality nothing of the sort, for similar views did not lead Tang Binyin, at least, into the Donglin fold.29

It is only regarding the symbolic meaning of the gentry that Tang Binyin stands in sharp contrast to the Donglin. His statement that “The gentry man (shen) combines into one truculent person all the clamor of a hundred-strong mob” could not be at greater variance with Gu Xiancheng’s nearly religious conception of the gentry. Referring to informal gentry assistance in the meeting of a district’s tax quota, Tang again took a rather crude view: “To make heavy appropriations, one must exert authority. For maximum authority, one must go to the gentry” (shenjin). Apparently, Tang’s version of gentry authority had nothing moral about it. Tang even took some pains to avoid associating with other gentry. “Some say that the dig-nified socializing of the gentry (shidafu) borders on the high-minded and tiresome,” he wrote. “In fact, I myself prefer to keep my own company and to have nothing to do with the business of gentlemen” (shifu).30

Tang seems to have disparaged political associations in general, believing them to be opportunistic and degrading. He criticized the imperiousness of Zhang Juzheng, as well as the calculating servility of his toadies (another political position that should have put him closer to Gu Xiancheng), but he indicted the Donglin’s adherents at least as severely:

When Zhang Juzheng was in charge, he wore people down with his power and thus made servants of the mean people, but gentlemen cannot be put on the leash by such means. Now that the Donglin are in charge, they lead people around with respectability and good name. The mean people come together on some cheap errand of fraud or obfuscation, while the gentlemen think they’re banding together to cultivate a luminous tomorrow.31



Although Tang Binyin did indeed use the terms “mean people” and “gentlemen” (xiaoren and junzi), he did not employ them, as Gu Xiancheng did, to justify the factional associations of the latter. It is clear that in Tang’s eyes, even if self-supposed gentlemen banded together to save the world, they were still, in spite of their pretensions, foolish pawns in a cheap political gambit. Shao Fuzhong’s above-cited indictment of Li Sancai made the same point, and indeed, it was the Donglin gentlemen’s clumsy embrace of Li that seems to have played a major part in turning Tang Binyin against them. In a satirical poem, Tang expressed his belief that Li was corrupt, and he once referred to the Donglin as a “bunch of old sot ministers gathered in the camp of Li Sancai.” With none of Gu Xiancheng’s reverence for gentlemanly gatherings in the first place, Tang no doubt saw the Donglin’s collu-sion with the wily Director General of Grain Transport as a simple power play, and a frightening one at that.32

John Dardess has found that Chinese commentators who lived in the immediate aftermath of the Donglin movement (as well as in later times), while they were greatly sympathetic to the Donglin cause, nonetheless conceded that the movement degenerated when it took on political (as opposed to philosophical) goals. By accepting the help of “small men” (supposedly, Yu Yuli, Huang Zhengbin, Wang Wenyan, and Li Sancai), the Donglin academicians became a mere “camp” (menhu), and all their admirable qualities were severely compromised. This assessment, classed as it may be as secondary literature, can hopefully be read as a supplement to the admittedly small sample of anti-Donglin pronouncements by Tang Binyin and Shao Fuzhong.33

This skeptical attitude toward the Donglin’s pretensions, reinforced by a disgust at their tactics, may be the only trait that can characterize the anti-Donglin faction with any hope of accuracy, but it still paints only a negative picture, as though the anti-Donglin’s ideology was simply a lack of Donglin ideology. As to what the anti-Donglin were for (if they were even nearly unanimously in favor of anything), the literary remains of Tang Binyin must continue to provide the scanty hints. It does in fact seem that Tang’s distaste for gentry boosterism was matched by a certain loyalty to the state, which, while far from fanatical, was palpably categorical. One of the books Tang edited was the collected works of Lu Zhi (754–805), a top minister whose practical statecraft and incisive administrative prose were credited with reviving the fortunes of the Tang dynasty. Tang Binyin’s choice to edit and reprint Lu Zhi’s works was an act



that might in itself have reflected statist priorities, but it is Tang’s annotations that reveal more of his mind. Above a Lu Zhi memorial urging the abolition of two imperial storehouses (and the levies stored therein), Tang superscripted, “It is just this sort of public spirit ( gong xin) that really puts the state first—the perfect cure for the present day’s love of profit among the sick ‘upright and refined’ ones” (hao li zhi bing jingjun). This remark poignantly suggests that putting the state first and putting the self-supposed gentlemen down were two components of the same thought, at least as far as Tang was concerned. While annotating a Lu Zhi memorial on military preparations, Tang’s attack turned philosophical: “I find fault with the Confucians (ru zhe) for having no grasp of planning.” Then, appraising Lu Zhi’s proposal for dealing with engrossers, Tang flirted with Legalism, saying, “If this had come from Shen [Buhai] or Han [Fei], it would be considered poison. Coming from Lu Zhi, it’s as welcome as rain after a long drought.” Again, it cannot be known for sure how faithfully Tang might have spoken for his anti-Donglin cohort, but it does seem clear that his own motivation for opposing the Donglin was grounded upon a philosophical difference concerning the proper locus of sovereignty.34

As related above, the anti-Donglin faction successfully resisted Gu Xiancheng’s imposition of Li Sancai on the central government. The charges of corruption directed against the latter continued well beyond his departure, as did the partisan rift in the bureaucracy. Gu Xiancheng continued to justify the schism morally, saying, “At first, I did not dare abandon Li Sancai; in the end, I did not dare abandon the gentlemen (junzi) of the country.” Ultimately, though, Gu did just that, for he died on June 21, 1612. The removal of Li Sancai in 1611 and the death of Gu Xiancheng the next year may make for one of the biggest anticlimaxes in Chinese history, considering what the two men clearly proposed to accomplish (and considering also the latent differences between them). Their only legacy was the division they left behind them, a stalemate China could ill afford.35

With the death of Gu Xiancheng, leadership of the Donglin Academy devolved on Gao Panlong. Gao was as energetic as Gu had been in the effort to keep the local environs free from the excessive exaction of the state. He once complained to a regional officer of overly aggressive customs collections by local officials. He noted specifically that a “rich man” (fu min) had been the victim of extortion, with at least one of his family killed. In his report, he wondered ironically what was so bad about the recent mine commissioner scourge when



conventional officials could also behave so poorly. Despite this basic dedication to defend the gentry interest in Wuxi, however, Gao was even more of a philosopher and less of a politician than Gu. He was a meditative stoic, more interested in his own enlightenment than in saving the world through the massing of gentlemen. Perhaps because of Gao’s general detachment from the political sphere, the Donglin interest at court declined somewhat over the next few years, and only stalemate prevailed.36

The Situation in the CountrysideA contentious stalemate reigned also over Jiaxing prefecture, where the troublesome land dispute continued, but in this case, one gentry faction clearly held the advantage. In Jiaxing, as has already been related, powerful landowners were able to prevail on local officials to nullify the results of Zhang Juzheng’s 1581 land survey. Now, some thirty-odd years later, the various disputes over land registration were actually growing more intense, and individual gentry members were beginning to come forward, endeavoring to secure for themselves the greatest advantage. At the root of the problem, to recapitulate, was the fact that the residents of three counties paid taxes at dif-ferent rates: landowners in Jiashan county paid more taxes per unit of land measure than did their counterparts in Jiaxing or Xiushui counties. Clever landowners in Jiashan had the option (among other subterfuges) of registering their holdings falsely in Jiaxing or Xiushui, thus enjoying the lighter tax rate. As a result of this practice, the tax register of Jiashan county was steadily shrinking, and the various county and prefectural officials were fighting a never-ending battle to restore this “lost land” to Jiashan. There were many lawsuits and small-scale land surveys stemming from these irregularities during this time, but the most significant eruption occurred in 1614–1615, after a Jiashan elder accused the monks of a certain temple of hiding some thirty-three thousand acres (mu) of land in the county. The ultimate result was that yet another review of the registers was undertaken in 1617, and two groups of gentry emerged as the chief contenders in the dispute, one based in Jiaxing and Xiushui counties and one based in the high-tax Jiashan county. Each group tended to support or oppose, on the basis of its economic interest, any of the various corrective registration measures advanced by local government; and the Jiashan faction was especially opposed to any new surveys. Evidently (and somewhat understandably), the Jiashan



gentlemen were almost certainly involved in schemes to conceal their own land holdings, probably on a large scale. However, what is even more interesting than their tax dodging is how boldly this group thwarted the power of the state.37

When officials from the three counties began their investigation of the land registry in 1617, they were shocked to find that many of the village registers from Jiashan county had been radically altered, with entire sections of several volumes ripped out and replaced by impromptu forgeries. A few register books from Jiaxing county were also shown to have been falsified. As it turned out, residents of Jiashan county had filched the books three years before, to guard against (and protest) any impending audit. Just as the truth of this discovery was being absorbed, on June 8, 1617, the same Jiashan leaders who had played the major roles called together a crowd to demonstrate at the prefectural office. This mob vandalized the residence of one Yue Yuansheng, who was the leader of the Jiaxing side of the land dispute, and continued to shout their grievances against the allegedly biased officials and proud landowners of Jiaxing and Xiushui counties.38

Both the hiding and forging of the land registers and the prefectural uprising can be traced to Ding Bin (d. 1633), a wealthy and powerful landowner from Jiashan. Ding Bin was a fairly typical gentry stalwart of the county: he paid taxes for those who could not, he donated land to support local schools, and he had a certain influence over the Jiashan county clerks. His record of positive service to the community does not alter the fact that he also forbade compliance (perhaps through intimidation) with the new land survey and instigated a riot. Whether or not Ding was in the aggregate a good citizen, one of the chief outcomes of the events of 1617 was that the local government completely lost its author-ity over the gentry. There were mass resignations. The prefect left first, declaring he was “thwarted at every turn.” Then, all three of the county magistrates resigned, complaining that their skills were not up to the task of braving local entanglements. A newly arrived prefect and a surveillance commissioner proclaimed that they would make it their responsibility to rectify the land register in the strict-est fashion, but they too were soon sent packing, saying they had no more control over the situation than frogs in a busy street. The local officials did not lack resolution, but the local gentry had far greater power, for they, according to the historian Liao Xinyi, could marshal their followers in the villages below and appeal to their friends in the court above.39



“Marshal their followers in the villages below,” reopens the question of gentry-instigated violence, which was explored in the previous chapter. Certainly, a new standard of boldness was reached, for the Jiashan gentry did not hesitate to purloin and falsify official records, incite a riot, and destroy the property of a local rival, all to continue the misrepresentation of their own land holdings. “Appeal to their friends in the court above” suggests that the Jiashan gentry enjoyed a measure of political cover that had been missing during Wanli’s mine tax offensive, which now emboldened them to employ more direct methods in the defense of their interests. Who were their friends in the court above? Of the four chief figures of the Jiashan county faction, three were at some point identified as Donglin adherents. The leader, Ding Bin, carried righteous credentials going back to the days of Zhang Juzheng, when he was righteously driven from office by the First Grand Secretary. Wei Dazhong (1575–1625), whose dedication to the Donglin was still before him, was part of the Jiashan group too. Of the three leaders of the opposing Jiaxing and Xiushui echelon, only one appears on a Donglin list, and he seems to have drifted away from the Donglin group in some minor schism.40

It may, of course, be a coincidence that most of the Jiashan county gentry were to be found on the Donglin side of things in the 1610s. Indeed, it would be problematic to assert that the Donglin group actively advocated local tax dodging and rioting, and it certainly seems very unlikely that the Jiashan gentry received their marching orders from Wuxi, Beijing, or any other place. The case of the Jiaxing land dispute does, however, reinforce a point raised previously in the introduction, that gentlemen (positively regarded) and gentry (negatively regarded) were one and the same, and any supposed difference between the normative, moral view of the gentry and the pejorative, economic view of the gentry was largely subjective. Given the Donglin’s moral pretensions (and the historiographic acceptance of them), this assertion would seem to bear repeating.41

Beyond this rather obvious reminder that self-supposed good people often do bad things, the more subtle point, however, relates to the changing norms of good behavior itself, as the sixteenth century turned into the seventeenth. In the mid-sixteenth century (with reference, again, to the introduction), the more self-conscious members of the gentry sought to rise above the economic brutishness of gentry life by reinventing themselves as gentlemanly reformers and curbing the excesses of other gentry. Now, in the early seventeenth century, it would seem that the defining standard of gentlemanly



behavior was not so much to rise above other gentry as it was to defend gentry interests from the state. Perhaps the attacks on the gentry by Zhang Juzheng and the Wanli emperor had changed the parameters of the game, preempting the gentry’s self-reform and compelling more gentry to view the acquisitive state, rather than the set of their own engrossing cousins, as the existential other against which to measure themselves.

Hilary Beattie writes that gentry tax evasion was also on the increase in 1620s Tongcheng, where there lived another Donglin hero, Zuo Guangdou (1575–1625), but it is hard to say how accu-rately the behavior of the gentry in these two counties reflected the behavior of the gentry as a whole. Both the Jiaxing and the Tongcheng cases may of course have been aberrant, and the bulk of China’s gentry, Donglin-affiliated or not, might more gener-ally have refrained from disruptive or recalcitrant activities during this time. Even if most of the gentry were better behaved, however, the very fact that they continued to dominate local society effec-tively put them in competition with the state. In his study of gentry patronage of Buddhist monasteries, Timothy Brook has suggested that the ever-increasing amount of funds invested in Buddhism became proportionally less available for infrastructure improve-ments and perpetuation of the state cult. At the turn of the seven-teenth century, the Donglin group, with the Confucian imperative to counter Buddhist influence, merely shifted the stream of patronage from the monastery to the academy, with its own repertoire of local charitable projects. Since the rents due the gentry were far greater than the taxes due the state, the former enjoyed a much more com-plete control over the country’s resources than the latter, and these resources were employed, benevolently, no doubt, as the gentry and not the state saw fit. It was by no means a given that the gentry’s investments in its own Buddhist karma or Confucian virtue would accord with the local priorities of the state.42

Cynthia Brokaw (whose work Brook cites) has approached this same subject in the context of the “ledgers of merit and demerit” by which gentry justified their status by good deeds. Summarizing the implications, Brokaw writes of the “ideological basis of the program of social and political reform urged by Donglin partisans,” likening it to “a kind of ‘mandate of heaven’ for local landlords and literati, a social ideology for the gentry,” under the terms of which “their very standing in the community imposed a responsibility on them to serve the interests of the community (often against those of the central



government), to fulfill the moral promise reflected in their wealth and status.” Brokaw’s remark about a gentry “mandate of heaven” correctly highlights the magnitude of the gentry’s usurpation of authority. Her description of the gentry’s need to fund community projects relates more to Brook’s point: that the resources involved belonged originally to the peasants and was now being appropriated and managed by the gentry and not by the state. Thus, whether the Donglin gentry were following the unruly example of Jiaxing (or Tongcheng), or whether they were being extremely, self-consciously good, the state’s losses, measured in authority and in silver, were considerable. The timing could not have been worse.43

Trouble on the FrontierOn May 9, 1618, word reached Beijing that the Jurchen (or Manchu) chief Nurhaci had captured the frontier city of Fushun, in the Liaodong Military Region of Shandong province, by means of a ruse. Nurhaci had dynastic pretensions and a list of grievances against the Ming, which also became known at court shortly afterward. As part of the flurry of activity that took hold of the capital, the anti-Donglin grand secretary Fang Congzhe prevailed upon the emperor to make a personal contribution of one hundred thousand taels (jin) from his private stash. He moved also to appoint a new general, Yang Hao, to deal with the situation. Presently, General Yang was defeated, though a successor, Xiong Tingbi, managed to stabilize the situation.

The real problem, of course, was how this new round of military campaigning would be paid for.44

In a rescript of May 21, 1618, Wanli advised his ministers to “draft soldiers and transfer provisions,” the later half of these orders referring to the lateral movement of military supplies from other parts of the empire to the trouble spot, a typical minimalist approach. A few days later, on May 24, Wanli wrote in another rescript that his private treasury was depleted (this claim was untrue) and asked that some means be found to supplant it. Fang Congzhe seems to have wanted to test the emperor on this point, for he soon put in a request for another hundred thousand jin contribution. Wanli refused, saying,

We are not unaware of the situation in Liaodong or of the fact that military supplies are insufficient. However, We have already disbursed some silver for the army; thus your second memorial on the subject is inappropriate. According to Our ancestral system, the



Ministry of Revenue apportions to Our coffers some one million taels per annum to defray the costs of palace ceremonies, support of the royal family, and so on. These expenses are mounting, and the income from the Ministry of Revenue is no longer enough to meet them . . . Said Ministry is hereby put on notice that it must make its own internal adjustments and transfers, so that military provisions will no longer be wanting. It is inadmissible to shirk your own duty to the military by making repeated application to Us for palace funds.45

But Wanli’s ideas about the duties of others were nothing but the old statist presumptions: surely his officials would deal with problems such as the frontier, and if additional funds were needed, surely his officials would produce them. On the other side of the aisle, though, many of these same officials reasoned that the Ming dynasty was Wanli’s family legacy and that it was up to Wanli to defend it. It may seem a strange reversal of the state’s and the gentry’s usual claim of “Me first,” but the unfamiliar refrain of “After you,” which suddenly became common, now that it was time to pay for defense, was really nothing new at all. It was consistent with the perennial expectation, made by the state’s or the gentry’s partisans, that state or gentry were each at the disposal of the other. The presumption of sovereignty, after all, is the presumption that others will work for you. Tragically for the Ming dynasty, the more the partisans of the state and the gentry claimed sovereignty over each other, the more they denied their responsibilities to each other.

The Donglin partisans took as little helpful interest in the Manchu crisis as Wanli did. True, the Donglin faction was still mostly in eclipse at this time, and thus its ability to effect positive changes would certainly be limited, but its leaders’ indifference toward the imperial interest, as opposed to the factional interest, is still striking. While some historians have imagined a very patriotic role for the Donglin at this time (just as they have imagined democratic and bour-geois capitalistic roles), Jerry Dennerline quite correctly reports that the Donglin’s performance during the Manchu crisis was singularly uninspired, and that Donglin partisans advocated only the “sparsest measures” for frontier defense.46

Vying with each other on the battlefield of stinginess, state and gentry finally agreed to foist the increased fiscal responsibility onto a third party, namely, the Chinese people. On November 12, 1618, a surtax was ordered on all the accounts in the empire save Guizhou’s. The move was designed to bring in an additional two million taels from the empire’s taxpayers and was called Liaoxiang, the first of the



surtaxes that were supposed to help meet the crisis in Liaodong. Since nothing was done to change the actual practice of tax collection, however, the related problems of gentry tax evasion and arrearage did not go away. The new taxes being basically uncollectible, China’s armed forces remained chronically underequipped. Even taking the Liaoxiang and other surtaxes into account, Ray Huang concluded that the “slow and ineffectual mobilization of the empire’s fiscal resources seriously compromised the war.” Of course, gentry tax dodging proved even more ruinous to the common people stuck with the increased burden. According to Beattie, the surtaxes “appear to have been largely evaded by rich landowners whose rapacious desire for land and exploitation of their tenantry are reported to have grown apace.” Commendation of lands and people to tax-exempt gentry intensified.47

More radical proposals than simple surtaxes were not lacking, but they had been tried and discarded before, and they were squelched again. On June 14, 1619, for example, a man named Jiang Dingguo recommended opening up a mine of some kind in Xia county in Shanxi. His request was routed through a civil official named Yao Siren, and Yao accordingly shot it down. The same day, according to Tan Qian’s Guo que chronicle, a Nanjing military officer named Li Yizhong asked permission to search for hoarded wealth in the southeast, apparently promising some twenty thousand taels and five hundred soldiers per prefecture. Yao Siren did not like this proposal either and vetoed it as well. On July 4, a group of people in She county (in southern Nanjing province) memorialized in support of “the eunuch” (Li Yizhong?), advocating the seizing from the rich families of Jiangnan some million taels to give to the military. Yao Siren, a busy man that summer, rejected that idea too, of course. Yao Siren’s name would later be placed on a blacklist of supposed Donglin partisans, and his surviving writings tend to reflect the gentry view of things.48

The Three CasesWhat concerned bureaucrats at this time, more than the Manchu crisis or how to meet it fiscally, were the so-called Three Cases (san an). These controversies were the chief fuel for the party fire in the early seventeenth century, and they also serve as a good vehicle for the narration of this stretch of time, which included two reign changes. The first case, the “stick beating” case, refers to a clumsy attempt on



the life of the crown prince by a man with a stick in 1615. The Donglin partisans, who had long advocated the crown prince’s prompt inves-titure instead of a rival (the son of Ms. Zheng), thought that this attack was part of a plot to get rid of him after his investiture, in place of the same rival. The anti-Donglin partisans simply thought the attacker was crazy. The Wanli emperor, meanwhile, died at the age of fifty-seven on August 18, 1620, after having ruled the empire for an extraordinarily long and tumultuous forty eight years and presiding over (and greatly contributing to) sharp and now habitual differences that remained after his passing. On his deathbed, he was alleged to have expressed great regret for the mine commissioner policy and for allowing the frontier to go out of control. He claimed to be planning a late renaissance when illness overcame him. He praised the heir apparent for his filial piety and sharpness of mind and predicted a new beginning for the empire.49

In the event, Wanli’s firstborn son, Zhu Changluo, was crowned as the Taichang emperor, but he was himself, perhaps even upon his ascension, already a dying man. He ruled for only about a month. As he grew sicker, first grand secretary Fang Congzhe allowed him to be administered a few red pills, from which the second, “red pill,” case gets its name. The medicine either killed him or failed to save him. The Donglin suspected the former, the anti-Donglin the latter. With Taichang dead on September 26, a pro-Donglin official named Yang Lian (1571–1625), essentially kidnapped the late ruler’s son, Zhu Youxiao, from his possibly ambitious concubine mother, crowning him as the Tianqi emperor on October 1 and ordering his mother to leave the palace immediately. These two bold moves, known collectively as the “removal from the palace” case, won the praise of the Donglin and the scorn of the anti-Donglin.50

Bureaucrats would be embroiled in recriminations related to the Three Cases for the remainder of the dynasty, although a few lonely voices called for unity. There did briefly seem to be a new beginning. After the passing of the Wanli emperor, pains were taken to fill bureaucratic vacancies, and the Donglin group benefited most from this fresh start. After 1621, Zou Yuanbiao, Zhao Nanxing, and Gao Panlong were all reactivated, and they went to work at various posts in the Censorate and the Ministry of Personnel. So positioned, they were able to intensify partisan maneuvering. Gao Panlong, reporting back to work in 1622, memorialized immediately to suggest that talent be employed without regard to seniority or institutional practices, saying that any heroic gentleman (shidafu) could be made one of the



six chief ministers or a grand secretary. Just to make sure there was room for this new talent, Gao also wrote two more memorials loudly demanding punishment for Fang Congzhe, the first grand secretary who had allowed the red pills to be given to the late Taichang. Gao called Fang and everyone connected with the case traitors.51

Also in 1622, Zou Yuanbiao and another man named Feng Congwu (1556–1627?) decided the time was right to open up a Neo-Confucian school, the Shoushan Academy, right in Beijing. This attempt to save the country by placing it under the control of philosophers was condemned as a blatantly partisan tactic, and the Shoushan was closed down.52

In 1623, Zhao Nanxing resurrected his old strategy from the 1580s and 1590s and used the system of evaluating metropolitan officials as a means to remove as many political opponents as possible. He justified his actions in ways that harked back to Gu Xiancheng and his harmonic convergence of gentlemen. “The empire will be ordered and at peace,” Zhao declared, “as the spirit of the junzi [gentleman or gentlemen] is constantly expressed. The empire will be endangered and disturbed as the spirit of the junzi is constantly repressed.” In a memorial to the throne before the evaluation, he warned of a thorough housecleaning, and he did not disappoint. According to Zhao’s biography in the official Ming History (Ming shi), “The Donglin’s power was at its peak, as the mass of upright officials filled the court. Zhao Nanxing restored them from their idleness and placed them in various positions throughout the government . . . The mean people (xiaoren) hated him.”53

It is interesting to note that Zhao’s rampage in the bureaucracy was approved by the young Tianqi emperor, on the advice of the palace eunuch Wei Zhongxian, who had been his childhood playmate. Wei had actually sent his nephew to befriend Zhao and was rebuffed. Later, the two did meet, and Wei endured a lecture from Zhao about the necessity of keeping the young emperor on the right road. At the same time, Wei was actually cooperating quite well with first grand secretary Ye Xianggao, who was perhaps the highest placed Donglin adherent at court, though evidently a moderate. In this atmosphere of cooperation, Zhao’s various memorials were given due imperial attention and answered promptly. It is hard to say how long this detente could have continued, but as it turned out, the excesses of a few of the Donglin partisans soon ruptured this arrangement in such a way that would result in the complete collapse of their movement, with violent punishment thrown into the bargain.54



Purge of the DonglinOn July 15, 1624, the immoderate censor Yang Lian impeached Wei Zhongxian for twenty-four heinous crimes including virtual usurpa-tion and murdering Tianqi’s unborn offspring while they were still in the womb. Yang acted against the advice of at least one of his friends, and Ye Xianggao, trying to keep things from getting out of hand, essentially refuted the contents of Yang’s memorial and tried to make it possible for Wei to retire with full honors. Wei seems to have remained calm, which was noted by the emperor in his edict ordering that Yang Lian be dismissed. Next, Gao Panlong, returning from a brief leave (he apparently liked government service even less than Gu Xiancheng) and with encouragement from Zhao Nanxing, accused a censor named Cui Chengxiu of corruption. This Mr. Cui fled to Wei Zhongxian for protection, and now there was enough fear and loathing of the Donglin, gathered together in one place, to allow for a counterattack.55

The persecution of the Donglin faction has been finely narrated by John Dardess. First, in August of 1624, the conciliator, Ye Xianggao, resigned from office, offended that eunuchs had searched his home for a Donglin partisan. Then, in the spring of 1625, Donglin whip Wang Wenyan was arrested, tortured, and murdered by prison officials under the control of the Embroidered Uniform Guard. A dubious confession resulted from Wang’s ordeal, and using this evidence, the anti-Donglin faction authorized the arrests of Yang Lian, Zuo Guangdou, and Wei Dazhong, as well as Yuan Huazhong, Zhou Chaorui, and Gu Dazhang. Yang, Zuo, and Wei were seized in their home villages, where they were greatly lamented by local people, some of whom rioted (another possible example of gentry-instigated violence that will be examined in the next chapter). Together with Yuan, Zhou, and Gu, these victims became known as the “six gentlemen” (junzi), and they were tortured to death in the summer. While they suffered, their families were supposed to have been paying ransoms, which were said to equal the amount of bribes they had received in the past. The persecution of the six gentlemen, then, in some ways resembled the shakedown carried out by the mine commissioners of Wanli’s day.56

The six gentlemen were the most famous victims of the purge, but they were not the last. By 1626, the Wei Zhongxian-Cui Chengxiu faction was fully organized and went to work finishing off the Donglin group. Hundreds of alleged Donglin sympathizers were



driven from office, and an additional seven Donglin leaders were driven to death. Zhao Nanxing, who had led the Donglin’s own purges, was exiled to the frontier, where he soon died. Gao Panlong, cofounder of the Donglin Academy, who had been removed from his post in 1624, drowned himself in a pool next to his home in Wuxi, on April 12, 1626, on word that his arrest had been ordered. One of the lines he left behind read, “When a high official is humiliated, the dynasty is humiliated.” The ordeal of another Donglin man, Zhou Shunchang (1584–1626), will be discussed in the next chapter. The Donglin Academy itself was demolished by local authorities, on orders from Beijing. The materials of which its buildings were made, together with its aggregate land endowment, were sold for a total of 631 taels.57

Having listed this sum of money as the state’s reward, as it were, for disposing of the Donglin, it may now be as good a time as any to review, in table 4.1, the fiscal state of the Ming empire during the height of the Donglin movement.

It would seem that there was a general trend of budget unbal-ancing during this period, in contrast to the earlier Wanli years



1607–1608 Not Available Not Available1609 4,000,000 Not Available1610–1611 Not Available Not Available1612 4,000,000 4,000,0001613 4,000,000 Not Available1614–1615 Not Available Not Available1616 4,000,000 Not Available1617 3,890,000 4,219,0291618 6,000,031 Not Available1619 Not Available Not Available1620 5,830,246 6,086,6921621 7,552,745 8,568,9061622 4,968,795 5,927,7211623 7,893,137 10,776,9821624 Not Available Not Available1625 3,030,725 2,854,3701626 3,986,241 4,279,417



of 1596–1606 when the budget was more often balanced than not (which did come at the price of great social disruption). The increase in revenue resulting from the Liaoxiang surtax is clear after 1618, but expenditure always seems to have been growing faster than revenue during the military crisis (the low figures in 1625 and 1626 are explained by the fact that some of the monies were sent directly to the frontier and did not pass through Beijing at all). In general, it does not seem too unfair to say that as the power of the Donglin gentry waxed, that of the Ming state waned.

In any case, the Donglin movement was over. Born of Gu Xiancheng’s ambitious scheme to run the empire with a cohort of righteous gentlemen, it had startled and frightened other men, who had the same background as Gu’s but a different mindset. They saw the Donglin only as rampaging “camp,” composed of self-righteous gentry. Once more, the overreaching of one side led to the resurgence of the other side, and with the stakes getting higher and higher, the purges that accompanied each swing of the pendulum were becoming bloodier. By 1626, the Donglin dream of a state dominated by country gentlemen had been replaced by the nightmare of a state dominated by a court eunuch. As much as China’s righteous gentry had been spooked by paranoiac memories of Zhang Juzheng and the Wanli emperor, Wei Zhongxian would be even more loathsome than the first two villains put together.


CHAPTER V

WEI ZHONGXIAN, 1626–1628

Almost lost in the graveyard of monuments that is the Beijing Art Museum of Stone Carvings is an interesting stele that was first erected during the height of chief eunuch Wei

Zhongxian’s career in the reign of the youthful Tianqi emperor. The tablet is a commemoration of a commemoration. It describes the dedication of a shengci (a shrine to a living person) named the Puhui Shengci, in honor of Wei Zhongxian, to commemorate, in turn, his sponsoring the restoration of a complex of horse and camel stables and grazing land to the east of Beijing. According to the tablet, Wei was “promulgating loyalty to the state” when he gave his support to the stable project, which was designed to bring the state several benefits. First, the state would earn rent from tenants who used the facility, although no rent would be charged for the first two years, to encourage herdsmen to move in and establish a livelihood. Second, the state would be able to buy or requisition the animals raised there. Third, the complex was supposed to have an intrinsic military value, as its dikes and ponds were easy to defend and constituted a barrier blocking an eastern advance on the capital. “Thus,” reads the tablet, “was barren land transformed into a marshalling area, not only benefiting the people but also increasing the protection of the north-east.” The Tianqi emperor, in authorizing the project, cautioned only that notices be posted nearby the facility, warning against encroach-ment by local strongmen and promising capital reprisals for those who ignored the warning.1

This stele is evidence of a comprehensive fiscal, military, and internal resettlement project, sponsored by the Ming state in the late 1620s. It represents, literally, a constructive idea, a positive investment in defense and in the future tax base, not merely yet another request to transfer funds piecemeal from other departments or yet another confiscating raid on wealthy gentry. This stele immor-talizes, in short, a state-building project of some sophistication, one in which the eunuch Wei Zhongxian had at least some involvement.



It is fortunate for historians that this piece of evidence can still be seen standing twelve feet tall in Beijing, for it is nearly impossible to find anything like it in the pages of the surviving written history, where Wei Zhongxian’s name is synonymous with depravity. If Wanli’s mine tax eunuchs are portrayed as little devils in the literati histories drafted by Confucian moralists, Wei Zhongxian appears as evil incarnate. Even those writings created outside the framework of Confucian values are tainted with the moral hyperbole of the factional strife then prevalent. Liu Ruoyu (b. 1584), himself a eunuch, in his account of life and politics in the inner court, referred to the controversial chief eunuch formulaically as “the traitor Wei Zhongxian” (ni Xian). Indeed, most historians, having internal-ized this bias, would read the stele in Beijing as evidence of Wei’s overriding vanity, rather than evidence of any public service, even though shengci were actually rather common (Li Sancai had temples dedicated to him, for example). In short, the modern student inter-ested in Wei Zhongxian must deal with almost universally prejudiced sources and is compelled, therefore, to read them very doubtfully, turning a critical eye to many matters hitherto taken for granted.2

The Historical and Historiographical Case of SuzhouOne source due for a more skeptical reading is Charles Hucker’s translation of the Kai du chuan xin, which is an account of the arrest and death of Zhou Shunchang, a Donglin sympathizer from Suzhou prefecture, Nanjing province. The original source is informed by the Donglin’s Confucian worldview and portrays Zhou as a demigod, Wei as a devil. Hucker, uncritically, has assimilated this bias and presents as fact the Donglin’s contention that all China had gone to the dogs because of the chief eunuch. Thus, “In 1626,” Hucker writes in his introduction, “Chinese political morality was at one of its lowest ebbs.” Eulogizing Zhou Shunchang, Hucker explains that he was “a stickler for honesty [who] tried to inject his own austere and incorruptible spirit into the process by which official appointments were distributed,” and he also “hated evil as a personal enemy.” With all due respect for Professor Hucker, these sentences are transcribed propaganda, not history. One might just as easily say, with neither a greater nor lesser claim to truthfulness, something like “Zhou was quick to accuse others of dishonesty. Those he claimed to be dishonest, he impeached, replacing them with friends he claimed to be more honest. He believed everyone opposed to him was evil.”3


Wei Zhongxian, 1626–1628 127

Saint or scoundrel, Zhou Shunchang got himself into trouble in at least four different ways, in all cases motivated by a suicidal self-righteousness and in some cases also exhibiting tendencies of local gentry recalcitrance in the face of state power. First, Zhou went out of his way to attach himself to Wei Dazhong (suspected in the last chapter of tax dodging in Jiaxing prefecture), as the latter was being conducted through Suzhou on his way to torture and death in Beijing. In a rushed conference, Zhou actually promised to marry his daughter to Wei’s grandson, and when the guards tried to break up their meeting, Zhou began loudly to execrate Wei Zhongxian, almost daring the eunuch to have him arrested. Second, Zhou Shunchang ostentatiously commiserated with Yingtian grand coordinator Zhou Qiyuan, another Donglin adherent who would soon be dead, and again he cursed Wei Zhongxian, this time in writing. The cause of Zhou Qiyuan’s trouble was his intervention on behalf of a local official who had, in the approving words of Hucker’s source, “obstinately refused to cooperate” with a eunuch supervisor of local textile production (a Li Shi, whose version of events follows below).

Zhou Shunchang himself refused to cooperate with the new grand coordinator, Mao Yilu, on some mission given him by the central government. Hucker’s source is most vague on this point, saying that Mao had some orders “secretly to spy around” and that Zhou “put an end to all his interventions and pleadings [what happened to the secrecy?]; he remained in solitude and took no part in affairs.” Finally, Zhou had apparently been responsible for the sacking of a certain unnamed metropolitan official in a recent personnel evalu-ation. This man now spoke out against Zhou, and the latter lost all his privileges. The combined effect of these four separate affairs was to make Zhou Shunchang rather obnoxious in the eyes of Wei Zhongxian and others in Beijing. Cui Chengxiu, the refugee from Donglin purges who allied himself with Wei, said of Zhou and other Donglin partisans, “If they are not all arrested, authority cannot be established.” Without agreeing with Cui’s demand for arrests, one can find no fault with his charge that Zhou had worked to thwart government authority.4

Accordingly, Wei and Cui ordered that Zhou Shunchang be arrested. Carrying out this order, however, was far from easy, owing to Zhou’s reputation as protector of the local community. “In all lightening of corvee requirements or delaying of tax collections,” for instance, “it was always Shunchang who was in the forefront.” Naturally, when on April 11, 1626, men came to take him away,



the roads were blocked by indignant throngs, including “various students” (zhusheng). Zhou was taken to a succession of other local offices, in a futile attempt to evade attention. Meanwhile, the crowd, “literati and commoners alike,” began piling up a considerable ransom for the sake of Zhou (who himself gave nothing), which the guards-men pocketed without lessening their commitment to make the arrest. The students continued to plead for Zhou’s release, at some risk to their persons, but since the Donglin were now out of power, they reasoned, the whole world was turned upside down anyway, and thus they had nothing to lose. “In present day affairs,” they explained, “those whom the court casts away are worthy and excellent, whereas those who are employed are treacherous and cunning. How can we students have the countenance any longer in green collars to dwell in so vile a world?” Indeed, Heaven itself seemed to agree that great evil was afoot, sending dark clouds, wind, and rain to protest the infamy of Zhou’s arrest.5

By now, it should be easy to guess what happened next: a “spontaneous” riot against the palace guardsmen who had taken Zhou and against another group that was passing through, on their way to arrest Huang Zunsu (1584–1626). The guards were chased out of town, and a few of them were killed, but the perennial question remains as to who instigated the mob. Tantalizingly, this source notes that some regional officials were greatly suspicious of the “leading personages” (xiang dafu) of the vicinity, accusing them of inciting the crowd or at least doing nothing to disperse it. Soon, though, this striking portrait of intriguing gentry is replaced by the tired image of loyal serfs. According to this latter version, a group of commoners and petty merchants, simply because they “had long loved righteous-ness,” determined to rescue Zhou Shunchang, even though they did not know him personally. In the end, only this second group was punished, and the forces of the law finally managed to ship Zhou off to Beijing, where he died in prison.6

Actually, the bias that informed this account is just as informative as its elusive factual content. The hero of the story is a local gentleman who regularly blocked tax collection and obstructed local govern-ment. His arrest by evil men calls forth angry storms and convulsions in the atmosphere. The villain, Wei Zhongxian, is preoccupied with vulgar fiscal matters, saying (to Cui Chengxiu), “You told me to arrest all of these five men, and now rebellion has been aroused in the southeast. The southeast is the area from which great revenues are levied. If they are lost, how can we later accomplish great things?”



After this speech, earthquakes rumble, meteors fall from the sky, and roof tiles are dislodged, braining the eunuchs passing below. The sense of pathetic fallacy may remind the reader of Macbeth, but whereas the unruly weather in Shakespeare’s play heralds the murder of a king, the cosmic disturbance in this account accompanies the or-deal of the Donglin gentlemen, who were supposed, by themselves, to rule China in lieu of kings.

Unmasking “Wei Zhongxian’s Misrule”So much for the fantastic images of Wei Zhongxian’s tyranny. The basic facts have been examined by Ulrich Mammitzsch, and they suggest that Wei was not really powerful enough to have established a tyranny or even an administration of any kind. The conventional term “Wei Zhongxian’s misrule” should not be taken to mean that Wei ruled anything, for it was simply a name invented by political enemies. In fact, Wei kept within his sphere of responsibility as chief eunuch and refrained from exploiting his position. He did not, for example, distract the Tianqi emperor from affairs of state, nor did he intercept memorials to him, which explains why even Yang Lian’s 1624 denunciation of Wei was dutifully forwarded to the throne.

The subsequent torture of Yang and other Donglin partisans, while undeniably ghastly, was actually standard (and circumscribed) judicial procedure for the whole Ming dynasty, not a vindictive invention of Wei or anyone else. Illiterate, Wei would have had trouble producing the copious forged edicts (jiao zhi) by which he was alleged to have perpetrated his usurpation. It seems more likely that the forged edicts, so called, simply contained policies that were unfavorable to the Donglin faction. According to this principle, “Wei Zhongxian’s misrule” merely refers to the brief interval in the mid-1620s during which time the righteous interest was suppressed. As in any monar-chy, in which the ruler cannot directly be indicted for such a state of affairs, the bitter gentlemen found a scapegoat in the form of a Mephistophelean advisor.7

Equating the Donglin with the GentryOf course, it is hard to say for sure who, if anyone, was poisoning Tianqi’s ear, but it is clear that the emperor, or at least his misleaders, dissented fundamentally from the Donglin worldview. One uncommon source containing evidence to this effect is the San



chao yaodian, an apologue giving the anti-Donglin version of the Three Cases. Authorizing the compilation of the San chao yaodian in a June 18, 1626 edict, Tianqi invoked the authoritarian aspects of Confucianism to defend the idea of court and state supremacy. Emphasizing the basic Confucian concept of human relations, Tianqi equated the relationship between lord and minister (jun-chen) to that between father and son (fu-zi). The emperor made it clear that he expected simple loyalty from his ministers, as a father would expect obedience from a son. Charging them specifically with scandal-mongering, Tianqi seemed aware that his disloyal minis-ters were somehow linked to the idea of the gentry. “Creating doubt where none was before,” he said, “follows in all cases a desire to take credit for something, even the circulation of evil talk. Accordingly, the senses of the gentry (shidafu) are deceived, and government is vexed by much unnecessary business. No true minister or son would dare involve himself in any such mischief.”8

In answer to the Donglin claim that only the gentlemen could legitimize policy, the compilers of the San chao yaodian, following the pattern set by Wanli, now reiterated the reverse. “When an emperor does something, he decides and acts on his own. When the multitude below ponders and deliberates, agitation is piled upon delay. The fault is with those below and not with the emperor above.” Occasionally, the San chao yaodian editors made references to the gentry more explicit than either “those below” or shidafu. In some of these cases, interestingly, the words for “gentry” could only have meant “Donglin.” Discussing the Red Pill case, the editors included a memorial from old Zou Yuanbiao in which he stated that his own doubts about the case were inspired by the loudly voiced skepticism of the “various gentry of the south” (nan zhong zhu shishen). Elsewhere, the Sanchao yaodian recounted the experience under torture of Donglin whip Wang Wenyan. The interrogators concluded that Wang had “amassed power through bribery and rewarded friends and punished rivals, single-mindedly pursuing these activities in order to facilitate his association with the gentry” (jinshen).9

Strictly speaking, Zou’s and Wang’s associates comprised the Donglin faction in particular, not the gentry as a whole, but the point is that nobody was speaking strictly anymore. Stereotype was in fact the chief determinant of the factional divide, and it really always had been, ever since the days of Zhang Juzheng, when the “pedantic Song Confucianists” took sides against the “mean Lord Shangs.” By the mid-1620s, partisans now claimed to be either for the state or



for the gentry, and those who were for the state claimed to be against the gentry. One proscription list of Donglin names, for example, was called the “List of Gentry for Easy Reference” ( Jinshen bianlan). Assembling a roster of their own adherents called the Tianjian lu, or “Record for the Emperor’s Reference,” the anti-Donglin referred to themselves as “true-hearted and for the state, unattached to the Donglin, wantonly ostracized, and forced to reemerge from obscurity.” This party roll call included Tang Binyin’s name, as well as Cui Chengxiu’s, for a total of “one hundred and three persons together comprising Wei Zhongxian’s faction.”10

The Yujing xintan, an informal history of the Wei Zhongxian era, written in its immediate aftermath from the Donglin perspective by Zhu Changzuo, not only confirms that the Donglin were labeled “gentry” by their enemies but also shows that this label was not at all denied by the Donglin’s sympathizers. The first part of this confirmation comes in the form of Zhu’s reprise of a memorial by Li Shi, who was the eunuch involved in the disagreement over tax collection with Yingtian grand coordinator Zhou Qiyuan (the same disagreement that ultimately involved Zhou Shunchang). In an initial complaint against Zhou Qiyuan, Li Shi wrote that the latter was a mere pawn of the local Donglin partisans, whom he called gentry:

Zhou Qiyuan has been the grand coordinator of the Wu region for some time, but I have yet to hear of his abilities at governance. All he can do, it seems, is to form comradely associations based on Neo-Confucianism (daoxue), attracting like minds and cultivating protégés. Of the evil party attaching themselves to him, there are Zhou Shunchang, Gao Panlong, [and others]. All are gentry of [ Jiangnan] (Wu di jinshen), and all are of the Donglin faction. They are quite intimate with Zhou Qiyuan, and whenever they make their selfish (si) projects known to him, he invariably accedes to their wishes. He makes these decisions without even notifying me, as was the case, for example, when he divided tax payments into various installments, claiming that it was only possible to deal with the matter gradually.11

Zhu Changzuo’s work also reveals that he, for one, was also prepared to view the Donglin definitively as gentry. Not citing any other source, Zhu wrote in his own words his judgment that Yang Lian’s 1624 attack on Wei Zhongxian was the beginning of the “disaster that visited all the gentry (jinshen) within the seas.” Since only the Donglin were targets of the subsequent purges, Zhu’s use of the word “gentry” could only have meant “Donglin.”12



Further Close Reading of Anti–Wei Zhongxian Sources

Zhu’s book is a catalogue of every conceivable fault that could be attributed to Wei Zhongxian, right down to the sin of allowing his horse to gallop ahead of the emperor’s while both were riding (Tianqi solved this disciplinary problem by executing Wei’s horse). In making his case against Wei, Zhu often cited primary sources that appeared to bring credit to the eunuch but that he included only to make Wei look vainglorious (and to make his comrades seem fawning). Of course, it is possible to read these same primary sources without Zhu’s prejudice. One section of Zhu’s book, pertaining to military campaigns of 1624, is especially promising in this regard.13

The occasion of this set of correspondence was the earlier repulse of a Manchu attack on the town of Ningyuan on March 12, 1624. After his own outline of the battle, Zhu included a simple factual account by the Ming commander, Yuan Chonghuan, followed by a set of related memorials that Zhu cited in order to prove his main point, namely, that Wei Zhongxian sought to capitalize on the victory and that sycophantic minor officials also used the occasion to flatter Wei inordinately. First to be included was a memorial by an unnamed censor from Henan:

As for military supplies, a ten year lackluster performance was rejuvenated at once. As for grain transport, a million measures of backlogged provisions were shipped to the army as fast as the wind. As for the weapons and tools the army needed, these were also produced and delivered as if in an instant . . . All these are the divine achievements of our all-powerful, sagely, and virtuous Emperor, together with the strong-hearted First Minister (yuanchen, meaning Wei Zhongxian) with his pure loyalty to the Sovereign, love for the state as his own family, concentration, and attentiveness.14

This same censor from Henan said in a separate memorial that Wei was responsible for dispatching relief troops to the threatened area at the critical time, and he also said that Wei exerted himself tirelessly to address the problems of cavalry mounts, provisions, and equipment. Another unnamed official credited Wei with maintaining good communication with military commanders in the interior, so that the redeployments to the frontier were well coordinated. The special coordinator in charge of the Liaoxiang surtax claimed that the “recent difficulties in Ningyuan and Jingzhou were overcome thanks



to the (Eastern) Depot Minister [chang chen, or Wei Zhongxian] and his pure loyalty in service of the state. He coordinated everything with regard to equipment, weapons, provisions, and fodder.” Finally, the Tianqi emperor himself, writing a rescript on a congratulatory memorial from the Ministry of War, indicated that “during the campaigns in Jingzhou and Ningyuan, We relied on Our chang chen [Wei], who, in receipt of Our secret orders and strategy, addressed himself urgently to the problem of supplying the army. Thus we have achieved this miraculous victory.”15

It is difficult to deny that Wei was being flattered in these reports, and it is also hard to imagine Wei managing the military and logis-tical situation as adroitly and single-handedly as is claimed. Again, he simply was not powerful enough. However, if Wei Zhongxian did not have enough institutional power to claim responsibility for the victories on the frontier in 1624, he did function well enough as a political conduit and expediter to share the credit. Early 1624, it will be remembered, was a time of smooth cooperation between Wei and first grand secretary Ye Xianggao, who was inclined toward the Donglin but still open to accommodation and compromise. It is most believable that this good connection between the palace and the bureaucracy went a long way toward restoring administrative efficiency, following the decades of mistrust under Wanli. To answer the question of who was responsible for the improved military and logistical performance that brought about the victory at Ningyuan, the best answer would have to be that no one party was responsible; it was a prevailing situation conducive to general administrative efficiency that (briefly) turned the tide. When Yang Lian, against Ye Xianggao’s wishes, launched his attack on Wei Zhongxian, the polit-ical détente that enabled the victory at Ningyuan was disrupted.16

Aside from the questions of whether or not Wei Zhongxian was being flattered and who was really responsible for the slight im-provement in military fortunes in early 1624, more germane to this inquiry is the question of what kind of values Wei’s flatterers invoked in the process of their sycophancy. Even though they might have been lacking somewhat in sincerity, the flatterers spoke almost universally of the need to keep the army supplied and strategically deployed, and they frequently mentioned var-ious forms of patriotism and service to the state. The rescript from Tianqi (and why, incidentally, would the emperor have to flatter Wei?) condensed Wei’s merits to two: following orders and paying and supplying the army. All these basic considerations relate to the



practical needs of the state. Noticeably unmentioned were gentlemen and mean people, world-saving organizations of gentry, or any other moralistic formulations characteristic of the Donglin. This par-tisan propaganda, initially intended to flatter Wei Zhongxian and subsequently reproduced in the Yujing xintan to discredit him, shows that, whoever was responsible for transferring troops and provisions, the Wei Zhongxian faction, so called, at least thought such things were important.

For more of how this short-lived regime thought and functioned, one must turn to minor administrative sources. One surviving document is from March 12, 1627. It is a zi, a horizontal communica-tion between departments, in this case a request from the Ministry of War to the Ministry of Revenue to release bounties to the army and thus encourage its fighting spirit. Apparently, the Ministry of Revenue was splitting hairs about keeping to regulations and was not allowing bounties to be released from revenue already earmarked for other uses. In response, the mid-level writer of this zi, a man named Tian Ji, who one modern scholar calls a favorite of Wei Zhongxian,

chided Revenue for not devising some means to shuffle the accounts in order to get the bounty delivered immediately. “All of the state’s money,” Tian asserted, “can be used equally for any state purpose.”

Thus, although the solution to the 1627 bounty problem conformed to the old practice of juggling accounts, there is still a strong identifica-tion with the national interest and a rather confident expectation that the bounty, which amounted to one hundred thousand taels, could be produced and delivered without too much trouble. Two subsequent documents from the same man’s brush convey somewhat less alarm, while still pressing for bounties and pay for various named officers. The second of these memorials suggested more creative accounting, but the overall impression is one of debugging rather than chronic misadministration. Also, at no point did Tian flatter Wei Zhongxian, nor did he even mention the eunuch’s name or titles.17

A fragment of another document from this period shows also that the Ming fiscal administration was concentrating on the problem of tax arrears in the Jiangnan region. This document also originated from the Ministry of War, perhaps owing to its focus on revenue from obsolete military colonies in the area that may yet have existed on paper. Whether the writer was addressing himself to the entire tax quota or merely the portion that was theoretically derived from the colonies is hard to judge. It is clear, though, that these particular arrears were not being waived but were instead being prorated into monthly payments.



The purpose of the document was to set the prorated arrears payments and accordingly to adjust the revenue quotas assigned to each local official as per the old Regulation for Evaluating Achievements of Zhang Juzheng, evidently still in place. Although it was not said exactly how and from where the back revenue would be obtained, the fact remains that the state was not writing it off, nor was it launching another attack on the gentry designed to gather enough cash at all hazards. While it is hard to be certain from these few documents how well the Manchurian war was being financed at this time, it does not seem too off-base to conclude that affairs were being managed reasonably well and that the administration had certainly not been reduced to a Roman circus, despite what Donglin critics and historians would have us believe about the depravity and debauchery that supposedly reigned at court.18

Other Measures of the Tianqi EraVarious policies besides those related to taxation also shed some light on the “Wei Zhongxian administration.” One of these was the practice of training soldiers on the palace grounds. As the modern scholars Han Dacheng and Yang Xin report, sycophantic mid-level officials recruited these troops from Zhejiang and other places and delivered them up to Wei Zhongxian so that he could train them personally. They ultimately numbered around ten thousand, and Wei drilled them in archery and other military arts, often in the presence of the emperor. Of course, all the primary and secondary writings imply that this palace training served no purpose but that of indulging Wei Zhongxian’s vanity, allowing him to wear official clothing and emblems above his station and to receive the cheers of the men whenever he scored a bull’s eye from a moving horse (Wei was trained as a horse archer). No source even considers the military threat that would have made the palace training a basically logical policy; and since the Donglin were supposed to have advocated more training for the army (one of their minimalist solutions to the fron-tier problem), one wonders why righteous opinion was so set against the training of soldiers at the center of government. Perhaps the problem was precisely that no Donglin official could tolerate such power gathered at the center of government at all, certainly not in the hands of a eunuch and perhaps not even in the hands of the emperor. Han and Yang, citing the official Ming history, refer vaguely to a fear of mutiny, but if mutiny was a real fear, it was not mentioned in the attacks launched against palace training. The criticism, rather, was



conventional, almost pharisaical, to wit: training soldiers on the palace grounds was said to be forbidden by the dynastic statutes; and the cavalry and artillery simply made too much noise for so sacred a place. The criticism perished along with many of the critics (Yang Lian among them), but in a way, it carried the point in the end, for now, nothing is known about whether this training policy was part of overall defense strategy or was merely another symptom of Wei’s depravity. This case is another good example of how a basically sensi-ble measure was eclipsed by the negative propaganda it generated.19

Also enacted during this time was the stable and fortification policy eulogized on the tablet in Beijing. Han and Yang (and Zhu Changzuo) admit no military value for the facilities involved, nor do they recognize any fiscal benefit related to the procurement of horses and camels. According to these writers, these various construction projects were intended solely to convince the monomaniacal Wei Zhongxian that future generations of Chinese living under those walls would remember his name. Han and Yang also claim that Wei’s vainglorious projects placed an unnecessary burden on the state treasury—though the Beijing stele makes the opposite claim, saying that Wei contributed his personal finances to what was essentially a public work.20

Peeking ahead to the military test to which these facilities were later subjected, the modern writers acknowledge that the improved walls in Suning county spared the inhabitants a massacre at the hands of the Manchus in 1642, but they insist that such was not Wei’s original intention. While there is no way to read Wei Zhongxian’s mind so as to confirm either his practical patriotism or his whimsical egomania, the effects of his policies, however they were inten-tioned, ended up serving very well the residents of Suning county. Likewise it was with the Ming state in general. Either in spite of, regardless of, or thanks to Wei Zhongxian, the frontier seems to have remained stable, the chief issue facing military logistics was providing soldiers with rewards and bounties and not merely the prevention of starvation and complete collapse; a firm but fair system of dealing with arrears was developed; and the capital was defended by an additional ten thousand picked troops who did not, after all, mutiny, even though some distinguished gentlemen complained that they made too much noise. At bottom, “Wei Zhongxian’s misrule” is a misnomer. The reflective citizens of any country, even a country much easier to govern than China in the 1620s, would aspire to such misrule. It was only the self-described gentry, for good and bad reasons, who hated it.21



The revenue and expenditure figures for the period from 1626 to 1628, included on table 5.1, show a rise in revenue, though expenses continued to outstrip income. Still, this performance does not bespeak any serious maladministration, relative to the performance of other years during the same general time period. The state col-lected almost as much revenue as it had in 1621 and 1623, when Wei was working harmoniously with Ye Xianggao. The numbers may conceal, furthermore, a greater efficiency in both collections and disbursements (as suggested by the administrative documents), not to mention the fact that no disruptive raid on wealthy houses was considered during this time. Again, a balanced budget was still unattainable, but the fiscal situation was about as good as it had ever been.

End of the RegimeIn any case, though, the “Wei Zhongxian administration” was coming to an end. The Tianqi emperor went into a decline and died on September 30, 1627. Despite traditional accounts that Wei was plotting to take the throne for himself, the eunuch in fact did nothing while the late emperor’s brother, Zhu Youjian, assumed the throne as the Chongzhen emperor. In what was becoming a familiar pattern, a few months of watching and waiting then ensued, as officials tested whether certain people would continue to enjoy the favor of the new emperor. After some probing attacks, serious impeachments were launched against Cui Chengxiu, and the new emperor’s resolve to silence this criticism declined as it mounted in intensity. In the usual escalation, the attacks on Cui soon spread to Wei Zhongxian and others, and the tide turned against them so quickly that the punishments against Wei could not keep up with the rising senti-ment against him. First, he was dismissed from the capital; then, this sentence proving too lenient, men were sent after him to arrest him before he even got to his proposed place of exile. Not waiting



1626 3,986,241 4,279,4171627 Not Available Not Available1628 7,064,200 9,568,942



to see what was in store for him under arrest, Wei hanged himself on December 14, 1627. The purge of his faction continued into the next year, at which time, Cui Chengxiu also hanged himself, and the thorough mopping up of Wei’s remnants, who were meticulously implicated in what became known as the “treason case,” lasted into 1629.23

There was no substance to the charges of treason against Wei, Cui, and their associates. The newest round of massive purges, with their often fatal consequences, was simply the conventional accompaniment to another swing of the political pendulum. The reasons for the turning of the revolving door had to be made to seem important. Obviously, there were many who had been injured by the eunuch faction, and in their bitterness they certainly felt that their oppressors deserved the label of traitor or worse. Also, the hated opposition (which had been, after all, the Donglin’s would-be prey) had obtained the protection of a eunuch, the symbol of irresponsible court power. More importantly, though, the eunuch party, in the eyes of the Donglin, deserved the epithet of traitor not because they had betrayed their country but because they had betrayed the country-party ideal of an imperial state ruled by country squires. For some reason, they had not joined in the Donglin crusade to bring this ideal situation about; on the contrary, they had clung to a palace eunuch and to each other, and they were moreover fiscalists and militarists, not moralists and philosophers. There was only one reason why people would make such choices in the eyes of the Donglin: they were mean people, conforming to a category of morality the Donglin had constantly at the ready to apply to their enemies.24

The Donglin, too, were viewed by their enemies as traitors. The basis of this claim, as put forth in the San chao yaodian, one of the few surviving statements of the anti-Donglin point of view, was the expectation of simple loyalty and obedience to the sovereign. This standard of loyalty reflected the predominant concern with the state and distrust of the gentry. This latter label they left to their enemies, even though, technically, it applied equally to themselves.

And now, the pendulum had swung again, and the statist party was out. The next chapter will detail the next, and the last, restoration of gentlemanly rule.


CHAPTER VI

THE RESTORATION SOCIETY, 1628–1644

The Chongzhen emperor moved to consolidate his power in the early days of 1628. On February 16, he issued a warning edict in which he asserted his right to expel “traitors”

(meaning Wei Zhongxian’s faction) and promote worthies. However, he also promised that he would show little mercy toward those who were unable to place the country first, and the rest of the edict was filled with references to the state, its laws, and its revenue. As unable as Wanli had been in 1582–1583 to stop the inevitable turning of the revolving door, Chongzhen determined at least to appear to be controlling it. On February 22, 1628, a censor named Luo Yuanbin echoed the emperor’s sentiments, exhorting officialdom in a memorial to put aside factional squabbles and resist the urge to seek revenge for recent wrongs. Luo opined that there was actually little difference between so-called gentlemen and mean people, since both could do equal damage with their denunciations of each other, while there was so much that needed to be done. The emperor heartily endorsed Luo’s plea for unity and public spiritedness, which might have seemed an odd thing to do for a man who had just authorized the continuing purge of Wei’s faction. Again, though, it would seem that Chongzhen’s goal was control of the purge, rather than the purge itself.1

Formation of the SocietyWhile these voices in Beijing were urging unity in the service of the state, however, a new coalition of literati was taking shape in the Jiangnan region, one that was rather inclined to ignore Luo Yuanbin’s admonitions about advancing protégés, exposing mean people, and exacting revenge. Toward the end of Wei Zhongxian’s career, there was a rapid proliferation of scholarly discussion groups called she (societies) throughout the Jiangnan region, a trend that the



allegedly all-powerful eunuch had been either unwilling or unable to counteract. These societies had smaller organizations than earlier academy-based groups of scholars such as the Donglin, though there were many more of them. In 1629, a scholar from Taicang in Suzhou prefecture named Zhang Pu decided that the moment was right to bring the various scholarly societies together into an amalgamated federation. Zhang Pu’s motivation for calling the societies together was similar to Gu Xiancheng’s motivation at the time he founded the Donglin, namely, to bring together as many good gentry (shi) as possible for the rescue of China’s corrupted culture. “As an individual,” Zhang explained, in a charter for the federated group, “my own virtue and energy are negligible. Thus it is only together with the various gentry (shi) of the land can I dare hope of revitalizing and restoring the ancient learning and thus be of some use at a later time. The name of our society, therefore, shall be the Restoration Society” (Fu she).2

Swarms of scholars accepted membership in the umbrella group over the course of the year, with most of the prominent members coming from the culturally distinguished counties of the Jiangnan area, though many others had hometowns all over the country. The leaders of the movement were Zhang Pu, the founder, as well as his friends Zhang Cai and Wu Weiye (1609–1672), who were both also from Taicang. An informal biography of Wu describes how he was descended from a leading family of nearby Kunshan that had been winning local accolades for generations. Wu’s writing style caught the attention of Zhang Pu, who saw in it a certain classical ideal, and Wu’s encyclopedic mastery of the ancient learning, we are told, led to his earning a low-level degree of some sort. Wu Weiye was one of the first to join the Restoration Society, among the many scholars who did so in 1629. The first great meeting of the Society, as Wu recorded in his own account, the Fu she ji shi, was held in Wujiang county. Local gentry (da xing, or “great names”) provided for food and lodging, and people wrote letters of support from great distances, adding their encouragement to that of the many who attended in person.3

The Restoration Society was theoretically a literary society, whose members discoursed on letters and published approved versions of certain works such as examination essays. This interest in the civil service exam, however, went beyond the publication of study guides, for the Restoration Society became a sort of endorse-ment board for test candidates and a political patronage network


The Restoration Society, 1628–1644 141

for successful degree earners. It may be hard to understand how the Society could have increased the likelihood of its candidates’ passing the exam, since great pains were taken to conceal identities during the examination process. However, the test proctors, who approved the final lists of successful candidates, were often told the names of promising students endorsed by the Restoration Society, and, coincidentally or not, they often passed the endorsed candidates.

A private history called the Fu she ji lue describes three sorts of “recommendations” (jian). One was completely above board and was simply a list of a Society leaders’ protégés and relatives; another took the form of a private letter to the examiner; and the third involved favorably reevaluating the exam papers of recommended candidates after initial ranking had already been determined. William Atwell notes wittily that while Restoration Society members no doubt won their degrees through honest academic effort, still, “the group was not prepared to leave its fate to chance and scholarship.” Xie Guozhen similarly notes that since the Society had enough informal power to facilitate or hinder an official career, the gentry (shidafu) naturally flocked there, and those who were not allowed to join were naturally resentful and began to maneuver against the group.

More than government jobs were at stake, of course. He Zongmei emphasizes economics, suggesting that an individual’s consider-able wealth could be suddenly forfeited, if he (or his family) lost the protection afforded by a civil service degree. The latter were thus seen as important prizes in an increasingly high-stakes struggle. If the Ming state needed another reason for factional discord, the Restoration Society provided one.4

Together with professional and economic competition, the desire for revenge also encouraged factional squaring-off. The turn of the revolving door that toppled Wei Zhongxian and company also restored many of his former victims, and several of these individuals were represented in the Restoration Society’s ranks. Persons in this class were now eager to settle scores, just as Luo Yuanbin had feared. The famous Neo-Confucian philosopher Huang Zongxi (1610–1695) was a Society member and son of Huang Zunsu, who had been martyred in 1626. At some point after Wei’s fall, the younger Huang stalked and assaulted his father’s enemies as they stood trial, and he also took a lock of another enemy’s hair, burying it as a sort of filial offering. Some of the Society members had also played some role in the Suzhou rioting that accompanied the arrest of Zhou Shunchang. Owing to these and other examples, but probably also just because



the see-saw nature of late Ming factional strife must have been fairly obvious, the Restoration Society was often called the “little Donglin.”

This book, however, will not equate the Restoration Society with the Donglin, because the leadership of the earlier faction was effectively destroyed in 1625–1626 and because the new group was created from scratch, had a different style of organization and modus operandi, and was based not at the Donglin Academy in Wuxi but rather in Taicang.5

Of course, even though the Donglin and Restoration Society organizations were different, their ideologies were similar. Restoration Society members believed just as firmly as the earlier Donglin academicians in a decentralized, gentlemanly sovereignty. The Restoration Society’s effective control of personnel selection from Taicang would have earned high marks from Gu Xiancheng, who had tried without such complete success to do the same thing from Wuxi. It would also, certainly, have earned the scorn of the Wanli emperor, who had insisted that personnel decisions came from the court. Since the Restoration Society wielded the sovereign power of personnel selection so confidently, they wielded it very well, their belief in their mission not only legitimizing but also facilitating their maneuvers against all opponents. Society members performed splendidly in the entry-level examinations of 1630 and again the next year in the metropolitan (jinshi) exam, in which Wu Weiye scored first (though he does not seem to have scored first in the special palace exam held in the presence of the emperor). Zhang Pu also earned his jinshi degree in 1631 and was posted to the Hanlin Academy, which was a sort of glorified clerical pool whose members were considered to be in good position for subsequent promotion to the Grand Secretariat. However, Zhang Pu soon found himself in the middle of continuing factional sniping and ended up on the bad side of grand secretary Wen Tiren (d. 1638). On shaky ground in the capital, Zhang took leave at the end of 1632 and returned home to Taicang.6

The Proposed Reform of Local Tax CollectionAs was the case with Gu Xiancheng, Zhang Pu may actually have been glad to leave Beijing, since he may have felt that his home base in Taicang was the place where he could best exhibit his talents. In the event, he was in fact able to do much more as a country squire than as a court official. Zhang Pu and his friend Zhang Cai wielded



considerable informal power at the local level, using their prestige and persuasiveness to influence the evaluation and promotion of interme-diate-level officials in Taicang on at least one occasion. Restoration Society members also helped local officials draft proposals for tax reforms, directed and financed public works projects, effected the removal of allegedly rapacious government workers, and, in times of famine, provided food for the hungry and burial money for the dead. All of these projects typified the Neo-Confucian interest in local gentry control. Most of them were based on the idea of the gentry’s positive service to the community, although the corollary, that the gentry were supposed to negate the power of the state, was well in evidence too.7

In fact, one of the Zhangs’ schemes intruded to a considerable extent into the state’s business. In 1633, in a response to bad weather that had damaged the harvest that year, the two Zhangs again made their rounds of local officials and gentry to see if there was some way of providing some relief to the area by reforming the tax system. Noting the unlikelihood that the central government would allow tax relief, given continued border unrest and fiscal shortages, the local reformers hit upon the following plan: whereas under current conditions Taicang subprefecture was, together with other local counties, responsible for grain shipments to local military stores (jun chu), the gentry now proposed that Taicang shoulder this burden alone, in exchange for prorating onto the other counties its regular tribute grain obligation (cao liang) to Beijing. The arrangement was supposed to benefit Taicang in the aggregate, and more grain would actually be saved for everybody by avoiding the necessity of multi-ple shipments (with their attendant bribes and wastage) to and from Taicang. The man responsible for assembling the final petition to Beijing was one Liu Shidou, whose recent promotion had been engi-neered by the Zhangs. Unfortunately, Liu’s rival, Zhou Zhikui (who had been passed over for the same promotion), was still nursing his wounds. In secret, Zhou accused Liu of “fawning on local gentry” (xing mei xiangshen), and he also charged Zhang Pu and Zhang Cai with subverting established procedures and disrupting grain trans-port. Liu Shidou was ordered demoted and transferred out of the area, but the local shimin (gentry and commoners or perhaps minor gentry, such as students) formed a human barricade before the city gates, blocking his egress. In addition, about a hundred thousand persons boycotted local marketplaces. In the meantime, Zhou Zhikui was exposed as the agent of Liu’s dismissal, and the local



gentry (shenshi) planned a counterattack against him. Soon enough, “various students” (zhusheng) began following and harassing Zhou wherever he went. Ultimately, and with the help of a few letters circulated among the gentry, the entirety of public opinion was turned against Mr. Zhou. He was removed, reinstated, and finally removed for good some time later, having been thoroughly ostracized by the gentry and believing all his troubles were the work of the Restoration Society.8

At the heart of this complicated affair was a squabble for wealth between the state and the gentry. The reform suggested by the two Zhangs would have reduced grain shipments, thereby cutting into the legitimate and illegitimate income of the transportation and storage authorities, who were ultimately employed by the state. Correspondingly, more grain and money would be handled by local tax collectors, resulting in more business for the gentry, acting in such roles as tax farmer. Even the seemingly petty rivalry between Zhou Zhikui and Liu Shidou may have been linked to this tug of war over the local tax portfolio. In any case, the former called his enemies “gentry,” and the latter certainly had many gentry friends. In the end, Zhang Cai was accused of “fighting over transport grain,” and his proposed reforms were rejected.9

As marshal of the gentry forces in this attempted grain seizure, Zhang Cai himself was strangely reluctant to embrace the gentry label. Despite his belonging to a social and political movement following the familiar pattern of massing gentry, he himself admitted no special admiration for the gentry as a class. Instead, he spoke suspiciously and deprecatingly about them, using a range of terms like shidafu, xiangshen, and jinshen, rather than the more classical shi. At one point, he wrote in a memorial, “The shidafu know only how to find glory for themselves as they see to their own families. In the process, they forget about helping with state business.” This remark could have come from the brush of any statist partisan from Zhang Juzheng on. It was incongruous coming from someone who had just tried to localize the Taicang granary operations and who was locally approving candidates for official recruiting and promotion. Elsewhere, in a discourse on the sources of rebellion in the empire, Zhang Cai suggested that the people were driven to such extremes by money-loving, influential gentry (jinshen), rapacious or murderous local officials and minor functionaries, and rich families and great houses (fu jia jushi) who drove their tenants and others to starvation.



All three of these oppressors were pretty much the same animal, as Zhang readily admitted.10

However, if Zhang Cai seemed agnostic toward the gentry as a whole, he was still a true believer in the cause of the good gentry in particular—the “gentlemen,” in other words. In his writings, he routinely divided the civil elite into gentlemen (junzi) and mean people (xiaoren), and he reiterated the old idea that only the former could legitimately associate. Substitute the word “gentlemen” for its cousin “gentry,” and the old normative sense of gentry leadership—which had, at any rate, always implied criticism of “bad gentry”—was still alive and well. Shortening the list of good people may have been additionally necessary, owing to the decades-long battle between individual partisans (and local competitors) who were all, technically, gentry. Finally, Zhang’s expressed concern for the Ming state may have grown with his proximity to power (a phenomenon observable even in the case of Gu Xiancheng), but it was, in any case, unmatched by his actions.11

Increasing Suspicion of the GentryAs long as the unfriendly Wen Tiren continued as grand secretary in Beijing, the Restoration Society remained on the defensive, building up its strength and carefully waiting. Sometime during or after 1634, the suspicious Wen dispatched a trusted underling to keep an eye on the two Zhangs. Although Wen’s spy proved unable to entrap the gentlemen, his observations about life in the Jiangnan countryside during the Restoration Society’s ascendancy were especially poignant.

The common people of Wu [meaning Jiangnan] are burdened by the service levies [or head taxes] in ways that cannot be enumerated. Meanwhile, the Jiangnan gentry (jinshen) are thriving. Through such means as their basic, legitimate youmian exemption from head taxes, added to more nefarious stratagems such as occupying public land or land in neighboring counties, the simple use of power or influence with the lackeys of local government, or other varieties of false land registration, the gentry escape more and more [taxes]. Those left with the tax responsibility are invariably bankrupted by it. They sell their holdings and ultimately become, in effect, vassals of more power-ful families . . . The official families (guanhuan), in their clans and cliques and with their powerful bondservants, are living off the fat



of the land and have totally forgotten what the term “head tax” even means . . . Additionally, the tribute grain and military stores respon-sibilities (jun chu) are also being left entirely to the common people. I am afraid that the people are in almost unbearable circumstances and are at the limits of their endurance. How will we be able to collect enough revenue to service the state’s fiscal system?12

It is noteworthy that the gentry were sloughing their obligations to provide military stores (jun chu), the tax, it will be recalled, that was the main part of the controversial redistribution plan put forth by the two Zhangs. Although the proposed reforms were not approved, it is still worthwhile to question their meaning, since if the gentry of Taicang were not paying this tax at all, it would have been somewhat pointless to arrange for Taicang to assume more of this same respon-sibility on behalf of other counties too. Local control would seem to have been a subterfuge for more tax dodging, in this case. Otherwise, the gentry were still up to their old tricks of falsifying land records and intimidating or corrupting local functionaries. The Restoration Society, in spite of the good neighborliness they displayed on other occasions, was apparently doing little to stop these habitual abuses of power and privilege.

The Chongzhen emperor answered the memorial of Wen Tiren’s spy by saying how seriously he took the problem of abuses by “strongman-gentry” (hao shen). He might also have made a veiled reference to the Restoration Society during a court audience on April 12, 1634. After entertaining suggestions for the wisest policy to pursue under the circumstances, the emperor wrote in response, “The gentry (shidafu) are the ones who should work together with Us to pacify the Empire. Today, the customs of the gentry are dishonorable and improper (shixi buduan). To get at the root of the problem, one must rectify the customs of the gentry (shi) and restore the old Way. Yet, by what artifice are we to do this?” Whether or not he was referring to the Restoration Society with his remark about restoring the old Way, the question was ominously rhetorical. Later in his message, Chongzhen asked again how the state should go about reducing the burden on the people while continuing to wage a costly defensive war. He complained that “Some speakers are not sensitive to the state’s inter-ests. At every breath, they ask for tax relief, saying that the people are the root of the state, but do they really think the Court is ignorant of that?” A few months later, on July 31, after bandits ambushed some three dozen persons in Fengxiang prefecture in Shaanxi province,



the military governor, Chen Qiyu took the opportunity to resign, castigating local officials and gentry (difang guanshen) for “obstruction and subversion of pacification activities.” When word of the affair reached the emperor, he became enraged and sent mounted guards to the area, where they arrested a county magistrate, another mem-ber of the gentry (xiangshen), and others, to a total of fifty persons (more than were killed in the ambush). In a comment immediately following this entry in his Guo que chronicle, Tan Qian accused Chen Qiyu of being both incompetent and a sore loser. James Parsons has suggested that Chen was trying to deflect blame from his role in a controversial surrender offer extended to local rebels, who included Li Zicheng and, possibly, Zhang Xianzhong (1605–1647), two men who were to continue making trouble for the Ming. Chen Qiyu was ultimately exiled, but it is interesting that Chongzhen believed his charges against the gentry in toto.13

On March 23, 1636, a minor military official named Chen Qixin memorialized the emperor with a list of radical proposals. Chen wanted the country to reduce its reliance on the gentry. He moved for a thorough devaluing of the examination system, the abolition of a few official positions, and a general stress on practical performance, in place of literary or cultural achievement. As if these modest pro-posals were not incendiary enough, Chen included a few other candid remarks showing how little he thought of the gentry class as a whole.

People say the Han dynasty wasted its treasure on the Huns, the Tang dynasty wasted its treasure on local military commands, the Song on tribute payments; and they say our Ming is wasting its treasure on frontier defense. I, however, do not think the current waste is taking place on the frontier. I think our Ming is wasting its treasure on the gentry (jinshen). County clerks and functionaries imitate them, writing fraudulent memorials to obtain graft. Thousands of taels are lost in this way. Soldiers also follow the gentry’s venal example, aiding and abetting various evildoers and profiting handsomely by it. Hundreds of thousands of taels are lost in this way. Generals and officers next follow suit, feeding off the supplies of the army and the chance of peace itself. Our military strategy thus collapses, and our generals and officers are exhausted. Finally, supply officers conform to the gentry example, profiting from pilferage and the sale of what is not theirs. Thus our system of grain shipments on the Grand Canal also collapses. Meanwhile, merchants and smelters also suffer. Why? Whenever they are guilty of some infraction, it is the gentry (jinshen) who



are responsible for punishing them, and it is the gentry who help themselves to fines and desperate sales that the merchants and smelters cannot avoid. By these means, the rich become poor, and the poor become resentful. As their resentment increases, they become more disposed to rebellion, and here we have the cause for today’s banditry. The empire’s officials (chen) seek benefits for themselves and their families, and this causes dishonesty and treachery. Likewise, our soldiers are also looking out for their own interests, and they turn to looting, which is causing the oppression of the weak. These bad habits, therefore, are spreading from the top down, and they are growing ever worse. If the source of the problem is not eliminated, then this current impasse and stalemate will never be resolved. Banditry will never cease, and we will be demoralized at home and reduced in stature abroad. Under the circumstances, Your Majesty’s empire will inevitably pass into the hands of glib-tongued, corrupt, Confucianists (zhangju fu ru).14

The emperor thought Chen’s proposals too strange and his suppositions off-putting. In the Guo que chronicle, in which only a part of Chen’s offensive memorial was copied, the Ming survivors Tan Qian and Yang Shicong commented that its writer was a “mean person” (xiaoren) and a shameless upstart. There was no real chance that Chongzhen would take up Chen’s suggestions to abolish the examination system, but many officials became defensive enough to join in a round of denunciations against Chen, just in case. They tried to force the reluctant emperor to have Chen locked up, but Chongzhen preferred leniency. Not giving up, the Restoration Society convened to discuss how the villain Chen might be punished. More accusations were forthcoming, along with some very interesting defenses of the civil elite tradition. One writer felt compelled to refute Chen’s claim that glib-tongued Confucians were of no use to the “world” (shi, he did not say “state,” which is what Chen meant). There were plenty of good Confucianists, he said, such as the Righteous Circles leaders Zou Yuanbiao and Sun Peiyang and the Donglin martyrs Yang Lian and Zuo Guangdou.15

Anxious to get the emperor looking the other way for blame and responsibility, on April 6, 1636, an official in the Ministry of Works, Liu Zongzhou (1578–1645), wrote a long, lamenting memorial in which he openly discussed the many trends showing that the dynasty was in serious decline. The emperor, Liu opined, came to the throne talking of a revival, and yet the situation had manifestly become worse, the ever-rising Manchu tide mocking earlier promises to



recover the northeast. The more the state sought to raise revenue, the more corrupt the administrative machinery became, and the less money was actually brought in. Even though the emperor (and those close to him, Wen Tiren, presumably) sought to restore law and order, drift and chaos were the results. The mass of officialdom was now beyond all hope of internal compromise and reconciliation. In the most portentous sentence of the memorial, Liu wrote, “The Court is beginning to show signs of squandering the sympathy of the gentry” (shidafu).16

The contentious year 1636 now saw more criticism aimed squarely at the Restoration Society. A man named Lu Wensheng, who was a fellow townsman and associate of Zhang Cai, became alienated from the latter in a complicated local affair. He thereupon became part of a general movement, being orchestrated behind the scenes by Wen Tiren, to disgrace the Restoration Society. He memorialized about the difficulties attendant to taxation in the area, and although no copy of this memorial survives, the Fu She ji lue does record a response as follows:

In the Wu [Jiangnan] region, the problem of tax arrears comes from corrupt functionaries blocking the remittance of payments, collecting illegal surtaxes, and embezzling; and there are also many abuses rising from false registration, seizure of land, misuse of youmian privilege, and unruly bondservants . . . The Restoration Society of Taicang has established cliques and acts in an unrestrained manner. It maintains an arbitrary monopoly [over the official recruitment process], usurping the rightful function of the education officers. That the habits of the gentry (shixi) should allow for such arrogance!17

Having been on the defensive for some time, the Restoration Society suddenly had a piece of good luck, when, in 1637, Wen Tiren retired from office. If the Restoration Society’s members were vitally interested in saving the Ming dynasty, the moment to do so would seem to have arrived. But the Society gentlemen simply maintained their steady bombardment of the grand secretaries. Wen’s chosen successor, Xue Guoguan, may in fact have been driven to suicide by the Restoration Society in 1640, and it is a reflection on the Society’s politics that no fewer than fifty grand secretaries served during the Chongzhen reign. By 1641, the Society had finally placed an ally, Zhou Yanru (1588–1644), in the Grand Secretariat, but by then, perhaps, it would have been too late for anyone to save the Ming.18



Roving Banditry and Local DefenseRoving banditry had been a problem in Shaanxi since the late 1620s. Parsons describes the province as suffering from severe misrule throughout the decade, a problem exacerbated by the factional disturbances in Beijing. There was an especially acute shortage of qualified prefects, subprefects, and magistrates, and these deficiencies became huge disadvantages after the tax rate was doubled (the effect of Liaoxiang) and drought and famine arrived in 1628. Shaanxi was technically a frontier province, and many of its denizens were soldiers. Since the current military crisis was in Manchuria, however, resources tended to be shipped there, leaving Shaanxi troops unpaid and mutinous. In 1629, this neglect was com-pounded when the government, to cut costs, dismissed its imperial post station personnel, and many of these desperate people joined the mutineers.19

Li Zicheng was an ex-postal attendant turned mutineer, in Mizhi county, Yanan prefecture, Shaanxi province. Roger Des Forges provides evidence that Li’s unemployment made it impossible for him to pay off a loan contracted with a member of the local elite. When the local magistrate intervened on behalf of the latter, other unemployed couriers gathered to help Li, and together with desperate villagers, they turned outlaw. Li joined several other bandit leaders, who fought sporadically with government forces through the 1630s. The armies of the state enjoyed limited successes against these roving bands, but they were just too weak to finish them off. Often, in fact, they were compelled to offer surrender terms, which the bandits used as a chance to regroup (an occurrence of this sort was what cost Chen Qiyu his career). The marauders’ raids spread beyond Shaanxi during the 1630s. By the end of the decade, Zhang Xianzhong was in full rebellion after a temporary surrender, and Li Zicheng moved into Henan province in 1640, where survivors of famine and disease flocked to his standard. Zhang and Li gradually emerged as the two strongest rebel chieftains.20

Li Zicheng was ultimately seeking to overthrow the Ming state, but he was exceedingly violent toward the gentry as well. Officials and gentry perished at his hands, while he endeavored to advance a populist agenda. Against the bandits, meanwhile, the state appointed a succession of regional officials such as supreme com-manders, but their successes, as has already been mentioned, were temporary. Very often, in fact, local communities were left to face



the danger without central government help. Meir Shahar reports that sometime during an early incursion in the 1630s, a magistrate in Henan province, finding that he “could no longer rely on support from the capital,” used his personal funds to finance a local militia, which he trained with the help of Shaolin monks. This militia force achieved a few victories before going down in defeat, crushed by a much larger bandit army.21

In the absence of reliable central government support, though, it was not Shaolin monks but local gentry who organized most of the resistance to the rebels. Two obscure sources help to illustrate how gentry defense worked. The first source is the Deng pi ji lue, or Record from Atop the Battlements, which describes how Zhang Xianzhong’s forces passed through Neijiang county, Chengdu prefecture, on its way to Luzhou subprefecture in Sichuan province, during 1640. According to the Record, Neijiang was left more or less to fend for itself as it faced Zhang’s invaders. Interestingly, however, the defenders of Neijiang do not seem to have wanted Beijing’s atten-tion, and the Record, accordingly, reads as a sort of “do it yourself” manual for community defense. Its first chapter covers the subject of improvements to town walls and other such defensive emplacements, a project that was undertaken in 1638. In Neijiang, the necessary rock and other building material was harvested from nearby hills and transported to the needed areas by a flotilla of thirty boats, manned by some three hundred men (it is unclear if these are the same men who did the actual harvesting). None of these workers were paid out of the proper treasury, the Record boasts. Instead, the total expenses, which amounted to some 424 taels of silver and 250 piculs (shi) of rice were covered by private contributions from a locally stationed censor, the magistrate, a member of the gentry (xiangshen), a former prefect, a former capital official, a juren (a holder of the intermediate academic degree), and a jiansheng (a student attached to the Imperial Academy). This informal consortium of backers was, in other words, the backbone of the local semiofficial scholar-gentry.22

Turning next to the subject of training the militia, the Record makes it quite clear that the local military was led almost without exception by students or degree holders of the various sorts. The militia was divided into various categories corresponding to their origin in society: regular militia, street militia (jie bing), monk militia (seng bing), and so on. Each unit was advised to follow the orders and stay under the control of its respective gentry (xiangshen) leader. The supply of the army seems to have come from an equal combination



of public funds (from the tax revenues retained in the county, not any amount that was handled by the central government) and contributions from the usual gentry suspects. The question of arma-ments seems not to have involved many economic considerations at all. Nearby areas were foraged for raw materials, and the county was in some cases made responsible for actual weapons production and procurement of gunpowder. The only sum of money for armaments mentioned in the Record, some one hundred taels of expenses, was apportioned onto the nine divisions of the militia and dealt with by them. Apparently, military equipment was not considered a major expense.23

Somehow, perhaps because the local militia also stressed spying and intelligence operations, the Neijiang militia scored a major victory against Zhang Xianzhong (but then again, Zhang’s objective was not Neijiang but Luzhou, which he took). For what threat it had to face, namely, part of a bandit army passing through, the gentry-organized, gentry-financed militia of Neijiang answered quite well. Indeed, as far as Neijiang was concerned, Beijing need never have existed, for the county was a country onto itself. The word guo, meaning “state,” appears not once in the Record from Atop the Battlements.24

The second source, the Yu kou xiang wen, or Detailed Documents on Resisting Banditry, mentions the state rather frequently, perhaps because the localist defense described therein did not work as well as it did in Neijiang. The Documents are simply a set of memorials by Wang Wei, magistrate of Taihe county, Fengyang prefecture, Nanjing province, detailing an incursion into the area by the bandit army of Li Zicheng in 1641. Doughty magistrate Wang was at first content to rely on his gentry militia. In the first memorial, dated February 2, 1641, Wang told of the arrival of the “Henan bandits” under a plume of smoke. His threefold policy, was to call for relief, order his “gentry and masses” (shenjin zhongshu) to man the battlements, and watch for opportunities to attack. In fact, Wang reported to have done so well on the attack that he seems to have weakened his case for relief. The local militia was described by Wang as being led by the same combination of students and similarly cultivated talent—one captain’s command came ex officio of his being the “Confucian Drill Instructor” (ruxue xundao)—that led the defense of Neijiang county. Actually, on this very first sally, the militia chanced to meet up with some troops under the command of the director general of grain transport (Li Sancai’s old post, stationed on the Grand Canal), and together they routed the bandits, inflicting countless



casualties and capturing over three thousand. The entire second half of Wang’s long memorial was devoted to the honorable mention of Taihe’s gentry militia. Every scholarly captain, including Mr. Ni, the Confucian Drill Instructor, received a paragraph describing his military exploits. Humorously, the distribution of praise received more attention than the military crisis—or Wang’s request for sup-port. Officials who handled this document on its way up the chain of command simply took the opportunity to heap additional praise upon the militia heroes. Governor Zhu, for example, wrote, “The deeds of these meritorious gentry (shenjin) . . . will be compiled so as to provide encouragement.” The sense of business as usual is particu-larly striking, considering that the bandit leader at the center of the business was shortly to topple the dynasty.25

Taihe county fell under a loose siege. Magistrate Wang was generally afraid to meet the besiegers, but he occasionally managed to sally out and bring back a few prisoners. Whenever he did so, his superiors congratulated him and promised more honorable mention for his scholarly soldiers. More significantly, the emperor himself finally addressed Wang’s repeated pleading for reinforcements in a rescript to a memorial dated March 22. He wrote, “Your alarm-ing embellishments have persisted for some time. As recently as a few days ago, you sent a message with the same warnings over and over again. You must plan to resist for a long time and on your own. You are not simply to expect reinforcements and so neglect self-defense. We implore you.” By February 19, 1642, after a year of siege and repeated requests for relief, Wang Wei was casting about for new forms of expression with which to get the court’s attention. He made the prophetic claim that Li’s peasant revolt was not an example of common banditry, and he pointed out that Taihe county guarded the Ming ancestral tombs in the area. Still, Wang got nothing.26

Taihe’s “gentry and commoners” (shimin) swore an oath to defend to the death on May 17, but morale was almost completely used up by then. Magistrate Wang’s next memorial, written on the same day, was headed “The People are Planning to Abscond.” An adjacent locality was overrun, and representatives of Li Zicheng soon appeared, prom-ising to spare Taihe serious damage if the defenders gave up at once. At this development, “gentry and commoners” (shenjin shishu) began to pick up and leave their posts, some gathering up their property and rejoining and mobilizing their families. Many cried over their broken oaths, but they claimed that sacrifice would be meaningless. Wang could hardly blame them, though the emperor wrote harshly



that all who fled would be dealt with according to the law. He also revealed how little he thought of the bandit attackers and scholarly defenders both. “The bandits,” he wrote, “have treacherously used false words to mislead the masses, and their speech, which both betrays and cheats Heaven, is readily believed by you book-reading types (du shu ren). What, We ask, will undeceive you?” Wang’s last memorial, dated May 20, 1642, was a final desperate appeal for aid, written from the precipice of impending destruction.27

The themes introduced by the Documents—poor or nonexistent coordination with the state and the increasing disinclination on the part of the gentry (or commoners) to defend to the death—are highlighted in Des Forges’ study of Henan and his narrative of Li Zicheng’s campaigns there. Des Forges shows that much of the progressive unraveling of state-gentry cooperation occurred over the course of three rebel sieges of Kaifeng. The first siege, in March of 1641, was met by a united opposition of local and regional officials, students and other local elites, and the locally enfeoffed Ming prince, who contributed part of his fortune toward rewards for the defenders. Regional troops returning from Luoyang provided timely relief, and Li Zicheng was hit in the face with a small arrow. The reb-els soon withdrew.28

The second siege lasted from January 21 to February 13, 1642. Kaifeng’s defenders were, if anything, better organized than they had been during their previous fight, with the magistrate requiring rich families to field militiamen, according to their level of wealth. In spite of (or perhaps because of) this arrangement, Des Forges suggests that the morale of the defenders was somewhat lower on this occasion, and social tensions among them were higher. There was at least one episode of very bitter fighting, but the resources of the defenders held out, and wealthy defenders, including degree holders, continued to make contributions. Li lifted this second siege, on the intelligence that government soldiers were nearby.29

After this successful resistance, however, more strains became apparent. Shangqiu county, Guide prefecture, was the scene of a protracted standoff between the local authorities and the elite, with both sides commonly employing lackeys to intimidate the other. Then, when the magistrate, Liang Yizhang, ordered the usual as-semblage of students and other elites to defend the walls in prep-aration for a rebel attack, the former official and metropolitan degree holder Song Quan was found away from his post. Liang had Song arrested, and a demonstration on the latter’s behalf by over



one hundred students was violently suppressed, with one student killed. The defenders of the county town, therefore, were already rather demoralized, when Li Zicheng and other rebels attacked in mid-1642. According to Des Forges’ account, resistance was very feeble, with a relief force of cavalry troops putting up the best fight. Another body of men from the outside, however, welcomed as rein-forcements, proved to be a fifth column, working for Li, and the town was overrun. Magistrate Liang fled, and resistance collapsed. The rebels then proceeded to massacre many of the inhabitants, in-cluding several prominent scholars, who were butchered with their families. Significantly, however, they spared the original gentry troublemaker Song Quan, who was permitted to escape and ended up in Shandong province. After the debacle at Shangqiu, Xiayi and Qi counties surrendered without a fight, at least partly due to the connivance of some elite leaders.30

Kaifeng fell under its third siege in the late spring of 1642. Government forces were driven away before reaching the city, and Li Zicheng was able to isolate and starve the inhabitants. Des Forges describes Kaifeng under siege as a “microcosm of late-Ming state-society relations.” The authorities seized grain from the masses to feed themselves, and the strong preyed on the weak in general. Famine led to incidents of cannibalism by autumn. Both sides tried to puncture the dikes on the Yellow River, in order to enlist flood as an ally. Finally, on October 7, the rain-swelled river burst through the weakened dikes in two places. Flooding overcame some of the rebels but completely inundated the town, with tremen-dous loss of life. The result of this third and final siege of Kaifeng was considered to be inconclusive, but the people of the region were obviously devastated, and more to the point, state and gentry had proven themselves less and less capable of working together to stem the rebel advances. This lack of coordination would continue to be a big problem, as Li Zicheng’s movement developed dynastic pretensions.31

Moral and Practical StatecraftMeanwhile, on the political front, Zhang Pu had died on June 15, 1641. Just as was the case when Gu Xiancheng died in 1612, the righteous party lost its leader just as it finally seemed to be on the way to greater power. Liu Zongzhou, the man who had warned Chongzhen against “squandering the sympathies of the gentry,”



emerged as a new spokesman for the latter. On November 25, 1642, Liu memorialized the throne with a few suggestions. First of these was to establish daokui, or a set of principles by which Chongzhen was to reflect on the successes and (especially, perhaps) the failures of his administration. To this end, Liu urged the emperor to reestablish the Shoushan Academy, which Donglin partisans had endeavored to set up in Beijing amid much controversy in 1622. Liu presented the idea as one that would give the promising students of the capital a chance to absorb the moral instruction sure to be emanating soon from the emperor, but the ultimate moral authority would be coming from gentry-scholars, of course. Liu also took the opportunity to criticize overzealous revenue procurement. “Performance in tax collection,” Liu complained, “has become the chief consideration governing the promotion or demotion of officials.” Liu’s blaming the tax collector rather than the tax dodger perhaps figured into Chongzhen’s later decision to have him dismissed.32

The focus on revenue that Liu Zongzhou lamented is reflected in table 6.1. These figures show exponentially higher revenue and expenditure, compared with anything previously seen. The Ming



1629 Not Available Not Available1630 9,136,357 9,500,6281631 12,249,195 11,125,2521632 Not Available Not Available1633 Not Available Not Available1634 12,812,000 12,153,0001635 Not Available Not Available1636 Not Available Not Available1637 16,700,000 20,000,0001638 Not Available Not Available1639 20,000,000 Not Available1640 Not Available Not Available1641 21,451,736 Not Available1642 23,000,000 23,000,0001643 21,300,000 Not Available1644 Not Available Not Available



state under Chongzhen was occasionally able to balance its income and its outgoes. This success can be attributed to the Liaoxiang and other surtaxes, coupled with more commutations of payments in kind to payments in silver; yet it came at a cost, for the additional revenue was extracted from those who could least spare it.

Liu Zongzhou notwithstanding, it would be wrong to say that the members of the Restoration Society were completely indifferent to the empire’s practical problems. The pragmatic echelon of Neo-Confucianism statecraft, of which Shen Bang was perhaps an early example (see chapter II), cannot be discounted. Ni Yuanlu (1594–1644) the Ming’s last minister of revenue, devoted consid-erable energy to solving fiscal problems. He proposed changes to Grand Canal operations (including the rerouting of some shipments via the sea route), planned to commute more taxes to silver, advo-cated issuing paper money, and hoped to encourage trade. He strove always to renew obsolete regulations and procedures, making them conform more to the reality of the seventeenth century than to the era of the Ming founding.34

On the other hand, though, no amount of pragmatism could trump what Ray Huang called “Ni’s overriding belief in the primacy of moral virtue.” During one lecture session with the emperor, Ni was flustered when Chongzhen asked, “If virtue is really of such preponderant importance, how could it be usefully employed to solve the nation’s pressing problems, while pay and supplies to the soldiers on the frontier are in arrears?” A genuinely puzzled Ni wrote to a friend, “His Majesty . . . seems to place priority on strengthening the nation and enriching the country over benevolence and righteousness. Yet no one can tactfully dissuade him from doing this.” Thus, the minister was working through, and not for, the ruler, a “tactful dis-suader” rather than a responsive servant of the state. In this crucial respect, Ni Yuanlu and his emperor, though supposedly in the same boat, were ultimately working at cross purposes.35

In 1638, a group of literati led by the Restoration Society’s Chen Zilong (1608–1647) had published the Huang Ming jingshi wenbian, a compendium of documents, mostly letters and memorials, written by the distinguished officials of the dynasty, on various practical subjects. The Jingshi wenbian became a sort of Bible of late imperial statecraft, and it was relatively nonpartisan, even including about twenty-five of Zhang Juzheng’s memorials and several dozen of his letters. Significantly, however, the editors expressed their hope to serve the state almost as a belated compensation for years of



neglect on the part of the gentlemanly class. Chen Zilong’s pref-ace indicted scholars for their deficiency in practical knowledge. “Vulgar Confucians (su ru) affirm only the ancient and negate the present,” he wrote. “Gentry-literati (wenshi) value flowery prose and leave the practical behind.” Xu Yuqing (jinshi 1616), in his preface, went even further, writing that it was the job of his readers to “assist the Imperial Son of Heaven in his good intention to seek worthies and pacify the empire, as well as wash away the old shame, arising from the careless inattention to the tasks of developing the land and saving the people, on the part of the elite” (shidafu). Xu’s words suggest that the compilation of the Huang Ming jingshi wenbian was an act of contrition or even guilt. Besides, the new desire to be useful was by no means universal, for Zhang Pu’s preface referred much more to the scholarship of the “dedicated literati” than to their need to serve the emperor. In any case, though the considerable attention to statecraft expressed in the Huang Ming jingshi wenbian can hardly be called too little, it seems safe to say that it was certainly too late, too late to save the Ming dynasty, anyway.36

The Fall of BeijingIndeed, total collapse was at hand. On March 24, 1644, the governor of the capitol area, Li Guozhen, memorialized the emperor to inform him just how bad the situation was. Apparently, Chongzhen still felt confident that his capital garrison would make a reliable last defense. Governor Li, however, took it upon himself to undeceive the emperor on this score, saying it was his clear duty to be as straightforward and truthful as possible in representing to Chongzhen the fiscal exhaustion and evaporation of morale that prevailed with the Beijing garrison, even as desertions were increasing on the frontier. Li listed eight specific problems: pay for the army did not arrive in time; it was worth less than it was before (bespeaking inflation and a worsening quality of soldiers’ pay); there were no bounties for training; the cavalry mounts were sickly; there was no feed for the horses (hence, they were sickly); there were no yanglian bonuses (a category of special salary that obviated an official’s relying on graft to make ends meet); minor officials were broke and were dropping out of the service; and all these conditions, including desertions, prevailed before the garrison had been involved in any fighting and were only bound to get worse. As a solution, Li recommended that the state concentrate on stabilizing the markets in Beijing and other places (by such means



as setting the prices of the various commodities) and then enact a schedule of customs duties. The measure would guarantee the peo-ple (and the army) a market for buying and selling, and it would also generate more revenue for the state.37

Why was it so desperately necessary to find new revenue sources? The gentry still had money, and the emperor, apparently, had plenty of money too. Even in the last pages of Tan Qian’s private chronicle of the Ming dynasty, there are repeated references to special silver disbursements requested by ministers and authorized by the throne. These appropriations were sometimes quite large, and the emperor does not seem to have objected to them at all. It seems fair to say that in the economic war between the state and the gentry, the most losses were absorbed by a third party, the common people. Politically, though, it was the state that was finished: the peasants attacked it, and the gentry, or at least a significant and self-conscious part of it, refused to defend it.38

As James Parsons notes, the rebel leaders Zhang Xianzhong and Li Zicheng failed to cultivate gentry support, and most gentry kept their distance. There are some isolated cases, though, of overt gentry desertion. On May 10, 1643, a number of gentry men were said to have surrendered to Zhang Xianzhong, a rather remarkable occurrence, since Zhang was known to have singled out and massacred several members of the gentry only a few weeks before. Likewise, Li Zicheng was known to be arresting “great families” (jushi), perhaps insuring himself against his promise that all who joined him would pay no taxes. On March 14, 1644, an official memorialized to note the prev-alence of gentry surrender to the rebels, and he recommend that examples be made of both loyal and disloyal students. Education officers, he went on, should be held accountable for the actions of their students, and the emperor assented. On March 25, someone else wrote that the current poor morale, including the condoning of flight or surrender, was “emanating from the gentry” (chu zi jinshen), in an ironic twist to the prepositional argument about the proper source of authority and legitimacy. This man advised more obvious rewards for good service. Despite these nagging questions about gentry loyalty, on April 3, the Grand Canal area was divided into two rough defense sectors, with regional governors coordinating defense with gentry militia troops only. Presumably, there were no other forces left.39

On April 24, 1644, when Li Zicheng entered Beijing, he overcame all resistance. The garrison, true to warnings, had melted away, and



so had the central bureaucracy. Awaking in the early hours of the next morning, Chongzhen summoned his officials, and nobody came. He hanged himself on the hill to the north of the Forbidden City. A prepared last message found after his death read: “Heaven has forsaken Us, and Our ministers (chen) have interfered with Us at every turn.”40

Heroic Resistance of Restoration Society MembersChongzhen’s officials would have called their interference “loyal remonstrance” (quan), and they took great pains to demonstrate their loyalty after he was gone. Ni Yuanlu killed himself on the same day that Chongzhen did, on April 25. In the meantime, the Manchus (who had announced their dynastic plans by founding the Qing, or “pure,” dynasty) exploited the situation by entering the country, crushing Li Zicheng, and then polishing off the chief Ming remnant in Nanjing in 1645, at which time Liu Zongzhou starved himself to death. Qi Biaojia drowned himself, rather than serving the Manchus. Chen Zilong fought with the continuing loyalist resistance in the south. Subsequently captured in 1647, he also drowned himself to avoid punishment. Many others associated with the Restoration Society famously gave their lives during and immediately after the collapse of the Ming. Their moving sacrifices have been celebrated ever since by poets and playwrights, and several historical studies, too, have generally upheld the heroically loyal reputations of these righteous gentlemen.41

Admittedly, this celebrated record of sacrifice presents a challenge to the thesis of this book, in which the righteous gentry of the Restoration Society (together with the so-called Righteous Circles and the Donglin faction) stand accused of treating their state with a philosophical contempt and a practical—and fatal—obstructionism. It certainly seems very illogical for these gentlemen first to kill the Ming and then die, gloriously, defending its corpse, but a close examination of the issue will resolve the apparent incon-gruity between the righteous gentry’s pre-1644 recalcitrance and its post-1644 loyalism.

First and foremost, it would appear that the ostensible Ming loyalists were not really acting on behalf of the Ming but were only acting on behalf of the ideals of loyalty and righteousness, considered in the abstract. Jerry Dennerline’s thorough examination



of loyalist activity in Jiading county, Suzhou prefecture, describes a high-minded though rather impractical resistance. Local gentleman Hou Tongzeng, in fact, “invoked the principle of ‘great obligation’ [da yi], vowing that he would die loyal to the Ming house”—even as he refused to serve the leading Ming prince in Nanjing. Hou’s associate Huang Chunyue also extolled the “great obligation.” As Dennerline explains Hou’s position,

The minister’s obligation was to serve as a model. Insubordination on the part of a minister led to insubordination on the part of his inferiors; therefore it was the minister’s obligation always to remain loyal. [Yue] Fei [1103–1141, a Song dynasty martyr] refused to obey his emperor’s command to desist but pursued his campaigns against the Song enemy independently. Could such action be called disloyal? Huang had concluded that [Yue] Fei’s disobedience was in fact a demonstration of his even greater obligation to glorify an inglorious ruler.42

The main themes should be very familiar: “great obligation” was a mode of leadership over the masses and not of service to the emperor or the state; loyalist endeavors could be undertaken independently (and in defiance) of the latter; and the ruler’s glory came from righteous officials, not from the ruler himself. Having refused to join the defense of even the rump regime in Nanjing, the Jiading loyalists—who by then had very little except ideals to be loyal to—decided to go it alone, launching a suicidal revolt against the Manchu tonsure. In the inevitable debacle, Hou drowned himself, and Huang, resolving to follow the Ming in death, as a chaste widow follows her husband, chose suicide by hanging.43

Furthermore, just as a widow’s reputation for chastity was earned, not by serving her husband, but by denying herself, through suicide, to any other man, the supposed exemplars of Ming loyalism did not really die to serve the Ming state as much as they died to avoid serving the Qing (Manchu) state. As Joseph Levenson put it, “The seventeenth-century . . . ‘Ming remnants’ who refused to serve the [Qing] . . . were not chained to a dead emperor; they were keeping free of a living one.” The Ming loyalists died (or became recluses) for their own honor, which, according to Levenson, “counted more than the deprived sovereign’s (and the deceased sovereign’s) pressure.” The whole point was for the gentleman to avoid feeling like a mere henchman, or tool, of the emperor, which was, of course, exactly how



the Legalist state would treat him. “Confucian disapproval of the transfer of loyalty from a deposed dynasty to its successor,” Levenson wrote, “was a way of refurbishing, not destroying, the official’s self-image as end, not means—not vocationally educated, hence not professional, hence not bound.”44

Indeed, many Ming survivors were about as far from being tools as they could get. As Gu Yanwu himself observed of the Ming survivors in the south, “The remnants (yi min) conceive of schemes to gain hegemony. Roaming here and there they feel such melancholy”—at their failure to attain hegemony, presumably. Even when the survivors of the Restoration Society had a chance to keep the Ming going, at Nanjing, they insisted on dominating it, and when domination proved impossible, at least a few of them withdrew their support. A study by Frederic Wakeman Jr. has noted Liu Zongzhou’s “intransigent integrity” (jie yi), which would seem to recommend Liu as the Ming’s savior but disallow Liu’s becoming the Ming’s servant. As Wakeman writes,

Chen Zilong, Huang Zongxi, and other stoical fundamentalists believed that Liu’s presence would compel the Southern Ming court at Nanjing to reform its ways and devote itself to a program of recovering control over North China. Liu Zongzhou recognized that acceptance of a position in the loyalist government would have constituted an endorsement of its probity, thereby legitimizing its authority. Because he did not approve of the Nanjing court’s policies, the philosopher decided to withhold his personal approval, and he turned down the Hongguang Emperor’s invitation to become censor-in-chief.45

For Liu Zongzhou, therefore, reform and even legitimacy itself came from him. Both the Chongzhen emperor and the Hongguang emperor were Liu’s subjects, not his sovereigns. Failing to recognize him as such, they “squandered the sympathy of the gentry,” which loss of support Liu clearly equated with the loss of Heaven’s man-date. When Liu committed suicide after the fall of Nanjing, it was, in effect, as a defeated sovereign; it could not have been as a loyal official.

The truth is that Liu Zongyuan, as well as Ni Yuanlu, Chen Zilong, and the other “loyalists” were not following Chongzhen in death but upstaging him in it, usurping the very last sovereign pre-rogative he thought he had. Having vied with the emperors for the



right to rule the empire, China’s righteous gentlemen were not about to let Chongzhen take it with him to the grave. On the contrary, in ostentatious defiance of the surviving princes of the royal house, many gentlemen of the Restoration Society died gloriously for the Ming, assuming as much as Chongzhen had that the Ming was dying with them. In this way, the Ming dynasty was a long time dying indeed, because it died piecemeal with every one of its sovereigns. Some of them were throned. Some of them were throneless.


NOTES

Introduction: The Problem of Sovereignty in Traditional China

“Yan Chu shui Qi wang,” in 1. Zhan guo ce, reprinted in Xie Bingying, Qiu Xieyou, Zuo Songchao, Ying Yukang, Huang Junlang, and Fu Wuguang (eds.), Xinyi Guwen guanzhi (Taipei: Sanmin shuju, 1988), p. 170.Mizoguchi Yuzo (Suo Jieran and Gong Ying, trans.), 2. Zhongguo qian-jindai sixiang de yanbian (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1997), pp. 367–370. Emphasis by Mizoguchi.Herbert Fingarette, 3. Confucius: The Secular as Sacred (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1998); Fei Xiaotong, “Lun shi ru,” in Wu Han and Fei Xiaotong, Huangquan yu shenquan (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1988), pp. 23–39; Analects, 9/5, in Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom (eds.), Sources of Chinese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 53, and in Zhu Xi (comp.), Si shu jizhu (Xian: Sanqin chuban she, 1998), pp. 164–165; Charles O. Hucker, China’s Imperial Past (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), p. 78; Analects, 9/13, in de Bary and Bloom, p. 53, and in Zhu Xi, p. 169; Mencius I/A/7, in D.C. Lau (trans.), Mencius (New York: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 58, and in Zhu Xi, p. 318; Mencius, III/A/2–3, in Lau, pp. 96–97, 99, and in Zhu Xi, pp. 378, 380–381; Mencius, IV/A/20, in Lau, p. 126, and in Zhu Xi, p. 424.Hanfeizi4. , ch. 49, in de Bary and Bloom, pp. 200–201, and in Wang Xianshen (ed.), Hanfeizi jijie (Taipei: Taiwan Commercial Press, 1968), ch. 4, pp. 55–58; Karen Turner, “Sage Kings and Laws in the Chinese and Greek Traditions,” in Paul S. Ropp (ed.), Heritage of China: Contemporary Perspectives on Chinese Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), esp. p. 100; Karen Turner, “Rule of Law Ideals in Early China?” Journal of Chinese Law 6.1 (Spring, 1992), esp. p. 18; Yongping Liu, Origins of Chinese Law: Penal and Administrative Law in Its Early Development (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 173–200; Shang Jun shu, 4/17, in Yan Wanli (ed.), Shang Jun shu (Taipei: Taiwan Commercial Press, 1968), pp. 29–31; Hanfeizi, ch. 7, in Wang Xianshen, ch. 1, pp. 26–28; Benjamin


166 Notes

I. Schwartz, The World of Thought in Ancient China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), pp. 328–332; Shang Jun shu, 4/17, in Liu, Origins of Chinese Law, p. 194, and in Yan Wanli, p. 30; Kung-chuan Hsiao (F.W. Mote, trans.), A History of Chinese Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), vol. 1, p. 346. Hsiao traces the equation of the monarch with the state to the philosopher Guan Zhong (fl. seventh century BCE), but Liu, Origins of Chinese Law, p. 182 claims that it was actually Shang and Han who deserve credit for this idea. H.G. Creel, Chinese Thought: From Confucius to Mao Tse-tung (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), also refers to Legalism as totalitarianism.For brief biographies of Shang Yang and Han Fei, see Hsiao, 5. pp. 371–374.Hucker, 6. China’s Imperial Past, p. 75; Mencius IV/A/6, in Lau, p. 120, and in Zhu Xi, p. 414.Shang Jun shu7. , 1/3, 5/25, in de Bary and Bloom, pp. 194, 198, and in Yan Wanli, pp. 5, 41.Hanfeizi8. , 49, in de Bary and Bloom, pp. 201–202, and in Wang Xianshen, ch. 44, pp. 58; Hanfeizi, 4, 11, in Wang Xianshen, ch. 1, pp. 16, 56; Derk Bodde, “The State and Empire of Ch’in,” in Denis Twitchett and John King Fairbank (eds.), The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), vol. 1, pp. 69–72.Turner, “The Rule of Law in Early China?” p. 29; Liu, 9. Origins of Chinese Law, pp. 185, 236–243; Vivienne Shue, The Reach of the State: Sketches of the Chinese Body Politic (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 82–84; Valerie Hansen, “The Creation of the Chinese Empire,” in Kevin Reilly (ed.), Worlds of History: A Comparative Reader (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2004), vol. 1, p. 149; Michael Loewe, “The Concept of Sovereignty,” in Denis Twitchett and John K. Fairbank (eds.), The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), vol. 1, pp. 731–743; Hsiao, pp. 484–503; Dong Zhongshu, Chunqiu fanlu, ch. 11, item 41, “Wei ren zhe tian,” and ch. 6, item 19, “Li yuan she,” in Ling Shu (ed.), Chunqiu fanlu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1991), pp. 175, 92, and in Hsiao, pp. 489, 499.David McMullen, 10. State and Scholars in T’ang China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), esp. p. 8; Howard J. Wechsler, Mirror to the Son of Heaven: Wei Cheng at the Court of T’ang T’ai-tsung (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 126–127, 131–132, 144, 147.Robert M. Hartwell, “Demographic, Political, and Social 11. Transformations of China, 750–1550,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 42.2 (December, 1982), esp. pp. 405–425; Conrad Schirokauer and Robert P. Hymes, “Introduction,” in Robert P. Hymes and


Notes 167

Conrad Schirokauer (eds.), Ordering the World: Approaches to State and Society in Sung Dynasty China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 1–5, 12–31.Robert P. Hymes, 12. Statesmen and Gentlemen: The Elite of Fu-chou, Chiang-hsi, in Northern and Southern Sung (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).Jaret Wayne Weisfogel, “Confucians, the 13. Shih Class, and the Ming Imperium: Uses of Canonical and Dynastic Authority in Kuan Chi-tao’s (1536–1608) Proposals for Following the Men of Former Times to Safeguard Customs (Ts’ung-hsien wei-su I)” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2002), pp. 171–172; Zhu Xi, “Daxue zhangju xu,” in de Bary and Bloom, pp. 722–724, and in Zhu Xi, pp. 1–2; Peter K. Bol, “Neo-Confucianism and Local Society,” in Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn (eds.), The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 246–249.Herbert Franke, “Chia Ssu-tao (1213–1275): A ‘Bad Last Minister’?” in 14. Arthur F. Wright and Denis Twitchett (eds.), Confucian Personalities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960), pp. 229–231; Paul Jakov Smith, “Impressions of the Song-Yuan-Ming Transition: The Evidence from Biji Memoirs,” in Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn (eds.), The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 87–88.John W. Dardess, “Did the Mongols Matter?” in Paul Jakov Smith 15. and Richard von Glahn (eds.), The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), pp. 129–131.Smith, “Impressions of the Song-Yuan-Ming Transition,” pp. 89–94; 16. Dardess, “Did the Mongols Matter?” pp. 131–133; John W. Dardess, Confucianism and Autocracy: Professional Elites in the Founding of the Ming Dynasty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), esp. pp. 13, 19, 85, 104, 151–155, 175.Edward L. Farmer, 17. Zhu Yuanzhang and Early Ming Legislation: The Reordering of Chinese Society Following the Era of Mongol Rule (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), pp. 40–41, 46–47; Edward L. Dreyer, Early Ming China: A Political History, 1355–1435 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), pp. 68–70, 100–106, 140–156; John D. Langlois Jr. “The Hung-wu Reign, 1368–1398,” in Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett (eds.), The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), vol. 7, esp. pp. 107, 135–136, 150, 154–157. Ku Chieh-Kang (L. Carrington Goodrich, trans.), “A Study of Literary Persecution during the Ming,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 3.3/4 (December, 1938), pp. 254–311, recounts how Zhu Yuanzhang executed many Confucian scholars in the paranoid belief that they were mocking him in their writings, although Hok-lam


168 Notes

Chan, “Ming T’ai-tsu’s Manipulation of Letters: Myth and Reality of Literary Persecution,” Journal of Asian History 29.1 (1995), pp. 1–60, has dismissed such cases as based on hearsay. Even if the persecu-tion during Zhu’s reign was not a literary persecution, however, it was still quite severe, and in some cases very arbitrary (i.e., guilt by association was quite common).Hok-lam Chan, “The Chien-wen, Yung-lo, Hung-hsi, and Hsuan-de 18. Reigns,” in Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett (eds.), The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), vol. 7, pp. 186–189, 201–202, 206–207, 212–221; Dreyer, pp. 175; Farmer, pp. 62–63.Dreyer, pp. 98–99, 132–133, 173–174, 212–225; Chan, “The Chien-wen, 19. Yung-lo, Hung-hsi, and Hsuan-de Reigns,” pp. 218–221.Dreyer, p. 244; Ho Ping-ti, 20. The Ladder of Success in Imperial China: Aspects of Social Mobility, 1368–1911 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), pp. 26–35.Ho, 21. The Ladder of Success, pp. 36–41; Chang Chung-li, The Chinese Gentry: Studies in Their Role in Nineteenth-Century Chinese Society (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1970), p. 7; Frederic Wakeman Jr. The Fall of Imperial China (New York: Free Press, 1977), pp. 22–23; Chen Baoliang, Mingdai ruxue shengyuan yu difang shehui (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 2005), p. 2. Also advocating the inclusion of shengyuan in the gentry is Gao Shouxian, “Wan Ming de difang jingying yu xiangcun kongzhi,” in Wan Ming (ed.), Wan Ming shehui bianqian: wenti yu yanjiu (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2005), p. 262.Martin Heijdra, “The Socio-Economic Development of Rural China 22. during the Ming,” in Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote (eds.), The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. 8, pp. 552–554; Timothy Brook, Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late-Ming China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. xiv; Hilary J. Beattie, Land and Lineage in China: A Study of T’ung-ch’eng County, Anhwei, in the Ming and Ch’ing Dynasties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 1–21.Ho, 23. The Ladder of Success, pp. 172–190; Chen Baoliang, pp. 199–216, 269–273, 297–357. See also Roger V. Des Forges, Cultural Centrality and Political Change in Chinese History: Northeast Henan in the Fall of the Ming (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 127–128.Heijdra, pp. 554–555, 560–564; Chen Baoliang, pp. 422–424; Liang 24. Fang-chung, The Single-Whip Method of Taxation in China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970), pp. 12–13; Gao Shouxian, pp. 256–259.Ray Huang, “The Ming Fiscal Administration,” in Denis Twitchett 25. and Frederick W. Mote (eds.), The Cambridge History of China


Notes 169

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. 8, pp. 109–112; Joseph R. Levenson and Franz Schurmann, China: An Interpretive History; From the Beginnings to the Fall of the Han (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 92–94; Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, vol. 2, The Problem of Monarchial Decay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 28; John King Fairbank, Edwin O. Reischauer, and Albert M. Craig, East Asia: Tradition and Transformation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1989), pp. 72–73; Conrad Schirokauer and Donald N. Clark, Modern East Asia: A Brief History (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth/Thomsen Learning, 2004), pp. 23–24.Levenson, 26. Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, vol. 2, pp. 30, 33; Levenson and Schurmann, pp. 94–95; Shue, p. 87.F.W. Mote, 27. Imperial China, 900–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 743–769; Timothy Brook, “Communications and Commerce,” in Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote (eds.), The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. 8, pp. 675–676; Huang, “The Ming Fiscal Administration,” p. 111; Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 80, 139–152, 201, 210–215, 253; Cynthia J. Brokaw, The Ledgers of Merit and Demerit: Social Change and Moral Order in Late Imperial China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 5–6; Xu Min, “Shangye yu shehui bianqian,” in Wan Ming (ed.), Wan Ming shehui bianqian: wenti yu yanjiu (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2005), pp. 138–142; William Shakespeare, Richard III, I.iii (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 20; Cynthia Brokaw, “Yuan Huang (1533–1606) and The Ledgers of Merit and Demerit,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 47.1 ( June, 1987), esp. pp. 152, 156, 166, 171, 176, 186–191. For different approaches to Brook’s and Brokaw’s themes, see also Kenneth J. Hammond, “The Decadent Chalice: A Critique of Late Ming Political Culture,” Ming Studies 39 (1998), pp. 32–49; and John Meskill, Gentlemanly Interests and Wealth on the Yangtze Delta (Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies, 1994), esp. pp. 141–155.Heijdra, pp. 556–557; Mori Masao, “The Gentry in the Ming: An 28. Outline of the Relations between the Shih-ta-fu and Local Society,” Acta Asiatica 38 (1980), pp. 45–47.See also Des Forges, p. 111.29. Heijdra, pp. 558–559, and fn. 450; Wu Han, “Lun shenquan” and 30. “Lun shidafu,” in Wu Han and Fei Xiaotong, Huangquan yu shenquan (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1988), pp. 49–50, 66–70.Heijdra, p. 558; Brokaw, “Yuan Huang,” p. 174; Brokaw, 31. Ledgers, pp. 110–156; Brook, Praying for Power, pp. 215–223.Heijdra, pp. 574–575; Wei Qingyuan, 32. Zhang Juzheng he Mingdai zhonghouqi zhengju (Guangzhou: Gaodeng jiaoyu chubanshe, 1999),


170 Notes

pp. 618–623; Chaoying Fang, “Hai Jui,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 476–477.Chaoying Fang, “Hai Jui,” pp. 476–477; Chaoying and Lienche Tu 33. Fang, “Hsu Chieh,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 574–575; Ray Huang, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 130–155; Meskill, pp. 121–132.Heijdra, pp. 575–576; Meskill, pp. 109–119.34. Wei Qingyuan, 35. Zhang Juzheng, pp. 8–12, 269–280; Meskill, pp. 132–133; Chaoying and Lienche Tu Fang, “Hsu Chieh,” p. 575. For an earlier case of jiangxue, see Willard Peterson, “Confucian Learning in Late Ming Thought,” in Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote (eds.), The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. 8, pp. 730–731.Robert Crawford, “Chang Chu-cheng’s Confucian Legalism,” in 36. Wm. Theodore de Bary and the Conference on Ming Thought (eds.), Self and Society in Ming Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), esp. pp. 369, 372–374, 393–404; Robert Crawford and L. Carrington Goodrich, “Chang Chu-cheng,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 53–54; Wei Qingyuan, Zhang Juzheng, pp. 31–46.Robert Crawford, “Chang Chu-cheng’s Confucian Legalism,” 37. pp. 368–369; Huang, 1587, p. 207.Wei Qingyuan, 38. Zhang Juzheng, pp. 336, 343, 348–349; Crawford and Goodrich, “Chang Chu-cheng,” p. 55.Zhang Juzheng, “Da Liang Guang Yin Shiding lun ping Gutian shi,” 39. Zhang Juzheng ji, ch. 16, reprinted in Zhang Juzheng, Zhang Juzheng ji (Hubei: Jingchu shushe, 1987), vol. 2, p. 203. This letter is also paraphrased in Wei Qingyuan, Zhang Juzheng, pp. 349–350, where it is said to be in ch. 23 of Zhang Taiyue ji.Zhang Juzheng, “Da Wang Jianchuan ji gongshi lihai,” 40. Zhang Juzheng ji, ch. 15, reprinted in Zhang Juzheng, Zhang Juzheng ji, vol. 2, p. 185. This letter is also paraphrased in Wei Qingyuan, Zhang Juzheng, p. 383, where it is said to be in ch. 22 of Zhang Taiyue ji.Zhang Juzheng, “Da Guanzhong xianshi Li Yihe shu shizheng,” 41. Zhang Juzheng ji, ch. 16, reprinted in Zhang Juzheng, Zhang Juzheng ji, vol. 2, p. 224. This letter is also paraphrased in Wei Qingyuan, Zhang Juzheng, p. 413, where it is said to be in ch. 23 of Zhang Taiyue ji.Wei Qingyuan, 42. Zhang Juzheng, pp. 433–439. For Zhang’s role as Wanli’s guardian and instructor, see Huang, 1587, pp. 10–12, and for the formal titles associated with this role, see Zhu Dongrun, Zhang


Notes 171

Juzheng da zhuan (Taipei: Taiwan kaiming shudian, reprint of 1945 edition), pp. 401–402.

I Zhang Juzheng, 1572–1582 1. Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 68, reprinted in Tan Qian, Guo que (Beijing:

Zhonghua shuju, 1988), vol. 5, p. 4193. “Jiangling,” in “Jiangling bingzheng,” refers to Zhang’s ancestral home and hence to Zhang.

2. Wei Qingyuan, Zhang Juzheng he Mingdai zhonghouqi zhengju (Guangzhou: Gaodeng jiaoyu chubanshe, 1999), p. 79. The ten-dency to withdraw from government service is discussed in Timothy Brook, Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late-Ming China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 312–316, and Fei Xiaotong, “Lun shenshi,” in Wu Han and Fei Xiaotong, Huangquan yu shenquan (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1988), p. 8.

3. Edward L. Dreyer, Early Ming China: A Political History, 1355–1435 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), pp. 212–215, 222; Tan Tianxing, Mingdai neige zhengzhi (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1996), esp. pp. 35–41.

4. Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 68, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, p. 4197. 5. Wei Qingyuan, Zhang Juzheng, pp. 523, 918–920; Tan Qian, Guo

que, ch. 68, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, p. 4227; Zhang Juzheng, “Qing ji cha zhang zou sui shi kao cheng yi xiu shizheng shu,” Zhang Juzheng ji, ch. 3, reprinted in Zhang Juzheng, Zhang Juzheng ji (Hubei: Jingchu shushe, 1987), vol. 1, pp. 131–133; Zhu Dongrun, Zhang Juzheng dazhuan (Taipei: Taiwan kaiming shudian, reprint of 1945 edition), pp. 169–170.

6. Zhang Juzheng, “Da Yingtian xunfu Song Yangshan lun jun liang zu min,” Zhang Juzheng ji, ch. 19, reprinted in Zhang Juzheng, Zhang Juzheng ji, vol. 2, pp. 481–482. The Yingtian grand coordinator’s jurisdiction included the ten prefectures of Yingtian, Huizhou, Ningguo, Chizhou, Taiping, Anqing, Suzhou, Songjiang, Changzhou, and Zhenjiang, as well as overlapping military regions. See Wu Tingxie, Ming du fu nianbiao (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1982), vol. 2, p. 346.

7. Robert Crawford, “Chang Chu-cheng’s Confucian Legalism,” in Wm. Theodore de Bary and the Conference on Ming Thought (eds.), Self and Society in Ming Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), pp. 386–390.

8. Frederic Wakeman Jr., “Introduction,” in Frederic Wakeman Jr. and Carolyn Grant (eds.), Conflict and Control in Late Imperial China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), p. 4; Frederic Wakeman Jr., The Fall of Imperial China (New York: Free Press, 1977),


172 Notes

pp. 19–37; Wu Han, “Lun shenquan,” in Wu Han and Fei Xiaotong, Huangquan yu shenquan (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1988), pp. 49–51. See also Gao Shouxian, “Wan Ming de difang jingying yu xiangcun kongzhi,” in Wan Ming (ed.), Wan Ming shehui bianqian: wenti yu yanjiu (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2005), pp. 268–269.

9. Zhang Juzheng, “Da Yingtian xunfu Song Yangshan lun jun liang zu min,” Zhang Juzheng ji, ch. 19, reprinted in Zhang Juzheng, Zhang Juzheng ji, vol. 2, pp. 481–482.

10. Wei Qingyuan, Zhang Juzheng, pp. 297–298; Zhang Juzheng, “Da Yingtian xunfu Song Yangshan lun jun liang zu min,” Zhang Juzheng ji, ch. 19, reprinted in Zhang Juzheng, Zhang Juzheng ji, vol. 2, pp. 481–482. Crawford has described Zhang’s thought as “Confucian Legalism.” Zhang’s concern for dynastic health followed the “prag-matic” wing of Neo-Confucianism, of which Chen Liang (1143–1194) may be considered representative, but Chen and his pragmatism had been decisively cast out of so-called Cheng-Zhu Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, named for Cheng Hao (1032–1086), Cheng Yi (1033–1107), and Zhu Xi. See Crawford, “Chang Chu-cheng’s Confucian Legalism,” pp. 393–399; Hoyt Cleveland Tillman, Confucian Discourse and Chu Hsi’s Ascendancy (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1992), pp. 7, 154–186, esp. pp. 154–155, 163–164.

11. Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 69, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, p. 4267; Zhang Juzheng, “Qing shen jiu zhang shi xuezheng yi zhenxing rencai shu,” Zhang Juzheng ji, ch. 4, reprinted in Zhang Juzheng, Zhang Juzheng ji, vol. 1, pp. 172–177.

12. Wang Wenlu, Bailing Xueshan (reprint of Longqing ed.), “Shu du, ch. 1,” p. 6a, “Ce shu, ch. 3, Yan ke,” pp. 9b–11b, “Ce shu, ch. 3, Jun yi,” p. 6a; Gu Yanwu, Tinglin wenji, ch. 1, “Shengyuan lun, shang” (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959), pp. 22–23.

13. Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 69, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, pp. 4267–4268.14. Zhang Juzheng, “Qing shen jiu zhang shi xuezheng yi zhenxing rencai

shu,” Zhang Juzheng ji, ch. 4, reprinted in Zhang Juzheng, Zhang Juzheng ji, vol. 1, pp. 172–177; Jaret Wayne Weisfogel, “Confucians, the Shih Class, and the Ming Imperium: Uses of Canonical and Dynastic Authority in Kuan Chi-tao’s (1536–1608) Proposals for Following the Men of Former Times to Safeguard Customs (Ts’ung-hsien wei-su I)” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 2002), pp. 286–287.

15. Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 69, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, pp. 4295; Zhang Juzheng, “Qing ze yousi juan bufu yi an minsheng shu,” Zhang Juzheng ji, ch. 5, reprinted in Zhang Juzheng, Zhang Juzheng ji, vol. 1, pp. 214–215.

16. Zhang Juzheng, “Da Yingtian xunfu Song Yangshan,” Zhang Juzheng ji, ch. 21, reprinted in Zhang Juzheng, Zhang Juzheng ji, vol. 2, pp. 575–576. Zhang’s habit of using private letters to coach underlings on how to write official documents is discussed in Ray Huang, 1587,


Notes 173

A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 64.

17. Zhang Juzheng, “Da Yingtian xunfu lun da zheng da dian,” Zhang Juzheng ji, ch. 21, reprinted in Zhang Juzheng, Zhang Juzheng ji, vol. 2, pp. 594–595. Fan Jinmin, “Ming Qing Jiangnan zhong fu wenti shulun,” Zhongguo jingji shi yanjiu 3 (1996), p. 110, shows that, by late Ming, Jiangnan, which occupied 7% of the empire’s land, was paying 21% of the empire’s taxes. Ho Ping-ti, The Ladder of Success in Imperial China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962), pp. 226–233, shows the prominence of southerners among the elite.

18. Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 69, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, p. 4300.19. Wang Yinglin and Wang Qiao, (Wanli) Zhenjiang fu zhi (1596), ch. 5,

p. 22b.20. Hu Zhi, “Daliqing Song Huayang xiansheng xingzhuang,” Heng lu xu

gao, ch. 6, p. 8b, reprinted in Si ku quan shu (Taipei: Taiwan Commercial Press, 1986), vol. 1287, p. 727; Ming shi lie zhuan, ch. 81, reprinted in Xu Qianxue, Ming shi lie zhuan (Taipei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 1970), p. 3879.

21. Zhang Juzheng, “Da Yingtian xunfu Hu Yazhai yan yanzhi wei shanai,” Zhang Juzheng ji, ch. 22, reprinted in Zhang Juzheng, Zhang Juzheng ji, vol. 2, p. 692; Crawford, “Chang Chu-cheng’s Confucian Legalism,” pp. 386–390; Hanfeizi, ch. 50, in Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom (eds.), Sources of Chinese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 206, and in Wang Xianshen (ed.), Hanfeizi jijie (Taipei: Taiwan Commercial Press, 1968), ch. 4, p. 68.

22. Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 70, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, p. 4320; Wei Qingyuan, Zhang Juzheng, pp. 794–799; F.W. Mote, Imperial China, 900–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 732; Ray Huang, 1587, pp. 21–26.

23. Wei Qingyuan, Zhang Juzheng, pp. 800–803; Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 70, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, p. 4320.

24. Wei Qingyuan, Zhang Juzheng, pp. 803–807.25. Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 70, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, p. 4323.26. Liu Gao et al. (eds.), Danyang xian zhi (Qing Guangxu ed.), ch. 3,

pp. 3a–4b; Martin Heijdra, “The Socio-economic Development of Rural China during the Ming,” in Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote (eds.), The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. 8, pp. 564–567.

27. Sui Yu, “Shen jin qin tian Lian Hu bei ji,” in Liu Gao et al. (eds.), Danyang xian zhi, ch. 32, pp. 45a–46b; “Qian dai Changshou xian chongjun Sanzhang Pu ji” and “Chen Yunsheng Wu Song jiang gongcheng bei ji,” in Zhang Guowei (ed.), Wu zhong shuili quanshu, ch. 25, pp. 91b–93b and 88b–91b, reprinted in Si ku quan shu (Taipei: Taiwan Commercial Press, 1986), vol. 578, pp. 954–956; Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 70, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, p. 4314.


174 Notes

28. Zhang Juzheng, “Da hecao anyuan Lin Yunyuan yan wei shi ren yuan,” Zhang Juzheng ji, ch. 23, reprinted in Zhang Juzheng, Zhang Juzheng ji, vol. 2, p. 737; “Qing ze yousi juan bufu yi an minsheng shu,” Zhang Juzheng ji, ch. 5, reprinted in Zhang Juzheng, Zhang Juzheng ji, vol. 1, p. 215.

29. Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 70, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, p. 4327; Wei Qingyuan, Zhang Juzheng, pp. 604–607.

30. Guo Houan (ed.), Ming shilu jingji xiliao xuanbian (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1989), p. 965.

31. Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 70, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, p. 4346; Zhang Juzheng, “Kan xiang hubu jin cheng jie tie shu,” Zhang Juzheng ji, ch. 8, reprinted in Zhang Juzheng, Zhang Juzheng ji, vol. 1, pp. 385–386.

32. Lin Li-yueh, “Du Mingshi jishii benmo: Jiangling bingzheng; jian lun Ming mo Qing chu ji zhong Zhang Juzheng zhuan zhong de shilun,” Guoli Taiwan Shifan Daxue lishi xuebao 24 ( June, 1996), p. 59; Ray Huang, “The Ming Fiscal Administration,” in Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote (eds.), The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. 8, pp. 133–134; Wei Qingyuan, Zhang Juzheng, p. 600.

33. Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 70, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, p. 4330; Zhang Juzheng, “Da Yingtian xunfu Hu Yazhai,” Zhang Juzheng ji, ch. 24, reprinted in Zhang Juzheng, Zhang Juzheng ji, vol. 2, p. 847.

34. Zhang Juzheng, “Da Yingtian xunfu Hu Yazhai,” Zhang Juzheng ji, ch. 24, reprinted in Zhang Juzheng, Zhang Juzheng ji, vol. 2, p. 859.

35. Wei Qingyuan, Zhang Juzheng, pp. 598–599.36. Jiao Hong, “Zhang liang,” Jiao shi bi cheng xu ji, ch. 3, p. 18b, reprinted

in Jinling congshu (Taipei: Li xing shuju, 1970), vol. 12, p. 6486; Roger V. Des Forges, Cultural Centrality and Political Change in Chinese History: Northeast Henan in the Fall of the Ming (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 29–31; Zhu Xuan and Zhou Ji, Qi xian zhi, ch. 9, p. 6a, ch. 21, pp. 11a–13a (Taipei: Chengwen chubanshe, 1976), pp. 515, 1363–1367. Jiao referred to Duan by his zi, or style name, which was Shao.

37. Fang Yang, “Zhangtian gao chenghuang wen,” Fang Chu-an xiansheng ji (1612 ed.), ch. 8, pp. 20b–21b.

38. Fang Yang, “Zhangliang fanli,” Fang Chu-an xiansheng ji, ch. 16, pp. 36a–41b.

39. Xie Guozhen, Mingdai shehui jingji shiliao xuanbian (Fuzhou: Fujian renmin chubanshe, 1980), vol. 3, p. 145.

40. Wei Qingyuan, Zhang Juzheng, pp. 600–601.41. Zhang Haiying, Zhang Juzheng gaige yu Shanxi Wanli qingzhang yanjiu

(Taiyuan: Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 1993), pp. 210, 218–219.42. Xie Guozhen, Mingdai shehui jingji shiliao xuanbian, vol. 3, p. 190.43. Xie Guozhen, Mingdai shehui jingji shiliao xuanbian, vol. 3, pp. 187–188.

Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in


Notes 175

Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 16, lists a Li Yue (with the above-mentioned dates), but the present writer has heard Mr. Li’s two-character name pronounced as Li Le as well.

44. Heijdra, pp. 447–449; Hilary J. Beattie, Land and Lineage in China: A Study of T’ung-Ch’eng County, Anhwei, in the Ming and Ch’ing Dynasties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 62–63.

45. Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 71, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, pp. 4394; Long Wenbin (ed.), Ming hui yao, ch. 513 (Taipei: Shijie shuju, 1960), pp. 984–986; Ping-ti Ho, Studies on the Population of China, 1368–1953 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959), pp. 101–135.

46. Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 71, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, pp. 4403; Zhang Juzheng, “Qing juan ji bu yi an minsheng shu,” Zhang Juzheng ji, ch. 11, reprinted in Zhang Juzheng, Zhang Juzheng ji, vol. 1, pp. 471–472.

47. Heinrich Busch, “Ku Hsien-ch’eng,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 745; Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 71, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, pp. 4406, 4412–4414.

48. Mizoguchi Yuzo (Suo Jieran and Gong Ying, trans.), Zhongguo qianjindai sixiang de yanbian (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1997), p. 371; Edward Kelley, “Miao Ch’ang-ch’i,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 1067.

II The Righteous Circles, 1582–1596 1. Ray Huang, “The Lung-Ch’ing and Wan-li Reigns,” in Denis Twitchett

and Frederick W. Mote (eds.), The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. 7, pp. 534–535.

2. Heinrich Busch, “Ku Hsien-cheng,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 736–737; Zhao Yuan, Ming Qing zhi ji shidafu yanjiu (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 2000), pp. 209–212.

3. Ray Huang, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 32–41; Fan Shuzhi, Wanli zhuan (Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshu guan, 1996), pp. 181–185, 189–192, 208–210; Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 71, reprinted in Tan Qian, Guo que (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1988), vol. 5, pp. 4426–4427.

4. Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 71, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, pp. 4427, 4429, 4433; J.F. Millinger and Chaoying Fang, “Ch’i Chi-kuang,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 220–224; Ray Huang, 1587, pp. 156–188.


176 Notes

5. Tan Tianxing, Mingdai neige zhengzhi (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1996), esp. pp. 35–41; Lynn A. Struve, The Southern Ming, 1644–1662 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), pp. 8–9.

6. Busch, “Ku Hsien-cheng,” pp. 736–737; Gu Xiancheng, “Shang Pingweng Xu xiangguo xiansheng shu,” Jinggao cang gao, ch. 2, pp. 6b–9a, reprinted in Siku quanshu (Taipei: Taiwan Commercial Press, 1986), vol. 1292, pp. 14–16; Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 72, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, pp. 4439–4440; Gu Zhenguan (comp.), Gu Duanwen gong nianpu, ch. shang, pp. 11b–12a, in Gu Duanwen gong yishu (Qing Guangxu ed.).

7. Joseph R. Levenson, Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, vol. 2, The Problem of Monarchial Decay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 72; Timothy Brook, Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late-Ming China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 21–22.

8. Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 72, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, p. 4441; Chou Tao-chi and Lienche Tu Fang, “Chang Ssu-wei,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 105.

9. Gu Zhenguan, ch. shang, p. 12a; Tsuen-hsuin Tsien, “An Kuo,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 9–12; Zhao Yongliang and Xu Zhijun, “Mingdai Wuxi shehui jingji chutan: du Huang Yin, ‘Xi jin shi xiaolu,’ ” in Mingshi yanjiu luncong ( Jiangsu: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1991), vol. 4, pp. 253–254; Ono Kazuko, Minki tosha ko: Torinto to Fukusha (Kyoto: Donhosha shuppan, 1995), appendix, p. 27.

10. Xia Weizhong, “Guanyu Donglindang de ji dian sikao,” Nanjing daxue xuebao (zhexue, renwen, shehui kexue) 2 (1997), p. 168; Hilary J. Beattie, Land and Lineage in China: A Study of T’ung-Ch’eng County, Anhwei, in the Ming and Ch’ing Dynasties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 13; Busch, “Ku Hsien-ch’eng,” p. 736; Zhang Anqi and Bu Jinzhi, Gu Xiancheng, Gao Panlong pingzhuan (Nanjing: Nanjing daxue chubanshe, 1998), pp. 59–61.

11. Martin Heijdra, “The Socio-Economic Development of Rural China during the Ming,” in Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote (eds.), The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. 8, pp. 556–557; Gu Zhenguan, ch. shang, pp. 12b–15a; Willard Peterson, “Confucian Learning in Late Ming Thought,” in Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote (eds.), The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. 8, pp. 755; Busch, “Ku Hsien-ch’eng,” p. 736; Zhang Jingxiu, “Zhang Wenzhong gong xingshi,” in Zhang Juzheng, Zhang Juzheng ji (Hubei: Jingchu shushe, 1987), vol. 4, p. 411.


Notes 177

12. Ming (Shenzong) shilu, ch. 146 (Nanjing: Jiangsu guoxue tushuguan, 1930), pp. 3a–3b, 7a.

13. Tan Qian, Guo que, chs. 71, 72, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, pp. 4426, 4470; Ono Kazuko, Minki tosha ko, appendix, p. 31; Ming (Shenzong) shilu, ch. 147, p. 4a.

14. Chou Tao-chi, “Shen Shih-hsing,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 1188; Ming (Shenzong) shilu, ch. 147, pp. 6b–8a; Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 72, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, p. 4471; Ono Kazuko, Minki tosha ko, appendix, p. 37; Ming shi, ch. 231 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974), pp. 6037–6039; Mizoguchi Yuzo (Suo Jieran and Gong Ying, trans.), Zhongguo qianjindai sixiang de yanbian (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1997), pp. 372–373, 75.

15. Liao Xinyi, “Lue lun Mingchao houqi Jiaxing fu zhengtian,” in Mingshi yanjiu luncong ( Jiangsu: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1991), vol. 5, pp. 125–134; Heijdra, p. 571.

16. Chaoying Fang, “Cheng Kuei-fei,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 209; Gu Zhenguan, ch. shang, p. 15b; Huang, 1587, pp. 5, 35.

17. Busch, “Ku Hsien-cheng,” p. 737; Gu Zhenguan, ch. shang, pp. 16a–16b; Zhang Juzheng, “Da Shandong xunfu He Laishan yan jun tianlaing he lizhi,” Zhang Juzheng ji, ch. 216, reprinted in Zhang Juzheng, Zhang Juzheng ji (Hubei: Jingchu shushe, 1987), vol. 2, p. 1060; Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 74, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, p. 4550; Gu Xiancheng, “Du shi ji zhong gong chen dang jin di yi qie wu kenqi shengming te ci sheng na yi duan zhengben yi hui renxin shi shu,” Jing gao cang gao, ch. 1, pp. 1a–9a, reprinted in Siku quanshu, vol. 1292, pp. 2–6; Zhao Yuan, pp. 137–141.

18. Gu Zhenguan, ch. shang, p. 18a; Gu Xiancheng, “Kui xuan ji” and “You yue yan ji,” Jing gao cang gao, ch. 10, pp. 1a–6b, reprinted in Siku quanshu, vol. 1292, pp. 129–132; Busch, “Ku Hsien-ch’eng,” p. 738.

19. Gu Zhenguan, ch. shang, pp. 18b–19b.20. Chaoying Fang, “Shen Pang,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and

Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 1185–1187; Shen Bang, Wan shu za ji (Beijing: Beijing guji chubanshe, 1980), ch. 6, pp. 49–53, ch. 12, pp. 94–97, 101, ch. 13, pp. 106–108, ch. 15, pp. 144, 154–155. Shen’s Righteous credentials seem to be based on two criteria: According to Fang, “Shen Pang,” p. 1185, he ingratiated himself with Righteous Circles leader Zhao Nanxing in 1593; and in Shen Bang, ch. 20, p. 293, he criticized Zhang Juzheng, calling him unscrupulous and overbearing.

21. Huang, “Lung-Ch’ing and Wan-li Reigns,” pp. 534–536; Paul Jakov Smith, “Impressions of the Song-Yuan-Ming Transition: The


178 Notes

Evidence from Biji Memoirs,” in Paul Jakov Smith and Richard von Glahn (eds.), The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), p. 88. “Fiscalist,” from a previous version, replaces “aggrandizer,” in this cited text, with Smith’s permission.

22. Quan Hansheng and Li Longhua, “Ming zhongyehou taicang suiru yinliang de yanjiu” (A Study on the Annual Revenue of Silver Taels of the T’ai-ts’ang Vault after the Mid-Ming Period), Xianggang Zhongwen Daxue Zhongguo wenhua yanjiusuo xuebao (The Journal of the Institute of Chinese Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong) 5.1 (December, 1972), pp. 129–130; Quan Hansheng and Li Longhua, “Mingdai zhongyehou taicang suichu yinliang de yanjiu” (The Annual Expenditure of Silver Taels of the T’ai-ts’ang Vault after the Mid-Ming Period), Xianggang Zhongwen Daxue Zhongguo wenhua yanjiusuo xuebao (The Journal of the Institute of Chinese Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong) 6.1 (December, 1973), pp. 178–179.

23. Guo Houan (ed.), Ming shilu jingji ziliao xuanbian (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1989), pp. 966–969.

24. Quan Hansheng and Li Longhua, “Ming zhongyehou taicang suiru yinliang de yanjiu (A Study on the Annual Revenue of Silver Taels of the T’ai-ts’ang Vault after the Mid-Ming Period),” pp. 123–124; Fan Shuzhi, Wanli zhuan, pp. 122.

25. Guo Houan, p. 966; Mizoguchi, p. 374.26. Chaoying Fang and Toyoko Y. Chen, “Konishi Yukinaga,” in L.

Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 730; Fan Shuzhi, Wanli zhuan, p. 246.

27. Fan Shuzhi, Wanli zhuan, pp. 246–248; Fang and Chen, “Konishi Yukinaga,” p. 730; Min Dugi, “Li Ju-sung,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 832–834.

28. Busch, “Ku Hsien-ch’eng,” p. 738; Gu Zhenguan, ch. shang, p. 22a; Gu Xiancheng, “Jian zhu zhongdian guoben youguan bu yi you dai kenqi sheng ming zao ci zhen duan yi xin chengming yi wei yuq-ing shi shu,” Jing gao cang gao, ch. 1, pp. 9a–13b, reprinted in in Siku quanshu, vol. 1292, pp. 6–8; “Shang Loujiang Wang xianggong shu,” Jing gao cang gao, ch. 2, pp. 14b–16b, reprinted in Siku quanshu, vol. 1292, pp. 18–19; Chaoying Fang, “Cheng Kui-fei,” p. 209; Charles O. Hucker, “Chu I-chun,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1386–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 331; Huang, 1587, pp. 83–88; F.W. Mote, Imperial China, 900–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 663–668, 735.


Notes 179

29. Busch, “Ku Hsien-ch’eng,” pp. 738–739; Chaoying Fang and Lee Hwa-chou, “Chao Nan-hsing,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 128–129; Wang Lihua, Mingdai Wang Xijue yanjiu (Master’s Thesis: Zhongguo wenhua daxue [Taipei], 1984), p. 217; Gu Xiancheng, “Zhi yi an yu fen shi shu,” and “Wen ming ti zhong zican dumian gongchen yukun yi qi sheng duan shi shu,” Jing gao cang gao, ch. 1, pp. 14a–17a, reprinted in Siku quan-shu, vol. 1292, pp. 9–10; Gu Zhenguan, ch. shang, p. 23b; Chaoying Fang, “Shen Pang,” p. 1185; Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom (eds.), Sources of Chinese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), pp. 595–596; Ari Daniel Levine, “Faction Theory and the Political Imagination of the Northern Song,” Asia Major (Third Series) 18.2 (2005), esp. pp. 175–178.

30. Gu Zhenguan, ch. shang, pp. 23b–24a.31. Zhang Xianbo, “Donglin dang, Fu she yu wan Ming zhengzhi,” in

Wan Ming (ed.), Wan Ming shehui bianqian: wenti yu yanjiu (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2005), pp. 483–485; Zhang Anqi and Bu Jinzhi, ch. 4; He Zongmei, Ming mo Qing chu wenren jieshe yanjiu (Tianjin: Nankai daxue chubanshe, 2004), p. 91, incl. fn. 1.

32. Cited in Zhang Xianbo, p. 486.33. Fei Xiaotong, “Lun ‘zhishi fenzi,’ ” “Lun shiru,” and Wu Han, “Lun

shen quan,” “Zai lun shen quan,” “Lun shidafu,” in Wu Han and Fei Xiaotong, Huangquan yu shenquan (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chuban-she, 1988), pp. 16, 24–33, 48–49, 63–70.

34. Zhao Yuan, p. 127.35. Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English-Speaking Peoples, vol.

1, The Birth of Britain (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1956), pp. 254–257; Zhao Yuan, pp. 129–130; Mencius, III/A/3, in Zhu Xi (comp.), Si shu jizhu (Xian: Sanqin chuban she, 1998), pp. 380–381, and see D.C. Lau (trans.), Mencius (New York: Penguin Books, 1970), p. 99. Mencius’s sentiments are used as a point of departure in Joseph W. Esherick and Mary Backus Rankin (eds.), Chinese Local Elites and Patterns of Dominance (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), which includes an overview of gentry studies and pertinent case studies.

36. Busch, “Ku Hsien-ch’eng,” pp. 739–740; Gu Zhenguan, ch. shang, pp. 23b–24a; Heinrich Busch, “The Tung-lin Academy and Its Political and Philosophical Significance,” Monumenta Serica 14 (1949–1955), p. 26; Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 76, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, pp. 4729–4730; Ming (Shenzong) shilu, ch. 273, pp. 5a–7b.

37. Busch, “Ku Hsien-ch’eng,” p. 740; Gu Zhenguan, ch. shang, pp. 26a–27b.38. Mencius, II/A/2, in Zhu Xi, p. 346.39. Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 76, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, pp. 4733–4734,

4739–4740, 4745, 4770.


180 Notes

III The Wanli Emperor, 1596–16061. Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 77, reprinted in Tan Qian, Guo que (Beijing:

Zhonghua shuju, 1988), vol. 5, pp. 4777–4779; Xia Xie, Ming tongjian, ch. 71, Wanli 24, item 13 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1980), vol. 7, p. 2766; Huang Yunmei, Mingshi kaozheng (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1979), p. 208.

2. Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 77, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, pp. 4777–4778.3. Thomas G. Nimick, “Ch’i Chi-kuang and I-wu County,” Ming Studies

34 ( July, 1995), pp. 18–19; Wanli qiju zhu, Wanli 22/1/20 (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1988), vol. 4, p. 554; Fan Shuzhi, Wanli zhuan (Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshu guan, 1996), pp. 409–410; Charles O. Hucker, China’s Imperial Past: An Introduction to Chinese History and Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 54, 322; Timothy Brook, The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), pp. 81–82.

4. Fan Shuzhi, Wanli zhuan, p. 412; Liang Fangzhong, “Mingdai yinkuang kao,” Zhongguo shehui jingji shi jikan 6.1 ( June, 1939), pp. 68–76; Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 77, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, p. 4778; Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 269; Enrique Tandeter, Coercion and Market: Silver Mining in Colonial Potosi, 1692–1826 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1993), p. 62.

5. Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 77, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, pp. 4780–4781; Mizoguchi Yuzo (Suo Jieran and Gong Ying, trans.), Zhongguo qianjindai sixiang de yanbian (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1997), p. 373.

6. Chaoying Fang and Toyoko Y. Chen, “Konishi Yukinaga,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 732.

7. Wen Bing, Dingling zhu lue (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1984), ch. 4, p. 2b; Gu Yingtai, Mingshi jishi benmo (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1994), ch. 65, p. 258.

8. Fan Shuzhi, Wanli zhuan, p. 408; Wen Bing, ch. 4, p. 3b. For portraits of Wanli as an inattentive emperor, see Ray Huang, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 75–78, and F.W. Mote, Imperial China: 900–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 734–735.

9. Guo Houan (ed.), Ming shilu jingji xiliao xuanbian (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1989), p. 573.

10. Gu Yingtai, ch. 65, p. 258; Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 78, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, p. 4830; Charles O. Hucker, “Chu I-chun,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of


Notes 181

Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 331.

11. Gu Yingtai, ch. 65, p. 258; Ulrich Mammitzsch, “Ch’en Feng,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 152; “Chubian jie yuan dao,” in Wang Yusheng (ed.), Ying shi ji lue (Wanli edition), p. 2a; Hok-lam Chan, “Wang Ao,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 1345–1346.

12. “Chubian jie yuandao,” in Wang Yusheng, pp. 2a–2b.13. Wang Chunyu and Du Wanyan (eds.), Mingdai huanguan yu jingji

shiliao chutan (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue chubanshe, 1986), pp. 358–359.

14. Wang Chunyu and Du Wanyan, pp. 85–86, 358–359; Mammitzsch, “Ch’en Feng,” pp. 152.

15. Influenced by Marxist class analysis, some studies, such as Bu Jinzhi and Zhang Anqi, Gu Xiancheng, Gao Panlong pingzhuan (Nanjing: Nanjing Daxue chubanshe, 1998), pp. 218–222, and Zhu Wenjie, Donglin dang shihua (Nanjing: Nanjing daxue chubanshe, 1998), pp. 40–41, have cast anti–mine tax rioters as an incipient bourgeoi-sie. Rioting in Suzhou by silk weavers in 1601, described in James Tong, Disorder Under Heaven: Collective Violence in the Ming Dynasty (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), pp. 162–163, Tsing Yuan, “Urban Riots and Disturbances,” in Jonathan D. Spence and John E. Wills Jr. (eds.), From Ming to Ch’ing: Conquest, Region, and Continuity in Seventeenth-century China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 287–290, and Richard von Glahn, “Municipal Reform and Urban Conflict in Late Ming Jiangnan,” The Journal of Asian Studies 50.2 (May, 1991), pp. 300–301, may indeed approximate this pattern. However, Tong, pp. 197–198, suggests that class analysis, while occasionally useful, is a bit anachronistic for Ming history, and the discussion in the present work will confine itself to Ming concepts.

16. “Ying shi ji lue xu,” “Chu bian jie yuan dao,” “Ying shi zonglun,” in Wang Yusheng, pp. ib–iia, 1a, 2b–3a; Wang Chunyu and Du Wanyan, pp. 358–359.

17. Wang Chunyu and Du Wanyan, pp. 349, 358–359; Martin Heijdra, “The Socio-economic Development of Rural China during the Ming,” in Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote (eds.), The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. 8, p. 557; Mori Masao, “The Gentry in the Ming: An Outline of the Relations between the Shih-ta-fu and Local Society,” Acta Asiatica 38 (1980), pp. 37, 47; Huang, 1587, p. 139; John Meskill, Gentlemanly Interests and Wealth on the Yangtze Delta (Ann Arbor: Association for


182 Notes

Asian Studies, 1994), p. 127; Chaoying Fang, “Tung Ch’i-ch’ang,” in Arthur W. Hummel (ed.), Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (Taipei: Ch’eng wen, 1970), p. 789; Zhang Huijian, Ming-Qing Jiangsu wenren nianbiao (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986), pp. 435–436; David Robinson, Bandits, Eunuchs, and the Son of Heaven: Rebellion and the Economy of Violence in Mid-Ming China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2001), pp. 50, 87; Meir Shahar, “Ming-Period Evidence of Shaolin Martial Practice,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 61.2 (December, 2001), p. 365; “Chu bian jie yuan dao,” in Wang Yusheng, p. 2a.

18. “Chu bian jie yuan dao,” in Wang Yusheng, p. 2a; Wang Chunyu and Du Wanyan, pp. 358–359.

19. Wang Chunyu and Du Wanyan, p. 360; Tsing Yuan, pp. 290–292.20. Heijdra, pp. 556–557.21. Wang Chunyu and Du Wanyan, pp. 113–114; Yang Chin-yi and

L. Carrington Goodrich, “Li Tai,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 869–871.

22. Wang Chunyu and Du Wanyan, p. 114.23. Ming shi, ch. 305 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974), pp. 7807–7808;

Wang Chunyu and Du Wanyan, p. 359; Mammitzsch, “Ch’en Feng,” p. 153.

24. Shih-shan Henry Tsai, The Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), p. 180; Ming shi, ch. 305, p. 7806; Wang Chunyu and Du Wanyan, pp. 331–332.

25. Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 78, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, p. 4837.26. Li Sancai, “Yi liu majia shu,” Fu Huai xiao cao (Wanli edition), ch. 1, p.

4a; “Yubao daoqing bing ting kuangshui shu,” in Fu Huai xiao cao, ch. 1, pp. 62a–73b.

27. Li Sancai, “Di yi tingba kuangshui shu,” Fu Huai xiao cao, ch. 3, pp. 42b–43a; Ming shi, ch. 232, p. 6062.

28. Li Sancai, “Di yi tingba kuangshui shu,” Fu Huai xiao cao, ch. 3, pp. 44b–47b; “Di er tingba kuangshui shu,” Fu Huai xiao cao, ch. 3, pp. 62a–65a.

29. Li Sancai, “Cha jie he dao qianliang shu,” Fu Huai xiao cao, ch. 5, pp. 25b–27a.

30. Li Sancai, “Wan jie jingku qianliang ge guan kai feng shu,” Fu Huai xiao cao, ch. 5, pp. 38b–39a; “Kao cha yousi guanyuan shu,” Fu Huai xiao cao, ch. 5, pp. 50a–65b.

31. Li Sancai, “Huizou guntu huantong kuangshui zhapian shu,” Fu Huai xiao cao, ch. 6, pp. 23a–64a; “Neishi bei nong wu ji shu,” Fu Huai xiao cao, ch. 8, pp. 70a–74b; “Jinzhi jia yi neijian cha shui you min,” Fu Huai xiao cao, ch. 13, pp. 1a–2a; “Anfu Shucheng Hefei er xian,” Fu Huai xiao cao, ch. pp. 16b–17b; “Yanjin jianmin zhi shui jie hai,” Fu


Notes 183

Huai xiao cao, ch. 14, pp. 17b–19a; “Anfu shuijian qinrao Huai Yang shangmin,” Fu Huai xiao cao, ch. 14, pp. 19a–21a.

32. Shen Defu, “Chen Zeng zhi si,” in Wanli ye huo bian, ch. 6 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959), pp. 175–176; Ming shi, ch. 305, p. 7806.

33. Gu Yingtai, ch. 65, p. 261.34. Quan Hansheng and Li Longhua, “Ming zhongyehou taicang suiru

yinliang de yanjiu” (A Study on the Annual Revenue of Silver Taels of the T’ai-ts’ang Vault after the Mid-Ming Period), Xianggang Zhongwen Daxue Zhongguo wenhua yanjiusuo xuebao (The Journal of the Institute of Chinese Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong) 5.1 (December, 1972), p. 130; Quan Hansheng and Li Longhua, “Mingdai zhongyehou taicang suichu yinliang de yanjiu” (The Annual Expenditure of Silver Taels of the T’ai-ts’ang Vault after the Mid-Ming Period), Xianggang Zhongwen Daxue Zhongguo wenhua yanjiusuo xuebao (The Journal of the Institute of Chinese Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong) 6.1 (December, 1973), p. 180.

35. Quan Hansheng and Li Longhua, “Mingdai zhongyehou taicang suichu yinliang de yanjiu” (The Annual Expenditure of Silver Taels of the T’ai-ts’ang Vault after the Mid-Ming Period), pp. 180–181; Wang Chunyu and Du Wanyan, pp. 48–49; Fan Shuzhi, Wanli zhuan, pp. 413–414.

36. Huang, 1587, pp. 89–90. See also Madeleine Zelin, The Magistrate’s Tael (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), pp. 25–71, for an assessment of similar conditions in the Qing dynasty.

37. Shen Defu, p. 176; Wang Chunyu and Du Wanyan, pp. 331–332.38. Mizoguchi, p. 361 (emphasis added).

IV The Donglin Faction, 1606–1626Gu Zhenguan (comp.), 1. Gu Duanwen gong nianpu, ch. shang, pp. 27a–27b, in Gu Duanwen gong yishu (Qing Guangxu ed.); Gu Xiancheng, Xiaoxinzhai zha ji, ch. 2, p. 1a, in Gu Duanwen gong yishu (Qing Guangxu ed.); Zhu Wenjie, Donglin dang shihua (Shanghai: Huadong shifan daxue chubanshe, 1989), pp. 72–73.Hou Wailu, Zhao Jibin, and Du Guoxiang (eds.), 2. Zhongguo sixiang tongshi (Beijing: Remin chubanshe, 1992), vol. 4, xia, p. 1103; Gao Tingzhen et al. (eds.), Donglin Shuyuan zhi (Taipei: Guangwen shuju ed.), ch. 3, pp. 6a–b.Gu Xiancheng, “Jian Wu Cheru guanglu,” 3. Jinggao cang gao, ch. 5, pp. 18b–19a, reprinted in Siku quanshu (Taipei: Taiwan Commercial Press, 1986), vol. 1292, p. 64; Martin Heijdra, “The Socio-Economic Development of Rural China during the Ming,” in Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote (eds.), The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. 8, pp. 558–559, and fn. 450.


184 Notes

Zhu Wenjie, p. 73; Gu Zhenguan, ch. xia, pp. 1a–2a.4. Gu Zhenguan, ch. xia, p. 3a; Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom 5. (eds.), Sources of Chinese Tradition (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 62.Gu Zhenguan, ch. xia, pp. 4a–7b; Zhu Wenjie, p. 75; Heinrich 6. Busch, “The Tung-lin Academy and its Political and Philosophical Significance,” Monumenta Serica, vol. 14 (1949–1955), pp. 27–31.Busch, “The Tung-lin Academy,” pp. 74–97; Gu Zhenguan, ch. xia, 7. pp. 8a-b; Gao Tingzhen, chs. 3–6, esp. ch. 3, pp. 6a–6b and ch. 4, pp. 1a–2bRay Huang, “The Lung-ch’ing and Wan-li Reigns, 1567–1620,” 8. in Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote (eds.), The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), vol. 7, p. 540.Timothy Brook, 9. Praying for Power: Buddhism and the Formation of Gentry Society in Late-Ming China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 23–29, 318–319; Ray Huang, 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 79–85; He Zongmei, Ming mo Qing chu wenren jieshe yanjiu (Tianjin: Nankai daxue chubanshe, 2004), pp. 156–157. Brook cites Jürgen Habermas (Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence, trans.), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).Brook, 10. Praying for Power, p. 27; Habermas, pp. 27–56.Frederic Wakeman Jr., “The Price of Autonomy: Intellectuals in 11. Ming and Ch’ing Politics,” Daedalus 101.2 (Spring, 1972), p. 54; Brook, Praying for Power, p. 27.Busch, “The Tung-lin Academy,” p. 30; Gu Zhenguan, ch. xia, p. 7b; 12. Gu Xiancheng, “Yu Chen Jianwei biejia shu,” Jinggao cang gao, ch. 5, pp. 3b–6a, reprinted in Siku quanshu, vol. 1292, pp. 56–58; Zhu Wenjie, pp. 83–84.Gu Zhenguan, ch. xia, p. 7b; Huang, “The Lung-ch’ing and Wan-li 13. Reigns,” p. 541.Hou Wailu, vol. 4, xia, p. 1103; Gu Xiancheng, “Jian Gao Jingyi,” 14. Jinggao cang gao, ch. 5, p. 50a, reprinted in Siku quanshu, vol. 1292, p. 80; Zhang Xianbo, “Donglin dang, Fu she yu wan Ming zhengzhi,” in Wan Ming (ed.), Wan Ming shehui bianqian: wenti yu yanjiu (Beijing: Shangwu yinshuguan, 2005), pp. 509–516; Busch, “The Tung-lin Academy,” pp. 49–50, 141–142, 151–155; Ming shi, ch. 231 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1974), p. 6032, ch. 233, p. 6074.Chou Tao-chi, “Shen I-Kuan,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and 15. Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 1181–1182; Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 80, reprinted in Tan Qian, Guo que (Beijing: Zhonghua


Notes 185

shuju, 1988), vol. 5, pp. 4958–4961; Ming shi, ch. 232, pp. 6064; Wu Yingji, “Donglin benmo,” in Wu Yingji et al., Donglin shimo (Taipei: Guangwen shuju, 1977), pp. 11–12; Busch, “The Tung-lin Academy,” pp. 51–54; Huang, “The Lung-ch’ing and Wan-li Reigns,” p. 541; Gu Xiancheng, “Wu yan,” and “Mei yan,” Jinggao cang gao, ch. 3, pp. 3a–9b, reprinted in Siku quanshu, vol. 1292, pp. 25–28.Gu Yingtai, 16. Mingshi jishi benmo (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1994), ch. 66, p. 264; Wen Bing, Dingling zhu lue (Beijing: Beijing daxue chubanshe, 1984), ch. 9, p. 1b; Zhu Wenjie, p. 93; Gu Xiancheng, “Jian Xiuwu Li Zongcao,” Jinggao cang gao, ch. 5, pp. 6a–6b, reprinted in Siku quanshu, vol. 1292, p. 58.Li Sancai, “Jinyue Taizhou shengyuan,” “Jin shengyuan zhutuo,” 17. Fu Huai xiaocao (Wanli edition), ch. 14, pp. 9b–12a; Busch, “The Tung-lin Academy,” esp. p. 86.Gu Zhenguan, ch. xia, p. 20b; Gu Xiancheng, “Yu Li caofu Xiuwu,” 18. Jinggao cang gao, ch. 5, pp. 34b–35b, reprinted in Siku quanshu, vol. 1292, p. 72.Shen Defu, “Er Li zhongcheng,” in 19. Wanli ye huo bian, ch. 22 (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1959), p. 561.Ming shi,20. ch. 232, pp. 6064–6065, 6067; Gu Yingtai, ch. 66, p. 264; E-tu Zen Sun, “Li San-ts’ai,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 849; Wen Bing, ch. 9, pp. 1a-b.Gu Yingtai, ch. 66, p. 264; Tan Qian, 21. Guo que, ch. 81, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, p. 5014; Lin Li-yueh, “Li Sancai yu Donglin dang,” Guoli Taiwan Shifan Daxue lishi xuebao, 9 (1981), p. 97.Hou Wailu, vol. 4, xia, p. 1103; Gu Xiancheng, “Yu Wu Rongan,” 22. Jinggao cang gao, ch. 5, pp. 27b–28b, reprinted in Siku quanshu, vol. 1292, pp. 68–69; Gu Yingtai, ch. 66, pp. 264–265; Ming shi, ch. 231, pp. 6032–6033; Lin Li-yueh, “Li Sancai,” p. 95.Ming shi,23. ch. 231, pp. 6032–6033; Gu Yingtai, ch. 66, p. 265; E-tu Zen Sun, p. 848Wu Han, “Mingdai de xin shihuan jieji shehui de zhengzhi de wenhua 24. de guanxi ji qi shenghuo,” in Mingshi yanjiu luncong ( Jiangsu: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1991), vol. 5, p. 56.Charles O. Hucker, “The Tung-lin Movement of the Late Ming 25. Period,” in John King Fairbank (ed.), Chinese Thought and Institutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), pp. 157–160; Tsuen-hsuin Tsien, “An Kuo,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 9–12; Busch, “The Tung-lin Academy,” pp. 50–51, 141–142, 151–152, 155.F.W. Mote, 26. Imperial China, 900–1800 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 765–769; Lin Li-yueh, “Donglin yundong


186 Notes

yu wan Ming jingji,” in Zhongguo shehui yu wenhua xueshu yantaohui (eds.), Wan Ming sichao yu shehui biandong (Taipei: Honghua wenhua shiye, Ltd., 1987), pp. 568–572; Hucker, “The Tung-lin Movement,” p. 158.Hucker, “The Tung-lin Movement,” pp. 160–161.27. Hucker, “The Tung-lin Movement,” p. 160; Kin Bunkyo, “Tang 28. Binyin to Minmatsu no shogyo shuppan,” in Arai Ken (ed.), Chuka bunjin no seikatsu (Tokyo: Heibonsha, 1994), pp. 352–355; Heinrich Busch, “Ku Hsien-ch’eng,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 742.Tang Binyin, “Zeng Xu hubu Rongman xu,” 29. Shui An gao (25 ch. prose ed., 1611?), ch. 7, pp. 10a–12b; Tang Binyin, “Wang zhongcheng Jin shaosi kong xu,” Shui An gao (prose), ch. 7, pp. 5b–8b; Lin Li-yueh, “Donglin yundong,” pp. 568–569, 571. For the approximate publication date of Tang’s collected works, see Kin, p. 349.Tang Binyin, “Dezheng lu xu,” 30. Shui An gao (prose), ch. 1, pp. 24a–25a;Tang Binyin, “Da zhongcheng Luquan Zhan xiansheng bashi shou 31. xu,” Shui An gao (prose), ch. 10, pp. 14a–17a.Tang Binyin, “Li Caofu xishang,” 32. Shui An gao (poetry, 36 ch., Wanli edition), ch. 2, p. 1b; “Da zhongcheng Luquan Zhan xiansheng bashi shou xu,” Shui An gao (prose), ch. 10, p. 14b.John Dardess, 33. Blood and History in China: The Donglin Faction and Its Repression, 1620–1627 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002), pp. 164–165.Lu Zhi, “Feng tian qing ba xuanlin/daying er ku,” “Qing jian Jingdong 34. shuiyun shou jiao jia yu yanbian zhouzhen chuxu junliang shi yi zhuang,” and “unjie fushui xu baixing liu tiao, qi liu lun jianbing zhi jia si lian zhongyu gongshui,” Lu Xuan gong quanji (Tang Binyin ed., 1628), ch. 14, pp. 3a, ch. 19, pp. 12a, and ch. 23, p. 31b.Gu Xiancheng, “Zi fan lu,” p. 1b, in 35. Gu Duanwen gong yishu; Gu Zhenguan, p. 34a.Zhu Wenjie, pp. 84–85; Busch, “The Tung-lin Academy,” pp. 58, 36. 121–133; Charles O. Hucker, “Kao P’an-lung,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 704; Gu Yingtai, ch. 66, p. 265.Liao Xinyi, “Lue lun Mingchao houqi Jiaxing fu zhengtian,” in 37. Mingshi yanjiu luncong ( Jiangsu: Jiangsu guji chubanshe, 1991), vol. 5, pp. 127–143.Liao Xinyi, pp. 127–128.38. Liao Xinyi, pp. 128–137; Julia Ching, “Wang Chi,” in L. Carrington 39. Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976, p. 1354.


Notes 187

Liao Xinyi, pp. 135, 137; Ono Kazuko, 40. Minki tosha ko: Torinto to Fukusha (Kyoto: Donhosha shuppan, 1995), appendix, pp. 27–43; George A. Kennedy, “Yang Lien,” in Arthur W. Hummel (ed.), Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (Taiepi: Ch’eng Wen, 1970), p. 893.Heijdra, pp. 556–557.41. Hilary J. Beattie, 42. Land and Lineage in China: A Study of T’ung-Ch’eng County, Anhwei, in the Ming and Ch’ing Dynasties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 30, 40–41, 67; Brook, Praying for Power, pp. 163, 262, 279–283, 308–309 (referring to the Qing dynasty), 316–319.Cynthia J. Brokaw, 43. The Ledgers of Merit and Demerit: Social Change and Moral Order in Late Imperial China (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), p. 153.Tan Qian, 44. Guo que, ch. 83, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, pp. 5115–5118; Charles O. Hucker, “Chu I-chun,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 336; Gu Yingtai, ch. 1, p. 355.Fan Shuzhi, 45. Wanli zhuan (Taipei: Taiwan shangwu yinshu guan, 1996), pp. 438–440.Zhu Wenjie, pp. 155–159; Jerry Dennerline, 46. The Chia-ting Loyalists: Confucian Leadership and Social Change in Seventeenth-Century China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 45.Tan Qian, 47. Guo que, ch. 83, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, pp. 5119–5126, 5146; Ray Huang, “The Ming Fiscal Administration,” in Denis Twitchett and Frederick W. Mote (eds.), The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), vol. 8, p. 167; Beattie, p. 15.Tan Qian, 48. Guo que, ch. 83, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, p. 5137; Ono, Minki tosha ko, appendix, p. 41; Zhu Yizun, “Yao shi zupu xu,” in Pu shu ting ji, ch. 40, pp. 15a–16b, reprinted in Siku quanshu (Taipei: Taiwan Commercial Press, 1986), vol. 1318, pp. 111–112; Ji Zengyun (ed.), Zhejiang tongzhi, ch. 158, p. 43, reprinted in Siku quanshu (Taipei: Taiwan Commercial Press, 1986), vol. 523, p. 276.Tan Qian, 49. Guo que, ch. 83, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, p. 5153.Ulrich Mammitzsch, “Wei Chung-hsien (1568–1628); A Reappraisal 50. of the Eunuch and the Factional Strife at the Late Ming Court” (Ph.D. diss., University of Hawaii, 1968), pp. 93–98; Dardess, Blood and History in China, pp. 9–30.Gu Bingqian (ed.), “Sheng yu,” p. 14b, in 51. San chao yao dian (Taipei: Wei wen tushu chubanshe, 1976), vol. shang, p. 28; Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 84, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 5, pp. 5185, 5187, 5202; Busch, “The Tung-lin Academy,” p. 58; Mammitzsch, “Wei Chung-hsien,” p. 85; Gao Panlong, “Poge yongren shu,” Gaozi yishu, ch. 7, p. 16b, reprinted in Siku quanshu (Taipei: Taiwan Commercial Press, 1986), vol. 1292, p. 448; “Shi qun yi xiao yin huo shu,” and “Gong chen shengming


188 Notes

wuxue zhi yao shu,” Gaozi yishu, ch. 7, pp. 18a–21a, reprinted in Siku quanshu, vol. 1292, pp. 449–451; Hucker, “Kao P’an-lung,” p. 706; Charles O. Hucker, “Tsou Yuan-piao,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 1313.Hucker, “Tsou Yuan-piao,” p. 1313.52. Wakeman Jr., “The Price of Autonomy,” p. 51; Zhao Nanxing, 53. “Chaojin he xingshi yi shu,” Weibo zhai wenji ( Jifu congshu ed., 1879), ch. 2, p. 12a; Ming shi, ch. 243, pp. 6299–6300.Mammitzsch, “Wei Chung-hsien,” pp. 159160; Chaoying Fang and 54. Lee Hwa-chou, “Chao Nan-hsing,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 130–131.Mammitzsch, “Wei Chung-hsien,” pp. 180–194; Gao Panlong, “Jiuhe 55. tanwu yushi,” Gaozi yishu, ch. 7, pp. 25b–27b, reprinted in Siku quanshu, vol. 1292, pp. 452–455; Hucker, “Kao P’an-lung,” pp. 707–708.Dardess, 56. Blood and History in China, pp. 79–100.Dardess, 57. Blood and History in China, pp. 101–125; Hucker, “Kao P’an-lung,” pp. 707–708; Chaoying Fang and Lee Hwa-chou, “Chao Nan-hsing,” p. 131; Busch, “The Tung-lin Academy,” p. 65.Quan Hansheng and Li Longhua, “Ming zhongyehou taicang suiru 58. yinliang de yanjiu” (A Study on the Annual Revenue of Silver Taels of the T’ai-ts’ang Vault after the Mid-Ming Period), Xianggang Zhongwen Daxue Zhongguo wenhua yanjiusuo xuebao (The Journal of the Institute of Chinese Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong) 5.1 (December, 1972), pp. 130–135; Quan Hansheng and Li Longhua, “Mingdai zhongyehou taicang suichu yinliang de yanjiu” (The Annual Expenditure of Silver Taels of the T’ai-ts’ang Vault after the Mid-Ming Period), Xianggang Zhongwen Daxue Zhongguo wenhua yanjiusuo xuebao (The Journal of the Institute of Chinese Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong) 6.1 (December, 1973), pp. 181–182.

V Wei Zhongxian, 1626–1628Display, Beijing Art Museum of Stone Carvings (1. Beijing shike yishu bowuguan).Liu Ruoyu, 2. Zhuozhong zhi (Beijing: Beijing guji chubanshe, 1994), p. 59; Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 87, reprinted in Tan Qian, Guo que (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1988), vol. 6, p. 5319; Ulrich Mammitzsch, “Wei Chung-hsien (1568–1628); A Reappraisal of the Eunuch and the Factional Strife of the Late Ming Court” (Ph.D. diss., University of Hawaii, 1968), p. 250.Charles O. Hucker, “Su-chou and the Agents of Wei Chung-hsien,” 3. in Silver Jubilee Volume of the Zinbun-Kagaku-kenkyosyo (Kyoto, 1957), pp. 224–226.


Notes 189

Hucker, “Su-chou and the Agents of Wei Chung-hsien,” pp. 229–233.4. Hucker, “Su-chou and the Agents of Wei Chung-hsien,” pp. 235–245.5. Hucker, “Su-chou and the Agents of Wei Chung-hsien,” pp. 244–250, 6. 255. For another account of this wave of arrests, see John Dardess, Blood and History in China: The Donglin Faction and Its Repression, 1620–1627 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002), pp. 101–125.Mammitzsch, “Wei Chung-hsien,” pp. 1–3, 51, 134, 135, 189, 243; 7. Hucker, “Su-chou and the Agents of Wei Chung-hsien,” p. 247.Gu Bingqian (ed.), “Sheng yu,” p. 23b, in 8. San chao yao dian (Taipei: Wei wen tushu chubanshe, 1976), vol. shang, p. 46; ch. 7, p. 15a, in vol. shang, p. 355.Gu Bingqian (ed.), “Yuan shi,” pp. 10b–11a, in 9. San chao yao dian, vol. shang, pp. 72–73; ch. 10, p. 22b, in vol. zhong, p. 534; ch. 23, p. 16b, in vol. xia, p. 1326Liu Ruoyu, pp. 56, 57, 63; Qian Renlin, 10. Donglin biecheng (1958 manuscript), pp. 55a–56b; Xie Guozhen, Zengding wan Ming shijikao (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1981), p. 215.Zhu Changzuo, 11. Yujing xintan, ch. 1, “Na jian,” reprinted in Zhu Changzuo, Yujing xintan (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1989), p. 7.Zhu Changzuo, 12. Yujing xintan, ch. 2, “Luo zhi,” reprinted in Zhu Changzuo, p. 11.Zhu Changzuo, 13. Yujing xintan, ch. 5, “Zou ma,” reprinted in Zhu Changzuo, p. 69.Zhu Changzuo, 14. Yujing xintan, ch. 3, “Jing Ning san jie,” reprinted in Zhu Changzuo, pp. 28–30.Zhu Changzuo, 15. Yujing xintan, ch. 3, “Jing Ning san jie,” reprinted in Zhu Changzuo, pp. 30–31.Chaoying Fang and Lee Hwa-chou, “Chao Nan-hsing,” in 16. L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang, Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 130–131; Leng Dong, Ye Xianggao yu Ming mo zheng tan (Shantou: Shantou daxue chubanshe, 1996), pp. 175–188.Ming Qing shi liao, jia bian17. (Shanghai?: Academia Sinica, 1930), book 8, pp. 701a–701b; Han Dacheng and Yang Xin, Wei Zhongxian zhuan (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1997), p. 218; Ming Qing shi liao, yi bian (Shanghai: Academia Sinica, 1935), book 1, pp. 27a–27b, 28a–28b.Ming Qing shi liao, gui bian18. (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1975), book 1, pp. 7a–7b.Han Dacheng and Yang Xin, pp. 207–209; Zhu Changzuo, 19. Yujing xintan, ch. 5, “Nei cao,” reprinted in Zhu Changzuo, pp. 64–65.Han Dacheng and Yang Xin, pp. 271–273; Zhu Changzuo, 20. Yujing xintan, ch. 6, “Zhu cheng,” reprinted in Zhu Changzuo, pp. 85–88.Han Dacheng and Yang Xin, p. 273.21. Quan Hansheng and Li Longhua, “Ming zhongyehou taicang suiru 22. yinliang de yanjiu” (A Study on the Annual Revenue of Silver Taels


190 Notes

of the T’ai-ts’ang Vault after the Mid-Ming Period), Xianggang Zhongwen Daxue Zhongguo wenhua yanjiusuo xuebao (The Journal of the Institute of Chinese Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong) 5.1 (December, 1972), pp. 130–135; Quan Hansheng and Li Longhua, “Mingdai zhongyehou taicang suichu yinliang de yanjiu” (The Annual Expenditure of Silver Taels of the T’ai-ts’ang Vault after the Mid-Ming Period), Xianggang Zhongwen Daxue Zhongguo wenhua yanjiusuo xuebao (The Journal of the Institute of Chinese Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong) 6.1 (December, 1973), pp. 181–182.Mammitzsch, “Wei Chung-hsien,” pp. 263–293; Han Dacheng and 23. Yang Xin, pp. 297–301.Mammitzsch, “Wei Chung-hsien,” p. 281.24.

VI The Restoration Society, 1628–1644Tan Qian, 1. Guo que, ch. 89, reprinted in Tan Qian, Guo que (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1988), vol. 6, pp. 5413–5415.Lu Shiyi, “Fu She jilue,” in Wu Yingji et al. (eds.), 2. Donglin shimo (Taipei: Guangwen shu ju, 1977), p. 181.Zhang Huijian, 3. Ming Qing Jiangsu wenren nianbiao (Shanghai: Shanghai guji chubanshe, 1986), pp. 490–491; Lu Shiyi, pp. 181–204; Anonymous, “Wu Meicun xiansheng xingzhuang mubiao” (Qing Jiaqing print), p. 1b; Wu Weiye, “Fu She jishi,” in Wu Yingji et al. (eds.), Donglin shimo (Taipei: Guangwen shu ju, 1977), p. 158.William S. Atwell, “From Education to Politics: The Fu She,” in 4. William Theodore de Bary and the Conference on Seventeenth-Century Chinese Thought (eds.), The Unfolding of Neo-Confucianism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975), pp. 349–350; Jerry Dennerline, The Chia-ting Loyalists: Confucian Leadership and Social Change in Seventeenth-Century China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), pp. 16–23, 30–39; Lu Shiyi, pp. 207–208; Xie Guozhen, Ming-Qing zhi ji dang-she yundong kao (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1982), p. 136; He Zongmei, Ming mo Qing chu wenren jieshe yanjiu (Tianjin: Nankai daxue chubanshe, 2004), pp. 155–156.Atwell, “From Education to Politics,” pp. 339, 342, 345; Tu Lien-che, 5. “Chang P’u,” in Arthur Hummel (ed.), Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (Taipei: Ch’eng wen, 1972), p. 53; He Zongmei, pp. 164–169.Jiang Yixue, 6. Zhang Pu nian pu (Shanghai: Commercial Press, 1946), pp. 26–27; Atwell, “From Education to Politics,” p. 341.Lu Shiyi, p. 209; Atwell, “From Education to Politics,” pp. 347–348.7. Lu Shiyi, pp. 209–214.8. Zhang Cai, “Jun chu shuo,” 9. Zhi wei tang ji (1674 ed.), wen, ch. 11, pp. 18a–20b; Lu Shiyi, pp. 211, 252.


Notes 191

Zhang Cai, “Zai li yan li shu,” 10. Zhi wei tang ji, wen, ch. 1, p. 10b; “Shi shi shuo,” Zhi wei tang ji, wen, ch. 11, pp. 6a–9b.Zhang Cai, “Huang Jingyu ce shi shi lun,” 11. Zhi wei tang ji, wen, ch. 2, p. 18b.Donald L. Potter, “Wen T’i-jen,” in L. Carrington Goodrich and 12. Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), pp. 1474–1478; Atwell, “From Education to Politics,” pp. 341, 350–352; Lu Shiyi, p. 217.Lu Shiyi, p. 218; Tan Qian, 13. Guo que, ch. 93, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 6, pp. 5633–5634, 5647; James Bunyan Parsons, The Peasant Rebellions of the Late Ming Dynasty (Tuscon: University of Arizona Press, 1970), pp. 33–36.Tan Qian, 14. Guo que, ch. 95, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 6, pp. 5727–5728; Lu Shiyi, pp. 227–234.Tan Qian, 15. Guo que, ch. 95, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 6, pp. 5727–5728; Lu Shiyi, pp. 235–237.Tan Qian, 16. Guo que, ch. 95, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 6, pp. 5729–5730.Lu Shiyi, pp. 242–244.17. Atwell, “From Education to Politics,” p. 355; Potter, “Wen T’i-jen,” 18. pp. 1477; William Atwell, “The T’ai-ch’ang, T’ien-ch’i, and Ch’ung-chen reigns, 1620–1644,” in Frederick W. Mote and Denis Twitchett (eds.), The Cambridge History of China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), vol. 7, esp. p. 634.Parsons, 19. Peasant Rebellions, pp. xiv, 2–6; Atwell, “The T’ai-ch’ang, T’ien-ch’i, and Ch’ung-chen reigns,” p. 615.Parsons, 20. Peasant Rebellions, pp. 19–20; Roger V. Des Forges, Cultural Centrality and Political Change in Chinese History: Northeast Henan in the Fall of the Ming (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), pp. 183, 204–207; James B. Parsons, “The Culmination of a Chinese Peasant Rebellion: Chang Hsien-chung in Szechwan, 1644–46,” The Journal of Asian Studies 16.3 (May, 1957), p. 388.Des Forges, pp. 207–211, 227–228; Parsons, 21. Peasant Rebellions, pp. 8, 22, 33, 40; Meir Shahar, “Ming-Period Evidence of Shaolin Martial Practice,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 61.2 (December, 2001), p. 385.Zhu Xiangyu et al., 22. Neijiang xianzhi, ch. 2, p. 57a (Taipei: Taiwan xuesheng shuju, 1968), vol. 1, p. 249; Guoli zhongyang tushuguan shanben shumu (Taipei: Guoli zhongyang tushuguan, 1986), p. 183; Miao Yuan, Deng pi ji lue (1641 edition), “Xiushan,” pp. 1a-3a.Miao Yuan, “Xunlian,” pp. 1a–5b; “Chuliang,” pp. 1a–3a; “Qiju,” p. 1a.23. Miao Yuan, “Zhendie;” Zhu Xiangyu, ch. 2, p. 57a, in vol. 1, p. 249.24. Wang Wei (ed.), 25. Yu kou xiang wen (1642 ed.), pp. 1a–11b.Wang Wei, pp. 17a–18b, 39a–39b.26. Wang Wei, pp. 43b, 44a–46b, 48a–48b.27.


192 Notes

Des Forges, pp. 213–214.28. Des Forges, pp. 222–226.29. Des Forges, pp. 237–254, esp. p. 244.30. Des Forges, pp. 254–268, 270–272. Aside from Henan, Hilary J. 31. Beattie, Land and Lineage in China: A Study of T’ung-Ch’eng County, Anhwei, in the Ming and Ch’ing Dynasties (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 45–46, notes that the gentry of Tongcheng were also left by the state to their own devices.Jiang Yixue, p. 46; Earl Swisher, “Liu Tsung-chou,” in Arthur 32. Hummel (ed.), Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (Taipei: Ch’eng wen, 1972), pp. 532–533; Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 98, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 6, pp. 5946–5947, 5952, 5955.Quan Hansheng and Li Longhua, “Ming zhongyehou taicang suiru 33. yinliang de yanjiu” (A Study on the Annual Revenue of Silver Taels of the T’ai-ts’ang Vault after the Mid-Ming Period), Xianggang Zhongwen Daxue Zhongguo wenhua yanjiusuo xuebao (The Journal of the Institute of Chinese Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong) 5.1 (December, 1972), pp. 130–135; Quan Hansheng and Li Longhua, “Mingdai zhongyehou taicang suichu yinliang de yanjiu” (The Annual Expenditure of Silver Taels of the T’ai-ts’ang Vault after the Mid-Ming Period), Xianggang Zhongwen Daxue Zhongguo wenhua yanjiusuo xuebao (The Journal of the Institute of Chinese Studies of the Chinese University of Hong Kong) 6.1 (December, 1973), pp. 181–182.George A. Kennedy, “Ni Yuan-lu,” in Arthur Hummel (ed.), 34. Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (Taipei: Ch’eng wen, 1972), p. 587. Ray Huang, “Ni Yuan-lu: ‘Realism’ in a Neo-Confucian Scholar-Statesman,” in Wm. Theodore de Bary (ed.), Self and Society in Ming Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970), pp. 421–430; Ni Yuanlu, “Guo fu ji lue,” in Cao Rong (comp.), Xue hai lie bian, reprinted in Bai bu congshu jicheng (Taipei: Yiwen yinshuguan, 1964).Huang, “Ni Yuan-lu,” pp. 440–443; Ni Huiding (comp.), 35. Ni Yuanlu nianpu (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1994), p. 70.Earl Swisher, “Ch’en Tzu-lung,” in Arthur Hummel (ed.), 36. Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (Taipei: Ch’eng wen, 1972), p. 102; Wolfgang Franke, An Introduction to the Sources of Ming History (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1968), pp. 8, 27, 123–124; “Chen Zilong xu,” “Xu Yuqing xu,” and “Zhang Pu xu,” in Chen Zilong et al. (eds.), Ming jingshi wenbian (Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 1987), vol. 1, pp. 22–25, 29, 40, 42.Ming Qing shiliao,37. yi bian (Shanghai: Academia Sinica, 1935), book 6, p. 0593.Tan Qian, 38. Guo que, ch. 99, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 6, pp. 5949, 5983, 5992.Parsons, 39. Peasant Rebellions, pp. 206–216; Ming Qing shiliao, xin bian, (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1987), book 10, pp. 0952, 0961; “Bing


Notes 193

bu xing wei quecha xunnan shenjin qi ci youxu yi fu fenghua shi,” Number One Historical Archives, Beijing, China, Ming dynasty archives, item 1311; Tan Qian, Guo que, ch. 99, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 6, pp. 5960, 5968, 6018, 6027; ch. 100, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 6, pp. 6023, 6028, 6030.Tan Qian, 40. Guo que, ch. 100, reprinted in Tan Qian, vol. 6, pp. 6044–6045.Ni Huiding, p. 72; Julia Ching, “Ch’en Lung-cheng,” in L. Carrington 41. Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (eds.), Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1976), p. 175; Earl Swisher, “Ch’i Piao-chia,” in Arthur Hummel (ed.), Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period (Taipei: Ch’eng wen, 1972), p. 126; Earl Swisher, “Ch’en Tzu-lung,” pp. 102–103; Kong Shangren, The Peach Blossom Fan (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976); Jerry Dennerline, “Hsu Tu and the Lesson of Nanking: Political Integration and the Local Defense in Chiang-nan, 1634–1645,” in Jonathan D. Spence and John E. Wills, Jr. (eds.), From Ming to Ch’ing: Conquest, Region, and Continuity in Seventeenth-Century China (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 89–132; Atwell, “From Education to Politics,” pp. 356–357; Parsons, Peasant Rebellions, pp. 200–205. Wu Weiye bowed to family pressure and surrendered to the Qing, though he guiltily wrote poems celebrating the loyalists. See Frederic Wakeman Jr., “Romantics, Stoics, and Martyrs in Seventeenth-Century China,” The Journal of Asian Studies 43.4 (August, 1984), pp. 637–639.Dennerline, 42. The Chia-ting Loyalists, pp. 261–263.Dennerline, 43. The Chia-ting Loyalists, pp. 297–298.Joseph R. Levenson, 44. Confucian China and Its Modern Fate, vol. 2, The Problem of Monarchial Decay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 62.Wakeman, “Romantics, Stoics, and Martyrs,” pp. 641, 646.45.


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academies (shuyuan), 37, see also Donglin Academy; Shoushan Academy

Ai Mu, 41, 56An Guo (1481–1534), 59An Xifan (1562–1621), 59, 60, 98army, 132, 133, 135–6, 147, 150,

157, 158Atwell, William, 141

banditry, 146, 148, 150–5Beattie, Hilary, 15, 52, 115, 118Beijing, 158–9Beijing Art Museum of Stone

Carvings, 125Bol, Peter, 11Book of Changes (Yi jing), 60Book of Documents (Shu jing), 37Brokaw, Cynthia, 19, 20, 21, 115–16Brook, Timothy, 15, 19, 21, 22, 58, 99,

100, 115, 116Bu Jinzhi, 70Buddhism, 22, 53, 97, 115bureaucracy, 24, 25, 26, 32, 33–4, 93

Chang Chung-li, 15Chen Baoliang, 15Chen Feng, 80–3, 84–6, 92Chen Qike, 84Chen Qixin, 147–8Chen Qiyu, 147, 150Chen Zeng, 78, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90,

91, 94

Chen Zilong (1608–47), 157, 158, 160, 162

Cheng Shouxun, 86–8, 89, 91, 94Chengtian prefecture, 80, 92Chongzhen emperor (r. 1627–44), 137,

139, 146–7, 148, 153, 154, 156, 157, 158, 160, 162, 163

Chuzhou prefecture, 64civil service degrees, 14–15, 16civil service examination, 3, 10, 14, 16,

23, 31, 57, 140–1, 142, 147, 148class, see social classConfucianism, 4–8, 22–3, 24, 25, 26,

57–8, 63, 64, 76, 94, 97, 98, 111, 126, 130, 148, 152, 158, 162

and landed wealth, 7, 19Neo-Confucianism (daoxue, Song

ru), 10, 11, 14, 24, 27, 42, 65, 72, 105, 108, 131, 143

and social classes, 19statecraft school (jingshi), 65, 157–8

Confucius (551?–479? BCE), 5, 7, 95, 97Crawford, Robert, 25, 26, 33Cui Chengxiu, 121, 127, 128, 131,

137, 138

dao tong, see succession to the WayDaoism, 97Dardess, John, 12, 110, 121Daye county, 80democracy, 70–3Dennerline, Jerry, 117, 160, 161Des Forges, Roger, 47, 150, 154, 155

INDEX


214 Index

Ding Bin (d. 1633), 113, 114Dong Qichang (1555–1636), 82Dong Zhongshu (195?–105? BCE), 8–9Donglin Academy, 98–9, 100, 101,

102, 103, 105, 106, 122Donglin faction (Donglin dang), 105

destruction of, 121–2and Manchu crisis, 117organizing principle of, 106–8synonymous with gentry, 129–32

Dreyer, Edward, 13, 14Du Wanyan, 82, 83, 93Duan Xu, 47–8

embezzlement, 84, 85, 86, 91, 93–4Embroidered Uniform Guard (jin yi),

75, 84, 121emperor, 9, 71, 130, 135, 158, 161

emperors’ private funds, 67, 116–17, 159

see also individual emperorseunuchs, 3, 13, 14, 75, 76, 81, 83, 85, 91,

94, 135, 138

famine, 150, 155Fan Shuzhi, 66, 93Fang Bao (1530–82), 28Fang Congzhe, 116, 119, 120Fang Xiaoru (1357–1402), 13Fang Yang (1540–83), 48–9Farmer, Edward, 13Fei Xiaotong, 71–2Feng Congwu (1556–1627?), 120Feng Qi (1559–1603?), 92, 94Fingarette, Herbert, 4Franke, Herbert, 11Fujian province, 47Fushan county, 78

Gao Gong (1512–78), 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 32

Gao Panlong (1562–1626), 60, 71, 98, 106, 111–12, 119, 120, 121, 122, 131

Gao Shouxian, 17gentlemen (junzi) and mean people

(xiaoren), 5, 7, 63–4, 69, 71–2,

73, 97, 109–10, 120, 121, 139, 145, 148

gentry, 2, 3, 4, 17, 25, 33–4, 39, 48, 49, 54, 61, 62, 67, 71, 78, 79, 81, 82–4, 88, 94, 98, 99, 101, 103, 105, 115–16, 119, 128, 130–1, 140, 141, 143, 144–6, 147–8, 149, 150, 158, 159

and commerce, 19–20contrast with English gentry, 72as defense against banditry in late

Ming, 151–5definition, 3, 15–16, 21growth of, 14, 16–17and landowning, 15–17, 18“localist” community leadership

and survival strategy of, 10–11, 12, 59, 60, 72, 113, 115–16

origin of, 10privileges of, 16–17, 35–6, 38, 39,

145, 149self-image of, 18–22, 23, 108, 109,

114–15, 162tax evasion by, 16, 22, 33, 35–6,

38–40, 44, 46, 47, 48, 50–1, 52–3, 62, 112–13, 118, 145–6, 149

see also gentlemen and mean people; see also under Gu Xiancheng

gong, see public vs. privateGrand Canal, 42–3, 90, 94, 147, 152,

157, 159grand secretariat, 14, 56–7, 58, 61–2,

63, 69, 70, 73, 102, 142, 149Great Learning (Daxue), 64Gu Dazhang, 121Gu Xiancheng (1550–1612), 70, 72, 95,

107, 145background, 59–60, 65, 106cashiered, 73death of, 111and faction, 69, 97, 101–2home leave and provincial career,

58, 60–1, 64–5intention to marshal the gentry,

95–7, 108, 109, 110and Li Sancai, 88, 100–4, 111


Index 215

and Wanli emperor, 63, 68, 102and Zhang Juzheng, 53, 57–8, 60,

95, 103Gu Xue, 59Gu Yanwu (1613–82), 36, 72, 162Gu Yuncheng (1554–1607), 57, 59,

63, 98Guan Zhidao (1536–1608), 97, 98Guanzi (a.k.a. Guan Zhong; 7th cen.

BCE), 35Gui Youguang (1507–71), 19Guiyang subprefecture, 64

Habermas, Jürgen, 99, 100Hai Rui (1513–87), 22–4Han Dacheng, 135, 136Han dynasty (202 BCE–220 CE),

8, 147Han Fei (d. 223 BCE), 5, 6, 8, 17, 34,

40, 111Hangzhou prefecture, 48–9, 87Hanlin Academy, 142Hanyang prefecture, 81Hartwell, Robert, 10He Zongmei, 99, 141Heijdra, Martin, 15, 16, 20, 21, 23,

52, 60Henan province, 79, 150Ho Ping-ti, 16Hong Wenheng, 82Hongguang emperor (“Southern

Ming,” r. 1644–5), 162Hongwu emperor, see Zhu

YuanzhangHongxi emperor (r. 1424–26), 14Hou Tianjue, 80Hou Tianming, 80Hou Tongzeng, 161Hu Zhili, 39, 40, 43, 46–7Huaian prefecture, 87Huang, Ray, 26, 45, 55, 56, 65, 69, 99,

102, 118, 157Huang Chunyue, 161Huang Ming jingshi wenbian, 157–8Huang Zhengbin, 102, 105, 110Huang Zongxi (1610–95), 141, 162

Huang Zunsu (1584–1626), 128, 141Hucker, Charles, 106, 107, 108, 126, 127Huguang province, 80Hymes, Robert, 10, 22

Intrigues of the Warring States (Zhan guo ce), 1

Japan, 23, see also Toyotomi Hideyoshi

Jia Sidao (1213–75), 11Jiading county, 161Jiajing emperor (r. 1521–67), 23, 47, 67Jiang Dingguo, 118Jiangnan region, 39, 40, 46–7, 52–3,

96–7, 98, 106, 118, 131, 134, 139, 140, 145, 149

jiangxue, see philosophical discussion

Jiangyin county, 100Jianwen emperor (r. 1368–1402), 13Jiao Hong (1541–1620), 47–8Jiashan county, see Jiaxing prefectureJiaxing county, see Jiaxing prefectureJiaxing prefecture, 62, 112–14, 115, 116Jin Yang, 100–1Jingdezhen, 84Jinhuatan, 80junzi, see gentlemen and mean peopleJurchen, 116

Kaifeng prefecture, 154–5Khubilai Khan (1215–94), 12Korea, 68, 75, 78Kunshan county, 106

land survey, 44–53, 61, 62, 112Langlois, John Jr., 13Lao Yangkui, 83Legalism, 4–8, 24–6, 33, 57, 60, 103,

162Levenson, Joseph, 17, 18–19, 21, 57–8,

161, 162Li Dai (1531–1607), 84–5Li Dao, 80, 86Li Feng, 83, 84


216 Index

Li Guozhen, 158Li Hualong (1554–1612), 104Li Le (Li Yue?; 1532–1618), 51–2Li Lianglin, 87Li Qinqin, 80, 83Li Sancai (d. 1623), 57, 65, 70, 93–4,

110, 126and Chen Zeng, 88–91, 103denunciation of, 104–6, 110,

111and Gu Xiancheng, 100–4personality and values of, 103–4

Li Shi, 127, 131Li Yizhong, 118Li Youzi, 42Li Yunyi, 83Li Zhi (1527–1602), 98Li Zicheng (1605?–45), 147, 150, 152,

153, 154, 155, 159, 160Lian Hu (lake), 42–4Liang Yizhang, 154–5Liao Xinyi, 113Liaodong military region, 116, 117,

118Liaoxiang surtax, 117–18, 123, 132,

150, 157Lin Li-yueh, 107Lin Yingxun, 43–4, 61Liu, Yongping, 6Liu Boxian, 101Liu Canjiang, 80Liu Ruoyu (b. 1584), 126Liu Shidou, 143Liu Yuewu, 86, 94Liu Zongzhou (1578–1645), 148–9,

155–6, 160, 162Longqing emperor (r. 1567–72), 26Longwangzhou, 80Lu Kun, 78Lu Wensheng, 149Lu Zhi (754–805), 110–11Luo Yuanbin, 139, 141

Mammitzsch, Ulrich, 129Manchus, 116, 132–3, 148, 160, 161

Mandate of Heaven (tian ming), 8, 11, 90, 115–16, 160, 162

Marxism, 107, 109Mao Tingbo, 80Mao Yilu, 127McMullen, David, 9mean person (xiaoren), see gentlemen

and mean peopleMencius (385?–12? BCE), 5, 7, 11, 12,

59, 73, 96, 100Meng Qiu, 59merchants, 19, 59, 81, 86, 87, 100, 109,

128, 147–8Meskill, John, 23Miao Changqi (1562–1626), 54military stores (jun chu), 143, 146Ming dynasty (1368–1644)

commerce, 19–20dynastic cycle, 17faction, 17–19founding, 12treasury, revenue, fiscal policy,

etc., see taxesMing History (Ming shi), 89, 105–6,

120Ming Veritable Records (Ming shilu), 66mining, see mine tax under Wanli

emperorMizoguchi Yuzo, 2, 25Mongols, 11, 12, 26, 27, 31Mori Masao, 20Mote, Frederick, 107

Nanjing province, 79, 86, 87, 161, 162Neijiang county, 151–2Neo-Confucianism, see under

ConfucianismNi Yuanlu (1594–1644), 157, 160, 162Ningyuan town, 132–3Nurhaci, 116

Ouyang Xiu (1007–70), 69

palace fires, 74, 75Pan Xiang, 84


Index 217

Parsons, James, 147, 150, 159philosophical discussion (jiangxue),

24, 96piracy, 23, 26private (si), see public vs. privatepublic (gong) vs. private (si), 8, 27, 32,

34, 37, 38, 43–4, 48, 57–8, 63, 70, 85, 90, 111, 131

public sphere, 99–100

Qi Biaojia (1602–45), 2, 4, 72–3, 160Qi county, 47–8Qi Jiguang (1528–87), 26, 56Qin dynasty (221–207 BCE), 8Quwo county, 51

Raochuan prefecture, 84rape, 81Regulation for Evaluating

Achievements (kao cheng fa), see under Zhang Juzheng

Restoration Society (Fu she), 140–2, 144, 145, 146, 148, 149, 157, 160, 162, 163

Righteous Circles (qing liu), 55rioting, 82–3, 113–14, 121, 128, 141Robinson, David, 82

Sage Kings, 4, 5, 6, 9, 11San chao yaodian, 129–30“scholar-officials”, see gentrySchurmann, Franz, 17Shaanxi province, 146–7, 150Shahar, Meir, 151Shandong province, 83, 88Shang Yang (a.k.a. Gongsun Yang,

Lord Shang; d. 338 BCE), 5, 6, 7–8, 24, 41

Shangqiu county, 154–5Shanxi province, 51Shao Fuzhong, 104–5, 110Shaolin monks, 151Shen Bang (fl. 1550–96), 65, 157Shen Buhai (d. 337 BCE), 111Shen Defu (1578–1642), 94, 104

Shen Shixing (1535–1614), 58, 62, 67, 77

Shen Yiguan (1531–1615), 102, 105shengci (shrine dedicated to a living

person), 125, 126shengyuan (students), 14–15, 16, 35–6,

38, 41, 58, 81, 82, 84, 92, 103, 128, 144, 155, 159

Shipai town, 80Shoushan Academy, 120, 156si, see public vs. privatesilver mines, see mine tax under Wanli

emperorSingle Whip Reform, 22, 39, 45, 65Smith, Paul, 11social class, 2, 106–7societies (she), 139–40Son of Heaven (tianzi), see emperorSong dynasty (960–1279), 9–11, 12, 19,

69, 80, 147Song Quan, 154–5Song Yiwang (js. 1547), 32–3, 38–40,

44, 46Songjiang prefecture, 22–3, 53Spring and Autumn Annals

(Chunqiu), 60Spring and Autumn period (772–453

BCE), 4state, 3, 26, 27, 34, 36, 37, 43, 50, 53, 58,

60, 70, 73–4, 90, 96, 103, 110–11, 115, 125, 131, 132, 133, 139, 144, 145, 152, 161

statecraft school (jingshi), see under Confucianism

students, see shengyuansu wang, see Throneless Kingsuccession to the Way (dao tong), 5, 11, 72Sun Long (1525–94), 69Sun Peiyang, 148Suning county, 136Suzhou prefecture, 49–50, 53

Taicang subprefecture, 49–50, 140, 143, 146

Taichang emperor (r. 1620), 119, 120


218 Index

Taihe county, 152–4Taiping prefecture, 87Taizhou philosophical school, 103Tan Qian (1594–1658), 31, 36, 106, 147,

148, 159Tang Binyin (b. 1569), 108–11, 131Tang dynasty (617–907), 9, 19, 110, 147taxes, 23, 33, 37–9, 44–6, 53, 65–7, 74,

92, 122–3, 128, 134–5, 137, 143–4, 149, 156–7, 158–9, see also Liaoxiang surtax; mine tax under Wanli emperor; Single Whip Reform; tax evasion under gentry

Three Cases (san an), 118–19, 130Throneless King (su wang), 5, 72Tian Ji, 134Tianqi emperor (r. 1620–7), 119, 120,

125, 129, 130, 132, 133, 137Tongcheng county, 52, 115, 116torture, 41, 87, 121, 129, 130toukao (commendation of a taxpaying

person to a non-taxpaying person), 38

Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536–98), 67–8, 74, 78, 89

trunk of the state (guo ben), see Zheng gui fei under Wanli emperor

Turner, Karen, 6

Wakeman, Frederic Jr., 15, 100, 162Wan Xiangchun, 78Wang Anshi (1021–86), 10, 41Wang Chunyu, 82, 83, 93Wang Lin, 67Wang Maoji, 87Wang Wei, 152–4Wang Wenlu (1503–86), 35Wang Wenyan, 102, 107, 110, 121, 130Wang Xijue, 69, 73, 102Wang Yangming (a.k.a. Wang

Shouren; 1472–1529), 26, 98Wang Yusheng, 82Wanli emperor (r. 1572–1620), 61–2,

69, 73, 74, 133death of, 119

and Manchu crisis, 117mine tax, 75–80, 83–5, 90, 92–4,

100–1, 102, 111, see also Chen Feng; Chen Zeng; Cheng Shouxun

minority of, 28, 31, 32, 57, 62personal qualities of, 77, 78–9and war in Korea, 68and Zhang Juzheng, 55–6and Zheng gui fei, 62–3, 68–9,

77, 119see also emperor, emperors’ private

fundsWanping county, 65Warring States period (453–221

BCE), 4Wei Dazhong (1575–1625), 114,

121, 127Wei Guoxian, 78Wei Qingyuan, 24Wei Yunzhen, 77Wei Yunzhong (d. 1585), 58–9, 60Wei Zheng (580–643), 9Wei Zhongxian (1568–1628), 120, 121,

125–6, 127, 128, 129, 131, 132–6, 137, 138, 139–40, 141

Weizhou prefecture, 87Wen Bing (1609–69), 78Wen Tiren (d. 1638), 142, 145, 149Western Zhou period (1027?–771

BCE), 8Wu Baoxiu, 80Wu Han, 21, 34, 71, 106Wu Weiye (1609–72), 140, 142Wu Yinghong, 83Wu Zhongming, 81Wuchang prefecture, 81, 82Wuxi county, 58, 59, 98

Xia Weizhong, 59Xiao Gongquan (Kung-chuan

Hsiao), 6xiaoren, see gentlemen and mean

peopleXie Guozhen, 141


Index 219

Xiong Tingbi, 116Xiushui county, see Jiaxing prefectureXu Guo (1527–96), 57Xu Jie (1503–83), 22–4, 82Xu Min, 19Xu Wenzao, 79Xu Yuqing (js. 1616), 158Xu Zhaokui, 105, 106Xuan, king of Qi, 1, 4, 69Xuancheng county, 106, 108Xue Guoguan, 149Xuzhou subprefecture, 89

Yan Chu, 1, 4, 69Yang Hao, 116Yang Lian (1571–1625), 119, 121, 129,

131, 133, 136, 148Yang Shicong, 148Yang Xin, 135, 136Yang Xinsan, 84yanglian bonuses, 158Yangzhou prefecture, 86Yao Siren, 118Ye Xianggao (1562–1627), 105, 120,

121, 133, 137Yin Zhengmao (1513–92), 26Yizhen county, 86, 87Yongle emperor (r. 1402–24),

13–14Yu Yu, 100–1Yu Yuli, 102, 105, 107, 110Yuan Chonghuan, 132Yuan (Mongol) dynasty, 12Yuan Huazhong, 121Yue Fei (1103–41), 161Yue Yuansheng, 113

Zhang Anqi, 70Zhang Cai (1596–1648), 140, 142,

143–5, 149Zhang Juzheng (1525–82), 2, 4, 49,

51–2, 54, 57–8, 60, 62, 63, 98, 109, 157

background and early career, 25–6, 31–2

Confucianist vs. Legalist inclinations, 24, 25–6, 27, 34–5, 43–4

death of, 53duoqing controversy, 40–2, 44, 56education policy of, 35–7and Gao Gong, 24–8posthumous disgrace of, 55–6, 61Regulation for Evaluating

Achievements (kao cheng fa), 26, 32, 35, 38, 45, 135

and Wanli emperor, 31, 32see also land survey; Lian Hu

Zhang Lüxiang (1611–74), 72Zhang Pu (1602–41), 140, 142, 143–4,

145, 155, 158Zhang Siwei (1526–85), 58Zhang Wenxi, 61, 62Zhang Xianbo, 70, 71Zhang Xianzhong (1605–47), 147, 150,

151, 152, 159Zhang Yangmeng, 79Zhao Huan, 100Zhao Nanxing (1550–1628), 65, 69,

119, 120, 121, 122Zhao Xixian, 100Zhao Yuan, 72Zhejiang province, 105, 106Zheng gui fei (Senior Consort Zheng),

see Wanli emperorZheng He (1371–1433), 14Zhenjiang prefecture, 39Zhi Keda, 83Zhongxiang county, 80, 81Zhou Chaorui, 121Zhou Mi (1232–1308), 11, 65Zhou Qiyuan, 127, 131Zhou Shunchang (1584–1626), 122,

126–8, 131, 141Zhou Yanru (1588–1644), 149Zhou Zhikuei, 143, 144Zhu Changluo, see Taichang

emperorZhu Changzuo, 131–4, 136Zhu Di, see Yongle emperor


220 Index

Zhu Gaozhi, see Hongxi emperorZhu Xi (1130–1200), 11, 14, 98Zhu Yijun (1563–1620), see Wanli

emperorZhu Youjian, see Chongzhen

emperorZhu Youxiao, see Tianqi emperor

Zhu Yuanzhang (a.k.a. Ming Taizu, Hongwu emperor; 1328–98, r. 1368–98), 12–13, 25, 70

Zhu Yunwen, see Jianwen emperorZou Yuanbiao (1551–1624), 41, 50–1,

56, 119, 120, 130, 148Zuo Guangdou (1575–1625), 115, 121, 148


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