How did hongwu stabilize china

History Paper

The Confusions of Pleasure

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The Confusions of Pleasure Commerce and Culture in Ming China

Timothy Brook

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University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd. London, England

First Paperback Printing 1999

© 1998 by the Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data

Brook, Timothy, 1951– The confusions of pleasure : commerce and

culture in Ming China / Timothy Brook. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-520-22154-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. China—History—Ming dynasty, 1368–

1644. 2. China—Commerce—History. I. Title. DS753.B76 1998 951′.026—dc21

97-8838 CIP

Manufactured in the United States of America

12 11 10 12 11 10 9 8

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

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For Jonah, Taylor, Katie, and Vanessa, each in a different time and a different way

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Let the state be small and the people few: So that the people . . .

fearing death, will be reluctant to move great distances and, even if they have boats and carts, will not use them.

So that the people . . . will find their food sweet and their clothes beautiful, will be content with where they live and happy in their

customs. Though adjoining states be within sight of one another

and cocks crowing and dogs barking in one be heard in the next, yet the people of one state will grow old and die

without having had any dealings with those of another.

Daode jing (The Way and Its Power): a favorite passage of the founder of the Ming,

the Hongwu emperor (reigned 1368–98)

How important to people are wealth and profit! Human disposition is such that people pursue what is profitable to them, and

with profit in mind they will go up against disaster. They gallop in pursuit of it day and night, never satisfied with what they have, though it wears down their spirits and exhausts them physically.

Since profit is what all people covet, they rush after it like torrents pouring into a valley: coming and going without end, never resting day or night, never reaching the point at which the raging floods within them subside.

Zhang Han (1511–93)

One man in a hundred is rich, while nine out of ten are impoverished. The poor cannot stand up to the rich who, though few in number, are able to control the majority. The lord of silver rules heaven and the god of copper cash reigns over the earth.

Zhang Tao (1609)

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Contents

List of Illustrations

Preface

A Ming Chronology

A Genealogy of Ming Emperors

List of Abbreviations

Introduction: Seasons of the Ming (1609)

Dramatis Personae

Winter: The First Century (1368–1450) A Brick in the Wall The Burden of Communication Ideas into Texts Economy and Exchange The Distance between Rich and Poor

Spring: The Middle Century (1450–1550) The Center Recedes State and Market Commerce Commerce and Culture The Zhengde Decay

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Summer: The Last Century (1550–1644) The God of Copper Cash Travels and Letters Consumption and Production Trade Fashion

Fall: The Lord of Silver (1642–1644) The Fall of the Ming Last Glimpses

Notes

Bibliography

Glossary and Index

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Illustrations

FIGURES

Aside from three Ming paintings, one statue, and a photograph, the illustrations in this book have been taken from nine Ming and Qing books, which are coded to their sources as follows:

1592 Bianmin tuzuan [Annotated Illustrations for the Convenience of the People]

1599 Wanyong zhengzong [The Correct Source for a Myriad Practical Uses], an almanac published in Fujian

1609 Hainei qiguan [Marvelous Sights of the Realm], an armchair tourist’s pictorial guide to famous sights

1610 Shuihu zhuan [Water Margins], the famous Ming novel in a newly illustrated edition published in Hangzhou

1637 Tiangong kaiwu [The Exploitation of the Works of Nature], Song Yingxing’s survey of technology published in Nanchang

HH Gu hanghai tu [Ancient Navigation Map], a Qing copy of a Ming coastal mariner’s route map

NK Nanke meng [The Dream of Governor Nanke], an opera by Tang Xianzu (1550–1616)

ZX Zixiao ji [The Purple Flute], another Tang Xianzu opera, published in Nanjing by Fuchun Hall as “the newly carved illustrated edition with punctuation and pronunciations”

YL Yuli chao [Documents of the Jade Calendar], an undated popular religious text printed in the Qing dynasty

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The woodcuts adorning the title page and chapter headings come from the almanac of 1599 and date each stage of the book. The Ming dynasty began and ended with years of the monkey (Winter, Fall); Jean Nicolet set out in search of China in 1634, which was a year of the dog, as was 1550 (preface, Summer); Zhang Tao published the Sheh county gazetteer in 1609, a year of the chicken (introduction); 1450 was a year of the horse (Spring).

1. Mid-Ming image of the classical subsistence ideal of men harvesting rice, 1592

2. Women working at textile production within the home, 1592 3. A six-oared river boat, 1637 4. A brick kiln, 1637 5. Brick making, 1637 6. Lu Li’s brick in the Nanjing city gate 7. An idealized ancestral portrait of Zhu Yuanzhang, the Hongwu emperor 8. Jin Shan, an island monastery, 1610 9. A two-bearer sedan chair, YL

10. A two-masted grain tribute boat, 1637 11. A pony cart, NK 12. A decorated river barge, 1610 13. Miners scraping for small silver deposits, 1637 14. An official and his retinue on horseback, ZX 15. A famine victim and a man eating a radish 16. Shops and stalls at the Hangzhou night market, 1609 17. A silk-reeling machine, 1637 18. Papermaking, 1637

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19. A well-sweep, 1637 20. Tenants deliver harvested grain, 1592 21. Zhu Yong’s walled hometown of Chongwusuo, HH 22. Copper coins, 1637 23. Late-Ming bronze statue of Vairocana Buddha 24. Selected omens, 1599 25. Officials being ferried across a river, 1610 26. A small river ferry with a mat shed mounted on the back, 1610 27. An official saying farewell to his wife, ZX 28. Women lighting incense before Buddhist statues, ZX 29. Sending off a letter with a prefectural courier, 1610 30. Woman tending silkworms, 1637 31. Spinning cotton thread, 1637 32. Yu Xiangdou’s self-portrait, 1599 33. Delicate rosewood folding chair signals wealth and status, ZX 34. Pursuits of the gentry, 1599 35. Temple fair at Zhaoqing Monastery in Hangzhou, 1609 36. Fowling pieces, 1637 37. Ancestor portrait of Yang Maolin 38. Carters pushing two-wheeled barrows, 1610

MAPS

1. Central China 2. The principal routes of the courier system as of 1587 3. Jiangnan and the northeast coast of Zhejiang province 4. Fujian province

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Preface

In the summer of 1634, Jean Nicolet (1598–1642) set out from the French colony in Québec to sort out tribal conflicts on the Great Lakes that were threatening the fur trade, Canada’s small part in the world economy. Nicolet was also instructed to make his way, if he could, to the Mer de l’Ouest. Natives directed him to Lake Michigan, and over this Western Ocean, he was sure, lay China. Determined to make a good impression, he packed what he thought would be suitable for meeting Chinese. How he got his hands on a Chinese damask robe woven with flowers and multicolored birds we do not know, but by 1634 silks had been flowing from China to Europe for a century. He crossed Lake Michigan and put on his robe, only to find Green Bay.

The error strikes us as humorous because it is all out of proportion to our knowledge. Not to his. We are so far from the Ming dynasty (Nicolet drowned two years before it ended) that we forget the acquisitive passion China inspired. Stimulated by Marco Polo’s eagerly read Travels, European adventurers like Christopher Columbus and explorers like Nicolet dreamed that the China they would find at the other end of the world would be Marco’s world of stately pleasure domes and unsurpassed wealth. They were looking as well for things a little harder to the touch: porcelains, the silks in which Nicolet robed himself, rhubarb, and other such curiosities that the Ming economy was producing. These

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artifacts fetched extraordinary prices in Europe, and Europeans charted routes across the world in the hope of cutting import costs. Canada is one of the historical accidents that resulted from this geographical miscalculation, and Ming China the lure for miscalculating so greatly.

Nicolet’s venture was not a complete failure. He explains that when he appeared before the natives in his multicolored robe, they mistook him for a god and devoutly agreed not to block the flow of furs back east. We cannot know whether the Amerindians saw their cooperation with French commerce in these religious terms, nor whether they thought Nicolet was out of his mind for wanting to canoe the upper tributaries of the Mississippi looking for the Western Ocean. Eventually he had to give up his search for a northwest passage to China, returning in disappointment to Québec.

Consider Nicolet’s error carefully. Perhaps we, like he, look at the world through the wrong end of the telescope. We are used to thinking of Europe as the center of the world in Nicolet’s time because that is what Europeans thought then and what it became later on. But it wasn’t so in Nicolet’s time. Europeans may have developed a technical capacity to circumnavigate the globe, but their “trade” was not based on markets or on efficient production at home. It depended on plundering and enslaving others, disrupting preexisting exchange networks, taking out precious metals, furs, and spices at bargain prices and selling them for fortunes in Europe. Nicolet wanted to buy from China, but he had nothing to sell. All he had to offer was silver—pure money in Chinese eyes, and therefore worth the trade. His search for a route to the Chinese market reminds us that China, not Europe, was the center of the world in Ming times. This book is a portrait of that center: not an economic history of the Ming dynasty (that is not yet possible), but a cultural history of a place that commerce was remaking. It is about the role of commerce in Ming society—the pleasures its wealth brought and the confusions that it fueled—during one longue durée of Chinese time.

My interest in the Ming dynasty goes back to my student days at Fudan University in Shanghai, when Professor Li Qingjia first introduced me to the writings of late-Ming philosophers. That was in the heady spring of 1976, when Shanghai was caught in the final year of the Cultural Revolution, suspended between the high-court politics and anticommercialism of the “Gang of Four” (all of them natives or one-time residents of Shanghai) and the world of what then passed for fashion down on Huaihai Road, where muted commercial instincts sought to inch past the political cordon. With the death of Chairman Mao Zedong later that year, China slipped from socialism to the market with a rapidity most Chinese found shocking, provoking anxieties about what in the late 1970s was called a “poverty of philosophy,” then moving on to a more general sense of cultural crisis in the 1980s. Struggling with the conundrum of how to blend desire for profit with desire for moral good, Chinese in the post-Mao age found themselves reliving a contradiction that Chinese of the late-Ming dynasty knew

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well. From the perspective of the 1990s, when silver has become the undisputed lord of the land and the urban sex and luxury trades assume almost late-Ming-like proportions, even that debate now seems antique, a quick backward glance to a moral vision that disintegrates as China finds its place in the international division of labor.

In presenting the Ming dynasty as a coherent arc of change from ordered rural self-sufficiency in the early Ming to the decadence of urban-based commerce in the late, I am conscious of parallels with my own time. Had I not experienced the compressed journey China has taken from rural state-socialism to urban state- capitalism since the 1970s, I might not have conceived of writing this history, nor of writing it in this way. This is not to say that the narrative arises from other than Ming sources, only to acknowledge that every historian writes the past from the present.

I must thank Frederick Mote and Denis Twitchett for prompting me to write this book when they asked me to contribute a chapter on Ming communications and commerce for volume 8 of the Cambridge History of China. Finding myself unable to shoehorn all that I wanted to say about the dynasty into the generous format of that chapter, I ended up writing The Confusions of Pleasure. I am grateful to Denis for giving me the freedom to meet his commission in my own way and encouraging me to proceed with this book.

Zhenping Wang, Jun Fang, and Yunqiu Zhang, one a colleague and the others my graduate students at the University of Toronto, contributed research in an early phase of this project. For their help toward the end, I am grateful to Paul Eprile for reading the first draft and getting me on the right track for the second; Roger Des Forges for scrutinizing the second draft and reminding me to keep my paean to commerce down to two cheers; Richard von Glahn for warning me away from some of the simplifications I was making about the late-Ming economy in the third; and André Gunder Frank for pushing me always to think of Ming China in a global context. My literary agent Beverley Slopen helped to steer this book in the direction it wanted to go, and I am once again in her debt for the confidence she has shown in my writing. I am also delighted to have been able to work with Sheila Levine, Laura Driussi, and Rachel Berchten at the University of California Press, who provided warm encouragement at every step from manuscript to book. Lynne Russell compiled the index.

To the end I reserve two special debts of thanks: to Bin Wong, who critiqued the entire manuscript with the erudition of a scholar and the care of a friend; and Fay Sims, who helped me find the time and place from which I could complete the manuscript while gazing out over the blue waters of Lake Huron. I wonder if Nicolet ever saw it like this?

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A Ming Chronology

THE EARLY MING (1368–1450)

1368 Zhu Yuanzhang founds the Ming dynasty and enthrones himself as the Hongwu emperor; orders every county magistrate to set up four granaries; cancels the book tax

1369 Hongwu orders every county magistrate to open a Confucian school

1380 Hongwu purges Chancellor Hu Weiyong and imposes direct imperial rule

1381 the lijia village registration system is universally imposed

1398 death of the Hongwu emperor

1400 date of the earliest surviving land-sale contract in the Ming

1402 Zhu Di ascends the throne after overthrowing his nephew, the Jianwen emperor, and declares the inauguration of the Yongle reign the following year

1405 Zheng He launches the first of his six expeditions into the waters around Southeast and South Asia

1415 the Grand Canal is fully restored to use

1420 the Yongle emperor confers the name Beijing on his new capital

1429 a series of seven customs barriers is installed along the Grand Canal

1433 the seventh and last of the great maritime expeditions reaches Africa; cotton appears as a permanent item on the tax registers in Songjiang prefecture

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1436 a portion of the southern grain tax is commuted to silver; inauguration of the reign of the Zhengtong emperor

1449 the rebellion of Deng Maoqi’s “silver bandits” in Fujian is suppressed; Beijing officials depose the Zhengtong emperor after he is captured by the Mongols in favor of his brother, who ascends as the Jingtai emperor in 1450

THE MID-MING (1450–1550)

1457 restoration of the Zhengtong emperor as the Tianshun emperor

1464 marginal people in the hills of the interior province of Huguang rebel

1465 massive flooding in central and south China sets off a spate of bridge building

1492 the commercial transportation of grain to the northern border in exchange for salt certificates is monetarized

1506– 21

troubled reign of the Zhengde emperor

1506 the local costs of the courier system are met by a tax in silver assessed on landholdings rather than by corvée

1525 Ministry of War orders ships of more than one mast on the southeast coast seized, investigated, and destroyed

1527 granary quotas are severely reduced, diminishing the state’s capacity to relieve famines

1538 first in a decade-long wave of severe famines and epidemics sweeps central and southeast China

1548 closure of the coast against all foreign trade

1549 Portuguese and Chinese begin regular seasonal trading at Sao João Island near Macao

THE LATE MING (1550–1644)

1557 Portuguese gain permission to establish a permanent settlement on the Macao peninsula (retroceded in 1999)

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1567 the ban is lifted on maritime trade to all but Japan

1570 the first commercial route book is published in Suzhou

1573- 1620

reign of the Wanli emperor

1581 Chief Grand Secretary Zhang Juzheng imposes the Single Whip Reform, by which taxes are assessed on land and paid in silver

1582 earliest reference to the publishing of private newssheets in Beijing

1587 severe nationwide famine

1602 the iconoclastic Confucian philosopher Li Zhi commits suicide in prison

1629 the Chongzhen emperor reiterates the state prohibition against female infanticide; a third of courier stations are closed for lack of funds

1638 the Beijing Gazette switches to movable type

1641 massive epidemic throughout north and central China

1642 Manchus raid into Shandong province

1644 rebels capture Beijing and the Chongzhen emperor commits suicide; the Manchus invade and declare the founding of the Qing dynasty

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A Genealogy of Ming Emperors

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Abbreviations

b. born

d. died

fl. flourished

gs. gongsheng, “tribute student” (university licenciate)

jr. juren, “recommended man” (provincial graduate)

js. jinshi, “presented scholar” (metropolitan graduate)

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Introduction

Seasons of the Ming (1609)

The Ming dynasty began with the peace of the winter season. Or so our late-Ming author (we’ll leave him nameless for the moment) thought as he stood in the opening decade of the seventeenth century and looked all the way back to the fourteenth. The first half of the dynasty seemed to him the very picture of sensible order and settled life. “Every family was self-sufficient,” he was sure, “with a house to live in, land to cultivate, hills from which to cut firewood, gardens in which to grow vegetables. Taxes were collected without harassment and bandits did not appear. Marriages were arranged at the proper times and the villages were secure.” Men and women followed the time-honored division of household tasks, men in the fields and women at home weaving. (See figures 1 and 2.) “Deception did not sprout, and litigation did not arise.” All as it should be.

A century before his own time, our author declared, the dynasty’s winter of repose gave way to the bustle of spring. The sedate certainty of agriculture was edged out by the hotter speculative world of commerce: “Those who went out as merchants became numerous and the ownership of land was no longer esteemed. Men matched wits using their assets, and fortunes rose and fell unpredictably.” Polarizations of capability and class followed, with some families becoming rich and others impoverished. “The balance between the mighty and the lowly was lost

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as both competed for trifling amounts.” As the prospect of wealth fueled avarice, the moral order that had held society together gave way. “Each exploited the other and everyone publicized himself.” In this evil climate, “deception sprouted and litigation arose; purity was sullied and excess overflowed.”

Figure 1. This mid-Ming image of the classical subsistence ideal of men harvesting rice is contradicted by the presence of a managerial landlord holding a parasol, from whose perspective the picture is composed. The harvesters are not owner-cultivators but tenants or hired laborers (Bianmin tuzuan, 1592)

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Figure 2. A matching image pictures the ideal of women working at textile production within the home. It too is rendered unreal by the elegant setting in which the weaver and her assistant are placed. The ideal of unity of labor within the household largely disappeared in the Ming as textile production became commoditized (Bianmin tuzuan, 1592).

The chaotic growth of the spring season of the Ming proved mild compared to what came after. In the frantic press of the dynasty’s summer starting in the latter half of the sixteenth century, “those who enriched themselves through trade became the majority, and those who enriched themselves through agriculture were few. The rich became richer and the poor, poorer. Those who rose took over, and those who fell were forced to flee. It was capital that brought power; land was not a permanent prospect.” The agricultural base of society was abandoned. In its place “trade proliferated and the tiniest scrap of profit was counted up. Corrupt magnates sowed disorder and wealthy racketeers preyed.” As moral rot crept in, “deception reached the level of treachery and litigation led to open fights; purity was completely swept away and excess inundated the world.”

Our author completed his narrative of the seasons of the Ming with the world of his own adulthood since the 1570s. The face of Ming society was ravaged in the fall. “One man in a hundred is rich, while nine out of ten are impoverished. The poor cannot stand up to the rich who, though few in number, are able to control the majority. The lord of silver rules heaven and the god of copper cash

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reigns over the earth,” he declared. “Avarice is without limit, flesh injures bone, everything is for personal pleasure, and nothing can be let slip. In dealings with others, everything is recompensed down to the last hair.” His vision of descent into actuarial frenzy was apocalyptic. “The demons of treachery stalk,” he warned. “Fights have turned to pitched battles; pounding waves wash over the hills; torrents flood the land.” The sole remedy for this grim state of affairs was to “establish policies to close the gates and prevent the merchants from traveling about.” But our author sensed that this remedy was impossible. All he could do was lapse into despair and offer up the standard sigh of vexation in classical Chinese when everything is going wrong: “Juefu!”1

This account of Ming time comes from the 1609 gazetteer of Sheh county.2 Sheh was an inland county perched in the picturesque, hilly region south of Nanjing. Its gazetteer of 1609, a locally produced publication that recorded information concerning the official life and history of the county, was its first. Sheh was slow off the mark to produce a gazetteer. Most Ming counties already had one edition, if not several, by this time. Sheh’s backwardness here is striking in light of its enormous reputation as the home of some of the wealthiest merchants of the age; but then, merchants were beyond the social pale of many of the gentry who wrote the gazetteers.

The man wielding the pen was the centrally appointed county magistrate, Zhang Tao. Shortly after arriving in 1607, Zhang opened discussions with the local gentry about compiling a gazetteer. An editorial board was set up, compilers were commissioned the following year, and by 1609 the manuscript was finished and the woodblocks cut. Although it was conventional to name the magistrate as editor-in-chief, even when he did nothing, the Sheh gazetteer was very much Zhang’s book and a record of his personal views. Lest there be any doubt, he marked his editorial comments dotted throughout the gazetteer with the slightly immodest byline, “Master Zhang Tao says.” One of these is the essay we have just perused on the seasons of the Ming, which appears as a commentary closing the chapter on “local customs.”3 This section was where the compiler could comment on local attitudes and practices and note “whether the people are hard or pliant, lethargic or agitated, . . . what they like and dislike, what they take and discard, whether they move or stay in one place.”4 Since locals wanted to put the best face on their home county, in this section matters might be raised that were potentially controversial, as we shall see.

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Figure 3. This six-oared river boat is of the type Zhang Tao might have taken down the Yangzi River to reach his post in Sheh county (Tiangong kaiwu, 1637).

Zhang Tao is a minor figure in Ming history. In the bulky official history of the dynasty his name comes up only once.5 But we can piece together something of his story from the gazetteers of Sheh and his home county of Huangpi, some 500 kilometers up the Yangzi River. Huangpi was in the hinterland of Wuchang, the great interior marketing center where the Han River flowed into the Yangzi, yet it was slow to be swept into the commercial stream. Huangpi in the mid-Ming was known as a quiet backwater where “the people all devote themselves to agriculture and sericulture and few go off on commercial travel.” Women were almost never seen outside the home but stayed indoors from morning till evening spinning and weaving. In Zhang’s youth, however, the county was coming under influences that the local gentry regarded with suspicion. “In recent years,” according to the 1591 county gazetteer, “local customs are gradually weakening. A family without as much as an old broom go about in carriages and on oramented mounts and dress themselves up in the hats and clothing of the rich and eminent.” Despite the poverty of the region, “in all things style now substitutes for substance.”6

We cannot say when Zhang Tao was born into this slowly changing world. All we know of his origins is that his father, regarded as a paragon of filial piety, studied medicine to help the local people and provided the poor with free coffins. The first sure date in Zhang’s biography is 1586, the year he passed the highest examination in Beijing and gained the title of jinshi. Unless he was exceptionally brilliant or lucky, he was probably not much under thirty when he passed his jinshi. This would put his birth about 1560 or slightly earlier.

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His first posting was a three-year magistracy far up the Yangzi River in Sichuan province. His work there won him a strong promotion to Beijing as a supervising secretary in the Office of Scrutiny for Works. This post invested in him the power to investigate official corruption. Zhang was too outspoken. According to his one appearance in the official history, he joined the chorus of critics who attacked the mild-mannered Chief Grand Secretary Zhao Zhigao (1524–1601). Zhao Zhigao was already in his seventies when he became chief grand secretary and struggled feebly to hold to the power that his great predecessors, like the fiscal reformer Zhang Juzheng (1525–82), had concentrated in the post. Junior officials such as Zhang Tao were dead set on preventing Zhao from wielding the sort of autocratic power his predecessor had so conspicuously enjoyed in the 1570s. The official history does not give the date or substance of his attack; Zhang Tao is simply a name mentioned in passing. Falling afoul of the power brokers who dominated Beijing politics, Zhang had no choice but to retire to Huangpi. He spent the next fifteen years at home writing and staying out of politics.

When the court reversed the verdicts on the young activists who had spoken out in the 1580s, Zhang was called back to public life. His first assignment in 1607 was the magistracy of Sheh county. The county was in famine when he arrived. Punishing spring rains had washed away crops earlier in the year. Zhang watched the price of rice as a barometer of the disaster, and when it rose to .13 tael (a tael is roughly equivalent to an ounce of silver) per dou (10.74 liters), he released grain stocks in the county granary to moderate that price and ordered the wealthy of Sheh to buy grain from elsewhere and sell it below the market rate. As a result of his efforts, no one starved to death. Once the immediate crisis passed, he turned to dike-building to prevent further flooding. The investment proved wise, for rain would inundate the region in the following years without causing major distress in Sheh.7

Zhang Tao also invested in symbolic resources. That same year he restored the county’s leading academy honoring the great Song philosopher and native son Zhu Xi (1130–1200); he built a pagoda on a hill deemed to have geomantic influence on the success of local sons in the civil examinations; and he restored two shrines, one to virtuous former officials and another to a local paragon of filial devotion. Shrines, academies, and pagodas symbolized the values of self- cultivation, reverence, and virtuous action that Zhang was committed to nurturing in his program of renovating local customs. Zhang also recognized the need for building practical incentives into his moral program and reformed the service levy that furnished the county office with corvée labor for maintaining local infrastructure, particularly the state courier service. His appreciative biography in the 1771 county gazetteer closes with the observation that “over his two years’ residence, styles shifted and customs changed”8—precisely what Zhang aspired to achieve. He would have been pleased by this judgment.

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As soon as Zhang’s work began to take effect in Sheh, he was promoted out of the county and back to Beijing. His career went upward through a succession of posts in the capital and culminated with his appointment as governor of Liaodong, the Ming bridgehead in the northeast that would fall to the Manchus in 1644.9 Zhang held this appointment in the second decade of the seventeenth century, prior to the Manchu annexation of the region in 1621.10 He then retired from service and spent the remainder of his life at home in Huangpi county, where he enjoyed a local reputation for his wide experience and erudition. He lived at least until the late 1620s.

Zhang Tao was critical of his time, but he was also of his time. When he attacked the chief grand secretary, he acted not as a lone crusader but as someone who shared the commitments of his contemporaries to limit the power of that post. So too, when he attacked commerce in the Sheh county gazetteer, he voiced anxieties that disturbed others in the reform-minded but conservative wing of his generation. What sets Zhang Tao’s diatribe against commerce apart from similar texts by his contemporaries is its extreme tone—which is why it caught my attention. I have ended up writing this history of the Ming dynasty in order to understand his history of the dynasty and why it made sense to him. By engaging in a dialogue with someone four centuries in the past, I have sought to write in some small part from inside the Ming world, using Zhang Tao as my guide.

Zhang read the history of the Ming as an inexorable fall. The dynasty had descended from the fixed moral order imposed by the dynastic founder, Emperor Taizu of the Hongwu era (r. 1368–98; also called the Hongwu emperor), toward a thoroughly commercial, and, in his eyes, morally debased, society. Commerce— personified in the evil figure of the lord of silver—is fingered as the culprit that reduced a once settled China to a world of anarchic motion where commerce set people traveling, imaginations soaring, and taboos tumbling. By allowing consumption to drive production, commerce disrupted the moral solidarity that Zhang believed obtained in pure agrarian social relations and fueled a competition that dissolved communal norms.

Zhang Tao’s interpretation accepted the Hongwu emperor’s claim that, by intervening in the lives of his people in thorough and often harsh ways, he was resurrecting the ancient Daoist ideal expressed in the passage from the Daode jing quoted on the opening page of this book. The Hongwu emperor believed that closed rural communities ruled by a little elite would restore order to a troubled realm and bring a lasting stability to his dynasty. Having lived through a childhood of intense poverty—he lost his parents in a famine, survived in a monastery until the monks were too poor to feed him, and then went begging— the Hongwu emperor regarded the idea of living and growing old in one’s home village without ever going to the next, only a dog’s bark away, as a heaven he had never known. As emperor he would do anything to bring that heaven down to

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earth. No matter that this ideal was, as we shall see, a nostalgic fiction written onto a reality more mobile and commercialized than either the Hongwu emperor or Zhang Tao was willing to admit. The emperor enjoyed enormous coercive and communicative means to impose his vision of order, and was moderately successful in doing so. His descendants were less energetic in their efforts and ultimately less committed to his goals. By Zhang Tao’s time, the Hongwu vision —one part arcadian and two parts draco-nian—had attenuated to nothing more than a textual memory with little purchase on daily life. For Zhang to reimagine this vision was only to compound his and the emperor’s nostalgia.

In terms of Zhang’s understanding of what was at stake for Chinese culture, the vision’s fictionality doesn’t matter. Nor does it matter that he may not have grasped the larger trends that we now see and emphasize in our analysis: that China’s population more than doubled through the dynasty; that merchants were drawing producers and consumers into regional and national commercial networks that neither could do without; that exports were luring Japanese and Spanish silver into the Chinese market and helping to lubricate the economy; and that the new wealth was affecting the ways in which information was circulating and knowledge being recorded. Zhang saw only a harrowing contest of rich against poor, traders against plowmen, profit against virtue. The analysis left him powerless, and feeling so. All he could do was lament, and in lamenting give us clues for tracing the contours of his world.

Not everyone at the time agreed with Zhang’s grim evaluation of the changes overtaking the Ming. Zhang acknowledges the local unpopularity of his views in a dedicatory text to the City God of Sheh, in which he declares that he wrote the gazetteer with “an upright pen” and carried out the work with “an icy heart and an iron face.”11 He implies that he had been pressured to change his text and had refused. What had people objected to? His report to the deity is too tactful to say, though most likely it was his condemnation of the commercial environment of the county. Local unhappiness with Zhang Tao’s pronouncements in the 1609 gazetteer meant that a replacement edition appeared in 1624, just fifteen years later (the customary interval was sixty). The magistrate who edited the 1771 edition of the Sheh gazetteer called the 1624 version “a work of reconciliation.” He conceded that Zhang’s 1609 gazetteer was “in form closest to true history and extremely informative.” But he found the “pronouncements on public affairs strident and discordant.” Zhang’s comments about the lord of silver he regarded as “verging on impropriety and lacking in restraint.”12 The good merchants of Sheh still rankled from the sting of his words.