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In 1368 Zhu Yuanzhang proclaimed the Ming dynasty and established the capital at Nanjing on the Yangtze River. Zhu was the first commoner to become emperor in 1,500 years. Known as the Hongwu Emperor, he proved one of Chinas most despotic rulers. At first a secretariat, headed by a chief counselor, dominated the administrative affairs of the central government. In 1380, however, Hongwu abolished all executive posts in the secretariat because he suspected treason on the part of the chief counselor.
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Hongwu became the sole coordinator of the central government. Throughout his 30-year reign, Hongwu humiliated, dismissed, and even cruelly executed officials he came to suspect.
After Hongwus death in 1398, a grandson succeeded him as emperor. However, in 1402, Zhu Di, Hongwus son and the new emperors uncle, usurped the throne. Known as the Yongle Emperor, he pursued aggressive and expansionist policies. He led five campaigns against the Mongols in the north and acquired territory from them. To oversee his new territory more closely, he moved the capital north from Nanjing to Beijing, where he built an elaborate palace compound known as the Forbidden City. He also reacted to turbulence in what is now Vietnam by sending an expeditionary force to the area. Yongle sent the admiral Zheng He on tribute-collecting voyages into the South China Sea, the Indian Ocean, and the Persian Gulf. On one early voyage, Zheng He intervened in a civil war in Java and established a new king there; on another, he captured the hostile king of Sinhala (now Sri Lanka) and took him to China as a prisoner.
Most Ming emperors after Yongle, who died in 1424, were weak. In the 16th century Chinas problems with foreign encroachment multiplied. Japanese pirates plundered the southeastern coast, while Mongols routinely raided the Mings northern frontier despite the presence of defensive walls, known collectively today as the Great Wall, that the Ming had constructed to keep the Mongols out of China.
Internally, the Ming bureaucracy became absorbed by partisan controversies. The harassed emperors abandoned more and more of their responsibilities to eunuchs. In 1592, when Japanese forces under Toyotomi Hideyoshi invaded Korea, the Ming sent its armies in support of Korea. The seven-year war left the Ming exhausted and the imperial treasuries depleted. Sporadic peasant uprisings began in 1628, and soon rebellions were occurring all over North China. The death toll mounted steadily, especially after a group of rebels cut the dikes of the Huang He in 1642 and several hundred thousand people died in the flood and subsequent famine. Beijing fell to the rebel Li Zicheng in 1644, the day after the last Ming emperor committed suicide.
The Tribute System and the Arrival of Europeans. The early Ming emperors worked hard to reestablish Chinas preeminence in East Asia. Ever since the Han dynasty, Chinese had viewed their emperor as properly everyones overlord, and the rulers of non-Chinese tribes, regions, and states as properly his vassals. Foreign rulers were expected to honor and observe the Chinese ritual calendar, to accept nominal appointments as members of the Chinese nobility or military establishment, and to send periodic tribute missions to the Chinese capital. All foreign envoys received valuable gifts in acknowledgement of the tribute they presented to the emperor, and they were permitted to buy and sell goods at official markets. In this way, copper coins, silk, tea, and porcelain flowed out of China, and horses, spices, and other goods flowed in. On balance, the combined tribute and trade activities were highly advantageous to foreignersso much so that China limited the size and cargoes of foreign missions and prescribed long intervals between missions.
To preserve the governments monopoly on foreign contacts and keep the Chinese people from being contaminated by foreign customs that the Ming considered barbarian, the Ming rulers prohibited the Chinese from traveling abroad. They also prohibited unauthorized dealings between Chinese and foreigners. These prohibitions were unpopular and unenforceable, and from about the mid-15th century, the Chinese readily collaborated with foreign traders in widespread smuggling. By late Ming times, thousands of Chinese had relocated to various places in Southeast Asia and Japan to conduct trade.
Ming policies on foreign trade shaped the Chinese reception of Europeans, who first appeared in Ming China in 1514. The Portuguese had already established themselves in southern India and at the port city of Malacca (now Melaka) on the Malay Peninsula, where they learned of the huge profits that could be made in the trade between China and Southeast Asia. The Ming considered the Portuguese smugglers and pirates and did not welcome them in China. By 1557, however, the Portuguese had taken control of Macao, a small trading station on Chinas coast. Soon, the Spanish also were trading illegally along the coast. Representatives of the Dutch East India Company, after unsuccessfully trying to capture Macao from the Portuguese, took control of coastal Taiwan in 1624 and began developing trade contacts on the mainland in nearby Fujian and Zhejiang provinces. In 1637 a squadron of five English ships shot its way into Guangzhou (Canton) and disposed of its cargoes there.
Christian missionaries followed the traders. Jesuits, members of a Roman Catholic religious order, showed respect for Chinese culture and overcame the foreigners reputation for lawlessness. The most eminent of the Jesuit missionaries was Matteo Ricci, who acquired a substantial knowledge of the Chinese language and of Confucian learning. During the latter part of the Ming dynasty, the Jesuits established communities in many cities of south and central China and built a church in Beijing under imperial patronage. Jesuits even served as astronomers in the Ming court. Some officials and members of the court became Jesuit converts or sympathizers, and European books on scientific subjects and Christian theology were published in Chinese.
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