Early Modern China

Asian Civilizations II
Jervy C. Briones
Lecturer, Saint Anthony Mary Claret College
Late Ming
Dynasty
• In China, the signs of early
modernity include the
appearance of a
commercialized consumer
culture in the late Ming
and the forging of a vast
new “gunpowder empire”
under the subsequent Qing
Dynasty.
• Confucian moralists in China were inclined to decry the growing
commercialization of the late Ming Dynasty as a decline from the austerely ideal
order established by the dynastic founder.
• Precisely because the government neither understood nor approved, much of
this late Ming commerce took place outside the sphere of government
surveillance. Ming commercialization therefore could be described as laissez-faire
in approach partly by default.
• Given China’s huge size, most of China’s trade has always been domestic. The
Ming government inadvertently helped facilitate internal trade by reopening and
maintaining the Grand Canal.
• Although much coastal shipping was for domestic purposes, the volume of
foreign trade was also substantial. Since the Ming government viewed foreign
trade with suspicion, however, a large portion of this traffic operated outside the
law, including both smuggling and piracy.
• For the first 142 years of
the Ming Dynasty, the only
legally acknowledged
foreign trade had been
that which was conducted
under the rubric of formal
diplomatic tribute
missions.
• The first Portuguese landfall in south China was probably made in 1513. Because
of mutual misunderstandings, Portuguese relations with Ming China got off to a
poor start, but by 1557 the Portuguese had a permanent base on Chinese soil at
Macao, a small peninsula near the mouth of the river leading up to Guangzhou.
• By the 1560s, official Ming restrictions on overseas trade were beginning to relax,
and the Portuguese were soon joined by the Spanish, who had established a base
at Manila in the Philippines in 1571.
• The Dutch also attempted to trade with China and established a successful
outpost on the island of Taiwan. In Taiwan, the Dutch erected their second-largest
fortress in Asia, and there they purchased silk from Chinese merchants to
exchange for silver in Japan.
• The Dutch were forcibly driven off Taiwan in 1662, however, by a colorful Chinese
freebooter named Zheng Chenggong who became the first Chinese ruler of
Taiwan.
• Europeans were therefore
among the participants in
China’s overseas trade by
the seventeenth century,
but they hardly constituted
a dominant presence. Even
so, Europe had already
begun to make an impact
on China.
• The first Jesuit missionary came to China in 1552, when the Spanish missionary
Saint Francis Xavier arrived on an island off the southeast coast. In 1601, Matteo
Ricci became the first European Christian missionary since Mongol times to be
allowed to reside in Beijing.
• Matteo Ricci made a favorable impression on many Chinese. The Jesuit mission to
China enjoyed a measure of real success, and by the end of the seventeenth
century, there may have been two hundred thousand Chinese Christian converts.
• Ideas about China and Confucius had explicit influences on such important
European Enlightenment figures as Leibniz (1646–1716), Voltaire (1694–1778),
and the eighteenth-century French school of pioneering economists known as
the Physiocrats.
• There was a long-standing vogue in Europe for Chinese-style art objects, called
chinoiserie, which, among other things, had a significant impact on English
gardening styles.
Qing Dynasty
• Among the local
strongmen at the turn of
the 17th century was a man
named Nurgaci (1559–
1626) who founded what
was to become the
Manchu imperial lineage
and began the process of
empire building.
• Nurgaci introduced the device of different colored banners, a form of military and
political mobilization, and over the course of the 17th century it brought together
people of diverse origin, including Chinese, Korean, Mongolic, Turkic, Tibetan,
and even some of Russian descent.
• In 1635, Nurgaci’s successor officially adopted the name Manchu for his
following. Soon afterwards, he also took the Chinese-language dynastic name
Qing for his state, and the Chinese title “emperor.”
• “The Qing dynasty represents the culminating phase of the unification of Inner
and East Asia,” and its remarkable success in building a vast and stable empire
arguably owed much to its cultural and institutional hybridity.
• Even as the Manchus were beginning their imperial expansion, the Ming Dynasty
in China had been collapsing. By the mid-17th century the Ming government was
bankrupt.
• Communications were
disrupted, government
offices went unfilled, and
troops went unpaid. Unrest
erupted into rebellion, and
in 1644, one Chinese rebel
(Li Zicheng, ca. 1605–1645)
captured the Ming capital
at Beijing.
• A loyal Ming general refused to submit to these rebels, however, and sent a letter
requesting military assistance from the Manchus who accepted the invitation and
attacked. On June 5, 1644, Manchu forces entered Beijing.
• The Qing Dynasty was a vast multiethnic conquest empire that, by the 18th
century, may have ruled over as much as 40% of the world’s total population. It
had three official languages, Manchu, Mongol, and Chinese, with Tibetan also
enjoying considerable prominence.
• The total number of Jesuit missionaries who came to China remained small
where they also chose to treat Confucianism as a secular philosophy rather than
a religion, and therefore viewed it as somewhat compatible with Christianity.
• Other Catholic orders, however, particularly the Dominicans and Franciscans,
were outraged by this Jesuit tolerance of Confucian rites. In 1773, the Jesuit order
was even (temporarily) suppressed altogether by the Roman Catholic Church.
• In 1724, a Qing emperor
had condemned
Christianity. The unraveling
of the once promising
Jesuit mission to China is
symptomatic of an
apparently widening gap in
mutual appreciation
between China and Europe
in the 18th and 19th
centuries.
• Substantial private trade resumed after the consolidation of Manchu authority.
The leading European traders were now the British who in 1664 first imported
two pounds of a curious Chinese leaf thought to have medicinal properties. The
British tea trade would soon grow to enormous importance.
• Beginning in 1757, the Qing Dynasty limited all Western maritime trade to only
one port: Guangzhou (Canton). Despite this new restriction on European trade,
the Qing Dynasty was still not really especially closed and isolationistic – nor was
it obviously in decline in the 18th century.