Speaking of the Ming Dynasty, the last unified dynasty established by the Han people in Chinese history, there are too many legends and unbelievable. After 16 emperors and 276 years of enjoying the country, it is nicknamed a bowl at the beginning and a rope at the end. However, the martial arts of the early and middle Ming Dynasty were not much inferior to the Han and Tang dynasties, if Emperor Hongwu rebuilt the territory of the Song Empire, then the Yongle Emperor restored the momentum of the Yuan Empire, but it was such a strong dynasty, but it made mistakes one after another in the middle and late stages and fell under the "heavenly punishment" of the Xiaoice Period, so what happened to the Ming Dynasty?
The Ming Empire, which has the atmosphere of the Han and Tang dynasties
In 1405, more than 600 years ago, there was no country or power in the world that could compete with the Ming Empire. Zhu Di, who was born as a military general, ascended the throne as the Yongle Emperor after the "Jingnan", and the Ming Empire had an absolute world advantage in terms of political ambitions, economic strength, military technology, and shipbuilding technology. At this time, the Ming Dynasty had been founded for about half a century, and with the recovery of national strength, the agricultural economy prospered, the political system was strong, and the era of expansion began again.
To the north, the Yongle Emperor made five imperial expeditions against the nomadic tribes of the Mongolian steppe, extending China's northern frontier to the Krulun River and the Heilongjiang River; To the south, the empire's 200,000 troops conquered the Nguyen dynasty in Vietnam, Annam Cochin was included as a vassal, and in the first year of Yongle to the west, Hou Xian visited Xifan (**Nepal, India), and then in 1413 Tran Cheng sent an envoy to the Western Regions (Central Asia). If Emperor Hongwu rebuilt the territory of the Song Empire, then Emperor Yongle restored the momentum of the Yuan Empire, which has the atmosphere of Han Wu and Tang Sect.
At this time, the territory of the Ming Empire included the Han Dynasty and the northeast, and the northeast reached the Sea of Japan and the Outer Khingan Mountains; North to Yin Mountain; west to Hamiwei and Jiayuguan; southwest to Burma and northern Siam; And set up a guard in the Qinghai-Tibet region, continuing the Yuan Dynasty's jurisdiction over the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. At the same time, Zheng He was sent to the West, creating the most incredible maritime expedition in the history of the world and the most unforgettable in the history of China.
At that time, after the two peaks of development in the Qin and Han dynasties and the Tang and Song dynasties, China's shipbuilding technology and craftsmanship finally reached its peak in the Ming Dynasty, and a number of shipbuilding technologies were the first in the world. Take the types of ships in Zheng He's fleet as an example, according to their functions, they are divided into large treasure ships, sub-treasure ships, horse ships, grain ships, seat ships, war ships, water ships, etc.; According to the characteristics of the ship type, there are blessed ships, sand ships, Guangzhou ships, etc.; According to the load capacity, there are 2000 materials, 1500 materials, 400 materials, 100 materials, etc.; According to the mode of propulsion, there are 9 masts and 12 sails to 3 masts and 3 sails or large eight oars, 28 oars, six oars and so on.
Hundreds of years ago, in the southern seas of the world, there was never such a magnificent sight. While reaping the best achievements of agricultural civilization and nomadic civilization, the Ming Dynasty produced an unprecedented fruit in the maritime civilization, but in just a few decades, Zheng He's voyage to the West became a legendary and incredible "event in the early Ming Dynasty".
At this time, when Zheng He's mission set out from the capital of the Ming Empire and went to the Western Ocean for the first time, it first went to Champang, took the northwest needle from the old port, passed through Manraka and went west to Sumatra, entered the Indian Ocean, passed through Cuilan Island and Ceylon Mountain, and then went northwest to Little Gülen, Kezhi, and Guli to return home, and the distance it sailed was almost one-third of the earth, and the latter part of the journey to the Western world was left to the Portuguese more than half a century later: in 1498, Vasco da Gama's fleet docked at the port of Calicut in India, It was Guli that Zheng He visited again and again.
Compared with relying on force, commercial development and colonial expansion for the purpose of Western voyages, Zheng He's voyage to the West was more to use ** as a means to pursue official tribute**, in order to maintain the vassal relationship between Southeast Asian countries and the Ming Empire. However, this kind of navigation activity, which lacked the support of the people, and whose political significance was far greater than its economic significance, came to an abrupt end after the death of Emperor Yongle.
The financial crisis, the heart of the empire's demise
So the 15th century was both a starting point and an end point: there were two ends of Eurasia, a vast land empire shrinking in the East, and a small, remote kingdom expanding in the West. After the Yongle Emperor, the Ming Empire's expansionist policies reached their peak, and then they turned to convergent nativism: Zheng He's voyage to the south was ended, and the Great Wall was rebuilt to the north. World history began to reach a critical step in the growth and decline of East and West, and the rise and fall of great powers.
The construction of the Great Wall also laid the groundwork for the demise of the Ming Dynasty, because the strong and majestic Ming Great Wall was the Ming Dynasty to raise the strength of the whole country and spend a lot of real gold ** "piled up", especially the Great Wall in the eastern dangerous area, because of the task of guarding the Beijing Division, are made of stone and blue bricks, which are very solid. Of course, it also takes a lot of manpower, material and financial resources to complete the construction.
According to historian Huang Renyu's estimate, the Ming Dynasty generally cost 7,700 taels to build a 1-kilometer Great Wall**, and the height was 31,500 taels**. The length of the artificial wall of the Great Wall of the Ming Dynasty is 62596 km, the length of the trench is 3597 kilometers, 2232 days long4 km. Counting the side walls alone, the construction of the Great Wall in the Ming Dynasty cost at least more than 48.5 million taels**. In addition to spending money on building the Great Wall, it also costs money to fight a war, and to maintain the operation of more than a dozen military towns in the north, it will cost more than 8 million taels per year**.
You must know that even during the "Zhang Juzheng Era" (1572-1582) when the Ming Dynasty was relatively wealthy, the annual fiscal revenue of the Ming Dynasty was only 4 million taels**. After the death of Zhang Juzheng in 1582, the finances of the Ming Dynasty continued to deteriorate, and by the eleventh year of Wanli (1583), the financial deficit of the Ming Dynasty's treasury had reached 2.3 million taels**. Therefore, the construction of the Great Wall was a heavy burden for the Ming Dynasty, which could only be solved by constantly collecting taxes and even selling official titles. So in the middle and late Ming Dynasty, officialdom almost became a vegetable market, and the official position became a clearly priced fruit and vegetable, which could be bought and sold freely.
Faced with such an embarrassing situation, couldn't the Ming Dynasty stop building the Great Wall? The answer is no. Because although Emperor Yuan Shun fled north to Mobei, his military strength still exists, and the Mongolian tribes always want to regain control of the Central Plains. At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, the policy of taking the initiative to attack Mongolia was adopted, Xu Da, Chang Yuchun and others had led troops deep into Mobei many times, and Emperor Yongle also had 5 huge pro-conquests to attack Mongolia, but it was always difficult to solve the border troubles once and for all because of the mobility of nomadic forces.
The Mongol Empire's destruction of the Han regime of the Song Dynasty almost became a lingering memory of the Ming Empire's rulers. At that time, there seemed to be no better way than to build a strong Great Wall, so Emperor Yongle even moved the capital from Nanjing to Beijing, opening the history of the Ming Dynasty's Son of Heaven guarding the country, and the construction of the Great Wall was to achieve the purpose of resisting more enemy attacks with fewer troops.
In fact, the role of the Great Wall of the Ming Dynasty in defending against the northern nomads was still significant, and the high wall not only effectively blocked the attack of the besieging enemy, but also made the enemy feel intimidated. Therefore, some people believe that if Wu Sangui had not "turned against the water" to open the gate of Shanhaiguan, it would not have been easy for the Manchu Qing Dynasty to break through the Great Wall.
Of course, in addition to the huge financial pressure on the Ming Dynasty due to the construction of the Great Wall, the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression and the policy of vassal kings also put considerable pressure on the finances. For example, according to the practice of the Ming Dynasty, all the vassal kings in various places were supplied by the local finance, and compared with the Qing Dynasty's basic salary "free-range" policy for the clan, almost all parts of the Ming Dynasty were "captive" with high salaries, so that in the late Ming Dynasty, the descendants of the feudal princes in various places multiplied, and the financial expenditure continued to rise.
In contrast, the Qing Dynasty learned this lesson, and the princes and heirs of the clan would not only be "demoted to the throne", but also stripped of their titles and become "idle clans" if they failed the exam. This kind of operation seems to be mean and unkind to the "Tianhuang nobles", but it maximizes the efficiency of the Gongwei Imperial Chamber, and also greatly restricts the "tail is too big".
To add insult to injury, the Xiaoice period lowered the "heavenly punishment".
For the Ming Empire, this kind of huge expenses need to be covered by taxes from the peasants, so when there is a large-scale locust plague and severe drought in the north, including northern Shaanxi, when even the children and girls have to bear the tax burden under the grain of no harvest, the peasant uprising swept in, so the fate of the Ming Empire also came to an end. In fact, not only the Ming Dynasty, but also the rise and fall of China's dynasties are largely closely linked to climate change and food production.
The Qin, Han, Sui and Tang dynasties with bumper grain harvests, social stability and strong national strength were all in a relatively "warm period", and several prosperous eras in Chinese history - the rule of Wenjing, the rule of Zhenguan, the prosperity of the Kaiyuan Dynasty, and the prosperity of Kangqian and so on, all correspond to the relatively warm period of climate and the warm time lasts for a long time. Most of the Northern and Southern Dynasties, the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms, the late Northern Song Dynasty, and the late Ming and early Qing dynasties were in a relatively "severe cold and cooling period", which was not only accompanied by climate change, frequent droughts and grain failures, but also often faced large-scale southward invasion by nomads.
This is because the change of dynasties in China often has external factors such as the collision of nomadic and agricultural peoples. A powerful and unified dynasty perished, and then a northern nomadic tribe invaded the Central Plains, forming a situation of "Huarong mixed living", or secession, or confrontation between the north and the south. Then, after the process of war, the world was reunited, and China was revitalized into a powerful dynasty again, and then another northern iron cavalry went south, and the Central Plains faced another war...A kind of cyclical **, this is the case in the Wei, Jin, Southern and Northern Dynasties, the five dynasties and ten kingdoms after the death of the Tang Dynasty, and even more so in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties.
This ** cycle corresponds to the cycle of cold, hot, dry and wet changes in the climate. When the warm and humid climate environment turns to cold and dry, agricultural production that depends on the weather for food will be greatly impacted, and social unrest will lead to wars. At the same time, because of the cold climate, the northern nomads also faced the threat of livestock freezing to death, pasture grass drying up, and water sources drying up, so they had to go south to find suitable land for grazing, or go south to plunder to tide over the difficulties, so the Central Plains Dynasty, which was already crumbling due to "internal worries", collapsed under the impact of the outside.
Later, when the climate warms up again, with the increase of rain, the recovery of agricultural production, the people are fed and clothed, the economy is developed, and the culture is prosperous, the Central Plains Dynasty will enter a period of prosperity and strength; At the same time, the northern nomads also because of the restoration of the grassland, the nomadic culture is also flourishing, and there is no need to make trouble for the livelihood of livestock in winter, so the contradiction between the nomadic tribe and the Central Plains Dynasty will be much smaller, and because the output value of agriculture is greater than that of nomadism, the strength of the Central Plains Dynasty in the period of the rich period of the Wufu people is far stronger than that of the nomadic tribes.
Moreover, by comparing the climate records of ancient China, it will be found that from the middle of the 8th century AD, the climate and environment began to become dry, natural disasters occurred frequently, agricultural harvest failed, wheat production in North China generally decreased, rice cultivation areas also retreated south, and the total grain output decreased. In particular, after the Anshi Rebellion (755-763), the northern feudal towns were numerous, a large number of people moved south, and the Yangtze River basin to Lingnan also changed from the previous excessive water volume to the climate, so the economic center of Chinese civilization became more difficult to shift, and the Jiangnan region became a land of fish and rice, a land of abundance.
After that, although there was a brief period of warmth, the overall temperature of China's climate never returned to the level of BC and Han and Tang dynasties, and even in the last years of the Ming Dynasty, there was a century of cooling that had not occurred in previous dynasties - the Xiaoice Age, and finally the Ming Empire was drowned in the cold. Therefore, if you read the history of human civilization, you will find that this is also a history of natural disaster struggle, and the changes in the climate, such as cold, warm, dry and wet, often bring about deep-seated social problems, profoundly affecting the process of civilization and the change of historical dynasties.
Of course, there must have been other reasons for the demise of the Ming Dynasty, such as the emperor's neglect of government, the Donglin party struggle, the eunuch dictatorship and other issues, but it is undeniable that the financial collapse and climate change undoubtedly played a fundamental role in making the Ming Dynasty, a dynasty with a Han and Tang atmosphere, strong for a while. And now with global warming, is it good or bad for us?
Last review: The cold and warm changes of the climate carry the changes of China's territory, and it is the driving force behind the rise and fall of the dynasty Remarks: This article is the original work of Chapter 75 of the "Collection of the Five Northwest Provinces", and it is only a family's words, **Please indicate [The copyright belongs to the original author and the source], plagiarism must be investigated. In addition, the picture part of the article is quoted from the Internet, if there is a copyright private link, please delete. List of high-quality authors