archaeogeek
Banned
And the only one I'd gotten is Kubla Khan. And Star Trek obviously.
Still great update - glad to see some activity in the north and west.
Still great update - glad to see some activity in the north and west.
Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)
- Thread starter subversivepancakes
- Start date
Yeah, that's fair enough. The Hui are going to be in for a pretty rough time when the dust settles, regardless of who the victor is. They rolled the dice with Wu Sangui, and things are coming up snake eyes. You're right that there will probably be considerable migration west by Hui - but it will be individual, not directed by any greater agency. I'm still of the opinion that Wu himself trying some kind of proto-Long March with Muslims doesn't really work, and he might very well lose the war with the Dzungars that would result anyway.
These are all excellent ideas. I'll see what I can do. OK, Willy Wonka might be pushing it a little.
You guys are pretty good; between the two of you you got almost everything . . .
. . . except this one. In fairness, it's quite a bit less well-known than the other ones. Don't think Ironman, or Lord of the Rings, or the Green Lantern; think Wallace Stevens.
*Also, suggestions for what to do with Japan are more than welcome. Nothing too drastic, I think; just some small and interesting changes. Otherwise I'll have no choice but to come up with some half-baked scenario that involves mashing together the plots of about seven Haruki Murakami novels.
maverick
Banned
I'd say something, but I think I prefer this.
The Shimabara Rebellion is far gone and I dunno about what you could do with the Keian Uprising or the ronin behind it.
On the other hand, Tokugawa Iemitsu's death in 1651 left the Shogunate with a small bunch of underaged heirs, the oldest of them being 10. Maybe have a civil war/succession fight between the five regents and place another Tokugawa child as Shogun, one of the regents, or perhaps replicate the deal with the Hojo during the Kamakura Shogunate, with one Clan becoming permanent hereditary Shikken for the Shogun?
Also, I wonder if replicating events in China and Mongolia in Japan won't just result in recreating Samurai Champloo.
Excerpted from “Rise of the Roujuu: The Tokugawa Shogunate Reconsidered,” by Hosokawa Tsuyoshi.
- In a sense, all Japanese history from 1650 to 1750 must be considered in the context of one fateful choice: the decision to re-normalize relations with the Southern Ming Dynasty and resume trade with that polity, which was made in 1648 after an embassy headed by the Prince of Fu anchored off Nagasaki Bay and entreated the Shogunate to re-open its doors to the world. Had the Ming been stronger at the time, the embassy likely would have ended in failure; paradoxically, had they been weaker, it likely would have had the same result (1). Yet the Ming were neither too strong nor too weak; they came to the Shogunate not as supplicants, nor as domineering would-be overlords - they valued the resumption of the lucrative Japan trade too much for such a posture - but as equals, more or less, and it was this negotiating stance which secured the reopening of trade. Chinese luxury goods, such as silk and porcelain, began to flow into Japan with increasing speed, sparking something of a boom in the port cities of Nagasaki and Shimonoseki, among others. Meanwhile, Japan exported large quantities of copper, mostly in coin form, and silver to ports controlled by the Southern Ming (2). As the 1650s began, Japanese traders also began to make voyages to the retrenching Manchu Empire, which established a port at Haishenwai for foreign trade; Japan began to export significant quantities of high-quality swords and firearms to the Manchus at this time. Meanwhile, the Dutch were unceremoniously ejected from the artificial island of Deshima in Nagasaki Bay. They had always been viewed with considerable opprobrium by the Shogunate, and given the reopening of trade with China proper the presence of Christians - a group deeply distrusted by the central government after the events of the Shimabara Rebellion scarcely ten years before - was deemed unnecessary. The China trade brought considerable wealth to Japan, as merchant lineages competed to win permission to send ships abroad.
Yet while the China trade was undoubtedly lucrative, it also exacerbated already-existing social problems that threatened stability, which the Shogunate prized above all else. In particular, Japan during the early 1650s had a serious rounin (浪人, or “masterless samurai”) problem. Due to the general peace that had persisted since the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, feudal lords no longer found it necessary to employ the vast number of retainers which had previously been the norm. The policies of the bakufu (幕府, or “shogunal government”) toward the growing number of rounin only made the situation worse; rounin were generally prohibited from finding new masters to serve after being discharged, and they were also banished from many large cities due to crime concerns. The resumption of the China trade would have offered an outlet for many of these unemployed samurai, were they to take service on one of the ships plying the seas; however, the majority of them viewed such an occupation as menial and unworthy of their status as samurai (3). Meanwhile, with ocean trade came sailors, and a host of unsavoury elements disembarked on Japanese shores in the early 1650s. Somewhat paradoxically, despite many rounin turning down berths on trading ships due to the job’s supposed meniality, not a few of them formed criminal partnerships with freebooters who had made their way to Japanese shores, mostly dealing in stolen goods and acting as hired muscle. Many rounin who took on such tasks viewed it as a deep shame on their honor, yet preferred a clandestine life of crime to openly engaging in an occupation which they believed to be beneath their station. In any event, large numbers of rounin and imported criminal elements made for a combustible mixture, and eventually something had to give.
Matters came to a head in 1651 with the outbreak of the 慶安事件 (Keian jiken, or “Keian Incident”), an uprising of disaffected rounin led by Yui Shousetsu, who was himself a rounin. The plotters mounted coordinated attacks on Osaka, Shizuoka, and Edo Castle, the beating heart of the Shogunate itself. Ultimately the revolt failed, though it was not without considerable loss of life and damages; parts of both Edo and Kyoto were burnt to the ground in the melees that ensued during the chaos of battle (4). In the wake of the struggle, after the remaining leaders of the rebellion had been hunted down and put to death in inventive and painful fashion, it was very clear to the bakufu and to the 老中 (roujuu, or “Elder”; a term that refers both to individuals and to the collective council of roujuu that ruled at the time in place of Shogun Tokugawa Ietsuna, who was barely ten years old) that drastic measures needed to be taken to combat the growing rounin crisis. A more widespread and general campaign of persecution was viewed as counterproductive, while simply relaxing the laws regarding rounin was viewed as not going far enough. What was needed was to give the rounin something to do, even if that something was essentially make-work; in the words of Roujuu member Matsudaira Nobutsuna, the court needed to send them on a “wild sheep chase” (羊をめぐる冒険, hitsuji wo meguru bouken). In the end, the shogunal court decided to relax the laws regarding inheritance of feudal lords, creating new members of the aristocracy. These men - who surely needed samurai retainers as per their new status, and how fortunate it was that there were so many masterless samurai wandering around - were not given lands carved out of existing domains. Rather, they were granted entirely new domains on the wild and largely unpacified northern island of Ezo (Hokkaido). The Northern Expedition had begun.
Even with their new status, many of the newly-made 大名 (daimyou, or “lords”) were less than thrilled at the prospect of relocating to Ezo, essentially considered the end of the world by most Japanese at the time. In recognition of the expenses that they would have to assume, including the cost of hiring samurai retainers and carving their fiefs out of the northern wilderness, the shogunate gave these new lords “grants” of what amounted to start-up cash in addition to generous tax breaks and incentives (5). Yet despite the hardships associated with Ezo, it quickly became clear that the northern island was not without its compensations. For one, it was excellently situated for trade with the Manchu Empire, which continued to increase throughout the 1650s, and later on for Korea. However, what truly made the Ezo expansion viable and rescued what otherwise would have been a disastrous venture was the Southern Ming, and more precisely, the Hongguang Emperor’s infatuation with esoteric Daoism. For in the early 1650s, the latest and most popular ingredient demanded by the Emperor’s army of alchemist-sages (炼丹圣, liandan sheng) was bear bile, a traditional element of Chinese medicine and one that was thought to reduce harmful toxins, prolong life, and even act as an aphrodisiac. It was thus extremely fortunate that Ezo was renowned for the number of its bears, although it was less fortunate for those unlucky souls tasked as hunters that Ezo was also justly renowned for the ferocity of its bears. Indeed, the bear trade would prove to be so lucrative that in only a few short years, it was evident that a new supply of those animals that were worth their weight in gold would have to be found - and it was then that Japan headed north once more, to Karafuto and eventually to points beyond.
NOTES
(1) In OTL the collapsing Southern Ming sent an informal mission or two to Japan asking for aid and were basically laughed out of town by the Shogunate, which correctly judged that the Ming were about to go under anyway and took the opportunity to sneer at their former rival. ITTL things are rather different . . .
(2) Contrary to what you may have heard from the contemporary historico-industrial complex, Japan wasn’t always totally bereft of natural resources. On the contrary, it was a large exporter of copper and silver in particular for centuries.
(3) In this context, it’s not without some irony that the literal translation of rounin is actually “man of the waves.”
(4) Although the Keian Uprising failed as it did OTL, ITTL it’s a much bigger deal and the response to the incident by the shogunate is correspondingly more of a, “Holy shit, we’ve got to do something serious!” reaction.
(5) Among these tax breaks is an exemption from sankin koutai, which is absolutely going to come back and bite the bakufu in the ass sometime in the future.
*I meant to deal with Korea in this update too, but got too caught up in talking about bear bile. It will thus be the focus of the next entry, hopefully with some additional reference to what the Manchus are doing as well. After that it’s over to Southeast Asia for a couple of updates to get caught up on the war that’s still going on. As always, thanks for reading.
- In a sense, all Japanese history from 1650 to 1750 must be considered in the context of one fateful choice: the decision to re-normalize relations with the Southern Ming Dynasty and resume trade with that polity, which was made in 1648 after an embassy headed by the Prince of Fu anchored off Nagasaki Bay and entreated the Shogunate to re-open its doors to the world. Had the Ming been stronger at the time, the embassy likely would have ended in failure; paradoxically, had they been weaker, it likely would have had the same result (1). Yet the Ming were neither too strong nor too weak; they came to the Shogunate not as supplicants, nor as domineering would-be overlords - they valued the resumption of the lucrative Japan trade too much for such a posture - but as equals, more or less, and it was this negotiating stance which secured the reopening of trade. Chinese luxury goods, such as silk and porcelain, began to flow into Japan with increasing speed, sparking something of a boom in the port cities of Nagasaki and Shimonoseki, among others. Meanwhile, Japan exported large quantities of copper, mostly in coin form, and silver to ports controlled by the Southern Ming (2). As the 1650s began, Japanese traders also began to make voyages to the retrenching Manchu Empire, which established a port at Haishenwai for foreign trade; Japan began to export significant quantities of high-quality swords and firearms to the Manchus at this time. Meanwhile, the Dutch were unceremoniously ejected from the artificial island of Deshima in Nagasaki Bay. They had always been viewed with considerable opprobrium by the Shogunate, and given the reopening of trade with China proper the presence of Christians - a group deeply distrusted by the central government after the events of the Shimabara Rebellion scarcely ten years before - was deemed unnecessary. The China trade brought considerable wealth to Japan, as merchant lineages competed to win permission to send ships abroad.
Yet while the China trade was undoubtedly lucrative, it also exacerbated already-existing social problems that threatened stability, which the Shogunate prized above all else. In particular, Japan during the early 1650s had a serious rounin (浪人, or “masterless samurai”) problem. Due to the general peace that had persisted since the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600, feudal lords no longer found it necessary to employ the vast number of retainers which had previously been the norm. The policies of the bakufu (幕府, or “shogunal government”) toward the growing number of rounin only made the situation worse; rounin were generally prohibited from finding new masters to serve after being discharged, and they were also banished from many large cities due to crime concerns. The resumption of the China trade would have offered an outlet for many of these unemployed samurai, were they to take service on one of the ships plying the seas; however, the majority of them viewed such an occupation as menial and unworthy of their status as samurai (3). Meanwhile, with ocean trade came sailors, and a host of unsavoury elements disembarked on Japanese shores in the early 1650s. Somewhat paradoxically, despite many rounin turning down berths on trading ships due to the job’s supposed meniality, not a few of them formed criminal partnerships with freebooters who had made their way to Japanese shores, mostly dealing in stolen goods and acting as hired muscle. Many rounin who took on such tasks viewed it as a deep shame on their honor, yet preferred a clandestine life of crime to openly engaging in an occupation which they believed to be beneath their station. In any event, large numbers of rounin and imported criminal elements made for a combustible mixture, and eventually something had to give.
Matters came to a head in 1651 with the outbreak of the 慶安事件 (Keian jiken, or “Keian Incident”), an uprising of disaffected rounin led by Yui Shousetsu, who was himself a rounin. The plotters mounted coordinated attacks on Osaka, Shizuoka, and Edo Castle, the beating heart of the Shogunate itself. Ultimately the revolt failed, though it was not without considerable loss of life and damages; parts of both Edo and Kyoto were burnt to the ground in the melees that ensued during the chaos of battle (4). In the wake of the struggle, after the remaining leaders of the rebellion had been hunted down and put to death in inventive and painful fashion, it was very clear to the bakufu and to the 老中 (roujuu, or “Elder”; a term that refers both to individuals and to the collective council of roujuu that ruled at the time in place of Shogun Tokugawa Ietsuna, who was barely ten years old) that drastic measures needed to be taken to combat the growing rounin crisis. A more widespread and general campaign of persecution was viewed as counterproductive, while simply relaxing the laws regarding rounin was viewed as not going far enough. What was needed was to give the rounin something to do, even if that something was essentially make-work; in the words of Roujuu member Matsudaira Nobutsuna, the court needed to send them on a “wild sheep chase” (羊をめぐる冒険, hitsuji wo meguru bouken). In the end, the shogunal court decided to relax the laws regarding inheritance of feudal lords, creating new members of the aristocracy. These men - who surely needed samurai retainers as per their new status, and how fortunate it was that there were so many masterless samurai wandering around - were not given lands carved out of existing domains. Rather, they were granted entirely new domains on the wild and largely unpacified northern island of Ezo (Hokkaido). The Northern Expedition had begun.
Even with their new status, many of the newly-made 大名 (daimyou, or “lords”) were less than thrilled at the prospect of relocating to Ezo, essentially considered the end of the world by most Japanese at the time. In recognition of the expenses that they would have to assume, including the cost of hiring samurai retainers and carving their fiefs out of the northern wilderness, the shogunate gave these new lords “grants” of what amounted to start-up cash in addition to generous tax breaks and incentives (5). Yet despite the hardships associated with Ezo, it quickly became clear that the northern island was not without its compensations. For one, it was excellently situated for trade with the Manchu Empire, which continued to increase throughout the 1650s, and later on for Korea. However, what truly made the Ezo expansion viable and rescued what otherwise would have been a disastrous venture was the Southern Ming, and more precisely, the Hongguang Emperor’s infatuation with esoteric Daoism. For in the early 1650s, the latest and most popular ingredient demanded by the Emperor’s army of alchemist-sages (炼丹圣, liandan sheng) was bear bile, a traditional element of Chinese medicine and one that was thought to reduce harmful toxins, prolong life, and even act as an aphrodisiac. It was thus extremely fortunate that Ezo was renowned for the number of its bears, although it was less fortunate for those unlucky souls tasked as hunters that Ezo was also justly renowned for the ferocity of its bears. Indeed, the bear trade would prove to be so lucrative that in only a few short years, it was evident that a new supply of those animals that were worth their weight in gold would have to be found - and it was then that Japan headed north once more, to Karafuto and eventually to points beyond.
NOTES
(1) In OTL the collapsing Southern Ming sent an informal mission or two to Japan asking for aid and were basically laughed out of town by the Shogunate, which correctly judged that the Ming were about to go under anyway and took the opportunity to sneer at their former rival. ITTL things are rather different . . .
(2) Contrary to what you may have heard from the contemporary historico-industrial complex, Japan wasn’t always totally bereft of natural resources. On the contrary, it was a large exporter of copper and silver in particular for centuries.
(3) In this context, it’s not without some irony that the literal translation of rounin is actually “man of the waves.”
(4) Although the Keian Uprising failed as it did OTL, ITTL it’s a much bigger deal and the response to the incident by the shogunate is correspondingly more of a, “Holy shit, we’ve got to do something serious!” reaction.
(5) Among these tax breaks is an exemption from sankin koutai, which is absolutely going to come back and bite the bakufu in the ass sometime in the future.
*I meant to deal with Korea in this update too, but got too caught up in talking about bear bile. It will thus be the focus of the next entry, hopefully with some additional reference to what the Manchus are doing as well. After that it’s over to Southeast Asia for a couple of updates to get caught up on the war that’s still going on. As always, thanks for reading.
archaeogeek
Banned
I actually thought this actually succeeded, but admittedly with such an opportunity I'd probably have been equally petty.
I forgot the numbers but the dutch loved the cheap copper ore they got out of the japanese trade, which once smelted at Batavia would bring in enormous profits.
Which apparently amounts to shipping them off to Japan's little bit of siberian paradise
- oh well, they can still trade and open up bears Yeah, that's exactly it, although I've never learned how to make the symbol above o in Microsoft Word and thus I just write "ou" or "uu." The extra "u" is because it's a long vowel; "ro" is pronounced differently from "rou." Of course, a lot of people don't even bother putting that line above "o" and just write ronin or roju or whatever, but that just seems sloppy to me. Plus I originally learned a weird style of Japanese romanization that always uses doubled vowels, so it's kind of natural for me to write that way.
Yes, the Japanese copper trade was in OTL very lucrative for the VOC, especially in the late 17th and early 18th centuries. At some point I'll have to get around to making a post on how the Europeans are coping ITTL given that they've been shut out of the Chinese and Japanese markets. Long story short: they're forced to work through middlemen in Southeast Asian ports. Who controls those ports will depend on the outcome of the ongoing war in Southeast Asia, which I will eventually get around to writing about.
I thought of this option, but it wasn't immediately clear to me who had the resources and the desire to hire/equip/transport/feed vast mercenary corps of samurai. Manpower is not among the Ming's concerns, while Wu Sangui simply doesn't have the funds for such an undertaking. Ba is landlocked, and the Manchus certainly wouldn't be interested. Southeast Asia is interesting, since there's a war going on there now, but then the distances start to increase and one would successfully put such a project together.
maverick
Banned
Yeah, I'm horribly lazy that way. I guess that's the problem when not putting that much effort in dealing with foreign languages.
Japanese mercenaries had a big presence in SE Asia in OTL, right? I remember they were active in Thailand.
Well in OTL, the Ming were notoriously short on professional soldiers. Most units were operating on less than half their nominal strength as local military leaders made their living on collecting the salalry of non-existant soldiers. Most of the elite units were the personal military staff of the generals which typically accounted for less than 10% of the nominal strength of the units on paper. A loyal and well trained mercenary corps could be very attractive to the Emperor or marshalls like Koxinga.
Speaking of Koxinga, he will make an ideal leader of such a Samurai troop, considering he is half Japanese and his father more or less operated like the Wokou Japanese pirates. Might be even interesting to have him lead an army of ronin Samurais to topple the Tokugawa Shogunate and become the new Shogun of Japan.... heck he can lead the 17th century version of Meji restoration.
Speaking of Koxinga, he will make an ideal leader of such a Samurai troop, considering he is half Japanese and his father more or less operated like the Wokou Japanese pirates. Might be even interesting to have him lead an army of ronin Samurais to topple the Tokugawa Shogunate and become the new Shogun of Japan.... heck he can lead the 17th century version of Meji restoration.
Yeah, I'm horribly lazy that way. I guess that's the problem when not putting that much effort in dealing with foreign languages.
It's so easy to be lazy when dealing with foreign languages. Almost every day I go to a place for lunch that has a bunch of newspapers lying about, and I invariably pick one up and start slogging through whatever article catches my eye. Then after five minutes I realize that I'll enjoy myself a lot more if I put down the damn newspaper and watch the game show that's on the TV featuring college students bobbing for apples in a hot tub.
They were quite active in Southeast Asia in the early part of the 17th century - especially in Thailand, as you note - but if I'm not mistaken the flow was basically cut off after the sakoku edicts went through in the late 1630s. ITTL the situation is a bit more complicated. On the one hand, trade is ongoing with the Southern Ming at this point; on the other hand, the Shogunate is still not wild about the idea of large numbers of Japanese sailing off and then returning with strange and potentially troublesome foreign ideas. I imagine that there's a rather restrictive permit process in place for Japanese attempting to get a berth on one of the trading ships - maybe I'll go more into detail on that whenever I return to Japan. But basically, rather than reopen willy-nilly and send ronin flooding into Southeast Asia again, the bakufu decides to push the northern expansion policy instead, thus keeping them more firmly in the fold and removing the chance that they'd go abroad, pick up foreign habits, then return and spark unrest.
I'd dispute your first paragraph as a blanket characterization of the state of the military in the Ming Dynasty as a whole - in the early years the system actually worked quite well - but one certainly can't argue with the contention that as time went by and as dynastic decay became more apparent things did fall apart. And that's where we are now. That said, for the reasons I've delineated above, there won't be a large outflow of mercenaries from Japan in the near future, at least. Also, just as a general note, ITTL the Southern Ming really don't suffer from troop strength issues, in part because their forces have been augmented by auxiliaries from religious sects like the Wu-Tang Clan and pro-Ming rebel/bandit factions that have been operating in the territory of their enemies, namely the Manchus and now Wu Sangui's Sultanate.
**Apologies for the lack of action on the thread in the past couple of weeks. The timeline's by no means dead; it's just resting. I've been meaning to write about Southeast Asia, but I always find those updates terribly difficult because I know comparatively little about the region, have trouble finding decent sources, and don't really have a handle on what's going to happen there ITTL. So I might just kick that can down the road, so to speak. Plus, I also realized that one of the events I wrote about a few posts ago . . . not so much. So I'm trying to find a way to retcon things with a minimum of fuss, which is proving to be difficult. Nevertheless, things will be up and running again soon - even today, I had a great idea about something that our increasingly esoteric Daoist Southern Ming friends should be doing. Update coming before the New Year, to be sure, and I'll try to return to a more regular schedule with this one as soon as is practicable. Thanks for your patience.
Excerpted from “The Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of the Ming Dynasty,” by Humbert Nabokov.
- As the Ming establishment in Nanjing continued to sort itself into the ranks of the two opposing factions that dominated court life in the early and mid-1650s - the Confucian Wude, or Five Virtues, faction and the esoteric Daoist Neidan, or Internal Alchemy, faction - one of the most influential leaders of the Ming remained on the outside looking in. That man, of course, was Zheng Chenggong, the Great Barbarian-Subduing Admiral, Lord of Five Thousand Years. Although he did not fit neatly into the established hierarchy at court, in many ways Zheng exercised more personal power than any member of the Ming bureaucracy save for Chancellor Shi Kefa and the Hongguang Emperor themselves. In large part, this was due to his unique status as the sole commander of all Ming naval forces, a task which had fallen to him after his successful expulsion of the Dutch from Fort Zeelandia and his continued success in the campaigns of the Second Ming-Qing War against both the Manchus and Wu Sangui. While Shi Kefa had undertaken a comprehensive reorganization of the military establishment in the late 1640s, appointing many of the Ming “guardian generals,” who were warlords in all but name, to higher posts in order to move them away from their independent bases of power (1), and naming trusted subordinates to command battlefield armies in their stead, he had not acted to limit Zheng’s authority, judging (quite correctly) that Zheng’s loyalty to the Ming was unquestioned. Thus, though the Ming military establishment was no longer threatened by the specter of warlordism, Zheng’s star continued to rise. He ruled Taiwan virtually as a private fief, and he also exercised ultimate jurisdiction in several important port cities, including the northern port of Lushun and the southern port of Guangzhou. In that he possessed an independent base of power, Zheng’s unique status made him a kingmaker of sorts in the factional struggle that dominated life at court. For several years, he declined to get caught up in the internecine struggle; Zheng spent the vast majority of his time far away from court, mostly at Tainan, and he had little wish to get involved in the murky and difficult world of court politics.
This changed in 1655, when Zheng Chenggong returned to court for an extended period, ostensibly to participate in discussions regarding whether the Ming should intervene in the ongoing Lamaist War in Southeast Asia, and if so, what form the intervention should assume. It was during these discussions that Zheng was introduced to, and eventually formed a strong friendship with Method Man, formerly the Wu-Tang Clan’s chief strategist and now Vice-Secretary of the Board of War (2). Method Man, realizing the importance of Zheng in the factional conflict between Confucians and esoteric Daoists, did not miss the opportunity to present esoteric Daoism to Zheng in the most favorable light possible, constantly sending tracts to the rented villa where Zheng was staying as well as arranging for a parade of esoteric Daoist luminaries to drop by and pay a call on the Great Barbarian-Subduing Admiral. And if, during their visits, they happened to speak about the wonders of the Dao, then so much the better. It is unfortunate that none of Zheng’s personal papers or correspondence from this period has survived, to give us a sense of his thought process and frame of mind. We can only judge from his actions, and they indicate that by the end of 1655 Zheng considered himself a member of the esoteric Daoist camp beyond a shadow of a doubt. Archives from the Board of Personnel note that Zheng requested the transfer of several Alchemist-Sages from the Emperor’s workshops to his base of power on Taiwan, and further requested funds from the Board of Works in order to build Daoist temples in Tainan and Gaoxiong (2). The movement of Zheng into the esoteric Daoist camp shifted the balance of power, which had previously teetered precariously from one side to the other, firmly in the favor of the Internal Alchemy faction. Indeed, many scholars have argued that it was Zheng’s embrace of esoteric Daoism that gave the Hongguang Emperor the self-confidence and the conviction to more firmly challenge Shi Kefa, as he began to deliver more pointed rebukes to his right-hand man when the latter spoke out in disfavor of esoteric Daoism. In this climate, even more outré practices soon began to be the norm at court.
Excerpted from “Esoteric Daoism and the Southern Ming,” by Scheherazade Wang.
- Divination based on the 易經 (Yi Jing, or Book of Changes) (3) had been around for thousands of years. For virtually all of that time, divination had been almost wholly practiced by itinerant fortune-tellers, who mostly plied their trade in market towns and were patronized by the peasant masses. The elite almost universally frowned on divination, considering it peasant foolishness and believing that the future was determined as a result of one’s virtuous actions, not as a result of peering at some stalks of grain and deciphering meaning from them. Prior to the initial Ming collapse and the outbreak of war, several of the monks in the Wudang Temple complex had themselves practiced divination and fortune-telling; most notably, the Old Dirty Bastard and Raekwon were considered to be masters at interpreting the Yi Jing. Indeed, during their growth divination was used frequently by the Wu-Tang Clan, though on an informal and ad hoc basis. Doubtless the most famous instance of this came in the Battle of Luoyang in 1651, when Method Man’s forces were heavily outnumbered by Wu Sangui; Method Man cast the hexagrams for guidance, and interpreting the result to mean that he should attack, did so and won a famous victory despite the disparity in numbers. With the end of war and the entrance of numerous Wu-Tang adherents into the court bureaucracy, divination thus made its way to Nanjing, where it rather quickly caught the eye of the Hongguang Emperor. It is not hard to see why it appealed to the Emperor, who was famously indecisive and inconstant, often taking days to come to a decision and frequently contradicting himself numerous times in doing so. For a monarch who had trouble making decisions, divination was thus highly appealing, in that it enabled him to appeal to a higher authority for guidance and thus bypass the whole tiresome process of making decisions by himself. The increasing use of divination by bureaucrats affiliated with the Internal Alchemy faction of course infuriated their Confucian counterparts, who could not abide divination on general principles, and simply could not stand it when policy was made based on the Yi Jing.
Yet the Emperor’s love of divination assured it a place at court; indeed, he considered unilaterally declaring war on Wu Sangui’s Sultanate in 1654 on the advice of many in the Internal Alchemy faction, but was dissuaded after casting the hexagrams and receiving an unfavorable augury (Penetration changing to Waiting, which carries the strong implication that patience is the correct choice at this point in time). In organs of government that were dominated by esoteric Daoists and by the Internal Alchemy faction, divination based on the Yi Jing was common in the mid-1650s and was used by bureaucrats before making policy to ensure that the choice they had decided on was the correct one. At times, an ambiguous augury caused governmental gridlock, as was the case in 1655 when the Board of Works was considering a plan to enlarge and refurbish the road from Nanjing to Wuhan, only to cast the hexagrams and receive hexagram 13, “People Together,” changing to number 17, “Following,” which implied that following another’s initiative is the correct course. In this case, the Board of Works decided to scrap the road upgrade plan, on the hopes that someone else would begin to refurbish the Nanjing-Wuhan road and they could then follow that person’s initiative. At other times, conflicting auguries caused an equal amount of trouble; consider one case of 1654, when the Board of Punishments ruled against clemency for one Liu Han, a convicted murderer, after casting the hexagrams, only to receive a confused reply from the provincial magistrate who had himself originally granted clemency, saying that he had as well consulted the Yi Jing and had received a fortune that indicated clemency was the correct choice. It is likely that the wholesale embrace of divination on the part of the esoteric Daoist party at court would have caused a total rupture between the competing factions - Shi Kefa was in the process of preparing a memorial to the Emperor in which he denounced the Internal Alchemy faction and threatened to resign were the power of that faction not checked - but events forestalled that clash. For in 1656, the war that everyone had known was destined finally came to pass, and the Southern Ming put aside their internal differences for the time to focus on destroying their nemesis, Sultan Wu Sangui, once and for all.
NOTES
(1) By appointing the “guardian generals” to prestigious and lucrative positions in Nanjing, he’s hoping to separate them from their armies and their fiefs and thus begin the process of cutting down on the warlordism that plagued the military establishment of the Southern Ming during its early years.
(2) Many members of the Wu-Tang Clan received government positions in the years after the Second Ming-Qing War, as part of the process by which the Wu-Tang Clan was subsumed into the apparatus of the Ming bureaucracy and more or less ceased to exist as an independent religious sect. Obviously, as one of the Nine Masters of the Clan, Method Man is assured an especially prestigious post.
(3) More commonly transliterated as the I Ching, but I love me some pinyin.
*I decided to return to the Southern Ming, because I enjoy writing about them and I was getting kind of stuck on the Southeast Asia issue. Still, the final war between the Ming and Wu Sangui won’t begin until I’ve cleared up what’s happening on the peripheries. Look for a post clarifying the situation in Manchuria and Korea next. As always, thanks for reading.
- As the Ming establishment in Nanjing continued to sort itself into the ranks of the two opposing factions that dominated court life in the early and mid-1650s - the Confucian Wude, or Five Virtues, faction and the esoteric Daoist Neidan, or Internal Alchemy, faction - one of the most influential leaders of the Ming remained on the outside looking in. That man, of course, was Zheng Chenggong, the Great Barbarian-Subduing Admiral, Lord of Five Thousand Years. Although he did not fit neatly into the established hierarchy at court, in many ways Zheng exercised more personal power than any member of the Ming bureaucracy save for Chancellor Shi Kefa and the Hongguang Emperor themselves. In large part, this was due to his unique status as the sole commander of all Ming naval forces, a task which had fallen to him after his successful expulsion of the Dutch from Fort Zeelandia and his continued success in the campaigns of the Second Ming-Qing War against both the Manchus and Wu Sangui. While Shi Kefa had undertaken a comprehensive reorganization of the military establishment in the late 1640s, appointing many of the Ming “guardian generals,” who were warlords in all but name, to higher posts in order to move them away from their independent bases of power (1), and naming trusted subordinates to command battlefield armies in their stead, he had not acted to limit Zheng’s authority, judging (quite correctly) that Zheng’s loyalty to the Ming was unquestioned. Thus, though the Ming military establishment was no longer threatened by the specter of warlordism, Zheng’s star continued to rise. He ruled Taiwan virtually as a private fief, and he also exercised ultimate jurisdiction in several important port cities, including the northern port of Lushun and the southern port of Guangzhou. In that he possessed an independent base of power, Zheng’s unique status made him a kingmaker of sorts in the factional struggle that dominated life at court. For several years, he declined to get caught up in the internecine struggle; Zheng spent the vast majority of his time far away from court, mostly at Tainan, and he had little wish to get involved in the murky and difficult world of court politics.
This changed in 1655, when Zheng Chenggong returned to court for an extended period, ostensibly to participate in discussions regarding whether the Ming should intervene in the ongoing Lamaist War in Southeast Asia, and if so, what form the intervention should assume. It was during these discussions that Zheng was introduced to, and eventually formed a strong friendship with Method Man, formerly the Wu-Tang Clan’s chief strategist and now Vice-Secretary of the Board of War (2). Method Man, realizing the importance of Zheng in the factional conflict between Confucians and esoteric Daoists, did not miss the opportunity to present esoteric Daoism to Zheng in the most favorable light possible, constantly sending tracts to the rented villa where Zheng was staying as well as arranging for a parade of esoteric Daoist luminaries to drop by and pay a call on the Great Barbarian-Subduing Admiral. And if, during their visits, they happened to speak about the wonders of the Dao, then so much the better. It is unfortunate that none of Zheng’s personal papers or correspondence from this period has survived, to give us a sense of his thought process and frame of mind. We can only judge from his actions, and they indicate that by the end of 1655 Zheng considered himself a member of the esoteric Daoist camp beyond a shadow of a doubt. Archives from the Board of Personnel note that Zheng requested the transfer of several Alchemist-Sages from the Emperor’s workshops to his base of power on Taiwan, and further requested funds from the Board of Works in order to build Daoist temples in Tainan and Gaoxiong (2). The movement of Zheng into the esoteric Daoist camp shifted the balance of power, which had previously teetered precariously from one side to the other, firmly in the favor of the Internal Alchemy faction. Indeed, many scholars have argued that it was Zheng’s embrace of esoteric Daoism that gave the Hongguang Emperor the self-confidence and the conviction to more firmly challenge Shi Kefa, as he began to deliver more pointed rebukes to his right-hand man when the latter spoke out in disfavor of esoteric Daoism. In this climate, even more outré practices soon began to be the norm at court.
Excerpted from “Esoteric Daoism and the Southern Ming,” by Scheherazade Wang.
- Divination based on the 易經 (Yi Jing, or Book of Changes) (3) had been around for thousands of years. For virtually all of that time, divination had been almost wholly practiced by itinerant fortune-tellers, who mostly plied their trade in market towns and were patronized by the peasant masses. The elite almost universally frowned on divination, considering it peasant foolishness and believing that the future was determined as a result of one’s virtuous actions, not as a result of peering at some stalks of grain and deciphering meaning from them. Prior to the initial Ming collapse and the outbreak of war, several of the monks in the Wudang Temple complex had themselves practiced divination and fortune-telling; most notably, the Old Dirty Bastard and Raekwon were considered to be masters at interpreting the Yi Jing. Indeed, during their growth divination was used frequently by the Wu-Tang Clan, though on an informal and ad hoc basis. Doubtless the most famous instance of this came in the Battle of Luoyang in 1651, when Method Man’s forces were heavily outnumbered by Wu Sangui; Method Man cast the hexagrams for guidance, and interpreting the result to mean that he should attack, did so and won a famous victory despite the disparity in numbers. With the end of war and the entrance of numerous Wu-Tang adherents into the court bureaucracy, divination thus made its way to Nanjing, where it rather quickly caught the eye of the Hongguang Emperor. It is not hard to see why it appealed to the Emperor, who was famously indecisive and inconstant, often taking days to come to a decision and frequently contradicting himself numerous times in doing so. For a monarch who had trouble making decisions, divination was thus highly appealing, in that it enabled him to appeal to a higher authority for guidance and thus bypass the whole tiresome process of making decisions by himself. The increasing use of divination by bureaucrats affiliated with the Internal Alchemy faction of course infuriated their Confucian counterparts, who could not abide divination on general principles, and simply could not stand it when policy was made based on the Yi Jing.
Yet the Emperor’s love of divination assured it a place at court; indeed, he considered unilaterally declaring war on Wu Sangui’s Sultanate in 1654 on the advice of many in the Internal Alchemy faction, but was dissuaded after casting the hexagrams and receiving an unfavorable augury (Penetration changing to Waiting, which carries the strong implication that patience is the correct choice at this point in time). In organs of government that were dominated by esoteric Daoists and by the Internal Alchemy faction, divination based on the Yi Jing was common in the mid-1650s and was used by bureaucrats before making policy to ensure that the choice they had decided on was the correct one. At times, an ambiguous augury caused governmental gridlock, as was the case in 1655 when the Board of Works was considering a plan to enlarge and refurbish the road from Nanjing to Wuhan, only to cast the hexagrams and receive hexagram 13, “People Together,” changing to number 17, “Following,” which implied that following another’s initiative is the correct course. In this case, the Board of Works decided to scrap the road upgrade plan, on the hopes that someone else would begin to refurbish the Nanjing-Wuhan road and they could then follow that person’s initiative. At other times, conflicting auguries caused an equal amount of trouble; consider one case of 1654, when the Board of Punishments ruled against clemency for one Liu Han, a convicted murderer, after casting the hexagrams, only to receive a confused reply from the provincial magistrate who had himself originally granted clemency, saying that he had as well consulted the Yi Jing and had received a fortune that indicated clemency was the correct choice. It is likely that the wholesale embrace of divination on the part of the esoteric Daoist party at court would have caused a total rupture between the competing factions - Shi Kefa was in the process of preparing a memorial to the Emperor in which he denounced the Internal Alchemy faction and threatened to resign were the power of that faction not checked - but events forestalled that clash. For in 1656, the war that everyone had known was destined finally came to pass, and the Southern Ming put aside their internal differences for the time to focus on destroying their nemesis, Sultan Wu Sangui, once and for all.
NOTES
(1) By appointing the “guardian generals” to prestigious and lucrative positions in Nanjing, he’s hoping to separate them from their armies and their fiefs and thus begin the process of cutting down on the warlordism that plagued the military establishment of the Southern Ming during its early years.
(2) Many members of the Wu-Tang Clan received government positions in the years after the Second Ming-Qing War, as part of the process by which the Wu-Tang Clan was subsumed into the apparatus of the Ming bureaucracy and more or less ceased to exist as an independent religious sect. Obviously, as one of the Nine Masters of the Clan, Method Man is assured an especially prestigious post.
(3) More commonly transliterated as the I Ching, but I love me some pinyin.
*I decided to return to the Southern Ming, because I enjoy writing about them and I was getting kind of stuck on the Southeast Asia issue. Still, the final war between the Ming and Wu Sangui won’t begin until I’ve cleared up what’s happening on the peripheries. Look for a post clarifying the situation in Manchuria and Korea next. As always, thanks for reading.
maverick
Banned
I too think that the Southern Ming chapters are the most enjoyable.
I'm confused about Esoteric Daoism, though. I thought regular Daoism opposed divination and fortune telling. Is this one of the differences between Esoteric Daoism and original daoism or am I just misremembering?
I'm confused about Esoteric Daoism, though. I thought regular Daoism opposed divination and fortune telling. Is this one of the differences between Esoteric Daoism and original daoism or am I just misremembering?
Faeelin
Banned
Mmm. I think that the Dutch will remain. They were very, very careful to not Prosletyze (being willing to tread upon the cross to remain there, frex), and I think the Shogun would prefer to not become dependent on the Ming.
Matters came to a head in 1651 with the outbreak of the 慶安事件 (Keian jiken, or “Keian Incident”), an uprising of disaffected rounin led by Yui Shousetsu, who was himself a rounin. The plotters mounted coordinated attacks on Osaka, Shizuoka, and Edo Castle, the beating heart of the Shogunate itself.[/quote]
Hrm. What was their goal?
.... I would like to appoint you as the Son of Heaven.
This brilliant, and it's a shame more people aren't commenting.
So part of the Ming dynasties politics is based on rolling dice? That seems stable. To war! Men, prepare the d6!
More or less, though it's awfully damn hard to figure out exactly what Daoism is for and what it's against. One of the byproducts of having no established church and only a few vague and allegorical texts to go by, as well as being as much a philosophy as it is a religion. Plus there's popular Daoism, which blended in elements from folk religion, as opposed to organized religious Daoism, and it goes on and on. There are also quite a few varieties of divination, of which I've only explicated one - that being divination based on the Yi Jing. But in short, some people who called themselves Daoists favored divination and others who also called themselves Daoists were opposed. I've placed the divination/internal alchemy/elixirs of life/other wacky stuff group into one big category called "esoteric Daoism," but in point of fact it's considerably more complicated than that.
I've come to the conclusion that you're right on this one, and more broadly, with your statement upthread that the Ming wouldn't have closed down trade with Europeans as I'd portrayed them as doing. In the case of Japan, your point about the Shogunate not wanting to become too dependent on the Ming is well taken; having them jump as thoroughly into each other's arms as I'd written strains credulity a bit. As for the Ming and trade with the West, I'm still of the opinion that given the rise of Zhang Xianzhong and the concomitant anti-Christian feeling that would have ensued, as well as a general xenophobic trend in the wake of Manchu invasion, they might well have told the Europeans where to stick it. But what I forgot to take into account while I was writing that bit was the immense disruption to the global economy that would ensue. There would be butterflies everywhere that I really have no desire to deal with.
So I'll be doing some retconning to be sure. Right now, my idea is that the Ming's anti-Christianity and xenophobia extends as far as retaking Taiwan and Aomen, but not so far as canceling trade altogether (they want that silver!). Instead, an even more restrictive version of OTL's Guangzhou System is implemented, the details of which I'll come up with later. As for Japan, the Ming still make an approach to the Shogunate, likely at a point where they're either unsure of their position vis-a-vis the Manchus or strongly considering the idea of cutting off all European trade and thus looking to pick up the slack. Japan accepts the overture, as I wrote, but the Dutch are allowed to remain in Deshima. How does this sound?
As maverick said, a coup d'etat. The plotters were disaffected with the Shogunate, largely due to restrictive inheritance laws that, as I understand it, often nullified domains and thus produced a large body of samurai without a lord. Samurai were additionally prohibited from taking service with a different lord, and their code made any occupation other than that of samurai dishonorable, which was more or less a fate worse than death. Combine this with the fact that many samurai were more or less laid off after the end of Sengoku and the outbreak of general peace, and what you had was basically an enormous unemployment problem, with the added complication that the unemployed were all heavily armed and refused to consider the idea of, say, taking up farming. The Keian Uprising itself happened in OTL, and I haven't done too much to change it - just made it more serious (though still unsuccessful) based on better coordination between the plotters and a slightly higher pool of ronin/bandits to work with.
Don't forget that they're also stoned out of their minds on proto-LSD. It's a recipe for good governance! And I should note that dice aren't the medium used in divination; one can use a coin, but in this time I think the most common method involved taking a bunch of little sticks and manipulating them in various ways. I'm hazy on the details.
I just love all of the wackiness in your TL's subversivepanda, they truly make my day.
Thanks and thanks. I'd also like to see more discussion - it's a great way of drawing out points that I forgot to cover or didn't cover as well as I should have. It keeps me honest, so to speak.