Q: Date of decline of Ming

I would agree with the Timu Crisis for the first chink in the Ming Dynasty armor; but I would put it sometime in the Wanli Emperor. Wanli had many headaches - fighting the Mongols, the Japanese invasion of Korea, fighting a Rebellion, his opium habit, and then came the assassination attempt on the palace grounds. Due to these factors, Wanli outright quit from his government. His successors were let us say - idiots. (I do not count Taichang Emperor as a successor of Wanli, his reign was too short to even have an effect other than putting his idiot successor on the throne.)

As for the decline of the Qing... Qianlong Emperor's early abdication was the start.
Note a couple of things.The campaigns during Wanli’s reign wasn’t actually that expensive(by the standards of other dynasties).It was only expensive by the standards of the late Ming Dynasty.Even at the height of the Korean War,only 60,000 Ming soldiers were sent to Korea.By Chinese standards,this would be a miniscule number of soldiers—yet for some reason the empire was almost bankrupt deploying this army.Campaigns in early Ming Dynasty deployed several hundreds thousand soldiers.The fact that the state was almost bankrupt after deploying such a small number of soldiers is evidence that the quality of the state’s administration has been seriously eroded.It did not help that Wanli,under the influence of his corrupt government officials, reversed the reforms of Zhang Juzheng,despite its’ success in bringing surplus to the treasury.That and the fact that his heirs in generally were poorly educated and thus easily manipulated by court officials.Tianqi actually wasn’t an idiot. The eunuchs endorsed by him actually succeeded in bringing much needed income to the treasury.The fact that he got a bad reputation had a lot to do with the fact that he endorsed eunuchs who persecuted the court officials.Frankly,a lot of the court officials who got persecuted deserved what they got.
 
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60,000 Ming soldiers were sent to Korea.By Chinese standards,this would be a miniscule number of soldiers
A fairly reasonable estimate said that 250.000 soldiers were deployed in Vietnam at the height of the sino-Vietnamese war of the YongLe emperor. This was a 20 year long war too!
 
A fairly reasonable estimate said that 250.000 soldiers were deployed in Vietnam at the height of the sino-Vietnamese war of the YongLe emperor. This was a 20 year long war too!
And to be honest,much of the wars in Wanli’s reign were funded out of the emperor’s privy purse rather than the treasury.Instead of finding ways to increase revenue,the officials pressure the emperor into funding disaster reliefs and campaign funds out of the emperor’s own pocket.Eventually that dried up as well.This is one of the reasons among many that lead to the break between Wanli and his officials.This is unprecedented because in previous dynasties,money from the treasury was generally sent to the emperor’s privy purse rather than the other way around.In previous dynasties,it was accepted practise that the officials regulate how the emperor spends money in the treasury but is otherwise free to spend whatever money he had in the privy purse without influence by his officials.

Apart from the fact that the state’s bankrupt,an important reason behind the empire’s inability to fight wars lies behind that fact that the Wei Suo system,which is similar to the Tang’s fubing system, was defunct for many years.The Wei Suo system,like the Tang Dynasty’s fubing system granted land to soldiers and officers where they will farm land in peace time and then mobilize as army units in wars.In the early Ming period,this was a cheap way of building and maintaining an army.Unlike the fubing system however,officer ranks were fully hereditary.Officers would illegal seize the land of their subordinates and render them to a status not unsimilar to serfdom.There was no way for the rank and file to escape this except through desertion because service in the army was hereditary.All of this meant that much of the soldiers provided by the Wei Suo system in the late Ming period would be practically useless in a military context due to the fact that the officers mainly got their ranks by birth rather than merit ,and that the troops they command would have been untrained personnel (given the officers would have tried to work them hard to maximize farming rather than training them in peacetime).

By the late Ming dynasty,the government would be forced to rely on a regular,professional army that was much more expensive.But even this system failed due to the fact that the bureaucrats and the officers laundered what little funding this army had.Generally,an officer will try to concentrate most of the funding on training his personal retainers than entire unit he commands.This means that apart from his personal bodyguard,most of the troops would have been poorly trained.
 
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Toraach

Banned
In the Ming Dynasty,any individual who passed the first exam are eligible for tax exemption on his property.This meant that all of this individual’s friends and relatives who didn’t pass the exam can just pass their deeds over to him in order deflect taxes while preserving de facto ownership of their lands.No points for guessing which people passes the exams the most.All of this meant that land taxes,the main source of Ming’s revenue steadily dried up even as the empire grew more prosperous.Any attempt to reform this will once again be smacked down/derailed due to the fact that the officials and their merchant friends not only benefited from this arrangement,but because the merchant/landlords were often hired as lower ranking civil servants out in the provinces to help collect taxes.

Rather than accept that they needed to increase taxes on the merchants and landowners to fight the Manchus and growing rebellions,officials aligned with the Donglin Academy convinced the emperor to lower taxes on the landowners and merchants while increasing the taxes of the peasants to finance the army—which resulted in evermore peasants joining the rebellion.
I think you posts are very interesting and give a good insight into a real operation of the Chinese Empire. It is contrary to a myth which pops sometimes here and there about "so effective confucian, meritocratic, exam-based beaurocracy in contra to an european poverty, trash and feudalism".

I want to ask about one more thing. What are real number of chinese troops fieldied during those wars? They seams to be totally overestimated, and impossible to field such large groups. I know that during the Tumu Crisis is said that there were a half of million of chinese soldiers, and during wars before the Qin unification there were similar numbers. But are they real? I know how hard is to estimate numbers of soldiers in the past, but noone keaps Herodot's fantastic numbers of Xerxes' soldiers as true, or a similar thing about Darius the III army. I know how hard is too feed a huge army, and despite a stereotype that a chinese soldiers ate only a fistfull of rice, they also needed to eat properly. In Ceasar's commentaries he wrote a lot about foraging and how food was important for his army. So I think that chinese numbers of a half of million troops are just unrealistic.
 
I think you posts are very interesting and give a good insight into a real operation of the Chinese Empire. It is contrary to a myth which pops sometimes here and there about "so effective confucian, meritocratic, exam-based beaurocracy in contra to an european poverty, trash and feudalism".
Certainly,it’s much more meritocratic and exam based,given that as long as you can pass the exams you will be given a substantial post.But it’s exceptionally hard to pass the exam given how many people are applying for the exam and the amount of money and time needed to study the Confucian texts.A good number of high ranking officials did come from impoverished backgrounds however.
I want to ask about one more thing. What are real number of chinese troops fieldied during those wars? They seams to be totally overestimated, and impossible to field such large groups. I know that during the Tumu Crisis is said that there were a half of million of chinese soldiers, and during wars before the Qin unification there were similar numbers. But are they real? I know how hard is to estimate numbers of soldiers in the past, but noone keaps Herodot's fantastic numbers of Xerxes' soldiers as true, or a similar thing about Darius the III army. I know how hard is too feed a huge army, and despite a stereotype that a chinese soldiers ate only a fistfull of rice, they also needed to eat properly. In Ceasar's commentaries he wrote a lot about foraging and how food was important for his army. So I think that chinese numbers of a half of million troops are just unrealistic.
Would be impossible to know how many soldiers they really fielded.It’s well known that non-combatants like porters were often counted as well when calculating the size of the army.There’s also the fact that size of armies were often intentionally exaggerated in order to confuse the enemy.So it’s possible that there’s only half the number of soldiers they claimed to have fielded,and that many of these ‘soldiers’ were in reality non-combatants who serves in auxiliary roles.
 
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