In recent years, scholars have developed a new appreciation
for Ming warfare. The early Ming state was, they have shown, the world’s most
powerful gunpowder empire, possessing gun-bearing infantry that were more
numerous and effective than those of any other state in the world. Nor did the
Ming lose its military mojo over the following centuries. Whereas previously
the mid- and late-Ming Dynasty military was seen as backwards, conservative,
and ineffective, recent work has established that throughout the 1500s and
early 1600s the Ming undertook a series of strikingly innovative reforms and
adaptations, which kept it a major military power until its sudden military
collapse in the late 1630s.
Scholars have drawn attention to many different aspects of
Ming military history – the wide and deep use of firearms in its armed forces
(the proportion of firearm-toting units was higher than in Europe from the
1300s through the mid-1500s); the rapid and effective adoption of gunpowder technology
from other peoples (from Vietnam, from the Portuguese, from the Japanese, from
the Ottoman Empire, from northern Europe); the effective use of advanced (by
the standards of Europe) infantry tactics such as the volley technique;
advanced hybrid metallurgical cannon casting techniques; experiments with
broadside ships and Renaissance artillery fortresses; and so on. Yet there is
much work yet to be done, and this is particularly true of the early Ming
period.
This article focuses on the two-decade reign of the third
Ming emperor, the bellicose and ambitious usurper Yongle (r. 1402–1424). Most
work on early Ming military history has focused on his father, the founder of
the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang. This makes sense, because, as historians have
noted, Zhu Yuanzhang invested heavily in firearm manufacture, working to
increase the proportions of gunners within his infantry, gunners who helped him
overcome his powerful Han Chinese rivals, run the Mongols out of China, and
expand China’s borders, laying the groundwork for the long and successful Ming
Dynasty.
Yet his son Yongle carried forth his father’s firearms
innovations, systematizing and expanding them. It was under his rule that the
central administrative structure of Ming firearms use, the Firearms Commandery,
was established, and Yongle increased the proportion of gunners beyond the
levels in his father’s armies. He also focused on the deployment of guns in his
massive wars northwards against the Mongols and southwards against Vietnam (Đại
Việt), and those wars helped stimulate firearms innovation, particularly the Đại
Việt conflict.
Intriguingly, Yongle didn’t start out as a partisan of the
gun. Sources suggest that his attitude toward firearms changed as he made a
transition from prince of the northern reaches to usurper fighting in the
central plain. His embrace of the gun may thus shed light on a central
problematic of Chinese military history: the question of whether guns evolved
more slowly in China because the Chinese faced primarily mounted nomads as
enemies, rather than infantry armies. As we’ll see, it was during his war for
succession in more southerly parts of China, to wit the central plains, that he
came to appreciate the gun, and he did so, it seems, because guns were used
successfully against him, leading to a significant defeat from which he barely
escaped. After this episode, he rapidly increased his use of guns, and we can
see further stages in his use of guns occurring during the huge military
expeditions he undertook after he finally defeated his rival and came to the
throne. In his use of guns against the Đại Việt state (itself a powerful
gunpowder empire) and the Mongols, we see the development and systematization
of the Ming gunpowder empire, a coming into being of institutions and practices
that would in some cases remain extant for the rest of the Ming Dynasty.
YONGLE
The Yongle emperor had grown up in a martial world. At the
age of nine, his father named him the Prince of Yan and gave him a fiefdom
based in the city of Beiping (current-day Beijing), admonishing him to
“diligently drill the troops and defend the domain.” In the golden book he was
given that day, his father noted that rulership was difficult and recalled his
own rise: “I came from the peasantry, battled with so many warlords, and
endured all kinds of hardships.” These battles and hardships were fresh in
mind. The Ming Dynasty had been declared just two years previously, in 1368,
and throughout the previous decade his father had fought one rival after another.
Guns and other gunpowder weapons were significant factors in his eventual
victory.
Sitting now upon the dragon throne, he encouraged his sons
to undertake military training, and the future Yongle, i.e., the Prince of Yan,
proved an eager pupil. The boy enjoyed riding and practicing and parading, and
he trained hard, living in the rain and snow, learning the use of gunpowder,
firearms, and traditional weapons. He grew into an impressive man: tall,
athletic, and better looking than his father. At the age of seventeen he
married the daughter of China’s top military man, Xu Da, who had helped bring
his father victory on many occasions, as in 1367, when he captured the city of
Suzhou, seat of the powerful King of Wu, Zhang Shicheng. The prince learned the
art of war from his father-in-law and from another top general, Fu Youde, to
whom the young prince served as aide-de-camp, helping in routine training,
fortification, and patrols. He also accompanied his mentors northward on
expeditions, including a famous 1381 campaign that his father launched against
the Mongols, which gave a hint of his abilities as a field commander. When Xu
Da died, the prince inherited the loyalty of the old general’s men, the best
army in China. This loyalty would come in handy starting in 1398, when his
father died and the throne passed to his nephew rather than to him.
The new emperor, who took the reign title Jianwen, was young
– not quite twenty-one – but he understood that his uncle was a threat to his
authority. The Prince of Yan, for his part, felt with some justification that
he was more capable than his nephew. The young emperor had more troops, more
resources, and the legitimacy of the throne, but the prince was a canny leader
and knew how to use deception. When imperial forces surrounded his palace in
Beiping in 1399, he sent out word that he would surrender. His men waited for
the two imperial officials charged with arresting him to enter the palace. Then
the Prince of Yan had them seized and killed. The prince’s small force of loyal
guards quickly took control of Beiping and its military forces and then
prepared to seize the imperial throne.
The ensuing war of succession was hard fought. The Prince of
Yan was outnumbered, and the new emperor had the advantage of legitimacy, but
the prince was a superior commander. For example, in one of the first major
episodes, an imperial army said to be 300,000-strong was sent against him (the
actual numbers were lower – perhaps 130,000). It might have seemed prudent to
wait and let the army attack, relying on Beiping’s stout walls, but instead the
prince moved his army southward and attacked first. It was a bold wager, based
on the calculation that the imperial army was still forming and might be broken
if struck hard. He attacked the army’s garrisons and encampments, using ruses
and stratagems. On one occasion, he hid soldiers in the water under a bridge and
hid scouts along the road to watch. When the scouts saw the enemy approach,
they fired a signal cannon, at which the ambush was sprung. The imperials were
trapped on the bridge and two top imperial commanders were captured. From these
commanders he learned which imperial garrisons were weak. He moved against
them, and soon he had routed the main imperial force.
At this point it might have seemed best to press the
advantage and continue the attack, but he had a masterly sense of timing, so
instead took his spoils northward – including more than 20,000 horses – and
consolidated his control there. The imperials attacked Beiping but were
ill-prepared for the northern winter, wearing thin clothes and poor shoes. When
they gave up the siege and returned to the south, they were weak and sickly.
The Prince of Yan decided to keep them tired. He made a feint to draw their
attention, and, indeed, the imperials duly marched north again, and then, when
the danger had lifted, turned back toward the south. Many died on the way back,
leaving armor and equipment on the road.
In these early battles of the war of succession, the Prince
of Yan used guns only peripherally. We see plenty of evidence of signal guns
and occasionally guns used offensively or defensively, but never in core
functions. This may seem odd. After all, we know that under the Prince of Yan’s
father, the Hongwu Emperor, some 10 percent of infantry were already armed with
firearms, which indicates that there were on the order of 150,000 gun units in
Ming infantry forces. Why might the Prince of Yan have used fewer guns?
The Prince of Yan was used to warfare in northern China, and
particularly to conditions in Mongolia. Kenneth Chase has argued in his
influential book, Firearms: A Global History to 1700, that guns are far less
useful against mounted nomads than against standard infantry armies, because
early guns were slow and clumsy and ineffective on horseback. According to
Chase, the fact that China faced primarily mounted nomads as enemies helps
explain why it did not “perfect” guns whereas Europe did. The Chase thesis has
some problems with it – most notably, the fact that it neglects the many other
types of warfare that occurred in China. Southern Chinese warfare, for example,
was quite a bit more like European warfare than was northern Chinese warfare.
Yet if Chase’s conclusions are too sweeping, he is nonetheless onto something.
Northern warfare was different from southern warfare; guns were used
differently against mounted nomads.
Until the war of succession, the Prince of Yan’s experiences
were primarily based on northern warfare. His father had deliberately situated
his princedom in Beiping, knowing that his primary foes would be mounted
nomads, primarily Mongols. The Prince of Yan was the second-highest ranking son
but he was also the most able, and he ended up playing a major role in northern
defenses, commanding various expeditions against “wild men” and frontier
raiders. He was particularly successful against the Mongols. In early 1396, for
example, he led troops to defeat a major Mongol force east of the bend of the
Yellow River and then chased them to Uriyangqad, taking prisoner top Mongol
commanders. This type of warfare against Mongols frequently focused less on
infantry – who were, after all, the primary types of troops armed with guns –
and more on cavalry, who were generally armed with traditional weapons.
But when he fought against the forces of his nephew in the
central plains of China, an area suited to infantry warfare, he experienced
firsthand the devastating effect of guns. The most frightening battle of his
life occurred in January of 1401. The prince, feeling confident, had moved
against the commander-in-chief of the imperials, a general named Sheng Yong,
who had garrisoned his troops in Dongchang City, in Shandong Province (present
day Liaocheng City). Although the sources differ on some particulars, the main
contours of the battle seem clear. Sheng Yong had prepared carefully, feeding
his troops, readying the walls, inspecting and reviewing battle formations,
and, most importantly, “preparing and laying out firearms and poison crossbows
to await [the Prince of Yan].” The prince’s troops were confident, having won
so many engagements, and they advanced at once upon Sheng Yong’s troops. But
when Sheng Yong’s guns opened fire, the results were disastrous. The troops of
the Prince of Yan “were all entirely wounded by the firearms.”
Sheng Yong, spirits buoyed by the arrival of reinforcements,
pressed his advantage, and the prince found himself and his cavalry troops
completely surrounded. As one source notes, “the Prince of Yan tried to attack
and charge, but he couldn’t escape.” The enemy pressed in, and “the prince was
in grave danger several times.”
Fortunately for the Prince of Yan, his nephew, the young
emperor, had issued a filial order: no one was to harm the Prince of Yan, who,
after all, had imperial blood. So although swords slashed close, the enemy
soldiers never dared to cut him. The prince was saved by the arrival of some
“barbarian cavalry troops,” most likely Mongols who had joined the Ming. The
mounted warriors charged the imperials’ lines from the outside, extracted the
prince, and galloped off. The prince survived, but the troops he left behind
were less lucky. In the melee and under the fire of Sheng Yong’s guns, perhaps
ten thousand of the prince’s troops expired.
All accounts of this key defeat focus on the devastating
role of guns. The Ming History says that Sheng Yong “used firearms and powerful
crossbows to annihilate the prince’s troops.” A history written by Ming scholar
Tan Xisi noted that “Yan’s troops suffered a great defeat from the firearms.”
The biography of Sheng Yong in the Ming History notes that “multitudes of Yan
troops were wounded by the firearms.”
The battle seems to have traumatized the prince. He was
particularly preoccupied by the loss of one of his top generals, his friend and
mentor Zhang Yu, who died trying to save him from encirclement. “Victory and
defeat are part of life,” he is said to have exclaimed, “but at a time like
this to have also lost such a teacher [as Zhang Yu] is deeply lamentable.” It
seems that whenever the Battle of Dongchang was discussed, the prince became
disturbed, having trouble eating and finding it impossible to rest. It is of
course impossible to diagnose post-traumatic stress disorder from across a
chasm of six centuries, but his symptoms certainly seem commensurate with such
a diagnosis. And a traumatic battle experience like this – in which fear,
responsibility, and near capture is combined with guilt at being saved while
leaving comrades behind to die – is just the sort of thing to elicit such
symptoms.
What is particularly intriguing, however, is that his
military leadership seems to have changed. In subsequent battles in the war of
succession, he was much more diffident – less bold, less decisive. As the Ming
History notes, at the beginning of his revolt “the prince’s troops had been
victorious and able, and there was nothing like Dongchang, but from that point
forward, the Prince of Yan’s troops went southward only to Xu and Jin. They
didn’t dare again go to Shandong.”
There was an even more important change to the prince’s
warcraft after Dongchang: he began to integrate guns more firmly into his
warcraft. After Dongchang, guns are mentioned more frequently in descriptions
of battles. His gun victories weren’t always glorious. On one occasion, for
example, he launched a dawn gun attack on an imperial encampment, and the
imperials mistook the gunfire for signal cannon on their own side. They rushed
out the gate and, panicking under fire, fell into the deep trenches that they
themselves had dug. But there were also great gun victories, as when the
prince’s gunmen terrified Sheng Yong himself. The prince had dispatched a small
force of gunmen to creep close to the great general’s encampment. Once within
range, they opened fire. The imperials threw down their weapons and ran. Sheng
Yong was supposedly frozen with fear, unable to climb on his horse, and had to
be carried to a waiting boat.
After the gunmen’s victory over Sheng Yong, the prince’s
momentum increased. He moved closer and closer to Nanjing. The fall of the
imperial city, however, was achieved not by arms but by intrigue. The prince
had collaborators within the administration of the young emperor, whose
policies had alienated key blocs of power, including the once-powerful eunuchs.
When the prince entered Nanjing in the summer of 1402, he did so by the most
traditional means in China’s military history: through a gate opened by
conspirators.
The prince ascended the dragon throne and took as his reign
title the term Yongle, “eternal happiness,” but his reign is remembered less
for happiness than for outlandish ambition and profligate spending. Much of
this spending went to a huge military buildup, in which firearms played a key
role.
Historians have shown that the Yongle period (1402–1424) saw
the highest sustained gun production levels of the entire early Ming period
(1368–1521, i.e, Hongwu through Zhengde reigns). This production – which
sometimes reached around ten thousand guns per month – was overseen by new
centralized facilities, most notably the famous Firearms Commandery, a bureau
tasked with overseeing firearms production and training. The protocols and
structures he established continued in use throughout the dynasty. Those
protocols and structures emerged, however, in a somewhat ad hoc fashion, as
part of a series of massive expeditions Yongle undertook, southward against the
Đại Việt state, and northward against the Mongols.
Yongle’s Vietnamese War
Although it is barely mentioned in our history textbooks,
the Ming Vietnamese War was one of the most important wars of the late medieval
period. Whereas armies in contemporary European conflicts numbered in the
thousands or tens of thousands, Yongle sent more than two-hundred thousand
troops to Vietnam. It was also a war in which both sides – but especially the
Ming – employed the most advanced weapons in the world. Indeed, according to
historian Sun Laichen, whose wonderful work has explored this war in detail,
the spectacular victory of the Ming invasion force was due mainly to “Ming
China’s military superiority, including firearms.”
To be sure, there is a tendency among some scholars to
overrate Ming technological superiority. Wang Zhaochun has written, for
example, that the first time the Ming invaded Vietnam, the Vietnamese had no
firearms. This was clearly not the case. As Sun Laichen points out, Vietnamese
annals make clear that the Vietnamese state – known as Đại Việt – deployed guns
against its long-term enemy to the south, the Cham state, against whom it had
been fighting a series of increasingly desperate wars. The Chams were led by a
warlike king, who invaded Đại Việt over and over again in the 1360s, 1370s, and
1380s. By 1390, the Đại Việt state was on the brink of collapse. Guns saved it.
Đại Việt forces shot and killed the Cham king with a Ming-style gun [huochong].
The Vietnamese adoption of Chinese guns saved their state,
and after 1390 Đại Việt began to enjoy the upper hand in its battles with
Champa, as noted by John Whitmore in the present volume. Indeed, by 1471 the
expansive Vietnamese state had defeated and annexed its longtime rival,
relegating Champa to the status of a historical footnote, one that is largely
ignored in the West, thereby obscuring the Vietnamese accomplishment and
glossing over the crucial role of firearms in the process. Many Western authors
still ignore the widespread presence of firearms in Southeast Asia prior to the
large-scale arrival of Europeans and completely discount the role of the Ming
in disseminating these firearms as chronicled ably by Sun Laichen in his many
publications.
It’s rarely a good idea for a great power to get involved in
Vietnam, so what made Yongle decide to invade? In 1404, a man appeared in
Yongle’s court and said he was the legitimate heir to the throne of Annam
(i.e., Đại Việt) and that his family – the Tran – had been usurped by the Ho
clan. After considerable diplomatic wrangling with the actual occupants of the
Vietnamese throne, Yongle decided to try to reinstate the man. In early 1406,
he sent five thousand soldiers to escort him to the Đại Việt capital. The
expedition never made it. The Ho army ambushed them, killing most of the
Chinese troops as well as Tran himself. When Yongle learned about the ambush he
supposedly flew into a rage. “If we don’t destroy them,” he said, “then what
are our armies for?”
Was he really so furious? Had he really expected that five
thousand Chinese troops would be able to impose his will on a state as powerful
as Đại Việt? Or did he perhaps deliberately send a vulnerable force of escorts
so that, once it was attacked, he would have a pretext for war? We’ll never
know, but we do know that Yongle began preparing his campaign immediately after
this outburst, and he put considerable care into it.
What is intriguing is that in making his preparations he
recognized the fact that the Đại Việt troops were armed with powerful guns. He
ordered his commanders to follow ten elements of his strategic plan, and among
them was the following point:
[I have heard] that the enemy has prepared many firearms
to resist the enemy. If our troops, when on the march, should encounter a
mountain that is narrow and dangerous, they should rather avoid it than to
waste our troops’ strength. Moreover, [I] have heard that the enemy has
prepared its equipment not thinking that there is anything to stand up against
it . . . [I] order that the Board of Works discuss the
development and production of a thicker armor in order to withstand their
firearms.
Following this exhortation are stipulations about how
workers should weave the armor out of bamboo and strengthen it with leather,
with clear benchmarks for testing its resistance to projectiles at various
ranges. Yongle, like his father, paid close attention to the role of guns.
He also took measures to prevent his advanced gun designs
from being leaked to the enemy. “It is most important,” he commanded, that the
miraculous weapon guns that are employed and all types of gunpowder weapons
(huoqi) be kept in the strictest secrecy. It is not permitted to leak [them] to
foreigners so that they can learn the techniques. When encountering the enemy,
be certain to carefully and secretly gather them together [afterward].
