This Western Civilization; my name is Dr. Long – this video is entitled Ming China
and the East Asian shift.
This video will especially focus on the later years of the Ming Dynasty as well as changes
in Korea and Japan.
As we have seen in a previous video, the Ming Dynasty, which ruled China from 1368 until
1644, replaced the Yuan Dynasty, which was Mongol.
Because of China’s experience with foreign rule under the Yuan Dynasty, the Ming focused
on defending their northern frontier – for instance, by increasing fortifications of
the Great Wall of China.
The Ming were also noted for promoting traditional Chinese culture, especially Confucianism.
In addition, foot binding – although not unknown before, also became very common under
the Ming.
Now in China, women with small, delicate, dainty feet were seen as extremely attractive
– and to have such small, delicate feet Chinese women engaged in foot binding, binding
their feet to force them to become smaller.
This was painful and in many cases women had a hard time walking afterward and thus could
not work outside their home.
Foot binding thus became a status symbol.
Only families who could afford women not to work outside the home could do it, and became
seen as a way for women to increase their beauty and their prospects in marriage.
Under the Ming, foot binding especially became a status symbol and became prominent among
the wealthy in China.
But it was also reflective of an oppressive, patriarchal view of women and of their bodies.
In other matters, After Cheng Ho’s last voyage in 1433, the Ming scrapped China’s
fleet and stopped attempting to have contact with the rest of the world through trade or
through exploration.
China had a huge internal economic market, thus making exports less important for it.
Europeans, however, were very interested in contact with China.
The Portuguese came to the Chinese port of Macau, and the Spanish from the city of Manila
in the Philippines also traded with China.
In the 17th century, the Dutch also came to have a lively trade relationship with China
from their colony in the East Indies, which is present-day Indonesia.
These European merchants – Portuguese; Spanish; Dutch – brought luxury products – such
as silk; porcelain, later simply called China or lacquerware; and later tea from China – to
Europe; the Chinese were largely not interested in products from Europe.
Nonetheless, they did accept silver as currency.
Between 1492 and 1800, eighty-five percent of the world’s silver and seventy percent
of the world’s gold came from the Americas; most of it coming from the Spanish colonies
in the Americas.
Europeans used a substantial portion of these precious metals to pay for Chinese luxury
products.
As European trade to China also involved the Americas, it’s worth pointing out that this
was a truly global relationship with Europeans purchasing Chinese products using gold and
silver from the Americas.
In addition to merchants, Catholic missionaries – who’d already begun engaging in mission
activity in nearby Japan – were also interested in converting the Chinese to Christianity
as well, particularly Catholic missionaries.
In 1601, the Italian=Catholic priest, Matteo Ricci, first established a Catholic presence
in Beijing; this was the first Catholic missionary activity since Mongol times.
Matteo Ricci was a member of the Society of Jesus, or the Jesuits, which was a Counter-Reformation
order of monks, and the Jesuits were famous as teachers and as missionaries.
Ricci also introduced the latest European inventions and scientific discoveries to China
– including clocks and new discoveries in astronomy – and the Chinese were very interested
in European technology.
Ricci made a real effort to adapt to Chinese culture and he may have been the first European
to learn to speak Chinese fluently.
He attempted to use Confucianism as a bridge between Christianity and the rest of China,
arguing that the Christian gospel was simply a culmination of the ideas of China, such
as the existence of the lord of heaven.
Ricci’s efforts to win the Chinese over to Christianity largely did not succeed, and
few Chinese converted to Christianity.
Also, the Vatican wary of his approach, viewing it as too sympathetic to other religions – such
as Confucianism and Buddhism; still, Ricci made a very positive impression on the Chinese
overall, although his impression was limited to the elites in China.
The masses in China, especially peasants in rural areas, continued to have no contact
whatsoever with Europeans.
The Ming attempted to keep our foreign invaders along their northern frontier, and this attempt
was ultimately unsuccessful.
In 1644, the Manchu – a people to the north of China – invaded China and captured the
city of Beijing, the capital.
These Manchu invaders set up a new dynasty, the King Dynasty, which ruled from 1644 to
1912.
Under the King Dynasty, the ruling Manchu population maintained much of their Manchu
culture, such as their language and their long hairstyle for men.
The Manchu also refused to intermarry with non-Manchu.
While the King Dynasty largely did not impose Manchu culture on the Han Chinese majority,
many trends that began under the Ming continued under the King – for instance, China experienced
significant agricultural changes during the latter years of the Ming Dynasty and this
continued under the King.
This especially included the introduction of crops from the New World, from the Spanish
colonial empire in the Americas, and this included crops such as corn; sweet potatoes;
and peanuts – all brought to China from contact with the Spanish.
These agriculture changes – all the new crops from the Americas, improved diets in
China and led to strong population growth.
China’s population doubled from 1450 to 1800, when it reached three-hundred-and-fifty
million people – about one-third of the Earth’s population in 1800.
Population growth, in turn, led to pressure to acquire new land – particularly to add
nearby lands to China to Chinese rule.
Under the Ming, China invaded and began to colonize Taiwan with Han Chinese.
For their part, the King invaded Central Asia, winning wars that resulted in the most traumatic
expansion of China into Central Asia, in Chinese history.
By 1800, China was still a very important nation in the world.
It had a large and even – It was very large and expanding territorially, and as noted
– it had the world’s largest population, and an important economy.
Nonetheless, China was largely isolated from the rest of the world, all at a time when
Europe and later the United States began to experience dramatic economic, technological,
and social and political changes because of the Industrial Revolution.
China did not experience the changes of the Industrial Revolution, and began to fall behind
the West after 1800.
Now during this time period, Korea was ruled by the Chosun Dynasty, a long-ruling dynasty
which controlled Korea from 1392 until 1897, and under the Chosun Dynasty Korea became
increasingly isolated from the rest of the world as well.
In fact, it was known as the ‘hermit kingdom’.
Korea, unfortunately, was also faced with aggressive wars from nearby Japan.
In 1592, led by the warlord Hideyoshi, Japan launched a major invasion of Korea with a
force of over a hundred-and-fifty thousand Japanese soldiers.
Now this Japanese invasion, under Hideyoshi, went well at first and the Japanese samurai
nearly overran all of Korea.
However, the Koreans fought back, and led by a resourceful admiral named, Yi Sun-shin,
the Koreans managed to seriously disrupt Japanese shipping and ultimately to drive them out
with the assistance of the Chinese.
Japan was forced to withdraw from Korea, but it did attempt to invade Korea again in seven
bloody years of warfare followed between Japan and Korea.
Notoriously, Japanese samurai collected between one-hundred thousand and two-hundred thousand
severed noses of Koreans who died in war, as war trophies of this war.
But once again, the Koreans ultimately pushed the Japanese out of Korea.
The war did, though, devastate Korea and sowed the seeds of lasting bitter antagonism between
Japan and Korea.
Also after these wars with Japan, Korea – as mentioned – became more isolated, presumably
in an attempt to invade – an attempt to prevent further Japanese invasion.
In the 17th century, Korea was arguably the most isolated nation in the world – again,
called the ‘hermit kingdom’.
Now for its part, Japan actually went in a similar direction as Korea, although for different
directions, for different reasons rather.
As we have seen, the Tokugawa shogunate, which ruled Japan from 1603 until 1868, rose to
power in 1603, restoring order to Japan after a long period of chaos and internal fighting
between rival Japanese lords and samurai.
Just prior to the rise of the Tokugawa to power in Japan, the Spanish-Catholic Jesuit
missionaries began to arrive in the country.
Other Jesuit missionaries, especially Spanish and the Portuguese, and later the Dutch began
to arrive in Japan as well.
As a result of Catholic mission activities, thousands of Japanese – perhaps even up
to thirty thousand, began to convert to Christianity, with the city of Nagasaki coming to have a
large Christian population.
Now this greatly alarmed the Tokugawa shogunates.
They began to fear that Japanese Christians would ally with foreigners – such as the
Spanish or the Portuguese, and then attempt to overthrow the Japanese government.
Consequently, the Tokugawa government began to persecute Japanese Christians, famously
crucifying many of them, especially those known as the twenty-six martyrs of Japan.
Twenty-six Japanese Christians, who were crucified publicly near Nagasaki in 1597.
This harsh persecution caused a reaction among Japanese Christians.
In 1637 and 1638, a group of Japanese Christians near Nagasaki revolted against the Tokugawa
government.
This led to an especially vicious crackdown against Christians in Japan, aimed at getting
them at renouncing their faith under torture, and especially while forced to listen to other
Christians tortured, and asked to step on an image of Jesus in order to stop this torture
– many Japanese Christians did renounce their faith.
This persecution, including the torture of Christians to obtain renunciations of their
faith, has been vividly recounted by Japanese novelist, Shūsaku Endō in his novel, Silence,
which has recently been made into a film.
While some Christians in Japan renounced their faith, others went underground – and in
fact, an underground Catholic Church – cut off from the Catholic Church in the rest of
the world – would exist in Japan for the next three-hundred years.
Part of the reason that Japan had an underground Catholic Church was because the country in
general was cut off from the Western world – rest of the world as well.
After suppressing Christianity in Japan, the Tokugawa shogunate began severely limiting
foreign trade and contact with the outside world.
In 1641, the only foreigners allowed in Japan were the Dutch, who were restricted to the
small, to a small island in the Nagasaki harbor.
Internally, the Tokugawa shogunate also kept very close tabs on Japan’s nobles, the daimyo,
and its elite warriors, the samurai.
The Tokugawa even required nobles to spend half of their year in the capital and it held
family members hostage in the shogun’s castle.
All of this was to prevent nobles from revolting.
As with the Ming Dynasty in China and the Chosun Dynasty in Korea, the Tokugawa shogunate
was driven by a fear of disorder and foreign influence and invasion.
Still, despite being isolated, Japan was a dynamic country under the Tokugawa.
Culturally it developed an elaborate, showy theatre, known as Kabuki theatre.
Other forms of entertainment in Tokugawa, Japan included licensed pleasure houses, that
included tea houses; theatres; and brothels, where cultured female entertainers, known
as the geisha, at the heart of these pleasure quarters.
Japan also came to have growing cities and a very dynamic urban population under the
Tokugawa – for instance, Edu or modern Tokyo had a population of over one million people
in 1800.
That made it the largest city in the world at the time.
By way of comparison, the largest European city in 1800 – Paris – had a population
of half a million people; so half the size of Tokyo.
So let’s make a few concluding points.
First, East Asian nations from the 16th through the 18th centuries – particularly China;
Korea; and Japan – increasingly withdrew from contact with the outside world.
All of this was because of prior negative experiences with foreigners and foreign powers.
Still, they remained very vibrant – with growing economies; growing populations; and
growing cities.
But finally, their isolation from the rest of the world hurt them in the long run – especially
after Europe began industrializing in full force by 1800.
This in turn would have a profound impact on East Asia in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Well that’s all for today.
Thanks for watching.