China vs. Northern Barbarians - Part 2: The Ming

Waging War, Building Walls

(Pictured: part of the Ming Great Wall - this section was militarily insane to build and it has not been restored)

This is part 2 of a 4 part series. See: Part 1 - the Problem of the Northern Barbarians - Part 3 - the Manchu Solution - Part 4, Who were the Northern Barbarians?

For a related series on Chinese attitudes towards their military see The Song, Ming, and Qing efforts to built a functional army - Part 1.

Introduction to Part 2

The year 1280 was a low point in Chinese history. The Song, after nearly 300 years of failed wars, failed diplomacy, and after paying unbelievable amounts of tribute - had been conquered by the Mongols.

The Song - right up until the end - thought they would triumph over the Mongols because China’s long experience with the Northern Barbarians taught them that the various northern tribes never stayed together after a great war-leader died. History showed that only a great war-leader could hold the various tribes together, because normally they hated each other for stealing livestock and women from each other. Once every 200 years a great leader would appear, unify the tribes, cause trouble for China, and then he would die and with his death, the northern tribes would break apart and return to fighting one other. Each time a great Khan of the Mongols died - the Song said We are saved!

Each time, their knowledge of history proved to be an unhelpful guide.

Genghis Khan died fighting the Xi Xia in 1227 but - remarkably - Ogdai Khan succeeded Genghis without any conflict at all. Ogdai’s hordes fought all across Asia, and although some hordes raided the Song, he did not focus on China. When Ogdai Khan died in 1241, there was indeed a battle over his succession, and the Song celebrated. Unfortunetly, the Mongol empire was so large that even when the Golden Horde under its leader, Batu, gained its independence, Mongke Khan still ruled the largest empire in the world.

When Mongke Khan died at the siege of Diaoyu Castle in 1259, again the Song celebrated. Again, there was another battle for the succession, and it lasted for four years - now called the Toluid war, fought between Kublai and his brother Ariq Boke. At the end of the war, additional hordes split off and refused to accept Kublai Khan as their ruler. More fighting between the Mongol kingdoms ensued, such as the war between the Golden Horde and the Ilkhanate as well as a long conflict between Kublai and his cousin, Kaidu.

However, the Song respite from Mongol attacks didn’t last long. True, Kublai Khan lost control over central Asia, Persia, and the Middle East. But his Eastern Mongol Empire still controlled most of Mongolia, Korea, the rich lands once ruled by the Jin Dynasty, and the former nation of Dali (roughly: modern Yunnan province). All this territory provided more than enough man-power for Kublai Khan to defeat the Song. So, while the Song were correct that each time a Mongol leader died his empire shrank, that didn’t save them.

The Ming Dynasty - Wars then Walls

The Sage will not describe the fascinating origin of the Ming Dynasty - not today. Suffice it to say that the Mongol Empire in China (as of 1277 called the Yuan Dynasty) survived for 90 years. By 1360 it was but a faint shadow of its old power and in 1368, Chu Yuan-Chang - the Hongwu Emperor - conquered the Mongol capital of Dadu (at the site of today’s Beijing) and proclaimed Chinese rule over China once again. The long national nightmare was ended.

The Hongwu Emperor hated the Mongols - for good reasons - and he sent his armies north into Mongolia to annihilate the remaining Mongol forces. Displaying remarkable skill and unparalleled leadership, the Ming armies went deep into Mongolia and defeated the Mongols on their own lands several times. Only Li Shimin’s armies near the start of the Tang Dynasty could claim similar victories. No Chinese army since 700 CE had marched north into Mongolia and defeated the Northern Barbarians. His son, the Yongle Emperor also hated the Mongols and continued waging war against them - with only moderate success.

Like all things, the era of Ming military capability did not last. Just 25 years after the death of the Yongle Emperor, his great grandson took half a million Chinese soldiers to the border of Mongolia where nearly all of them were killed by a tiny Mongol army in the 1449 disaster of Tumu. From this point on, the Ming adopted a defensive posture versus the Mongols. A Ming governor of the Ordos region began building a wall in 1470. Over the next 180 years, the Ming extended their wall, and strengthened it, while neglecting their own military, especially their cavalry and their weapons.

Very much like how the construction of the Maginot Line in France diverted resources away from the development and deployment of weapons and training which could have stopped the Nazi-German army in 1940, the construction of the Ming wall diverted the Ming army away from a focus on military training and developing modern military equipment for their soldiers.

To be fair, the Ming Wall worked - to a degree. The Mongols couldn’t easily breach the Ming Wall, and so they usually went around it. Going around the Ming Wall took more time and required them to make arrangements with other Mongol tribes which might not welcome a warband from a rival tribe crossing their land. Also, the Ming Wall was initially built in sections to cover the places along the border which were easy to cross. The places the Ming left unfortified were regions with little water for horses or on top of steep mountains.

However, by and large, the Ming Wall was a failure.

1. The wall cost too much. The Ming knew how to build cannons, and knew - thanks to the Jesuits like Matteo Ricci - how to mass produce the arquebus. In Japan, Oda Nobunaga created a large military force armed largely with European designed arquebuses, starting in 1549. Oda used this new European-style army to defeat all his Japanese rivals who hadn’t modernized and were still using archers. The Ming could easily have copied Oda’s example and created even larger armies than the Japanese - equipped with flintlock arquebuses which would have destroyed the Mongol cavalry raiders. But instead, the Ming spent all their extra money building and repairing their stupid Long Wall.

2. Completing the wall even in places where it made no sense became the thing to do for Ming governors. No doubt there was a lot of corruption when it came to building the Long Wall. From a military perspective, putting a wall along a steep mountain ridge is idiotic. The photo at the top of this essay shows a section of the Ming Wall which should never have been built! No horses can climb steep mountains, and the Mongols refused to march on foot. After all, they were raiding China for loot. They weren’t planning on walking home with the goods they had stolen.

3. There were other enemies of the Ming who knew how to use gun powder. The Ming Wall only stopped the Mongols because the Mongols hated technology beyond bows and swords. By contrast, the Manchu acquired modern cannons and learned how to use them.

The Manchu Armies Crossed the Ming Walls Easily

The Manchu destroyed the Ming Dynasty. The Manchu staged at least four major raids into Ming territory between 1624 and 1644, blasting holes through the Ming Walls with cannons and gunpowder each time they crossed - both entering China and leaving China. The Ming Wall was merely an inconvenience for the Manchu armies, because they had the skills to break through it.

Yes, the army which marched into Beijing in the spring of 1644 was commanded by a Chinese rebel, Li Zicheng. The main reason why Li Zicheng was able to bring his army to Beijing in the first place was because the Manchu had already degraded the Ming government and military during the preceding decades. Just two months later, Li Zicheng’s army fled in panic from Beijing as the Manchu army rode up to the gates of the city. The Manchu took control of Beijing without a fight.

In a very real sense, the Ming were defeated by an evolved group of Northern Barbarians. The Manchu were very much like the Khitans from 700 years earlier who had repeatedly defeated the Song. The Manchu made extensive use of their captured Chinese slaves, treating them well, and eventually bringing the most useful Chinese administrators and generals into the upper ranks of their society. By 1644, the Manchu (called the Qing Dynasty as of 1636) were a fairly well integrated Manchu-Chinese political entity.

The Great Wall of China – Not old, Never great

Almost everything Europeans say about the Great Wall of China is wrong (though the Wikipedia article as of 11/2022 gets most of the details right).

Historically there was no wall which protected China from the northern barbarians until the Ming started building a wall in 1470 CE.

The First Empire (the Qin) built watchtowers and connected them with an unfortified rammed earth mound for their chariots to ride along. The Qin defensive line wasn’t much of a wall, it was more akin to an elevated road. The Han tried to maintain the Qin watchtowers in the north but mostly they waged aggressive wars on the northern barbarians and the border was constantly shifting, making the Qin defensive line mostly useless. Following the collapse of the Han Dynasty (190 CE), none of the subsequent dynasties built a wall along their northern frontiers. Watch towers - yes. A wall? No. Except for the Ming.

To be clear: there was no wall at all from at least 200 CE until 1470 CE.

The Ming Dynasty built the wall which tourists visit today. The Ming wall began as a defense strategy for Shaanxi province, and later Ming Huangdi had the wall extended further, eventually reaching the Yellow Sea in the late 1500s.

After the Manchu took over China, the Ming wall was left to decay, because it was of no use at all to the Qing Dynasty. The wall became a running joke in China, Japan, and even Korea as it symbolized the incompetence and lack rational military planning by the Ming Dynasty.

The Ming Wall was never called The Great Wall by the Chinese, it was called the Long Wall by the Qing. The English and French called it the Great Wall, while the Qing snickered at them because the Europeans didn’t realize that Manchu armies had broken through the Long Wall several times in the years before they conquered China.

Tourists visiting China today are marveling at a expensive example of military engineering which failed to do it’s job.

This is part 2 of a 4 part series. See: Part 1 - the Problem of the Northern Barbarians - Part 3 - the Manchu Solution - Part 4, Who were the Northern Barbarians?

For a related series on Chinese attitudes towards their military see The Song, Ming, and Qing efforts to built a functional army - Part 1.