Dynasty, tempered by the practical need for armed forces and local security,
and the widespread, popular performance of martial arts in contests and
theater. When an educated man chose to pursue martial arts with any rigor,
he had to explain why he was not pursuing more acceptable intellectual
activities. Those literati who did write descriptions of their involvement in
the martial arts world not only justified them in pragmatic terms but also
brought to bear their considerable knowledge of literary and historical
devices to legitimize those skills. Thus certain lineages of martial arts knowl-
edge began to appear in writing–knowledge that had often before been left
to unreliable or imaginative oral tradition. Local traditions were trans-
formed into national martial arts history.
Several scholars date significant changes in the martial arts to the middle
and late Ming Dynasty. While the hereditary Ming military system worked
adequately for some time after the dynasty’s founding, by the middle of the
dynasty it had begun to fail badly. Military families were not producing a
large pool of skilled soldiers available for army service or campaigns but
rather a large pool of farmers exploited by the officer class. Despite efforts
to maintain military training within the army itself, the long stretch of
peace degradedfighting capabilities. Overall Ming strategy also changed.
Whereas at the beginning of the dynasty a forward defense of military
bases directly engaged the steppe, this was withdrawn due to expense, and
strategy shifted toward static defense. Ming troops took fewer chances and
fought less, ceding the initiative to the Mongols. The Ming court was
unwilling to treat diplomatically with the Mongols or trade with them
from a position of weakness. In response, the Mongols raided more
frequently and in greater depth, at one point in 1550 reaching the suburbs
of the capital, Beijing. Unwilling either to pull the border back to more
defensible positions or to mount an expensive offensive campaign into the
steppe, the court left it to local commanders to deal with the raiders. The
result was a line of long walls that would eventually grow into what we
now know as the Great Wall.^2
Ming troops stood on the defensive behind the Great Wall armed with
thousands of guns. The wall itself was never a complete solution, and,
indeed, a Mongol force managed to capture one emperor in 1449 on the
Chinese side of the wall. The importance of guns to the Ming military is
also significant. Guns were critical military equipment but remained slow
enough in operation to keep bows and crossbows in use. Guns were used
extensively in the Ming conquest and were a basic part of the imperial
military’s armament. As with other weapons, however, soldiers needed
training to use them properly and warriors armed with guns needed skillful
162 The Ming Dynasty