government. He sought tofix permanently the correct balance between the
martial and civil in his dynasty, at least as he conceived it.
Officers and soldiers were registered as military families and given land
on which to support themselves. In return, they would supply officers and
soldiers to the imperial army in perpetuity. Zhu Yuanzhang imagined that
this would create a self-sustaining military and limit the need for a large
and expensive army dependent upon the imperial treasury. Zhu’s sons
were enfeoffed along the border in military commands to protect the
empire from the steppe. His utopian vision went further, conceiving of
an empire of satisfied farmers happily dwelling in their individual hamlets
and villages without even venturing to a neighboring settlement. This static
society would maintain its martial edge through those tasked to maintain
military skills while most of its subjects were engaged in productive and
peaceful farming.
Zhu’s vision was impractical at its inception, and parts of it collapsed
entirely after his death. His original heir, his eldest son, predeceased him,
leaving a precarious political situation. Zhu Yuanzhang decided that his
eldest son’s son should then succeed him. His own highly militarized sons
were ambitious and little inclined to accept their nephew’s succession to
the throne. A brutal civil war followed soon after thefirst emperor’s death.
His fourth son, the Prince of Yan, based at what became Beijing, defeated
his nephew with the aid of Mongol cavalry and took the throne. The new
Ming ruler, the Yongle emperor ( 1360 – 1424 ), moved the capital to Beijing
and had the short reign of his nephew deleted from the records.
In spite of the founding emperor’s vision, Ming society changed in many
dynamic ways over nearly three centuries of the dynasty’s rule. Commerce
and trade expanded rapidly, for example, directly undercutting the notion
of a static empire of disconnected farmers living in their villages. Trade
with the outside world also increased, and Christian missionaries made
theirfirst attempts to enter China. The ranks of the educated elite increased
as well, though the size of government did not, leaving larger and larger
numbers of qualified men unable to pass the civil service exams and serve
as officials. Even those who passed the exams had difficulty getting posts.
This was a problem that had begun to appear as early as the eleventh
century, leading Confucian thinkers, originally wedded to the idea that
men studied in order to serve in government, to rethink the purpose of
education. The Neo-Confucians argued that self-cultivation was the pri-
mary goal of study, offering some consolation to the tens of thousands of
men whose family means and position in society required that they study,
but recognized how slim their odds were of passing the exams. An
158 The Ming Dynasty