deployment to function effectively in battle. The dynasty’s original military
system did not just fail to produce trained men but it also lost a substantial
amount of its knowledge of how to train soldiers, use weapons, andfight
battles. One of the reasons so many military and martial arts manuals were
produced during the mid to late Ming Dynasty was the urgent need to
recover lost military knowledge. Quite intriguingly, this was also when
many martial arts novels emerged, though like the military writings, they
were also built upon earlier traditions and stories.
Even while the Ming military as a whole declined, pockets of military
knowledge and martial arts skills remained. Army units on the border or in
the capital were the best maintained since they were on active service,
however limited. The Ming government, like so many governments in
premodern times, was unable to maintain a high level of readiness across
its entire military apparatus. Given time, and under the pressure of a crisis,
it could reinvigorate its army at least temporarily. Alternatively, it could
rely solely on the limited number of functional units to deal with a prob-
lem. During the Wanli emperor’s reign the paucity of good generals and
troops forced delays in addressing nearly simultaneous problems. These
problems were eventually solved, but only after several generals and their
troops marched from one end of China to the other, and on into Korea.^3 In
other cases, like Qi Jiguang’s suppression of thewokoupirates, new units
had to be raised and trained. When a problem was too large or time was
too short, the military could simply be overwhelmed before it could rise to
the task. This was largely what happened at the end of the dynasty.
More generally, knowledge of the martial arts was widespread in soci-
ety. The traditions of martial arts were broadly maintained by individual
families and in towns and villages for self-protection and as a legacy of the
past. Theater troupes had their own traditions of martial arts, and they
continued to travel around the empire performing. Increased commerce
meant a concomitant increase in travel by merchants, their guards, and
itinerant sellers of services. Thisfloating population was joined by other
travelers in the Ming: literati sightseeing or pursuing education, monks
moving from monastery to monastery, and ambitious people seeking
better lives or a way off the farm. This wide variety of people collected in
towns and cities as they traveled, spreading and mixing their skills, meeting
and performing their services at marketplaces. Many marketplaces were
set up at temples, which offered both open space and sometimes accom-
modations for travelers.
There was also a darker side to the practice of martial arts, a similarly
widespread“economy of violence”that operated in Ming China at every
The Ming Dynasty 163