urban thugs, bandits, rebels, soldiers, or traveling martial artists. Several
officials recognized a unifying thread for men in these positions and
recommended, following two Song Dynasty officials’writings in particu-
lar, that bandits, thugs and“heroes”be recruited into government service
both to gain their services and to deny them to any rebels.^8 Martial arts and
martial artists of many kinds abounded in the Ming Dynasty at every level
of society and in every region.
The Ming army was, of course, deeply involved in training and practic-
ing martial arts. This involvement extended from the military families to
the military exams and on to efforts of generals like Qi Jiguang to raise new
units tofight thewokoupirates. The Ming also saw the sudden elevation of
the Shaolin Temple to a prominent place in some writers’conception of the
martial arts world in the middle of the Ming Dynasty. Several aspects of
martial arts either developed significantly during the Ming or were written
down in currently extant manuals. Terminology continued to change, as
did the list of the eighteen martial arts. Boxing, fencing with both the sword
and long sword, spearfighting, and stafffighting all advanced or were
written about in detail. The shifts in writing about the martial arts in the
Ming, both infiction and descriptively, present us with a clearer image of
the place and form of martial arts in Ming society than for earlier periods.
The Ming Military
The Ming military went through several stages of development over the
course of the dynasty. Its original form, that of a hereditary military
system, declined by the beginning of the sixteenth century, leaving the
state with a partly functional military. It faced two problems, both of
them structural. First, the army of conquest was not well suited to defend-
ing the Ming empire’s territory. Like most dynastic armies of conquest, it
succeeded because it was able to attack and defeat opposing concentra-
tions of troops. Once the empire was established, however, it had to defend
against internal and external disturbances. Most of these problems, at least
until the early seventeenth century, were not threats to the existence of the
dynasty but rather challenges to its authority along the border or in local
areas. Even the most serious Mongol incursions were not directed at
destroying the dynasty. This was even more true of the pirate raids on
the southeastern coast. The Ming military struggled to re-create itself as a
defense force against low-level threats. It was mostly successful in this
effort, but then failed in the seventeenth century to adapt to the new
Manchu threat.
The Ming Military 165