124 Fall of the Ming Dynasty
Learning Objective
- Explain why the Ming dynasty eventually fell from power
Key Points
- During the last years of the Wanli Emperor’s reign and the reigns of his two successors, an economic crisis developed that was centered around a sudden widespread lack of the empire’s chief medium of exchange: silver.
- In this early half of the 17th century, famines became common in northern China, and the central government did little to relieve the populations, leading to widespread discontent among the people.
- The Manchu, formerly called the Jurchen people, rose to power under the leadership of a tribal leader named Nurhaci, who commissioned a document titled the Seven Grievances, essentially a declaration of war against the Ming.
- Peasant and soldier uprising under the leadership of Li Zicheng weakened the government and army of the Ming.
- The last Ming emperor, the Chongzhen Emperor, hanged himself on a tree in the imperial garden outside the Forbidden City.
- Li Zicheng, who had attempted to start a new Shun dynasty, was eventually defeated by the Manchu army, who founded the Qing dynasty.
Terms
Forbidden City
The Chinese imperial palace from the Ming dynasty to the end of the Qing dynasty—the years 1420 to 1912—in Beijing.
Wanli Emperor
The 13th emperor of the Ming dynasty of China; his reign of forty-eight years (1572–1620) was the longest of the Ming dynasty, and it witnessed the steady decline of the dynasty.
Manchu
A Chinese ethnic minority, formerly the Jurchen people, who founded the Qing dynasty.
Economic Breakdown
During the last years of the Wanli Emperor’s reign and the reigns of his two successors, an economic crisis developed that was centered around a sudden widespread lack of the empire’s chief medium of exchange: silver. The Protestant powers of the Dutch Republic and the Kingdom of England were staging frequent raids and acts of piracy against the Catholic-based empires of Spain and Portugal in order to weaken their global economic power. Meanwhile, Philip IV of Spain (r. 1621–1665) began cracking down on illegal smuggling of silver from Mexico and Peru across the Pacific towards China, in favor of shipping American-mined silver directly from Spain to Manila. In 1639, the new Tokugawa regime of Japan shut down most of its foreign trade with European powers, causing a halt of yet another source of silver coming into China. However, while Japanese silver still came into China in limited amounts, the greatest stunt to the flow of silver came from the Americas.
These events occurring at roughly the same time caused a dramatic spike in the value of silver and made paying taxes nearly impossible for most provinces. People began hoarding precious silver, forcing the ratio of the value of copper to silver into a steep decline. In the 1630s, a string of one thousand copper coins was worth an ounce of silver; by 1640 it was reduced to the value of half an ounce; by 1643 it was worth roughly one-third of an ounce