The military of the Ming dynasty was the military apparatus of China from 1368 to 1644. It was established from the Red Turban rebel forces in the late Yuan dynasty under the leadership of Zhu Yuanzhang, who later became its founding emperor as the Hongwu Emperor.
Like many aspects of Ming politics and society, the military combined traditional Chinese elements—particularly those traceable to the Tang dynasty—with Mongol influences inherited from the Yuan. The new imperial army was initially organised along largely hereditary lines, with manpower drawn from self-sufficient agricultural communities across the empire. Soldiers were grouped into guards (wei) and battalions (suo), forming what is known as the weisuo system. This system declined less than a century after the dynasty's founding, around 1450, and was ultimately abandoned in favor of the extensive use of mercenaries and salaried troops during the 16th century.
At its outset, the military included substantial cavalry forces skilled in mounted archery in the Turco-Mongol style. Only in the 16th century did it begin to make widespread use of modern firearms of Western type, increasingly equipping infantry units organized in structured formations.
Background The Ming emperors from Hongwu to Zhengde continued policies of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty such as hereditary military institutions, dressing themselves and their guards in Mongol-style clothing and hats, promoting archery and horseback riding, and having large numbers of Mongols serve in the Ming military. Until the late 16th century Mongols still constituted one-in-three officers serving in capital forces like the Embroidered Uniform Guard, and other peoples such as Jurchens were also prominent. A cavalry-based army modeled on the Yuan military was favoured by the Hongwu and Yongle Emperors.
Contrary to the stereotype that the Confucian Ming were disinterested in the military, the Ming poured enormous resources such as landholdings into upkeeping its military, which also constituted the biggest portion of the state budget. The Ming deliberately placed the military and civilian officials in opposition to each other for checks and balances. Troops often feuded, looted, evaded tax or resisted law enforcement in defiance of civilian officials, prompting the court to place civilian officials to supervise the military.Robinson, David. “WHY MILITARY INSTITUTIONS MATTER FOR MING HISTORY.” Journal of Chinese History 1, no. 2 (2017): 297–327.
At the Guozijian Academy, equestrianism and archery were emphasized by the Hongwu Emperor in addition to Confucian classics, also being required in the Imperial Examinations. Archery and equestrianism were added to the exam by Hongwu in 1370 just as archery and equestrianism were required for non-military officials at the College of War (武舉) in 1162 by Emperor Xiaozong of the Song dynasty.
Guard battalion system
The Ming founder Zhu Yuanzhang set up a system of hereditary soldiery inspired by Mongol-style garrisons and the fubing system of the Northern Wei, Sui and Tang dynasties. Hereditary soldiers were meant to be self-sufficient. They provided their own food via military farms (tun tian) and rotated into training and military posts such as the capital, where specialized drilling with firearms was provided.
These hereditary soldiers were grouped into guards (wei) and battalions (suo), otherwise known as the wei-suo system. A guard consisted of 5,600 men, each guard was divided into battalions of 1,120 men (qiānhù), each battalion contained 10 companies of 112 men (bǎihù), each company contained two platoons of 56 men (zǒngqí), and each platoon contained five squads of 11 or 12 men (xiǎoqí).
Most of the soldiers in Ming's army came from military households, which consisted of about 20 percent of households in the early Ming period. Each military household was required to provide one man to serve in the army. If that man died, the household was required to send another.
There were four ways to become a military household. The first was for the family to be descended from a “fellow campaigner” who took part in the wars of the Ming founder. The family could also be descended from a soldier serving one of the enemies of the Ming founder but became incorporated into Ming troops after defeat. Those convicted of criminal offences could also be sentenced to serve in the military. But by the fifteenth century, criminal conviction no longer resulted in a normal household's conversion into military household. Punitive service was made non-hereditary. Lastly, soldiers were also recruited through a draft.
Command structure
The guard battalions outside the capital were placed under local provincial military commanders. Those in Beijing were placed under the joint command of the Ministry for War and five grand military commanders, which reflected the separation of power and command. The Ministry issued orders to be carried out by the commanders.
Some officers were recruited through the military version of the imperial examinations, which emphasized horse archery, but not enough to impose a quality standard. These exams did however produce a few notable individuals such as Qi Jiguang and Yu Dayou.
In the late Ming dynasty, Ming army units had become dominated by hereditary officers who would spend long periods of ten or twelve years in command instead of the usual practice of constant rotation, and the Central Military Command had lost much of its control over regional armies. Zongdu Junwu, or Supreme Commanders, were appointed throughout the empire to oversee the fiscal and military affairs in the area of his jurisdiction, but they became increasingly autonomous in later periods.
Social status and decline Soldiering was one of the lowest professions in the Ming dynasty. Military officers were not only subordinate to civil officials, but generals and soldiers alike were degraded, treated with fear, suspicion, and distaste. Military service enjoyed far less prestige than its civil counterpart due to its hereditary status and because most soldiers were illiterate.
The guard battalion system went into decline from 1450 to 1550 and the military capacity of hereditary soldiers declined substantially due to corruption and mismanagement. Some officers used their soldiers as construction gangs, some were too oppressive, others were too old and unfit for service, and many did not observe the proper rotational drilling schedule. In the 16th century official registers listed three million hereditary soldiers, but contemporary observers noted that the actual number of troops was around 845,000, and of that only about 30,000 cavalry. Modern historians estimated that by 1587, some province's actual army strengths could hit a mere 2% of nominal strength.Ray Huang, 1587. A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981. Page 160. The effectiveness of the Ming's now much smaller army was also considered pitiful, the capital armies being "old and weak lackeys of central government officials." When Altan Khan invaded China in 1550 (even setting the suburbs of Beijing on fire), the Ming could only muster about 60,000 troops to counter him, who then routed at the sight of the Mongols. A particularly extreme example came in 1555, when according to Ming records, a mere 60 pirates in a single ship landed in Nanjing. The city and its surrounding area was nominally garrisoned by 120,000 troops. Despite this, these 60 pirates encountered little resistance for the next three months, when they looted and burned towns around the area, killing four thousand people and rampaging over a thousand miles before the government could muster the strength to crush them.Ming Shih, chapter 322, in Kwan-wai So, Japanese Piracy in Ming China During the 16th Century. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1975. Page 181.
Soldiers were also assigned tasks unrelated to warfare and combat. One of the primary military assignments in the early stages of the Ming empire was farming plots of land.David M. Robinson “Military Labor in China, c. 1500.” Fighting for a Living: A Comparative Study of Military Labour 1500-2000, edited by Erik-Jan Zürcher, (Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2013), pp. 44–45. Soldiers were often subject to exploitation from higher-ups in the army; they did menial tasks such as chopping down trees and picking herbs for the sole benefit of their superiors.David M. Robinson “Military Labor in China, c. 1500.” Fighting for a Living: A Comparative Study of Military Labour 1500-2000, edited by Erik-Jan Zürcher, (Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2013), pp. 46. The Ming sometimes utilized soldiers as transport workers to move grain and other foodstuffs throughout the empire. Soldiers were essentially no different than hired help due to the fact that they were often assigned to various menial tasks requiring manual labor.Ray Huang “Military Expenditures in Sixteenth Century Ming China.” Oriens Extremus, vol. 17, no. 1/2, (1970):39-62 pp. 43. Officers were known to seize the lands of military colonies and convert them into their private estates, and subsequently force their troops into becoming their serfs. Other officers accepted bribes from soldiers to be exempted from military drill, and used other troops as menial labour. Corruption was so lucrative that the sons of merchants were known to bribe officials for appointments as army officers so as to exhort bribes from soldiers in exchange for drill exemption, or to register their own servants as soldiers so as to embezzle their rations. Desertion from the weisuo became commonplace.
The military was not the most profitable occupation and thus soldiers had to rely on other means to make money aside from the salary given by the government. The most straightforward method was to kill more enemy soldiers, which would grant them a reward for each soldier killed in battle.David M. Robinson “Military Labor in China, c. 1500.” Fighting for a Living: A Comparative Study of Military Labour 1500-2000, edited by Erik-Jan Zürcher, (Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2013), pp. 58-59. Some soldiers defected from the army and turned to banditry because they did not have enough food to eat.
Complicating the matter was that soldiers of the same rank did not share the same authority. Soldiers who had more wealth were able to bribe their superiors with money and other gifts increased their standing and status within the army.David M. Robinson “Military Labor in China, c. 1500.” Fighting for a Living: A Comparative Study of Military Labour 1500-2000, edited by Erik-Jan Zürcher, (Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2013), pp. 45.
Since most did not want to serve in the army, family members who chose to be soldiers might get some sort of compensation from other male family members. For example, they could become the next "descent-line heir" even if they were not the eldest son, as was tradition, by volunteering to enlist. The "descent-line heir" was the right to hold a special ritual role within the clan and hence enhance one's social status since the heir would inherit his father's privileges. In a military family, soldiers who were assigned to locations far away from their ancestral homes often saw their relationships with their extended family decline. To counter this, subsidies were granted to serving soldiers in an attempt to lower the desertion rate of soldiers serving in the family and help maintain a connection between the serving soldier's immediate family with their ancestral one. The subsidy gave a reason for the immediate family members of the soldier to regularly visit their ancestral homes to collect payment and thereby maintain their relationship.