Chinese History for White People - Ming Dynasty

In 1343, a 15-year-old serf with no given name¹ lost his entire family to drought, locusts, and plague. Many of his siblings had already been sold into slavery due to desperate poverty, and he and his one surviving brother buried their parents and remaining siblings in a white cloth, then joined a Buddhist monastery to survive. There he managed to become literate, but in a few short years even the monastery couldn't sustain them, so they commanded him to go out and beg for a living. So for three years he lived with nothing but a bowl and a shirt, until at the age of 25 his childhood friend came to him with an invitation to join the Red Turban Rebellion.

The boy—whose surname was Zhu—had been told stories by his 99-year-old grandfather of his service in the Song resistance against the Mongols. Eager for glory and a better life, he joined, and impressed his commander sufficiently to marry his adopted daughter². The were five commanders in the Red Turban rebellion, however, and they had fallen to infighting—leading to Zhu's commander being kidnapped. Zhu managed to rescue his father-in-law but became disillusioned with the petty squabbles of the resistance. He left to start his own faction, getting 700 people to join him.

With those 700, he attacked and captured a fortress of 3000, getting 800 of the surrenders to join his cause. He then attacked a Yuan military base and recruited another 20,000—including various advisors who told him that if he kept strict military discipline and never killed civilians, then he was all but guaranteed to win the nation. “Build your walls tall, gather your grains rich, and declare yourself King slowly.” He occupied easily defended areas, putting his resources into boosting the economy, which drew refugees and talent. Once his neighbors were depopulated, he conquered them and repeated the strategy. When the Red Turban factions officially split apart, Zhu went on a full offensive and wiped out the opposition. Taking the name Zhu Yuanzhang, and founding the Ming Dynasty.

Zhu Yuanzhang's reign was what you'd expect from someone of a lower class background. He was very stingy with pay, and he had a 24/7/365 work ethic for both himself and his court. His primary agenda was draining the swamp³, with draconian punishments⁴ for even petty corruption, greatly reducing the power of court eunuchs⁵, and abolishing the position of chancellor entirely because the evil chancellor meme has stopped being funny at this point. He also established the Jinyiwei—his personal guard and commissars prior to his coronation, and extrajudicial not-so-secret police afterwards. When his beloved wife died, he became significantly more ruthless, with an estimated 50,000 flayings of ministers⁶ the secret police accused of corruption or even entire villages accused of sedition. When he died, he ordered his entire harem to be killed and buried with him—something China hadn't seen since Qin Shihuang started the use of terracotta figures instead.

Yet despite that, his greatest flaw is considered to be treating his family⁷ like an ordinary person would, and not with the sociopathic calculations required of an Emperor. He made all 25 of his sons princes, with half of them having their own army. He insisted that strict primogenitor inheritance would stop any conflict from arising, as the princes would have no legitimate claim. All members of the extended royal family—side branch or not—received a stipend from the Imperial Treasury like a trust fund. These actions met with immense resistance from his ministers who protested this would plunge the country into a War of 25 Princes, and he executed them in mass until he stacked his court with people who knew when to shut the fuck up. This plan fell apart when his primogenitor—Zhu Biao—died, and then his primogenitor grandson died as well. This forced the Emperor to name Zhu Biao's side branch son—Zhu Yunwen—as heir.

Zhu Yuanzhang started with nothing but a bowl—not even a name—and in just 16 years he claimed the world. Other nations talk quite a bit about class mobility, but none of them have ever acknowledged a former beggar as their head of state. Much less the sovereign of a superpower. Yet Yuanzhang is also notable in China for being the only Emperor to have suffered all of the Three Great Tragedies of Chinese Society⁸. He lost his parents when he was young, he lost his wife in middle age, and he lost his son in old age.

Zhu Yunwen took the throne with a weak claim, and found himself surrounded by literal dozens of highly competent uncles with their own armies and land. Whether paranoid or prudent, he and his secret police made every excuse to exile, demote, and suicide them while keeping their own children hostage in the capital. The Prince with the strongest claim to the throne was Zhu Di⁹, fourth main branch son of Yuanzhang¹⁰ and an accomplished general who repelled Mongol invasions every year. When the purges began, Zhu Di feigned madness¹¹ to escape persecution. Yungwen wasn't buying it, and after a failed assassination attempt, Zhu Di pulled a coup and took the throne.

But Zhu Di just wanted to grill (Mongols) for fuck's sake! He didn't even want to be Emperor! So in 1402AD he moved the capital north to Beijing (where it has remained to this day), built a new Forbidden City¹², and left his son as regent so he could return to the northern front. Zhu Di's greatest contribution as Emperor was restoring Chinese pride and honor for their military after centuries of distrust—which was a tremendous accomplishment indeed! He's a very beloved Emperor in history for this reason.

It helps that his son was actually an excellent ruler as well! Though he was obese, and only survived his father by a year. Thankfully, his son was also an excellent ruler. China had more or less gotten the Tang/Song meritocracy functioning once more, and the abundant prosperity that came with it¹³. But the shadow of conservatism remained. Ming was hesitant to experiment with new social policies, pursued isolationist foreign policy, and while I haven't found a specific taboo against technology, the attitude of “move fast and break things” would have been received poorly. Scholars were almost universally public servants, and neoconfucian dogma believed there to be a thin blurry line between merchants and swindlers—so there wasn't great incentive to profit from entrepreneurship.¹⁴

Whereas Tang and Song Dynasty National Exams were very practical and policy-based, Ming Dynasty is also the start of the National Exams being much more about literary interpretation and empty philosophy. The Exams stopped rewarding creativity and problem solving, but instead had set answers to set questions, and it became a competition of memorisation instead.

Despite that, Ming was the height of Chinese commerce, estimated to be responsible for 2/3rds of global manufacturing. They led the world in production of ships, steel, silk, cotton, and porcelain. Roughly 20% of the world's ships were Chinese. Iron production was 2.5 times that of Song¹⁵, and military blacksmiths could work in seasonal shifts rather than full time. Cotton replaced linen as the everyday fabric of China. Full color dye printing was developed. Ming benefited from the Colombian exchange, integrating potatoes, pumpkins, and corn—not to mention New World gold and silver¹⁶. Agriculturalists discovered you could add fish to rice paddies, which fed on mosquito eggs—reducing plagues while also giving you a fish yield. The most notable advance in medicine came from Li Shizhen, and absolute mad lad who decided to test the effects of various pharmacological substances by taking them himself and writing about his experiences¹⁷—including several poisons!

Ming had the most extensive social safety net in the world for its time as well. The Government paid for the care of any old people without family, provided bankruptcy subsidies for small businesses, and those who became disabled in the workplace were given land and money—which China claims is the world's earliest unemployment benefit and bankruptcy protection. Ming kept Song's policy of government leased oxen, but also added 3 months living expenses and a set of kitchenware and tools as a subsidy to new farmers, as well as government backed interest free loans up to 50k.

Unfortunately, Ming would also lead the world—perhaps all of world history—in the oppression of women. Indeed, modern Saudi Arabia by comparison seems entirely progressive and liberal. Following what began in Southern Song, Ming's obsession with chastity increased—leaving widows and divorcees as nearly unmarriageable¹⁸. Concubines could no longer become wives. The Ming ideal of a noble woman was that after the age of 7 she never left her bedroom her entire life, and never encountered any man besides her husband—not even her father. Female servants would bring her food, bathing supplies, books and stationary, and on her wedding day she'd be blindfolded, veiled, and carried by litter to her new room in her husband's abode—presumably the room in which she would die. Nonetheless, foot-binding wouldn't become a form of maiming until Qing.

None of this was prescribed by law. It was done “voluntarily” by women to their daughters, competing with each other for marriage into an upper class household. Peasant women could still work in fields and own businesses, but in doing so they forfeited any opportunity to marry up. Likewise the law did not forbid widows to marry¹⁹ (though divorce was uncommon even in prior dynasties compared to modern times), but their options were bleak. Women were barred from power and office—military and civil—by custom, more than law.

The Chinese Navy controlled the entire North Pacific, and kingdoms were established in Indonesia and the Phillipines with the support of Ming. European missionaries once claimed that if the Emperor lined his ships bow to stern, they would reach from China to Singapore. Portugal and Holland couldn't extend their colonization to the south Pacific until the Chinese fleet became preoccupied with Japanese pirates, and even then the Dutch continued to pay annual tribute to Ming for the privilege.

Most notable of Ming Navy accomplishments was the seven expeditionary voyages of Zheng He²⁰, a eunuch admiral who in 1405AD was given a fleet of 317 ships, including the largest ships in the world until the 20th century²¹. The 28,000 crew included sailors, marines, and a full diplomatic delegation, and the purpose of the voyage was basically to “shock and awe” the rest of the world, collect tribute from them, and explore the known world. They pretty much knew what to expect in Southeast Asia already, and accomplished their mission in the Kingdoms of South Asia. They got to Mecca and were somewhat underwhelmed. They got to East Africa and it was even worse. Rather than continue, they asked the merchants and traders of the Ottoman world what lay beyond—and their account of both Europe and West Africa as impoverished unsanitary warlords did not impress. At the end of the voyages, Ming basically concluded “there is nothing in the world worth exploring—China is in fact the pinnacle of civilization”—which only reinforced their isolationist stagnation. Zheng He's mighty fleet was dismantled²², and China didn't bother exploring the world after that.

There was no golden age of Ming. Rather, true to the promise of conservatism, the entire dynasty from start to finish maintained the same first class standard of living right up until its fall. It had its problems—and it pretty consistently solved them. It did, however, have a candidate for the worst Emperor in the entirety of Chinese history. This should be mind-blowing to you after the shit Zhao Ji pulled in Song Dynasty.

Zhu Di's son and grandson oversaw prosperous reigns. Unfortunately he inspired his great grandson Zhu Qizhen to delusions of grandeur. The Mongols were now back in their ancestral lands and reduced to a tributary state of the Ming. But Ming, as a custom, gave gifts to foreign delegations. The Mongols figured out if they brought thousands of people on their tribute journey, they could actually get more silver in gifts than they were paying in tribute to the Ming. Qizhen's eunuch Wang Zhen convinced him this was worth going to war over. The rest of the court unanimously opposed that in favor of softer measures for dealing with this mischief, but the last time an Emperor listened to his ministers telling him not to fight (the Jurchens) was... Zhao Ji. No way was he going to make that mistake. He was going to bring HONOR and GLORY just like his great granddad Zhu Di had done! And he'd lead the army himself!

So this absolute fucking man-child drafted 200,000 untrained militia to march with him, because his professional military was stationed elsewhere and he didn’t want to wait even a single moment. And he forced the entire capital bureaucracy without exception to march with him and witness his GLORY. Not just the defense ministers, but every fucking judge, engineer, and bean counter. He didn't want to wait to actually build a logistics train, so he just marched them all out of Beijing towards the Mongol army's last known position. It didn't take very long for even this dipshit to figure out marching without food kinda sucks. The ministers begged for him to retreat to a nearby fortress, but Wang Zhen wanted to bring this army to his nearby hometown to show off how successful he’d become to the people who bullied him for becoming a eunuch. The Emperor decided loyal brave Wang Zhen deserves GLORY too, and these pussy coward scholars need to man up and learn bravery, so he punished them by making them kneel all day.

Except halfway to the village, Wang Zhen realized he's bringing 200,000 disgruntled armed men who haven't eaten in days to his hometown. They might, you know, eat everything there and leave the town destitute. Then the town wouldn't respect him, they'd just hate him. So he decided to turn around midway. The untrained militia army is now in complete confusion at this point about their destination, objective, or when they're going to eat.

The answer is never. The Mongols ambush this shit show, wipe out the starving untrained militia²³, kill the entirety of the capital bureaucracy, and capture the Emperor.

The Mongols then wrote the Dowager Empress ransom notes²⁴, and repeated the exact same strategy that worked for the Jurchens in Song. They demand the ransom in the form of logistics that they use to press their invasion. When they came upon a Ming fortress, they had the Emperor march up to the gates, command them to stand down and let the invaders in. This stupid fucking coward consistently complied. Within a year, the Mongols had made it all the way to Beijing, where the military refused to comply with the Emperor's command and repelled the Mongols. When the Mongols sued for peace, they gained no territory, and returned the Emperor in exchange for safe return to their homeland.

Emperor Qizhen had made his brother Zhu Qiyu regent in his absence, but he was only permitted to return as Dowager Emperor. He then lived in luxury for 7 years before deposing his brother²⁵, executed every Military officer who participated in the defense of Beijing, rounded up all the women in their family and sent them off as sex slaves to the Mongols, and built temples to Wang Zhen and the Mongols’ ancestors.²⁶

Despite the loss of the entire capital bureaucracy and the capital's best military talent, Qizhen did not break the Dynasty. His successor quietly and competently got the Empire back on track, posthumously honored the military his father had betrayed, and everyone had sane foreign policy for the rest of the Dynasty. Sane does not mean flawless—isolationist conservative stagnation would ultimately prove fatal. But when problems did occur, people took reasonable actions to solve them—and right up until the end, those solutions prevailed.

So what happened in the end? The Turchin cycle happened. The population of the royal family exploded geometrically, and each descendant—including side branches—got to use the treasury as a trust fund. One noble sired 94 children by himself. Towards the end of the dynasty, wealthy elites had once again become estate holding landlords and controlled most of what used to be government land—land which was intended to be earmarked for military logistics, which instead got supplied by further depleting the treasury. Ministers schemed to cut the Emperor out of governance entirely²⁷, wasting his time with pointless paperwork and irrelevant ceremony—and ambitious eunuchs were all too happy to make proclamations on the Emperor's behalf “so as not to bother him with trifling matters”. Of the last eight Emperors of the Ming dynasty, four of them either did not actively rule for decades at a time²⁸, and all but two Emperors in this dynasty died in their early 40's or younger²⁹. Yet there was no single catastrophic decision that sealed their fate—but a slow decay of mistakes that made them vulnerable to something they should have been able to survive.

During Zhu Yijun's reign, three wars erupted simultaneously. The Miao people in Guizhou entered into inter-tribal warfare, starting the Bozhou rebellion. Soon after a general in Ningxia would defect with his army to the Mongols, starting the Pubei rebellion. It was also during this time that Joseon Korea—who gave regular tribute to Ming—requested aid repelling the Japanese invasion³⁰—the Imjin war. It wasn't an established precedent³¹ for China to act as world police, but nonetheless Ming had incentive to get involved to protect its own interests. While the Imjin war is incredibly significant to Korean³² and Japanese history³³, China views the conflict as one of many routine “military policing actions”, to borrow an anachronistic American term. There are dozens of minor conflicts throughout the dynasty I've either skipped or merely alluded to (like everything Zhu Di did), but these wars did put a strain on the treasury now that the Imperial family was taking much more from the treasury than the military.

Ming is considered to have fallen in 1644AD, though a rump regime lasted until 1662AD. What really killed it was the Little Ice Age—and this is part of a broader historical phenomena of the period known as The General Crisis—in which nearly every state on Earth entered into some kind of war. Not that this was part of the contemporary consciousness. Once again the cold led to droughts, led to locusts, led to famines. The granaries ran dry, the treasury depleted, and despite the noble efforts of Zhu Youjian, the state was too dysfunctional to respond effectively. The Manchurians—formerly known as the Jurchens—had to move south or die—and the Ming army moved to intercept them at the border. But that meant the army wasn't in the capital when the people once again decided the Mandate of Heaven had spoken.

It wasn't actually the Manchus who took the capital. It was a rebellion that established itself as the Shun Dynasty, which would last less than a year. Shun beat the Emperor's army to the capital by mere days, and in accordance with the honor Ming lived by, the Emperor refused to surrender, took a sword and killed his own children so that they could not be humiliated when captured. In his suicide note, he cursed himself for having ruined a dynasty, and begged the usurpers to not defile the royal tombs—then hung himself from a tree.

By the Mandate of Heaven—if you stab the Emperor, you become the Emperor. But you better be goddamn sure everyone else hates that Emperor, or you'll find yourself stabbed. As it turns out, not everyone was ready to cast out the Ming—and the Manchus used this to their advantage.

The Manchus had come to the country promising the starving peasantry specific reforms and tax relief. They swore—even as they fought the Ming Army—that they would preserve the Ming Imperial system³⁴. That they only meant to oust the wicked from power. And when the Ming Emperor died, many loyalists were quick to turn against the Shun usurpers, and join the Manchus' side to avenge him. Because of this, the Manchus were able to take Beijing with the Imperial Bureaucracy remarkably intact, and establish the Qing Dynasty.

Yet such was the glory of Ming, that not a day went by in Qing where there was not a popular movement to restore the Ming. Even in the 20th century, when it had long vanished from living memory, love for the Ming lives on.

Back to Yuan Dynasty

Next to Qing Dynasty

1. Literally, his name was just “number eight”, as he had seven older siblings, and he went by “eight-eight” because it sounded more like a name, I guess.

2. His best friend had died in battle, and he promised to watch over his descendants.

3. While this might sound like a good idea after just reading about the absurd corruption of Northern Song’s ministers, Southern Song had changed a lot after the Rape of Jingkang, and Zhu grew up relatively uneducated in the Yuan Dynasty. Most of the corrption was already cleared just by ousting the Mongolian and Semuren caste system.

4. Specifically execution by flaying.

5. They were supposed to be illiterate and barred from holding any office, but these are human beings the Emperor interacts with the most on a daily basis and screen who has an audience with him, so they ended up having a profound influence on each Emperor all the same.

6. Zhu didn’t just kill ministers, though. He re-instituted the National Exams and Imperial Bureaucracy in force after its suppression under Mongol rule. He made public schools mandatory for every province, established a national curriculum, and qualified applicants were allowed to bypass the national exams by continuing their education at an institute of advanced learning in the capital—basically a PhD program to which admittance automatically gave you a position in the bureaucracy upon graduation.

7. Evidently, concubines did not count as family—just surrogates you have an imperial duty to breed with. Wikipedia speculates he ordered the live burials to prevent the harem from encouraging the princes to in-fight in the uneasy succession that followed, but the status and power of women was approaching a historic low, and the practice continued for the next four Emperors (including Zhu Di), before it was eventually banned by Zhu Qizhen. So I find this uncompelling and most likely apologism. More likely, in my opinion, this was done to be absolutely certain nobody could defile the Emperor’s women after he was gone—such was Ming’s obsession with purity.

8. That feel when your society is so puny, it doesn’t even have canonically ranked life tragedies that everyone agrees on. They even have the Four Great Delights of Life: rain after a drought, meeting someone familiar in a foreign land, your wedding night, and getting a top rank in the national exams.

9. Pronounced “Judy”.

10. In brazen fucking audacity that contradicts the political logic of the sitaution, “some sources claim” that Zhu Di was not the son of Queen Ma, but a Korean concubine. Give you one guess which country’s expert claimed that.

11. Legend has it he actually fucked a pig, rolling around in mud and shit.

12. The previous one in Nanjing remained standing until the Japanese burned it down in the Rape of Nanking. The one in Beijing is actually the smallest of its kind, but the layout is roughly the same in all incarnations—made for maximum security as well as maximum feng shui.

13. Chinese historians estimate Ming had 45% of GDP, with about 30% of world population.

14. Although unsatisfying, this is my best guess as to why Ming never achieved industrialisation despite having invented all the requisite technology and having adequate resources, economy, and educated population to have done so. A professor of mine also once suggested that Europe had more cutthroat competitiveness in their society, and that this spurred competition through innovation.

15. Northern Song’s iron production was already 2.5 times greater than the entirety of Europe in 1735.

16. Ben Franklin himself estimated that 1/3rd of the world’s silver went to China in trade for tea and porcelain.

17. To my knowledge, he provides the earliest written account of psilocybin’s hallucinogenic properties. Weirdly, these aren’t illegal in modern China, and people in Yunnan are renowned for being high as balls all the time from eating hallucinogenic mushrooms as cuisine.

18. This is in stark contrast to previous dynasties, where multiple Queens were remarried widows, and high-ranked ministers would fight for the favour of divorcees in the streets. Chastity norms in Abrahamic relgious societies were not the default in pre-Ming Asia. I briefly wondered whether the intorduction of syphilis from the new world prompted this, but it seems to predate that by over a century.

19. In fact, Ming had to give stipends to widows to prevent the family from murdering her to return her estate to her husband’s family. But the Ming didn’t want to admit that had become a problem, so they claimed it was to protect chastity. This led to some provinces misguidedly giving stipends to widows’ families if she committed suicide to honour her husband, which resulted in a lot of widows getting suicided.

20. Zheng He was in Zhu Di’s service since before he became Emperor, and this expedition was one of the only proejcts Zhu Di insisted on as Emperor. Because MING DYNASTY, FUCK YEAH.

21. The ten-masted treasure ships—at 538ft long, 210ft wide, and 4 decks high—are a matter of some dispute even among Chinese historians. Mostly because a wooden ship five times the size of a Spanish Caravel would buckle cresting a wave at high sea. After studying the debate extensively with the full force of my nerdery, I’ve concluded with historians who believe the largest ships were brown-water parade vessels—essentially river barges—but the blue water capability of the immense fleet and the massive amount of personnel and treasure it transported was never in doubt.

22. This was absolutely baffling to me when I learned it in high school, but with the An Lushan rebellion as historical context, actually maybe giving a cool fat guy you trust a super navy isn’t a great idea after all—which was exactly the sentiment of imperial ministers. Besides, the shock and awe mission was accomplsihed, and much smaller fleets were sent out henceforth to collect regular tribute.

23. Wang Zhen was killed by his own men before the battle ended, so as pointless as their sacrifice may have seemed, they fought righteously and bravely.

24. Ming policy was no surrender, no tribute paid, no territory yielded, and no princesses married off to foreign powers. The memory of Song had not at all faded. The ransom was paid as “the Emperor’s travel expenses”, and they euphemistically referred to the capture as “the Emperor’s hunting trip”.

25. Supposedly, Emperor Qi Yu died of illness while under house arrest, and supposedly, his son wasn’t poisoned a year before.

26. To be clear, this was seven years after the invasion, with no prompting from the Mongols, who didn’t pose any significant military threat to begin with. Zhao Ji at least had the excuse of being afraid of his own army and being an enormous coward. Zhu Qizhen was some kind of sincere Quisling, and his actions defy explanation from Chinese historians both modern and contemporary. Our best guess is that he felt deeply humiliated by the military refusing his orders or ransom, which made his previous actions look unnecessary and cowardly. This guy very clearly lacked self-wareness or he wouldn’t have gotten in this mess to begin with.

27. Perhaps they might even have thought themselves noble for doing so, especially after Qizhen had gotten the entire court killed on an egotistical whim. Perhaps maybe one man shouldn’t have autocratic control of a super power?

28. Houzhao loved battle as much as Zhu Di, but his appointed regent was powerless among the ministers and eunuchs at court. Houcong actively went on strike to protest his dysfunctional court, as did Yijun after he’d resolved the three simultaneous wars he oversaw. Youjiao eschewed his studies, was consequently illiterate, and fucked off to be a carpenter, leaving eunuch Wei Zhongxian to run the court, and his wet nurse Madame Ke to manage the palace—which she did by locking the entire harem up to starve to death (both were executed by the subsequent and final Emperor of Ming.)

29. Inexplicably, Ming made the position of Imperial Physician hereditary—requiring no study or degree in medicine at all! Of the two Ming Emperors who survived into their sixties, both used common country doctors instead of traditional Imperial Physicians. Houcong was known for becoming a Doaist and taking immortality elixirs made from the menarche of thousands of 8 to 14 year old girls (he died of mercury poisoning, and yet he still outlived most other Emperors of this Dynasty). Zai Ji died from Ancient Chinese Viagra. Changluo shat himself to death on laxatives. Only Emperors seem to die young, though. Princes who fail to seize the throne live to ripe old ages. Make of that what you will. One Imperial Physician managed to personally oversee the deaths of three Emperors, earning him the internet meme title of “The Dragon Slayer.”

30. Hideyoshi had just unified Japan after centuries of total civil war, and he needed to redirect his bloodthirsty warrior class at a common enemy. They were apocalyptically violent in their occupation of Korea, with a tremendous aptitute for war crimes.

31. The Koreans, worried the Ming would refuse to fight, actually low-balled their estimate of the Japanese invasion as just a thousand samurai. Ming consequently sent a few thousand soldiers in return—complete with field artillery unavailable to Korea or Japan-only to realise there were actually more like 150,000 Japanese soldiers and that the King of Korea was “agriculturally bankrupt” and could not provide logistics for the Ming. Wearily, the General had to request an order of magnitude more reinforcements, and then proceeded to enact a very one-sided victory.

32. If you know anything about Admiral Yi Sun-sin, Ming did in fact speak highly of him—and poorly of the government that abused his talents. If you don’t know anything about Admiral Yi Sun-sin, go Google him right now. He is a fucking legend for a reason.

33. It’s also clear western accounts are heavily biased by this. Wikipedia makes absurd claims like how the Ming took “horrendous losses” at the siege of Pyongyang, when their own numbers agree with 800 Ming casualties to 12,700 Japanese casualties. Or that the war “challenged Ming’s status as the supreme power in East Asia”, even though Japan never dared mount another invasion for the next 300 years, even as Ming collapsed into the much weaker Qing Dynasty.

34. Spoiler: they lied.