The Price of Collapse The Little Ice Age and the Fall of Ming China

This downturn precipitated the collapse of the Ming Great State (1368–1644), to give the Zhu family’s dynasty its formal title. The Ming had survived with reasonable stability and durability for close to three centuries of the Little Ice Age.2

I shall largely set aside the political events, factional feuds, and armed incursions across borders that usually dominate the narrative of Ming history to focus instead on data so ordinary that we take them for granted, prices.

1588–89, flood gave way to drought the following year. The drought of 1641 was

locusts blanketed the fields and ate everything that sprouted.

Then an epidemic broke out, likely the plague, passing through the population and infecting 50–60 percent of households. A wave of suicide—Chen calls it “going to a tree”—followed.

We conceptualize the world as a physical ecosystem that is vulnerable to the effects of changing conditions, they as a metaphysical board game in which Heaven directs the action.

we and they inhabit a global ecosystem that was and is prone to disturbance, whether because human folly blocks Heaven’s blessing or human-generated carbon and aerosols block the sun’s energy.

The people of the Ming understood the logic of letting supply and demand determine fair prices, though they would have thought of this mechanism more in terms of the exercise of personal virtue than the working of abstract justice. Granting agency to the market as an autonomous generator of justice would not have been an argument that Ming observers were quite willing to make.

when prices became unfair, the government should intervene to ping them, to “level” them to the amounts that people expected and could afford to pay. This is what the Ming state did, through several different mechanisms.

In a crisis, the Ming state could intervene in ways more aggressive than data collection.21 Sometimes it mandated the prices at which commodities should be sold.

the state intervened to influence them by releasing government grain stocks onto the market at prices

Officials could also intervene by imposing blockades to prevent dealers from taking grain out of distressed economies to

the government needed to make purchases, and the founding emperor was adamant that his officials pay for these purchases at market rates so as not to drive dealers into bankruptcy or interfere with the prices ordinary people paid.

Chen Qide relates In his writings, the schoolmaster has not a word to say about the world beyond China, other than to count being born inside China as one of the ten fortunate things of his life.

Chen Qide was one of the many people of the Ming who were not conscious of being affected by the foreign trade that was enmeshing some Chinese into trade networks

Insulating the people from foreign trade was politically intended, for the Ming state monopolized the right to license foreign contact and foreign trade. It did so through what is known as the tribute system,

From the sixteenth century, silver was the principal medium of exchange, not just in China but around the world.

In 1447, for example, the court made the sale of blue-and-white porcelains to foreign envoys a capital crime for Chinese in order that the court keep for itself the privilege of distributing highly prized porcelains (céramique chinoise) to foreigners as

political gifts.17

sale: “The commodities circulating in south China, which come from foreigners from Malacca, Siam, and Java, are nothing but pepper, sappanwood, elephant
tusks, tortoise shell, and such like,” not “daily necessities such as cloth, silks, vegetables, and grain.” This Confucian-tinged ((Confucianisme)) complaint about nonnecessities was a convenient way of disguising the real anxiety at work here: not the consumption habits of Chinese but the security threat posed by the prospect of “thousands of evil persons building huge ships, privately purchasing arms, sailing unhindered on the ocean, illicitly linking up with foreigners, and inflicting great harm on the region.”24

, in 1525, Emperor Jiajing banned any ship equipped with more than one mast from going to sea. The sea remained closed down to the end of his reign in 1567.

This struggle between those who wanted to restrict trade in order to control it and those who wanted to allow trade in order to tax its benefits and spread the wealth intensified in the sixteenth century.

all international trade during the late Ming had to be conducted offshore: Nagasaki and Hirado on Kyushu, Manila on Luzon, Patani and Malacca on the Malaysian Peninsula, and Bantam and Jakarta (which the Dutch called Batavia) on Java, to name only a few of the more active trade entrepôts around the East and South China Seas. The one exception to this pattern ofoffshore trading was Macau, the small peninsula at the mouth of the Pearl River where Portuguese were permitted to come ashore in 1557 for the purpose of refitting and resupplying their ships. There they built a small port, developed relationships with local suppliers, and constructed one of the key nodes in the emerging global economy.

Porcelain ((céramique chinoise)) had been a major Chinese export for centuries, to the extent that it carries the very name of “china” in many languages (sīnī, in the case of Arabic).

tightly that you could toss one of these bundles on the ground and nothing would break.

The people of the Ming believed, as the emperor did, that the world was in good order when the price of grain remained stable and fair.

famine was a manifestation of Heaven’s displeasure rather than the effect of our abstraction of climate change. Since only the emperor had the authority to communicate with Heaven and interpret its actions, official historiography was tasked with recording the disturbances that Heaven visited upon the emperor and his people so as to maintain a record of what Heaven did as evidence of the human failings that provoked its interventions.

Heaven is not alone in the Confucian ((Confucianisme)) cosmology as the bringer of catastrophe. Earth does the same, on Heaven’s cue. It produces seismic quakes, unleashes floods, and spawns plagues of insects. Humans do the rest by murdering parents, assassinating rulers, and waging wars. All are equally signs and agents of a disturbed cosmic order that invites a new regime to take over.

Based on the evidence of tree-ring data, astronomer John Eddy proposed in 1976 that a decline in solar activity drove the earth into a colder phase between 1450 and 1550. He named this phase the Spörer Minimum in honor of Gustav Spörer, a nineteenth-century astronomer who studied sunspots.

These colder temperatures may have been exacerbated in the 1450s by extensive volcanic eruptions in the southwestern zone of the Pacific Ocean, from New Zealand to the Bismarck Archipelago and Java up through Luzon and Japan.48 The local effect of blocked solar radiation was so intense that, in the summer of 1454, canals on the Yangzi delta were choked with ice.

Precipitation through the Ming displays a bit less volatility than temperature. Overall, however, rainfall tended to be low. Drought dominates the record,

, I have identified six multiple-year periods during the Ming when severe temperature or precipitation abnormalities or both coincided with documentary reports of environmental crisis, famine, and social distress.

Beijing fell to peasant rebels in April 1644, then to an invading Manchu army. Nanjing held out for another year, but eventually it too had to surrender to the Qing armies that rolled south and consolidated the Manchu military occupation of China.

When an economy depends on solar radiation as its source of energy, nature—writ as large as you like—must be recognized as the factor determining the viability of society or state.