Organizer and Chair: Sarah Schneewind, University of California, San Diego

Discussant: John W. Dardess, University of Kansas

Asian and Western writers have long presented the Ming founder as tremendously powerful. Historians often use Ming Taizu, Zhu Yuanzhang (r. 1368-1398), to explain developments in politics, economics, society and culture. Since many of Taizu’s policies quickly failed, what accounts for this historical image?  This panel hypothesizes that political actors deploying the Ming founder rhetorically for many purposes synergistically reinforced his iconic status.

As a commoner of uncertain background who overthrew the Mongols to found an explicitly Chinese but functionally multi-ethnic order, in later eras Taizu could be read and reinvented ethnically, historically or universally. Benite reveals how Chinese Muslims built an identity by seeing Taizu as a crypto-Muslim. Kye explains how the historical Ming-Choson relationship encouraged the Korean king and courtiers to invoke Taizu in debates over legitimacy, even after submitting to the Qing. The early Qing rulers, by contrast, understood the founder of the dynasty they had defeated in universalist terms; Elliott’s sources paint Ming Taizu as a positive exemplar of how Heaven empowers the righteous transmitter of the Way.  Nedostup shows how the modernizing Kuomintang, having rejected the Manchus and the whole traditional order, reclaimed Taizu as a Han nationalist hero.

Dardess is first reader for a larger project on the development and deployment of the image of Ming Taizu, organized by Schneewind, which includes these papers. We hope the audience will suggest new theoretical approaches and comparisons with other historical figures who play similar textual-political roles.

Zvi Ben Dor Benite, New York University

In recent years, Chinese historiography has undergone a radical ‘opening up’ in all senses of the term. While for much of the past century Chinese historians took Chinese claims about the uniformity of Chinese culture at face value, scholars are now probing the multicultural realities that lie behind ‘Han’ Chinese cultural chauvinism. On the face of it, the Ming period is much more immune to such challenges than the Qing. One fascinating, little-documented feature of this history is the longstanding Muslim claim that the great Ming founder was secretly a Muslim.

Chinese Muslim traditions cast Ming Taizu as an almost gnostic figure, whose true nature could only be properly understood by those like him – by other Muslims. The claim cast Ming Taizu as a secret laborer for Islam, as Chinese Muslims themselves secretly labored for the imperium. This interpretation gave Chinese Muslims a metaphoric means of understanding themselves as central, if hidden, members of Chinese society and culture.

This paper projects Chinese Muslim visions of Ming Taizu upon the broader historical backdrop of the late imperial period, unearthing the reasons that Ming Taizu came to be of such vital importance to Chinese Muslim tradition. Drawing on hitherto unknown source materials, the paper shows how Chinese Muslims of the Ming and Qing, like other ‘aliens’ of the period, were extraordinarily aware of their time as a multicultural one, and were consequently able to understand themselves as central to its culture, and even make political demands on that basis.

Seung B. Kye, University of Washington

This paper provides the historical background of the conservative Korean attitude toward the outer world in the late nineteenth century within the context of the politico-intellectual trend after the Manchu compromise in 1637. With the Ming entry into the Imjin War (1592-98), also known as the Hideyoshi invasions of Korea, Ming China was honored in Korea as the suzerain-father who gave Chosŏn a second life. Consequently, the Ming became the object for Chosŏn filial piety and loyalty. After the surrender to the Manchus in 1637, however, the Korean leadership faced an ideological crisis because the Manchu compromise signified that the king and court officials themselves violated the two primary values, loyalty and filial piety, on which the ruling mechanism of the dynasty had been based.

The establishment and enlargement of the Altar of Great Gratitude (Taebodan) was designed to offset the ‘violation' and demonstrate visibly Chosŏn's fulfillment of its righteous obligations to the fallen Ming regardless of the circumstances. The 'post-Ming' Korean kings performed sacrifices for three Ming emperors, with emphasis on Ming Taizu, on the anniversaries of their deaths every year. These sacrifices were regularly performed even after Chosŏn opened up its ports to Western powers in the early 1880's, and continued until Seoul was occupied by the Japanese in the early phase of the Sino-Japanese War in 1894. This suggests that the majority of the Korean elites still lived spiritually under the imaginary Ming order, and thereby could not respond to the new order effectively.

Mark C. Elliott, Harvard University

In April 1751, on the first of his famed Southern Tours, the Qianlong emperor (r. 1736-1795) stopped in the former Ming capital of Nanjing. He led sacrifices at the tomb of Ming Taizu, explaining that his grandfather, the Kangxi emperor, had visited several times out of respect, a respect Qianlong shared. Apparently satisfied that the mausoleum was well maintained ("It has been more than one hundred years since Our dynasty took up the Mandate, and still the tomb and mausoleum of the vanquished state remain as they were, their pines and catalpas healthy and strong"), Qianlong ordered that the site remain protected.

At first glance, it seems strange that the 18^th century Qing rulers should have troubled to honor the spirit of the founder of the regime their ancestors had fought so long against and had supplanted in 1644. Why such respect for Ming Taizu? What kind of figure was he? This paper seeks to answer these questions by exploring Manchu attitudes toward Taizu in the early Qing. Drawing on such sources as the mid-17th-c. translation into Manchu of Taizu’s "Essential Instructions," I show that, for the Manchus, Taizu was a positive exemplar. His association with the Ming mattered less than his personal accomplishments, which demonstrated what a single individual could do if Heaven favored his righteous cause. Such a lesson made him a hero to those whose claim to rule depended on just such an interpretation of the historical logic behind the legitimate transmission of the dao.

Rebecca Nedostup, Boston College

On Qingming day 1936, a company of several hundred Nationalist officials proceeded to the Purple Hills east of Nanjing. There they paid obeisance to Zhu Yuanzhang in an austere ceremony designed for their new inflection of Qingming, ‘National Tomb-Sweeping Day.’ Citing the Ming founder’s ability to ‘seize upon the awesome spirit of the nation,’ KMT conservatives placed him in a line of racialized Han heroes stretching back to the mythical Huangdi. Faced with mounting Japanese threats and domestic dissatisfaction, leaders like Lin Sen and Chiang Kai-shek sought to link themselves in an eternal bloodline to a figure they had thus far largely ignored.

Yet they did so while reminding revolutionary hearts to remain steadfastly attached to a second tomb, to the east of and higher than the Ming site: that of the KMT’s own founding hero, Sun Yat-sen. Sun himself had famously conducted a similar ceremony to Zhu Yuanzhang in 1912, and Nationalist treatment of the Ming emperor thereafter remained intertwined with the man they called the father of their nation. Although the requisites of modernization initially dictated that the two sit in eternal opposition as the imperial and the republican, the despotic and the democratic, the national crisis of the mid-1930s challenged the balance between revolutionary and rehabilitated heroes.