I’ve seen the Ming Dynasty held up as something of a Golden Age of Chinese technology and culture. Although it had hiccups, and ultimately collapsed to the Manchu invaders when it ran out of silver to pay its soldiers (a classic mistake), it still included some great feats and impressive economic growth. If you’ve heard of the voyage of Zheng He, which took hundreds of ships to India and Africa and brought back giraffes and treasure of all types, that’s from the Ming Dynasty.

But let’s look at Zheng He a bit more closely. His voyage was an incredible feat, to be sure, and the treasure he brought back was real. But it wasn’t really a “trade mission” like we might think. The Emperor at the time, Yongle (famous from Civ VI by the way), was a usurper who had killed his own nephew to take the throne. As any usurper, he had plenty of enemies at court. And as any kin-slayer, he had people undermining his authority by calling him evil. He also had the problem that the body of his nephew was never actually found after Yongle destroyed his nephew’s palace, so there were rumors that the nephew had escaped as a Buddhist monk and would one day return as a righteous Emperor to rid China of Yongle’s evildoing.

So Yongle was “well hated” and he wondered if his nephew was still out there. The voyage of Zheng He was intended to kill both these birds with one trade fleet.

First, Confucious orthodoxy taught that the Emperor’s moral righteousness radiated outward into the whole world. A righteous Chinese Emperor was venerated by foreigners just as he was obeyed in China, and great heavenly beasts only appeared on earth under the rule of a righteous Emperor. Zheng He’s fleet therefore bribed hundreds of foreign dignitaries to come to China and kowtow to Yongle, acknowledging him as the true son of Heaven and silencing any critics who claimed he was illegitimate. Bringing back giraffes (animals unknown in China) was also portrayed as great heavenly beasts showing up on earth. They can only do so if Yongle is righteous, of course.

So Zheng He’s fleet was not an economic nor military expedition, it was a political one. It legitimized the ruling Chinese Emperor, and once his successors took power and no longer needed that legitimizing, Zheng He’s fleet and ship plans were discarded as unnecessary and expensive.

A comparison is worthwhile here, a comparison with the Portuguese and the Golden Age of Sail. When Vasco de Gama went to India in 1498, he traded European goods for so much Indian spices, that his voyage made a 600% profit on the trip. 600% profit in just 10 months, try finding a deal like that *anywhere* today. The profits were so great that future expeditions were obvious, no one was going to pass up a money-making opportunity like that.

So Zheng He’s fleet was a money *losing* operation that was discarded as soon as politics no longer required it. Vasco de Gama’s fleet was a money *making* operation that spurred a huge virtuous cycle of shipbuilding and trading. European nations rushed to build bigger and better ships and find newer and faster ways to reach India, spurring on technological and engineering progress to make it happen. Zheng He’s fleet had no such positive externalities, there was no reason to keep increasing technology or ship engineering because the point of the fleet wasn’t to make money in the first place, it was to bring back foreigners and their goods to kowtow and gift to the Emperor.

So which expedition was actually part of a “Golden Age”? The one-off trip that didn’t, indeed *couldn’t* spur any future voyages because it cost so much, or the extremely profitable one that created a whole industry?

Another part of the early Ming “Golden Age” is their supposedly thrifty defense policy. The first Emperor of the Ming had given families some prime farmland for free, all they had to do was agree that their family and their descendants would always be bound to sending at least one man to fight for the Emperor in times of war. Yes, this is the same system you can see in Disney’s “Mulan.”

But in the reality of the Ming Dynasty, this system almost immediately broke down. First, the soldiers were supposed to *arrive to the Emperor already trained*, they didn’t get a Disney training montage. They were supposed to spend some parts of the year growing and harvesting, but some parts of the year were set aside for training. Most didn’t do this as they’d prefer to spend that time on more lucrative tasks that benefited themselves, like trades and crafts. So instead of a hereditary “army,” the Ming ended up with a hereditary “militia.”

Second, even getting these men to obey the Emperor’s summons turned into a nightmare. Local officials or corrupt officers were systematically steal, take, or buy the soldiers’ hereditary land, leaving them destitute or landless. The families would then migrate to cities or other areas looking for work. So when the Emperor’s men came calling, instead of farmer-soldiers they found lords and serfs. They had to scour the country for these families to drag their men into the army, and again these men were entirely untrained.

So again, was this the army of a “Golden Age?” It doesn’t seem so. Yongle himself is famed for leading 4 expeditions to “punish” the Mongol nomads north of the Great Wall, but all he seems to have done is marched around causing these nomads to migrate away. Then when his armies went south again, the nomads returned to where they’d been. He never managed to inflict any kind of defeat on them which could prevent them from raiding or pillaging nearby Chinese villages.

Not only that, but Yongle’s grandson shows this system at its absolute worst. That Emperor, like Yongle, summoned his hereditary army to fight the Mongols. Only this time, the Mongols fought back instead of fleeing. The Emperor and his entourage were camped without water and surrounded by Mongols blocking access to the only river. After days of thirst, the Mongol leader feigned a ceasefire to allow the Chinese troops some water, but as soon as the desperate soldiers ran to the river to drink, the Mongols attacked, killing the entire army and capturing the Emperor himself.

Not much of a “Golden Age,” is it?

Golden Ages always seem to exist in the past, never the present. We can certainly talk about the economics of the Ming Dynasty, how the population grew rapidly during the mostly-peaceful times. How new land was drained for farms, and how new canals were built or rebuilt. But the idea of a technology advanced and militarily overwhelming state, that doesn’t seem to be the reality. What we see is a large state like any other, with its own nuances, but not really an aberration in the grand scheme of things.

Some Chinese nationalists write alt-history fanfics about how advanced China would have been if the Golden Age of the Ming hadn’t been subjugated by the “barbaric” Manchu people of the Qing Dynasty. But I don’t see much evidence that things would have been that different. The Ming Dynasty was hardly a “Golden Age” in my eyes.