3.5: Ming and Qing Chinese Society and Culture

Life in Ming and Qing China

Among historians, a belief about a Chinese insular nature became common prior to the fifteenth century.  The Chinese themselves didn’t necessarily do much to dissuade that, given their lack of large-scale interaction with European traders.  However, this Eurocentric perspective discounts their trade and exchange within the Indian Ocean Trading network and the Silk Road, particularly at the beginning of the Ming dynasty with the creation of the Chinese Treasure Fleet under Zheng He and the Emperor Yongle. The Chinese regulated their interactions with those from other regions, though, as the Portuguese brought armed trading into the network after making their way along the African coast and colonizing port towns on both the eastern and western sides of the African continent while other European countries followed suit.  This, combined with Christian missionaries attempting conversion throughout the Southeast and Eastern Asian regions, left the Chinese feeling uneasy with European traders, except for the Dutch, who were far more secular in their business dealings during this period. Later, due to bad trade, the Chinese and the Dutch would go to war, but this pertained to issues surrounding business practices between the two regions. 

The previous chapter discussed China’s growth in terms of political/administrative, economic, and military events, issues, and concepts.  However, social, cultural, and religious issues and concepts also had an effect on China’s development, particularly those involving the marginalized populations that occupied the same regions.  While China was busy developing the world’s largest bureaucracy for their government structures, they had help in the form of women, slaves, and eunuchs who also lived and worked during the Ming and Qing dynasties of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. During the Ming and Qing dynasties the use of glazed tiles became popular for the rooftop of palaces and temples. Figure 3.5.1 shows how tiles were placed next to each other: the tiles overlapped each other by 40 to 70 percent. Even if a crack developed in one of the tiles, the roof did not leak! 

Figure 3.5.1: "Rooftop tiles of a house dating to the Ming and Qing Dynasty," 猫猫的日记本, is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Eunuchs, Slaves, and the Roles of Women

During the Ming dynasty, marriage laws changed significantly as the cult of the “virtuous widow” grew.  Women were discouraged from remarrying if their husband died starting in the Yuan Dynasty, and this concept grew during the Ming dynasty, elevating widowed women to a sort of cultural hero during this period. This also extended into the growing popularity of chastity groups, who would consider their purity a high honor by their families and gained a cult-like status.  Women who died resisting rape, or who ended their lives after being “dishonored,” were given high status and almost worshipped by these groups as martyrs.  The opposite of these revered women was the “licentious” woman, made popular through various story collections and novels.  They appeared as a “temptress” in these writings, about as titillating as modern romance novels, and any woman who had any sort of skills, or “talent,” as one Chinese author noted, was seen as not virtuous. This practice would continue well into the Qing dynasty, becoming an officially state-sanctioned promotion, with the “ideal” woman being widowed at 30 and remaining a widow for at least 20 years. However, women would only be referred to as the “wife of” someone, unable to own property, and destined to serve her father, then her husband, and be venerated by her sons.  Like the Japanese society, ancestor worship required this veneration and resulted in an extended household within the mother’s home, her sons bringing their wives back to the family homestead to live there.  

In the early Qing dynasty, the idea of women working outside of the home was severely curtailed by the practice of foot-binding, which was the practice of gradually folding the smaller toes of the foot with successively tighter binding until they were tucked permanently under the foot on top of the ball of the foot, forming what was known as a “lotus” look to the foot, with only the big and second toes remaining straight and unfolded.  This practice supposedly gained popularity after the wife of one of the emperors was shown to have high arches and tiny feet, causing her to walk slowly in a sort of toddling walk.  Her larger-footed waiting women attempted to mimic this walk to appear more graceful but could only do so if their feet were restricted.  It became a sign of wealth to have one’s feet bound; since a woman could not be expected to stand or walk for long periods of time with bound feet, poor women who had to work in the field avoided this practice, since women who did this would need to be served and could focus only on indoor “women’s work,” such as sewing or weaving. 

Eunuchs have existed in Chinese civilizations since the second century CE. The process of creating a eunuch involved castration, similar to the eunuchs of the gunpowder empires, although the Chinese performed full emasculation.  This was usually only performed on the slaves, men taken from surrounding conquered territories, such as Korea or Tibet, and given as gifts to high-ranking officials.  The Ming dynasty of the fifteenth century saw a number of these eunuch slaves reaching the highest-ranking households, holding significant positions within the domestic bureaucracy of the nobility and emperor.  The eunuch population throughout the dynasty time period peaked at 100,000 and included thousands who served in the military as well as several hundred working within the imperial palace, including for Empress Wang.  The empress had a young eunuch write an account of his childhood and transition into a eunuch, even though the empress tried to prevent it.  As the dynasty continued, eunuchs gained more education, and with that came more opportunities, such as acting as a secretary to a high-ranking official. 

The practice of using eunuchs started to decline during the Qing dynasty, as the Imperial Household Department slowly started replacing them, being in charge of their employment.  Although the Qing (translated to “Pure”) Dynasty utilized younger Han from rural regions in northern Shandong during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it wasn’t until the early twentieth century that Chinese men voluntarily chose to become eunuchs in the face of debilitating poverty as a way to make a living.  But those who were forced to become eunuchs prior to the twentieth century faced extreme abuse by the emperor, especially when he was in a bad mood.  This certainly appeared to be an about-face from the opportunities offered to eunuchs under the Ming dynasty, as well as a much different treatment than the eunuch-slaves of the Ottoman and Safavid empires.