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In the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries, despite

occasional upheavals, the countries of East Asia ranked among the world’s most prosperous and stable. China and Japan were especially powerful. Initially, these Asian countries welcomed the Westerners from Europe. However, despite the increased trade, they despised the efforts of the Jesuits and other foreigners in disrupting their traditional beliefs. Nonetheless, even as the East Asian countries sought to maintain stability by limiting foreign influence, they were ultimately affected by connections with other cultures.

The Unification of Japan

In theory, Japan’s ruler was its emperor, a hereditary monarch revered as a god, who reigned in Kyoto, the capital. Beginning in 1192, however, Japan was actually run by a shogun, commander of its samurai armies, who exercised power in the emperor’s name. In the late 1200s, the Japanese repulsed several Mongol invasions. As a result, many Japanese samurai, members of the warrior class, expected land grants as reward, following the usual custom. But no land had been conquered, so there was none to distribute. Furthermore, as samurai divided their family estates among various heirs, individual landholdings grew smaller, leaving many warriors impoverished and embittered. As a result, resentful samurai supported various daimyo (DĪM-yō), hereditary regional warlords who dominated parts of Japan. By the 1400s, Japan was ripe for a rebellion.

By this time, the government in Kyoto had little real power, as regional daimyo exploited the chaos to increase their power. From 1467 through 1477, a civil war destroyed all sense of central control, initiating an era of regional warfare called the Age of Warring States (1467-

1568). During a century of almost constant conflict, many Japanese daimyo acted as independent rulers, battling each other with their own armies and vassals. Some daimyo also functioned as sea lords, forming pirate companies to raid the Chinese coast.

In the 1540s, while wars still raged among the daimyo, a new source of instability came to Japan. In the south appeared strange foreigners, equipped with deadly weapons that Japanese called "lightning sticks." Although the Chinese had developed gunpowder weapons centuries earlier, Japan's warriors were not directly introduced to firearms until 1543, when Portuguese sailors arrived by sea armed with muskets. Before long, Portuguese and Spanish merchants were trading regularly with various daimyo, bringing guns and other items to exchange for Japanese goods.

A different sort of threat appeared in 1549 with the arrival of Christian missionaries, led by Francis Xavier (ZĀ-vē-ur), the first of many European Jesuits who came to Asia to spread their Catholic religion. Although at first coolly received, the Jesuits won favor by adapting to Japanese ways. Soon several daimyo, hoping perhaps to gain firearms and fortune from trade with the Europeans, adopted Christianity and imposed it on their people. In the ensuing decades, as Western missionaries came to compete with Jesuits for converts, several hundred thousand Japanese became Christians. The new faith was professedly peaceful, but some in Japan saw its growing strength as a threat to their Shinto and Buddhist traditions, and its loyalty to a distant pope as a menace to their autonomy.

Some Japanese warlords, meanwhile, equipped their armies with cannons and muskets, hoping to conquer their rivals and unify Japan. Oda

Nobunaga (Ō-dah nō-boo-NAH-gah) (~534-1582), son of a minor daimyo, set out in the 1560s to unite Japan under his control. He built a powerful army, equipped it with Western firearms, placed it under command of a military genius named Hideyoshi, and used it to conquer rival

daimyo in central Japan. Then Oda moved on Kyoto, promising not to pillage the city as previous warriors had done, and captured the capital in 1568.

Next Oda's forces moved westward, using the new weapons to defeat other daimyo. In 1573 he deposed the last reigning shogun, ending for a time the position of shogun. By 1582, Oda Nobunaga controlled 32 of Japan's 68 provinces and was well on the way to uniting all Japan. That year, however, he was ambushed by one of his generals and committed suicide to avoid being captured. Someone else would have to finish unifying Japan.

The person best suited to do so was the man who commanded Oda's armies. Hideyoshi (1536-1598), son of a peasant soldier, was a small man with no class status, no family name, no wealth, and little education, but with exceptional military skills that had made him Oda's leading general. In the eight years following Oda's death in 1582, Hideyoshi managed to defeat or gain allegiance from all remaining warlords, completing the country's unification. The emperor awarded him the title of chief minister and gave him a family name, Toyotomi.

Japan’s Expansion Under Hideyoshi

Hideyoshi took steps to consolidate control. He conducted a national survey to gather data on the size and yield of all cultivated lands, so as to improve the collection of taxes. He let defeated daimyo keep substantial lands, turning former foes into allies. Furthermore, he ordered the expulsion of Christian missionaries and disarmed Japan's nonmilitary population, engaging in a “sword hunt” and thereby moving to secure internal stability. By 1590, although officially he still served the emperor, Toyotomi Hideyoshi was master of Japan.

Hideyoshi's ambitions, however, were far from fulfilled. His ultimate goal rested in his desire to invade and conquer China. In 1592 he began this quest by landing forces in Korea. The fortunes of Korea, a longtime Chinese vassal state, were traditionally tied to those of China. In the thirteenth century, for example, when the Mongols overran China, they also conquered Korea, oppressing its

people and forcing its rulers to marry Mongol women and adopt Mongol ways. Then, when Mongol rule over China ended in 1368, a struggle arose in Korea between its Mongolized monarchy and admirers of China's new dynasty, the Ming. In 1388, when the Ming finally sent in forces, the Korean general ordered to repel them instead overthrew his own rulers. Later this general, named Yi

Song-gye (YĒ sung-yeh), founded a new regime called the Yi dynasty, which reigned in Korea from 1392 until 1910. The Yi rulers restored Korea's ties with China, copying its Confucian institutions and paying it annual tribute.

In the 1590s, as Japan's Hideyoshi pursued his expansionist dreams, these ties benefited both Korea and China. First the Koreans rejected Hideyoshi's request to let Japan's forces pass freely through Korea on their way to China. Then, in 1592, when he sent to Korea a 160,000-man army equipped with firearms and samurai swords, the Koreans sought help from their Chinese overlords. Having learned through spies that the Japanese planned to use Korea as a springboard for invasion of China, the Chinese eventually sent half a million soldiers to aid their Korean vassals. This force did not arrive in time to prevent Hideyoshi's armies from overrunning Korea, but the Chinese did manage, with Korean help, to push back the Japanese forces. Meanwhile Korea's navy, whose innovative "turtle ships" had decks that were protected with iron plating, dealt several stunning defeats to the Japanese fleet.

In 1597, however, after several years of futile talks, he renewed the war. But it ended the next year when Hideyoshi fell ill and died, distressed that his dream of conquering China would never be fulfilled. Korea thus survived, but Hideyoshi's invasion left it devastated and dependent on China. The Yi dynasty lasted three more centuries, mainly because China's rulers sustained the Yi monarchs as tribute-paying vassals. Beset by its location between China and Japan, Korea typically had to accept the dominance of one or the other.

Japan Under Tokugawa Rule

Hideyoshi's death left Japan in the hands of a regency council, governing for his 5-year-old son. The council's most powerful member, Tokugawa Ieyasu (TŌ-koo-GAH-wah Ē-ā-YAH-soo), an astute old warlord with large estates in eastern Japan, quickly became dominant. Several western daimyo opposed him, but by 1603 he defeated all his rivals and compelled the emperor to appoint him shogun, thereby both restoring that office and making him Japan's real ruler. As shoguns, Tokugawa Ieyasu and his heirs ruled the unified, stable state conceived by Oda Nobunaga and created by Hideyoshi.

Tokugawa Ieyasu, lacking Hideyoshi's keenness for foreign conquest, focused on consolidating Japan's hard-won stability. The Tokugawa Shogunate begun by Ieyasu lasted until 1868. It sought to maintain stability, partly by keeping the daimyo and their samurai under its control, and partly by isolating Japan from the outside world. But the Tokugawa years were not static. Indeed, they brought significant changes to Japanese society, including the emergence of a new urban culture.

In the Tokugawa era, although the emperor still reigned in Kyoto, the shogun actually ruled Japan from the city of Edo (Ā-dō), today called Tokyo. Living in a palace larger than that of the emperor, Ieyasu's successors as shogun headed a regime that embraced the daimyo but centralized power in the shogun's hands.

The shogun directly ruled much of Japan, including its three main cities, Kyoto, Edo, and Osaka. He ruled the rest indirectly, through more than 250 daimyo vassals. The shoguns used some clever devices to keep their vassals in line. Daimyo were required to provide soldiers for the shogun's army, laborers for his projects, and officials for his regime. All were obliged to spend half their time at Edo, under the shogun's watchful eyes, and while they were gone their families had to live there, in effect serving as hostages to ensure against revolt. These obligations reduced the daimyo's powers by making them court aristocrats rather than warlords, and impoverished many by requiring them to support more than one household.

The Tokugawa regime, aware of Spanish rule in the Philippines to the South, also took steps to end Western influence in Japan. In 1612-1614, fearful that Japan's growing number of Christians (by then about three hundred thousand in a population of perhaps 12 million) could facilitate foreign interference, the regime began enforcing Hideyoshi's edict expelling European missionaries. It forced Japanese Christians to renounce their faith, and by 1660 executed more than 3,000 who refused to do so. In the 1630s it forbade Japanese people to travel abroad or contact outsiders. After crushing a revolt, in 1639 the regime evicted all Europeans except the Dutch, whose focus seemed to be commerce, not conversion, allowing them to trade at a tiny island near the port of Nagasaki. Japan thus embarked on over two centuries of self-imposed isolation.

The Dutch presence near Nagasaki supplied some contact with the West, as some Japanese who dealt with the Dutch learned their language and ways. The spread of this knowledge, which the Japanese called Dutch

learning, acquainted some in Japan with Western approaches to art, science, shipbuilding, weaponry, music, and medicine, even in an age of isolation.

The Changing Japanese Society

Tokugawa rule brought unity, stability, and security, but it did not prevent change. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, each of Japan's social classes-samurai, peasantry, and urban dwellers - was slowly transformed.

The samurai continued to constitute Japan's upper class. By tradition they were loyal, proud, and

oblivious to pain, but two centuries of peace slowly dulled their fighting edge. With no one to fight, they became civil servants rather than combat warriors. Required to live at the castles of their lords, the samurai lost their old rustic frugality, as castle towns grew into urban centers that fostered indulgence in such pleasures as sake (SAH-kā), an alcoholic beverage made from fermented rice. The warriors still brandished samurai swords and trained in the martial arts, but they focused no longer on warfare.

The peasants, in theory, were esteemed as food providers, but in practice many were harshly oppressed. In earlier times they had supported the samurai by serf labor; now they did so through high taxes, raised from 30 to 50 percent of their rice crop as ruling class ways of life grew ever more lavish. Some farm families became desperately poor sparking several peasant revolts in the 1700s. Others turned from growing rice to raising cash crops such as mulberry leaves (which fed the caterpillars that spun the thread for silk) and tobacco. Rural Japan thus came to include both prosperous peasants owning large farms with fertile fields and landless families who rented marginal farmlands and lived in poverty.

As increasing commerce spurred the growth of towns and cities, merchants and other urban dwellers thrived. Trade expanded from simple barter, involving mainly rice and tools, to complex commerce that included housewares, textiles, brewing, banking, and lending. As cities and towns grew larger, Japan's urban culture became increasingly sophisticated. Merchants and other townsfolk, born without prestige, strove to secure it through education and promotion of literature and the arts. Anxious to preserve their superior social status, samurai often did the same.

Learning therefore flourished, though mainly among men. By the nineteenth century Japan had more than ten thousand schools and almost 50 percent male literacy. Along with emerging urban culture, rising literacy promoted growth in literacy and artistic works. For all its cosmopolitan privileges and pleasures, however, Tokugawa culture did little to enrich the lives of women. In Japan, as in most societies during this era, parents

arranged marriages to improve their family's status, often with little regard for their daughter's desires. Wives were subject to their husbands, expected to stay home, raise children, and take care of household chores. Peasant women might also help the men in the fields or engage in the tedious work of producing silk. Not all women, however, were confined to the home. In cities and towns, some were employed to make clothing, while others waited on men in restaurants and teahouses. Some women, sold during childhood into servitude by destitute parents, eventually became singers, dancers, musicians, and courtesans, later known as geisha (GĀ-shuh). In such roles they could live in comfort and gain some social status - but only as a consequence of serving the pleasures of men.

The Ming Ascendancy

China, like Japan, struggled to find stability in the fourteenth through eighteenth centuries. Degraded by decades of Mongol rule and battered by famine and plague, the Chinese finally expelled the Mongols in 1368. A new dynasty, known as the Ming ("Brilliant"), revived China's pride and independence, restoring the strength and splendor of ages past. Reacting to the trauma of foreign rule, however, in the Ming era (1368-1644) the Chinese also turned inward, favoring their own time-tested ways above outside ideas and connections.

In the early Ming dynasty China was probably the world's mightiest and wealthiest empire. With the Mongol rulers gone and stability restored, farming and commerce flourished, while China's million-man standing army, equipped with cannons and gunpowder grenades, was East Asia's dominant military force. Surrounding lands such as Korea and Vietnam, and even for a time Japan, were compelled to recognize Chinese supremacy and to pay regular tribute for the right to trade with China.

Ming emperors worked to enforce China's security and power. In the late 1300s, the huge Chinese army pushed north into Mongolia, destroying Mongol fortresses and dividing their forces. China also extended its land westward into Central Asia and eastward into Korea. A civil service system and imperial university was reinstated, and the role of the Confucian scholar-bureaucrats was revived. Slavery was abolished and taxes were raised on the rich to provide land and seed for the poor. But in the long run these actions failed to narrow the gap between rich and poor. The huge standing army drained the economy, and the conservative Confucian bureaucracy became more powerful than ever. The emperor himself, after surviving an attempted coup, grew paranoid.

Instituting a secret police that made heavy use of spies

and torture, he executed thousands of alleged conspirators.

In the early 1400s, to fortify the north against the Mongols, China's Great Wall was rebuilt in its modern form: compacted earth enclosed by brick and stone, roughly 20 feet wide, 25 feet high, and four thousand miles long. To ensure the flow of food and supplies from south to north, the Chinese dredged, repaired, and widened the Grand Canal. The capital was moved to its current location in Beijing, where the magnificent Forbidden City was built up; whose great red walls, gold-tiled roofs, marble courtyards, and lavish palaces have ever since symbolized China's mystery, majesty, and might.

China expanded as a great naval and commercial power, building huge fleets of large sailing ships and sending out vast expeditions to foreign lands, hoping thereby to increase China's trade and tribute. The most extensive expeditions were led by Zheng He (JUUNG-HUH), a former court eunuch and talented Muslim mariner, commissioned to explore the whole known world. From 1405 to 1433, in seven great voyages with fleets of up to 70 ships and crews of up to thirty thousand men, Zheng He sailed to the Philippines, Southeast Asia, India, Persia, Arabia, and even down Africa's east coast. Some scholars have even argued that he may have landed somewhere in South America decades before the Portuguese or Spanish voyages of exploration. His crews brought back exotic animals such as ostriches, zebras, and giraffes, as well as extensive knowledge of foreign countries. But the voyages found nothing to change China's perception that its ways and goods were superior to all others. Indeed, Zheng He's expeditions,

reaffirmed China's sense of superiority, especially in such areas as commerce, technology, and ocean travel.

Ming China had vast wealth and advanced technologies, but its rulers did not opt to explore further and create connections with the rest of the world. That path, instead, was pursued by Europeans.

Ming Stagnation

Intent on preserving their resources for defending their northern borders, China's leaders thus curtailed the great sea expeditions and focused inward. Trade and commerce continued to grow, as Chinese merchants forged commercial networks throughout Southeast Asia. But in relying on time-tested practices rather than innovation, the dynasty slowly lost its vigor and stagnation set in.

Various factors contributed to Ming stagnation. One was the drain of responding to the continued Mongol threat. The move to Beijing and rebuilding of the Great Wall fortified northern defenses but exhausted China's resources, since the new capital's northern location left the regime more vulnerable to Mongol attack. Regional rivalries were accentuated between the North, which had political and military power, and the South, which had prosperous commerce, fertile farmlands, and most of the population.

Secondly, the North was left exposed to periodic Mongol raids, while the South hated paying high taxes to support the inept Beijing regime. In 1550 the Mongols reunited, then penetrated the Great Wall, pillaged the outskirts of Beijing, and terrorized northern China for years thereafter.

A third important element of Ming decline was the behavior of the rulers themselves. Attended by a vast array of eunuchs, cooks, and concubines who indulged their every whim, many Ming emperors had little concern

or capacity for governance. A final factor in the Ming decline was the traditionalism and anticommercialism of China's civil service. In the Ming era, as in the past, the imperial administrat.ion was staffed with civil servants drawn largely from the sons of landed gentry, the high social class. In order to pass the extremely rigorous civil service exams, these scholar-bureaucrats, known in the West as mandarins (a Portuguese version of a Southeast Asian term for government ministers), immersed themselves in the study of ancient Confucian classics. Steeped in the values of the past, and protective of a system that gave them power and prestige, the Confucian officials resisted innovation and disparaged commerce. Certain that China's ways and goods were superior to all others, many mandarins saw little value in contact or trade with outsiders.

With Confucian disdain for avarice and greed, they scorned merchants as parasites who profited from selling goods they had not made, and ranked merchants below farmers and artisans who produced useful things. Since most gentry incomes came from agriculture and most state revenues came from land taxes, many bureaucrats saw little to gain from commerce, either for themselves or for the government.

Foreign Influence

Yet commerce flourished during much of the Ming era. Even as the dynasty declined, China's economy thrived, strengthened by expanded agricultural production and extensive trade.

Farming, as in ages past, was the backbone of China's economy. The growing cultivation of Champa rice, a fast-growing, drought-resistant crop that came to China from Vietnam in the early 1000s, vastly increased the food supply. With ample food available, China's population, rebounded to at least 100 million by 1500, and grew to around 150 million during the next century.

Although officially discouraged, foreign trade also expanded. Neighboring countries typically paid tribute to the Chinese emperor, partly for military protection and partly for the right to send trade missions to China. Ming

regulations limited the size and number of such missions, restricting them to certain ports, but traders from Southeast Asia and Indonesia often ignored these restrictions, as did many Chinese merchants.

From the South came Europeans, whose great sea voyages around Africa to Asia were driven by dreams of lucrative trade with wealthy Asian societies. First to arrive were mariners and merchants from Portugal, who reached south China in 1514. Their disrespect for Chinese laws, the stench of their unwashed bodies, and their purchase of Chinese children as slaves led many in China to view the Portuguese as crude "ocean devils." They enraged Ming officials by firing their ships' cannons near the great port city of Guangzhou (GWAHNG-JŌ), which the English later called Canton, and building an island fortress off the nearby coast. In 1522 Chinese forces drove the Portuguese out, killing a number of them. But the Portuguese persisted, and in 1557 they were allowed to set up a trading post at Macao (mah-COW), on a small peninsula south of Guangzhou, in return for paying annual tribute.

The city of Manila in the Philippine Islands also emerged as a major trading center. Founded by Spain in 1571, six years after the Spanish opened a round-trip route between Mexico and the Philippines, Manila became the focal point of trade between Asia and America.

From the East, meanwhile, came Japanese sailors and soldiers, also eager to tap into China's great wealth, but increasingly defiant and unwilling to pay the tribute required for official trade. Instead they turned to plunder. In the mid-1500s, as Japanese pirates ravaged Chinese merchant vessels, ships full of Japanese samurai landed in China to pillage towns and villages and then quickly exit by sea. The Ming fought back by prohibiting trade with Japan, but this ban only prompted even more Chinese to engage in smuggling or join with the Japanese raiders. Then, in the 1590s, came Japan's assault on Korea, planned by Hideyoshi as a prelude to invasion of China. A massive Ming army of half a million men helped deter the Japanese assault, but the venture's huge cost further drained China's treasury, already depleted by the extravagance of rulers, supported by the state.

By the early 1600s, a conspicuous cooling of the climate, which shortened the growing season and dramatically decreased the harvest, seemed to signal that the regime was losing Heaven's Mandate. In 1628, as northern China was swept by deadly famine, bands of starving peasants and unemployed soldiers began to ravage the region, creating widespread chaos. Several years later, a fired postal clerk named Li Zicheng (LĒ zuh-CHUNG) led a rebellion. Calamitous developments aided the rebels' cause. In 1639, lacking the resources to restore order, the Ming regime raised taxes even higher, further angering the people and compelling even more of them to join the rebellion. As floods, droughts, and smallpox epidemics amplified the human disaster, support for Li Zicheng increased. In 1644 he captured Beijing, while the despondent Ming emperor hanged himself on a nearby hill. It looked as if a commoner - a man of the people – had gained the Mandate of Heaven.

The Little Ice Age

The Little Ice Age was a period of cooling that occurred, by some accounts, around 1350 through 1850 AD. The Little Ice Age followed a Medieval Warm

Period (~950-1250 AD) that helped facilitate the resurgence of Europe through the expansion of farmland, food surpluses, and increased wealth. While not a true ice age, global temperatures slid, drier climate was pervasive, and the polar glaciers expanded during this time period.

Being a global era, China under the Ming, were forced to react to the changing times. Wheat crops in the North repeatedly failed and Champa rice was shipped via the Great Canal to help feed the hungry people in Northern China; eventually becoming its staple crop.

As a result of the Little Ice Age, directly or indirectly, the Europeans sought new land, food, and riches outside of their states. Concurrently, the Chinese focused inward, by ending overseas expeditions, bolstering the Great Wall, and working to limit foreign influence among their vast population.

Europe and China; two regions, worlds apart, yet connected through trade, and by way of unpredictable and uncontrollable global climate change.

The Qing Empire

The fall of the Ming dynasty in 1644 resulted, however, not in a new Chinese dynasty led by Li Zicheng but in China's conquest by the Manchus, a nomadic people who came from the region northeast of China known as Manchuria. The Manchu expansion had only just begun. When Li Zicheng's forces took Beijing in 1644, the Ming called on the Manchus for help. This invitation was all the Manchus needed to move in. The Manchus attacked and overran the Chinese capital, expelling and later destroying Li Zicheng's army. The Manchus had no intention of restoring the Ming, instead forming their own dynasty, the Qing (CHING), meaning “Pure,” that would reign from 1644 until 1912. Nonetheless, they adapted themselves to Chinese ways and ruled through China's bureaucracy.

Beginning in 1673, warlords in the South led a revolt against the Qing. Fortunately for the Manchus, the Kangxi (KAHNG-SHĒ) Emperor (1662-1722) possessed extraordinary talent, intelligence, and vigor. Not confined like many Ming rulers to the comforts of his court, Kangxi led his armies in battle, deftly planning strategy, dividing the rebel coalition, and proving a brilliant general. Finally, in 1683, Kangxi crushed the rebel warlords and proved a splendid Chinese emperor.

Although he forbade intermarriage between Manchus and Chinese and gave precedence in his government to Manchu officials, he also fostered harmony between Manchu and Chinese civil servants, demanding honesty and talent from both. A frugal and politically effective administrator, he managed simultaneously to lower taxes and improve bureaucratic efficiency while initiating numerous public works such as flood control and water conservation projects. A man of enormous energy, he rose daily before dawn and dealt with stacks of official reports.

Kangxi's foreign ventures were equally effective. After several times sending forces north to confront unruly Russians infringing on his domain, in 1689 he negotiated a treaty with Russia that defined the borders between the two empires. Later he led his armies into western Mongolia, mastering that region and vastly diminishing the Mongol menace that had plagued China for centuries. He expanded into Tibet, sending forces in 1720 to subdue

that land, bringing under Manchu dominion the leader of Tibetan Buddhism, known as the Dalai Lama (DAH-lī LAH-mah).

The Problems of the Qing Regime

In the 1500s, Jesuits from Europe made their way into China, adapting to their ways, and influencing many Chinese to adopt Catholicism. The Jesuits presented Christian ideals as similar to those of Confucius (equating, for example, Christian compassion with the Confucian virtue of humanity), and even took part in Chinese rites involving ancestor worship. This blending of traditions antagonized many Chinese scholars, who saw it as corrupting their own beliefs and practices. It also upset other Christians, who complained to the pope in Rome that the Jesuits were compromising Catholicism by taking part in Chinese rituals. Kangxi backed the Jesuits and even gave them supportive documents to take back to Rome. But in 1704 the pope denounced Catholic participation in Chinese rites, formally banning it in 1715. Kangxi's successors, influenced by disgruntled Confucians and by a later pope's extension of the ban in 1742, actively suppressed Christianity in China, thus undoing the work begun by the Jesuits.

In the late 1700s, a combination of rising poverty and taxes, along with government corruption helped trigger the White Lotus Rebellion (1796-1804). This massive peasant uprising in Western China was led by the White Lotus Society, a religious cult promising the removal of the Manchus and the return of the Buddha. It took the government fully eight years to put down this rebellion. The Qing dynasty, riddled with corruption and faced with internal rebellion, had clearly begun to decline.

Change in Vietnam

One repercussion of Manchu decline was increased foreign meddling in the lands on China's periphery. In the late 1700s, for example, taking advantage of Chinese weakness and Southeast Asian strife, the French intervened in Vietnam, a vassal state of China that long had blended Chinese institutions with its own native culture. After occupying Vietnam in the early 1400s, China had withdrawn its troops in the face of Vietnamese resistance, letting Vietnam henceforth run its own affairs, as long as it sent tribute payments to China. In the 1470s, led by the powerful Nguyen ('n-GIH-un) family, they eventually pushed south of Champa into Cambodian

territory, conquering the Mekong River delta in 1757, thereby extending their control over Southeast Asia's entire eastern coast.

The French, having gained a foothold in the region during the late 1700s, expanded their influence, and the Nguyen dynasty (1802-1945) in time became a puppet regime dominated by France, adding a French Catholic element to Vietnam's blend of Chinese and Southeast Asian cultures.

Chinese Society in the Ming and Qing Eras

As in earlier eras, society and learning in Ming and Qing China were dominated by the government and its Confucian scholar-bureaucrats, who functioned as an educated elite. In village or town schools, and often under private tutors, boys studied the Confucian classics to prepare for civil service exams held on the county, province, and national levels. Since the multi-stage examination process removed all but the brightest and most orthodox candidates, it gave the civil service a very high level of learning and stability, but it also tended to discourage innovation and creativity.

Kangxi sponsored an extensive literary encyclopedia and an official history. Kangzi’s grandson and emperor went even further, employing about three hundred scholars and four thousand scribes for more than ten years to assemble the 36,000-volume Complete Collection of the Four Treasuries, a compilation of China's great works of literature, art, history, philosophy, science, and medicine.

In contrast to official scholarship, popular culture tended to be creative and unconventional. Wealthy urban families adorned their homes with majestic landscapes and vivid still-life paintings, colorful silk tapestries, exquisite blue and white Ming vases, and multi-colored porcelains from the Qing era. The country's countless market towns, although less urbane and affluent than the cities, were nonetheless central to the Chinese economy. They linked the peasant masses with the outside world, providing farmers with a place to sell their surplus, purchase household goods, and engage in such amusements as drinking, smoking (a habit derived from the Americas), and card playing (a practice that spread with printing from China to the West).

Even the peasant villages, although generally much smaller and less sophisticated than the cities and towns, advanced China's prosperity by producing plentiful food. As faster growing Champa rice continued to expand output in lush moist regions, harvests in less fertile areas were enhanced by new crops such as sweet potatoes and corn, cultivated initially by Amerinds and brought to China by European traders via Macao and the Philippines. Improved irrigation using water pumps, the mechanized sowing of seeds, the planting of northern wheat as a

winter crop in the South, and the massive use of fertilizers contributed to an era of agricultural abundance.

As food supply increased, China's population, which had more than doubled in the Ming era, doubled again to more than 300 million by the late 1700s. At first this increase, associated with prosperity and growing agricultural output, created few concerns; indeed, it enlarged both the market and the work force for China's expanding economy. Eventually, however, the growing population caused problems: urban crowding and high crime rates afflicted China's swelling cities, while in rural areas, as China's woodlands were relentlessly cleared to make room for new cultivation, deforestation led to soil erosion and flooding. By the end of the eighteenth century the increase in people was outpacing the food supply, reviving in China the poverty of the past.

In cities, towns, and villages, in good times and in bad, the patriarchal family remained China's basic social unit: the main provider of training for the young, health care for the sick, and material support for the aging. Elder males formally headed the households-making decisions, enforcing discipline, leading the family in ancestor worship, and arranging marriages-while women typically managed the household in service to their husbands and families. Raising girls, who would one day leave home to serve their husband's family, was often deemed a burden: as in ages past, poor peasant families sometimes sold their daughters into servitude, while urban parents subjected their daughters to foot binding, since tiny feet were considered helpful in attracting wealthy husbands. For the most part, China's families were sources of stability, reinforcing ancient traditions and resistant to change.

Still, during times of misfortune and turbulence, when long-suffering peasants were pushed beyond their limit, rural families and villages sometimes served as sources of rebellion and change. They had done so during the 1640s, as Li Zicheng's rebels helped to overthrow the Ming dynasty. They did so in the 1790s, as the White Lotus Rebellion seriously challenged the Qing regime. And they would do so time and again in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.