There have always been divergent opinions on the guarding system of the Ming army, but they always derogate more than praise. Because of its "antique" management model, the Ming army's combat capability was extremely low, and it was no longer able to withstand the pressure of large-scale wars in the middle and late Ming Dynasty. Therefore, the Ming Dynasty monarchs later introduced a battalion system to replace the guard system.
However, this reform did not happen overnight, nor was it profitable and harmless for the Ming Dynasty.
- First of all, talk about the background of the system of health institutions.
After the Hongwu emperor "expelled the Tartars and restored China", the size of the Ming army reached an unprecedented level-"In the early days of the country, the guards were 491, so all three hundred and eleven." The total number of troops was about 300. More than one hundred thousand, and in the early years of the Ming Dynasty, there were almost no shortages in the army, so this number is quite reliable. In other words, when the world had just been settled, the country’s productivity had not yet recovered, and the country’s production population was small, the size of the Ming army reached more than three million people, three to four times the size of the standing army of the Ming Dynasty. In terms of society, it is unbearable.
However, rash disarmament will instantly create a large number of idle veterans in society, which will not only affect social stability, but also threaten the imperial government that has not been established for a long time. Therefore, the implementation of the Tuntian garrison system has become the best choice. The
- guard station system created the root cause of the Ming army’s low combat capability.
can also be seen from the design of the army at the beginning of the Ming Dynasty: "Sergeants defended the city three points and planted seven points." Depending on the degree of barrenness of the land, there will be other plans for allocating military forces, but there are far more soldiers in the field than fighting. soldier. The emperor Hongwu once said to the generals of the Five Armed Forces: "Today, the sea is quiet and the border is safe. If you use soldiers but eat and eat in the farming, the farmer will suffer. It is not a long-term security technique. Farming, the commonwealth, the soldiers and the farmers are one, and the state is used for comfort." All his goals are to satisfy production.
Therefore, it is only natural that the Ming army’s combat capabilities under the Wei’s control were weak—the original intention of its design was to resolve the contradiction between the huge military population and the yet-growing production population.
Facts have proved that the system of guards in the early Ming Dynasty achieved the goal of the Hongwu Emperor. Not only could the guards be self-sufficient, but some even had surpluses. However, under such a system, most of the guards have never received military training or have insufficient training intensity. Moreover, since sergeants have served their entire lives and most of the middle and lower-level officers are hereditary, the ageing of the troops is serious, the rising space is narrow, and the combat capability is extremely Low, at best, it can only maintain local security. Although it was originally aimed at this, it was later used in large-scale wars, such as six northern expeditions, three attacks on Annan, and troops to the northwest during the Yongle period. The size of the troops was varied. Hundreds of thousands, there are a large number of guard troops in it.
- The system of guarding is destined to be temporary, and reform is urgent.
As mentioned earlier, the original intention of the sanitation system is to integrate soldiers and agriculture to solve the problem of insufficient productivity at the beginning of the country. In the middle and late stages of the country’s productivity gradually recovering and the production population is increasing, the existence of the sanitation system loses its meaning. , The government should gradually and planned reform of the military system, and gradually eliminate the sanitation system. Emperor Yongle knew this very well, so after moving the capital to Beijing, he immediately set up a Beijing camp, trained more than 200,000 standing troops, and gradually replaced the guard army with professional soldiers in Jiubian and other places. However, in the vast hinterland, there are still many "ghost" guards where there is a field but no one. There are serious occupation of officers and more and more soldiers fleeing from the guards. However, due to a series of political events, this reform was postponed indefinitely. It was not until the situation became more and more uncontrollable that the Weisuo system gradually withdrew from the stage of history.
- Then the war gave birth to the battalion system.
During the Zhengtong reign of Ming Yingzong, the fifth emperor after Hongwu, the reform gradually began. After the Tumu Fortress change, the Ming army’s Beijing camp was completely lost and the border defenses in various regions fell into crisis. Then the Mongolian tribes invaded Beijing. When the guard troops were unusable and insufficient, the Ming court sent Yushi to the inland to recruit troops.
Afterwards, wars continued. In order to make up for the shortage of the army, recruiting became the norm, supplemented from time to time. In the Jiajing era, it was launched on a large scale.The system was completely marginalized, and recruitment became the main force of the Ming army.
recruits are called battalions, and their organization and treatment are different from those of the guards. Under the
battalion system, the generals are divided into generals, lieutenants, participating generals, guerrillas, generals, generals, etc., while the guards are composed of general commanders, commanders, thousand households, hundred households, general banners, and junior officers. flag. One guard is about 5,600 men, and the strength of a battalion is about 2,250 to 4,500. The garrison troops have land for farming, while the battalions have military pay. After the implementation of the
recruiting system, the Ming army's combat effectiveness has been greatly improved. The most famous are the Qi Jiajun and Yu Jiajun in the Southeast, the Guanning Cavalry in the Northeast, and the Qin Soldier in the Northwest. These soldiers join the army at their prime age and fight professionally. With their military merits, they can get bounties or be promoted to achieve a class transition, so they are more vigorous as fighters. The existence of the
battalion system allowed the Ming army to fight against opposition forces at home and abroad. For example, during the Wanli period, the army entered Korea to conquer Japanese. Although the number of troops was small, they all fought from Liaodong, Xuanfu, Yansui, Zhejiang and other places. The team was mobilized and won the battle against the Japanese. If the Ming Dynasty still generally used the guard system at this time, the combat effectiveness of the troops would not be able to cope with long-distance expeditions and sustained operations. The
- battalion system opened the prelude to the military reform of the Ming Dynasty, but failed to go to the end-because the recruitment system was too expensive!
In the early years of the Ming Dynasty, the national finances were still abundant, and the intensity of external wars was relatively small, so the scale of the battalion’s military pay was not huge. However, in the middle and late stages, recruitment became the mainstream, and recruitment costs were also rising, but the country’s finances were gradually collapsing.
After the arrival of the Little Ice Age, peasant uprisings broke out one after another. The Mongolian tribes who had been suffering for many years also madly attacked the frontier fortresses. The Jurchen tribes rose up in the northeast to weaken the Ming forces in North China and Northeast China with captives and massacres. The Ming court had to recruit more soldiers to deal with it, so it formed a situation of "spending money and cutting resources".
For example, the Ming Dynasty Confucian General Tan Lun once sighed to the court: "China's long skills are not as good as firearms. If you want to train 30,000 soldiers, you can beat the 3,000 people to charge." Two to five dollars, four hundred and fifty thousand dollars in annual expenses, the farmer complained about the shortage, and one difficulty was also met.” Calculate and find that it is equivalent to 18 taels per soldier. This level has scared the Ministry of Households and the Ministry of War, and this is Longqing Things during the year.
arrived in Chongzhen, the financial situation was even worse, but the annual salary of each soldier has exceeded forty-two, soldiers in the case of insufficient military income, mutiny has become a common occurrence, which directly affects the soldiers Loyalty and morale. What's more serious is the issue of the ownership of troops under the recruitment system. The issue of privatization of officers and soldiers at the end of the Ming Dynasty was always serious. For example, there were large-scale family groups in various border towns. After the rise of the recruiting system, most of the troops were owned by generals. For example, recruiting in Zhejiang no longer selected generals for the troops. The generals recruited themselves, with a hundred people for the generals and three thousand for the generals. In this way, the problem of privatization of the army is difficult to reverse. After Emperor Chongzhen was martyred, there were four towns in Jiangbei in Nanjing Jingji and Zuo Liangyu in Jingxiang, and they had nearly one million soldiers, but these soldiers were all troops serving the generals. Their fate was the same as that of the generals. After Gao Jie was assassinated, the troops gradually disintegrated and split; Liu Zeqing and Liu Liangzuo surrendered to the Manchu Qing, and the troops became the forwards of the Qing army; Huang Degong's tribe fought to die.
The final destination of these troops is consistent with their generals, and never accept court orders. This is naturally related to the general environment in which the soldiers of the Ming Dynasty lived, but the expansion of personal power of generals is one of the important factors.
Therefore, any reform must be social and comprehensive. The problem with the Ming Dynasty’s military reform was: on the one hand,
was too late—it was unable to gradually find a path suitable for its own national conditions in the early stage, but when the war broke out, it suddenly expanded its army on a large scale without considering the consequences; on the other hand, it was economic. The backward system cannot guarantee the huge expenditure of the troops.
In the same era, the Ming dynasty farmers’ taxes were one-twentieth that of Japan and one-fortieth of those of the United Kingdom, but the common people’s burden was severe and the country’s deficits were constant. The society urgently needed a comprehensive reform to break the shackles. A military reform is far from enough.
Text: Zuo Guangdou
Reference: Wang Hongxu, "Drafts of Ming History", Gu Yanwu's "Book on the Advantages and Disadvantages of the World", and Tan Qian's "Guo Que"
The text was created by the History University team, and the pictures are from the Internet and the copyright belongs to the original author
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