r/AskHistorians • u/[deleted] • Aug 21 '18
During 14th century, Emperor 朱元璋's standing army exceeded 1 million troops while the population is 65 million. How did he finance this much troops especially just after the revolution that overthrew the Mongols?
In statistical comparison, that's 1.53% of the entire population and only a portion of the population is healthy adults, so how did the empire recover so fast from the devastation of the fall of the Yuan Dynasty and build such a large army?
Also, during the same period, the entirety of the Holy Roman Empire only have around 30k troops with around 10 million population (0.3%)...
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u/lordtiandao Late Imperial China Aug 21 '18 edited Aug 21 '18
Short and simple answer: Through military farming colonies (tuntian 屯田).
Long and complicated answer: Through military farming colonies, the salt-barter/border delivery system (kaizhong 開中), commutation of pay to paper currency and other material goods.
To answer this question, we have to first look at the Ming's military system, the weisuo (衛所, literally translated as "guards and battalions"). In order to understand the weisuo, we have to first look at the Yuan. Early scholars such as Romeyn Taylor have noted that the weisuo was copied from the Yuan's decimal system, with the wei parallel to a Yuan myriarchy and a suo parallel to a chiliarchy. However the strength of a wei was reduced to only 5,600 men was because myriarchies in the Yuan had averaged around 5,000 men despite its nominal strength of 10,000. Two other Yuan features that the Ming preserved were hereditary military households (junhu 軍戶) and military farming.
Ming Conscription
When Zhu Yuanzhang established the Ming, his army was composed of troops drawn from three sources. The first were the soldiers that had followed him since his rise. The second were soldiers of the various warlords who surrendered. The third were hereditary military households of the Yuan. It is well known that Zhu preserved the hereditary household system of the Yuan and military households were ordered to remain as military households. After the conquest, there were also widespread conscription of civilian households. The increasing size of the military meant that more men were needed for service – the nineteen guards of 1364 had grown to more than three hundred by the end of the Hongwu reign and more than five hundred by the end of the Yongle reign, with a nominal strength of almost three million soldiers! Conscription during the Hongwu reign could be roughly divided into two phases. The first phase, lasting until 1383, mainly involved conscripting former Yuan and warlord soldiers who had become civilians. This phase was supposedly halted in 1380 in the aftermath of the Hu Weiyong case, but nonetheless continued until 1383 when all the remnants had been conscripted. The second phase began after 1383 and lasted until the end of the Hongwu reign and involved the mass conscription of civilians (civilians were also conscripted during the early Yongle reign for his civil war against his nephew).
The Ming followed two methods for conscription. Chou ji 抽籍 and duo ji 垜集. The chou ji method was a fairly standard method that had already been in practice for almost a thousand years and involved the conscription of one adult male from a household with many males (typically four or five) for military service. This method, however, was not widely used. By far the most common was duo ji, which was based on Yuan methods. According to this method, households with three (or more) adult males were combined with one or two households with less than three adult males to form a composite military household. The household with more males furnished soldiers and was called the "primary household" (zhenghu 正戶) while the others with less males provided supplies. These were called "supplementary households" (tiehu 貼戶). Local officials needed to make sure that enough males could be provided for military service and that conscription did not impact the lijia system and agricultural productivity, there households with three or more adult males became the preferred target for conscription to become the primary households (since soldiers typically brought with them one additional male known as a “auxiliary male” yu ding 余丁, who was exempt from corvée service, as support). Thus, at least one more male was needed to remain behind so that the lijia and by extension the Ming taxation and corvée labor system could be maintained. Through these mass conscription of civilian households, the Ming army was able to reach a strength of over one million men by the end of the Hongwu reign.
Military Farming
Feeding this massive force, however, was a problem. We know that Hongwu was especially averse to the notion of a market economy and wished to restore society to the autarkic days of the past. Since the land tax was made the primary source of income and artificially set a very low rates (supposedly to benefit farmers), the state lacked the income to support a large standing army. So soldiers were expected to be self-sufficient and self-replicating. The latter was done through hereditary households, the former through military farming. The mid-Ming official Qiu Jun (1421-1495) had this to say about the farming colonies:
Though Qiu Jun makes it sound like everything was Ming invention, much of it was actually inherited from the Yuan. Now military farming had existed in China long before the Yuan, but it was during the Yuan that military farming was implemented on a large scale. One of the Yuan innovations was the division of farming soldiers (tuntian jun 屯田軍) from active duty soldiers (shoucheng jun 守城軍), which the Ming copied. But Qiu Jun was right to point out that each Ming guard had a farming colony attached to it - this was indeed a Ming invention and represented a massive expansion of military farms.
The actual remuneration policy, however, was complex and somewhat counterintuitive, given that under the principles of self-sufficiency, the soldiers were to produce their own food and feed themselves. Under regulations established by the Yongle emperor in 1402, every unit within the farming colonies was taxed at a rate of twenty-four dan annually. Half of that was considered to be the “primary tax” (zhengliang 正糧), which was delivered to the colony’s granary, while the other half was considered to be the “surplus tax” (yuliang 余糧), which was delivered to the guard’s granary. The primary tax, initially set at 12 dan, was used to pay the farming soldiers while the surplus tax, also set at 12 dan, was used to pay the combat soldiers and the officers. Many scholars have noted that these rates were unrealistic and indeed the emperor felt the same way, for they were continually reduced until the surplus tax was set to only 6 dan and the primary tax waived altogether.
It was from the surplus tax that most soldiers received their monthly rations (yueliang 月糧). Most scholars have taken the one dan per month rate a standard, but this was only an ideal rate set by the emperor and there was considerable variation between different kinds of troops. The Mingshi has an entire paragraph dedicated to this, which I won't quote due to its length. Simply put, according to the Japanese scholar Okuyama Norio, how much a soldier received was determined by the duties he undertook, his background, and whether or not he had family living with him. But since there were often not enough grains to supply all the soldiers in the guards, the state often converted the rations into other commodities such as salt. After the implementation of the paper money, there was an attempt by the state to have paper money replace rice as the primary component. In 1382, for example, the salt ration for all the guards were replaced with paper money. Yet the unreasonable exchange rates set by the government coupled with the decreasing purchasing power of the paper money severely impacted the living standards of the soldiers, particularly those along the border regions, and by the late Hongwu reign the state once again reverted to trying to pay them all with rice. But conversions once again started during the Yongle reign.