The Ming founder
Zhu Yuanzhang set up a system of hereditary soldiery inspired by Mongol-style garrisons and the
fubing system of the Northern Wei, Sui and Tang dynasties. Hereditary soldiers were meant to be self-sufficient. They provided their own food via military farms (
tun tian) and rotated into training and military posts such as the capital, where specialized drilling with firearms was provided. These hereditary soldiers were grouped into guards (
wei) and battalions (
suo), otherwise known as the wei-suo system. A guard consisted of 5,600 men, each guard was divided into battalions of 1,120 men (qiānhù), each battalion contained 10 companies of 112 men (bǎihù), each company contained two platoons of 56 men (zǒngqí), and each platoon contained five squads of 11 or 12 men (xiǎoqí). Most of the soldiers in Ming's army came from military households, which consisted of about 20 percent of households in the early Ming period. Each military household was required to provide one man to serve in the army. If that man died, the household was required to send another. There were four ways to become a military household. The first was for the family to be descended from a “fellow campaigner” who took part in the wars of the Ming founder. The family could also be descended from a soldier serving one of the enemies of the Ming founder but became incorporated into Ming troops after defeat. Those convicted of criminal offences could also be sentenced to serve in the military. But by the fifteenth century, criminal conviction no longer resulted in a normal household's conversion into military household. Punitive service was made non-hereditary. Lastly, soldiers were also recruited through a draft.
Command structure The guard battalions outside the capital were placed under local provincial military commanders. Those in Beijing were placed under the joint command of the Ministry for War and five grand military commanders, which reflected the separation of power and command. The Ministry issued orders to be carried out by the commanders. Some officers were recruited through the military version of the
imperial examinations, which emphasized horse archery, but not enough to impose a quality standard. These exams did however produce a few notable individuals such as Qi Jiguang and Yu Dayou. In the late Ming dynasty, Ming army units had become dominated by hereditary officers who would spend long periods of ten or twelve years in command instead of the usual practice of constant rotation, and the Central Military Command had lost much of its control over regional armies.
Zongdu Junwu, or Supreme Commanders, were appointed throughout the empire to oversee the fiscal and military affairs in the area of his jurisdiction, but they became increasingly autonomous in later periods.
Social status and decline Soldiering was one of the lowest professions in the Ming dynasty. Military officers were not only subordinate to civil officials, but generals and soldiers alike were degraded, treated with fear, suspicion, and distaste. Military service enjoyed far less prestige than its civil counterpart due to its hereditary status and because most soldiers were illiterate. The guard battalion system went into decline from 1450 to 1550 and the military capacity of hereditary soldiers declined substantially due to corruption and mismanagement. Some officers used their soldiers as construction gangs, some were too oppressive, others were too old and unfit for service, and many did not observe the proper rotational drilling schedule. In the 16th century official registers listed three million hereditary soldiers, but contemporary observers noted that the actual number of troops was around 845,000, and of that only about 30,000 cavalry. Modern historians estimated that by 1587, some province's actual army strengths could hit a mere 2% of nominal strength. The effectiveness of the Ming's now much smaller army was also considered pitiful, the capital armies being "old and weak lackeys of central government officials." When
Altan Khan invaded China in 1550 (even setting the suburbs of Beijing on fire), the Ming could only muster about 60,000 troops to counter him, who then routed at the sight of the Mongols. A particularly extreme example came in 1555, when according to Ming records, a mere 60
pirates in a single ship landed in Nanjing. The city and its surrounding area was nominally garrisoned by 120,000 troops. Despite this, these 60 pirates encountered little resistance for the next three months, when they looted and burned towns around the area, killing four thousand people and rampaging over a thousand miles before the government could muster the strength to crush them. Soldiers were also assigned tasks unrelated to warfare and combat. One of the primary military assignments in the early stages of the Ming empire was farming plots of land. Soldiers were often subject to exploitation from higher-ups in the army; they did menial tasks such as chopping down trees and picking herbs for the sole benefit of their superiors. The Ming sometimes utilized soldiers as transport workers to move grain and other foodstuffs throughout the empire. Officers were known to seize the lands of military colonies and convert them into their private estates, and subsequently force their troops into becoming their serfs. Other officers accepted bribes from soldiers to be exempted from military drill, and used other troops as menial labour. Corruption was so lucrative that the sons of merchants were known to bribe officials for appointments as army officers so as to exhort bribes from soldiers in exchange for drill exemption, or to register their own servants as soldiers so as to embezzle their rations. Desertion from the
weisuo became commonplace. The military was not the most profitable occupation and thus soldiers had to rely on other means to make money aside from the salary given by the government. The most straightforward method was to kill more enemy soldiers, which would grant them a reward for each soldier killed in battle. Some soldiers defected from the army and turned to banditry because they did not have enough food to eat. Complicating the matter was that soldiers of the same rank did not share the same authority. Soldiers who had more wealth were able to bribe their superiors with money and other gifts increased their standing and status within the army. Since most did not want to serve in the army, family members who chose to be soldiers might get some sort of compensation from other male family members. For example, they could become the next "descent-line heir" even if they were not the eldest son, as was tradition, by volunteering to enlist. The "descent-line heir" was the right to hold a special ritual role within the clan and hence enhance one's social status since the heir would inherit his father's privileges. In a military family, soldiers who were assigned to locations far away from their ancestral homes often saw their relationships with their extended family decline. To counter this, subsidies were granted to serving soldiers in an attempt to lower the desertion rate of soldiers serving in the family and help maintain a connection between the serving soldier's immediate family with their ancestral one. The subsidy gave a reason for the immediate family members of the soldier to regularly visit their ancestral homes to collect payment and thereby maintain their relationship. However certain regions were known to have differing views of military service, such as
Yiwu County where Qi Jiguang recruited his troops. Young men with varying backgrounds ranging from peasants to that of a national university student in those areas chose to join the army. A major reason for the popularity of military service in this area was the potential for quick advancement through military success.
Navy ,
Ming dynasty, 1584 The navy was not a separate entity during the Ming era and was part of the guard battalion system. Every coastal guard battalion was allotted 50 ships for maritime defense. The Ming also set up naval palisades, beacon towers, strategic forts, and irregular military units and warships. Unfortunately these defensive measures proved largely inadequate against pirate raids, and conditions continued to deteriorate until the
Jiajing wokou raids were ended by
Qi Jiguang and
Yu Dayou.
Shaolin monks also took part in anti-piracy campaigns, most notably between 21 and 31 July 1553 at
Wengjiagang, when a group of 120 monks exterminated over 100 pirates with only 4 monks dead. Ming naval activity was noticeably subdued. Its founder, the
Hongwu Emperor, emphasized that "not even a plank is to be allowed into the sea." He did however establish the Longjiang Shipyards of Nanjing that would grow into the birthplace of the Treasure Fleet. The Ming Navy was also equipped with firearms, making them one of the earliest gunpowder armed navies at the time. It was therefore described by Lo and Elleman as the world's "foremost" navy of that era. The Hongwu Emperor ordered the formation of 56 military stations (
wei), each with a strength of 50 warships and 5000 seamen. However most of these seem to have been left under-strength. The size of the navy was greatly expanded by the Yongle Emperor. The Ming Navy was divided into the Imperial fleet stationed in Nanjing, two coastal defence squadrons, the high-seas fleet used by Zheng He, and the grain transportation fleet. After the period of maritime activity during the
treasure voyages under the
Yongle Emperor, the official policy towards naval expansion swayed between active restriction to ambivalence. Despite Ming ambivalence towards naval affairs, the
Chinese treasure fleet was still able to dominate other Asian navies, which enabled the Ming to send governors to rule in Luzon and Palembang as well as depose and enthrone puppet rulers in Sri Lanka and the Bataks. In 1521, at the
Battle of Tunmen a squadron of Ming naval junks defeated a
Portuguese caravel fleet, which was followed by another Ming victory against a Portuguese fleet at the
Battle of Xicaowan in 1522. In 1633, a Ming navy defeated a Dutch and Chinese pirate fleet during the
Battle of Liaoluo Bay. A large number of military treatises, including extensive discussions of naval warfare, were written during the Ming period, including the
Wubei Zhi and
Jixiao Xinshu. Additionally, shipwrecks have been excavated in the
South China Sea, including wrecks of Chinese trade and war ships that sank around 1377 and 1645. File:籌海圖編 鄭若曾 明朝 16.jpg|Sand ship, from the
Chouhai Tubian, 1562 File:登壇必究 王鳴鶴 明朝三 49.jpg|Guangdong ship, from the
Dengtan Bijiu, 1599 File:登壇必究 王鳴鶴 明朝四 10.jpg|A centipede ship and anchor, from the
Dengtan Bijiu File:兵錄 何汝賓 明朝七 25.jpg|Covered son and mother wheel boat, from the
Binglu, 1606 File:兵錄 何汝賓 明朝七 24.jpg|Netting ship, from the
Binglu File:兵錄 何汝賓 明朝七 18.jpg|Tiger roar ship, from the
Binglu File:兵錄 何汝賓 明朝七 13.jpg|Fuzhou ship, from the
Binglu ==Other military institutions==