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Chapter 4 • Political Transformations, 1450–1750 227

Temple of Heaven, where subsequent rulers performed Confucian-based rituals
to ensure the well-being of Chinese society. Two empresses wrote instructions for
female behavior, emphasizing traditional expectations after the disruptions of the
previous century. Culturally speaking, China was looking to its past.
Politically, the Ming dynasty reestablished the civil service examination system
that had been neglected under Mongol rule and went on to create a highly cen-
tralized government with power concentrated in the hands of the emperor himself.
The state acted vigorously to repair the damage of the Mongol years by restoring
millions of acres to cultivation; rebuilding canals, reservoirs, and irrigation works;
and planting, according to some estimates, a billion trees in an effort to reforest
China. The economy rebounded as rice and other crops were produced commer-
cially on a large scale, both international and domestic trade flourished, and the
population grew. Also contributing to the growth of a market economy was a pol-
icy established in the early sixteenth century that required the payment of taxes in
hard currency, mostly silver, rather than in rice. Taxpayers were thus forced to sell
goods or their labor in the market to meet their obligations to the state. Thus China
recovered during the fifteenth century to become perhaps the best governed and
most prosperous of the world’s major civilizations.
During the early Ming dynasty, the Chinese state had launched a series of mas-
sive maritime voyages into the Indian Ocean. (See “Chinese Maritime Voyages in
the Indian Ocean World” in Chapter 3.) These voyages offered China the possibil-
ity of creating a sea-based empire in the Indian Ocean basin. But that possibility
was decisively rejected, in part because Chinese authorities feared further incur-
sions from the recently ousted Mongols.
®
Instead, during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries China built another AP EXAM TIP
kind of empire on its northern and western frontiers that vastly enlarged the ter- You must know features
ritorial size of the country and incorporated a number of non-Chinese peoples, of the Qing (Manchu)
including many nomadic pastoralists. Undertaking this enormous project of impe- dynasty for success on
the AP® Exam.
rial expansion was China’s Qing, or Manchu, dynasty (1644–1912), which was
itself of foreign and nomadic origin, hailing from Manchuria, north of the Great AP ®
Wall. The violent Manchu takeover of China, part of the General Crisis of the
seventeenth century, was facilitated by a widespread famine and peasant rebellions CONTINUITY AND
CHANGE
associated with the Little Ice Age. But having conquered China, the Qing rulers What changes took place
sought to maintain their ethnic distinctiveness by forbidding intermarriage between in the relations between
themselves and the Chinese, even as they enforced outward obedience to their rule China and other states
between 1450 and
by requiring Chinese men to adopt the Manchu hairstyle of a long braid or queue. 1750?
Through time, though, Manchu ruling elites adopted Chinese ways by mastering
the Chinese language and Confucian teachings and using Chinese bureaucratic
techniques to govern the empire.
For many centuries, the Chinese had interacted with the nomadic peoples
who inhabited the dry and lightly populated regions now known as Mongolia,
Xinjiang, and Tibet. Trade, tribute, and warfare ensured that these ecologically
and culturally different worlds were well known to the Chinese, quite unlike the
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