The Han-ness of Ming China

Abstract

One way to gauge the “Han-ness” of the Ming dynasty is to examine how Ming rulers and officials went about sorting their subjects. That “Han-ness”—however it was interpreted—would emerge again in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries as a defining characteristic of China is a story that has been told a number of times. Zhu Yuanzhang, the founding emperor, did justify the ascendance of the Ming in part by claiming to be “recovering the native land of our Han people". That “Han people” were the imagined norm can also be detected from a variety of references concerning borderland violence. According to Mote, a trend of great importance in the Ming period was “the expansion of the Chinese population throughout the border provinces of the south and southwest” and the subsequent “displacement or absorption of non-Han minorities". In the Ming period, a national group within the empire happened to be very clearly defined—usually by culture, but in some instances by genealogy.