Ming-Qing Border Defence, the Inward Turn of Chinese Cartography, and Qing Expansion in Central Asia in the Eighteenth Century

Since the Song dynasty, China had sometimes supported a massive navy, which the Mongols expanded to invade Japan in 1274 and again in 1281 and to attack Java. Subsequently, the early Ming navy carried out enormous excursions into Southeast Asia and the Indian Ocean from 1403 to 1434. Ming rulers also declined any political accommodation with the Mongols and their nomadic neighbours, a policy that lasted from 1368 until 1570. They saw in such accommodations, which included possible diplomatic and commercial relations, one of the reasons for the fall of the Song in 1280 to the steppe barbarians. As a result of its more narrow-minded defensive and punitive measures, the Ming dynasty faced continual threats from their Mongol neighbours on the steppe.1 During the first century of Ming rule, for example, the “perennial problem of the Mongol menace” became so acute that officials in Beijing feared an imminent reconquest by the Mongols. The infamous Tumu debacle of 1448-49, for instance, began when the Oirats, who had reunified Western Mongol forces on the steppe, had captured the reigning Zhengtong emperor (r. 1436-49) when he led a Ming military campaign against them. In the climactic battle, the Ming army lost half of its 500,000 soldiers. Rather than capitulate to Oirat extortionist demands for ransom or move the capital from Peking back to Nanjing, the Ming court chose to replace the captured emperor with his younger brother, who was then enthroned as the Jingtai emperor (r. 1450-56) and led the successful defence of Beijing. The proposal to retreat to the south reminded Ming officials too much of the disastrous experiences of the Southern Song when it had moved its capital from Kaifeng to Hangzhou.2 The crisis continued when the Zhengtong emperor, a worthless hostage by then, was returned by the Oirats in 1450. Several years later he retook the throne in 1457 as the Tianshun emperor (r. 1457-64) during the coup d’êtat of 1457, during which the officials who had sacrificed their emperor