The Fall of Qing Dynasty

Richard Santos

Captain
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A little background on the silver issue, as well as its associated economic population dislocation associated with it, during the final 80 years of Ming might be apropos:

Silver has traditionally been in short supply across the sinosphere since the Tang dynasty, when the major silver mines in the sinosphere were exhausted. so the amount of silver that circulated in east Asia has been steadily dwindling due to loss and wastage since the beginning of Song. The introduction of paper currency by the Song dynasty was done to combat the powerful deflationary effect s of dwindling silver reserve.

It is estimated at the Beginning of Ming dynasty, there were at most a few tons of silver remaining in circulation in east asia to back up the system of paper currency instituted during Song and perpetuated under Yuan.

During the Ming dynasty, for controversial reasons counterfeit control completely collapsed and paper money counterfeiting ballooned . As a result paper money were withdrawn from circulation and precious metal economy returned. But the problem of diminishing amount of silver available was not solved. So silver was increasingly replaced by copper as the main medium of exchange for most transactions throughout the economy. Silver itself became high status high value exchange medium.

Then in the 1550s the long term decline in the role of silver to that of copper reversed. During the early 1500s, China came into contact with the Spanish through the Philippines. Shortly afterwards the Spanish discovered the Potosi silver mine in Peru. This was and remains by far the largest and richest silver mine ever discovered. Silver mined from Potosi continues to makes up more than half of all the silver specie in circulation around the world. The Spanish quickly exploited the astonishing wind fall, the Chinese thirst for silver, and the long-standing European thirst for Chinese luxury goods, by establishing a circumglobal trade where conquistadors go west from Europe to Peru, where they emslave Indian labors to extract silver cheaply and with enormous loss of life. The silver is the. cast into ingots and transshipped west through Philippine to China, where they are exchanged for Chinese silk and porcelain, which are then shipped west to Europe, completing the circumglobal trade and sold for a large profit.

So between 1550 and 1630, it is estimated more than 10,000 tons (about 250 million Chinese teals) of Potosi silver were exported to china in exchange for Chinese silk and porcelain merchants. This tripled the silver in circulation in China, and made it possible for silver to be again the preeminent medium of exchange in the Chinese monetary system.

The inflow of so much silver in a relatively short time totally transformed the agriculture landscape in much of the coastal china. Large tracts of prime agricultural land were withdrawn from food production by large land owners and devoted to mulberry tree raising to feed the silkworms to make more silk because it is so much more profitable to exchange silk for silver than rice or millet for copper. Large areas of forested land were similarly denuded of trees to feed porcelain kilns. Large number of peasants who couldn’t adapt from rice and millet production to Mulberry tree growing were driven off of their traditional farm lands and forced the migrate inland where they started to plant corn and potatoes, both also Spanish American imports, on hitherto uncultivatable uplands. By 1610 much of Chinese south East coastal went from subsistence agricultural economy to focus on luxury goods production. Farther inland hitherto marginal uplands that have been protected by natural forest are now devoted to corn and potato growing by migrant farmers forces off their land at the coast. Potato and corn have negligible soil protection value. The soil lost through erosion washes down hill onto river flood plains where traditional river valley based farming that has been the core of Chinese arbor culture for thousands of years primarily occurred. So this impoverished the local farmer as well. So the net effect is the tremendous influx of silver and wealth into China thanks to the Spanish trade was calamitous to a large part of Chinese peasantry. Even worse than the dislocation, Chinese peasants have no access to the silver because the silver came from abroad through merchants and crafts class, who didn;t depend very much on the food producing peasants. But the dominance of silver based trade to the Chinese economy means land rents are also demanded in silver. This is a double Whammy for the peasantry in a large part of China.

The net effect is, while the total wealth in Chinese society greatly increased during period, the peasantry experienced tremendous dislocation and impoverishment.

At the same time, the luxury goods production in coastal China became, in modern parlance, highly leveraged. In anticipation of ever higher inflow of Spanish silver year after year, the silk and porcelain merchants borrowed heavily against next years’ s expected earnings to invest in additional mulberry trees and porcelain kilns. If the flow of silver stopped, there will be financial ruination.

In 1630, the flood of silver into China went into precipitous decline. This was caused by another calamitous event, this time in Italy. In Europe this was the middle of the 30 year war. The Hapsburg monarch was neck deep in the war. Mercenaries hired by the Hapsburg monarchy marched through northern italy and spread a plague that killed a quarter of Italian population in one year. Northern Italy at the time was still the richest part of Europe, and thus the richest part of Hapsburg holdings. The Hapsburgs were hurting. Their distress did not go unnoticed. The war against the Hapsburgs turned decisively more vicious during the plague.

The Hapsburg empire has several parts and the other major part was Spain. In response to the financial ruin in Italy and the bitter turn of the war, the Hapsburgs halted the flow of Potosi silver to China, and ordered it shipped straight to Spain to fill in the financial hole and sustain its war effort.

The result of this is Chinese economy suffered massive inflation that in ten years quadrupled the value of silver, starved millions of peasants, and kindled the Li Zicheng’s uprising that toppled the Ming dynasty then ruling China 14 years later.
 
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nlalyst

Junior Member
Registered Member
@Richard Santos

Interesting theory, but it completely brakes down in face of evidence. Nowhere did I see a single mention of Japan!

How peculiar, since it was Japan and not Europe, which was the main source of silver to China until the late 17th century. In fact, in the 1630s imports of silver to China soared to their greatest values ever.

In this figure, Total=Europe + Japan. Source:
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1626175247800.png

A different source, paints a similar picture.
TABLE 1 ESTIMATES OF SILVER IMPORTS TO CHINA, 1550–1645, metric tons
1626175467100.png

Import of silver by Ming where at an all time high in the decade prior to the collapse. The sharp fall in the early 1640s is rather attributed to the turmoil in Ming due to famines and rebellions:

"More recently, the Taiwan scholar Li Longsheng has provided new quantitative evidence that supports scepticism about the claims for the catastrophic impact of diminished imports of silver on the late Ming economy. Based on the calculations of the value of Chinese exports (especially raw silk and silk cloth) and data on ship traffic, Li actually arrives at much higher figures for silver imports from Japan into China during the last years of the Ming. His data indicate that the level of silver imports to China remained high until 1641, and then fell by one-third the following year. Similarly, Li's estimates for silver imports from the Philippines show a large drop beginning only in 1643 (
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and
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). Li also concurs with my conclusion that the decline of silver imports resulted primarily from domestic social and economic turmoil in China—the outbreak of widespread peasant rebellions, as well as epidemic disease in many parts of China during the 1630s, is believed to have resulted in massive mortality—rather than an interruption in supply because of disturbances in the global economy (Li
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, p. 19)."
1626176157400.png

Source:
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Richard Santos

Captain
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I drew the theory from earlier works done by Spanish language scholarship which suggested Mexico exported an average 140 tons a year of Peruvian silver to China through Philippines between 1550 and 1630. It also challenged the amount of net silver export from japan to china by pointing out:
1. Japanese silver mines had been the only significant source of silver production in the sinosphere since around 900 AD. If japan could provide that much silver per year why had it not done so before?
2. What did japan receive in net import from China to warrant such large net outflow of silver? In comparison the value of the chinese goods spain sold in the European market was enormous. So if large amount of silver flowed from japan to china much of that silver likely ultimately came from Peru, and paid for chinese goods which ultimately went to Europe.
 

nlalyst

Junior Member
Registered Member
The boom in silver mining in Japan coincided with the discoveries of silver deposits in the new world.

1) From the 1550s to 1650s, 1/3 of the world's silver was mined in Japan (~ 200 tons annualy). Most authors on the subjects agree that Japan was the dominant supplier of silver to China in the century leading up to the collapse of the Ming.
2) Japan by and large imported raw and woven silk from China, but also gold, musk and porcelain. In return, they exported almost exclusively silver.

Sources:
1.
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2.
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Richard Santos

Captain
Registered Member
The boom in silver mining in Japan coincided with the discoveries of silver deposits in the new world.

1) From the 1550s to 1650s, 1/3 of the world's silver was mined in Japan (~ 200 tons annualy). Most authors on the subjects agree that Japan was the dominant supplier of silver to China in the century leading up to the collapse of the Ming.
2) Japan by and large imported raw and woven silk from China in exchange for their silver, but also gold, musk and porcelain.

Sources:
1.
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2.
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It might be 200 tons of silver ore, but 200 tons of refined silver is highly implausible. Potosi did not produce 200 tons of refined silver a year on average, and potosi was estimated to have produced over 50% of the refined silver in the world during that period and down to the present.
 

nlalyst

Junior Member
Registered Member
It might be 200 tons of silver ore, but 200 tons of refined silver is highly implausible. Potosi did not produce 200 tons of refined silver a year on average, and potosi was estimated to have produced over 50% of the refined silver in the world during that period and down to the present.
All the papers I read spoke of refined silver, mostly in form of high silver content coins. Just the two most well known mines in Japan, Iwami and Sado produced together 80 tons of refined silver annually at their peak.
 

james smith esq

Senior Member
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An interesting article from Foreign Policy that is somewhat relevant to the topic here.

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Archived version
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.
Very interesting. I was unaware of the history of the Taiping Rebellion. It’s also interesting to observe divergent outcomes of China’s and the US’s, contemporaneous, Civil Wars. The US emerged as a more centralized polity while China emerged as a more fragmented polity.
 
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feitianxianfeng

Just Hatched
Registered Member
Very interesting. I was unaware of the history of the Taiping Rebellion. It’s also interesting to observe divergent outcomes of China’s and the US’s, contemporaneous, Civil Wars. The US emerged as a more centralized polity while China emerged as a more fragmented polity.
My oversimplified opinions on the military perspective of the two wars:

For the US civil war, even though the Union forces are divided into various theaters and armies during the war, after the war the control of the forces are returned to the federal government.

For the Taiping Rebellion, Qing suffered heavy losses of its Green Standard which can be directly controlled by the central government, in the two Battles of Jiangnan (1856 & 1860) and other battles. For replacement, the central government needs to rely on the regional forces such as Xiang Army and Huai Army, which are based on local nobles and gentry. After the Taiping Rebellion, the regional forces continue to fight other rebellions and wars, as the central government cannot effectively reconstruct its own forces. These regional forces finally lead to warlordism.
 
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