What were the military households in the Ming Dynasty?

Military household system in Ming dynasty

After Zhu Yuanzhang proclaimed himself emperor, he used the army to open up wasteland by stationing troops. Exploitation of non-commissioned officers. According to the Records of Food Goods in Ming History, the Ming government stipulated that the troops in the border areas were "three points guarding the city and seven points farming; The mainland is divided into two parts and eight parts. " The troops stationed in the army have to pay taxes to the government, which is called "farming". During the Hongwu period, it was stipulated that the military camp "had a bucket of mu tax". The tax grain of the military camp is one of the main incomes of the Ming government.

In the early years of Hongwu, the central government set up the Governor's Office as the highest military organ in the country, commanding all commanders and envoys in the country. In the 13th year of Hongwu (AD 1380), the commander-in-chief was divided into the commander-in-chief of the central, left, right, front and rear armies. All the commanding envoys, as well as all the commanding envoys and other officials, have been placed. The guards under the jurisdiction of each division have no rules. Generally speaking, a guard has 5600 people, as well as commanders and other officials. Each guard has jurisdiction over 5,000 houses, 1,120 people have 1,000 houses and thousands of officials. There are 100 households under the jurisdiction of every thousand households, with 1 12 as 100 households and 100 officials. Every hundred households also have jurisdiction over two general flags and one general flag officer. Each ordinary flag has five flags.

There are basically four ways to source the chief officials in Ming Dynasty. According to the military records of the Ming dynasty, the soldiers taken by Wei were from the levy, from the attachment, and from the surrender. Conscription is the soldiers of the original peasant uprising army and the anti-Yuan Qunxiong ministries. Join the army, that is, surrender the yuan army. Send troops to exile, that is, officials and soldiers and civilians who are punished for crimes. The army in exile is also called the Enjun or the Immortal Army. In addition to the above three kinds, the fourth kind is the pile army, that is, the army filled with civilian personnel recruited from all over the country, which is the main source of non-commissioned officers in health clinics. As soon as civilians are recruited as non-commissioned officers, they will be enlisted in the army for generations, and they are not allowed to trade and participate in the imperial examinations. In the Ming dynasty, there was a strict distinction between civil and military status, and military status was also called military households.

Military households all over the country are directly under the jurisdiction of the Governor's Office of the Fifth Army and are not bound by local governors. All military households are hereditary. The main task of the sergeants in the military household guards is to serve as the former army in a fixed guard station, which is called Zhengding. Zhengding's children are Er Ding or, when Zhengding dies, Er Ding and the army corpse will take turns to replace them. If the family has no heir, it will be replaced by the same family.

Military households "officers have heavy burdens and relatively low social status, and Ming people are generally lucky enough to leave the army." For example, at that time, the Han people in Lingnan were called civilian households, while the Guyue people were called military households.

After the British orthodoxy, the health care system gradually declined, and court officials at all levels seized and occupied wasteland, serving the sergeants in health care centers at will, and many sergeants were even forced to farm for dignitaries and become tenant farmers. Soldiers became ill without medicine and died without coffins, which led to more and more soldiers fleeing, while officers used this to embezzle and lack monthly food. This phenomenon was very serious after Jiajing in Ming Dynasty. For example, according to the Records of Jingzhou Waiji, Tang Shunzhi wrote in his notes to the emperor after investigating the border affairs of Zhen Ji Town: "From huanghua town to Juyongguan, it ends in the border town. Anyone in the third district found that 23,250 soldiers and 10 195 escaped. " Juyongguan front line is regarded as a military town that determines the fate of the imperial court. Even here, the disintegration of the army in other places is even more serious. In this case, the combat effectiveness of the National Defense Center has been so weak that it has fallen without a fight, and the military camp system has completely collapsed. In the last few years of British orthodoxy, the fighting capacity of the Weisuo army became weaker and weaker, and the recruitment system began to appear. Recruiting soldiers is different from Wei Suojun, who was recruited by the imperial court among the common people in order to cope with the war. Recruiters are still citizens, and all wages and military supplies are paid by the state after enlistment. The state, in turn, passed on this huge military expenditure to farmers through tax collection. With the increase of the number of conscripts, the tax corvee borne by farmers is getting heavier and heavier.

To sum up, the military household system in the Ming Dynasty and the Eight Banners system in the Qing Dynasty have several similar characteristics:

1 The identity of military households in the Ming Dynasty was hereditary. Children and grandchildren are all soldiers, and they are not allowed to engage in commerce and handicrafts, or even to take the imperial examinations. This is the same as the flag bearer in Qing Dynasty. The Qing government stipulated that flag bearers could only be soldiers and were not allowed to engage in other industries.

The Ming government allocated land to the military households, and the military salaries of the Ming army were actually paid by the military households themselves, and the court even taxed them. After the Eight Banners Army entered the customs, it was distributed to the Eight Banners, and land income became one of the main sources of livelihood for the Banners.

The ethnic composition of military households in Ming Dynasty is diverse. For example, at that time, the Han people in Lingnan were called civilian households, while the Guyue people belonged to military households. Manchu, Mongolian and Han nationality are the main nationalities of flag-bearers in Qing Dynasty.

The social status of military households in Ming dynasty was very low, and Ming people generally left the army by luck. In the Qing dynasty, the status of standard-bearers was higher than that of ordinary people.

There were many military households in the Ming Dynasty, with more than 2 million soldiers alone, while the Eight Banners Army in the Qing Dynasty had 200,000 soldiers at most.

Military households in the Ming Dynasty needed to cultivate their own land, so senior officers often annexed and enslaved the wasteland of junior soldiers, which led to an increasing number of non-commissioned officers fleeing and the gradual decline of the medical care system. Banners in the Qing Dynasty mainly lived in Beijing to defend the supreme ruler, and most of the land they got was in Gyeonggi area, earning income through food and rent. Therefore, the Eight Banners Army was still fighting in the late Qing Dynasty, and the military households in the Ming Dynasty were basically replaced by recruiting soldiers after the middle of the Ming Dynasty.

I hope this helps.