A God Becomes an Ancestor

This chapter talks about the garrisons after the fall of the Ming. Even after the Ming military institution no longer existed, it continued to matter to the people who had lived in it. Some refused to let the institution die, seeking to maintain the prerogatives they had enjoyed under it. Others found they had inherited obligations that survived the change in dynasty and had to find ways to manage those obligations. Still others tried to adapt elements of the Ming institution to suit the new context. They found ways to make themselves legible to the Qing state, and they did so using language that Qing officials could accept, even though the language described social institutions that were actually very different from what they seemed.

A Temple with Two Gods

This chapter shows how military households strategized within the Ming state's registration system and how their assignment to the region generated new kinds of social relations. It explains how Ming military institutions have shaped local social life over the centuries and how their legacies shape social relations even up to the present day. The chapter also discusses the variety of approaches and methods members of military households used to integrate into the existing communities around them, sometimes infiltrating and taking over existing community organizations such as temples and thereby developing and maintaining a separate communal identity within the larger society, sometimes integrating as individuals and families with that society and blending into it. It explores the families' process in moving between different regulatory systems and tried to even take over existing social organizations. A small temple in the village of Hutou provides an illustration of how these new social relations could endure.

A Soldier Curses a Clerk

This chapter discusses military colonies that supported military garrisons. In these colonies, groups of military households worked the land to feed their colleagues in the garrisons. The tragic story of the Yan family of Linyang illustrates how soldiers of the colony became highly adept at turning the differences between their land and ordinary land to their own benefit. Commercialization of the economy generated complex patterns of landownership and usage, and households in the colonies tried to draw on these patterns for their own purposes. But everyday politics in the colonies involved more than manipulating the land regime. Just like their counterparts in the guard, households stationed there also had to integrate with the communities around them.

A Younger Brother Inherits a Windfall

This chapter opens with the story of the Zheng family, whose creative solutions to the challenge of choosing a family member to serve in the army introduces sophisticated strategies through which families in the military system addressed their obligations to provide labor to the army. Their regulatory position was straightforward—the Zheng family had to provide one soldier for military duties—but their actual situation could be complex. The Zheng family developed elaborate strategies to make their obligations more predictable, to reduce their risks, and to distribute the benefits of their registration as widely as possible while minimizing the costs. The chapter explores how families responded to various implications of registration, and how the social implications of the various meanings of registration changed over time. It focuses on the strategies registered households came up with using the organizational and cultural resources they had at their disposal, and how their actions in turn affected that repertoire of resources.

An Officer in Cahoots with Pirates

This chapter introduces the Jiang family, hereditary commanders of the garrison at Fuquan. At least one of their members was both an officer and also a smuggler and pirate. This story shows how families took advantage of their special position in the military system to gain advantage in illicit commerce. Their proximity to the state and their ability to negotiate the differences between the military and commercial realms using their special position gave them a competitive advantage in overseas trade. Families strategizing about how to work within military institutions, working the system to their advantage, making decisions about the degree to which they would or would not be incorporated by the Chinese state, played an important role in the development of China's diaspora and its global trade linkages. The chapter also talks about soldiers stationed in the garrison that had to adapt to the new contexts in which they found themselves and build new communities.

A Family Reunion Silences a Bully

This chapter talks about the Ye family of Fuqing, whose most famous member, Grand Secretary Ye Xianggao, has provided an account of how his family tried to restore contact with their soldier-kin on the northern frontier. Registration as a military household entailed more than simply providing soldiers to serve in the army. It carried valuable tax exemptions. It exposed the household to potential threats and blackmail from their neighbours. The chapter also talks about distinct regulatory regimes that affected everyday life for military households. There was the civilian household registration regime, access to which insulated a family from conscription at the cost of higher corvée exactions. There was the original conscription system, whereby family members in the home village were vulnerable to conscription. And there was the reformed conscription system after the localization policy was put in place, which effectively insulated the family from conscription and enabled them to reduce their corvée obligations.

Conclusion

This chapter reviews some of the ways Ming families dealt with their obligations to provide labor service to the state. It provides broader ways of thinking about the art of being governed in late imperial China and beyond. The families faced some distinctive challenges because they were registered as military households, but the fact of their having to deal with state institutions did not make them distinctive. For these families, as for most of the people who in the past several centuries have lived in what is today China, the critical political decision was not whether to engage with the state but how best to do so. This chapter also illustrates four cycles of human interaction with a changing institution. Within each cycle, people deployed their ingenuity and elements from their repertoire of cultural resources to better manage individual, family, and communal interaction with the institution. The institutional chronology reveals how the evolution of the institution generated different sorts of challenges for different groups of people, and how they responded strategically.

An Officer Founds a School

This chapter explores the soldiers' marriage practices, the temples at which they worshipped, and the Confucian schools at which some of them studied to show how soldiers and their families became integrated into the societies where they were garrisoned. When sons and daughters of the guard married, both to fellow military households and to other local families, they created new social networks that territorialized military household families in the locale. The chapter also talks about military households and their building of schools and temples for the community. Just as in other towns and villages in late imperial China, temples often served as the main venue for local management, the site where conflicts and tensions were worked out. In general, official military cults tended to be gradually displaced by popular gods, both those that soldiers brought with them from their own native places and those that were already worshipped in the area.

A Father Loses Three Sons to the Army

This chapter provides a background on the consequences of choices about military mobilization in China's southeast coast under the Ming dynasty from 1368 to 1644. It does not focus on military or logistical or fiscal consequences but on social consequences of how military institutions shaped the lives of ordinary people. This chapter tells the stories of ordinary Ming families' interaction with state institutions and how this interaction affected other kinds of social relations. It explains how ordinary people in the Ming were able to deal with their obligations to provide manpower to the army and what were the broader consequences of their behaviour. The chapter also shows how people seized opportunities offered by living with the Ming state. Their strategies, practices, and discourses constitute a pattern of political interaction that was not unique to soldiers but was distributed more broadly across Ming society, and was not unique to the Ming but can be identified in other times in Chinese history, and perhaps beyond.