Title

The Ministry of Revenue’s Finances and Its Supply of Northwestern Garrisons in the Early Chongzhen Period (1628-1633)

Author

Peng Hao

Genre

Article

Pages

727-763

DOI

10.6503/THJCS.202312_53(4).0004

Download

PDF

Language

Chinese

Key words

Late Ming, northwestern garrisons, Ministry of Revenue, Duzhi zouyi 度支奏議

Abstract

After the war against the Manchus began in 1618, the Ministry of Revenue of the Ming Dynasty shifted its focus to financing armies in Liaodong 遼東. In contrast, garrisons located on the northwestern border (Shanxi 山西 and Shaanxi 陝西) were not granted adequate funding and therefore fell behind in paying their soldiers, who had hardly been able to make ends meet and were nursing grievances. During the Jisi 己巳 Incident, the first Manchurian invasion of China proper in 1629, the northwestern garrisons dispatched large-scale reinforcements to Beijing to fight against the Manchus. However, many within these troops deserted and even launched mutinies for being ill-supplied, boosting the peasant rebellion which eventually toppled the Ming regime. Despite the dramatically weakening military capacity of Shanxi garrisons and the increasingly popular violent uprising in Shaanxi, the Ministry of Revenue remained reluctant to invest more resources in those northwestern garrisons than in Liaodong. This indicates that the Ministry of Revenue was subject to the national defense strategy as an executive agency for military supplies with little power to audit military expenditures, much less play a positive role in political decision-making.