IOTL, despite the rapid rise of gunpowder weaponry and China being its inventor and early pioneers, the bow and arrow were still seen in equal measure as much as gunpowder weapons were, your challenge is to create a scenario where the Ming dynasty has guns and cannons play a bigger role in their army.
AHC: Have the Ming dynasty make gunpowder weapons more central to their army.
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Early gunpowder weapons were crude and clumsy. Slow to load and not very accurate. For a long while, bows were actually superior in every aspect except possibly hitting power (although and English Longbow could probably punch through just about any armor that a man-portable gunpowder weapon could). The one huge advantage that gunpowder weapons had was that they were easy to learn how to use. A few days of training could produce a gunner as good as any other gunner. Bows on the other hand required years of practice to produce a good archer. So your alternate history would require conditions that required larger numbers of missile troops than could be met with the available archers and thus the commanders have to turn to the quickly trainable gunners to fill the need.
One question, how come in places like the Ottoman Empire, Europe and Japan, gunpowder weapons seemed to have been so prominent, while in China, a place that was also known to face gigantic threats, they always seemed to take a back seat to other weapons? How come bows and arrows were used as much as gunpowder was by the Ming while the Europeans were seemingly phasing out the bow and arrows for muskets?
Europe and such were more accepting of guns because the 10,000+ lords wanted an edge over one another. Guns offered a way to gain hegemony over rivals since it was a new and powerful weapon. China, however, wasn't fighting to expand power. It was seeking to maintain it. Why use this new trend when the traditional methods worked great? This idea carried on late into Imperial China, as seen with the Boxer Rebellion. Tradition was and is a powerful influence
What about the Ottomans? They were a rather centralized empire that was known for making extensive usage of gunpowder, though I'm not an expert on Ottoman history.
This. The Chinese weren't facing peer level opponents/rivals like the European states or the Islamic empires. It was enough to fight off the steppe tribes and that was that
Bows and arrows were not used in equal measures as gunpowder weapons.The Ming Dynasty was already heavily reliant upon gunpowder weapons, especially the late phase,as it simply did not have the means of training good archers in quantity.Don’t quite understand where you got the notion that gunpowder weapons were somewhat neglected in the Ming Dynasty.What should be noted however is that bows were used by more elite troops(who are the private troops of generals) because the Ming Dynasty had shoddy craftsmanship and that the gunpowder weapons they had were so unreliable and dangerous to the user that it was often left to the grunts.
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The Ming were in fact the first gunpowder empire, as Tonio Andrade has argued extensively. The Chinese used firearms in great quantities from their inception, and constantly adopted foreign weapons and adapted them to their own use. Qi Jiguang argued forcefully that the arquebus was a wholly superior weapon to the bow, being more accurate and powerful. They adopted the breech loading Portuguese cannon, and then the muzzleloading Dutch cannon; they actually improved the latter by an ingenious method of casting the cannon as a composite of an iron throat and bronze body, combining the strength and cheapness of cast iron and the flexibility of bronze. For the most part, Chinese gunpowder weapons kept pace with Western developments until the mid 17th century, whereupon interstate warfare in East Asia markedly slowed down. In the 18th century, the adoption of the flintlock as the universal infantry arm and the development of scientifically designed cannon, combined with preexisting advantages in fortress and warship design and burgeoning industrial technology to create a decisive advantage in the Opium Wars.
Oh, I know about the Hongyipao and Koxinga kicking out the Dutch, but it still kinda vexes me that the country where gunpowder was first discovered, has a rich military history and is known for having large conflicts, seemed to have fallen behind so much, seems hard to believe.
The Ming Dynasty as a whole fell behind because of social and institutional issues such as the repressive new-Confucian school of Li and a stringent caste system where professions became hereditary.
Would you mind elaborating on what those social and institutional issues were? I have a huge interest in Chinese history and would be interested in learning more.
They recognized the power of gunpowder and used it because they would become more powerful because of it. I thought they used it a lot in their wars against the Mamlukes and in the Balkans. It all comes down to power in the end.
I am not a specialist in Confucianism,but from what I have read, the Neo-Confucian school of Li, which originated in the Southern Song Dynasty and was adopted as THE Orthodox version of Confucianism during the Southern Song Dynasty and Ming Dynasty promoted discrimination against women and science(the latter is seen as frivolous).The Ming Dynasty also had a highly stratified caste system whereby the craftsmen (along with the soldier) profession was hereditary.When corruption eventually creeps in,it was not an enviable role to be a craftsmen in service to the state(where a lot of arsenals were state owned).There was also not much means of escaping it given the profession was hereditary.All of it meant that techniques were only passed only between father and son, without much incentives of innovating or the means to produce good quality weapons given the corruption.
Just a general nitpick, Confucianism has a long history of discriminating against women, Confucius himself wrote about how women were inferior to men, they were looking down on women way before the school of Li came in.
The Ottoman Empire was rather small when it first adopted gunpowder. There are several theories as to why the "Gunpowder Empires" (Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals) emerged. Personally, I believe that the knightly societies of Europe had something to do with the region's comparatively slow adoption of gunpowder. Warfare was dominated by men who trained their entire lives on hand-to-hand combat and heavy cavalry. Peasants who would benefit the most from gunpowder had no voice in the rules of war. This was not as true with the Turks, who were not dominated by a professional military class as much as in Western Europe.
The global distribution of potassium nitrate might be a factor as well.
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The main advantage of arquebus over the English long bow was armor penetration. Plate was completely impenetrable to arrows.
The enemies the Ming faced at the time didn’t wear armor with this much protection. Furthermore Ming gunpowder innovation took place in two periods, during the formative era in the 1300s and towards the end in the 1600s, with long periods of peace in between. In the former they got pretty far for early gunpowder weapons, multi-barrel guns with serpentine triggers. In the latter their innovations were simply too little too late. Arquebuses were used extensively by the Japanese in the Imjin War and the Ming were in the process of adapting similar weapons following that conflict with the Japanese.
However the Ming fell to a combination of internal rebellion and Manchu invasion which couldn’t be stopped by better guns alone. The next dynasty was built by a semi-pastoral horse archer army imposing rule on a far larger Han majority. The last thing they wanted was a gunpowder revolution that swings the advantage to the infantry.
So if the Ming state was resilient enough to survive the 17th century crisis, a gunpowder revolution would be very likely.
The enemies the Ming faced at the time didn’t wear armor with this much protection. Furthermore Ming gunpowder innovation took place in two periods, during the formative era in the 1300s and towards the end in the 1600s, with long periods of peace in between. In the former they got pretty far for early gunpowder weapons, multi-barrel guns with serpentine triggers. In the latter their innovations were simply too little too late. Arquebuses were used extensively by the Japanese in the Imjin War and the Ming were in the process of adapting similar weapons following that conflict with the Japanese.
However the Ming fell to a combination of internal rebellion and Manchu invasion which couldn’t be stopped by better guns alone. The next dynasty was built by a semi-pastoral horse archer army imposing rule on a far larger Han majority. The last thing they wanted was a gunpowder revolution that swings the advantage to the infantry.
So if the Ming state was resilient enough to survive the 17th century crisis, a gunpowder revolution would be very likely.
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School of Li encouraged women to not remarry after the death of their husbands as well as foot binding.It encourage the notion that a woman was the property of her husband.This was most certainly not a thing before the school of Li.
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More of looking down on women in general I mean, Confucians always looked down on women, how much they did varied through the centuries, I'm guessing that the school of Li made their sexism much more pronounced.
kholieken
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https://www.goodreads.com/series/74695
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7690166-the-troubled-empire
There are many good resources about Ming. And there are numerous trouble that make Ming survival difficult : repeated weather disaster, ecological collapse due to introduction upland crops, dependence on imported silver, continued factionalism Donglin movement and its opponent, paranoia of its last Emperor, etc.
and for military matter, army had tendency to very quickly degrade once they no longer fight war, so military in peaceful country would fumble badly when encounter sudden military problem.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7690166-the-troubled-empire
There are many good resources about Ming. And there are numerous trouble that make Ming survival difficult : repeated weather disaster, ecological collapse due to introduction upland crops, dependence on imported silver, continued factionalism Donglin movement and its opponent, paranoia of its last Emperor, etc.
But they didn't fallen behind. Its Europe who jumped ahead with Industrial Revolutions. compared to many other places, China society in Ming and Qing isstill very advanced.
and for military matter, army had tendency to very quickly degrade once they no longer fight war, so military in peaceful country would fumble badly when encounter sudden military problem.
Well, they did definitely stagnate. China only just kept pace to the beginning of the 18th century; they never adopted crucial European advantages like the star fortress or the broadside warship, and held onto matchlock muskets that were obsolete long before the Industrial Revolution. While China did adapt muzzleloading cannon to their purposes, they didn't match the consistent refinements made possible in Europe by experimental science. They didn't develop things like carronades, or light and powerful field artillery, or conical powder, or explosive shells, or devastating rockets.