Recently, the popularity of the costume TV series "Daming Fenghua" has made many viewers have a strong interest in the history of the Ming Dynasty. In the play, the heroine Sun Ruowei repeatedly asked the Yongle Emperor Zhu Di to release more than 30,000 "Jingnan orphans" in Nuer Gandusi, and Zhu Di himself repeatedly talked about the topic involving Nuer Gandusi's "Jingnan Orphans". So the question is, what is the real history of the Nuer Gandusi? What is it for?
Founded in the ninth year of Yongle (1411) of the Ming Dynasty, Nuer Gandu Division was a military and political institution governing the Heilongjiang, Ussuri River basins and Sakhalin Island regions of the Ming Dynasty, and its seat of government was located in Nuergan (present-day Nikolayevsk, Russia) on the east bank of the lower reaches of the Heilongjiang River.
Geographically, Nuer Gandusi was located at the northeasternmost tip of the Ming Dynasty's territory, and in ancient times it was a sparsely populated and extremely cold place. Therefore, in "The Style of Daming", it is taken for granted that Zhu Di sent a large number of "Jing orphans" and their families to slave Gandusi to serve hard labor, but the real history is not so. In fact, the qing dynasty did to distribute the criminal subjects and their families to the northeast to serve hard labor, that is, the famous line we often hear in TV dramas: "Send ningguta, and enslave people with armor." "And the criminal ministers of the Ming Dynasty were all sent to the southern regions, such as today's Hainan and Guangxi.
Since Nuer Gandusi was not a place of exile for the distribution of criminal subjects, what was it for during the Ming Dynasty? The answer may come as a surprise to many, because in the strict sense of the word, Nuer Gandusi was not really controlled territory by the Ming Dynasty.
In the early days of the Ming Dynasty, there were many Jurchen tribes living in the northeast region that lived by fishing and hunting, and the Ming Dynasty divided them into three Jurchen tribes according to their area of activity, namely: Jianzhou Jurchen, Haixi Jurchen, and Savage Jurchen. At that time, the Jurchens were backward in productivity and extremely scarce in materials. The Ming Dynasty took this as an opportunity to attract the Jurchens to accept the ming dynasty's world order through tributary trade.
At the beginning of Zhu Di's reign, the Jianzhou Jurchens living in the mudanjiang, Suifenhe and Changbai Mountains were the first to accept the invitation of the Ming Dynasty. Later, the Jurchens of Haixi, who were more distant than the Jurchens of Jianzhou, also agreed to the Ming Dynasty to set up a guardhouse on their own territory. In the ninth year of Yongle (1411), Zhu Di sent the famous eunuch Yi Fuha, a famous eunuch from Haixi Jurchen, to lead an expedition to the mouth of the Heilongjiang River to recruit the Savage Jurchen. After arriving in the lower reaches of the Heilongjiang River, the team was warmly welcomed by the Savage Woman, and the two sides exchanged gifts. After some exchanges, the Savage Jurchen leader agreed that the Ming Dynasty would set up a capital command and envoy division in Nuergan in the lower reaches of the Heilongjiang River, which was the origin of the establishment of the Nuer Gandu Division.
The establishment of the Nuer Gandu Division marked the incorporation of all the Jurchen ministries in the northeast into the Ming Dynasty's governance system. However, it is worth pointing out that the Ming Dynasty did not have the right to conscript and collect taxes in this region, and its control of the northeast region mainly relied on the means of bondage, that is, the Ming Dynasty gave the Jurchens trade privileges, and the Jurchen leaders nominally accepted the Ming Dynasty's canonization, but the internal affairs of the Jurchens were actually decided by the leaders of the Jurchen tribes. The Ming Dynasty only nominally included the area under the jurisdiction of the Nuer Gandusi into the territory of the Ming Dynasty, which is fundamentally different from the concept of territory as we modern people understand it. Therefore, the distribution of "Jing's orphans" to Nuer Gandusi mentioned in the "Great Ming Fenghua" is completely inconceivable in real history.
Reference: "Myo history"