During the reign of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, the envoys of the Han Dynasty sent envoys to Southwest Yi, and when the King of Dian chatted with the envoys of the Han Dynasty, he asked a very domineering but ignorant word.
“
Han who is bigger than me?
(History of the Southwest Yilie)
This made the envoys of the Han Dynasty look confused, and it took many years to ask such a question of self-control, and they knew nothing about the strength of the Han Dynasty.
The key Han Dynasty emissaries then sent envoys to the Yelang Kingdom, and the king of the Yelang Kingdom also asked the same question, and the Han Dynasty emissaries were asked about physical and mental exhaustion.
Therefore, later generations often used "night lang arrogance" to indicate self-control, ignorance and fearlessness.
In the middle and late Ming Dynasty in the 16th century, Western countries also did not know anything about the strength of the Ming Dynasty, so all kinds of arrogant plans to conquer the Ming Dynasty emerged one after another.
So let's take stock of which Western countries in the 16th century wanted to conquer the Ming Dynasty, and what was their fate?
1. The earliest clamor for the conquest of the Ming Dynasty was Portugal
The first successful voyage of the Portuguese to the Ming Dynasty was in the twelfth year of Emperor Mingwu Zhengde (1517), when Fernand Andrad's fleet of 8 ships arrived in Guangdong.
But in fact, before the formal contact with the Ming Dynasty, it was at the time of the great maritime colonial expansion of the West, for the Ming Dynasty, which had a vast territory and rich products.
The Portuguese, who had already occupied Manchuria in Southeast Asia, had begun planned detective activities against the Ming Dynasty, and there was no shortage of advocates of the conquest of the Ming Dynasty by force
。
It so happened that at this time, the Portuguese king Don Manuel I was also a ruler who was obsessed with the expansion of the empire, so he had ideas and expectations for the conquest of the Ming Dynasty.
As early as 1508 (the third year of Zhengde), he instructed the commander of the fleet to Gonzaga, Segra, to pay attention to collecting intelligence about the Ming Army's military, political, and economic aspects from the Ming Dynasty's Nanyang merchants.
Then give yourself a detailed return.
You have to find out what happened to the Qin (Ming Dynasty)... What are the new styles and sizes of their ships? ...... Were they cowardly or strong? Do they have weapons or artillery? ...... Are their bodies tall? ...... Is their country big? ...... What customs do they observe? Where does their territory extend? ......
(National Archives of Portugal, Chronicles, Part I, Document No. 82)
Since then, whether it is Ming intelligence obtained from Southeast Asia or Ming Intelligence collected on the coast of Guangdong, it has been continuously transmitted back to Portugal.
With the deepening of contact with the Ming Dynasty's trade and other aspects, the argument advocating the conquest of the Ming Dynasty by force began to rise, and the earliest systematic discussion of those who conquered the Ming Dynasty by force began to rise.
It was the first Portuguese ambassador to visit China, Tomei Pires.
In his own writings in 1515 (the tenth year of Zhengde), he boasted that proving the Ming Dynasty was an easy task.
The Governor of Manchuria did not need as much strength as people said to be in order to subdue China (the Ming Dynasty), because they were weak and vulnerable. The people who often went there and the captains of the ships said that the Indian governor who led dozens of large ships to conquer Manchuria could take all the coastal areas of China (Ming Dynasty) without wasting his efforts
。 (A Brief Chronicle of the Orient)
But in fact there was no market for his conquest rhetoric, because the Portuguese simply could not free up their hands to attack the Ming Dynasty on a large scale, and the Ming Dynasty was very reluctant to trade and contact with them.
Because the Portuguese are not in the list of tributary states in the "Ancestral Instructions of the Emperor and Ming", the Portuguese often need to pretend to be Siamese and others in order to make money from trade in Guangdong.
From the late Zhengde period when portuguese began to come to China, shortly after the death of Emperor Wuzong of Ming, the Portuguese burned and plundered many times along the coast of Guangdong, and were eventually expelled by force by the Ming officials and troops.
The Battle of Tuen Mun and the Battle of Sai Cao Wan broke out successively, and the Portuguese fleet in China suffered heavy losses, and their arrogance was also suppressed.
In particular, at the behest of the Portuguese king, he came to the Ming Dynasty to negotiate, in essence, he wanted to occupy the coast of Guangdong and encroach on the colonization of the Moldin fleet, which was beaten by the Ming army and was more than half damaged.
Only then did Murdin clearly realize that there was no drama in conquering the Ming Dynasty by force, and whoever believed in this argument again had no brain.
He wrote to the King of Portugal, saying:
At that time, the information provided to you in the Heavenly Father (Manuel I) (conquest of the Ming Dynasty) was very blind, and if there was no accurate data, I thought it was true and false... This is the real situation that happened there (the fiasco at the Battle of West Grass Bay), and fleets should no longer be sent to places thousands of miles away from Portugal. Even if the ship is strong and strong, it is not foolproof... The place where we can play here (the Ming Dynasty) is not as easy as we think, and the enemy (the Ming army) is much more powerful than we think!
(Letter from Moldin to the King
At this point, the Portuguese gave up the delusion of conquering the Ming Dynasty by force, and began to gain substantial rights and interests in a gesture of currying favor with the Ming Dynasty, and finally obtained the right of residence in Macau.
2. The Spanish conquest of the Ming Dynasty
After the Portuguese entrenched in Manchuria and other places, the Spaniards also quickly captured Luzon and other places, and also planned the military conquest of the Ming Dynasty.
The Spaniards first conceived of conquering the Ming Dynasty by force in 1571 (the fifth year of Longqing).
In 1573 (the first year of the Wanli Calendar), from Mexico and other places, the military and political information collected about the Ming Dynasty was continuously transmitted to Spain.
Since then, people from Manila have been sent to the southeast coast, and then traded while collecting the latest intelligence of the Ming Dynasty, and at the same time officially envisioning Manila as a forward base for the planning of the military conquest of the Ming Dynasty.
In 1578 (the sixth year of the Wanli Calendar), a Spaniard named Palacio provided the Spanish royal family with a memorandum of conquest of the Ming Dynasty by force, and even explored the possibility of merging the Ming Dynasty with Luzon after the conquest of the Ming Dynasty.
In 1584 (the twelfth year of the Wanli calendar), Francisco Cabral, the president of the Spanish missionary in Macau, and others wrote to King Philip II of Spain.
It provides the earliest and most detailed and systematic plan for the conquest of the Ming Dynasty by force.
He vigorously advocated that after conquering the Ming Dynasty, it would be possible to obtain huge benefits such as trade, missionary work, taxation, gold, silver and minerals, and emphasized that conquering the Ming Dynasty would be easy.
Here's why:
First, the Ming Dynasty people had a pretentious personality, weak and uncontrollable, and vulnerable;
Second, the Ming Dynasty army was not martial;
Not only did they have little combat experience, but they were still greedy and afraid of death when they started fighting, and using the distance between the Ming army and the Wukou, two or three thousand Ming troops could not defeat 13 Wukou.
And concluded:
The Chinese (Ming Dynasty) people are not the material for war!
(Letter to Philip II)
Third, the Weapons of the Ming Army were extremely backward;
Although the Ming army was equipped with artillery, there were no copper shells, and the ships of the marine division were not as tall and strong as the Spanish; although there were walls in the Ming Dynasty, the Spaniards could easily destroy them.
Fourth, the people of the Ming Dynasty were deeply oppressed by the ruling class, and rebellions and uprisings did not break out in the Territory of the Ming Dynasty, and the internal stability of the Ming Dynasty was not stable;
Fifth, the officials of the Ming Dynasty were corrupt and incompetent, and they especially liked to whip and beat the people, and they could appropriately win the people to lead the way.
According to the president's estimation, if the Spaniards wanted to conquer the Ming Dynasty, they could easily defeat the Ming Dynasty as long as they could invest 8,000 to 10,000 troops.
As I can see, in the beginning it was only seven or eight thousand, or at most ten thousand, and a fleet of seven or eight thousand, or at most, to carry out this great undertaking.
Troops could be deployed nearby from Portuguese India, the Philippines, Peru and New Spain.
In addition, two or three thousand Japanese minions would be enough.
Moreover, it was deliberately emphasized that in order to reduce military expenditure, it was possible not to pay or pay a small amount of military pay, because the Spanish Expeditionary Force or the Japanese Servant Army could be allowed to "treat" themselves by plundering.
Entering the city is easy, and His Majesty can grab money, weapons and ammunition, supplies, ships, and maintain the war and move forward without new expenses.
The minimum requirement for the expeditionary Ming Dynasty was to take Guangdong, and after successfully taking Guangdong, attack other provinces, or at least capture the coastal provinces.
This expedition plan was the template for the subsequent Spanish conquest of the Ming Dynasty, and the follow-up expedition plan was like this plan plus, but the plan was always a plan.
And it has not been implemented in any way.
3. The Dutch coveted the Ming Dynasty
As a maritime empire in the later period, the Netherlands did not have much territory to occupy when it came out of the mix, and the Ming Dynasty had been in contact with the Portuguese for a long time.
Macau, as the largest trading port in the Far East, made the Dutch salivate to take it for themselves, and from the late Wanli period to the apocalypse, the Dutch launched several attacks on Macau.
Seriously, the Dutch had no plans to completely conquer the Ming Dynasty.
But they always had plans to capture Macau and replace it, as well as to seize some coastal islands of the Ming Dynasty and open up new Far Eastern trade bases.
As early as the twenty-ninth year of the Wanli Calendar (1601), the Dutch fleet had arrived off the coast of Macau, and at the instigation of the Guangdong tax eunuch Li Feng, there was a skirmish with the Portuguese.
The battle ended in the defeat of the Dutch.
Later, in the thirty-second year of the Wanli Calendar (1604), the Dutchman Wei Malang's fleet occupied Penghu, but was expelled by the Fujian military general Shen Yourong.
Whether it was going to war with the Portuguese in Macau or occupying Penghu, the Dutch had always had a clear goal of taking a piece of the Far East trade.
Later, in the early years of the Apocalypse, the Dutch again sent expeditionary fleets to make a comeback, this time with the first goal still being to capture Macau or other islands off the coast of the Ming Dynasty.
The capture of Macau, or the occupation of another suitable place along the coast of China (Ming Dynasty), was a top priority for us to obtain trade from China (Ming Dynasty).
。 (The Dutchman in Formosa)
So in 1622 (the second year of the Apocalypse), the Dutch launched another raid on Macau, and the two sides fought a relatively fierce battle, which still ended in the defeat of the Dutch.
So the Dutch went to Penghu again to settle down.
During the Dutch occupation of Penghu, although it was still mainly a demand for trade with the Ming Dynasty, it was essentially a business of burning and looting.
The degree of disaster to the southeast coast, especially Fujian, was far greater than the sins created by the Portuguese in Guangdong in those years, and even more brutal than that of the Wokou in those years.
The Swiss mercenary Lipbon of the Dutch East India Company has called out:
We launched another offensive, and everywhere we went, we were spared! Burn and plunder all year long along the coast of China (Ming Dynasty) and nearby islands to see who can't stand it first, whether it's China (Ming Dynasty) or us!
(Memoirs of Maritime Adventures)
Zeng Dezhao, a contemporary missionary in the Ming Dynasty, also pointed out:
Because of the Dutch, the Chinese (Ming Dynasty) people had a bad impression of them, and often plundered the coast in that area!
(The Great China Chronicle)
For details of the raiding and killing of the Dutch in Fujian and other places during this period, we can refer to the Dutchman Bondku, who participated in the matter, in detail in the "Voyages of the East India".
When they were wandering along the fujian coast, they almost reached the point of burning and plundering every day, especially when they plundered nearly 2,000 people and sold them to Batavia as slaves.
There are no words to describe its means other than madness.
During this period, the Fujian side of the Ming Dynasty negotiated with it but was fruitless, and several battles broke out between the two sides, which basically ended in the defeat of the Ming Dynasty.
It was not until the fourth year of the Apocalypse (1624) that the Dutch evacuated from Penghu to Taiwan through a combination of force and negotiation.
At this point, the Dutch invasion of Fujian and other places can be alleviated.
(A word of family, seek common ground while reserving differences, thank you for reading)