An Examination of the Ming Empire’s Inner Asianness: Focusing on Qing Dynasty Analogies

Among overseas “New Qing History” scholars, the Ming Empire is typically interpreted as an ethnically Han-Chinese regime that lacked the characteristics of Inner Asian polities. This author, however, asserts that this view is incorrect. Like the Qing, the emperors of the Ming ruled as qaghans over their northern steppe subjects and as the incarnation of the bodhisattva Manjusri in the eyes of Tibetan-Mongolian Buddhists. Also like their Qing dynasty counterparts, the Ming Empire produced multilingual documents, combining Chinese and ethnic minority scripts, a potent symbol of their “universal” rule. Lastly, the Ming emperors also actively pursued a policy of promoting governance through religion, creating a cultural and political legacy that would come to directly shape later relations between the Qing empire and the frontier regions of their empire.