Hist 410 Keynotes 5

[Mongolian] Yuan - Ming - [Manchurian] Qing

Preparing butter tea: Tea (without tea leaves), butter, and a bit of salt are mixed with boiling water and churned. The mixture is then kept hot in a kettle.

Mongolian New Year


Ming - Qing



Bamboo shoots

Fresh bamboo shoots




Vitamin-C rich guava

Tiger-tooth-jujube (red date)

Papaya



Fresh dragon eyes

Techniques

Cormorant fishing: Fish are attracted by the lights and caught by the cormorants who wear a collar that prevents them from swallowing the fish.

Winnowing machine used to separate the oats from the shells (instead of throwing the grain in the air and using the wind to separate oats from shells)

Oilmill

Involution

The most important new foods imported during the Ming dynasty came from the New World: Sweet potatoes, peanuts, maize, and tobacco. Further foods imported from the West were tomato, guava, papaya, and yam-bean. From Southeast Asia came the chili-pepper.

In 1582 the tax system was reformed and silver became the major currency to pay for taxes and labor service obligations. Though the government did not claim time that could have been spend on one's own fields, to produce and sell enough to be able to pay taxes in silver instead of in kind became a dramatic burden for farmers when natural disaster destroyed the harvest.

Despite the grain storages and famine relief measures of the Ming government, famine was a constant guest at the tables somewhere in China. The period is often characterized as a time of involution:

One theory describes the lack of a development in China that would equal the industrial revolution as a "high level equilibrium trap": Manpower was cheaper than developing new machinery and innovations that required capital investment. Since China's population was large, there were always enough people who could be hired to do hard work instead of using devices and techniques that would save people from the bone-breaking agricultural work. The lack of the necessity to invest and develop is the trap: Enough farmers produce sufficient supply. Why should this rhythm be given up in favor of technology since the possible surplus provided by the inventions was considered superfluous. The result was a growth of the population without the development of more refined cultivation and production methods - an involution instead of technological revolution.