A Study On The Localization Of Military Households In Yueqing Bay Since The Middle Ming Dynasty

Yueqing Bay is located in the southeast of Zhejiang Province.During the Song and Yuan dynasties,Yueqing Bay was developed on a large scale.Since the Ming and Qing dynasties,due to the lack of sufficient control of the central government over the southeastern coastal area,the flow of people and wealth in the coastal area also brought great difficulties to the rule of the state.To maintain dynastic rule,the imperial court repeatedly promulgated the policy of relocation and repatriation.In the process of local administrative reconstruction and coastal social reconstruction,state and county officials cooperated with local forces and gradually carried out governance and edification.As the nationalization of Yueqing Bay progressed,these previously unincorporated island migrants and their private lands were gradually brought under the substantial control of the dynastic state,and a new Yueqing Bay society gradually emerged.This project attempts to recover the structural process of the local society of Yueqing Bay by taking the guards and military households as the entry point.To cope with the complex situation along the coast,a large number of guards were set up along Yueqing Bay.In the early Ming Dynasty,most of the military households in the guards maintained close ties with their places of origin.However,after the middle of the Ming Dynasty,with the decline of the guardhouse system,the military households gradually realized that the status of military households could hardly help them to obtain more benefits for survival.In addition,after the Zhengtong period,the Ming government allowed military surplus and military dependents to follow the army,which,to a large extent,solved the worries of the military households in the guards.Thus,they began to plan various strategies in an attempt to change this survival pattern.For example,the middle and senior officers entered into marriage relations with local clans,built clan organizations,and mastered the space of faith,to gradually get rid of the restrictions of military status and achieve the goal of "localization",thus obtaining more resources for survival.With the gradual success of "localization" of the military households in the guardhouse,the frequency of interaction between the military households and their descendants and the local society increased,and the beliefs of the military households’ origin were partly transplanted to Yueqing Bay,making the local beliefs in Yueqing Bay more diversified and complicated.After the Qing Dynasty,a breakthrough was made in the strategy of "localization" of the military families in the guardhouse,which began in the middle of the Ming Dynasty.The descendants of military households and the local natives showed more and more convergence in all aspects of social life.As they left the military status,they adjusted their livelihood strategies.On the whole,they were mostly engaged in commercial activities,agricultural production,or the examination of merit.It is worth mentioning that those who succeeded in business or attained merit and entered the civil service still maintained their status as a large clan.This means that the social order of Yueqing Bay in the Qing Dynasty,especially in the early Qing Dynasty,was rebuilt again in the process of moving the boundaries and spreading the rest.The implementation of the boundary relocation order in the early Qing Dynasty not only destroyed the productivity of coastal society,but the settlement structure also suffered a shock.In this process of moving the sea and spreading restoration,the local clan power waxed and waned.After returning to their homes,most of them relied on the power of their clans to recover their clans and resume production,to compete for more resources for survival in the new Yueqing Bay social order.However,many of the descendants of military families were greatly injured and their power was greatly reduced due to the relocation of boundaries,so they gradually withdrew from the competition for local resources.Therefore,in a sense,Zhanfu means the readjustment of clan relations and the reconstruction of local order in this process.The story of the "localization" of the military families in Yueqing Bay says that the formation of the Ming dynasty state depended on both the strength and timeliness of the state system’s advancement to the local level and the regional society’s response to the state system,and the interaction between the two shaped the dialogue between the local society and the dynasty state in Yueqing Bay since the mid-Ming Dynasty,the process and the outcome of the dialogue.