John Dardess has written a very fine study of Xu Jie (1503–83), the Ming-dynasty grand secretary who was, in Dardess's estimation, “an outstanding man and official . . . almost a great one” (p. 201).
This is an important book for several reasons. Xu Jie was grand secretary at a pivotal time in the Ming dynasty. As Dardess tells it, two things occupied Ming politics during this period: Mongol raids from the north, and raids along the southeastern coast by the wako, the so-called Japanese pirates. Xu Jie attributed these problems to corruption and malfeasance; Dardess adds that a more fundamental reason for the raiding on both fronts was the Ming refusal to legitimize foreign trade.
But this book is anything but a dry tome on arcane Ming politics. One of the things that initially drew Dardess to Xu Jie is the fact that Xu was a gifted and prolific writer. Dardess writes, “I thought by avoiding the usual summary condensations and directly citing a large selection of [the letters] instead, I might convey a real sense of what it was like to try to shape the destinies of what was one of the largest regimes on the face of the earth at the time” (p. viii). He succeeds beautifully.
This method, of extensive citation of vivid letters followed by incisive analyses, makes reading the book a pleasure. It also underscores the point that politics is made by people, operating within clear institutional constraints, and that some of those people, at least, were not afraid to articulate their fears and ambitions at some length in their letters. The letters give us a vivid sense of the give and take in the literati world. For example, in a letter to Zhu Tingli, Xu writes, “Keep standing tall; that's what the realm is expecting of you” (p. 82). We also see something of Xu Jie's personality emerging. In a letter to the ill-fated Wang Yu, he writes, “When people in desperate straits scream for help, my emotions are divided between an urge to help and the thought that it's not my responsibility” (p. 59).
The nature of the relationship between Xu Jie and the Jiajing emperor is made clear in the letters. We get a strong sense of the fragility of the imperial institution and its ramifications for this particular emperor. Several times Jiajing talks as if he is on the point of abdicating, and Xu Jie counsels that he must not. Dardess's treatment of Jiajing's final edict is particularly interesting. Xu Jie wrote it without consulting with other grand secretaries (though he did consult with Zhang Juzheng, then a young man). The edict expresses the emperor's regret at some of his excesses (“I went too far in seeking longevity,” p. 169). As with other final edicts, this one may in fact have reflected the opinions of the bureaucrat who crafted it rather than those of the emperor who posthumously proclaimed it.
One clear payoff of Dardess's close reading of the letters (and of his inviting the reader to share his close reading) comes in attention to language. The Mongols who threatened the Ming in the sixteenth century are not called Mongols in Xu's letters, nor are they called Mongols in official documents. They are simply called lu, which Dardess translates as “raiders.” In a characteristically elegant turn of phrase, Dardess suggests that the issue with the northern raiders was not their ethnicity, but rather their occupation (p. 41). This is an important insight into continuing work on ethnicity and the way it was conceptualized during the Ming.
Several aspects of Xu Jie's career stand out. One is his longstanding connection to the military. We are no longer as surprised by connections between literati and military men as we once were, but Dardess here provides clear evidence of Xu's connections in several arenas, not the least of which is Xu's marriage relations. Xu has respect for military men, but believes that only a fool would hold them to the standards of behavior that one would customarily expect of literati. The letters also show the close connections in the mind of Xu Jie (and other officials) between internal threats and external threats. For example, both the Mongols and White Lotus sectarians shared an adoration of the Buddha.
One would have liked to hear more about Xu's family life. We do learn that the family fortunes came from silk cloth manufacture, and that the women in his family—his mother née Gu, his first wife née Shen, his second wife née Zhang, and his daughter-in-law née Ji—all “supervised a labor force of weaving girls held in bondage” (p. 1).
This is a valuable contribution to scholarship on the workings of the Ming bureaucracy. But it is more than that. It is also a wonderful study of an individual and the ways in which he imagined himself and his responsibilities.
