Whereas in Ming times the Chinese organized themselves along wholly bureaucratic and tightly centralized lines, the Ming emperors maintained China’s traditional feudal-seeming relationships with foreign peoples. These included the Indigenous tribes of south and southwest China, who often rose in isolated rebellions but were gradually being assimilated. The Chinese took for granted that their emperor was everyone’s overlord and that de facto (mostly hereditary) rulers of non-Chinese tribes, regions, and states were properly his feudatories. Foreign rulers were thus expected to honor and observe the Ming ritual calendar, to accept nominal appointments as members of the Ming nobility or military establishment, and, especially, to send periodic missions to the Ming capital to demonstrate fealty and present tribute of local commodities. Tributary envoys from continental neighbors were received and entertained by local and provincial governments in the frontier zones. Those from overseas were welcomed by special maritime trade supervisorates (shibosi, often called trading-ship offices) at three key ports on the southeast and south coasts: Ningbo in Zhejiang for Japanese contacts, Quanzhou in Fujian for contacts with Taiwan and the Ryukyu Islands, and Guangzhou (Canton) in Guangdong for contacts with Southeast Asia. The frontier and coastal authorities forwarded foreign missions to the national capital, where the Ministry of Rites offered them hospitality and arranged for their audiences with the emperor. All envoys received valuable gifts in acknowledgment of the tribute they presented. They also were permitted to buy and sell private trade goods at specified, officially supervised markets, both in the capital and on the coasts and frontiers. Thus, copper coins and luxury goods (notably silks and porcelains) flowed out of China, and pepper, other spices, and similar rarities flowed in. On the western and northern frontiers the principal exchange was in Chinese tea and steppe horses. On balance, the combined tribute and trade activities were highly advantageous to foreigners—so much so that the Chinese early established limits for the size and cargoes of foreign missions and prescribed long intervals that must elapse between missions.

The principal aim of Ming foreign policy was political: to maintain China’s security and, especially, to make certain the Mongols could not threaten China again. To this end the Hongwu emperor repeatedly sent armies northward and northwestward to punish resurgent Mongol groups and prevent any reconsolidation of Mongol power. The Yongle emperor was even more zealous: he personally campaigned into the Gobi (desert) five times, and his decision to transfer the national capital from Nanjing to Beijing, completed in 1421 after long preparations, was largely a reflection of his concern about the frontier. His successors, though less zealous than he in this regard, were vigilant enough so that the Great Wall was restored and expanded to its present-day extent and dimensions. Frontier defense forces, aligned in nine defense commands stretching from Manchuria to Gansu, kept China free from Mongol incursions, except for occasional raiding forays such as those by Esen Taiji and Altan Khan.

The fact that the Mongols could not reunite themselves was a fortunate circumstance for Ming China. As early as the Yongle emperor’s time, the Mongols were divided into three groups that were often antagonistic to one another: the so-called western Mongols or Oirat (including the Kalmyk), the eastern Mongols or Tatars, and a group in the Chengde area known as the Urianghad tribes. The Urianghad tribes surrendered to the Hongwu emperor and were incorporated into China’s frontier defense system under a Chinese military headquarters. Because they served the Yongle emperor as a loyal rear guard during his seizure of the throne, he rewarded them with virtual autonomy, withdrawing the Chinese command post from their homeland beyond the Great Wall. Subsequently, the Xuande emperor similarly withdrew the command post that the Hongwu emperor had established at the Mongols’ old extramural capital, Shangdu. These withdrawals isolated Manchuria from China proper, terminated active Chinese military control in Inner Mongolia, and exposed the Beijing area in particular to the possibility of probing raids from the nearby steppes. They reflected an essentially defensive Chinese posture in the north, which by late Ming times allowed the Oirat to infiltrate and dominate Hami and other parts of the northwestern frontier and the Manchu to rise to power in the northeast.

The Ming attitude toward foreign peoples other than the Mongols was generally unaggressive: so long as they were not disruptive, the Ming emperors left them to themselves. The Hongwu emperor made this his explicit policy. Even though he threatened the Japanese with punitive expeditions if they persisted in marauding along China’s coasts, he dealt with the problem by building strong fortresses and coastal defense fleets that successfully repulsed the marauders. He did send an army to subdue Turfan (Turpan) in 1377, when the Turko-Mongol rulers of that oasis region rebelled and broke China’s traditional transport routes to the west. But he refused to intervene in dynastic upheavals in Nam Viet and Korea (when Koryŏ was replaced by Chosŏn), and he was unmoved by the rise of the Turko-Mongol empire of Timur (Tamerlane) in the far west at Samarkand, even though Timur murdered Chinese envoys and was planning to campaign against China.

The Yongle emperor was much more aggressive. He sent the eunuch admiral Zheng He on tribute-collecting voyages to Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, and the Persian Gulf and as far as East Africa. On one early voyage, Zheng He intervened in a civil war in Java and established a new king there; on another, he captured the hostile king of Sri Lanka and took him prisoner to China. The Yongle emperor also reacted to turbulence in Nam Viet by sending an expeditionary force that incorporated the area into the Ming domain as a province in 1407.

After the Yongle era the Ming government reverted to the founding emperor’s unaggressive policy toward foreign states. Nam Viet was abandoned in 1428 after protracted guerrilla-style resistance had thoroughly undermined Chinese control there. A new civil war in Nam Viet provoked the Chinese, after long and agonized discussion, to prepare to intervene there again in 1540, but the offer of ritual submission by a usurper gave the Chinese an opportunity to avoid war, and they welcomed it. On only two other occasions were Ming military forces active outside China’s borders: in 1445–46, when Chinese troops pursued a rebellious border chief into Myanmar despite resistance there, and in 1592–98, when the Ming court undertook to help the Chosŏn (Yi) dynasty in Korea repulse Japanese invaders, a long and costly effort.

In order to preserve the government’s monopolistic control of foreign contacts and trade and, at least in part, to keep the Chinese people from being contaminated by foreign customs, the Ming rulers prohibited private dealings between Chinese and foreigners and forbade any private voyaging abroad. The rules were so strict as to disrupt even coastal fishing and trading, on which large populations in the south and southeast had traditionally based their livelihood. Such unrealistic prohibitions were unpopular and unenforceable, and, from about the mid-15th century, Chinese readily collaborated with foreign traders in widespread smuggling, for the most part officially condoned. In addition, by late Ming times, thousands of venturesome Chinese had migrated to become mercantile entrepreneurs in the various regions of Southeast Asia and even in Japan. In efforts to enforce its laws, the Ming court closed all maritime trade supervisorates except the one at Guangzhou early in the 16th century, and by the 1540s it had begun to reinvigorate coastal defenses against marauders throughout the southeast and the south.

These circumstances shaped the early China coast experiences of the Europeans, who first appeared in Ming China in 1514. The Portuguese had already established themselves in southern India and at Malacca, where they learned of the huge profits that could be made in the regional trade between the China coast and Southeast Asia. Becoming involved in what the Ming court considered smuggling and piracy, the Portuguese were not welcomed to China, but they would not be rebuffed, and by 1557 they had taken control of a settlement at the walled-off end of a coastal peninsula (present-day Macau) and were trading periodically at nearby Guangzhou. In 1575 Spaniards from Manila visited Guangzhou in a vain effort to get official trading privileges, and soon they were developing active though illegal trade on the Guangdong and Fujian coasts. Representatives of the Dutch East India Company, after unsuccessfully trying to capture Macau from the Portuguese in 1622, took control of coastal Taiwan in 1624 and began developing trade contacts in nearby Fujian and Zhejiang provinces. In 1637 a squadron of five English ships shot its way into Guangzhou and disposed of its cargoes there. Russia, meanwhile, had sent peaceful missions overland to Beijing, and by the end of the Ming dynasty the Russians’ eastward expansion across Siberia had carried them finally to the shores of the Pacific north of the Amur River.

Christian missionaries from Europe were handicapped by the bad reputation their trader countrymen had acquired in China, but the Jesuit tactic of accommodating to local customs eventually got the Jesuits admitted to the mainland. Matteo Ricci was the successful pioneer, beginning his work in 1583 well-trained in the Chinese language and acquainted with Confucian learning. By the time of his death in 1610, despite hostility in some quarters, Jesuit communities were established in many cities of south and central China, a church had been built in Beijing under imperial patronage, and Christianity was known and respected by many Chinese scholar-officials. Before the end of the dynasty, Jesuits had won influential converts at court (notably the grand secretary Xu Guangqi, or Paul Xu), had produced Chinese books on European science as well as theology, and were manufacturing Portuguese-type cannon for Ming use against the Manchu. They also held official appointments in China’s Directorate of Astronomy, which had the important responsibility of determining the official calendar. Both European technology and European ideas were beginning to have some effect on China, albeit still very limited.