2025 Theses Doctoral

The Tripod of Ming Foreign Policy: Land Borders, State Language Training, and Maritime Borders in the Long Shadow of the Mongol Empire

Bensen, Nolan E.

The dissertation considers three primary sets of evidence for the idea that Ming dynasty (1368-1644 CE) foreign policy was an exercise in balancing two contradictory drives: the drive to become the premier successor state to the Mongol Empire of 1206-1368; and the drive to undo cultural perversions that had entered and altered the Sinosphere while the Mongols ruled it. These sets of evidence, realms of policy, are for convenience called tripods: the leg holding up the state that was its linked courier-relay network and land border policy; the leg that was its corps of language experts for communicating with other states; and the leg that was its maritime border policy, similar to its land borders but inverted in some odd respects.

The dissertation finds based on Persian, Latin, and classical Korean accounts of theinterior of Ming territory that it looked very different from within than from without. Some travelers came and went still believing in the externally presented image, while others saw through it, if reluctantly, once they were within Ming territory. The difference between these outcomes was not contingent so much on the attitudes and presuppositions of the travelers themselves, but on the time period in which they traveled and the quite varying degree to which Ming officials carried out their supremacist directives from decade to decade. When they didn’t do their jobs, it showed, and foreigners walked away with a countervailing impression of the Ming as something other than the land to which all the world’s riches flowed, the hub around which all of Asia turned.