David Z PERSIAN Chart: East Asia 1500 - 1750

Political

The Qing (Manchu) dynasty is in power beginning in 1644 following the end of the Ming dynasty; Qing dynasty undergoes an attempt to bring neighboring regions of China under Chinese control, especially central Eurasia, due to security reasons; Japan is a fragmented region with various feudal lords warring against one another when the Europeans arrived in the mid 1500s; Japan is united by a supreme military commander from the Tokugawa clan in the early 1600s;

Economic Religious Social Innovation

Tokugawa Shogunate member Qing emperor Map of the clans in Tokugawa Japan Maritime trading became more commonplace than land trading; European traders arrive in Japan during the mid 1500s; Japan limits trading with Europeans exclusively to the Dutch, maintains relations with China and Korea; Chinas requirement of many of its taxes to be paid in silver cause the value of silver to greatly increase; Silver from Bolivia and Japan is largely traded to China for luxury goods; Japan uses profits from silver to unify the region and invest in agriculture and industry; Europeans attempt to convert the Japanese to Christianity ending in about 300,000 converts; Japanese leaders kick out missionaries and stem Christian practices; Jesuit missionaries subtly attempted to convert the Chinese; There was no large conversion to Christianity in China, total number of converts is between 200,000 and 300,000 over a period of 250 year; Confucianism and Neo-Confucianism are prevalent in China; Qing rulers strengthen traditional Confucian gender roles; Qing officials didnt try to alter the culture of those they now governed (in the regions they had conquered); The Japanese stem their rate of population growth in order to slow the use of their resources; Zheng Hes fleet is built, consisting of massive ships; kaozheng (research based on evidence) is a practice developed to increase the practice of verification, precision, accuracy, and rigorous analysis in all fields of inquiry; Kaozheng leads to innovations in agriculture, medicine, and other fields;

Arts

Size comparison of Zheng Hes main ship compared to the Santa Maria Plays, paintings, and other forms of entertainment developed among the Chinese; The Dream of the Red Chamber becomes a famous novel during the time, which was written by Cao Xueuin;

Near
geographic

Chinas territory significantly expands, now moving deeper into Eurasia; Silver is discovered in Japan in the mid 1500s; Large forest areas in southern China are destroyed in order to plant cash crops;

All information is from Ways of the World 2nd ed., by Robert Strayer.