Chapter 91: The Decade of Children
The 1650s in East Asia is known today as the Decade of Children (少年の十年) as Japan, Joseon, and Ming China all saw the ascension of children to the helm of their respective realms. Only Japan would see this result in a power struggle between opposing factions culminating in a full-blown civil war. However, Joseon and Ming China would be hamstrung by the youth of their rulers and the personal interests of their ministers and regents, allowing an increasingly encroaching power to further expand its influence from the new northern frontier.
After the death of the great Gwanghaegun in 1641, Joseon’s crown prince and the late king’s eldest son Hyeonjo ascended to the throne. Hyeonjo would largely continue his father’s administrative and economic policies while presiding over an era of peace and prosperity. It was during his reign that the Jurchen Jin khanate split between the Lesser Jin and the Amur Khanate in the north. Still wary of the potential threat the Jurchens posed to Joseon, Hyeonjo sought to exert hegemony in the region through various means. His court financed economic missions to the two khanates, boasting of Joseon’s rich trade connections with Japan, Southeast Asia, and beyond. Also part of these missions were Confucian scholars from the peninsula who were gifts to the khans as advisors in their service. These gestures were readily accepted and deemed a win for Joseon as the peninsular kingdom began to incorporate the Jurchens within a northerly sphere of influence. Ties between Joseon and the Jurchens were further strengthened by the latters’ entrance into the Ming tributary system in 1649. In the realm of domestic politics, the king also dealt with religious controversy when growing numbers of local craftsmen and merchants in Busan began converting to Protestantism through their interactions with English and Dutch merchants. Hyeonjo would reinforce a ban on Christianity, putting to death native converts while exiling Europeans deemed responsible for the spread of the religion. Although he upheld the court’s continued adherence to Buddhism and Confucianism, many Confucian scholars privately criticized what they perceived as a soft response.
King Hyeonjo died in 1651 and was succeeded by his son Sohjong. However, the following year, the latter succumbed to illness, leaving his 13 year old son Gyeongseon as the new sovereign of the peninsula. Initially, his mother and queen dowager Inseon became the young king’s regent. However, poor health forced her to step back from politics, allowing a cabal of Confucian scholars led by the new chief minister, Kim Yuk, to rise to power. They took advantage of the declining influence of the military, whose power and prestige had peaked during Joseon’s campaigns against the Jin khanate under Gwanghaegun but had begun to wane in the 1640s due to Hyeonjo’s peacemaking diplomacy. The neo-Confucian cabal turned its focus inward, seeking to revive the conservative status quo that existed before the reign of Gwanghaegun by upholding proper Confucian courtesy and practices, perfecting fiscal soundness in government, and pushing back against the perceived excesses of the merchant class. Although Kim Yuk’s policies brought some relief to the common people, it also restarted factional infighting between Confucian thinkers and hurt trade with the wider world. This, in turn, weakened Joseon’s military and political power over the Jurchens, particularly over the northern Amur khanate.
In Ming China, Emperor Titian started his reign dealing with a revolt by another relative seeking the throne and claiming greater legitimacy through the latter’s direct blood ties with Zhu Changluo, the first son of Emperor Wanli executed for attempting to usurp the position of the future Emperor Zhenchun [1]. Having ascended to the throne as a middle aged man of 40, much of his attention early on was focused on further securing his and his bloodline’s position within the realm, maintaining his predecessor’s expanded tributary system and appointing loyal and just civil servants to Ming China’s most important positions. Nevertheless, his sudden death in 1657 caught the Middle Kingdom off guard and unprepared as his son, the 13 year old Zhu Linyue became the new sovereign as Emperor Yongwu. Pouncing upon this opportunity was the 23 year old Abunai, khan of the Northern Yuan and an ambitious young man. like his father, Ligden, Abunai dreamed of reviving Mongol power. Although as a child ruler himself he had been supported by the Ming court, as he got older he shed his dependence, building his own authority among the tumens through his assistance of his Dzungar subjects against the Kazakh khanate and the establishment of trade relations with Moscow. Now fully independent of Beijing, he gathered an army of 40,000 and invaded the Ming realm in early 1658, overcoming the Great Wall and ravaging the countryside. Abunai’s opportunistic campaign against Beijing would preoccupy the Chinese until 1661, with cities like Lanzhou experiencing brief but unsuccessful sieges during the conflict.
Official portrait of the new Ming Emperor, Yongwu
Although neither realm became embroiled in chaos and internal turmoil to the same extent that Japan did, both would be distracted from their own affairs, their attention drawn away from the Amur river valley and the far north where a new power began to take hold: Russia. After the establishment of the outpost of Okhotsk in 1647, Russian adventurer Yerofey Khabarov continued expanding Russian presence in the region, establishing forts at Albazin and Achansk on the northern side of the Amur River in the early 1650s. His men and accompanying Cossacks would subsequently engage in the violent suppression of the local Daur people and their unspeakably brutal conduct garnered them the moniker Ioucha, after demons in Buddhist mythology. Alarmed by this aggressive activity, Sahaliyan ordered an army northwards to drive out the Europeans in 1652. However, Khabarov and his men would successfully hold out in Achansk and endure a poorly coordinated siege by the Amur Jurchens, who were used to open battle on flat terrain and not drawn out and complicated encirclements of fortifications. After this, Sahaliyan made plans for a concerted campaign led by himself to defeat the intruders, but was forced to change course when conflict with the Lesser Jin broke out as Joseon’s influence that had helped broker between the two rival khanates waned amidst their own court politics. This gave Khabarov and his successors free reign to slowly grow Russian presence in the far north over the next couple years [2].
In 1658, Kim Yuk died and Joseon king Gyeongseon, now 19, began to exert his own influence within the royal court in Hanseong. His first priority was to reinvigorate his kingdom’s influence over the Jurchens. On the advice of the still powerful neo-Confucian scholars empowered during his minority, Gyeongseon would give preference towards the more Sino-friendly Lesser Jin, influencing its khan Gutai to join Joseon in assisting Beijing against Abunai while favoring the southern realm at the expense of Sahaliyan’s Amur Khanate. The latter, sandwiched between its southern rival ostensibly backed up by the Ming and Joseon and the ever-growing Russian presence to the north, desperately searched for an outside power to save it from inevitable defeat and collapse. They would find that power to its southeast beyond the mainland and begin to recover from civil war in the early 1660s.
[1]: Refer back to Chapters 24 and 80
[2]: Unlike IOTL, no serious efforts are made against the Russians after the unsuccessful siege of Achansk.
