A Dragon’s Head and a Serpent’s Tail: Ming China and the First Great East Asian War, 1592–1598 by Kenneth M. Swope (review)

A few years ago, I assigned my students a couple of chapters from Ray Huang’s classic 1587: A Year of No Significance along with Kenneth Swope’s article in The Journal of Military History titled “Crouching Tigers, Secret Weapons: Military Technology Employed during the Sino-Japanese-Korean War, 1592–1598.” As we kicked off our seminar on the military history of the Ming, one student sheepishly raised his hand and said: “I’m a little confused. Are these guys talking about the same Ming dynasty?” That comment cut to the heart of Kenneth Swope’s achievement in that earlier article and anticipated the pathbreaking accomplishment that is the book under review here. Almost single-handedly, Swope has fundamentally transformed our understanding of the late Ming. Rather than Huang’s moribund state, tottering toward inevitable collapse and overseen by a venal and distracted Wanli emperor, Swope gives us a dynamic and militarily muscular Ming ruled by an active and intensely engaged Wanli. The ultimate test of Ming military prowess and of Wanli’s leadership was the epic war over the fate of Korea, an immense effort that consumed the last decade of the sixteenth century. However, this book is much more than just a reinterpretation of China’s role in that conflict. Swope has dived into Chinese, Korean, and Japanese sources on this war and, as a result, gives us a view of the motivations and actions of all of the belligerents.

Swope has astonishing gifts as a scholar and as a writer. This book is not merely a great work of history; it is a great work of storytelling that will invariably invite comparison to Roger Crowley’s Empires of the Sea: The Siege of Malta, The Battle of Lepanto, and the Contest for the Center of the World. It is a gripping account of perhaps the greatest war of the sixteenth century — commonly called the Imjin War — a conflict that involved some of the most iconic figures in Asian history, including the much-maligned Ming emperor Wanli, the Japanese warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, as well as King Sonjo of Korea and his great admiral Yi Sun-sin. This is a great history of a pivotal conflict that continues to shape attitudes and politics in Asia to our own day. And yet for all of the gripping descriptions of campaigns and battles, Swope also delves into the minutiae of military planning and diplomacy. In the process, he shows us how all of the belligerents, but especially the Ming, dealt with the aspects of war.

There is an old saw that “amateurs talk strategy, but professionals talk logistics.” Swope shows that this was very much the case for the Ming. This is in no small part due to the fact that one of this book’s main sources for the Chinese side of the war is the correspondences of Song Yingchang, Wanli’s chief logistician in the early phase of the Korean conflict. While the Ming was strategically surprised by the Japanese invasion and distracted by other military commitments, Song’s correspondence shows just how professional and competent the Ming military was when it came to mobilizing for and waging war on the scale required to rescue their Korean ally. Taking his cues from William H. McNeill’s The Age of Gunpowder Empires, 1450–1800 and Geoffrey Parker’s The Military Revolution: Military Innovation and the Rise of the West, 1500–1800, Swope shows how Ming China was uniquely able to embrace the gunpowder revolution and equip its large army with both mass-produced small arms and, especially, cannon, a Chinese forte. The modernization of the Ming and Korean militaries only accelerated in the course of this protracted war. On reflection, this should come...