| dc.description.abstract | Army supervisory system, a military system in Chinese history, refers to that the king or the emperor sent his favorites to supervise the generals and his army troops. After Zhu Di—Emperor Cheng Tzu of the Ming Dynasty—raised troops and took the imperial power, seigniors were gradually weakened. In order to fill the power vacuum, the emperor sent eunuchs to strategic locations for supervision. Since then, army supervisory system began to flourish.
In general, the army supervisor in Ming Dynasty can be divided into two kinds: eunuch army supervisor and civil army supervisor. From Emperor Cheng Tzu to Emperor Shi Tzung, it was mainly eunuch army supervisors, but after that, civil army supervisor substituted. When it came to Emperor Sih Tzung, both were adopted. At that moment, military and political matters were replete with problems: outside Man Jou nationality launched invasion year after year, while inside there were insurrections of roving rebel bands. In the situation of successive internal and external failures, Emperor Sih Tzung not only strengthened the operation of traditional civil army supervisor system, but reinstated eunuch army supervisors aiming at preventing corruption and malfeasance and rejuvenated through mutual supervision and balance among different systems.
The complete reinstating of eunuch army supervisors began in September, the fourth year of the Reign of Chung Jen(September,1631).They were named as supervising eunuch, Chief eunuch and divisional eunuch. This reinstating resulted from Emperor Sih Tzung’s loss of confidence on civil and military officials. There were 3 main stages: the first two were for Manchu and the 3rd for Li Tzi-cheng. The sent places were mostly military cities around Beijing and close to Manchuria. Moreover, the inspectors’ authority and responsible areas gradually expanded, and switched over to lead in fighting, parallel to the governor. But because of the completion of the phased tasks, all eunuch inspectors withdrew later. They were also not fully assigned for the pertinence and limitations of the assigned place. In addition, in the presence of many controversies Emperor Sih Tzung did not believe one side only, so Emperor Sih Tzung was very cautious when assigning lots of eunuch inspectors. Although the assignment of eunuch inspectors did some good in the beginning period, later they became a member to accelerate the decay of the Ming Dynasty as the general situation has settled.
Civil officers who supervise the army were mainly central-government levels imperial supervisor, department officials and local levels military supervision Dau and so on. Because of the imperial’s assignment to eunuch supervisors, civil army supervisors were not as vigorous as eunuch supervisors. While the number of local civil supervisors gradually increased with the roving bandits’ insurrection. They were active in the battlefield, responsible for important tasks like disciplining supervision and reward assessment, commanding the troops, participating in military affairs, supervising and urging subsistence stores for troops, since the governor were tied down by war affairs. Although the local supervisor made successive victories in battle, and since the roving bandits occurred constantly, the situation was reversed in the end.
This paper concludes that, no matter eunuch supervisor or civil supervisor, both produced some effect in the years of Emperor Chung Jen, but they were only suitable for particular place and event. It cannot last long or change the end in the worsening overall situation.
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