明末宗敎的反亂の一考察 : 礦徒と宗敎結社の結合形態

Abstract

The present study treats the 1577 incident involving Qiao Jishi 喬濟時 where a group of miners illegally extracting silver in the border area of Nanyang 南陽 prefecture in Henan cooperated with a religious organization in planning insurrection. In it I wish to explore the development of late Ming popular religious movements from the perspective of their historical background. Nanyang, the stage for the Qiao Jishi incident, was an area into which vagrants had moved since the middle of the Ming dynasty and, furthermore, it was an area where the illicit mining of silver was rampant. For this reason there were also persons who were not peasants among those who belonged to the local religious associations and among these were also silver miners. In this we see a novel element which had arisen from the historical background of the development of a commodity economy and the growth of the circulation of silver during the Ming dynasty. The silver miners were different from the vagrants in that they were orgenized according to principles derived from the productive activity they engaged in, a fact that made possible their organized cooperation with a religious organization. Such cooperation occurred in a period with a high frequency of religious rebellions, but the relations among groups participating in the rebellions at the end of the Ming were also, as can be seen from the example of the silver miners, a result of the social changes that had occurred during the Ming and it shows that a new historical background exited for the epochal development of popular religious rebellions at the end of the Ming dynasty.