15th century Ming China started with the very outward-looking Yongle emperor who first dispatched Zheng He on his remarkable series of expeditions. It ended with the capable Hongzhi emperor, during a period of prosperity and relative dominance.
Ming China in the 15th century was without a doubt the wealthiest and most successful state on earth and in this period, in despite some real reverses and intermittent signs of decline, it still was the 800 lb gorilla of the world. Really this was mostly the case with China right down to 18th century and in some respects waveringly until the opening of the 19th, simply due to weight of population/economy. And folks tend to forget that modern China is significantly bigger than Ming China - the result of the very actively expansionist Qing dynasty’s conquest of a substantial chunk of Central Asia in the 17th and 18th centuries.
That doesn’t mean it was invincible as Esen Khan convincingly proved in mid-15th century. But Ming and Qing China as a whole was vastly wealthier than the Ottomans. For that matter the Mughals probably outweighed the Ottomans in both population and wealth( if not sq. miles )in both the late 16th and throughout the 17th century. One could argue that perhaps the Ottomans had a more effective military system man-for-man in that period( though the early Mughal military was to a limited extent imitative of Ottoman structure ), but resource-wise it wasn’t in the same category as those much more densely populated and agriculturally rich states.
The Ottomans just had a much larger impact on contemporary European states since it was a neighbor. Hence traditionally it looms a bit larger in most histories written by Europeans.
The Qing were Manchurian. The fact that a smallish backward peoples could bring down China tells us something about its true power.
Did you read about Yongle? Rebellion, assassination, an attempt to erase history, the granting of eunuchs extralegal power to repress. This right here is a major reason why China was a paper tiger: It was corrupt from the top down.
The Ottomans conquered the Byzantines; spread in just about all directions and brought what was good government for the 15th century.
Eh, the Vandals were a smallish, backwards people as well ;). Empires collapse and the Ming did so with a heaping helping of internal revolt. The Manchus can give plenty of thanks to Wu San-Kuei. The Manchus seperateness as a steppe people in the end evaporated pretty rapidly, they thoroughly sinicized.
That’s just how authoritarian empires tended to be. Again not much difference from the costant litany of crises throughout the Roman imperium.
The Ottomans administered a coup de grace against an enfeebled Byzantium. Heck, they even propped them up a little early on. They had far more impressive conquests than that, like that of Mamluk state in Egypt and Syria.
Anyway not to say the Ottoman state wasn’t impressive. It certainly was one of the great powers of its day. Just that IMHO people tend to unfairly under-rate the sophisticated , populous and massively wealthy states of South Asia and the Far East. Just lack of exposure, mostly.
To take an example from the European context I also don’t think people usually realize how powerful and wealthy Poland was in the 14th century. A lot of areas outside of western Europe seem to fly under the radar.