by John Keay
On to this agrarian and millenarian rootstock in the 1350s were grafted other elements of righteous protest and opportunist aspiration. In the north the discovery of a supposed descendant of the Southern Song provided a focus for legitimist sentiment; in Sichuan and the south, regional warlords reasserted local autonomy and adopted the usual nomenclature – Chu, Wu, Shu and even Xia, Zhou and Han; rural distress and the demand for forced labour triggered uprisings like those of 1351/52 over the rechannelling of the Yellow River; and in response to this growing lawlessness, local interests everywhere – provincial administrations, landed gentry and regional commanders, some of them Mongol – mobilised their own militias and, while declaring loyalty to the Yuan government, often acted unilaterally. Only in the north, within and around the great metropolitan province, could imperial troops be counted on. Military contingents stationed elsewhere were notoriously lax, ill paid and open to offers.
From this mêlée of conflicting local movements there emerged along the Yangzi in the early 1360s three or four contenders for a much wider dominion. Zhu Yuanzhang was not untypical. A penniless orphan from Anhui who had barely survived famine, plague and the grimmest of childhoods to acquire some basic literacy as a Buddhist monk, Zhu had joined the Red Turbans in 1352. Gathering a growing band of followers that included a few scholars as well as ever more troops, he moved south, crossed the Yangzi in 1355, and in the following year captured Nanjing. Nestling between the river and the wooded slopes of Mount Zijin, the city would remain Zhu Yuanzhang’s base and, massively rewalled, his stronghold for the rest of his career; much of the 33-kilometre (20-mile) wall he built is still the most impressive city fortification in China. Ten years later Nanjing would become his imperial capital and, thirty years after that, his resting place when he was interred in a great tomb on Mount Zijin. In adopting Nanjing, Zhu Yuanzhang, the Ming founder, would be the first to rule all China from a southern city.
By nature a firm disciplinarian and fearless leader, the young Zhu Yuanzhang possessed few other imperial attributes. He was ugly to behold, woefully ignorant and without that most basic unit of support, a family. But he was a good listener and a quick learner. Literary proficiency plus a knowledge of history, strategy and governance were acquired along the way; the steep curve of his learning experience mirrored that of his rise to power and seemed to validate it. So did the example of the founding emperor of the Han dynasty. Liu Bang (Han Gaozu) had risen from among the ranks of the ‘black-haired commoners’ to become emperor of all China; it was a noble precedent, and comparisons with the Han founder were encouraged. But whereas Liu Bang’s upbringing had been remarkable for frequent signs of heavenly favour, Zhu Yuanzhang’s had been about as unpropitious as possible. Self-made emperors were rare, and none had more ground to make up than Zhu.
Following an epic four-day battle with a neighbouring warlord in 1363, ground in the form of territory was quickly won, while ever more armies and navies transferred to his victorious banner. The battle itself had been waged on Lake Boyang, one of the vast Yangzi spillover reservoirs, in northern Jiangxi; if Zhu Yuanzhang really deployed ‘a thousand ships and 100,000 men’ – and his opponent still more men and still taller ships – it may have been the greatest lake-battle ever fought. Hunan and Hubei then fell to the Nanjing regime, followed by Zhejiang and Jiangsu. By 1366 Zhu Yuanzhang controlled the entire Yangzi basin below the Gorges and ‘had emerged as the obvious heir to the Yuan empire’.27
Increasingly conscious of his destiny, Zhu now withdrew from active campaigning. Heaven seemed to be taking his side; and his generals, some being companions of many years and others erstwhile opponents who had been allowed to retain the services of their own troops, were genuinely attached to him. Moreover, the army he sent north by way of Shandong and Henan in 1367 scarcely needed him. During the early 1360s most of the Yuan forces in the north had been siphoned off by rival warlords who preferred war among themselves for the privilege of defending the emperor – it was still Toghon Temur or Yuan Shundi – to actually defending the emperor. As Zhu Yuanzhang’s 1367 proclamation put it, the Yuan, though initially legitimate, had ‘deserted the norms of conduct’ and ‘the time had come when Heaven despised them and no longer sustained their rule’.28 In January 1368 Zhu followed this up with a formal declaration of his own dynasty. It was to be called ‘the Great Ming’, ‘Ming’ meaning ‘brilliant’ or ‘effulgent’. Nine months later Ming forces entered Dadu (Beijing) almost unopposed. Yuan Shundi had fled north into Inner Mongolia. For the first time in centuries China had a Chinese emperor, and for only the seond time ever, he was a man of the people.
Zhu renamed the great city ‘Beiping’ – not a misprint of its current name but a Pinyin rendering of the two characters signifying ‘North Pacified’ or ‘Northern Pacification’. Meanwhile the deep south had also been pacifiied, Fujian being taken by land, Guangdong by sea and Guangxi by river. In the north-west, Shanxi, Shaanxi and most of Gansu were cleared of Yuan loyalists over the next two years. Sichuan was reclaimed in 1371, and only Yunnan held out under a Mongol commander. When it was finally overrun by the Ming in 1381/82, among those captured was an intelligent eleven-year-old Muslim called Ma He. Castrated, dispatched to Beiping and taken on to the household staff of one of the first Ming emperor’s sons, Ma He would be renamed Zheng He. As such, he grew to become the most trusted confidant of the prince; the prince eventually became emperor; and thus would a Yunnanese Muslim eunuch find himself entrusted with the command of China’s greatest maritime enterprise.
After a century of Mongol rule, all of what was regarded as China had now been reconquered. It was back under the rule of a dynasty whose indigenous origins were beyond dispute; and for the first time the initiative for reunification had welled up from the south, not been imposed from the north. The credentials of the Ming dynasty (r. 1368–1644) were so impressive that later nationalists would hail Zhu Yuanzhang’s achievement as a triumphant reassertion of Han Chinese identity after centuries of ‘alien rule’. In the process the south had come into its own, with the empire being officially realigned in accordance with demographic and economic realities. In effect, the Yangzi had supplanted the Yellow River as its lifeblood, and Nanjing, the river’s northernmost city, had ousted Dadu/Beiping as the centre of power. At the heart of this reconfigured and re-sinified China, Nanjing would hold a strong appeal as the spiritual home of later Chinese nationalism. In 1925 Dr Sun Yat-sen, the first president of the republic, would be buried hard by the first Ming emperor on Mount Zijin. Soon after, General Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) would make the city the capital of the Nationalist republic.
But the triumph of indigenous culture and identity was not so obvious at the time. For one thing, the Mongol menace, though removed, was far from eliminated. Following their triumphs in the north, in the 1370s Ming armies struck deep into Mongolia, but with dwindling success. Mongol cavalry still enjoyed supremacy on the steppe. The Yuan and their adherents soon reclaimed what is now Inner Mongolia and would show themselves more than capable of striking back into northern China. The Mongol threat would dangle over the Ming for another two centuries, to be nullified only when the Jurchen, reincarnated as the Manchu, replaced it with a still greater menace.
Nor were the Ming quick to learn from the misadventures of the Mongols while ruling China. Though piously claiming to be restoring the institutions and rituals of the Tang and the Song, in practice Zhu Yuanzhang seemed bent on reconstituting the empire he had just toppled. Khubilai’s division of the country into provinces was retained, with modifications; and both in the provinces and in Nanjing ‘the formal structure of governmental institutions . . . began by imitating the Yuan almost exactly’. It was the same with the military. Zhu’s genuine determination to improve the lot of the cultivator, a legacy of his dreadful childhood, meant holding down taxation and giving a high priority to agricultural development, including military colonies. But with this proviso, the challenge of demobilising and resettling his armies was no
t dissimilar to that faced by the Yuan. Thus, like the Yuan, ‘the emperor made his army into a distinct occupational caste within the population, created a hereditary officer class to govern it, [and] gave the military officers a clearly superior status compared to their civil equivalents’. Edward Dreyer actually calls them ‘a new conquering horde, but this time Chinese in origin’. Generals became nobles with hereditary titles and fiefs; and imperial offspring became princes with supervisory responsibilities at the apex of this great military structure.29
Such change as there was revealed itself most clearly in the tone of government and the increasingly paranoid conduct of the emperor. Compared to the Song, the Mongol Yuan emperors had seemed beyond Confucian remonstrance, autocratic in their exercise of power and arbitrary in their judgements. But compared to the Mongol Yuan, Zhu Yuanzhang was even worse. Courtiers and ministers were beaten in his presence, sometimes to death, and as of the great purge of 1380 that accounted for those 30,000–40,000 lives, scarcely a day passed without mass executions. No reign of terror in Chinese history can compare with it. Obsessed with controlling every aspect of government and deeply suspicious of any who might ridicule his deficiencies of birth and education, the emperor dispensed with the office of chancellor and himself took on the executive role in government. The examination system was eventually reinstated but only with a view to improving the supply of bureaucrats, not to restoring their influence. In the 1390s it was the military hierarchy, the emperor’s own creation, which became the target of his suspicions. A word of complaint from a long-serving general in 1393 brought his immediate execution, followed by that of his supposed associates to the tune of four marquises, an earl, a minister, ten other nobles, sixteen chief commissioners and an unspecified number of junior officials, plus the extended families of all of them, giving a grand total of over fifteen thousand.
When in 1398 the emperor himself died, the empire heaved an almighty sigh of relief. The enthronement of his eldest grandson (the son of his designated, but lately deceased, heir) seemed to represent a return to Chinese norms of succession and to herald an era of civilian government. In fact, the empire was almost immediately plunged into a bloody civil war (1399–1402). By the end of it the young emperor had disappeared, his civilian policies had been rejected and his bellicose uncle, the prince of Yan, had swept to power. In retrospect the struggle thus closely resembled that which accompanied most Mongol successions. As if to reinforce the point, the new emperor’s forces had pushed down from his power base in the north, conquering the south and capturing its capital, just like Khubilai.
Nanjing never entirely recovered. The imperial palace had caught fire in the fighting and the new emperor would spend little time there. He preferred Beiping, which he immediately renamed Beijing (‘Northern Capital’), and which in 1424 he would adopt as the supreme Ming capital. Nanjing meanwhile acquired a different distinction. In 1403 the new emperor announced his intention of dispatching a fleet to ‘the countries of the Western Ocean’. The largest vessels in this fleet, indeed in the world at that time, were constructed on the Qinhuai river where it meets the Yangzi at Nanjing. Others would follow, making Nanjing, for the next three decades, the shipbuilding capital of the world’s greatest maritime power. For with the 1405 departure of Admiral Zheng He in command of China’s first world armada, the Ming were poised not just to emulate Khubilai Khan’s overseas adventures but sensationally to upstage them.
13
THE RITES OF MING
1405–1620
FROM THE EDGE OF THE SKY TO THE ENDS OF THE EARTH
THE PIVOTAL POSITION OF AN EMPEROR, as the Son of Heaven, in the all-transcending operation of the cosmos entailed heavy responsiblities. Assisted by a Ministry of Rites, he must perform frequent ceremonies and sacrifices to win the collaboration of gods and ancestors in warding off disasters and ensuring bounteous harvests. Shrines and tombs must be lavishly maintained, seasonal and familial rituals meticulously observed. Other related responsibilities extended to the conduct and interpretation of astronomical observations and portents, the regulation of protocol, titles and rankings, and the management of time (clocks, calendar, festivals) and space (territorial organisation and the geometry of the capital, the palace, the audience chamber). Adjusting the workings of ‘All-under-Heaven’ to harmonise with the ruling principles of the wider universe, the emperor himself partook of the supra-terrestrial. No mere mortal, he was not so much a deity as a constellation; and as such, the question of how to identify him was problematic.
An emperor’s personal name was rarely mentioned. Its use could only be defamatory and was therefore taboo. So were all those words that happened either to require the same written character(s) or to sound like them when pronounced; inadvertently or otherwise, they might be used to criticise or disparage the emperor. Thus every new reign began with a lexicographical purge. Whole word families were rounded up and temporarily removed from circulation. Scholars and scribes had to be especially alert; lives could be lost by a slip of the brush.
In history-writing, the safest way to distinguish one emperor from another was to use either their posthumous titles or their temple-names. The former are standard for dynasties until the Sui, the latter from the Tang till the Yuan. But there existed yet another method of identifying an emperor, and this was to invoke the officially named era, or eras, during which he reigned. In effect he was referred to not by name but as ‘the emperor of such-and-such an era’. These era, or reign-period, names, usually proclaimed to mark a triumph, launch an initiative or celebrate some other pressing aspect of sovereignty, could be confusing – there might be several new eras in the course of one reign. Year-on-year names, an adaptation of the same principle by impatient revolutionaries such as President Sukarno of Indonesia (e.g. ‘The Year of Living Dangerously’), mercifully never caught on in China. But the named eras could be quite short, typically four or six years, with the result that ‘altogether some 800 era names were used in Chinese history’.1 Inevitably duplication resulted, and since all dates were expressed in terms of these named periods (counting up from the year in which each was adopted), a tabulated listing of them with their BC/AD equivalents forms an essential tool for scholars of Chinese history, much as log tables do for mathematicians.
When claiming the Mandate in 1368, Zhu Yuanzhang had introduced a great improvement on this system. Besides designating his dynasty the ‘Ming’ (‘Brilliant’, ‘Effulgent’), and so following the Yuan precedent of showing some welcome originality in the choice of dynastic name, he adopted an era-name that was to last for his entire reign. Other Ming emperors followed suit, and so would those of the subsequent Qing dynasty. Henceforth era-names are therefore reign-names; the dating based on them corresponds to regnal years; and the emperors concerned can be confidently identified in terms of these reign periods. The first all-China emperor of the Manchu Qing dynasty, for example, is almost never called Qing Shengzu, his temple-name, but invariably ‘the Kangxi emperor’ (that is ‘the Kangxi period emperor’).
PROFILE OF AN EMPEROR
The Yongle Emperor
(1360–1424)
reigned 1403–1424
Father:
The Hongwu Emperor
Personal Name:
Zhu Di
Succeeded:
The Jianwen Emperor
(his nephew)
Pre-Imperial Title:
Prince of Yan
Reign Period Name:
Married:
Yongle (‘Perpetual Happiness’)
Empress Xu (d. 1407)
Temple Name:
Buried:
Taizong (‘Supreme Ancestor’)
Changling, Hebei
Changed to:
(‘Accomplished Progenitor’)
Yet for some unfathomable reason, in the case of the Ming this new system and the earlier one of ‘temple-names’ are both still commonly used. Zhu Yuanzhang, who became the first Ming emperor, is known as Ming Taizu (‘Great Progeni
tor’, his temple-name) and as ‘the Hongwu emperor’, ‘Hongwu’ (‘Abundantly Martial’) being the apposite name of his reign period. The second Ming emperor, grandson of the Hongwu emperor, is both Ming Huidi and ‘the Jianwen emperor’; and the third, the uncle and early usurper of the second, who would launch the great armadas of Zheng He, is both Ming Taizong (later changed to Chengzu) and ‘the Yongle emperor’. Some books not only interchange these two types of name but, when so inclined, throw in a posthumous title as well. Here, for the Ming as for the Qing, only reign-period names are used. Each emperor gets the definite article, followed by his reign period, and no inverted commas.
The Yongle emperor, then (r. 1403–24), third son of the rags-to-ruler-ship Hongwu emperor, was the former prince of Yan who successfully challenged the young Jianwen emperor (r. 1399–1402), captured Nanjing and eventually moved the capital back north to the site of the Mongols’ Dadu. There, having renamed it Beijing, the Yongle emperor began constructing a spacious new metropolis. It took most of his reign, and its innermost ‘Forbidden City’ is substantially that which remains to this day. Presiding over an age of comparative plenty, the Yongle emperor, unlike his father, had no conception of frugality. Further enormous sums were spent on restoring the Grand Canal and increasing its capacity so that the new capital could be assured of grain supplies from the south. Long and largely abortive campaigning in Mongolia and Vietnam would also weigh heavily on the public purse. But according to the Standard Histories, there was no greater example of wanton extravagance than the series of voyages that the Yongle emperor ordered Zheng He, his trusty Yunnanese Muslim eunuch, to conduct into ‘the Western [or Indian] Ocean’.
