At the time Hua Yunlong was appointed senior counselor of the Prince of Yan, he held the concurrent title of vice commissioner-in-chief of a military commission. The Ming campaign against the Mongols resumed in earnest in January 1370, and before the end of the year successfully drove the remaining Tartars—then in a state of confusion, desperation, and despair—north of the Great Wall. Hua was promoted to the position of Marquis of Huaian in June 1370 and, early in February of 1371, took charge of the administration of Beiping and its vicinity, which covered eight prefectures, thirty-seven subprefectures, and 136 counties. Zhu Di was only ten years of age when enfeo¤ed and would not take up his residence in Beiping until Hua Yunlong had arranged a proper, secure, and comfortable princely establishment. While in Beiping, Hua took over the residence of a former Mongol prime minister and, in his search for certain imperial seals and regalia (which the Mongols had taken with them when they fled) allegedly plundered the old Yuan palace for his own collection. He was recalled in 1374 but died on his way to Nanjing.16
After the death of Hua Yunlong and the dismissal of Gao Xian, several other meritorious and learned persons were hired to tutor the Prince of Yan, including Fei Yu, Qiu Guang, Wang Wuban, and Zhu Fu. Fei’s relationship with the prince was not always cordial, as evidenced by Zhu Di’s refusal to bestow a title of nobility on Fei’s grandson. On the other hand, Zhu Fu’s tenure between 1373
and 1388 as a sta¤ member of the princely establishment of Yan was long and significant. Zhu Fu received his first government post in 1370 as an instructor at the National University, where he helped edit Record of Outstanding 27
the formative years
Examples. He joined the sta¤ of the princely establishment of Yan during the autumn of 1373 and was quickly promoted to become its administrator. Four years later he was appointed the chief tutor of the Prince of Yan and ultimately was a trusted confidant of the prince until his retirement. Zhu Fu, a man of integrity, diligence, and honesty, had been a positive influence during Zhu Di’s formative years. As late as 1416 Zhu Di still remembered this old teacher and granted him a posthumous title, Branch Minister of Beijing.17
While receiving an excellent general education at the hands of eminent scholars and virtuous tutors, the Prince of Yan always regarded the discipline and excitement of military life as vastly more attractive than the dull placidity of palace life. Early in 1374, when he was not yet fourteen, he first took part in the so-called “spring drill.” Dressed in his military uniform, he rode his horse in a circle around a military compound near the palace, passed before seven review platforms, and finally gathered with other princes in a camp to enjoy specially cooked sacrificial lamb and pork. After this Zhu Di and his brothers would periodically go to their ancestral hometown, Fengyang, for the kind of training that would help bolster their confidence and competence in dealing with the real world. Located on the south bank of the Huai River some 400 li (200
kilometers) west of Huaian and Yangzhou on the Grand Canal, and some 330
li (165 kilometers) east of Nanjing, Fengyang had been established as a special administrative unit called the Central Metropolis. It was responsible for administering five subprefectures and eighteen counties and had eight guard units (each with roughly 5,600 soldiers) stationed there to protect the tombs of Zhu Yuanzhang’s ancestors and to defend the city.18
The first time Zhu Di was required to go there was early in the spring of 1376, barely one month after his wedding. Leaving his teenage wife, Princess Xu (1362–1407), in Nanjing, Zhu Di went to Fengyang with his two elder brothers—the Prince of Qin (Zhu Shuang) and the Prince of Jin (Zhu Gang)—
and stayed there for seven months, from the last days of the second lunar month to the ninth month. They lived in the rain and the snow and tasted the stern conditions of the Huai valley. They took part in the training of troops—
including infantry, cavalry, and artillery—and learned all the dos and don’ts of fighting a battle. In addition, Zhu Di became familiar with gunpowder, firearms, swords, spears, crossbow triggers, arrowheads, scimitars, and so on.19
This military training taught him how to be a leader and how to exercise authority, and strengthened another foundation of his demagoguery—his preference for authoritarianism and his belief in himself.
Zhu Di would return to Fengyang two years later, this time with the Prince of Zhou (Zhu Su, his younger brother and intimate friend) and two half-28
the formative years
brothers, the Prince of Chu (Zhu Zhen, 1364–1424) and the Prince of Qi (Zhu Fu). This time he would stay for two long years and, in addition to learning how to command troops on the firing line, he paid particular attention to the logistics of warfare, such as transportation, provisions, and funding. Zhu Di had clearly begun to acquire organizational skills, and the successes he later achieved came in part from his ability to utilize the resources available to him.
During this tour of duty, he sometimes dressed as an ordinary soldier and found opportunities to visit peasants.20 By going out into the real world, Zhu Di further appreciated what his father had said about the people who were still recovering from a prolonged disorder: “People are exhausted both physically and economically. They are like young birds learning to fly, or like seedlings newly planted. Do not pull the feathers o¤ the one or hurt the roots of the other.”21 Zhu Di recalled that those were among the happiest days of his young life, in which he lived in his own world of fantasy. He often asked the villagers about the price of rice, pork, vegetables, and other daily necessities and showed them the common touch. Whenever circumstances permitted, he bought fresh fruits and nuts from roadside vendors with his own Great Ming paper currency ( Da Ming baochao), which was in circulation in five denominations. As his admirers would claim, the Prince of Yan was always a man of the people and an ordinary soldier among the masses.22
It was during his first trip to Fengyang that Zhu Di imperiously instructed his elder cousin General Li Wenzhong (1339–84) to construct and refurbish buildings for his princely establishment in Beiping. Li was a nephew and adopted son of Emperor Hongwu, and, in spite of su¤ering a serious defeat at the hands of Koko Temur in 1372, he was in charge of military a¤airs in the north at the time. The construction of a palace for a new prince had to generally follow the guidelines called “The Ancestor’s Instructions” (Zuxunlu) personally drawn up by Emperor Hongwu, but because Beiping happened to have been the capital of the Yuan dynasty, the emperor was willing to relax the rules a little by permitting the Prince of Yan to move into the old palaces of the Mongol emperor. Consequently, the palaces owned by the Prince of Yan were much larger and better fortified than those of his brothers in Xi’an, Taiyuan, Kaifeng, and elsewhere. In fact, some of his less fortunate brothers had to reside in temples or county o‹ces. However, since the color yellow was a Chinese imperial symbol, General Li had to change the color of the palace roof from yellow to green. In addition, he strengthened the defense capacity of the city wall and palace gates. So well fortified was the city that when General Li’s own son Li Jinglong (d. 1421) led the loyalist army against the rebellious Prince of Yan in 1399, his troops could not even get through the Beiping city wall.23
29
the formative years
Before the Prince of Yan took up his residence in Beiping in 1380, he had to fulfill another very important duty, that of marrying a young woman selected by his father as a suitable match, the eldest daughter of Xu Da, who was Emperor Hongwu’s comrade-in-arms and ranked first among all of the early Ming military commanders. A woman of intellect, strong will, and abounding energy, Miss Xu was two years younger than the Prince of Yan, and the two were probably engaged when they were in their early teens. This was not unusual for royal or noble marriages; the generally accepted legal age of maturity was thirteen sui for females and fifteen sui for males (a Chinese baby is counted one sui at birth), conforming to contemporary ideas on mental and moral development.
Such a marriage would not be consumma
ted until later, when puberty had been reached at about fifteen sui for females and seventeen sui for males.
The marriage of the Prince of Yan to Miss Xu, in early 1376, was obviously a political one, meant to further solidify the alliance between the two families.
In fact, Xu Da’s two other daughters were married to Emperor Hongwu’s thirteenth and twenty-second sons. Nevertheless, the young royal couple seems to have found love in one another and would share their joys and sorrows for the next thirty-one years. The first joy they shared was the birth of their first son, Gaozhi, two years later, on August 16, 1378, followed by their second son, Gaoxu, in 1380.
It was in the midst of these happy days, when the young couple and their babies were all set to take up their residence in Beiping, that the prince learned that his father had just foiled a conspiracy against the dynasty. The leader of this conspiracy was the generally arrogant and frequently reckless prime minister Hu Weiyong (d. 1380), who had long worked for Emperor Hongwu. In order to curb Hu’s growing power, Hongwu trumped up charges not only against the man himself but also against many thousands of senior o‹cials who were associated with him. As the evidence against the alleged culprits was either doctored or made up by the emperor, Hu and over fifteen thousand others were put to death in February 1380. Everyone in the Ming court, including generals and Hanlin scholars, was shaken up by this political storm unleashed by the calculating emperor, whose distrust of his o‹cials seemed to be matched only by his contempt for innocent lives. Nevertheless, this was a great political lesson for the Prince of Yan on how to use sham politics to maintain one’s autocratic power. He also learned that his father had ordered the abolition of the o‹ce of the premier and the chief military commission. From then on, governmental operations were to be carried out by the Six Ministries and the Five Military Commissions, all of whose chiefs were to take orders directly from the emperor. Although the Prince of Yan was not yet twenty, he had already 30
the formative years
witnessed many examples of brutality and was indeed fairly familiar with the game of power. Much of what he absorbed remained unformulated in his mind, awaiting crystallization into decisions a decade later.
The last trace of snow on the North China Plain had all but disappeared when the yellow and purple wildflowers dotted the foothills of Mount Zhong (present-day Zijinshan, or Purple and Gold Mountain) in Nanjing. It was early in the spring of 1380 that the barely twenty-year-old Prince of Yan bade farewell to Emperor Hongwu and Empress Ma, receiving imperial blessings as he and his family departed for Beiping. The prince realized that from then on, unless there were special occasions or emergencies, he could see his brothers only once in a long while but that he was required to come to see his father in Nanjing once a year. With an annual income of some fifty thousand piculs (roughly thirty metric tons) of rice, plus cloth of various kinds, salt, tea, and fodder at his disposal, and three princely guard units under his command, the Prince of Yan, who had a tryst with power, had now embarked on a path that would capriciously lead him to become one of the most prominent monarchs in Chinese history. Fate, fulfilling the design of heaven, cast him into the strategically critical realm of Beiping, which ultimately would provide him the means to supreme power.
The royal entourage, escorted by more than 5,700 princely guard soldiers, made its first stop at Yangzhou, an important port along the Grand Canal.
Concerned about the operations of remnant pirates on the coast as well as the dangers of the Shandong promontory, the royal party relied upon boats to carry them and their household goods from Yangzhou to Huaian and then used carts and horses to reach Jining, Shandong. This section of the journey was so hard and dangerous that a few years after the Prince of Yan ascended the throne, he ordered the construction of the Union Link Channel (Huitonghe) to ease the crossing of the northern course of the Yellow River and to facilitate the transportation of goods to Beiping. The party traveled slowly along the high ground of western Shandong and finally arrived at the northern section of the Grand Canal. They proceeded northward to the White River (Baihe) and made a stop at Tongzhou before sailing eighty-one more kilometers along the Channel of Communication Grace (Tonghuihe).24 When they reached the city wall of Beiping, the Prince of Yan’s father-in-law, General Xu Da, was waiting there for them. In 1381 Xu was to be named theater commander of the Mongol suppres-sion forces, and for the next four years this uneducated, quiet, but brilliant strategist would take his son-in-law under his wing and train him to become a first-rate field marshal. Nevertheless, every winter Xu was ordered to return to Nanjing to visit his family, who lived in the capital as Emperor Hongwu’s hostages.
31
the formative years
The recent wars and expropriations had turned the peasants on the northern border into murderers, looters, and bandits. When General Xu Da first occupied the Mongol city of Dadu in the early autumn of 1368, his forces were ruthless in setting up a new administration. He found a plethora of weaknesses in the city’s security system. In particular, because the Great Wall had not been an e¤ective barrier since the sixth century, it would be susceptible to attacks by northern invaders. Consequently, the general decided that until he had the time and resources to reconstruct the wall and make it into an e¤ective fortifi-cation, he needed a larger bu¤er zone between Juyong Pass (the pass nearest to the wall) and the newly renamed city of Beiping. With this strategic consideration in mind, he moved the city wall southward and also made it smaller and more defensible, hence destroying its original symmetry and leaving vacant a huge area in the northern part of the old Mongol city. He then built a new wall surrounding the northern section of Beiping with only two openings—Peace and Stability Gate (Andingmen) and Virtue and Victory Gate (Deshengmen)—
clearly signifying the Ming’s new mandate and the beginning of a new era. The walls on the east and west sides were heavily reinforced. In 1419 Zhu Di would move the southern wall farther south.25 But devastation wrought by war, plague, famine, and attendant social disorder contributed to a stunning phe-nomenon: Beiping’s population su¤ered extremely heavy losses in the 1350s and 1360s. Between 1358 and 1359, for instance, nearly a million people died of disease and hunger. Outside each of the eleven gates, more than ten thousand corpses lay unattended.26 Indeed, long before General Xu Da arrived there, the imposing city that Marco Polo grandiloquently described in his Travels was no more.
When the Prince of Yan arrived at the old Mongol capital, a dozen years had elapsed, and although north China had not yet totally recovered from exhaustion, the economically emaciated core of the Beiping metropolis had regained some of its population, vivacity, and even grandeur. In addition to the hundreds of thousands of Ming troops stationed in the area, a large number of government personnel had been steadily filling in the newly established o‹ces, and an army of artisans and workers brought from all over the country were still rehabilitating the city. The most pressing problem was the supply of food and daily necessities needed to meet the demand of the booming city. Some farmlands had been reclaimed, and peasants, soldiers, and even convicts were coerced to take part in agricultural production while the government supplied them with seeds, oxen, tools, and tax remissions. In the meantime, the government encouraged merchants to bring grain to the area, but instead of paying them in cash, the Ministry of Revenue issued them licenses 32
the formative years
to buy and sell salt. The merchants obtained the salt from designated salt farms and sold it in the market for huge profit. The government also reopened coastal shipping so as to bring grain to Bohai Bay, but due to the unpredictable weather and resurgent piracy, such operations often sustained heavy losses. At this juncture, the Prince of Yan realized that in order to feed his ever-growing population in Beiping, he needed to transport at least 6.5 million piculs of grain from south China every year.27
Soon after the prince and his family settled into the revamped palace, he encountered both cultural and military-administrativ
e problems that he had never before faced in his young career. For example, Mongol customs remained evident in Beiping, and the Mongol language and script were kept alive and juxtaposed with Chinese in o‹cial documents. He was mindful that his father had outlawed several Mongol customs and fashions, and ordered the people to dress as they did before the Mongol invasions and not to use popular Mongol names. The prince found it di‹cult to enforce these orders at once, as he was convinced that it would take some time to embed changes in the new society.
Fortunately, he was surrounded by men of rectitude and high ability who advised him to open the sealed Mongol “imperial” libraries and treasuries and to retain some of the Mongol eunuchs who were left there to take care of the palace women. The prince personally drilled his guard troops, deploying them in various precincts. He also became aide-de-camp of General Fu Youde (d. 1394), a highly competent commander with immense personal courage. To trace Fu Youde’s peripatetic path from his humble background in Anhui to his rise to become an eminent field marshal is to appreciate Zhu Yuanzhang’s knack for recognizing talent and rewarding loyal servants. In 1361, after serving under a succession of overlords, some of whom proved to be Zhu Yuanzhang’s toughest rivals, Fu surrendered to Zhu. After his brilliant campaign in Sichuan in 1371, Fu was awarded the rank of marquis, and when the Prince of Yan met him in 1380, he was serving as Xu Da’s deputy, training troops, conducting patrols of the border, and supervising construction of defense along the Great Wall. It was his expertise as a shrewd field tactician, however, that would benefit his newest disciple, the Prince of Yan.28
Alexander the Great of Macedonia was only twenty-one years old when he took over his father’s command and ultimately built a huge empire. The Prince of Yan was the same age when he was baptized on the battleground and learned how to handle the levers of power in the northern region; he had begun a journey that would lead him to the dragon throne exactly twenty-one years later.29
Perpetual Happiness Page 5