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The Book of History says that heaven protects and benefits those who do charities anonymously. . . . When a person performs virtuous deeds and gives charities, but prefers not to be recognized or to receive anything in return, heaven, which governs all creation, will respond like an echo to a sound. I see [the examples of] many ancient people who were themselves prominent and glorious and were also able to pass on their good names and great careers to their descendants for generations. It is because they did so many charitable and virtuous deeds anonymously.37
When Yongle was still a child, he had been told the stories of the immortals. Among his favorite biographies in Do Charities Anonymously was the story of Jiang Ziwen, who lived near the end of the Eastern Han dynasty (c.e. 25–220).
A native of the lower Yangzi Valley, Jiang was kind to the poor, the sick, and the downtrodden. After his death he was deified as an immortal and was believed to have possessed certain charms and secret lore. Whenever there was a drought, people went to his temple to burn incense and kowtow to his statue, asking him for compassion and relief. Sick people relied upon his magical amulets and potions to cure their ailments. It is believed that once when Yongle became seriously ill as a child, his mother prayed to the immortal Jiang Ziwen, who cured his disease. The other biographies that Yongle loved to cite were those of the brothers Xu Zhizheng and Xu Zhie. The Xu brothers, who became well known during the Later Tang of the Five Dynasties period, sometime between 923 and 936, were always ready and willing to give succor to the a›icted who sought their help. After their deaths, they were enthroned in temples and remained popular among commoners and intellectuals alike. In fact, whenever Yongle was at the nadir of distress, he, too, sought solace in the comfort-ing words and deeds of the Xu brothers.38
The emotion, hope, and humanity of these stories were repeated in Yongle’s other didactic book, True Stories of Filial Piety, which featured the 207 most filial people throughout Chinese history. Also comprising ten juan , and completed in 1420, the book promoted kindness and tenderness, particularly care of the aged within the family. Once again, Yongle penned poems and commentaries on the text and wrote a preface, and after the book was completed, copies were sent out to leading ministers and military commanders as well as to various schools.39 Among the most filial sons in the book was Bian Zhen of the Eastern Jin dynasty. In 328 a rebel leader killed Bian Zhen’s father, who was then the chief minister of the court and also the commander of the government troops. Upon hearing of his father’s death, Bian Zhen and his younger 145
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brother rushed to the battlefield to seek out their father’s body, but both also perished. The story’s theme of loyalty and filial piety was, according to Yongle, the basis of virtue and the source of all instruction. Yongle wrote a glowing commentary on the Bian family, calling them true exemplars for the Chinese people.40 Yongle, who wanted to emulate sage-rulers before him, extolled the virtue of filial piety because of the important role it had played in human life and because of its e¤ect upon political thought and practice. He seemed convinced that when he fulfilled his prescribed role as emperor—and when his o‹cials, such as Bian Zhen’s father, and common people, such as Bian Zhen, all served him well—the empire would be a harmonious society in which all men and women were tied by bonds of moral perfection and virtuous deeds.
But how did one qualify as a filial son? How was a son to repay his parents su‹ciently for the great debt of gratitude he owed them? Should he give them worldly luxuries? Should he bathe their bodies in sweet-smelling ointments?
Yongle did not spell out specific guidelines, but he generally followed the time-honored social norms. As a consequence, he frequently publicized and awarded people who honored and served their parents, cherished their family lineage, protected their family property, and held periodic memorial services after their parents had passed away. But Yongle also included in True Stories of Filial Piety a few extreme examples of persons who had cut o¤ parts of their body to feed their parents to cure illness.41 Such filial acts were indeed sensational, but Yongle nonetheless praised them, signaling that only if one served one’s parents rev-erently, obediently, and unconditionally could one fulfill one’s other duties to one’s ruler and society.
By promoting the cult of filial piety and by incorporating the three religions into one ideology, Yongle attempted to safeguard the culture of his forebears and rea‹rm the institutions he inherited from the founder of the dynasty. In this sense, he was culturally a traditionalist, intellectually a pragmatist and utilitarian, and religiously an agnostic. He was and often considered himself to be simultaneously a Confucian, a Daoist, and a Buddhist. To his mind, the three religions or schools of thought were not contradictory but only di¤ered in function. During the process of harmonizing and promoting the three religions, Yongle in fact simultaneously donned a Confucian cap, a Daoist robe, and Buddhist sandals. In the political sense, he became the emperor of every creed and the model of every class. Therefore, he should be labeled as a utilitarian traditionalist, rather than as an avant-garde revolutionary, who saw the tragic flaws of Chinese culture and attempted to tinker with the old value system.
To the masses of illiterate Chinese peasants, Yongle’s stories and propaganda o¤ered order, salvation, and hope. To the literati and bureaucrats, his impres-146
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sive literary works forged bonds of a common education and culture. In addition, because Yongle fed them and paid them to constantly seek materials that were copied and compiled into printed collections, and because he gave them awards and promotions, Yongle literally bought their political allegiance. The energies of the literati were spent in their tedious encyclopedic tasks, and their ambitions and talents were channeled to help build a system that strongly deterred institutional reform and social innovation.42 China’s intellectuals of the early fifteenth century seemed not to love the real China so much as the promise of China, the China they hoped to help Yongle create. Yet when they talked about this imagined China, it was a land of high defense spending, low social spending, and very few cultural and institutional innovations. Ultimately even this China was not an end in itself but merely a stepping stone to the most rigid form of absolutist government.
Clearly, Yongle’s sponsored literary projects and his own writings were aimed at teaching moral platitudes, promoting social harmony, and, more important, legitimizing his rule. The underlying themes of these projects showed him as the true successor of his father. However, what he said belied what he practiced. He said he would rule the state and govern the people through moral persuasion and the teachings of the sages. However, in practice, Yongle often applied brutality and violence, backed up by generous rewards and severe punishments to achieve his goals. He was primarily interested in the accumula-tion of power and glory, the subjugation of the individual to the state, and the perpetuation of his family rule by means of absolutism. The ruthless and fear-inspiring instruments that he utilized to build his absolutist form of government were exactly what the legalists had long recommended, even though their works were purposely excluded from Yongle’s publications. Although he put legalist theories into practice and allowed despotism to live on in Chinese culture, he believed that legalism was entirely incompatible with other schools of thought, especially Confucianism. Thus, Yongle showed how everything is permitted to the excluded and nothing to the culture that excludes.
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8 / Yongle and the Mongols
While Yongle forged ahead with his political, social, economic, and cultural reconstruction programs, he carefully monitored the activities of the Mongols inside as well as outside his empire. One of the critical reasons for moving his capital from Nanjing to Beijing was that the northern frontier, of all the Ming’s borders, faced the heaviest constant pressure from external threats. Even after the founding of the Ming dynasty, the Mongol khan continued to contest Ming suzerainty, holding north Chi
na under his sway and frequently sending marauders into China proper. A succinct passage from Gu Yingtai, a mid-seventeenth-century historian, best describes the situation:
Even after repeated Ming punitive attacks, more than a million Mongol warriors continued to use their bows and arrows; the groups that pledged allegiance to the Mongols still covered several thousand li; their provisions, means of transportation, and weapons remained intact; and they still had plenty of camels, horses, cattle, and sheep.1
Both Ayushiridala (1338–78) and Toghus Temur (r. 1378–88), Toyon Temur’s successors, seemed to take to heart what the great Chinggis Khan had taught:
“War is the father of all and the king of all.” They managed to tap the rich vein of Mongol nationalism and promised to restore the Mongols’ pride and place in the world. And after su¤ering a terrible defeat at the hands of the Mongols in 1373, the Ming court took no o¤ensive initiatives against their northern enemies for fifteen years.2 This is why Yongle had to reprioritize his defense system when he took power from his nephew and why he was dubbed “the Son of Heaven who became his own general and who constantly patrolled along the northern borders.”3
As long as the Mongols remained a viable power and a formidable threat, 148
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and as long as the Ming emperor could not alter the status quo with impunity, relations with the Mongols were the top national security issue of the Ming court. After Toyon Temur, the last Yuan emperor, fled Beijing in 1368, the Mongol khan was considered to have lost his mandate to rule although he still possessed the imperial seal created by China’s First Emperor in 221 b.c.e. The First Emperor’s chancellor, Li Si, who was an accomplished calligrapher in the clerical ( li) style of writing, inscribed on the seal, “Receive the mandate from heaven / Enjoy longevity and eternal prosperity” (Shou ming yu tian / Ji shou yong chang). In the Chinese dynastic tradition, the imperial seal was generally equated with power, and whoever won the mandate of heaven also became the custodian of this sacred seal.
Since Chinese rulers were so enamored of possessing the seal, it had survived numerous dynastic changes, passing from Wei, Jin, Sui, Tang, and Song to the court of Qubilai Khan. After the death of Toyon Temur, its custodian was Oljei Temur, also known as Bunyashiri, who joined the Oirat forces but was later murdered by the Oirat chief Mahmud (d. 1416). In 1409 Mahmud pledged his allegiance to Emperor Yongle and o¤ered to return the seal to the Ming court. However, the Ming had by this time already created seventeen new imperial seals, each with its own unique and specifically stated functions, and had no need for such a seal. For the next two centuries the Yuan dynasty claimants kept it carefully stashed away until the last Mongol khan, after pledging service to the Manchus, turned over the seal to his people’s new master, Hong Taiji (r. 1626–43), in 1635. When Hong Taiji’s ninth son, a six-year-old boy, was enthroned in the Forbidden City on June 6, 1644, the seal was placed beside him. That, of course, was the end of the Ming dynasty, but it was not the end of the story of the seal. Throughout the 1920s it remained a highly cov-eted prize among contending Chinese warlords. This thousand-year-old, legendary seal is now housed in the National Palace Museum in Taipei.4
Even though the Mongols still possessed the sacred seal, the steady weakening of their forces ultimately led to the balkanization of the once far-flung Mongol world. It now split into three major groups, and the Ming leadership quickly learned how to maneuver within the confines of the divided Mongol population. A militant group consisted of former khans, princes, and nobles who, after safely retreating to the treeless steppe, resolved to gather whatever troops they could muster to fight their Ming nemesis. Since there was no restricted territory on which they could not trample, skirmishes and petty wars of reprisal against the Ming continued. The Ming court often responded in kind to their obscene killings and appalling savagery. Another, vacillating group of Mongols who preferred milder weather and richer food resources, elected 149
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to stay south of the Gobi, living under the watchful eyes of Ming frontier administrators. This group managed to maintain their traditional pastoral lifestyle, either as stock breeders or steppe nomads, while enjoying not only subsidies from the Chinese but also a degree of autonomy. Finally, a swelling number of Mongol defectors, many of them o‹cers who had brought their own troops along with them, sought service with the Ming emperor. Emperors Hongwu and Yongle both responded generously but also tried to utilize these surrendered Mongols to the utmost, integrating the Mongol defectors into the rank and file of the Ming army and selectively assigning them to defend the area along the Great Wall. Ultimately these Mongols mingled with the Chinese, adding a new layer to the mosaic of the Chinese nation.
It is nearly impossible to draw a demographic map of the Mongol population at this trying time, mainly because the deployment of the Mongol troops and the number of their families long remained a state secret. One source states that “among the total 400,000 Mongol troops, only 60,000 escaped and the remaining 340,000 fell to the hands of the enemies.”5 Such figures may or may not be unreliable, but one issue is certain: most of these Mongols willingly or unwillingly stayed in Henan, Hebei, Beijing, Shanxi, Shaanxi, Sichuan, Gansu, and Yunnan under Ming rule. An estimated 700,000 to 800,000 were captured as prisoners-of-war or forced to abandon their homes and become refugees.
In order to harness these exhausted and hapless Mongols, the invidious Emperor Hongwu tried to reach an accord with them. As a gesture of good will and a measure to break racial barriers, he had his second son, Zhu Shuang, marry a younger sister of the best-known Mongol general, Koko Temur, in October 1371. Hongwu exiled some of the prisoners-of-war, including a Mongol prince, to the Ryukyu Islands but nevertheless invested seventeen Mongols as Ming princes and marquises, and appointed many others to important posts in his new government. Such generous gestures caused Chinese to protest that the boorish Mongols were filling the court and that one-third of the tribute grain in Nanjing was allocated exclusively for feeding the Mongol o‹cials and their families.6
Both Hongwu and Yongle remembered the foreign policy of the Han dynasty known as “using barbarians against barbarians” ( yiyi zhiyi or yiyi fayi).
In 1374 Hongwu returned to the Mongol khan, then Ayushiridala, his expatriated son Maidiribala, who had been captured by Li Wenzhong at Yingchang in 1370. And when Ayushiridala died four years later, Hongwu sent a eunuch-envoy to express his condolences. Such generous gestures and conciliatory policies were designed not only to restore tranquility on the borders but also to lure more Mongol talents into Ming service. In almost no time the Ming court 150
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would test the loyalty of the surrendered Mongols, who were armed as cavalrymen and put into the Ming battalion-guard organizations so that they could be used to fight their own people. Several of the Mongol defectors distinguished themselves and were rewarded accordingly. For example, Toyon (Chinese: Xue Bin) was made a vice commissioner-in-chief of a chief military commission for his outstanding service. Qoryocin received an appointment as battalion commander in the Yanshan Central Protective Guard, serving under the command of the Prince of Yan. Known for his courage and determination, Qoryocin often broke through the enemy ranks recklessly during battles. Later, after the prince became emperor, on October 3, 1402, he invested Qoryocin as Marquis of Tongan, with an annual stipend of 1,500 piculs of rice.7 Other prominent Mongols also found it easy to serve under the Prince of Yan. In 1390 both Nayur Buqa and Alu Temur were captured by the Prince of Yan, and after a brief rehabilitation, the two fierce Mongol commanders and their troops also joined the rank and file of the Yan army. Another Mongol o‹cer, Aruygeshiri (d. 1433), surrendered to Yongle in 1409. The emperor first gave him a Chinese name, Jin Shun, and then appointed him assistant commissioner-in-chief at Daning.
Aruygeshiri twice helped Yongle defeat the Mongol forces and was first promoted to be a vice-commissioner of a chief military commission, then i
nvested as Earl Shunyi (Obedience and Righteousness).8 It should be noted that even though Yongle did not hesitate to turn to the Mongol defectors for e¤ective generals, he managed to contain their aspirations and refused to give them real positions of authority. Overall, the policy of divide-and-rule yielded good div-idends for the Ming court during the first two decades of the fifteenth century.
Yongle and his father were also concerned about the interrelationship of the Chinese and the Mongols, who now lived in a bifurcated society, and they looked for ways to build a genuine fusion or synthesis between the energy and ambition of the Mongols and the culture and splendor of China. Their often unspoken subtext was fear that the historical moral and cultural achievements of Chinese civilization were at risk of being diluted, even submerged, by the alien nomads. In spite of their desire to keep the goodwill and loyalty of the Mongols, they also wanted to flush out from the new society what they perceived to be the rotten residue of Mongol rule—elite illiterates, peddlers of vulgarity, and promoters of pomp and excess. The first step toward the restora-tion of basic Chinese characteristics was to forbid the Chinese to use popular Mongol names, imitate Mongol habits, dress in resplendent costumes like the Mongol elite, or speak the Mongol tongue. Early during his reign, Hongwu launched a program of “enculturation,” specifically ordering his subjects, by codified laws and regulations, to dress as their ancestors did during the Tang 151
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