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imity to China were visited less frequently, some only once in three or five years.
Burma, Borneo, Cambodia, Japan, Java, and Siam belonged to this category.
Yongle sent imperial agents to conduct state business as far away as Aden, Bengal, Brava, Isfahan, Khorasan, Malacca, the Maldives, Palembang, the Philippines, Samarkand, Somalia, and Sri Lanka.
Briefly conquered by the Mongols during the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), Tibet—the Roof of the World—maintained a cordial relationship with China and exercised full control over its own a¤airs during the Ming. Emperor Hongwu never sent troops to that part of the world but, during the spring of 1373, invested sixty Tibetans as “aboriginal pacification” o‹cials. Some of these o‹cials also facilitated the tea-for-horses trade between the Tibetans and the Chinese. As elaborated upon in chapter 5, when Yongle was still the Prince of Yan he learned about the holiness of a particular Tibetan lama named Halima.
As soon as Yongle ascended the throne in 1403, he dispatched the eunuch Hou Xian and the prominent Buddhist monk Zhi Guang on a diplomatic mission to Tibet. Zhi Guang had been to both Tibet and Nepal before, but it was Hou Xian’s maiden trip. They went by land, possibly via Qinghai or the Silk Road to Khotan and from there crossing the mountains to Lhasa, the City of the Sun.
They left no travel journal, but Ming sources state that they traveled thousands of kilometers and did not return until 1407. To the satisfaction of Yongle, they did bring His Holiness Halima to Nanjing. Halima stayed in China until late in the spring of 1408; meanwhile Hou Xian was ordered to accompany Admiral Zheng He on the Ming’s second and third grand maritime expeditions to Southeast Asia.24
Following Halima’s visit, Yongle twice ordered the construction of a road and several trading posts along the upper reaches of the Yangzi and Mekong Rivers. The road that was used to send tea, horses, and salt between Tibet and Sichuan crossed Deqin and Zhongdian beneath the hundred-kilometer peaks that marked the Tibetan plateau’s eastern descent to the lowlands of Sichuan.
In 1413 Yongle selected another hardy eunuch-envoy, Yang Sanbao, to travel the arduous and primitive dirt road to Tibet. Yang would return in 1414 and 1419. While in Tibet, Yang visited several maroon-walled Buddhist monasteries and won over many princes who subsequently pledged their allegiance to the Ming regime. During his first mission, Yang also visited Nepal, whose king—
also the highest priest of the land—responded with a tribute mission to the Yongle court in 1414. Yongle awarded the king with a seal of gilded silver and a patent of investiture. Four years later Yongle dispatched the eunuch-envoy Deng Cheng to Kathmandu and brought a load of brightly hued brocade and satin to the royal family of Nepal. And before his death in 1424, Yongle sent one more 187
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eunuch-envoy, Qiao Laixi, to award his Tibetan and Nepalese vassals with such gifts as silver, images of the Buddha, utensils for Buddhist temples and religious rituals, and gowns and robes for monks.25 It seems that in his e¤ort to draw neighboring states to the Ming orbit so that he could bask in glory, Yongle was quite willing to pay a small price.
In 1415 Yongle ordered Hou Xian to return to South Asia. This time Hou went by sea, first to Bengal, then to other states. As a means of spreading Yongle’s imperial will and of learning of Jianwen’s whereabouts, Hou awarded their rulers with valuable gifts brought from China. But not all of Hou’s missions were for ceremonial or religious purposes only. His 1420 mission was to defuse a conflict between Bengal and its neighboring state Jaunpur. Hou not only successfully prevented a war there but also amended a rupture between Saifu-dDin, the ruler of Bengal (who often sent live okapi to Yongle as tribute), and Ibrahim, his adversary and ruler of Jaunpur. Hou Xian’s last mission to the Himalayas took place in 1427, three years after the death of Yongle. Ming chroniclers, in a rare show of fairness to the castrati, lauded Hou Xian’s diplomatic career and ranked him second only to Admiral Zheng He among Yongle’s eunuchs.26
As Yongle was winning both Buddhist and Muslim states in South Asia to the orbit of his empire, he also courted Muslim states in Central Asia. Even though it was a much more challenging task—because of the region’s mountainous terrain and the hostility of the ruling Moghuls—Yongle managed to induce twenty delegations from the most important and glamorous Silk Road cities, such as Samarkand and Herat, to his court. In addition, thirty-two embassies from other Central Asian states and forty-four tribute missions from Hami arrived at Yongle’s capital. Nevertheless, such astonishing diplomatic activities—an average of four missions a year—got o¤ to an extremely rough start. In 1394 Emperor Hongwu sent to Samarkand a goodwill mission of 1,500
men, led by supervising secretaries Fu An and Guo Ji and the eunuch Liu Wei.
After Tamerlane finished reading Hongwu’s letter, which treated him as a typical vassal of the Ming court, the Moghul overlord had the Ming soldiers executed and the envoys detained. However, the Ming court seemed unfazed by such hostile acts. In the ensuing years Tamerlane not only imprisoned the Ming envoy Chen Dewen in 1397 but also executed another Ming group sent to announce Yongle’s accession.27 Following Tamerlane’s death in 1405, his grandson Khalil Sultan released Fu An, Guo Ji, and the seventeen surviving Ming escorts. When Fu and Guo returned to Nanjing in July of 1407, they briefed Yongle about the conditions of Transoxiana in general and the looming power struggle between Khalil Sultan and Tamerlane’s fourth son, Shahrukh Bahadur 188
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(r. 1408–1447), in particular. In the meantime, increasing caravan trade came from such cities as Samarkand, Herat, Khorasan, Kashghar, Khotan, Turfan, and Hami. Yongle quickly learned that the Central Asians desired to trade their jade, sal ammoniac, horses, camels, sheep, delicacies such as raisins, and native products for Chinese silks, garments, tea, and porcelain. Yongle treated these trade groups as tribute missions and utilized them for his own glory.28
Before Fu An could warm his seat at home, Yongle ordered him to scurry back to Samarkand to renew China’s relationship with the new Moghul ruler Shahrukh Bahadur. Yongle wrote Shahrukh a letter in his usual imperial tone, calling himself “the lord of the realms of the face of the earth” while treating Shahrukh like a Ming vassal. But Shahrukh replied in kind by advising Yongle to accept the will of Allah and convert to Islam. Fu An returned to China in 1409, bringing along a group of envoys from Shahrukh’s court. Afterward Yongle and Shahrukh exchanged embassies every two or three years.29 The agents who were employed to carry out Yongle’s Central Asian diplomacy were primarily court eunuchs, the most notable of whom was Li Da. Ming o‹cial history men-tions that Yongle sent Li to Transoxiana at least five times to spread the news that the Ming court was eager to establish contact, commercial as well as political, with Muslim states in the region. During his third mission, Li Da was accompanied by two seasoned diplomats and hardy travelers named Li Xian (1376–1445) and Chen Cheng. Even though this was Chen’s first mission to the empire of Tamerlane, he was a veteran diplomat and a cultivated scholar. He kept notes detailing the stages of his journey to Serindia. Based on Chen’s accounts, this particular mission took 269 days, from February 3 to October 27, 1414, to reach its final destination and did not return to China until November 30, 1415.30 During this exhaustive journey, Li Da and his associates delivered Yongle’s message and munificent gifts to the rulers of Karakhoto (Chinese: Gaochang), Turfan, Almalyk, Yanghi (in what is now the Kazakhstan Republic), Tashkent, Samarkand, Kez (the birthplace of Tamerlane), Badakh-shan, Endekhud (Andekan), and Herat.31
During the decade of the 1410s, Yongle’s envoys were going to or coming from Herat every year, while Shahrukh reciprocated in earnest, and the rulers of Asia’s two largest empires referred to each other as friends. For example, Yongle’s eunuch-envoy Lu An spent the months of April and May 1417 in Herat; afterward Shahrukh dispatched his special envoy Ardashir Togachi to visit the Ming court. During the winter of 1418, Li Da received another order to v
isit the same seventeen steppe towns he had visited earlier, and, in July of 1420 Yongle dispatched Chen Cheng and the eunuch Guo Jing to Herat. While the Ming envoys were traveling along the arduous Silk Road, Central Asian caravans 189
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undertook the di‹cult desert journey eastward. Near the end of 1419, for example, a caravan with a tribute mission of 510 people, including the famous painter Ghiyath-al-Din, left Herat. On August 24, 1420, they reached the Ming border, where Ming garrison guards checked their credentials and passports. When they reached Suzhou, Gansu, a town not far from the western extremity of the Great Wall, a portion of their cargo was immediately sent to Beijing while they were wined and dined by the Ming frontier o‹cials. From then on, the Ming government paid all of their travel expenses. However, their travel itinerary—
including routes, dates, and stop stations—had to be reported to and approved by the Ming authorities. Ghiyath-al-Din’s mission then passed through ninety-nine stations and finally arrived in Beijing on December 14, 1420.32
After their arrival in Beijing, o‹cials from the Ministry of War once again checked their identification documents and then quartered them in the International Inn (Huitongguan), just outside the east gate of the Forbidden City. The Beijing International Inn (also known as the Northern Inn, as opposed to the Southern Inn in Nanjing) had six facilities, with a trained kitchen sta¤ of three hundred who prepared rice, wine, meat, tea, pasta, and vegetable dishes for guests. It was also sta¤ed with physicians from the Imperial Hospital and interpreters from the College of Translators (Siyiguan). The Ministry of War had to appropriate large quantities of hay, beans, and grain for feeding tribute horses, lions, leopards, camels, and gyrfalcons.33 After going through all the ceremonial protocol, including kowtowing to Emperor Yongle, the tribute envoys began to barter their remaining cargo with their Chinese counterparts when the International Inn was open to each trade mission for five days.
While the painter Ghiyath-al-Din sketched Yongle’s elegantly designed new palace, his colleague Hafiz-i Abru kept a journal, in which he described the imperial majesty of Yongle and the riches of early fifteenth-century China. This particular mission stayed for six long months, and on the day of their departure the heir apparent came to see them o¤. They were then required, as was every tribute mission, to return home by following the route by which they had come.34
The twenty years between 1404 and 1424 were the highpoint of Yongle’s diplomacy. Within a decade after his death, the number of Ming envoys sent to the Silk Road states diminished while embassies from Central Asia gradually decreased. Ming records show only ten such follow-up missions, half of them sent to Hami on relatively short and easy journeys. Nevertheless, relations with the Ming’s leading vassal, Korea, remained strong, cordial, and long-lasting, as Korea willingly accepted the Confucian concept of “serving the great”
(Korean: sadae). According to this concept, the lesser state (the “younger 190
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brother”) should accept subordinate status to China, whereby China was honored and paid tribute as the superior state (the “older brother”). China in turn rewarded this filial piety and loyalty with privileges, protection, and noninterference, and it conferred legitimacy on the authority of new regimes of such lesser states and their rulers. Consequently, as soon as General Yi Songgye (1355–1408) seized power of Korea in 1392, he sent a huge tribute mission to Nanjing, asking to be conferred as a Ming vassal. The Korean delegation delivered the seals of the Koryö kings (935–1392), explained the whole “usurpation”
situation, and requested new seals bearing the name Chosön, or Morning Freshness, the name of Yi’s new dynasty.35
At first, Korean tribute missions were sent to the Ming court once every three years, but they gradually increased in frequency, to often four or five times a year. They also yielded to the blandishments of Ming protocol, as Korean missions were sent to o¤er felicitations on the occasion of the lunar New Year, to congratulate the emperor on his birthday, and to honor the birthday of the imperial crown prince. Other Korean missions were dispatched to mark the passing of the winter solstice, to mourn the death of the emperor, and to attend the investiture ceremony of the new empress. And since the Korean leadership was eager to replicate every aspect of the Ming system, the Korean king always sent his heir apparent to train in the Ming court and to learn the Chinese skills of governance. For example, Yi Songgye’s eldest son, the future King Taejong (r. 1398–1418), came to Nanjing soon after the Yi dynasty was founded.
The Ming court, in an artful and unobtrusive manner, reciprocated by sending envoys for various purposes, in particular, the enthronement of a new Korean king. In 1418 Yongle dispatched court eunuch Huang Yan to invest Taejong’s twenty-two-year-old son, Sejong (r. 1418–50), as the new and the third king of the Yi dynasty. And in 1423 King Sejong wished to install his eldest son as the crown prince and requested Yongle’s blessings and o‹cial sanction. Yongle then sent a delegation, led by the eunuch Hai Shou, to o‹ciate at the investiture ceremony.36
Actually, Sejong was the third son of Taejong and was chosen to replace his eldest brother, Yi Tae, as the heir apparent to the throne of Korea only a few weeks before his father decided to abdicate. The upbringing of Yi Tae and the history of Korean successional politics clearly confirm China’s noninterference policy toward her vassal states’ internal a¤airs. Being an heir apparent and the eldest son, Yi Tae was expected to learn all of the Korean virtues as well as to model all of the precepts of moralistic Confucian ideology. In the fall of 1407, when he was only thirteen years old, his father sent him to Nanjing not only to pay homage to Yongle but also to learn how to prepare himself for his future 191
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role of king. The Korean mission arrived in the Ming capital in time for the 1408 lunar New Year festivities. During their month-long visit, Yongle received the Korean prince three times and awarded him and his thirty-five escorts all kinds of imperial presents. The heir apparent stayed in Nanjing’s International Inn, and the court eunuch Huang Yan guided him daily around Nanjing and its vicinity. In addition, the Ming minister of personnel Jian Yi gave an o‹cial banquet for him and his entourage. On the day the heir apparent was scheduled to return to Korea, Yongle once again received him at Military Excellence Hall and promised to always help and protect the Yi regime. He then gave the young prince stationery and many special books, including 150 copies of the biography of Yongle’s mother, Empress Ma.37
But the Korean heir apparent grew up to be quite a disappointment. He was known to be lecherous, violent, cruel, and perverse. Following a long and painful consideration, in 1418 King Taejong decided to disinherit Yi Tae and simultaneously abdicated in favor of his third son, Sejong. And it was under the reign of Sejong that Korea witnessed an unprecedented period of cultural accomplishments. It was also he who gravitated even closer to his Ming big brother, as Sino-Korean borders became marketplaces instead of war zones.
Yongle and Sejong, the rulers of the two Confucian states, frequently exchanged ideas and books on religion, philosophy, history, morals, science, and technology. After Yongle moved his capital to Beijing, Korean tribute missions to China and Ming missions to Seoul could travel by land, via Manchuria, instead of via the more precarious Yellow Sea. A 1450 travel journal kept by Ni Qian states that it was 1,170 li, or 585 kilometers, from the Yalu River to Seoul, and a Ming envoy usually had to lodge along the way in twenty-eight di¤erent Korean hostels, including the Cosmopolitan Inn (Chinese: Datongguan) in Pyongyang. And while the Korean envoys were quartered in the International Inn in Beijing, their Chinese counterparts were housed at the Great Peace Inn (Chinese: Taipingguan), just outside the south gate of Seoul.38 Since the tribute relationship was a two-way street, the more horses, beautiful girls, and young eunuchs King Sejong could send to Emperor Yongle, the more Chinese gold and silver ingots, publications, silk fabrics, and foodstu¤s were awarded to the Korean king.
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In 1423 alone, Sejong sent ten thousand tribute horses to Yongle and, in return, received a huge quantity of silver as well as several thousand bolts of brocade and flowered and colored silks from his Ming big brother.39 A substantial number of Ming eunuchs with the Chinese surnames Jin (Korean: Kim), Shin (Shen), Zheng (Chong), and Cui (Ch’oe) were Korean-born. They often were assigned to escort aging Korean women who had been brought to the Ming 192
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palace at a young age and wished to retire to their native home. Among the most prominent of such eunuchs were Jin Xin, Zheng Tong, and Cui An, who were brought to Yongle’s court at a tender age, won the emperor’s confidence, and were later entrusted with important missions to Korea, their native land.40
The Korean-born eunuchs usually began their careers by serving the Korean-born concubines in the Ming seraglio. For example, in 1408 five beautiful girls from the Korean yangban (gentry) class were brought to the Ming inner court, and a year later a peerless Korean lady named Chuan became Yongle’s top-ranking concubine. Chuan was also a talented flutist and, in 1410, accompanied Yongle to provide nocturnal service on his first campaign against the Mongols.
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