By March 3, 1421, the emperor had given the go-ahead order for the sixth voyage to east Africa and the Persian Gulf. (There is no record of the number of ships involved in the fifth and sixth expeditions.) This time the Chinese treasure ships were loaded with porcelain and textile fabrics and the Chinese sailors were allowed to trade for their own profit. Once again Zheng He split up the fleet, sending his squadrons to Africa and Mecca while he himself stayed in Sumatra. Zheng returned home on September 3, 1422, just ten days before Yongle 206
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returned to the Beijing gate from his third campaign against the Mongols.
Literati-bureaucrats began to criticize these phenomenal maritime activities for the huge sums of money that Yongle expended to acquire exotic but, they thought, generally useless items from distant lands. Partly for this reason and partly because of the death of Yongle after Zheng He’s sixth expedition, early in the spring of 1425 Zheng was stationed by Yongle’s son Emperor Hongxi in Nanjing and charged with the beautification of the auxiliary capital. In the summer of 1430 Yongle’s grandson, Emperor Xuande, decided to revive Ming maritime activities and ordered the seventh and final expedition. Zheng’s fleet of more than one hundred vessels once again left Suzhou for Champa, Sumatra, and Java, and then traveled on to the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf. Soon after his return from Africa and the Arabian states, the sixty-five-year-old Zheng passed away.82 However, Zheng’s legacy and that of his superior, Emperor Yongle, linger on, and some of the historically significant issues pertaining to his voyages are still being examined and reexamined.
One such issue is the number and the size of Zheng He’s ships and their equipment. History of the Ming Dynasty records that, for the needs of an embassy to the countries of the “Western Ocean” (the area west of Borneo, which was used in Ming China as a point of demarcation), Yongle ordered Zheng He and his colleagues to build sixty-two large ships, each of which was 134 meters long by 55 meters wide.83 These expeditionary ships were built not only to transport personnel and merchandise but for naval battles. However, the fact that the total number of ships involved in di¤erent expeditions varied from 48 to 249, whereas the number of personnel remained about twenty-seven thousand led Paul Pelliot to conclude that Zheng He’s fleet consisted of smaller numbers of nine-masted ships and larger numbers of middle-sized and small-sized vessels, numbering between one hundred and five hundred.84 One entry in The Yongle Veritable Record indicates that three days after Zheng He returned from his first expedition, Emperor Yongle ordered Regional Commissioner Wang Hao to build 249 transport ships so as to better equip Zheng He’s fleet and make it more versatile.85 It is reasonable to surmise that Zheng He very likely commanded di¤erent sizes and various types of ships. Nine-masted treasure ships (135 by 55 meters) and eight-masted horse ships (113 by 46 meters) were used to carry, in addition to a large crew, huge amounts of merchandise; they also provided stores necessary to feed large numbers of men for a long voyage. Six-masted billet ships (73 by 28 meters) and five-masted combat ships (55 by 21
meters), on the other hand, because of their weight and mobility, could proceed under oars when entering and leaving harbor and in emergencies. They were most suitable for o¤ensive war and were capable of e¤ective self-defense.86
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To operate such a big fleet, Zheng He recruited several types of professionals.
All of the fleet’s principal o‹cers—such as Wang Jinghong (d. ca. 1434), Hou Xian, Li Xing, Zhu Liang (fl. 1409–30), Zhou Man (fl. 1409–22), Hong Bao, Yang Zhen (fl. 1409–30), Zhang Da, and Wu Zhong—were court eunuchs bearing civil service ranks from 6b to 4a. Since the fleet was armed for combat, Yongle also assigned high-ranking military commissioners, battalion commanders, various subaltern o‹cers, and soldiers to accompany Zheng He. In addition, the admiral was served by religious leaders (Buddhist, Hindu, and Islamic), physicians, purveyors, pilots, leadsmen, interpreters, accountants, boatswains, caulkers, sca¤old builders, carpenters, and civilian landsmen. According to History of the Ming Dynasty and other sources, 27,800 such people were deployed during the first expedition, between 27,000 and 30,000 in the third, 28,560 in the fourth, and about 27,500 in the seventh and last. There are no such records for the second, fifth, and sixth voyages.
These naval expeditions launched were indeed epic events in the pre-Columbian world. It is clear that in numbers, wealth, skill, technology, and sophistication, the Ming Chinese surpassed both the Portuguese and the Spaniards. The last major Chinese expedition, however, was in 1433, almost two generations before the Portuguese entered the Indian Ocean. Why did the Chinese discontinue their maritime reconnaissance? And why did they not reach Europe or America? Although ultimately there are no satisfactory answers, the story of Yongle, who was the master and patron of Admiral Zheng He, o¤ers a few clues. First of all, Yongle was devoted to expanding trade and diplomacy.
By taking the expansionist current when it served him, he enjoyed glory and was flattered by such sensational and auspicious tribute from distant lands as ostriches, gira¤es, rhinoceroses, and leopards. The reader is to be reminded again that throughout his reign, Yongle was haunted by the ghost of his nephew and, like Hamlet, had to “bear the whips and scorns of time.” Therefore, he sought glory to satisfy his gargantuan ego and to mitigate his guilt of “usurpation.” But like everything else in the temporal bounds of life, wherever there was glory, there was also frustration and a price to pay. Yongle’s expansion into Annam was certainly a disappointment and a frustration, and his maritime expeditions cost hundreds of thousands of lives and millions of silver taels. This is why time and again his scholar-o‹cials decried the ballyhooed diplomatic successes of the emperor’s eunuch-o‹cials and ultimately persuaded his successors to reverse his expansionist policy.87 Nevertheless, in the case of Yongle, he who died with high goals lives in death with glorious fame.
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10 / Epilogue
Yongle’s unshakeable sense ofdestiny and his relentless pursuit of power, prestige, and glory are apparent throughout the story of his extraordinary life. By the time he had reached the age of thirty-nine, in 1399, the restless and ebullient prince believed that the achievements of his father were like fragile sand castles built on the edge of the sea. As he believed that he ought to save his father’s accomplishments at all costs, he launched what he touted as the campaign for “suppressing trouble in accordance with heaven’s will.” But the bloody civil war and its ensuing purge made him a murderer, a villain, and a cynical manipulator, an image that he, in his lifetime, tried to erase and that his heirs struggled with after his death. During his twenty-two-year reign, Yongle tried extremely hard to prove that his father made a mistake by not naming him heir to the dynasty. Therefore, Yongle’s actions can be interpreted as those of one who saw himself as a savior and a redeemer.
Immediately after ascending the dragon throne, Yongle made known his broad and comprehensive principles of public policy and duty and quickly demonstrated that he had the spirit to carry them through. He single-mindedly pursued what his father had started, that is, the absolutist monarchy as a system of government. Absolutism was an asset in this politics of supreme monar-chial power over o‹cials and subjects, unrestrained by laws, and obedient only to heaven. Many previous Chinese rulers had ruled similarly by force of personality, with di¤erent results. Absolutism survived not in its original form, defined by the dynasty founder, but in a new version, for it was Yongle’s agenda, rather than his style of government, that separated him from Hongwu.
Because Yongle was so obsessed with playing the role of savior and redeemer, he actually surpassed his father in bringing glory to China, and ultimately exceeded Hongwu in the exercise of absolutism. On Yongle’s agenda was the institutionalization of the Grand Secretariat, which would consolidate the Ming’s centralized and authoritarian rule and e¤ectively make the emperor the 209
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center of the unive
rse. The other agendum was expansion of administrative service by eunuchs as Yongle appointed his trusted castrati as the minions of the throne and, by extension, the state. As a consequence, eunuchs orbited daily like satellites around Yongle and subsequent emperors throughout the entire Ming dynasty.
During the first two decades of the 1400s, Yongle had all the tools of an absolutist ruler and indeed relished using them to run the oldest bureaucratic machine in the world. He used such tools to correct corruption in government and to make his o‹cials more responsive and responsible. Consequently, he would not tolerate the misconduct of public o‹cials and ruthlessly removed and punished those who had seriously undermined public confidence through their misconduct. Nor would he condone any imperial clansmen or eunuchs who abused or violated his trust. Though fundamentally upright, he could be willful and capricious. This has led cynics to believe that by regularly throwing to his subjects the bones of bureaucrats and eunuchs who had made their lives miserable, Yongle was able to win public a¤ection.
Yongle labored hard and long, and his days often did not end until it was almost too late for conviviality. He was brutal but benevolent, stern and harsh but emotional and sentimental. He talked about the sage-kings and was able to cite their adages and noble principles, but he also reeked of blood and murder and possessed a beastly temper that sometimes overpowered his better judgment. He was self-assured and uncompromising, yet he did not hesitate to use divination for decision-making. In short, Yongle is a poignant case of a human being filled with great contradictions: he was part villain and part visionary.
Historians who model their biographies on the work of Erik H. Erikson (author of Young Man Luther, Gandhi’s Truth, and Hitler Among the Germans) can readily apply psychoanalysis to dissect Yongle’s genes and personality, and might easily brand him a sociopath. Like the clinical sociopath, Yongle indeed had a very complex personality—he was at once brilliant, erratic, prone to lying and cheating, generous, eccentric, and driven by a sense of mission. Sociopaths, the textbooks tell us, lie remarkably well, feel no guilt or remorse, and skillfully blame their problems on others. They are not good at sustaining personal or sexual relationships and often demonstrate a lack of anxiety or tension that can be grossly incongruous with the actual situation.
Yongle definitely was not a sociopath, because his natural disposition was of an overanxious cast, and he never shrank from taking responsibility. It was probably the ghosts of his father (of whose achievements Yongle was a savior) and his nephew (of whom Yongle was a redeemer) that dictated Yongle’s behavior. However, like the Sphinx, Yongle will forever present a riddle to biogra-210
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phers who try to understand his complex and enigmatic character. During his twenty-two-year stewardship of Ming China, he set a cheerful tone for the empire, making people feel as good as possible while waiting for the results of his actions and labors—economic growth, cultural regeneration, territorial expansion, and diplomatic glory. He smiled with a purpose, living and fighting as well as fighting and living. Action was his ideology, and with it he pioneered a new imperial politics.
Even before he died at Yumuchuan on August 12, 1424, the ailing Yongle did not behave as one who had fallen into decline. On the contrary, he was still actively ruling the world’s largest empire and felt as passionate about righting wrongs and protecting his borders as when he was a newly crowned monarch.
There is no question that Yongle had an overabundance of ego and embodied many virtues: he was self-confident, forthright, capable of identifying and retaining the service of men with great abilities, and protective of those who depended upon him, particularly his family. But he also had a dark side marked by unnecessary and unthinking aggressiveness that often resulted in violence and waste. Such excesses frequently turned his visionary dealings into villainous acts. After Yongle’s death, his son and heir gave him the grandiloquent temple title Taizong, or Grand Progenitor, which had traditionally been granted to second emperors in Chinese dynasties. In 1537 Emperor Jiajing added more honors and titles to his legacy by calling him Chengzu, Successful Ancestor or Completing Ancestor, implying that Yongle fulfilled what the dynastic founder had begun.1 Judging from the many policies he adopted and the several o‹ces he either inherited from his father or established on his own, Yongle truly deserved all these titles. There is a Chinese folk expression: “It is di‹cult to establish a business, but it is even more di‹cult to maintain it.” Certainly, it was Yongle’s father who started the business of the absolutist monarchy, but it was Yongle who carefully maintained and nourished it and made it grow into a system that would largely define China’s polity for the next five centuries.
Yongle time and again consulted with astrologers, diviners, and geomancers when he needed critical advice about matters such as making war or peace, moving the capital, or selecting a gravesite for himself. Long before the death of his wife, Empress Xu, in the summer of 1407, he had made up his mind to move his capital to Beijing. We know this because Yongle, a man who always planned ahead and worried about posterity, had chosen the southern slope of Heavenly Longevity Mountain (Tianshoushan), only fifty kilometers north of Beijing, to be the burial ground for himself and his wife, as well as his successors. After investigating numerous locations, he found the prevailing fengshui (lit., “wind and water”) balance there to his liking and was assured by his geo-211
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mancers that only benevolent spirits inhabited the area. More important, he was convinced that the very spot that would inter his body and his wife’s would also bring good fortune to his descendants.2 And indeed, thirteen of his descendants would rule China successively until 1644. In a culture where reverence of ancestors and caring for o¤spring are especially valued, fengshui exerted a powerful draw.
Heavenly Longevity Mountain, nestled in pockets between two dragon-shaped hillsides, with its excellent fengshui, constituted an auspicious resting place for Yongle’s wife. The construction of her tomb started in 1409, two years after her death, and when it was completed four years later, Yongle moved her co‹n from Nanjing to Beijing for permanent burial. It is very likely that at that time Yongle had already decided that he wanted to be buried right next to her, as he vowed never to invest another empress. Thirteen of the sixteen Ming emperors found their eternal homes in this approximately forty-square-kilometer area.3 Yongle’s tomb, called Changling, or Long Home, is the largest and is centrally located on Heavenly Longevity Mountain. The mausoleum consists of a red entrance gate ( lingmen), the Gate of Eminent Gratitude (Lingenmen), the marble Hall of Eminent Gratitude (Lingendian), the Ming Pavilion (Minglou), and the Treasure City (Baocheng, meaning “sepulchre”).
There are courtyards between the gate, hall, and pavilion, and the buildings are all rimmed by pine trees. In death as in life, Yongle was surrounded by magnificence.
The Hall of Eminent Gratitude—the mausoleum’s main structure—was built upon a three-layer, 3.21–meter-high white jade foundation. The lot is slightly more than 1,900 square meters—66.75 meters long by 29.31 meters wide. Nine rooms flank the east and west sides of the building while five rooms fill in its north and south ends. The roof of the hall is supported by sixty-two giant columns of durable, fragrant nanmu cedar, each standing ten meters high. In addition, four gold columns—14.3 meters tall and 1.17 meters thick—provide a buttress to the center of the colossal building. Since this hall was to serve as a model for future mausolea, it was meticulously designed and painstakingly constructed. The project, completed in 1427, more than three years after the death of Yongle, is one of the best preserved examples of medieval architecture in China. Behind this hall is the two-storied, square-shaped Ming Pavilion, and in its courtyard stands a simple stele with the epitaph of Emperor Yongle.
A passage directly behind the pavilion marks the sepulchre, about one square kilometer, where Yongle and his wife are interred.4
The great American architect Daniel Hudson Burnham (1846–1912) is bel
ieved to have said, “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s 212
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blood.” After his ascendancy, Yongle became the main architect of China’s imperial statecraft, and his gigantic plans and accomplishments—such as construction of the Forbidden City, exploration of the Indian Ocean, and compilation of the world’s largest encyclopedia of its time—have certainly stirred the blood of millions, in China and abroad.
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appendix
The Children of Emperor Hongwu
sons
Birth
Order
Title
Name
Mother
1
Crown Prince
Zhu Biao
Empress Ma
2
Prince of Qin
Zhu Shuang
Empress Ma
3
Prince of Jin
Zhu Gang
Empress Ma
4
Prince of Yan
Zhu Di
probably Consort Gong,
but raised by Empress Ma
5
Prince of Zhou
Zhu Su
Empress Ma
6
Prince of Chu
Zhu Zhen
Consort Hu Chongfei
7
Perpetual Happiness Page 31