PERPETUAL HAPPINESS: The Ming Emperor Yongle
By SHIH-SHAN HENRY TSAI
Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001. 292 pages, $32.50
Sarah Schneewind
Zhu Yuanzhang, a Buddhist monk who rose from poverty to become the leader of a rebel movement that defeated China's Mongol Yuan dynasty and established the Ming dynasty in 1368, was touchy about his humble origins. As the Hongwu emperor, in power from 1368 to 1398, he never quite trusted the cultured scholar-officials who, by long tradition, ran the government bureaucracy. His distrust led to a new absolutism in which the emperor set policy and officials only it carried out, serving and often dying at the emperor's will. Distrust also led him to enfeoff his sons as military commanders ruling border areas. When the heir apparent died, Hongwu passed over the obvious candidate to succeed him-his fourth son, Zhu Di, who was a skilled and experienced general in his prime-and chose a young grandson instead. But Zhu Di overthrew his nephew in a violent civil war. Widely perceived as a usurper, Zhu Di held onto the throne by both enhancing imperial control of government and society and working hard to win popular acceptance. Known as the Yongle, or "Perpetual Happiness," emperor, he reigned from 1402 to 1424, and is the subject of the biography Perpetual Happiness: The Ming Emperor Yongle by University of Arkansas historian Shih-shan Henry Tsai.
On the one hand, Yongle institutionalized the Grand Secretariat, a brain trust of scholar-officials who served at imperial pleasure; he entrusted eunuchs, his personal servants, with security, military, and diplomatic matters; and he employed a secret police force, the Embroidered Guard, to dispose of real or imagined political enemies. Indeed, Professor Tsai's basic argument is that Ming absolutism was only begun by the founder of the dynasty, and was really put on a firm footing by his son. On the other hand, Yongle manipulated all the teachings of China to improve his image. He was a filial son who preserved his father's legacy. He was a Confucian monarch who remitted taxes, heeded advice, lived frugally, scrupulously performed state sacrifices, and blamed himself for bad weather. He was a cultural patron who won over reluctant scholars by employing them in compiling compendia of all known texts. He published biographies of Daoist immortals, and his wife published an account of her conversations with the Buddhist deity Guanyin. Like other emperors, Tsai writes, "Yongle in fact simultaneously donned a Confucian cap, a Daoist robe, and Buddhist sandals." Tsai states that "To masses of illiterate Chinese peasants, Yongle's stories and propaganda offered order, salvation, and hope," though he does not give direct evidence about how effective the propaganda was. Yongle also aggrandized himself by building the Forbidden City in Beijing, recruiting foreign emissaries from places like Korea, Mecca, The Indian subcontinent, and Eastern Africa, and sending a series of vast armadas to Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Africa.
Tsai's book can be read as a collection of portraits. He vividly portrays Yongle as complex and fascinating, "part villain and part visionary." He also portrays his family: his autocratic father, his brothers and in-laws ranging from gentle to vicious, and his strong-willed mother, who checked her husband and commanded the devotion of her sons and daughters-in-law. Tsai portrays scholars who died rebuking Yongle, and others who served him loyally, although that, too, was dangerous: one close advisor, who had rewritten the records of the Hongwu reign to make Yongle look good, was buried alive in the snow by the Embroidered Guard.
The book also portrays early Ming China itself: still battling the Mongol forces it had overthrown; peopled by numerous ethnic minorities; drawing merchants from all over the world eager for porcelain and other goods; deeply religious, with thousands of young men choosing the monastic life and strange woman-warriors leading popular movements; outward-looking and even aggressive, using cannon and blunderbusses and attempting to conquer Annam ( North Vietnam); and plagued by inequalities as peasants suffered under imperial demands. These portraits, all based on primary sources, make the book fascinating to read.
To what extent did the early Ming emperors set the pattern for later Chinese history? Tsai states that "for the next five hundred years . . . all power in China flowed from Beijing." But just as the filial Zhu Di had, in fact, overturned or neglected many of his father's policies, so his descendants changed his. The great overseas voyages ceased. The Ming armies left Annam. The changes came because-as Yongle recognized in churning out propaganda-rulers had to coax cooperation from society as well as coerce it. Later emperors were influenced by officials; later laws took account of popular opinion. Nor could the economy be controlled. The late Ming-thoroughly commercial, flooded with independent publications, reveling in romantic drama-was quite the reverse of the stable, obedient society the early Ming emperors had envisioned. This book, and the actions of the Yongle emperor, cannot explain the later Ming, but it is a wonderful account of the complex Chinese society and politics of the late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries.
Sarah Schneewind is an assistant professor of Chinese history at Southern Methodist University who studies the early Ming period and relations between state and society during the Ming era.