Yongle Emperor

The Yongle Emperor, born Zhu Di, was the third emperor of the Ming dynasty, ruling China from 1402 to 1424. A son of the dynasty's founder, he seized the throne from his nephew in a civil war, then moved the capital to Beijing, built the Forbidden City, sent Zheng He's great fleets across the Indian Ocean and led armies into Mongolia and Vietnam. Historians often call his reign the second founding of the Ming.

Zhu Di was born on 2 May 1360 in Nanjing, the fourth son of Zhu Yuanzhang, the rebel leader who in 1368 became the Hongwu Emperor. Official records later insisted that his mother was Empress Ma, the emperor's principal wife, but other evidence suggests he was the son of a lower-ranking consort, possibly of Korean or Mongol origin, and the question has never been settled.

In 1370 he was made Prince of Yan, and in 1380 he took up residence in Beiping, the former Yuan capital, today's Beijing, with command over troops on the north-eastern frontier. Married to a daughter of the great general Xu Da, he spent the 1380s and 1390s campaigning against the Mongols and proved himself a capable commander, popular with his soldiers.

When the Hongwu Emperor died in 1398, the throne passed to Zhu Di's young nephew, the Jianwen Emperor, whose advisers set about reducing the power of the imperial princes. Several of Zhu Di's brothers were arrested or demoted, and one killed himself. In August 1399 Zhu Di rebelled, claiming he was rescuing the emperor from evil ministers. The civil war, known as the Jingnan campaign, "clearing away disorder", lasted three years. In 1402 his armies crossed the Yangtze and Nanjing's gates were opened to him by a commander inside the city. The palace burned; the Jianwen Emperor was officially said to have died in the fire, but rumours that he had escaped disguised as a monk persisted for centuries.

Zhu Di took the throne on 17 July 1402 and chose the reign name Yongle, "perpetual happiness". He erased his nephew's reign from the records, extending his father's era to cover it, and had official histories rewritten to support his claim. Loyalists of the old regime who refused to serve him were executed with their families, students and associates. The best known was the scholar Fang Xiaoru, who refused to write the new emperor's proclamation of accession; tradition holds that hundreds of his relatives and followers were killed with him. Tens of thousands of people were caught up in the purges.

Once secure, Yongle governed with more stability than his father. He relied on a small group of scholar-officials who began to form the Grand Secretariat, which became the core of Ming government, held the civil service examinations regularly and avoided mass purges of his ministers in later years. He also gave unprecedented power to eunuchs, whom he trusted more than officials, using them as commanders, envoys and spies. In 1420 he created the Eastern Depot, a eunuch-run secret police.

He sponsored huge scholarly projects. More than two thousand scholars compiled the Yongle Encyclopedia, completed at the end of 1407, an anthology of all knowledge in 22,277 chapters copied from thousands of earlier works. It was too large to print, and only a few hundred chapters survive today. He also commissioned official compilations of Neo-Confucian commentaries, which became the standard texts for the examinations, and supported Tibetan Buddhism, inviting the fifth Karmapa, Deshin Shekpa, from Tibet to Nanjing in 1407.

Yongle's base had always been the north, and he decided to make Beijing his capital, closer to the Mongol frontier he wanted to control. Preparations began in 1406, and over the following years a workforce of hundreds of thousands of labourers, soldiers and artisans built a new imperial city. To supply it with grain from the south, the Grand Canal was rebuilt, reopening in 1415. The palace complex now known as the Forbidden City was completed in 1420, and in 1421 Beijing formally became the principal capital, with Nanjing kept as a secondary one. Within months, fire destroyed three of the great audience halls, which the emperor took as a sign of Heaven's displeasure. He also began the imperial tombs north of the city, where he was later buried. In Nanjing he built the famous Porcelain Tower in honour of his parents.

From 1405 Yongle sent the eunuch admiral Zheng He on six great voyages, with fleets that on the first expedition reportedly carried nearly 28,000 men. They sailed through South-East Asia to India, the Persian Gulf, Arabia and the coast of East Africa, collecting tribute, displaying Ming power and bringing envoys and exotic goods, including a giraffe, to the court. Ming envoys also travelled overland to the Timurid Empire, whose founder, Tamerlane, had died in 1405 while marching on China, and relations with his son Shahrukh became peaceful.

To the south, Yongle exploited a political crisis in Đại Việt, where Hồ Quý Ly had overthrown the ruling Trần dynasty. Ming armies invaded in 1406 and in 1407 annexed the country as the province of Jiaozhi. Resistance never ended, and the rebellion led by Lê Lợi from 1418 eventually forced the Ming to withdraw in 1427, after Yongle's death, a story told in the History of Vietnam.

In the north, Yongle personally led five campaigns into Mongolia between 1410 and 1424 against the Eastern Mongols and the Oirats, playing the groups against each other. The campaigns won battles but no lasting settlement, and the later ones were costly and inconclusive. Returning from the last, he died on 12 August 1424 at Yumuchuan, in what is now Inner Mongolia, and was buried at Changling, the first of the Ming tombs north of Beijing.

Yongle's son succeeded him as the Hongxi Emperor and soon halted the costly voyages; after one more expedition under his grandson in the 1430s they ended for good. The capital stayed in Beijing, as it did under the Qing dynasty and as it does today. Traditional Chinese historians praised Yongle as a vigorous, Confucian ruler and a great general, while passing quietly over his usurpation. Modern historians stress both the scale of his achievements and the strain his wars, building projects and reliance on eunuchs placed on the state. The wider history of his dynasty is told in the History of China.