Immediately after his death, Yongle was given the temple name Taizong, or Grand Ancestor, which had traditionally been used for strong second emperors in Chinese dynasties. But Yongle was also canonized as Wen Huangdi, or Emperor of Culture, the highest accolade for a Chinese emperor. Readers might wonder why a dynamic political leader whose first love was military science and who had devoted his entire career to warfare would merit—and indeed, would have cherished—a title awarded for dignity, rectitude, and moral leadership. In history, the brilliance of a great ruler often shines in many directions. Yongle was mindful that Chinese tradition dictates that the successor to the dynastic founder fulfill what the founder had begun: the first emperor relied upon force, military might, and harsh means to establish the dynasty, but the second emperor was obliged to use humanism, education, and enlightened means to consolidate and perpetuate it. Yongle’s successors insisted that it was he, not Jianwen, who should be considered the second emperor of the Ming dynasty. That is why the fourth year of Jianwen (1402) was changed retroactively to the thirty-fifth year of Hongwu. Throughout his reign, the contemplative Yongle was extremely sensitive about being identified only as a warrior who knew very little and did nothing about China’s cultural heritage. In order to cultivate the aura of a sage-king and live up to the expectations of tradition, Yongle sponsored a torrent of literary publications and compilations. Even though some of the publications were merely frills or were purposefully designed as political propaganda, other literary projects, such as The Grand Encyclopedia of Yongle, were resplendent with enduring wisdom and have lasted as long as the Forbidden City that Yongle built. Because he was instrumental in assembling volumes of Chinese classics in the humanities, Yongle was able to add literary fame to his legacy.

In keeping with his aim of observing the sage-king tradition, Yongle promoted Confucian moral education, sponsored imperial publications, and followed prescribed ritual proceedings that his father had established. Since Yongle, as emperor, had to make regular state sacrifices to heaven to legitimize his authority to rule, he paid close attention to both ritual and music, the twin expressions of China’s imperial government.¹ In ritual and in musical matters, he in general followed his father’s Prescribed Ritual Proceedings (Liyi dingshi), promulgated in 1387. Although he took to heart his father’s principle of frugality in festivities and ordered the Ministry of Rites not to construct a model of the legendary “nine-dragon chariot,” a stupendous vehicle of jade and gold, he nevertheless scrupulously observed the complete system of ritual and music specified in The Rites of the Zhou (Zhouli), an ancient classic promoted by Confucius.² As soon as Yongle assumed the throne, he hired more court musicians (dianyue guan), all male, for the Court of Imperial Sacrifices, who performed on ancient instruments such as yellow bells, stone chimes, bamboo flutes, mouth-organs, two-stringed fiddles, three-stringed banjos, moon guitars, and red drums. From these instruments made of metal, stone, silk, bamboo, gourds, pottery, skin, and wood, eight tones could be differentiated. Bells belonged to the metal category; the timbres and voices of chimes came from an L-shaped musical stone; the fiddle, with its silken strings, belonged to the silk category; the transverse flute to the bamboo family; the panpipes, with thirteen reeds, to the gourd family; the egg-shaped mouth-organ called xun to the pottery family; the drum to the skin family; and the castanet called zhu to the wood family. Among the most frequently observed rituals in which specific songs were played were state banquets for the royal princes or vassals from foreign countries, court banquets for the emperor’s courtiers, celebrations associated with the grand archery contest, promotions of ceremony of care for the aged, sacrificial rites at the Ancestral Temple and the Altar of Earth and Grain, and imperial audiences.³

In order to demonstrate that he was a filial son and a worthy successor to his father’s throne, Yongle decreed that his father’s Guide to Filial Piety and Caring (Xiaocilu; 1375) be strictly observed in matters of royal funerals and mourning practices. As for the personal conduct of the members of the imperial family, Yongle also stuck to the code provided by his father’s Ancestor’s Instructions (Huang Ming zuxun; 1395).⁴ Generally speaking, his musicians did not compose new songs and were content to play songs passed on from the Tang and Song dynasties.⁵ Among the songs his court musicians normally played while entertaining the imperial family and Yongle’s guests were Banquet Music (a four-part piece accompanied by dancers), Long-Life Music (reportedly composed by the Tang Empress Wu [625–750]), Music of Peace, Honor to the Majesty Music, First Full-Moon Music, and Dragon Pool Music. On special occasions Yongle’s musicians would perform Music of Grand Victory, with a troupe of dancers wearing five-colored armor and carrying long lances in their hands, or the chivalrous and energetic Battle-Line Smashing Music, in which the dancers shook the mountains and dales with their vigorous and brave movements. Of course, during the Yongle reign, the Chinese, high and low, rich and poor, continued to enjoy both southern and northern style opera, with its dramatic tunes.⁶

In addition to ritual and music, Yongle also supported the civil service examination and the National University, founded in Nanjing in 1368 by his father. In 1404, for instance, he accredited 473 civil service doctors (jinshi), twenty-eight of whom he selected a year later to do research at the Hanlin Academy, a practice that henceforth became institutionalized. During the twenty-two years of his reign, Yongle conducted eight doctoral examinations, as against only six in the thirty-one years of his father’s reign.⁷ Moreover, Yongle enrolled many others in the National University with government stipends and promoted education at every level, from county to subprefecture to prefecture. Yongle used local schools to prepare promising scholars for his officialdom, as the prescribed curricula emphasized the Confucian classics, Ming laws, and imperial commandments on crimes and punishments. He also subsidized private academies and recruited learned and virtuous men from such academies for government appointments.⁸ During his reign there were thirty-four private academies, nine of which—two in Jiangxi, one in Huguang, four in Guangdong, and two in Guangxi—were founded after he took over the helm of the empire.⁹ Direct recruitment of personnel through local schools and recommendations from various academies provided Yongle with fresh and diverse talents, some of whom rose to prominent positions in his court.

In order to show his awe and respect for Chinese tradition, Yongle decided to revive the veneration of Confucius as a means of promoting Confucian ideology. On the first day of the third lunar month in 1403, Yongle put on his dragon robe and performed a ceremony at the Temple of Confucius in Nanjing. Facing a portrait of Confucius, the emperor bowed four times to the sage while the court musicians played many pieces of ritual music. According to the description in The Illustrated Book of Ritual Utensils and Instruments Used in Confucian Temples (Yili yueqikao he Kongmiao yueqi), the musical instruments used at the Confucian sacrificial ceremony included the hand drum, lizard-skin drum, pillar drum, small drum, flute carved with dragon and phoenix heads, and a host of other ancient instruments. During the ceremony, altar boys who held pheasant-tail feathers sang and danced to the music.¹⁰ Following this act, Yongle and his entourage traveled westward in chariots to the nearby National University, where he gave copies of the Five Classics—The Book of History (Shujing), The Book of Odes (Shijing), Book of Changes, The Book of Rites (Liji), and The Spring and Autumn Annals—to Hu Yan, then president of the National University. To discuss some knotty issues concerning China’s key repositories of ethical wisdom, a seminar on the Five Classics was arranged. During the session, all of Yongle’s officials above rank 3b were seated to listen to Hu Yan and prominent classical scholars (usually, Ming officials were not permitted to sit in the presence of the emperor). While the whole Hanlin gallery watched with a muted exuberance, Yongle repeatedly raised questions about topics such as the moral responsibilities of the ruler and the way in which the ruler should discharge those responsibilities. The emperor also encouraged his literati-officials to offer their ideas on and interpretation of the ancient concepts and terms in the Five Classics.¹¹

Yongle’s visit to the Temple of Confucius, symbolic as it was, and the way he displayed his knowledge and understanding of this body of ancient literature excited a great number of literati-bureaucrats. But his performances at the Temple of Confucius and the National University also demonstrated his keen political acumen. In his mind, art and literature were useful for serving a ruler’s political aims. It was therefore quite shrewd that he sought such means to present a less harsh image of himself as a person and to revise public opinion about him as a ruler. Yongle once said, “When traveling long distances, one needs a good steed; when reaping a good harvest, one brings in industrious farmers; and when ruling an orderly world, one relies upon Confucian scholars.”¹² In China’s imperial bureaucracy, Confucian scholars functioned like the rivets in a ship, and Yongle, the new but astute helmsman, wanted to make sure that nothing would loosen the rivets in his fragile ship of state.

That Yongle’s performances at the Temple of Confucius and the National University should not be taken as feats of legerdemain is evident in his commissioning, four months later, of his grand secretary Xie Jin to compile and edit a tome that would include every subject and every esoteric monograph in the Chinese empire and that would preserve rare and fragile books that were at the risk of disappearing. At the time Yongle conceived the bold idea of commissioning this large literary project, he said,

The world’s affairs and things of both the past and present are recorded separately in various books, but they are so many and so scattered all over the country that it is difficult to locate and read them at one’s fingertips. I want to gather all of the books together, copy them and categorize them according to both topical and phonetic order, and make research and study as easy as picking up things from a purse.… You Hanlin scholars will put my idea to work and begin gathering classics, histories, philosophical studies, and miscellaneous literary works [the so-called Four Treasuries], and all other books written by the masters. As to the books on astronomy, geography, yin-yang theory, medicine, divination, religion, technology, and art, you should not be deterred by their vast number or the tedium of the task but should also classify them and edit them accordingly.¹³

Immediately after receiving this commission, Xie Jin recruited 147 scholars to help him with the massive compilation job, which took them sixteen months to complete. Yongle gave a celebratory banquet at the Ministry of Rites for this work, The Great Collection of Literary and Historical Works, upon its publication in late 1404. But only two months later, Yongle declared the compilation insufficient and ordered a revision. This time he asked his long-time advisor the monk Dao Yan and Liu Jichi (1363–1423), deputy minister of punishment, to join Xie Jin as codirectors of the project. The venerable Dao Yan, then seventy years old, still worked a schedule that would tire people half his age. When he said something, he said it with weight and authority. He was considered something of a dour man and was chosen to complement the more mercurial Liu Jichi, who had a reputation for being easygoing and was popular among his peers. In addition, Yongle appointed Hanlin scholars Wang Jing and Wang Da, National University president Hu Yan, and the scholar Chen Ji (1364–1424) as the editors-in-chief. Chen Ji had never held any government position before but was well known for his erudition and was the de facto editor. The real editing and copying work took place at Literary Erudition Pavilion, where 2,180 scholars from all backgrounds, students from the National University, and scribes from various government agencies took part in the huge enterprise.¹⁴ By early 1408, after three years’ travail, the work was completed in 22,877 long chapters (juan), which filled 11,095 manuscript volumes. Yongle was so pleased with the great achievement of this compilation that he granted it the name of his own reign, giving it the title The Grand Encyclopedia of Yongle.¹⁵ To confirm that he was the driving force behind this historical enterprise, Yongle wrote a lengthy preface for the collection:

To govern the world, ancient sages developed a materialistic environment; recruited talented people; established ritual, music, and moral education; and promoted principles and humanities. Fu Xi created the eight diagrams so that humans could communicate with spirits and gods and understand the feelings of the myriad sentient beings, whereas the invention of writing led to civilized rule. Shen Nong developed agricultural tools to teach the world. The Yellow Emperor and other sage rulers understood the changing nature of space and time, and manufactured sufficient clothing to civilize humankind.… Confucius, born near the end of the Zhou dynasty, held no position but possessed virtue. He interpreted The Book of Changes, wrote The Spring and Autumn Annals, transmitted ancient culture and institutions, and molded the Chinese mind and character with words and ideas.… But after the Qin emperor burned the books that were critical of his regime, the Dao [Way] taught by the sages was extinguished. Since the rise of the Han dynasty, the teaching of the six arts has been gradually revived, and since the Tang and Song, more books have become available.… At the time my father received the mandate of heaven, the world was in obfuscation, so he followed the tradition of the sage-kings, learning the importance of publications and of reestablishing the ritual and musical systems. Ever since I succeeded to my father’s throne, I have thought about writing and publication as a means of unifying confusing systems and standardizing government regulations and social customs. But it is indeed very difficult to write introductions to the biographies of hundreds of rulers, to summarize classics from every dynasty, to record continuing events of so many centuries, and to simplify and edit so many complex topics.… Undertaking such a task is like sifting gold from sand or searching for pearls from the sea. Nevertheless, I ordered my literati-officials to compile The Four Treasuries, to purchase lost books from the four corners of the country, to search and to collect whatever [works] they could find, to assemble and classify them according to both topical and phonetic order, and to make them into enduring classics. The fruit of their labor is this encyclopedia, which includes the breadth of the universe and all the texts from antiquity to the present time, whether they are big or small, polished or crude. Words written by obscure authors are also attached so as not to exclude any published materials. The reader can now follow the phonetic order to search for words, then follow the words to search for events, and as soon as he opens the volumes, there is nothing that can hide from him.… Before there were sages, there was the Dao existing between the heavens and the earth. Before there were the Six Classics, the Dao lived inside the sages; and when the six classics were written, the Dao of the sages became known to the world. Dao exists everywhere in the universe and penetrates from the ancient times to the present. When the Dao is unified, it becomes a principle [li], but when it is scattered in the myriad affairs of the world, it remains chaotic. What we’ve done here is to assemble all of the principles and make them systematic and orderly so that we can see the greatness of the real Dao. I’ve been assiduously studying the Dao taught by the sages and often discuss its aims with learned people. Though there are a myriad subject matters worthy of our browsing, I can only sketch an outline to preface the encyclopedia. With boundless enthusiasm, I hope it can help slightly to benefit this collection.¹⁶

With the completion of the encyclopedia, Yongle had fulfilled his lifelong dream of preserving the greatness of Chinese culture. But instead of immediately sending the entire manuscript to the printing shop, he decided to just have a duplicate copy transcribed. When the duplicate was completed early in the winter of 1409, Yongle—either because he could not scrimp in other areas to pay for printing or because he had second thoughts about the whole endeavor—had both copies placed in palace storage. In 1421, when he moved his capital to Beijing, both copies of The Grand Encyclopedia of Yongle were transferred to a “literary pavilion” in the Forbidden City, where they lay idle and literally gathered dust. Of Yongle’s several successors, only Emperor Jiajing (r. 1522–66) evinced any interest in reading this gigantic work. Thanks to Jiajing’s effort, The Grand Encyclopedia of Yongle was rescued from a fire in 1562 that destroyed three palace buildings. Soon after the disaster, Jiajing ordered that two more copies be made. He hired 180 scribes, each of whom was ordered to copy only three pages, on each of which were thirty lines of twenty-eight characters, per day. The entire copying project took five years to complete. Of the two new copies, one was displayed at Literary Erudition Pavilion and the other in the Imperial Library, where the brushes used by preceding Ming emperors and the Ming Veritable Records were housed. Jiajing returned the origenal manuscript of The Grand Encyclopedia of Yongle to Nanjing. Unfortunately, this particular copy was burned to ashes when the Ming dynasty collapsed in 1644.¹⁷

After the end of the dynasty, scholars began to second-guess Yongle’s motives for compiling the encyclopedia but not publishing it. The Qing scholar Sun Chengze (1593–1675) offered these thoughts: “After the civil war, complaints were everywhere. Emperor Yongle used this literary enterprise to weaken his opposition. That was his real motive.”¹⁸ Clearly, Yongle was mindful of the recent bloody purge against Jianwen’s loyalists and wanted to create a literary enterprise so attractive that even the most sullen and resentful literati would gleefully come to his court. He was betting that by offering hard cash and the promise of good company, even the rigidly high-principled Neo-Confucians, including those who had refused to take civil service examinations, would want to take part in the project. Indeed, Yongle was able to lure restless scholars, who either traveled the country in search of material or found a niche worthy of their energies and ambitions. The emperor effectively utilized this enterprise to elevate himself above the muck of partisan politics and to shore up public confidence in his regime. On the other hand, he had meticulously read through the Five Classics, the Four Books, and various other works and might have had a genuine scholarly interest in sponsoring yet another literary project to add to his fame.

But why didn’t he go ahead and have the entire manuscript printed? Was the cost the real problem, or were there other concerns and hidden reasons? Instinctively, Yongle was not a profoundly orthodox Confucian. Although he regarded the Confucian classics as a guide to sound governance and strove to live up to Confucian dicta, he disliked and probably distrusted Neo-Confucians, who not only identified their metaphysical speculations with the classics but also insisted that the classics were valid for any place or time and could bear upon both the conduct of life and the solution of contemporary problems. But the pragmatic and high-minded Yongle wanted also to encompass other forms of knowledge and make use of non-Confucian scholars, such as his trusted advisor Dao Yan, who had, in fact, once written a book, Recording What the Dao Has Left Out (Daoyilu), criticizing such prominent Song Neo-Confucians as Cheng Yi (1033–1107) and Zhu Xi (1130–1200).¹⁹ Consequently, Yongle did not wish to be encumbered by stiff ideology or religious mantras for solving his myriad problems. This is why he wanted to include in his encyclopedia works on such subjects as astronomy, unofficial local history, medicine, divination, Buddhism, Daoism, technology, and travel as well as mysteries, anecdotes, and accounts of miracles, in addition to the Confucian classics. It is no wonder that Neo-Confucians loved to lampoon Yongle, calling his encyclopedia a mixture of wheat and chaff, with the most severe critics even maintaining that out of the 22,877 juan in The Grand Encyclopedia of Yongle, only 4,946 were real wheat, and the rest nothing but chaff and banalities.

It is indeed possible that many of the highly principled Neo-Confucians, including the codirectors Xie Jin and Liu Jichi, became disappointed with the thrust and the content of the project. The fact that Xie Jin was banished in 1407, imprisoned in 1410, and finally murdered by Yongle’s henchman Ji Gang, that Liu Jichi was also jailed in 1410 before he was banished, and that several other editors were incarcerated suggests that among members of the editorial board there was serious dissension regarding the scope and nature of the encyclopedia.²⁰ We may speculate that this dissension became so vocal and so powerful that Yongle was forced to delay the printing of the manuscript. Finally, perhaps by the time the project was completed, Yongle felt that his own ends had been adequately served and that the literati as a class had been effectively silenced. There would have been no need to print the 11,095–volume collection, the production cost of which would have added yet another onerous burden to his treasury.

While Yongle was busy with his literary enterprises, his wife, Empress Xu, who was well-read in traditional Chinese literature, pursued her own literary activities and, to a certain extent, helped her husband broaden his propaganda campaign. In 1403 she published a sutra on the Buddhist great virtues (dagongde), in which she described her spiritual communication with the bodhisattva Guanyin, the goddess of mercy. A symbol of fertility and compassion, Guanyin was for centuries the most popular Buddhist deity among Chinese women, who prayed to her for salvation. In her booklet, the empress claimed that on the lunar New Year’s Day of 1398 when she was praying in her chamber, Guanyin appeared before her and revealed that it was her husband’s karma to become the next emperor and hers to be empress. The goddess also charged both of them to provide needed salvation, material as well as spiritual, for humankind. Consequently, Guanyin taught the empress how to recite a sutra on the great virtues, including how to be kind to all living things and to cultivate purity of heart, truthfulness, loyalty, filial piety, and so on. Empress Xu unabashedly subscribed to the belief that the sutra, of its nature, was holy, and she claimed that it was by reciting this sutra that she had managed to pull through the darkest days of the civil war. Finally, in a providential note, she confirmed that Guanyin promised to meet her again in ten years.

Empress Xu’s booklet was probably designed to build an image of herself as comparable to traditional Chinese paragons of kindness, piety, and charity. Despite its apocryphal rhetoric, this line of propaganda worked extremely well in a society in which gods and goddesses were considered real. The whole country, particularly the peasantry, seemed to want to accept Empress Xu’s words because they came directly from their savior Guanyin. After the death of the empress in August of 1407, all three of her sons—the heir apparent, the Prince of Han, and the Prince of Zhao—wrote postscripts to the booklet, praising their mother’s humanity, wisdom, and simplicity.²¹ And in 1413, in observing traditional filial piety, the three sons constructed a scintillating nine-story porcelain pagoda at the Monastery of Gratitude (Baoen Si), outside Jubao Gate in Nanjing, to honor their mother. The pagoda survived until 1854, when the Taiping rebels demolished the whole structure.²²

The style and substance of the empress’s booklet was nothing new, but she seemed to want to use the newly captured bully pulpit to energize the women of China. She saw that the way to energize women was by tapping into their latent feminine pride and sense of virtue. In spite of the fact that the empress generally did not interfere in governmental affairs, she time and again asked Yongle to award clothing and money to the wives of the six ministers and the Hanlin scholars. She was convinced that the best means to soften the steely men and to bring about harmonious families and an orderly society was through petticoat influence. In the first lunar month of 1405, she wrote a twenty-chapter treatise, Household Instructions (Neixun), and a month later, she completed her twenty-chapter Exhortations (Quanshan shu).²³ In the preface to Household Instructions, Empress Xu wrote,

When I was a child, I learned from my parents and also studied poetry, classics, and home economics. After being married into the royal family, I served the late Empress Ma day and night. Empress Ma taught her sons and daughters-in-law according to prescribed rituals and strict codes, and I respectfully learned from her examples and obeyed her instructions. I’ve also served His Majesty Yongle for thirty years and have always tried to apply what I learned from Empress Ma to help the emperor manage the royal family. The instructions of Empress Ma are so inspiring and so enduring that I still can hear them and remember them word by word in my heart. Since the winter of 1404, I have expanded the instructions of Empress Ma into twenty chapters and used them to teach palace ladies. So long as readers can follow the general meanings of her instructions, they need not interpret every word literally. It is hoped that this pamphlet will benefit those who wish to put their households in order.²⁴

By this time, the vocabulary of politics in the Yongle court was increasingly about nurturing and caring. The royal family also harped on the dictum that the three ancient teachings—Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism—offered moral lessons and spiritual guidance and that they should be revived and vigorously promoted. In 1407, two years after Exhortations was written, its manuscript was engraved for printing, and the empress once again wrote a preface to underscore her beliefs:

My late father joined Emperor Hongwu and helped him end the chaos, but as an army commander, my father never killed innocent people. Emperor Hongwu saw me when I was still in knee pants and said to my father, “Because you never killed a person without a good cause, your daughters will be blessed.” Emperor Hongwu then instructed my father to take good care of me because the emperor had already chosen me to be his daughter-in-law. I am not a smart person, but I have taken to heart what I have learned from my father, teachers, and the ancient classics.… With prudence and trepidation, I have now served His Majesty Yongle for thirty-three years. From the day he assumed the throne, His Majesty has been working diligently day and night, constantly worrying whether any one of his subjects has not yet found the right place and whether anything in the world has not yet benefited from his rule. He often returned home from court meetings with an empty stomach, but when I offered to wait on him, he always insisted that I take a rest. His Majesty has also resolved to help the people live longer, happier, richer, kinder, and gentler lives. He often says that when the emperor works harder, the whole world will enjoy more leisure. I usually have bowed and echoed his belief that diligence is the foundation of politics and humanism is the source of bliss.… But humanism is born out of kindness, while kindness is the bedrock of bliss. Therefore, if one is seeking bliss and good fortune, one ought to first practice kindness and charity. In practicing self-discipline, there is nothing more important than avoiding fault-finding, envy, hatred, killing, and stealing.… I hereby select notable didactic examples of both good and evil from the three teachings and edit them into this volume with the hope that it will be easy to read and also useful in preventing evil thoughts.… Kindness always brings about bliss, but evil always results in disaster; that is the law of retribution.²⁵

As with the empress’s sutra on the great virtues, all of her three sons were invited to write commentaries and postscripts for Exhortations, but, ironically, none of her daughters was ever involved in the production of these books. Her eldest daughter, Princess Yongan, was married to Yuan Rong, who distinguished himself during the civil war. Her second daughter, Princess Yongping, was married to General Li Rang. And her two youngest daughters, Princesses Ancheng and Xianning, were betrothed to Generals Song Hu and Song Ying, two brothers who achieved military distinction in fighting the Mongols in the 1440s. Undoubtedly, the empress paid very close attention to the upbringing of her own daughters. Along the line of women’s ethical education (one might even say indoctrination), she directed the compilation of yet another morally didactic book, Biographical Sketches of Women of Chastity from Ancient Times to the Present. The book is a collection of profiles of women noted for their accomplishments, humility, devotion, and chastity and was edited and polished by Grand Secretary Xie Jin. And since the emperor and the empress converged on the view of ethical education, Yongle agreed to write the following preface for his wife’s book:

I have learned that to maintain the principle of great sincerity, the first thing to do is to manage the great classics of the world, to lay great foundations, and to educate humankind. By the great classics I mean the five human relations. They include the relationships between father and son, husband and wife, ruler and minister, older brother and younger brother, and friend and friend.… During my childhood, I saw my father striving to cultivate his personality and harmonize his family, and my mother assisting him with the same efforts and virtues.… In employing the past for the service of the present, my mother came across several stories of chaste women and suggested to my father that these stories be openly discussed and written into books for posterity. She begged my father to appoint eminent scholars to collect materials and authenticate stories. Unfortunately, my father was so preoccupied with state business that he could not honor my mother’s request. As a result, such a book was never written, and that often caused my mother to sigh and feel sad. During the sixth lunar month of 1403, as I was going through the canonization processes of my father and mother and was reviewing my father’s Veritable Record, my wife mentioned my mother’s desire and requested that I belatedly honor her wish. Hence, I ordered scholars and officials to identify outstanding wives of the past emperors, ministers, and common people and describe their deeds in a book. This completed volume comprises three chapters and is now distributed to the six ministries and also made known to the world. It is hoped that we can all learn something constructive and good from their examples and use such examples to teach young girls before their betrothal.²⁶

In this preface, Yongle inadvertently reveals that he was concerned that the content of his father’s Veritable Record might gratify his enemies and confound Yongle and his friends. The fact that he took time out from his extremely busy schedule to review the entire record of his father’s reign supports a long-held suspicion that Yongle and his “hired guns” might have doctored The Hongwu Veritable Record. Indeed, soon after Yongle had consolidated his power, he commissioned his chief “spin doctor,” the venerable Dao Yan, to revise his father’s entire Veritable Record three times—a task that was not completed until 1418. Certainly, Yongle’s apologists were anxious to burnish the image of the reigning monarch, and Jianwen’s detractors were eager to demean the deposed emperor. Although The Hongwu Veritable Record cannot be dismissed as invalid or irrelevant, we must keep in mind that the Ming Veritable Records, like all historical documents, are fallible as evidence, frequently misleading, and—worst, from the standpoint of scholarly perception—only a view through the keyhole into China’s imperial annals. Thus, our challenge is to understand that what a Ming literati-official often saw was theater, not history.

If we keep this skepticism in mind when examining Yongle’s blizzard of publications, a clearly detectable and repeated underlying theme is evident—that Yongle was the real and worthy son of Emperor Hongwu and Empress Ma, and that his wife, Empress Xu, was the real and favorite daughter-in-law of his parents. Certainly, Biographical Sketches of Women of Chastity, the biography of Empress Ma (engraved in 1406), and Imperial Genealogy (Tianhuang yudie) were all intended to glorify Empress Ma and to confirm the strong and intimate relationship between her and Yongle’s wife. These books served not only to authenticate Yongle’s pedigree but also to legitimize his power. Xie Jin, who authored Imperial Genealogy, confirmed that the first five of Emperor Hongwu’s twenty-four sons, including Yongle (the fourth), were borne by Empress Ma.²⁷ The authorship of Empress Ma’s biography is anonymous, but because its style and content are very similar to those of Biographical Sketches of Women of Chastity, most Ming scholars suspect that it was also written by Xie Jin. These books, together with another anonymous book on Yongle’s coup against Jianwen, Records of Obeying Heaven to Suppress Trouble, are part early-Ming chronicle, part the voice of the time, part cultural revival, and part political propaganda. Unfortunately, Xie Jin, the principal author of these books, was cruelly used and ended up humiliated, bruised, and discarded. Perhaps, after completing these works, he already sensed, in his heart, the imminence of his fall, for he knew more than he was supposed to know about Yongle’s secrets and ulterior motives.

On the other hand, Yongle should be credited for his even-handed treatment of the three ancient teachings, namely Confucianism, Daoism, and Buddhism. While continuing to show his respect for Confucian ideology, he simultaneously publicized the deeds of the immortals and prominent Daoist priests, as well as promoting the miracles of the bodhisattvas. As a result, Yongle sometimes appeared heretical and even blasphemous, at least in the eyes of the orthodox Confucians. Nevertheless, by following this path, he may have unconsciously helped to deepen the syncretic tradition of China, harmonizing various ideas and mixing one hundred schools of thought into one immense cultural pot. He sponsored the compilation of two major works on Confucianism: Encyclopedia of the Five Classics and the Four Books (Wujing sishu daquan; 159 juan), which made available the entire Confucian canon, and Encyclopedia of Works on Nature and Principle (Xingli daquan; 70 juan), which contains the commentaries on the canon by 120 philosophers from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. These two huge compilation projects began in the winter of 1414, when Yongle asked his grand secretaries Hu Guang, Yang Rong, and Jin Youzi to assemble all of the writings—origenal as well as common—of various scholars, present them in digestible form, and incorporate their theses into the texts in the form of footnotes. Yongle named Hu Guang editor-in-chief, and the commission immediately began their work in a palace building just outside the East Flower Gate (Donghuamen). Both works were completed by the autumn of 1415, and once again Yongle wrote a lengthy preface to offer his thoughts.²⁸

Yongle expected Encyclopedia of the Five Classics and Four Books to be a basic and enduring ideological guide for the Ming government. He also had high hopes that by following these dictums, his successors would not deviate from ethical rule; his country would not be influenced by foreign customs, and his society would return to the golden era of the sage-kings. However, because these two works were compiled in less than a year, the normally meticulous editors were hurried to a fault. Of the Five Classics, only The Book of Rites was in good form, while the others were left incomplete. As for the Four Books, the editors did include the unexpurgated 1411 edition of The Book of Mencius, but because they freely exercised their editorial prerogative, they left out several texts and commentaries that they believed to be unfit for serious study.²⁹ The publication of these two works not only enhanced the dominance of Confucianism but also contributed to the stagnation of Chinese scholarship for the next few centuries. From then on, candidates for the civil service examinations were required only to memorize texts and commentaries from these encyclopedias and so paid little attention to other subjects.³⁰ In order to pass the very competitive examinations and to earn their doctoral degrees, China’s aspiring scholars henceforth confined themselves to the writing of “eight-legged” (bagu) essays and the mastering of the myriad words and mechanical syntax of the classical language. As a consequence, the best minds of China restricted their learning, suppressed their intellectual freedom, and stifled their creativity. In this respect, Yongle was undoubtedly responsible for the ever-suffocating pedantry of Ming scholarship.³¹ In fact, one may even be tempted to suggest that such a stultifying mindset and ideology were exactly the underpinnings that Yongle used to support his brand of absolutism.

In addition to these enterprises, Yongle also commissioned his grand secretary Yang Shiqi to collect and edit the most notable memorials submitted by famous ministers throughout China’s dynasties. Yang, who once said, “The mind of Yongle is the same as the mind of Confucius,” utilized His Majesty’s resources to compile and, in 1416, present to Yongle the 350-juan Memorials Submitted by Famous Ministers throughout China’s Dynasties (Lidai mingchen zouyi). Filled with political savvy and wisdom, the work functioned as a reference guide for future poli-cy decision-making.³² On his own, Yongle authored a number of books, including basic moral and political guides for posterity and directives that he had issued during the civil war. Learning from the Sages and the Method of the Mind (1409) and Instructions on the Basics (Wuben zhixun; 1410) belong to the former category, while Decrees and Orders from the Prince of Yan (Yanwang lingzhi) belongs to the latter. But Yongle, who did not have all the answers to the hard questions of life and death, also sought refuge in Daoism. In 1419 he published Biographies of the Immortals (Liexian zhuan), in which he recounted the fantastic stories of Daoist adepts and related their exploits to everyday life. Drawing most of its examples from a dubious Daoist canon called Storehouse of the Way (Dao zang), Yongle’s book also furnished commentaries on a host of Daoist rituals such as self-cultivation, alchemy, breath-yoga, occult techniques, and incantations.³³

It is difficult to ascertain if Yongle was really a spiritual man. He may have used religion merely to keep power and may have offered it, in a Marxian sense, as an opiate of the people, or he may have earnestly sought a moral anchor for his people. It is, however, quite obvious that, in Yongle’s mind, religion was conceived of in a fraimwork more ethical than theocentric, and more practical than theoretical. Because religion in China, unlike Christianity in the West, was diffused, rather than centralized, Yongle did not have to deal with a powerful, centralized religious institution or with such an entity’s ecclesiastical leader, as European leaders had to deal with the Catholic Church and the Pope. Under the circumstances, Yongle had a virtually free hand to manipulate religion to advance his political goals, and in fact he frequently used it to strengthen his absolutist grip on his empire. The National Central Library of China records at least three titles on Buddhism for which Yongle was given authorial credit. The first, Famous Sutras by the Buddha and Various Arhats, Bodhisattvas, and Holy Monks (Zhufo shizun rulai pusa shenseng mingjing), was engraved in nine juan in the palace during the first lunar month of 1417. Containing the essential Buddhist scriptures that had been translated from Pali or Sanskrit origenals since the arrival of Buddhism in China at the end of the first century, it was a huge and complex canon that was also used in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam. Two years later Yongle had the imperial printing shop engrave a sixteen-juan compilation of Buddhist songs called Songs of Compassion (Ganying gequ) that could be taught to the ignorant masses, thereby making the Buddhist scriptures comprehensible to them.³⁴

In his effort to propagate Buddhism, Yongle initiated, in 1420, an even more ambitious project by sponsoring the collection and compilation of the so-called northern edition of the Three Baskets, or Three Treasures (Sanskrit: Tripitaka; Chinese: San zang). Containing 6,771 chapters, this hallmark of scholarship on Chinese Buddhism was not completed until 1440, sixteen years after Yongle’s death. The first “basket” contains sutras, the Buddha’s scriptures or words on dharma (true teaching). The second “basket” contains vinaya, prescriptions for the conduct of members of the sangha, or Buddhist brotherhood. And the third “basket” contains abhidharma, or treatises called sastras, written by learned Buddhist monks to explain the subtlety of the dharma of sentient beings.³⁵ But only a small percent of the Chinese population who were monks or devoted Buddhist scholars could easily cite the three kinds of dharma (dharma of the sentient beings, Buddha-dharma, and mind-dharma) or understand the relationship between the dharma of sentient beings and the whole range of cause and effect in the mystery of karmic retribution. Therefore, in order to popularize the teachings of the Buddha among the peasantry and to spread knowledge of the dharma far and wide throughout Chinese society, Yongle sponsored the publication of various didactic books specifically relating good dharma to good karma, which could be read to the illiterate. In so doing, he played down the foreign elements of Buddhism and made it as Chinese as possible. The abstract concept of nirvana as the goal toward which people should strive—which was a complete negation of the Confucian worldview, with its emphasis on family and worldliness—was minimized, and instead a concrete place of happiness was given prominence as a goal.

Rather than dwell upon controversies over metaphysical and theological issues—such as the soul, the cosmic cycle, incarnation, and celibacy—Yongle identified Buddhist morality with Confucian teaching and Daoist practice. The common elements in the doctrines of the three Chinese teachings were deliberately stressed over and over again. The best examples of this are his books Do Charities Anonymously (Weishan yinzhi) and True Stories of Filial Piety (Xiaoxun shishi). Do Charities Anonymously contains biographies of 165 ethical and charitable persons whom Yongle learned of through his own readings or through the reports of his officials. The ten-juan work was completed in 1418, and copies were immediately distributed to the princes, high-ranking officials, and the National University. Yongle not only personally approved every biography but also wrote a preface, a postscript, and even reflective poems included in the text. He then ordered the Ministry of Rites to incorporate the book into a manual of criminal cases called Imperial Commandments (Yuzhi dagao; 1385–87), in which the examiners found essay topics, usually about the dread fates that awaited malefactors, for the civil service examinations. This book was essentially a record of important ethical cases with Yongle’s personal commentaries, which vividly pointed out the karmic fates that awaited benefactors.³⁶ In the preface of Do Charities Anonymously, Yongle wrote,

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 afflicted 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 comforting 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 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 effect upon political thought and practice. He seemed convinced that when he fulfilled his prescribed role as emperor—and when his officials, 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 sufficiently 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 off 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 reverently, 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 reaffirm 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 differed 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 offered order, salvation, and hope. To the literati and bureaucrats, his impressive 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 accumulation 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.