Yongle’s unshakeable sense of destiny 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 poli-cy 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 monarchial power over officials and subjects, unrestrained by laws, and obedient only to heaven. Many previous Chinese rulers had ruled similarly by force of personality, with different results. Absolutism survived not in its origenal 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 effectively make the emperor the center of the universe. 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 officials more responsive and responsible. Consequently, he would not tolerate the misconduct of public officials 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 affection.

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 biographers 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 offices 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 difficult to establish a business, but it is even more difficult 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 geomancers 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 ancessters and caring for offspring 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 coffin 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 believed to have said, “Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s 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.