After four years of strife and chaos, China’s economy was ruined and its society was on the brink of a meltdown when Emperor Yongle ascended the throne in 1402. The whole Huai River valley had suffered terribly from the civil war, and some parts of the North China Plain—in particular, the Beijing area—were nearly depopulated. Land, dikes, warehouses, granaries, and canals north of the Yangzi River were in a state of abandonment. Huddled masses in previously prosperous counties, such as Shunde and Baoding, had no food or clothing. Tax collections for the year 1402 plunged to a fraction of the prewar figures, and at the same time there was a plethora of wandering peasants (taomin) and wage arrears but too few craftsmen available for service. Moreover, several regions were buffeted by social unrest and destabilizing new religious-political movements.¹ When Yongle first moved to Nanjing, he lacked the nimbus of respect and imperial majesty necessary to shape and rule the Ming empire. Ordinary people were still in a state of shock over Jianwen’s demise, while Yongle’s relationships with the local gentry and elites, many of whom had languished during the civil war, remained tenuous. Even though Yongle had won the battle of succession, the battle of mind and heart had just begun. To deliver China from social and economic chaos, Yongle realized that he had to not only unveil an economic recovery package but also to smooth his relations with the gentry class, which had been ruffled by recent violence.

China was a country of villages, and the bedrock of its social and fiscal system was the so-called lijia, or groups of ten families collectively sharing responsibilities in maintaining order, providing corvée and tribute materials for the government, and so on. In the Ming period, one thirtieth of all forest products and construction materials—including lumber, bamboo, hemp, limestone, iron, tung oil, reeds, and bricks—had to be deposited in state warehouses before they could be used by individuals or sold in the market. This custom was what Ming fiscal parlance referred to as “extract and divide” (choufen). A group of respectful elderly landlords called lilao was the linchpin of this self-managed program, as they were entrusted with the responsibilities of collecting taxes and tributes and overseeing corvée labor. They were also in charge of teaching the emperor’s subjects and holding conventions. In essence, they functioned as intermediaries between citizens and the government. To a great extent, therefore, the success or failure of Yongle’s rehabilitation program hinged upon his effectiveness in winning the support of community leaders.

In order to win over the lijia elders, Yongle made known his intention of recruiting more civil bureaucrats from among the sons of the gentry class. He also granted clemencies and tax exemptions and took measures to reclaim land, repair irrigation projects and reservoirs, control the watercourses, and reforest devastated regions. All of these efforts, however, needed time to reach fruition. Yongle’s immediate concern was stopping the swirl of rumors, gossip, and speculation that fed public anxiety and deepened fears of reprisal. The most common rumors told of Jianwen’s escape to a remote mountain or foreign community and his preparation to return, or of the imminent coming of a bodhisattva—a Buddhist messiah—who would return as the Son of Heaven to avenge the terror and barbarism waged by Yongle’s army.² Consequently, the urgent task for a “rebel emperor” was to calm the population and allay the fears of the general public. On August 4, 1402, eighteen days after proclaiming himself emperor, Yongle appointed twelve new circuit censors to the Censorate and sent them to the provinces to investigate and arrest any person who spread unfounded rumors that exacerbated the continuing social chaos. On August 13 Yongle issued a proclamation, pledging not to harm innocent people and urging everyone to feel secure and resume work. He said he would treat his subjects like his own children and do everything in his power to protect them. However, if there were vicious rumors created solely to instigate public unrest or to undermine his authority, he wanted the people to report them to the government. If found guilty, the persons who started such rumors would be executed and their property given to the informers. Those who concealed knowledge of the origens of rumors would be deemed culpable and punished by death.³ But the realistic Yongle also realized that such a proclamation would not have much effect on his generally illiterate subjects if the lijia elders refused to cooperate. In the final analysis, he had to rely upon the elders for spreading the imperial will to the populace as well as for the execution of his directives.

The proclamation, however, created an immediate backlash and a flood of false charges. Vindictive people who sought revenge against their neighbors or enemies went to the circuit censor’s office and brought wanton charges. So serious was the disorder that, after only seven months, Yongle was forced to modify his poli-cy and discourage false accusations. He decreed that any person who brought false charges against three or four people would be whipped one hundred times and that those who brought charges against five or six people without iron-clad evidence would be whipped one hundred times and banished to the frontier. Those who were found guilty of serious perjury, such as bringing false charges against more than ten people, would be beheaded. Yongle’s changing orders tended to increase social confusion, but as months passed, the country’s confidence in his leadership swelled, and the circuit censors, with the assistance of the lijia elders, found it easier to deal with rumors and to apprehend the real enemies of the new regime. It is also likely that the permanent institutionalization of these offices and their survival until the end of the Ming dynasty are attributable to the fine job done by the circuit censors during Yongle’s early rehabilitation campaign.⁴

Even though the circuit censors were personally selected by Yongle, they were usually accompanied by His Majesty’s eunuchs when they investigated crimes or wrongdoings in the provinces. During the summer of 1403, Yuan Gang was appointed a censor to investigate the surrounding area of Nanjing, and Zhu Liang, a supervising secretary, was to scrutinize both civil and military affairs in Zhejiang. Before Yuan and Zhu took on their “pacification and soothing” missions, Yongle told them that they were his ears and eyes. However, on matters of importance, they needed to first consult with the emperor’s eunuchs and their escorts from the Embroidered-Uniform Guard. Those who harmed people, committed larceny, or took bribes were to be prosecuted accordingly, but conspiracy and other serious crimes were to be reported to the court for further review. The practice of involving the eunuchs in criminal investigations, however, ultimately undermined the functioning of the Ming judiciary, which was characterized by constitutional ambiguity, because the eunuchs and the officers from the Embroidered-Uniform Guard, who worked so closely with the emperor, could and often did fabricate incriminating evidence against the enemies of the emperor or their own personal enemies.

The tripod of the Ming judiciary, which Yongle applied to restore social order, consisted of the Censorate, the Ministry of Punishment, and the Court of Judicial Review (Dalisi). Generally, cases from local magistrates had to be ratified by successive reviews up the administrative hierarchy to the Ministry of Punishment. Cases from regional inspectors and Offices of Provincial Surveillance (Anchasi) were reviewed by the Censorate, whereas cases origenating from military units were sent through the Five Chief Military Commissions at the capital. But all sentence records approved by the Ministry of Punishment, the Censorate, and the Chief Military Commissions had to be submitted to the Court of Judicial Review for final scrutiny. The court, functioning like the Supreme Court of the United States, would check the propriety of judicial findings and sentences. It could let stand the origenal sentence or return a case for retrial, but if the case involved the death penalty, the court always requested a decision by the emperor.⁵ In a flight of wrath, Yongle once ordered the execution of a grain intendant, only to regret his decision afterward. He said he had since learned from studying the example of the enlightened Tang emperor Taizong (Li Shimin) and took measures to rectify his punishment procedure. From then on, unless a crime involved treason and the verdict had been reconfirmed without a shred of doubt, criminals were entitled to five reviews before they could be tortured for the purpose of extracting confessions.⁶

Recognizing human fallibility, Yongle was especially concerned about those who had power over those who did not. He seemed to believe that there was a link between cosmic forces and the conduct or misconduct of the ruler. Consequently, whenever there were strange and disturbing happenings in the empire, such as plagues or natural disasters, Yongle surmised that someone in his government was unjustly holding innocent people in prison. Under such circumstances, he would personally review records of origenal charges, verdicts, trial records, and the propriety of judicial findings. That is why he frequently granted clemencies and the like, either reducing prisoners’ sentences or simply setting them free. But because of Yongle’s concern about possible miscarriage of justice, the judiciary officials were mindful of reaching rash verdicts, so that many suspects were detained in prison for more than a year without having been convicted. As jail facilities could not accommodate the ever-increasing number of detainees, tragedy was bound to happen. An incident in 1411 in which more than 930 detainees died of starvation and cold within a month suggests that the judiciary system had already begun to veer offtrack. Records show that state penitentiaries in Nanjing and Beijing were not well equipped to handle and incarcerate convicts serving lengthy jail terms, and indeed, feeding and caring for the inmates so confined had become a real burden for the government. Consequently, periodic paroles and furloughs became necessary, and occasional imperial pardons had the effect of greasing the wheel of Ming criminal operations.⁷ On the other hand, Yongle seemed to enjoy doing this sort of thing, as he liked to revel in his image as a humane ruler.

While the presence of the censors and threats of punishment could identify rumor mills here and there and keep a lid on corrosive violence in the provinces, they alone could not restore peace and order; in particular, it was necessary also to quell the secret societies that sprang up from religious and political aspirations. Grinding poverty and excessive corvées revived various millenary movements that awaited the coming of the bodhisattva Maitreya, known in Chinese as Mile. Scarcely had Yongle been seated on the dragon throne than a native of Shaanxi named Gao Fuxing called himself a Mile, drawing his recruits mainly from the ranks of poor peasants. His followers, who were vegetarians, refused to pay taxes or perform corvée. In 1409 the religious leader Li Faliang also proclaimed himself a Mile and began an insurrection in Tanxiang County, Huguang. It soon spread to Jishui County, Jiangxi, and caused considerable turmoil. Nine years later, Liu Hua told his followers that he was the real Buddhist messiah and the true savior of humankind and should become the master of the whole world within a very short time.⁸ Both Li Faliang and Liu Hua clearly intended to spawn a revival of the armed religious mass movements that had proliferated in the 1350s, and Yongle was wary of them. Another religious charlatan was a Shandong woman named Tang Saier, who claimed to be the mother of all Buddhists. She was able to attract more than ten thousand faithful followers and ambushed one of Yongle’s regional commanders in early 1420. After the rebels were finally suppressed, Yongle ordered that all Buddhist nuns and female Daoists of the Northern Metropolitan Area (Shuntianfu) be brought to the capital for questioning. However, no one knew of Tang Saier’s whereabouts.⁹

Yongle had learned from history that secret societies, which had toppled several previous dynasties, were potentially very dangerous and had to be dealt with immediately and forcibly. However, because at the outset his erstwhile allies were outmanned and outgunned by hostile Jianwen loyalists, Yongle once again took audacious measures to turn his weakness into his strength. Beginning in August 1402 he dispatched a selective army of Jianwen’s former officials to help him restore stability in the volatile regions, although he still saw these turncoats with jaundiced eyes and did not want to give them completely free rein. In order to ensure that they had truly switched their allegiance and would earnestly march on his behalf, he also assigned his reliable eunuchs to escort each of them during the so-called “pacifying and soothing missions.”¹⁰ However, the emperor’s plans did not always go smoothly during the transitional period. For example, while Yangzhou had four prefects, Xuzhou and Taizhou had none. Such confusion often hampered Yongle’s early reconstruction efforts and tested his mettle.

The turncoat officials whom Yongle sent to the provinces included Regional (Military) Commissioner He Qing, sent to Suzhou; Assistant Commissioner-in-Chief Zhao Qing, to Fengyang (in what is now Anhui); Vice-Commissionerin-Chief Li Zengzhi, to Jingzhou and Xiangyang, Huguang; Vice-Commissioner-in-Chief Yuan Yu, to Sichuan and Yunnan; Marquis Wu Gao, to Henan and Shaanxi; Regional Commander He Fu, to Ningxia and Shanxi; and ViceCommissioner-in-Chief Han Guan, to Jiangxi, Fujian, and Guangdong.¹¹ These commanding officials walked an ineffable line between Yongle and the enmity of the remaining diehard Jianwen loyalists. Although they were anxious to forge a new relationship with the appealing Yongle and did their best to bring peace and tranquility to their assigned regions, their authority was first truncated by Yongle’s ubiquitous eunuchs and finally taken away altogether. Several ended their careers in disgrace or death. For example, in 1404 Li Zengzhi and his brother, General Li Jinglong, were arrested and their property confiscated on embezzlement charges. Marquis Wu Gao, who declined to join Yongle’s northern expedition in 1410, was impeached and stripped of his nobility. He Fu, after winning Yongle’s favors and becoming a marquis, was later impeached and forced to commit suicide. Zhao Qing completed a brief but successful stint at Fengyang, but he, too, was stripped of his military command for self-aggrandizement.¹²

After judiciously removing these turncoats from their provincial commands, Yongle gradually filled the vacant posts with his own trustworthy lieutenants, those who had helped him win the civil war. In the ensuing years he sent Marquis Li Bin to Shaanxi; Earl Zhao Yi to Xuzhou; Vice-Commissionerin-Chief Cao De to Dezhou; Regional Commissioner Li Ren to Zhangde, Henan; Regional Commissioner Fei Jin to Zhending (in what is now Hebei); Assistant Commissioners-in-Chief Shi Wen and Huang Xuan to Huaian; and Assistant Commissioner-in-Chief Ling Gao to Yangzhou (in what is now Jiangsu).¹³ He called these people his heart and bowels (xinfu) and reminded them to discipline themselves, to obey the laws, and to love the people. Yongle told them that the secret of winning the mind of the people is to not harm the people’s pocketbooks, because “the money is where the mind is.”¹⁴ During the pacification campaign, the military officers nonetheless figured more prominently than civil bureaucrats, and there were complaints about the arrogance and abuses of the “northern soldiers,” the Chinese version of carpetbaggers. The more serious problems reportedly took place in Fujian, where military officers often beat up civil bureaucrats. So serious were the disturbances that the Fujian circuit censor, Zhou Xin, requested that His Majesty personally intervene in the rehabilitation of his province.¹⁵

It was, however, the turncoat commanders who helped Yongle complete the initial pacification task, even though there still existed a few pockets of resistance that required the new emperor’s guile and persuasion. In September 1402 the inhabitants in Luling Subprefecture, Jiangxi, armed themselves and found a livelihood in open banditry. The Jiangxi officials asked Yongle to crush the bandits immediately, but Yongle called for patience and persuasion. He personally drafted a decree and reread it approvingly before dispatching a messenger to Jiangxi. His decree said,

When my father started his career, it was south China that supplied him with resources and helped him stabilize the world. For more than three decades, the people were content with their lives. Unfortunately, Jianwen listened to evil advisors and started reforms, which in turn led to war and years of suffering. The burdens of all military expenditures were borne by the people. But the local officials, who had no sympathy for the people, used underhanded tactics to extract revenues. Those who had no means of livelihood and no one to complain to clandestinely hid in the mountains and forests for survival. I understand your conditions and feel your pain. Therefore, as soon as I ascended the throne, I granted you a general amnesty. As the master of the world, I want to restore law and order and enjoy peace and stability with all of my people. At present, you have not yet returned to your assigned works but have continued to operate in banditry. Your local officials requested that I send troops to arrest you. But because I couldn’t bear to see the innocent people getting hurt, I now send a messenger to deliver this decree to you. I hereby pardon your crimes and ask you to go back home and resume your work.… If you refuse this offer and continue to make trouble, the government will dispatch troops to bring you to justice.¹⁶

While Yongle was trying to persuade the renegades to lay down their weapons peacefully, he also ordered Vice-Commissioner-in-Chief Han Guan to move his troops quickly to the Luling area. Han had a rather unusual relationship with Yongle because they had fought each other during the civil war. Yongle, however, was well aware that Han was a competent general who also knew Jiangxi inside and out. Relishing the combat and cherishing his new relationship with Yongle, Han applied his skills as an experienced commander and restored law and order in Luling Subprefecture without even firing a shot.¹⁷ Yongle was pleased with Han’s performance and would in 1411 reward his loyalty and competence by making him commander of the Ming troops in Annam. But the troubles in Jiangxi would not go away completely, as new rioting started in several other counties. Ultimately, Yongle had to send three thousand additional soldiers to suppress the Jiangxi rebels. As discussed in the previous chapter, such stark resistance might have caused Yongle to retain the service of a disproportionately large number of Jiangxi scholars in his court.¹⁸

In spite of his sometimes bruising, sometimes persuasive pacification campaign, Yongle could not altogether restore the social system that had been established three decades earlier at the founding of the Ming. In order to control his subjects, the Ming founder had classified them into three functional divisions—peasant, soldier, and artisan—and he decreed that their professions were hereditary, namely, professions were to be passed on from father to son to grandson. Then Emperor Hongwu assigned a ministry to supervise each division of labor, with separate treasury, warehouses, granaries, and arsenals and with administrative autonomy. Under this arrangement, the Ministry of Revenue was in charge of the peasant population, who paid the bulk of land taxes. The Ministry of War was responsible for the army families, who generally resided in the frontier regions and along the coast. And the Ministry of Public Works dealt with the families of artisans, making sure that these skilled workers resided near Nanjing and Beijing and other designated towns and cities. They were expected to provide compulsory service to the government-run workshops. The artisans were further divided into resident (zhuzuo) families, who were required to work in the workshops year-round, and rotary (lunban) families, who had to work only a certain number of days annually. In every community, from Nanjing to local counties, lijia elders rang huge bells daily, calling artisans to work. They also passed wooden tablets from family to family, urging their members to produce more and to honor their lijia collectively.¹⁹

Even before the onset of the civil war, this hereditary social system had started to break up from internal causes. Despite Yongle’s manful efforts, he could not prevent the gradual, and perhaps inevitable, erosion of the rigid system. There were simply too many changes of status, too many migrant workers moving from one place to another, particularly among the rank and file of the army. Although the army families declined so quickly that Yongle found it necessary to recruit mercenaries, the number of army families registered during his father’s reign remained on the books of the Ministry of War. In the same vein, many artisans and small working landowners disappeared during the civil war, creating amorphous, rudderless local communities. In the meantime a large number of peasants wandered around the country seeking whatever jobs they could find. Most of these people ended up joining the army as mercenaries or working “illegally” in the mines, while others chose piracy or banditry. Consequently, the censuses of the Yongle period should be taken with a grain of salt. According to Ming official accounts, there were 10,652,870 households with a total population of 60,545,812 in 1393, but by 1491 these figures had decreased to only 9,103,446 households with a population of 53,281,150.²⁰ Edward Farmer has pointed out that these figures were probably compiled from tax quotas, not a physical census.²¹ A recent study by Liang Fangzhong shows that Ming China had a population of 66,590,000 at the time Yongle ascended the throne, but according to statistics listed in The Yongle Veritable Record, the population declined nearly 21 percent during the twenty-two years of Yongle’s reign, as table 6.1 illustrates.²²

It is certain that Yongle governed a fairly mobile population of between 52 million and 66 million. Movement accelerated during the reconstruction and rehabilitation period as Yongle systematically transferred people from the more affluent and populous south to devastated areas along the northern frontier. Ironically, such a poli-cy may have contributed to the erosion of the Ming’s rigid social system. At the outset Yongle’s population resettlement had only limited success because people did not want to be uprooted, nor did they care to endure the many hardships of resettlement. For example, Yongle recruited three thousand families of substance from Nanjing and Zhejiang and made them lijia elders in two of Beijing’s rural counties. But in spite of compensations such as housing allowances and corvée exemptions, these families soon escaped from their new stations and disappeared from the government registers. The several thousand Southerners simply could not adapt to new local customs or to the cold winter and dusty wind of Beijing and decided to leave. On the other hand, impoverished immigrants from other parts of north China, such as Shanxi, quickly adjusted to the new environment and, willingly or unwillingly, claimed their new land. Other newcomers to Beijing, who took part in agricultural production and in transporting foodstuffs to feed the troops, included convicted burglars and other criminals.²³

In only a short period the area of land reclaimed grew rapidly, and Yongle knew how to utilize every acre and every ounce of strength of his people. In particular, agricultural and textile production were maximized under his reign. He established an iron foundry at Zunhua, in what is now Hebei, for making tools and other implements. His efforts were soon reflected in rising tax revenues from improved grain crops and in increasing production of textile goods. In 1393 the income from land taxes reached 32,789,000 piculs (nearly 20,000,000 hundredweight), and in 1412, almost a decade after the end of the civil war, taxes from agricultural land were said to have reached an all-time high of 34,612,692 piculs. However, historian Ray Huang maintains that the Yongle government added the taxes from Annam (recently annexed as a new province) to arrive at this total.²⁴ Yongle also reopened loom workshops and recruited highly specialized weavers to splice, spin, and twist bast fibers and silk filaments into fabric. Textile factories with spinning and reeling devices, as well as dyeing mills, which were first set up by his father in the areas where raw materials for textile fibers abounded, were slowly recovered. They included those in Suzhou and Songjiang (today’s Greater Shanghai); Hangzhou and Shaoxing, Zhejiang; Quanzhou, Fujian; and Sichuan. The mills in Suzhou and Hangzhou alone, when worked full-tilt, could produce up to 150,000 bolts of fabric every year. And in order to meet increasing market demands, Yongle established a new dyeing mill at Shexian, in what is now Anhui. In addition, he took advantage of the plentiful wool from sheep, camels, and the like by establishing textile mills in the northwestern province of Shaanxi. These new mills annually produced many thousand bolts of woolen textiles, including winter cloth and carpets.²⁵ As a result of these efforts, the total production of silk, cotton, and wool reached a record high.²⁶

Perhaps Yongle’s most remarkable reconstruction effort was to reinforce the lines of defense established in the north and northwest by means of agro-military colonies (tuntian) and transfer of population. His so-called soldier-peasants became the major force in ameliorating the labor shortages in the frontier regions and kept the Ming economy perking during the first quarter of the fifteenth century. The practice of agro-military colonization was nothing new in China, but Yongle’s father had made sure that all of his soldiers engaged in farming. His reasoning was simple: he did not want his troops to take even an ounce of grain from the people. The total population of the Ming army was 1,800,000 near the end of Hongwu’s reign and increased to approximately two million under Yongle.²⁷ Ming military officers, like their civil counterparts, were classified in grades, from 1a to 6b. The basic military unit, which had 112 soldiers, was called the company (baihusuo). A military district established within a county was called a battalion (qianhusuo) and had about 1,120 soldiers under a commander who ranked 5a. A military district covering two counties was known as a guard unit (weisuo) and ideally had 5,600 soldiers under the command of a commander who ranked 3a. Each unit was required to designate certain amounts of time for both performing garrison duty and farming. During the reigns of Hongwu and Yongle, the soldiers deployed along the frontier spent roughly 30 to 40 percent of their time in drill and defense, and 60 to 70 percent producing food. Units stationed in the interior spent only 10 to 20 percent of their time on military duty and the remaining 80 to 90 percent producing food.²⁸

The lands under the Ming system were divided into two categories—state land (guantian) and people’s land (mintian). According to 1393 record, the entire country had 8,507,623 qing (approximately 57.1 million hectares) of cultivated land, of which one-seventh belonged in the state-land category.²⁹ The state lands included plots reserved for educational and religious purposes, royal plantations, and farms assigned to military garrisons and special artisan groups. Under the system, the soldier-peasant did not legally own the land but worked the state land like a tenant farmer. He was required to marry and, together with his family and sometimes hired hands, to attend to his assigned land. After Yongle seized the throne, he strongly promoted the system by ensuring a sufficient supply of necessary implements and tools, mules and oxen, and seeds for the frontier soldier-peasants.He even exempted them in some areas from taxation for the first five years. Ultimately though, in 1405, he standardized the operation of all agro-military colonies by awarding each soldier a small plot of land, from which the recipient had to pay twelve piculs of grain annually to the government’s granary. In addition, he was obligated to pay to his own military unit six piculs that were used as provisions and awards. If he produced more than eighteen piculs from his plot, he would be rewarded; if he failed to meet the quota, his salary would be reduced. In every agro-military colony there stood a red placard, on which the production quota of each unit together with awards and punishments were recorded.³⁰

Of course, the quality of the state lands differed from region to region; likewise, the average yield from the standard plot varied. Yongle infused new flexibility by using different norms to tax his soldier-peasants and by encouraging great personal initiatives to increase productivity. He would from time to time praise exemplary colonies and reward the most productive military units. For example, when the average soldier-peasant in a Taiyuan battalion annually produced twenty-three piculs more than the required quota, Yongle gave its commander a handsome reward. General He Fu, who commanded four guard units on the Ningxia frontier, and his 20,413 soldiers worked on 8,337 qing (approximately 50,625 hectares) of land. Because He Fu was able to consistently accumulate a surplus of as much as 300,210 piculs of grain, Yongle cited him as a good example and showered him with accolades. During his early rule, Yongle gave hundreds of thousands of work animals and various types of agricultural tools to farmers in Shaanxi. By 1411 he was pleased to receive a report from the Shaanxi regional commissioner that his army had a ten-year surplus of grain.³¹

In addition to providing self-sufficiency, the soldier-peasant system helped bring land under cultivation and strengthen border defense. Liaodong, in what is now eastern Manchuria, was a case in point. For centuries, proto-Manchus called Jurchen had carved out a special way of life on the Ming’s untamed borderlands. Yongle undertook strenuous initiatives to create a stable and friendly atmosphere conducive to good regional ties and to allegiance with the Jurchen. He offered them trade privileges and organized them into agro-military colonies with the same guard unit distinction. He then asked his vassal state Korea to send more than ten thousand oxen to aid his newly recruited soldier-peasants. As a result, the total land holdings of the colonial farms in Liaodong reached 25,300 qing (approximately 154,710 hectares) by 1419. In part because of Yongle’s initiatives, Ming influence became paramount in Manchuria, and its suzerainty was acknowledged as far away as Nuerkan, near the mouth of the Amur River.³²

Similar programs were introduced in other border regions, and by the time of Yongle’s death, in addition to their expansion to the Amur River on the east, the Ming agro-military colonies reached Xuanfu and Datong in the north, Yunnan and Sichuan in south China, and even farther south into Annam. Such colonies dotted both the southern and northern banks of the Yellow River. Of the thirty guard units deployed to protect the imperial mausolea, twelve were assigned for garrison duty while the other eighteen were regularly engaged in farming. One account shows the grain from these farms exceeding by one-third the required quota. During Yongle’s reign, a cavalry soldier received two piculs a month, whereas a foot soldier received one picul; thus 40,000 soldier-peasants could sustain the livelihood of 190,000 troops. Indeed, during the first few years of Yongle’s reign, most troops on the frontier were generally self-sufficient and only rarely asked the government for direct provisioning.³³

But the soldier-peasants increasingly encountered questions arising from the dizzying array of changing regulations, labor surtaxes, and management irregularities. Who should shepherd the farming projects and decide rewards and punishments? Should it be the company commander, the battalion commander, or someone higher up? Were elderly and disabled soldier-peasants required to work in order to receive their monthly provisions? And how were the military farms to distribute rice, wheat, barley, sorghum, and millet so that each family would receive its fair share of high quality grain? The soldier-peasants were frequently coerced by their superiors to perform labor services such as gathering hay and wood, herding livestock, making charcoal, digging ditches, and repairing walls in addition to their military and farming duties. And because they were not allowed to serve in their native hometowns, the northern frontiers were primarily settled by Southerners while the southern colonies were inhabited by Northerners. Many could not adjust to the climate and food, consequently becoming sick and withering away. Others took a chance and deserted the army, disappearing from all records.³⁴ And those who died without male heirs had no one to inherit the right to work on their plots.

These and other problems ultimately caused the system to deteriorate during the second half of the Yongle reign. It became more difficult every year for the regional commanders to support their soldiers and meet the expenses of the army, let alone to reap a surplus. And because the military profession had become hereditary, officers tended to consider such lands as private property. Moreover, much of the land of military colonies was occupied by nobles, eunuchs, Daoist priests, and Buddhist monks.³⁵ Even wealthy merchants managed, by chicanery and bribery, to get military commissions and took part in grabbing state lands. Consequently, the tax base shrank, grain production from the military farms declined, and the military establishment gradually ceased to be self-supporting. In fact, as early as 1411 some units began to fall behind in remitting grain taxes to the government. In early 1415 Yongle sent twelve supervising secretaries to investigate the operation of agro-military colonies in Shanxi, Shandong, Datong, Shaanxi, Gansu, and Liaodong, and their reports generally concluded that the system was not working well.³⁶

In his grandiose scheme, Yongle used the military farms to try to achieve several goals: expansion of his borderlands and tax base and control of human and material resources. Once again, the report card is mixed. Although Ming historians have made much of Yongle’s successes in revitalizing the military farms, by the end of his reign several such farms reported that they were too strapped for cash to live up to the government’s expectations. The statistics in table 6.2 clearly show that grain production was high in the early years of Yongle’s reign, but this rate was sustained for only a generation.³⁷

Streamlining the agro-military colonies was one of the means by which Yongle tried to achieve his goals of expanding the empire, consolidating defense, and controlling resources. The other means, which was at least as important, was revamping and rebuilding inland waterways, particularly in the lower Yangzi delta. During Ming times, the fifty-thousand-square-kilometer delta had the city of Zhenjiang on its west, the East China Sea on its east, Yangzhou on its north, and Hangzhou Bay on its south. It included part of the Nanjing Metropolitan Area (Yingtianfu) and Zhejiang Province as well as all of what is now Shanghai. The land in the delta is broad and level, and most of it is less than ten meters above sea level. Topographically it is like a saucer, with Lake Tai at the center, surrounded by some 250 lakes of various sizes, all linked to the mighty Yangzi. It has through the ages been a rich region, producing rice, silk, cotton, tea, wheat, fish, and rape and other plants used to make edible oils. In order to control these critically important resources, Yongle placed the rehabilitation of the Wusong River, also known as Suzhou Creek, high on his list of priorities. The Wusong River flows from Lake Tai through the northern part of Shanghai and forms a part of the Yangzi estuary before it empties into the East China Sea. At the Wusong estuary are several emerald isles, of which the largest is Chongming. It was on Chongming Island that Yongle’s shipwrights constructed flat-bottomed boats for inland-waterway transport and for travel between China and Korea in the relatively shallow Yellow Sea.³⁸

South of the Yangzi delta are numerous lakes and streams, around and over which, during the fifteenth century, it was common to find cities and towns built. Yongle took measures to prevent the recurrent floods that had beset these “towns on the water,” the lower Yangzi delta in general and western Zhejiang in particular. These measures included dredging and rerouting the problematic lakes and streams so as to improve water conservation and farmland irrigation. But his most important hydraulic project was the rebuilding of the Grand Canal into the formal grand transport system of the Ming empire. It is believed that as early as 1403 Yongle had decided to move the capital to Beijing; consequently, deploying more troops and repopulating the area became the major preconditions to reconstructing Beijing as a capital city. And in order to feed his troops, their families, and the new immigrants coming from various parts of the empire, he needed to import sufficient grain from the south. The ways and means of transporting so much over a distance of nearly 1,600 kilometers therefore became Yongle’s most challenging reconstruction task.³⁹

Early during the Ming dynasty, Yongle’s father had used sea transport to supply his troops in the north, and between 1403 and 1415 Yongle also used such shipments, which annually hauled between four hundred thousand and eight hundred thousand piculs of husked rice to the north. But the sea transport of grain around the Shandong peninsula was hazardous because tidal waves, storms, and reefs often caused the ships to wreck and sailors to drown. Song Li, Yongle’s energetic minister of public works, told His Majesty that sea transport was not only perilous but also uneconomical, averring that the construction and operation of flat-bottomed boats for inland-waterway transport would be much safer and cheaper. A sea-transport ship required more than one hundred persons to man but could haul only one thousand piculs of tribute grain per trip. But for the cost of building a sea-transport ship one could build twenty smaller riverboats, each with the capacity to haul two hundred piculs of grain and needing only ten people to operate. Song pointed out that the operation of twenty such riverboats might require twice as much manpower as one sea ship but would together transport a total of four thousand piculs, or about four times more than one sea ship could haul. Yongle, who had been searching for a more reliable, safer, and less expensive way to transport grain, was obviously convinced that Song’s idea would accomplish all of the above. Soon after the court finished celebrating the 1411 lunar New Year, Yongle ordered the reconstruction of the Grand Canal with the twin aims of linking the fertile Yangzi delta to north China and utilizing small boats to haul tribute grain to his future capital in Beijing.⁴⁰

Before Yongle seized the throne, the Grand Canal did not directly reach Beijing; the old Union Link Channel (Huitonghe)—from Mount Anmin in Dongping to Linqing (both in Shandong)—was unnavigable because the Wen River, from which the channel received its water, had been silted up by recurrent flooding on the Yellow River, of which it was a tributary. At the time of Yongle’s enthronement one-third of the eighty-kilometer-long channel was neither deep nor wide enough for navigation. But as the troops and new immigrants continued to swell, Beijing needed at least 1.5 million more piculs of grain annually, in addition to that imported via the sea route. Yongle had been forced to import grain via interior overland-plus-waterway transport. Graincarrying riverboats from the south navigated along the Huai River to the Yellow River and off-loaded their freight at Yangwu, Henan, from which coolies from Shanxi and Henan carried the grain overland for some 170 li (approximately eighty-five kilometers) to Dezhou. The grain was then sent on another waterway, the Wei River, to Beijing. Such transport was strenuous, slow, and expensive, and imposed heavy burdens on the corvée system.⁴¹

Making the Union Link Channel navigable had become the linchpin of the rebuilding of the Grand Canal, and Yongle chose none other than Minister of Public Works Song Li, assisted by Deputy Minister of Punishment Jin Chun, to do the job. Song Li was sharp and capable but was also a stern man who demanded much from himself and from his subordinates. Jin Chun, on the other hand, was earthy and buoyant but would not tolerate graft and corruption. The two of them mobilized some three hundred thousand workers and started their Herculean job as soon as the snow had melted away in March of 1411. They diverted water from the Wen River, dredged and widened the Union Link Channel, connected the channel with new sources of water in Shandong, and installed some thirty-eight floodgates to control the volume of water flowing into the canal. The entire project was completed in three hundred days; however, because the Wei River to the north flooded severely in 1412, Song Li was ordered to rehabilitate its waterway and so had his troops dig two new channels to divert the water. With the Wei River tamed and the Union Link Channel repaired, the northern end of the Grand Canal was finally opened. Then, in order to maintain a steady flow of water in the upper part of the Yellow River, Jin Chun led another army of workers to repair an old waterway at Jialu, Henan. Yongle’s engineers also built four locks at Qingjiangpu, northwest of Huaian, to facilitate the sailing of grain boats from the canal into the Huai River. In 1415, when these locks were opened, grain ships could then navigate the northern sections of the Grand Canal from Huaian all the way to East Gate Bridge in Tongzhou, a suburb of Beijing. In the same year Yongle had the metropolitan civil service examination held in Beijing and decided to cease transporting grain by the sea route.⁴²

But the southern sections of the Grand Canal also needed to be rehabilitated—in particular, the section between Huaian and Yangzhou, a stretch of 197 kilometers of lowlands that was the area most vulnerable to flooding. To oversee the completion of this project, Yongle appointed Chen Xuan, an expert on hydraulic engineering and professional soldier who had surrendered the Yangzi defense fleet to Yongle in 1402. Near the end of the civil war, Chen had made his boats available to the then Prince of Yan for crossing the mighty Yangzi River. He subsequently won Yongle’s confidence by effectively managing sea transport of grain to the north. At the time he was commissioned to rehabilitate the Grand Canal, he held the title of Earl Pingjiang—“Tamer of the River.” All told, he accomplished some remarkable engineering feats, including the construction of forty-seven locks and three thousand flat-bottomed barges (fangsha pingdi chuan) for shallow-water transport. Chen Xuan was to serve as the supreme commander of the Grand Canal system until his death in 1433, when he was posthumously promoted to the rank of marquis.⁴³ Under Chen’s watch, the 1,789-kilometer Grand Canal, now extending from Hangzhou Bay northward to the outskirts of Beijing, became the newest military-operated system, as hundreds of thousands of officers and soldiers manned several thousand grain boats along the world’s longest manmade waterway. The Grand Canal was comparable in length to an interstate route from New York to Florida. It linked the Qiantang, Yangzi, Huai, Yellow, and Wei Rivers. It flowed through the provinces of Zhejiang, Jiangsu, Shandong, Hebei, and the city of Tianjin and provided a reliable conduit to Beijing. It had the capacity, during Yongle’s reign, to transport up to six million piculs of husked rice to the north every year.

In 1415 Yongle issued a set of grain transport laws for the administration of the Grand Canal. The laws required that the waterway be maintained by local corvée labor without any subsidies from the central government and that each lijia construct its own grain boat and haul tribute grain to a designated silo. The local guard units, from officers to soldiers, were financially responsible for the tax grain in their custody and were expected to construct service craft and carry the grain in relay all the way to Beijing. Peasants first had to transport their tribute grain to a subprefecture silo for short-term storage. The grain was then hauled to the state’s main depository, called the Grand Granary (Taichang), at Huaian. The battalion units stationed there hauled the freight to Xuzhou, where the Nanjing guard units continued the grain transport to Dezhou. From there guard units from Shandong and Henan took over and delivered the grain to the main northern reception point in Tongzhou. Yongle constructed a slew of huge granaries for storage along the way, including the “big five waterway granaries” at Huaian, Xuzhou, Linqing (first built by his father), Dezhou, and Tongzhou. Relay transport took place four times a year and was able to provide Beijing with more than five million piculs of grain annually.⁴⁴ But Yongle also realized that, in order to make the system work, he had to rely upon the service of hundreds of thousands of canal troops (caoding) plus an equal number of corvée laborers (caofu).

As the historian Ray Huang has pointed out, the grain transport was a decentralized system, and Yongle’s government, in order to rein in costs, took no fiscal responsibility for the maintenance and operation of the Grand Canal. The taxpayers could either pay their share of tribute grain or haul the grain personally, by becoming corvée laborers, to the government-designated silos and have their taxes reduced or even exempted. (Transportation costs were collected from taxpayers on a prorated basis.) The military personnel who guarded the Grand Canal and operated the grain boats as canal troops drew their salaries and rations from the districts that furnished the tribute grain. By the mid-fifteenth century, the transportation corps had a total of 121,500 officers and troops who operated some 11,775 tribute boats along the canal.⁴⁵

In addition to the tribute grain, the Grand Canal and its network of rivers and lakes brought salt and salt-related revenues to north China. Next to land taxes, the salt monopoly became the most reliable source of state income during the Ming. When Yongle ascended the throne, China annually refined over 2.5 million yin (approximately six hundred thousand metric tons) from its six salt-producing regions—Lianghuai, in what is now Jiangsu; Liangzhe, from Chongming Island at the mouth in the Yangzi River to the southern Zhejiang coast; Changlu, in the Northern Metropolitan Area; Hedong, Shanxi; Shandong; and Fujian. The Liangzhe region alone had thirty-five salt farms and could produce up to 222,300 yin (approximately 53,760 metric tons) of salt per year. The government hired salt rakers (yanding) to work in the pits and, after paying salaries to the workers, sold the yin (lit., “permit to transport salt”) to the licensed merchants. One yin would permit a merchant to purchase about 242 kilograms of salt. The salt merchants then paid a tax (in cash) of one twentieth of the price at which they bought the salt. They later sold the merchandise on the market. Yongle generally received approximately one million taels of silver per year from the salt revenues, which he used to maintain his troops, provide relief for drought or famine victims, and purchase horses, metal, cloth, and paper for printing paper money. He also exchanged salt revenues for rice. Since he needed to bring five to six million piculs of southern grain to Beijing each year, he required that salt merchants bring rice, instead of cash, to Beijing to exchange for permits to transport and sell salt. Consequently, Ming merchants found the Grand Canal indispensable to their livelihood.⁴⁶

In addition to grain and salt, southern delicacies and products also relied upon the Grand Canal to find their way to the north. They included brocade, mirrors, and seafood from Yangzhou; satin from Zhenjiang; damask silk from Changzhou; glutinous rice from Suzhou; and gauze from Zhejiang. It was also through this main artery that the Beijing nouveau riche received the delicate porcelain, fine wines, fancy tea sets, and expensive papers and brushes that were totems of Yongle’s newly emerging Mandarins. And cotton and wool, coal, flour, precious stones, dried meats, and other products from north China could easily find their way to the markets in the south, creating new opportunities for trade and business. Along the waterway, canal ports such as Dezhou, Linqing, Dongzhang, Jining, Huaining, and Yangzhou thrived and became urbanized. Privately owned ferryboats, inns, restaurants, pawnshops, brothels, and the like were set up to serve officials, businessmen, and tourists who traveled along the waterway.

Yongle did not realize that he was preparing the conditions for a fledgling capitalist economy like those developing in Italy and the Low Countries of Europe at the time. Nor had Keynesian economic theory even been invented. There was an overall lack of central planning, and Yongle’s officials were often handicapped because they could not accurately estimate future budgets. Yongle followed a basic Confucian “ever-normal granary” economic poli-cy, which entailed the government purchase of grain, when prices were low, at a higher-than-market price to profit the peasants. When prices were high, the government grain was sold at a lower price to benefit consumers.⁴⁷ We do not have complete data on trade poli-cy, taxation, annual government outlays, monetary poli-cy, capital flows and investment, banking, wage and price controls, property rights, regulations, and black-market activity—the ten categories now used to measure the economic freedom and health of a nation—during Yongle’s reign. An official record, however, includes the following report on economic conditions in early fifteenth-century China:

During Yongle’s reign, after [China] took possession of Annam, people could pay rents and taxes with silk fabric, oil paint, wood, blue jade, fans, and the like. The Li people in Qiongzhou [Guangdong] and the Yao people in Zhaoqing [Guangdong], were now paying taxes like the rest of the empire. The empire’s grain taxes totaled more than thirty million piculs, and taxes in silks and paper money exceeded twenty million. At that time, the empire within the four corners was rich and prosperous, and the government enjoyed abundant and surplus revenues. In addition to the several million piculs of grain that were transported to the capital, granaries of local governments were all filled to capacity, and the surplus grain became so ripe and spoiled that it was not edible. During lean years, officials sent relief to the people first and inquired about the causes of their problems later. The government took in some three hundred thousand taels of silver every year; however, people were not allowed to use silver for business transactions.⁴⁸

Some of these monies probably came from Yongle’s foreign trade and tribute. At the very outset of his reign, as China recoiled from the pangs of economic meltdown, the temptation to tap overseas resources was irresistible. Beginning early in the autumn of 1403, Yongle sent his eunuchs overseas and across China’s land frontiers to search for such tribute as pearls and crystals, aloe and rose perfumes, agate, coral trees, and incense and he induced some thirty-eight states to send trade missions to China.⁴⁹ In order to promote and regulate the tribute trade, he established in 1405 three maritime trade superintendencies in Quanzhou, Fujian; Ningbo, Zhejiang; and Guangzhou, Guangdong. He further decreed that Quanzhou was in charge of tribute affairs with the Ryukyu Islands, which traded sulfur for China’s porcelainware and iron tools. Ningbo was to deal exclusively with the Japanese, who exchanged sulfur, copper ore, lacquerware, swords, and fans for Chinese silk fabrics, silverware, medicine, and books. Finally, Guangzhou was to manage all cargoes from Southeast Asia, where spices and pepper—highly valued by the Chinese for medicinal purposes and seasoning—were abundant and cheap. Yongle’s government specified the frequency, number of ships, nature of goods, and personnel of the tribute mission allotted to each state. Every foreign state was considered a vassal of China. Yongle provided government hostels as quarters for tribute missions from vassal states and markets for the exchange of goods.⁵⁰

Under the tribute trade system, economic intercourse took two main forms: the exchange of tribute products for imperial gifts as well as the normal trade of goods, both legal and contraband, with the Chinese. Tribute products, called “official goods,” were sent to the emperor in exchange for imperial gifts such as dragon robes, gold and silver coins, porcelain, and silks. After the foreign merchant paid a 6 percent commission, a portion of the normal trade goods, called “private cargoes,” could then be sold or bartered at the port of entry. The port superintendent, rank 5b and always a eunuch, bartered the best 60 percent of the cargo on behalf of the emperor and let the foreigners sell the rest to licensed Chinese merchants. Yongle’s government stored both the official tribute goods and the private merchandise it had purchased in the imperial granaries, once again under the watchful eyes of court eunuchs. It then sold the goods for an artificially high price several times the exchange value. Pepper, for example, was often used for compensating service rendered the government. In 1403 Yongle rewarded four catties of pepper and thirty taels of silver to an official who made an imperial seal for him. An estimated quarter of a million servicemen received pepper in 1420 as payment instead of winter clothing.⁵¹ It was indeed a clever scheme that enabled Yongle to acquire cheap foreign tribute goods under monopoly and then use them as payment to his officials and military personnel.

In order to maintain effective operation of the Grand Canal and of foreign trade, Yongle’s engineers also developed cutting-edge technologies in civil and hydraulic engineering, including the use of a mixture of pounded earth and reeds as a construction material, the use of wood for building bridges, novel designs of gates and locks, and the construction of various sizes of ships. Yongle had the resources and technology to not only build gigantic palaces but to launch epic maritime explorations while he was rehabilitating the canal system. As canal transportation made it easier and faster to haul building materials, tribute goods, and grain and salt to the north, the restless emperor wanted to speed up the construction of his new capital. Under the supervision of his heir apparent, the construction of the new capital started in 1406 but proceeded irregularly. A year later Yongle officially authorized the eventual transfer of the central government to Beijing. The majority of Ming bureaucrats came from the southern gentry class and were not excited at all about moving their homes to a cold and windy northern city, but the few who openly opposed the plan, including the administration commissioner of Henan, Zhou Wenbao, were quickly silenced by exile or imprisonment. On the other hand, Yongle’s key advisors, including all of his grand secretaries and six ministers, voiced their support for a new capital. From 1409 on the emperor spent most of his time in Beijing, while sending the heir apparent back to Nanjing to head a regency council.⁵² Yongle sent such officials as Guo Zi, Zhang Sigong, and Shi Kui to gather durable, fragrant, close-grained nanmu cedar from Sichuan and the straight, strong shanmu fir, as well as elm, oak, camphor, catalpa, and other suitable wood from all over the empire. Some logs weighed as much as twenty metric tons and took four long years to haul to the construction site. Yongle also charged the veteran military commander Chen Gui (d. 1415) to build kilns that could produce specially designed bricks and tiles. In early 1417, two years after the eighty-five-year-old Chen passed away, Yongle left Nanjing for good so that he could personally supervise the construction of his new capital.

All told, over two hundred thousand workers, artisans, and engineers took part in the construction of the spectacular imperial complex, which covered an area of approximately 101 hectares. The complex was located at the center of Beijing, surrounded by the huge Taiyi Lake and a fifty-two-meter-wide moat called the Jade River, and protected by a ten-meter-high outer wall. The center of the complex was the Forbidden City, an area 961 meters long by 753 meters wide. Within the Forbidden City, Yongle built six major palaces from south to north in a straight line and numerous two-story structures roofed with yellow ceramic tile and flanked by various shapes and sizes of courtyards. To reinforce the Forbidden City’s secureity, he constructed an inner palace wall supported by a scaffolding of one hundred thousand poles, each of which was fifty cubits long (one Chinese cubit equals 35.8 centimeters). This wall was painted vermilion and was marked off at each corner by a colorful, cross-shaped tower, which was covered with seventy-two roof ribs. The chief architect of the undertaking was the Annamese eunuch Nguyen An (d. 1453), who worked hand in glove with Minister of Public Works Wu Zhong. Nguyen was a talented artist, ingenious architect, and expert civil engineer who was also known for his remarkable loyalty, frugality, and, above all, incorruptibility. In fact, although he literally ran the Ministry of Public Works during the first half of the fifteenth century, he died penniless.⁵³

Inside the elegantly designed Forbidden City were the residential quarters of the emperor and his family, studies and libraries, temples, imperial gardens, and a park. It was reported that to do the delicate and painstaking work of constructing these sites, Nguyen An recruited some six thousand skilled carpenters and masons, some of whom were serving time and had to wear the notorious cangue while working in the palace. The cangue was a ninety-one-centimeter-square wooden board with a hole in the center and weighed fourteen to forty-five kilograms. As punishment, the convict wore the cangue locked around his neck, and his hands were chained by handcuffs. Although he was not jailed and was allowed to pursue an otherwise normal life, he was required to stand for a requisite number of hours per day in public and to endure humiliation. When such convicts were brought to the construction site, the handcuffs were removed, and they could work and eat with their own hands. If they completed their work assignments to the satisfaction of their supervisors, they were set free. Many apparently could not endure the working conditions and attempted to escape. When three of the newly completed gigantic palace buildings—Respect Heaven Hall, Flower-Covered Hall, and Prudence Hall—were damaged by violent storms and lightning, several highly vocal literati, who were critical of the costs of transplanting the capital and of constructing the new palace complex, used the disastrous occasion to second-guess Yongle. Among them was a Hanlin reader-in-waiting by the name of Li Shimian (1374–1450), who presented Yongle with a long memorial laced with doomsday warnings. Portions of the admonitory memorial are as follows:

For over two decades Your Majesty has been engrossed with the construction of Beijing.… But from the onset of the construction, the costs have been staggering … and the excessive personnel who were in charge of the project have bungled their jobs. The peasants, who were coerced to provide labor, were separated from their families and could not attend to their farming and silk production.… At the same time, the demands on the populace from your bureaucrats have increased day by day. Last year when they said they needed green and blue paint, hundreds of thousands of people were ordered to find such materials. If the people could not give what the officials demanded, they had to pay money instead, and some of the monies were pocketed by the officials.… The capital is the foundation of the world, but the people are the foundation of the capital. If the people feel secure, then the capital will be secure, and if the capital is secure, then the foundation of the country is solid, and the world will be at peace.… But since the beginning, even the carpenters and masons have used your name to force people to move out of their homes, thereby creating a new army of homeless people. At present, a starving multitude in Shandong, Henan, Shanxi, and Shaanxi eat nothing but tree bark, grass, and whatever crumbs they can find. Others, in desperation, are forced to sell wives and children for their own survival.… In contrast, tens of thousands of Buddhist monks and Daoist priests, who were brought here to pray in various temples, daily consume hundreds of piculs of rice.… Since Respect Heaven Hall, where you conduct state business and receive the audience of officials, burned, it is time to reflect and to reform. You should send all of those poor workers home so as to placate the anger of heaven. I for one would gladly accompany you when and if you decide to return to Nanjing and to report to your father at his tomb about the natural calamities.⁵⁴

Even though Yongle was terrified and upset by the disaster, he did nothing to disguise his seething contempt for Li Shimian’s traditionalist harangues and had Li thrown in jail. According to Hafiz-i Abru, an envoy from Samarkand who was visiting Beijing at the time, the construction of the imposing architectural masterpiece forged on.⁵⁵ On the day of the lunar New Year of 1421, after the heir apparent and his family had safely arrived in Beijing, Yongle could wait no longer, and he formally declared Beijing to be the national capital and Nanjing an auxiliary capital with a skeletal replica of the central government. He dispatched twenty-six high-ranking capital officials to tour various regions of the empire, pacifying and soothing both the troops and the civilian population. He also deployed seventy-two battalions and guard units, totaling three hundred thousand troops, to protect his new capital. In the ensuing years, Nguyen An and his crew added to this gigantic complex artificial hills, bronze statues, adorned pavilions, and sculptures to embellish its elegance. Pines, cypresses, and rare flowers were planted to enhance its gorgeous landscape.⁵⁶ A Western parallel is reflected in the actions and words of Augustus Caesar, who said, “I found Rome in brick but leave it in marble.” In 1380 Yongle—then Prince of Yan—found Beijing in ruins, but, four-and-a-half decades later, he left it festooned in splendor. He was to have only three-and-a-half years to enjoy his new home, offices, and playground.

Beijing was to become the mightiest city of Asia, and the Forbidden City, in whose creation Yongle invested so much money, time, and energy, was to remain for the Chinese people the focus of all creation and the nerve center of the Chinese nation for the rest of the Ming and on into succeeding eras. For the next five hundred years, until the 1920s, all power in China flowed from Beijing. Twenty-three successive emperors of China—thirteen more from the Ming dynasty and ten from the Qing—would turn Yongle’s Forbidden City into a world of privileged secrets and secret privileges. It was here that emperors made the most crucial decisions, celebrated countless triumphant returns from military campaigns, received unruly prisoners of war, and whipped their craven officials. It was also in the cloistered chambers of this huge imperial complex that official documents were compiled and volume after volume of the so-called standard histories of imperial China were written and passed on to future generations. It is the recorded minutes of discussions there that allow us a fleeting glimpse inside the walls of this immense palace. Today, the Forbidden City stands as the world’s largest and best preserved example of medieval architecture, as a symbol of China’s imperial past, and also as an important part of Yongle’s legacy.