The History of China - #208 - Ming 4: To Pick at the Dragon's Scales

Episode Date: February 1, 2021

To both the north and south, the armies of Great Ming continue to achieve order from chaos and stability across the realm, in the imperial palace at Nanjing, the Hongwu Emperor sits the Dragon Throne - as mercurial and temperamental as its very namesake... and woe betide anyone who stokes the dragon's wrath. Still, in the name of greater peace (and fewer mass slaughters), many a brave (and often fatally foolish)scholar will tempt fate by trying to tell Hongwu what he's doing wrong. Time Period Covered: 1379-1389 CE Major Historical Figures: Ming: The Hongwu Emperor (Zhu Yuanzhang) [r.1368-1398] Duke Li Wenzhong [d. 1384] General Fu Youde [d. 1394] General Feng Sheng [?] General Lan Yu [d. 1393] General Mu Ying [d. 1392] Scholar Chen Wenhui [d. 1381] Scholar Li Shilu [d. 1381] Scholar Xie Jin [1369-1415] Yuan/Yunnanese: Toghus Temür Khan [d. 1388] Basalawarmi, the Prince of Liang [d. 1382] General Naghachu [d. 1388] Si Lunfa, Chieftain of Shan [d. 1386?] Major Works Cited: Crossley, Pamela Kyle, et al. Empire at the Margins: Culture, Ethnicity and Frontier in Early Modern China. Dillon, Michael. China’s Muslim Hui Community: Migration, Settlements and Sects. Langlois, John D., Jr. “The Hung-Wu-Reign” in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 7: The Ming Dynasty, 13698-1644m Part I. Tsai, Shi-shan Henry. The Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty.g. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 208, To Pick at the Dragon's Scales. Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy when roasted and taste good with ketchup. Attributed to Suzanne McMinn. When last we left off with our foray into the reign of the Ming Dynasty's founding emperor, Hongwu, he had begun the back half of his three decades on the throne. A period which would be, in summation, a long, slow spiral into paranoia, madness, and a particularly terrifying and

mercurial rage, one which could incite the sovereign of all China to mass murder against anyone he even so much as suspected might be against him, which could be just about anyone at any time for any reason. As his policies became ever more brutal and arbitrary, the imperial officials felt themselves in a rather particular bind. If summoned into Imperial service, they could almost invariably look forward to harsh physical punishments for even minor errors on their part, at best. At worst, not only would they suffer the consequences of the ever-shifting Imperial wrath, but so too would their families and clans. The Honglu Emperor, as you'll recall, had come to hold in particular regard some of the most fearsome punishments ever conceived in the many centuries of the Middle Kingdom, ranging from being cut in half at the waist and death by a

thousand cuts for the offenders themselves, but even worse yet, the dreaded nine familial exterminations for their entire family lines. As such, many scholars and learned men came to particularly dread the possibility of being summoned into the imperial service, and many of them did whatever they could to avoid such a possibility, giving up their careers and livelihoods to stay out of the withering limelight of the golden dragon throne. Amazingly though, for all of this, there was still no shortage of particularly brave officials who felt it their legal and moral duty to castigate such cruelty, even and especially when it came from the imperial person himself. Time and again, they'd written Hongwu expressing

their disapproval at his rash and cruel actions. And time and again, they'd done little more than bring the ever-increasingly unhinged imperial wrath down upon their own heads. We capped this off last time with the fallout of the infamous Hu Weiyong Affair of 1379, in which Chancellor Hu was convicted of inciting a plot against the emperor himself, thereby sealing the fates of not only himself and his extended family, but touching off a paranoia-fueled, empire-wide rolling purge of the Ming government at every level. The purges would go on in phases for the following decade and a half, in all claiming somewhere between 15,000 and 30,000 lives before finally,

blessedly, sputtering out. As we might well expect, this increasingly meant that the Ming sovereign had precious few servants upon which he could rely. In fact, Hongwu seemed to be pleased with just such a prospect. Over the course of the 1380s, he determined time and again that he could, and indeed should, trust only himself to get the important tasks of his empire done right. As we mentioned in the last episode, though, that very solipsistic mania has often presaged a rather quick decline in imperial fortunes once that go-it-alone emperor is replaced by an almost invariably more lax heir, who finds to his great displeasure that dear old dad left him with no infrastructure to take up the slack of the system. But we will get to that fallout in its own due time. In the meantime, we start today by heading south, far more to the south than even the

imperial city at Nanjing, and all the way down to the steaming jungles and frigid mountains of Yunnan, abutting Myanmar, Laos, and Vietnam. So you may recall as of this point in 1380, Yunnan is still one of these scattered regions that has remained steadfastly loyal to the now evicted Yuan dynasty. Its governor was the Mongol Prince of Liang, Basala Warming. Back in 1372, the Hongwu Emperor had dispatched to the region the scholar Wang Wei as an emissary of Ming to conduct peace negotiations with the prince and negotiate the region's surrender to the Ming Empire. But owing to a combination of bad timing, but with Wang's visit occurring while another delegation from the Yuan Emperor was likewise there, Yunnan's own innate

resistance of and native distrust towards Han Chinese rule, as its population was then chiefly indigenous Tibeto-Burman peoples, who saw the Ming as equally foreign conquerors as the Yuan, and perhaps even more so, as well as Wang Wei's own apparent haughtiness towards both his host, the Prince of Liang, and the emissary of the Mongol Khan, that his mission ended in catastrophe. By 1374, Wang Wei had been murdered, and Yunnan remained just as committed to resist any Ming assault as ever. With his government newly reorganized via mass purging in 1381, Hongwu finally felt ready to give Yunnan and its intransigent leader, the Prince of Liang, the what-for. That September, General Fu Yuda was made overall commander of the Yunnan Expeditionary Force,

with the seconds in command being the generals Lan Yu and Mu Ying. Much as before in the planning of the northern campaigns into Mongolia itself, Hongwu managed to find a balance point between his natural inclination to micromanage every little detail of the expedition and the reality that as he'd be remaining in Nanjing, he would actually have to entrust his generals to think and plan for themselves once they were in the field. This seems to have been easier for Hongwu to accept than from his own palace's bureaucratic affairs, as it went pretty much without saying that, as a wartime commander and battle-hardened veteran himself, if Hongwu was going to trust anyone, it would certainly be his fellow men-at-arms. As of 1381, the Yuan

government in Yunnan was primarily based in and around its two main population centers, the provincial capital of Kunming, wherein lay the court of the Prince of Liang, and then the city of Dali, the ancient capital of the former Kingdom of Dali. Though it was understood that these would be the primary focal points of Yuan resistance to the Ming incursion, it was also understood by Generals Fu, Lan, and Mu that things were not likely to be so straightforward as a mere frontal attack. Leng Lua explains, quote, although nominally a province and the seat of a Mongol prince of the blood, the region was not ruled through integrated civil and military administrations, as were other Yuan provinces, but rather through a host of tribal organizations loosely united by the Prince of Liang. Aside from the prince's own ruling apparatus, there was an indigenous one headed

by the Duan family at Dali. Both organizations had to be overcome before Yunnan could be incorporated into the Ming Empire. It was going to take significant work to uproot both the Mongol and indigenous resistance. Fortunately, Hongwu sent in a force sufficient to such a task. When their plans had been finalized and approved, Fu Yuda and company set out southeastward at the head of an army of 300,000 men. By the emperor's orders, the main force was to proceed directly southeast through Hunan and Guizhou, and then down the throat of Yunnan to Chuching City, about 125 kilometers northeast of the provincial capital Kunming. Meanwhile, a smaller secondary force would march from Sichuan to western Guizhou,

a conspicuous and calculated move designed to, hopefully, draw off a significant number of Yunnanese defenders to chase them down. Therefore, the main army would have a more or less open path directly to the capital and make short work of it before the Yuan defenders could realize their error. Once Kunming had fallen, the main army within itself split into two groups, with a smaller detachment going to relieve the diversionary force in Guizhou from being overwhelmed, while the greater bulk of it proceeded on to the secondary headquarters at Dali City to the northwest. Leng Luo puts the result simply, quote, the plans were realized, end quote. To provide a bit more detail, Fu Yude's army reached their first jumping-off

point at Huguang in October, and from there dispatched his diversionary force, which arrived at their target in western Guizhou, called Wusai, by that December. The Yuan prince of Liang, Basalo Army, dispatched 100,000 troops to guard that throat of Yunnan at Chujing, but that defensive force was routed by the Ming expedition, resulting in some 20,000 Yuan soldiers captured, along with their commanding general. General Fu Yuda opted to personally lead the smaller relief force to aid the northern diversionary force, entrusting the bulk of the army and the capture of the Yunnan capital itself to his trusted lieutenants Lan Yu and Mu Ying. Just weeks later, on January 6, 1382,

Basala Warmi, having already fled Kunming just ahead of the Ming invaders, burned his princely robes in regalia, and then proceeded to drown his wife in a nearby lake. Then he, along with most, or all, of his ministers, committed suicide rather than face capture. With Kunming thus taken, the Ming generals Lan Yu and Mu Ying moved their forces to Dali, which was taken that April. Unlike the Mongol prince, the indigenous Duan rulers were

somewhat more amenable to capture versus suicide, and so they were sent on their way back to Nanjing. In spite of this decisive military victory, however, the Yunnan conundrum would prove to be not so easily resolved. Owing to its highly decentralized, multi-ethnic, and fractious nature, not to mention its sheer remoteness and geographic inaccessibility, the region would remain, quote, a difficult military problem throughout the Hongwu Reign. In fact, General Mu Ying spent the rest of his life engaged in frequent military actions against the Shan and other minority peoples there, in particular against such Sino-Tibetan ethnic groups as the Lolos. Even so, such resistance could more or less safely be written off from Nanjing as local tribal resistance, whereas the Ming's military victory over Basala Warmi marked

the definitive end to the Mongol-Yuan power in the Southlands. Back in Nanjing, the Hongmu Emperor had a whole other slate of issues and problems to deal with, in his own particular manner. For one, there was the question, the ever and ongoing question, of religious favoritism. Some of the imperial officials, you see, seemed to think that Hongmu was a little bit too friendly with the doctrines of that foreign barbarian Buddhist faith. They, good, moral Confucians, therefore spoke out against their sovereigns' seeming embrace of that scary, alien dogma, which had only been a mainstay within China, you'll remember,

for a measly 1,100 years at this point. It seems to have pretty much invariably proved to be a rather poor career decision. One such scholar, Chen Wenhui, submitted a formal remonstration of the emperor, complaining that he had promoted too many Buddhists to key ministerial positions. decision. One such scholar, Chen Wenhui, submitted a formal remonstration of the emperor, complaining that he had promoted too many Buddhists to key ministerial positions. For his own part, Hongwu seems to have simply ignored Chen's rather bland critique. But Chen himself was so overcome with fear at what the emperor might do to him, that he went ahead and jumped off a bridge to his death rather than face the potential consequences. And, once again, it should be noted, thereby saving his

family potential persecution, which, as we're it should be noted, thereby saving his family potential persecution, which, as we're all well aware by now, Honglu was just all about. Another eminent scholar, Li Shilu, directly attacked the emperor, first writing and then submitting verbally and in person that he had, quote, abandoned the learning of the sages and given honors to alien teachings. Li went on, quote, upbraiding the emperor for his indulgence toward Buddhism and Taoism, haughtily dashing his court audience tablet to the floor of the palace, and begged permission to retire from imperial service. End quote. Retire, eh? Hongwu must have thought. Sure, I'll have you retired right the hell now. In a rage as such a display of overt

disrespect, the emperor had his imperial guard captains beat ministerly to death with their bare hands on the front steps of the palace for all to see. It's somewhat ironic, then, that ultimately Hongwu seems to have listened to these criticisms, at least to some extent, and thereafter taken corrective actions. In 1382, for instance, the emperor reversed one of his previous orders that had stipulated that sacrifices to Confucius could only be conducted at his family's ancestral temple in Shandong. Instead, Hongwu now stipulated that sacrifices could, and indeed should, be conducted to the ancient sage all across the empire. Still, that must have been pretty cold comfort for the late ministers Chen and Li. In spite of the mortal terror that the Hongwu emperor rightly inspired in his minister's hearts,

he nevertheless faced over the course of the 1380s increasingly troublesome disciplinary problems from his high-ranked followers. As his paranoia grew and his patience thinned even further, he would fall back more and more onto that old standby, by which of course I mean brutal mass slaughter. One particularly interesting example of this inaction was his own nephew, Li Wanzhong, who was ennobled as a duke in 1370, and allotted an unusually large annual stipend of 3,000 picols of grain, which is about 60.5 kilograms each, so times 3,000, that's about 181,500 kilograms, or about 200 US tons. Which is to say, a lot. This rather blatant favoritism was due to the fact that Li was pretty much the only one of Hongwu's close family with any degree of formal

learning, and so was entrusted with the extremely important task of restoring discipline to the national university as of 1383, as the emperor had determined that it was extremely lax. Well, okay, so a little light nepotism is nothing to get super worked up about here. It's a hereditary monarchy, after all, and they're all about nepotism. No, the real problem here was that in spite of his close relationship to Uncle Emperor, Li Wanzhong wasn't exactly what you'd call the especially loyal sort. As such, by the end of 1383, Li had begun to voice some rather dubious criticisms of Uncle Hongwu, leading many within the court to wonder if he was, perhaps, attempting to build some sort of cabal that might eventually back an attempt at the throne itself. By 1384, Li Wenzhong had

fallen under a cloud of suspicion that ended not only his career, but also, apparently, his life. He died that year under unexplained but seemingly pretty sinister circumstances. Quote, Li's biographers in the official history say that he had criticized the emperor for relying unduly on palace eunuchs for important political functions, for killing officials, and other matters. Perhaps it was such criticism that provoked the incident. It's also suggested that the emperor may have ordered the deaths of Li Wenzhong's numerous followers, for apparently he had gathered a large following at his mansion in the capital, end quote. Ironically enough, again, after allegedly having his nephew killed

for calling out his over-reliance on eunuchs, it seems that Honglu had a rather belated realization that, huh, you know, actually, uh, Wen Zhong was right about that after all. Later that same year, the emperor would forbid all further eunuch participation in political affairs. So, congratulations, Li Wen Zhong, I guess? Not to get too terribly off track here, but this whole situation, the policing, the secrecy, the eunuchs, gives me a just about perfect inroad to discuss a topic I'd be remiss if I were to let it pass by unremarked—the jinyiwei, or brocade-clad guard, aka the terrifying secret police of the Ming dynasty. Shishan Henry Tsai writes of them and

imperial eunuchs in general, quote, Ming emperors relied on eunuchs principally for the same reasons European kings and queens of the Middle Ages relied on celibate clerics to manage sensitive agencies, such as the Chancery, Exchequer, and Inquisition bureaus. Critics who blame the eunuchs for causing the worst kind of problems and for besetting the Ming polity almost always cite their involvement in the Ming espionage and secret police handiwork. On closer look, however, one can find that the number of Ming eunuchs who were assigned to spy for the emperor was indeed minuscule. He goes on to compare the organization to comparable political organs across time, such as the KGB, the Stasi, the CIA, and the Roman Catholic Inquisitors. Throughout human history, various forms of security apparatuses were used to maintain those in power, to purify political ideology, and to perpetuate one's religious creed.

Intimidation, torture, banishment, and murder ultimately became a means of weeding out heretics and silencing dissidents and politically undesirable elements. End quote. The only significant difference between the Ming Jinni Wei and the other aforementioned intelligence organizations is that the former employed a cast of castrati to do its dirty work, while the others have used various voluntary agents, cardinals, or commissars to achieve the same. The Jinni Wei began life as simply a contingent of the imperial bodyguard, yet over the course of both Hongwu's reign and especially that of his eventual successor, the Yongle Emperor, it would be transformed into a quasi-independent spy, counterintelligence, and inquisitory body. They were, quote,

not attached to the five chief military commissioners or to the regular imperial guards, as they were specially assigned to spy for his majesty, to silence political opponents of the empire, and to stop vicious rumors, end quote. During the Yongle era, the third Ming Emperor would ultimately become dissatisfied with the professionalism and efficacy of mere bodyguards acting as their own secret agent service. As such, by 1420, he would roll the brocade-clad guards into a larger intelligence organization known as the Eastern Depot, which was then overseen and managed by palace eunuchs, whom Yongle apparently saw as being more reliable and generally more vigilant. The organization of this espionage unit was quite impressive. From Tsai,

Under the eunuch director, there were a battalion commander, a company commander, both from the embroidered uniformed guard. Immediately below these two commanders were a number of foremen, section heads, and lesser officers, about 40 people in all. The military officers in the depot wore special outfits and long boots, easily becoming the most feared secret police in Ming China as they tortured, maimed, and murdered countless innocent people. In fact, when it came to unmitigated evil and unrelenting ferocity, the Ming eunuchs did not always win the contest over their colleagues from the guard. In addition to these top officers, about 100 agents, known as service captains,

were routinely sent out to obtain information and seek out conspirators. These captains were divided into 12 sections, and each of them in turn hired a large number of inquisitors, similar to the FBI's informants, to do their dirty work. It is estimated that by the end of the 16th century, His Majesty's ubiquitous secret police numbered over 1,000 persons, end quote. Their purview of monitoring and intelligence gathering was by no means limited to military or political affairs, although that did remain their organization's primary role. Still, they also kept close tabs on just about anything else that might be considered off in the capital and wider empire. Things like market prices of goods,

agricultural and business conditions, mysterious religious leaders and sects, the greed of landlords, and any number of other rumors that might reach their ears, almost regardless of how small or seemingly insignificant. And just to be clear, lest one think that they were sneaking around in their very distinctive uniforms, no, of course they weren't. While on assignment, they would absolutely disguise themselves to fit in and thereby be able to surreptitiously take notes and collect evidence for their case. Throughout any such process, regular updates would be dispatched from the Eastern Depot's commander, stamped with the unique ivory seal of the organization, and delivered directly and

immediately, day or night, to the emperor himself. When sufficient evidence of malfeasance had been collected, the suspects were then rounded up, arrested, and brought to the depot for further questioning, and once they went in, virtually none were ever seen or heard from again. To be taken in for questioning by the eastern depot was, as we'll see, already a virtual death sentence in itself. Quote, At that point in time, and unfortunately still too often the case in the modern Chinese state, the primary function of such questioning sessions was to elicit a confession from the accused, for without a confession, there could be no conviction. Given the Chinese notion that torture was a legitimate means of extracting a confession,

the suspect would either confess or die under severe physical abuse. Once a written confession had been signed by the arrested party, the Ministry of Punishment would then pass the appropriate sentence. Needless to say, there was no such thing as due process or civil rights protection under this system, and the guard officers, in collusion with their eunuch bosses, repeatedly made a travesty out of Ming judiciary principles. So, that's the Jin-Yi Wei. Sounds like a group of fun guys, right? Anyways, let's get back to the Hongwu Emperor and his own personal sense of justice. In May 1385, the Vice Minister of Revenue, Guo Huan, was arrested on charges of embezzling more than 7,000 peacles of grain,

which is 420,000 kilograms or about 413 tons. Guo was, obviously, convicted and put to death. And then, Hongwu widened the scope of the investigation, rounding up and likewise executing anyone else suspected of being involved with the scheme to defraud the treasury. This resulted in hundreds to thousands of additional executions, including that of the Ministers of Rights and Justice and the Vice Ministers of War and Works. Then, that November, Hongwu released a public update on the case that, well, actually, that 7,000 picol figure had been a huge understatement of Guo Huan's embezzlement,

and the real figure was actually more than 3,000 times that amount, listed at 24 million picols worth, or just a little bit less than a billion and a half kilograms, or about 1.6 million tons. As many of you probably know, I am not good with conceptualizing large numbers like that, so for my own sake, and some of yours as well, here's a point of reference. That's about twice the gross weight of the Shanghai Tower, the second tallest skyscraper in the world right after the Burj Khalifa, or about 8,000 blue whales. Hongwu justified his numeric switcheroo on the grounds that he felt that had his government released the real amount right off the bat, the general public would have never believed it,

which is, let's face it, a very reasonable fear. Looking at that figure from seven centuries down the line, it certainly seems unbelievably huge. And yet, on the other hand, why bother inflating the number after the fact if it wasn't true? It wouldn't have made any difference to anyone at that point. In fact, it makes Hongwu's own government look all the more inept since they allowed two entire skyscrapers worth of grain to get embezzled right out from under their noses. Napoleon Bonaparte rose from obscurity to become the most powerful and significant figure in modern history. Over 200 years after his death, people are still debating his legacy. He was a man of contradictions, a tyrant and a reformer, a liberator and an oppressor, a revolutionary

and a reactionary. His biography reads like a novel, and his influence is almost beyond measure. I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast, and every month I delve into the turbulent life and times of one of the greatest characters in history, and explore the world that shaped him in all its glory and tragedy. It's a story of great battles and campaigns, political intrigue, and massive social and In that same proclamation, Hongwu made sure to point out with evident satisfaction that, quote, the corrupt granary clerks who had made this embezzlement possible had been subjected to brutal tortures, end quote, and in a later pronouncement spelled it out further, that in order to secure their confessions, they'd undergone, quote, such punishments as severing fingers,

cutting off feet, shaving the head, and tattooing. He also admitted that countless numbers of people had been killed, end quote. As a brief aside, I realize that that list of punishments might sound a bit like arson, murder, and jaywalking, what with that head shaving bit being included, so let me explain that briefly. Within the Confucian tradition and belief structure, the body itself was a sacred gift from one's parents, and thereby their ancestors, and it was therefore considered sacrosanct. To alter or cut it, even the hair or the nails, was considered tantamount to disrespecting your parents, which is a big no-no in Confucianism. This is also why so many Chinese punishments across time have centered on the mutilation and disfigurement of the body, both pre- and post-mortem,

i.e. using tattooing as a punishment. By desecrating the offender's body, they would then have to carry that shame with them not only for the rest of their usually very short lives, but into the afterlife as well. It's not so much that they would arrive in spirit form looking like they did in death or anything, it's no death becomes her or Beetlejuice sort of situation. But rather that they would arrive at the gates of the next world with their family and ancestors gathered all glumly around, shaking their heads in disappointment, and telling them that, you know, this is why you can't have nice things. Now I'm sure that I could spend the next half hour or more talking about even more of the various mass slaughters and executions meted out by the Hongwu emperor upon his ministers and citizens. But even I have to admit that after a little while, it does

just all start blending together into a single monotonous river of blood and screaming. Suffice it to say that it doesn't really ever get better. Hongwu's famous three dagao, or grand pronouncements, essentially say as much. Quote, in these, the emperor made it clear that while he cared deeply for his people and wanted to rule with benevolence, he would resort to the most brutal tactics to bring an end to practices detrimental to the welfare and security of his empire. End quote. I don't want to beat you with this chain, oh beloved. Why must you continue to force me to do so? I'm sure you'll all agree that this is really all your fault. In any event, though there's really no avoiding further discussion of these brutal acts and purges, I'll attempt to limit myself to just the particularly important,

noteworthy, and interesting examples. That way, the rest of this episode won't become just me reading off some endless list of the dead. Hongwu's grand pronouncements were rolled out over late 1385 and into 1386 in three major sections. All three had a similar overall structure and feel. First, the emperor would rather broadly describe a new policy or set of policies, which he intended to correct a perceived problem or immoral set of practices. He'd further describe that immoral practice in the second part of the document, and in the third part, well, that was what made everyone gulp every time one of these things was promulgated. Because that's where Hongwu would invariably start individually naming

and shaming the people who were guilty of the crimes and misdeeds that he was now correcting. His second pronouncement, for instance, focused on corruption among the empire's security forces, and then went on specifically to point a finger at the police force in Jading County, Jiangsu, for quote, inventing 18 types of irregular exactions against the local populace. Certainly, as a result of the Brocade Guard's intelligence work, Hongwu laid out with almost preternatural detail all of the instances in which the Jiaming County police had been shaking down the people they were supposed to be protecting and serving. Quote, he noted that countless local policemen had refused to permit village elders to take guilty clerks to the capital for trials. He ordered one such policeman beheaded and had his head exposed in the marketplace, while the clerk in question had his foot amputated, end quote. Funnily enough, in this same proclamation, Honglu seems to have had something like a moment of clarity, in which he realized that simply imposing harsher and more punishments

was not achieving his goal of creating less crime. The more severe my government, he wrote, the more numerous in violations. And he continued on that, if I am lenient, people say I am muddled-headed. The law ruined, and discipline lax. If I am harsh, the people call me a tyrant. Even so, this little lightbulb moment seems to have done little to curb the viciousness of the Hongwu government in the long or even short term. This we can see oodles of evidence for in the emperor's third great proclamation. This one, to the great chagrin of just about every official and degree holder in the capital and across the empire, turned the golden dragon's eyes squarely

upon them and their failings once more. Quote, the third proclamation contained a list of bad metropolitan degree holders and national university students, Jian Sheng. He prescribed a death penalty for 68 metropolitan degree holders and 53 students, exile for 5 degree holders and 2 students, penal servitude for 70 degree holders and 12 students, end quote. Oh, but it gets even better. Seemingly aware of the absolute chilling effect that such a stark example would likely have on degree holders and students accepting imperial appointments in the future, Hongwu went on to attach a little addendum.

Quote, To the edges of the land, all are the king's subjects. Literati in the realm who do not serve the ruler are estranged from the teachings of Confucius. To execute them and confiscate the property of their families is not excessive. End quote. In other words, if called upon, imperial service was quite literally an offer that they could not refuse. Oh yeah, and the other thing, Honglu made sure to include that as a matter of state security and all that jazz, he reserved the right to employ, quote, brutal punishment that were not authorized by the legal code, end quote, against those who might violate this commandment. So

they've got that to look forward to, which is nice. Lengua points out one story in particular here, told by the emperor in vivid detail. He explains that it, quote, concerns a seller of poison who had been brought in by the imperial bodyguard. The emperor ordered him to the antidote, and after hearing details of its preparation, duly had it prepared. He waited until the seller was in deep agony before administering the antidote. End quote. The seller, wracked in agony and of course exhausted by this ordeal, was then dragged off to his cell for the night so that he could recover from the poison's effects.

The next morning, upon learning that the vendor had indeed made a full recovery, Hongwu had him beheaded and his head mounted on a pole in a public square. That was just how he rolled. How far the Hongwu Emperor's great proclamations were actually circulated, and how widely they were read and made known, is, as usual, pretty difficult to directly ascertain. Would it only have been the capital itself and the major cities where such rulings were made known, or would they have been circulated even among the small folk of the countrysides? Lengua posits it may well have been the latter case, a very wide circulation indeed,

pointing out a poem from the period written by the recluse scholar Xie Yingfang, entitled Du Da Gao Xiang Ge, or Village Song About Reading the Grand Pronouncements. It goes, The sun of heaven's words are earnest, sure in guiding men's fortunes. Winds swirl, thunder is frightening, the spirits are startled to listen.

Hanging the text on the ox's horns, reading it at the field's edge, how delightful that the farmer can also read such simple writing. In spite of the seemingly suicidal nature of speaking out against Hongwu's imperial policies, or even appearing to so much as possibly be disloyal to the throne, almost unbelievably critics continued to come forward to say their peace and petition for justice and reform. Perhaps the youngest and certainly the most eloquent of all stepped forward into the great dragon's jaws in the year 1388. He was Xie Jin, a man of only 20 years, who had just received his metropolitan degree that very year. Intrigued by the renown Scholar Xie was receiving from the literary and ministerial

circles, in spite of his youth and professional inexperience, the Honglu Emperor invited the precocious and outspoken youth to the imperial court in order to present his views directly to the throne. Xie Jin, not one to waste such an opportunity, and either ignorant of the possible consequences, which we will soon see is definitely not the case, or convinced that he was effectively invincible, like pretty much every 20-year-old ever, duly appeared and proceeded to deliver a cutting attack on the emperor's style of ruling. He began by acknowledging the vast and undeniable achievements that the emperor had made in unifying the shattered realm, restoring its economy,

and purging the wasteful and decadent practices of both the foreign Mongol regime and the even more ancient Song. Then, however, Xie Jin turned his address to the Ming judicial system, and things got real, real quick. In particular, he focused on the capricious and constant changes that Hongwu inflicted on his own legal code. Quote, When commands are frequently changed, the people harbor doubts. Doubting, they lose trust in the ruler. When punishments are too numerous, the people grow cynical about the laws. Cynical, they are no longer incorrupt. From the beginning of the dynasty until now, some twenty years have elapsed. Never has there been a moment when the laws were not in flux, and never has there been a day on which the people did not

make errors. I have heard your majesty has grown angry and pulled out roots, cut tendrils, and executed evil traitors. I have never heard of an edict praising a single great person. Some people in the morning are esteemed by the throne, and by the evening they are executed. One moment some people are sentenced, and in the next forgiven. End quote. One has to imagine that by this point, whatever activity might have been going on in the throne room while Xie Jin had begun his address had ground to a dead stop.

Everyone, absolutely everyone had stopped dead in their tracks, and every eye is now locked on this boy, swatting the emperor on the nose with a rolled up newspaper, and waiting, just waiting for Hongwu's inevitable explosion. Yet the Emperor hasn't cut Xie off yet. He too just sits there unmoving, and Xie boldly presses on, apparently just not caring about the mortal danger he's in. Next he says what everyone's been thinking, that no one's spoken up until now about such misrule for the very simple and obvious reason. Because if they did that, they would be risking the emperor's wrath against not just themselves, but their entire family. Quote, Everyone wants peace and honor for his parents.

Remonstrating the throne is hard, however, and brings unfathomable calamities to one. If an official increases the sentences of a criminal, some may say he's being impartial, but if a sentence is reduced, they invariably suspect bribery. Praising one's superiors is easy and brings honors, but reversing their errors is often difficult and brings disasters. And these disasters reach not merely to one's self, for punishments always extend to one's relatives and friends. Who is willing to abandon his parents, throw away his children, in order to pick the dragon's scales and incur the wrath of heaven? To which Xie Jin's parents, had they been there, might have replied, only someone really stupid, Xie, or someone who really, really hates us.

Xie Jin concluded his dressing down of the Hongwu Emperor by calling on the sovereign to reform his rule on many points, halt the use of intimidating extra-legal punishments, and to abolish the policy of collective responsibility, or lianzuo, aka the clan extermination policies. And then, with his first and quite possibly last official audience before the emperor concluded, Xie Jin must have exhaled and, along with everyone else, waited for the deadly volcanic eruption that was sure to be forthcoming from the throne. But it never came. Maybe it was owing to the boy's sheer youth,

or perhaps because Hongwu saw a fair degree of truth in what had just been said to him. But the ever-mercurial emperor simply let him go. Xie Jin even went to go on in his career and eventually serve as an important and high-ranking official in the reign era of the Yongle Emperor. For the time being, though, Xie Jin escaping the wrath of the emperor was about the best outcome he could possibly have hoped for, not that the emperor might actually have taken him up on said advice. Honglu seems to have simply ignored the remonstration and kept on keeping on, but it is notable that from 1388 onward, there was a noticeable down tick in the harshness and amount of extrajudicial punishments across the Ming Empire.

Where we'll finish off today, though, is with yet another pair of military campaigns aimed at further stabilizing the outlying regions of the realm, and bringing old enemies more firmly to heel. As early as 1385, a final push against the leadership of the Mongol remnant in Northern Yuan was being prepared and planned, against the forces under the command of one of the failing regime's last notable commanders, Nagachu, who hailed from the Liao River region in Manchuria to the far northeast. Yet before that could be launched, another emergent crisis erupted. This one, again, to the far south in the jungles and mountains of Yunnan and Burma. Yep, that's right, we're back to Yunnan, all in one episode!

Though they'd just been suppressed and pacified some five years prior, now the native chieftain of the Shan nation in the Burmese state of Ava, Si Lun Fa, stirred his people to insurrection against the Chinese domination once more. Ming general Feng Sheng was therefore dispatched with 100,000 men to put the rebellion down as of January 1386. As that was taking place though, the Lolo people once again rose up, necessitating Generals Muying and Fuyu De to personally oversee its re-suppression in the Dongchuan region of western Yunnan. It took the better part of that year to re-pacify the native uprisings in the south, and as such, it was only as of December 1386 that Hongwu actually felt it to be in a

stable enough position to commence with his operations against the Mongols to the far north. When Fengsheng, Fuyu Da, and Muying had mopped up Yunnan, they were sent the following January on that long-planned northern expedition at the head of a force of 200,000. They first stopped just east of Beiping, at a place called Dongzhou. From there, Feng dispatched Lan Yu and a cavalry unit to launch a surprise attack on a Mongol force camped at Qingzhou, near Linxi in modern Liaoning. Lan Yu executed this maneuver in the snow, capturing the Mongol governor and many horses and prisoners. Next, the main Ming force pressed further north, past the northern border walls

and to the walled and fortified city of Daning Liaoning, as well as its nearby outlying settlements. Once Daning had been taken, Feng left a detachment of 50,000 as a garrison there, and by the following July had pressed all the way to Jinshan, the Golden Mountain, where intelligence had reported that the Mongol general, Nagachu, was encamped. Once his own force was positioned and dug in, Feng Sheng dispatched riders to Nagachu, was encamped. Once his own force was positioned and dug in, Fengsheng dispatched riders to Nagachu's camp, including someone the Mongol general almost certainly did not expect. Along with the Ming emissaries rode Nagachu's former lieutenant and friend,

Naiyao, who had been taken prisoner and held as a guest of the Hongwu Emperor for nearly a decade now. Not in some dungeon, mind you, but actually living a pretty darn good life. He'd been given a minor position in the Ming army, along with a stipend and wage, a Chinese wife and a concubine to boot, a residence and even a field of his own. Now he was at long last returned to the Mongol commander, bearing a letter from General Feng urging Nagachu to surrender his forces and accept Ming's his arity. Nairao's diplomacy, which I choose to think of as mainly

him telling about the last decade he'd had with his house and women and cash in the south and how all that and more could be his too, quote, led Nagachu to surrender to General Lan Yu in October 1387. Naga Chu and 6,500 of his officers and relatives were sent to Nanjing. Naga Chu himself was granted a marquisate and a stipend of 2,000 peacles of grain, an estate of public fields in Jiangxi, and a mansion in Nanjing. He died near Wuchong on 31 August 1388, probably from overindulgence in alcohol, and was buried outside Nanjing. End quote. It was a truly Mongol exit. As for General Feng Sheng, he had led

yet another glorious and successful campaign against the foes of the realm, and surely was expecting a great reward of his own. But this is the Hongwu Emperor we're talking about here, so of course there's a twist. He was soon after his victory summoned to the capital and cashiered completely out of the military by the emperor, who stripped him of his titles, seals of authority, and even his estate in Henan. He was thereafter shunted off to Fenyang City for a comfortable, safe, but utterly inconsequential mandatory retirement. As for why, there's a fair bit of room for speculation. There's a fair bit of room for speculation. Some suspect that Hongwu may have seen the rising military star of Feng Sheng and begun to fear that he might become a rival power to his own authority. Another possibility, though,

is that Hongwu had been receiving reports from the front informing him of Feng's disorderly behavior and arrogance. Yet another possibility was that Feng's sister was the wife of one of Hongwu's sons, the Prince of Zhou. Quote, Thus, the real reason for cas prince for making a secret visit to Fengsheng at Fengyang. Thus, the real reason for cashing Fengsheng may have been the emperor's suspicions of a dangerous military alliance between the prince and the general. The other generals of the southern and northern campaigns were treated far better upon their return. Lan Yu would remain on active duty, becoming the ranking general of the north, and in 1388 leading a force of 150,000 across the Gobi in an effort to capture the Mongol Khan,

Pogus Temur, and his command staff. Though the Khan and his eldest son were able to make good their escape, the Ming force did manage to capture a younger son of the Mongol lord, along with 100 other members of the Yuan royal family, some 3,000 other princes and their subordinates, 77,000 additional men and women, several of the Northern Yuan official seals of office, and 150,000 head of cattle. Following this great, if incomplete, victory, Lan Yu returned to Nanjing on September 25, 1388. The next day, he presented himself before the emperor to receive his due honors. But this was the Hongwu emperor we're talking about here, so of course there's a twist.

But the praise he received was tempered by reprimand. The emperor had heard that Lanyu had taken some former Yuan princesses and palace women for his own concubines. Togus Temur's captured son, Dibaonu, had in fact registered a complaint to this effect. One such woman later hanged herself, presumably in observance of the Mongol custom whereby a ruler's wife would commit suicide upon the death of the ruler. I should note here that though Togas Temur had escaped Lanyu's clutches at Lake Buyur, he met his demise just half a year later, in November 1388, when he was betrayed and murdered by his own kinsmen. It was a truly Mongol exit. Anyways, back to Lan Yu, he wasn't demoted or fired or anything like that. Though Hongwu was angry enough at his presumptuousness in taking

imperial women for his own that he delayed his promotion to the rank of Duke for several months, until January 1389. Nevertheless, when the ceremony arrived at last, it was a truly lavish affair, with heaps of imperial gifts and honors bestowed on the victorious new Duke and several of his subordinates in a formal banquet at the heart of the Forbidden City, Fengtian Hall. And oh, what a feast it must have been. That is where we'll leave off today. Next time, we'll be getting into the final decade of the Emperor's reign, the 1390s, wherein the Princes of the Blood, having finally grown up and spread their wings, will begin to more fully exert their own powerful influences across the Ming Empire,

even as the sun begins to set on dear old dad. Princey influences that will be used both for the better, and for the much, much worse. Thanks for listening. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history. When a war was fought to save the Union and to free the slaves. And when the work to rebuild the nation after that war was over turned into a struggle to guarantee liberty and justice for all Americans.

I'm Tracy. And I'm Rich. And we want to invite you to join us as we take an in-depth look at this pivotal era in American history. Look for The Civil War and Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts.