The History of China - #229 - Ming 18: The Raven Himself Is Hoarse

Episode Date: January 5, 2022

After a very rocky start in life, the Chenghua Emperor takes the throne, only to be endlessly shoved around by overbearing mother, manipulative and murderous consorts, and conniving, terrorizing eunuchs. What else would one really expect for a guy with the personality of a west dishrag? Time Period Covered: 1464-1487 CE Major Historical Figures: The Chenghua Emperor (Zhu Jianshen) [r. 1464-1487] The Hongzhi Emperor (Zhu Youcheng) [1470-1505] Noble Consort Wan Zheng'er [1430-1487] Empress Wang Empress Wu Empress Dowager Zhou Empress Dowager Qian Grand Secretary Li Xian Lady Zhi Tangmei Eunuch Zhang Min Spymaster Wang Zhi Notable Works Cited: Mote, Frederick W. “The Ch’eng-hua and Hung-chih Reigns, 1465-1505” in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 7: The Ming Dynasty, Part I. Li Shizhen. Bencao Ganmu (The Compendium of Materia Medica) Tsai, Shi-shan Henry. The Eunuchs of the Ming Dynasty. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 229, The Raven Himself is Horse. We begin today with the formal enthronement of the Crown Prince Zhu Jianshen as the 8th emperor of Great Ming, or 9th by some counts, on February 28th, 1464, five days after the death of his father, the restored Emperor Yingzong. He took power just two months after his 16th birthday, and would proclaim the official beginning of his reign era, the Chenghua, or Accomplished Transformation, upon the following Lunar New Year's Day, February 5th, 1465, just after he turned 17. It would be three years after that, in 1468, that the Great Ming would mark a full century of it having come to power over both southern and northern China, after having driven the listless Bojigin Khan emperors from their bases

of power in the North China Plains and sent them scattering back across the Gobi to Mongolia. Having thus reached the centennial mark of power, we can pretty safely say that the Great Ming isn't a spring chicken anymore, even if its emperors will strongly tend to remain that way. The reign of the Chenghua Emperor, and yes, for consistency's sake, we're back to naming our emperors after their reign periods for the rest of the dynasty, given that our one and only divided reign of Yingzong is now over. So no, we're not going to call Zhu Jianshen by the temple name Xianzong. I mean, we could, and there are plenty of sources that do, but I'm not because I've got too many Xianzongs floating around in my head already. Anyways, the Chenghua era is as good a place as any to officially say that Great Ming has entered its midlife. This is definitely not to say that we're anywhere close to Late Ming yet. Far from it. But this is the period where we start to see less freewheeling antics of the young, up-and-coming, anything-goes

regime, and more of a settlement into a crystallized structure. A few lines on the forehead, the first little crow's feet around the eyes, and maybe a couple of gray hairs that were still too private to let remain and so tweeze them out. The Chenghua Emperor will sit the throne for 23 years before dying on September 9th, 1487, three months shy of his 40th birthday. He would be succeeded by his own eldest son, the also 17-year-old Crown Prince Zhu Yutang, who will reign for 18 years as the Hongde Emperor before himself dying on June 1505, just a month shy of his 35th birthday. How and why did this father-son duo die so young?

Well, it was neither battle nor any apparent malfeasance, nor even an accident that's recorded. Instead, we're left with the utterly unsatisfying non-explanation that it was random and sudden illness that felled them, certainly an all-too common reality in the 15th century. Rather more compelling, though, is the also quite plausible speculation that these boys liked to play around with their alchemy sets and, like so many members of imperial households of old, sought to answer the question of mortality with longevity elixirs, to strongly toxic effect.

If cinnabar and other such heavy metal elixirs were the culprit, however, that would fly rather directly in the face of prevalent attitudes regarding such concoctions at the time. Markedly unlike the Song, Tang, Han, or Qin eras, and likely having learned from the historical outcomes of those sovereigns' fatal failures, the Ming strongly condemned the use of longevity elixirs or the use of alchemy in any such fashion. We can really only confirm that one Ming monarch killed himself as such, the Jiajing Emperor, who hasn't even entered our story yet. In fact, it's only a century from now, 1578, that Li Shizhen will publish his seminal work on Chinese medicine and pharmacology, the Banzhao Ganmu, or Compendium of Materia Medica, on which I had a whole episode last year. Li Shizhen pulled no punches in his

condemnation of immortality elixirs and the ingestion of toxic compounds, writing, quote, The alchemists will never realize that the human body thrives on water and cereals, and is unable to sustain such heavy substances as gold and other minerals within the stomach and intestines for any length of time. How blind it is, in the pursuit of longevity, to lose one's life instead. I am not able to tell the number of people who since the sixth dynasty's period, the third to sixth century, so coveted life that they took mercury, but all that happened was they both impaired their health permanently or lost their lives. I need not bother to mention the alchemists, but I cannot bear to see these false statements made in Pharmacopoeus. However, while mercury is not to be taken orally,

its use as a medicine must not be ignored. End quote. Regardless of whether or not alchemical elixirs specifically played a role in the premature deaths of the Changhua and Hongzhe emperors, it cannot be denied that such outcomes irrevocably changed the dynamic of the Ming court, and the relationship between the monarch and his chief ministers. During the early Ming, the emperors such as Hongwu, Yongle, and, sure, even Yingzong, had held a place of absolute command and deferent obedience from their ministerial staff. Not even the center point of the constellation, so much as they were the only shining body in the entire sky. But now, the throne would be held by what Frederick W. Mote puts as, quote,

feckless young men whose brief lives tended to be dominated by their consorts, their mothers and grandmothers, and their eunuch servants, end quote. This inner court tended to be likewise young bloods of similar ages to the Ming emperors themselves, mothers and grandmothers aside, of course. Meanwhile, the outer court came to be largely controlled by scholar officials from the generation of the previous reigns, gray-bearded men of serious comportment and bureaucratic expertise who had worked their way up the ladder of power through a lifetime of often tenuous and dangerous power-mongering behind the scenes. They were often of an age to be the sitting monarch's father or even grandfather, and it showed in their interactions. As so often happens when such generational rifts develop, what had once been a relationship of, if not peers, then at least generational cohorts between monarch and servants, who understood the thoughts and time frame of the others, became increasingly characterized by distance and mistrust. Who do these creaking old corpses think they are to tell me what I should do?

Who is this pampered, know-nothing child to ignore our hard-earned wisdom? So let's get to Chenghua, shall we? Who is this pampered, know-nothing child to ignore our hard-earned wisdom? So, let's get to Chenghua, shall we? In his earliest childhood, Zhu Jianshen suffered several painful experiences that undoubtedly left an indelible mark on his developing psyche and worldview. Just two years old, when in 1449, the Tumu Crisis ended with the capture of his father by the Oirat Mongols outside of Beijing, the subsequent accession of his uncle as the Jingtai Emperor, as the Jingtai Emperor for the subsequent eight years, were not easy on the boy either. Stripped of his status as heir in favor of Jingtai's own son in

1452, the five-year-old Jianshun was forced to live in a heavily guarded section of the imperial city with the deposed empress of Yingzong, who was not even his own mother. There, he suffered both conditions of physical hardship and general neglect, until 14 not even his own mother. There, he suffered both conditions of physical hardship and general neglect, until 1457, when his father's allies successfully restored him to the throne and eliminated Jingtai and his heir altogether. Though restored as well to his position as heir apparent, the nine-year-old nevertheless lived in a world surrounded by, quote, a court where lingering jealousy and feelings of revenge had been engendered by the conflicts between his father's supporters and those who had saved the dynasty in the crisis of 1449 by supporting his uncle as emperor.

As the crown prince entered his adolescence, he's written of as being a stocky, broad-faced, and rather slow-witted boy, and one with a serious stutter. His father, troubled by this, is said to have seriously reconsidered Jianshan as the imperial heir, given the rather bolded question mark hanging over the boy's intelligence and capacity to rule, but was convinced by his grand secretaries in the end that it would be better to keep him on. The dynasty had already suffered through not one, not two, but three imperial turnovers slash overthrows, and yet another reshuffling of the cards that would interfere with the legitimate agnatic succession would undermine further confidence in the regime overall. So it was that he would remain the crown prince unto his father's death in early 1464. In terms of his own personality, it's something of a mixed bag. One might think that having grown

up with such unfairness and deprivation surrounding him, he might have grown into a vengeance-minded young adult who thought to settle old scores against those who had wronged his family. On this count, however, little could be further from the truth. From Mote, quote, And that was great, for what it was worth. Unfortunately, there was more, To a certain extent, he valued the forthright and able statesman in his court, end quote. And that was great, for what it was worth. Unfortunately, there was more, or perhaps less, to him, continuing the quote. Yet he also employed untrustworthy servitors almost indiscriminately, and was often indecisive about policy judgments, and capricious in favoring and abandoning both good and bad courtiers. Above all, he was unwilling to impose a strong hand on the affairs of his consorts, their families, and the baser eunuchs, sycophants, and adventurers who grasped power through them. One cannot say they ever gained control over him, yet neither did he exert himself to hold a tight rein on them."

We might, therefore, characterize Changhua as little more than a wet dishrag. But there's at least one exception, one element of his life that he seemed to not only just accept, but enthusiastically shared the predilections of his hangers-on, and that was greed. Thanks in large part to his father's giant building projects, not to mention his disastrously foolhardy and ruinously expensive military campaigns, the House of Zhu was by Chenghua's reign somewhat cash-strapped, and Chenghua wanted very much to be not that. To that end, therefore, he began a widespread campaign of land confiscations in order to establish vast imperial

estates from which he could draw usurious rents directly into his personal piggy bank. At one point, a censor got enough gumption to actually rebuke him for such a lowly practice, saying, quote, all within the four seas is already your majesty's domain. Why should you compete for profits with your common people? End quote. Yet true to his dishrag nature, Cheng Hua simply ignored the critic, and the practice continued to grow. To throw how this must have looked at the time into more modern terms, it'd be something like the president of one of the most powerful countries on earth continuing to own and operate hotel chains and other properties and to radically overcharge for

them. It's not a great look. Mote writes, quote, Hangers on at the court took their cues from the avarice of the ruler and wheedled grants of tax-exempt imperial or imperially conferred estates. One of the most festering problems of the Ming government was launched by this mediocre imperial talent without consulting his government's experts on fiscal management or involving the relevant ministries and bureaus. That the all-powerful celestial ruler encouraged the degradation of his own officialdom in order to share in improper profits is one of the revealing anomalies of the Ming government." But let's now get to what must be absolutely the most insane aspect of Cheng Hua's life, the women he was surrounded by and surrounded himself with.

In particular, his mother and his favorite consort. And get ready, because if you thought this was going to be dull politics all around, we're about to take a sharp left turn into utter crazy town. His mother, Lady Zhou, was not his father's empress, but instead a consort of the second rank. Yet the fact that it was she who had produced the imperial heir infused in her a superiority complex that she would insist upon for the remainder of her life. Moat refers to her, accurately, as a pugnacious shrew. When Cheng Hua acceded to the throne, Lady Zhou loudly and repeatedly insisted that she be given the rank of Empress Dowager,

equal to that of the actual Empress Qian. What resulted was a bitter feud between the two widows, with meek, weak-willed Cheng Hua caught squarely in the middle. In the end, he decided to punt on the decision, kicking it over to his Grand Secretary, Li Xian. Li managed to cobble together a strange compromise in which, yes, Zhou would receive the rank of Empress Dowager like Qian, but Qian would technically still rank above her.

All parties formally agreed to this compromise, and yet scarcely was the ink even dry on the Imperial seal than pretty much all parties involved, but especially Empress Dowager Zhou, casually ignored such trivial details and insisted on her own supremacy, constantly pressing for further advantage within the inner court. as we'll come to see, it turns out that, at least in certain circumstances, having a mother who is incredibly overweening and willing to beat up anyone who goes against her interests can come in handy sometimes. But that's not even the craziest relationship Cheng Hua had. It's not particularly notable that, at the time of his accession, the 16-year-old already had a favored consort, the lady Wan Zhen'er. He was considered a grown man, after all, and an imperial prince beside. It was only fitting that he take female companionship. What was rather more eyebrow-raising was the age differential between the couple. Lady Wan was more than twice the new emperor's age at 35, and had entered the imperial service as a maid of Cheng Hua's grandmother,

and was then given to the toddler-era parent as his nursemaid. Their relationship ultimately tilted toward the sexual, in a way that would make even Chris Hansen blush and go speechless. And as it turned out, that thing that all ministerial scolds were worried about was exactly right. She dominated him, manipulated members of his household and inner court, and exercised a willful and unprincipled influence on the government. End quote. Yet it would turn out that the 17-year age differential was only the tip of the iceberg. Two years into Chenghua's reign, in 1466, Lady Wan bore her charge-turned-husband a

son of his own, for which she was elevated to the status of guifei, or senior consort, though notably not empress. Yet within a year, the child had died, and she never became pregnant again. Sad, certainly, but common enough. Where things took a turn for the really weird was that she would spend the rest of her life hovering over the Chonghua emperor like a vulture, keeping watch over the other palace ladies and endeavoring with all her might and to near complete success to ensure that all other pregnancies would terminate in abortions

forced by her eunuch agents, or, failing that, that neither male offspring nor their mothers would survive. She apparently decided that if she wasn't going to be the mother of the imperial heir, then no one would be. Upon his formal enthronement in 1464, Cheng Hua had taken a proper empress, a girl his own age, known as Wu. She had an, oh, let's go ahead and call it contentious relationship with Lady Wan from the get-go, and soon after her enthronement, attempted to establish her dominance over the much older consort by having her publicly flogged for a display of discourtesy by the lower ranked woman. I say attempted because within a month, Lady Wan had her revenge, getting Wu

deposed as empress and relegated for the rest of her life to, quote, a remote back courtyard of the imperial city until her death 45 years later, end quote. Tenghua's next empress, Lady Wang, was installed the following year, and was properly cowed by Wang's display of absolute power over the inner court and the emperor. She would have no children at all, and ensured her own survival by deferring to Lady Wang in all matters. History isn't black and white, yet too often it's presented as such. Grey History, The French Revolution is a long-form history podcast dedicated to exploring the ambiguities and nuances of the past.

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deeply concerned about the emperor's failure to produce an heir. In a scenario I have difficulty envisioning today, even respected elder statesmen became profoundly and publicly worried about the sovereign's sex life, so much so that they would urge him in state-level memorials to the throne to set aside Lady Wan and, you know, make some babies with women more his own age. Publicly, Cheng Hua was resolute, responding to such exhortations that the ministers of state should leave personal matters to me. And then, inevitably,

Lady Wan would herself find some means of embarrassing or demeaning the officiant who had dared to try to pry her claws off the emperor. But though he would publicly shush his concerned advisors, privately his lack of issue weighed heavily on the emperor's mind. At one point in 1475, while having his hair brushed by one of his eunuch servants, the then 28-year-old Tsanghua looked into his mirror and noted sadly that he was growing old, and yet still had no son. And before you get too up in arms at him saying that he's old at 28, remember that he is going to die at 39, so he's technically right, he's almost three quarters of the way through his life. Anyways, one of his hairbrusher attendants paused and then knelt down beside the emperor and whispered to him, but your majesty does have a son.

What now? I have a son? Where? How? The eunuch, named Zhang Min, revealed that he had sired a child with one of his consorts, the young Lady Zhitang Mei. The lady, then about 24, was, quote, a young aborigine, presumably of the Yao nation, who had been submitted to the palace by a eunuch with the forces that campaigned in Guangxi against the Yao in 1467, end quote. That is to say, she'd been taken as a captive of war from the southern border tribes, known variously as the Yao and Mian, across Guangxi, Yunnan, and northern Vietnam. As a slave servant, she'd been assigned to the palace storehouses. After about two years working there, she was encountered, by chance, by none other than Chang Hua,

who took a liking to the girl after she had answered a question of his in a charming manner. Mote writes, quote, Imperial ignorance of the pregnancy, however, was not nearly enough, because the eyes and ears of Lady Wan were everywhere across the palace, and she quickly came to know of the royal dalliance and its growing product. The infanticidal maniac therefore sent one of her eunuch servants, the very same Zhang Min, he claimed, as was now relaying this story to Cheng Hua's ears, to secretly administer an abortifacient potion to the girl and take care of this threat to Lady Wan's place and position. Instead, the eunuch took pity on both the girl and the emperor, whom he knew greatly desired an heir, and hid Lady Zhe for the duration of her pregnancy and delivery.

Even then, however, the danger was not over, for if Lady Wan learned of the infant, a boy at that, then she would surely have him, and everyone associated with him, killed. It was at this point that the deposed empress, Wu, in her back alley hovel, learned of the situation and decided at long last to settle the score between her and the psychopath Wan. Thus, she offered to shelter and conceal Lady Zi and her infant son in her remote quarters, ensuring the boy's survival till now, at age five. Cheng Hua was, as you might imagine, bursting with joy at this sudden revelation that he had a son. He immediately proceeded to Lady Wu's quarters and found all three therein. He placed his son, named Zhu Youcheng, on his knee and emotionally acknowledged him as his heir. Thereafter, he notified the court at once to the great joy and celebration of the entire imperial city.

All, that is, except one. The boy was placed into the protective custody of Cheng Hua's mother, the ever-protective Empress Dowager Zhou, in which her compound he remained safe from Lady Wan's omnicidal machinations. Unfortunately, the boy's mother, Lady Zhi, would not prove so fortunate. Within a month of the revelation of the imperial heir, Wan had one of her agents poison the young woman to death. The Chenghua Emperor's reaction to this whole affair, and especially the revelation that his mommy wife, Lady Wan, was pretty much dead set on murdering anyone who might disrupt her primacy within the imperial household, is just bizarre. On the one hand, yes, he did finally distance himself from her. He no longer

regularly stayed in her quarters, and would go on in the remaining 11 years of his life to father 17 other children with his various consorts. He also recognized that he really, really needed to take precaution against Wan's, uh, proclivity to outright murder his kids whenever she could. To his heir, Crown Prince Yeo-cheung, he would explicitly warn the boy that should he ever visit Lady Wan's quarters or be in her presence, that he should absolutely refuse all food and drinks she might offer him. This is seriously like something lifted out of the original version of Grimm's Fairy Tale or something. It's just beyond comprehension. And yet for all that, on the other hand, he never once raised a hand against her,

or did anything to stop her, and what's more, remained totally devoted to her. I mean, back to that whole remember to not eat any of Auntie Wan's cookies bit, why are you allowing your son to go over to Auntie Wan's house in the first place? Indeed, rather than punishing her, Cheng Hua still made it a habit of punishing and demoting officials who raised complaints against her improper dealings, influence peddling, embezzlement, and extravagant expenditures, giving her clear signals to continue those activities. I know you're a monster, my dear, but you're my monster. In fact, if anything, her losing the absolute stranglehold she'd once held on his private life seems to have been made

up for by allowing her even greater leeway to influence public and financial dealings and misdealings for the subsequent 11 years of both of their lives. It is to Chung-Hwa's reign, Moe asserts, in fact, that one of the great failings of later Ming can be traced, namely the, quote, direct appointment of persons to office by imperial edict issued from within the palace rather than by the usual procedures of nomination and approval through the ministry of personnel, end quote. That does warrant an explanation. It all began rather harmlessly, right at the beginning of his reign. The young emperor began allowing his trusted eunuch advisors to directly draw up

edicts of appointment for a particular artisan, one who apparently caught the fancy of his prime consort, Lady Wan. Though in itself insignificant, it would go on to set a malignant precedent within the Ming imperial court for, quote, thousands of subsequent appointments eventually made in the same way, mostly to artisans, military men, Buddhist and Taoist clergy, and assorted hangers-on who performed services for the imperial household. It became a pernicious abuse of appointment power in that and several subsequent reigns, end quote. Court eunuchs who held the emperor's trust, but were themselves quite untrustworthy,

could and would access and utilize the imperial seal to draft appointments in the emperor's name of their own choosing and utterly without the sovereign's knowledge. They could also accept bribes for including a person's name in such an edict in what amounted to the virtual sale of offices, ranks, and privileges. Utterly shocking. We have surely never seen anything of its ilk in the modern age. Just about the only thing that constrained the Changhua court from devolving into one of the most corrupt in Ming history was, ironically enough, the emperor himself, or rather, his seeming inability to really ever get really firmly behind any action enough to truly follow through to completion. The 16th century historian of the period, Zheng Xiao, wrote of Chenghua in the typical stylings of the period that he was

characteristically magnanimous and reasonable, perceptive and understanding, and that, quote, in supervising the government as in relations with the people, he was neither hard nor yielding. He could now be tense, now relaxed. He was not precipitate in advancing the worthy, but he gave them his full confidence. He was not fervent about distancing himself from evil, but he had his own means of exercising control." So let's just keep in mind a rather key detail here. This Zheng Xiao is a servant of the Ming imperial court writing this, and as such he's not just free to write whatever he wants to or believes willy-nilly. His work is specifically supposed to laud and uphold the virtues of the rulers of the current dynasty

and very, very much soft-pedal any criticisms. Those, it had long been understood, would be left to whatever dynasty might eventually follow. Yet apparently this was the best he could manage? That Cheng Hua was ambivalent to and well past a fault about both the worthy and the evil among his retinue? The best thing you can say about the guy, and I repeat myself now with historical backing, was that he was a human wet dishrag.

Among Cheng Hua's unmanaged servants, the person who must surely be the most notorious and feared in his day is Wang Zhi. Like many of his Ilkhan caste, in his youth as a Yao tribesman of the southern wilds, Wang Zhi was captured and inducted into the imperial eunuch program in the 1460s. After surviving the brutal procedure, he was eventually placed within, who else, Lady Wan's staff, where his career prospered under her patronage. Nevertheless, he was an outsider to the established hierarchy of the Directorate of Ceronies, which is, as you'll recall, the highest command structure for the palace eunuchs. Instead, Wang Zhou would become the head of the Chenghua era's, um, addition to the already despised and feared Ming intelligence agency called the Eastern Depot, or Dongchang.

The aptly named, and shortly thereafter even more hated and feared, Western Depot, or Xichang. Established on the new year of 1477, the Western Depot quickly made a name for itself as, ostensibly, a witch-hunting organization. But far more accurately, from Shishan Henry Tsai, quote, And yeah, we can pretty safely assume that mingled with means exactly what we all immediately assume it to mean. Paranoid that someone might be partying with his women, Cheng Hua devoted an abandoned lime factory to root out the cause of this after-hours canoodling. I mean, witchcraft.

And Wang Zhou was just the eunuch for the job. Tsai continues, As director of the Western Depot, Wang proved to be a monster, but also, in a twisted way, a genius. He practiced the worst aspects of terror during his tenure. From time to time, he would disguise himself as a civilian, and together with a dozen or so Imperial guards, who were also disguised, went out in search for suspects.

During his first five months in office, Wang had started several trails, apprehending the transvestite, breaking up a salt smuggling ring, and restoring calm to the palace, end quote. The deep terror for the agents of the Western Depot ran all across the capital, from top to bottom. Officials and commoners alike, it was said, hid as soon as they learned that their residential quarter had been targeted by the depot for fear that they might be swept into its dragnet. At one point, a eunuch performer and comedian quipped to the Chenghua emperor himself that the passage of Wangzhe through the streets of Beijing aroused more awe among the populace than the son of heaven himself. All at once, it grew deadly quiet in the throne room. How would the emperor take such a statement? As an insult?

As an indictment? As it turned out, Cheng Hua was pretty slow on the uptake of the meaning of the crack, and only after some time finally allowed everyone to exhale with a mild chuckle, apparently taking it as nothing more than an anodyne joke. It was no such thing. Indeed, there was a deep resentment and hatred of Wang Jie's terroristic power throughout the eunuch and official classes, as well as the commoners. As Wang Jie dug through every scrap of information, true as well as false, and investigating any person whose words or deeds he disliked, fear and trust also spread through the ranks of the elite preeners.

In spite of his notable efficacy at rooting out corruption, albeit undoubtedly with a terrifyingly high rate of collateral damage, high-ranking members of Changhua's court, quote, appalled by his high-handed tactics, end quote, began impeachment proceedings against the eunuch spymaster. Quote, among them was Grand Secretary Shang Lu, who time and again admonished the emperor to abolish the Western Depot altogether, end quote. His missives carried the tone of a man horrified and shocked at the truths he had uncovered about the nefarious doings of the intelligence organization, alleging, quite rightly, that in his ever-increasing arrogance and recklessness, the Western Depot hid behind the aegis of executing the Emperor's secret orders, even while it used that cover to torture

and kill scores of innocent civilians with impunity. Zhang's memorial went on to say, quote, That ever since Wang Jie took charge of the Western Depot, scholar officials felt uneasy in their posts, traders and merchants felt unsafe attending to their businesses, and even the common people could not devote all their efforts to their jobs. The memorial concluded that if Wang was not let go, no one could be sure if the world would be at peace or in peril, end quote. For his part, Cheng Hua was little more than mildly annoyed

at such, in his mind at least, histrionics. He's written to have responded, quote, I merely use a castrato. How would that endanger the world? End quote. Yet as the charges and complaints continued to amass against Wang Zhe's tactics and the fear they inspired across the whole of the capital, ultimately even one so languid as the Chenghua Emperor was forced to bend to the political winds. To reiterate, this had all happened in the span of just five months, but as of the summer of 1477, the Western Depot was forced to close its doors, allowing everyone to breathe a sigh of relief. One that, it would turn out, came far too soon, as very quickly, the Western Depot would be reopened as a refurbished and reformed institution,

with its new director being the Eunuch Wangzhe. Wait, what? This, as you might well imagine, caused Grand Secretary Shang to throw up his hands in defeat, and no doubt terror, as he must have understood that he was himself now firmly in the crosshairs of the re-empowered and now vastly expanded agency, and he requested an early retirement from public life. Wang Zhi would thereafter serve as the all-but-omnipowerful director of the agency from 1477 until early 1482. He was at that point reassigned as the head of the imperial stables in Nanjing, an unmistakable demotion and mark of his loss of favor in the emperor's eyes. This was followed after yet another round of political quibbling and indictments against him, with a further demotion to the rank of common eunuch without office, and the, again, temporary closure of the Western Depot

altogether. Yet in spite of the hatred and fear his very name had inspired for years, the now down-and-out Wang Jie managed to avoid any further reprisal or punishment for his actions, and in a truly unusual fate for spy chief with his degree of infamy, wound up dying of natural causes. I'm sure any number of his victims would have gladly traded places. The Zhenghua era trudged through that solacism of the 1470s and into the 1480s largely without major incident, because the ponderous machinery of the Mid-Ming government could, quote, absorb such heavy shocks, end quote, in stride, a real measure of its fundamental stability as a system. At last, on February 3rd,

1487, Lady Wan died of a sudden seizure at the age of 57. From Mote, quote, The emperor cancelled all meetings of the court for seven full days of mourning, an extraordinary gesture, meant quote. Cheng Hua, as it would turn out, would swiftly follow his lifelong love into death. On September 1st, just seven months later, the emperor fell ill. Three days after that, he commanded that his 17-year-old heir, Crown Prince Zhu Yutang, provisionally take charge of the affairs of the court. Five days after that, on September 9th, 1487, he breathed his last. With full ceremony and pomp, he was buried in the Maoling Mausoleum alongside almost all of his imperial ancestors. So it was that on September 17th, his son would formally accede to the throne,

marking the following new year as his reign era, Hangzhe. And that is where we'll leave off this time. Next time, we'll track the period of Hangzhe through to the very end of the 15th century and beyond. 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.

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