The History of China - #239 - Ming 26: Red Lead Prescription

Episode Date: August 20, 2022

The Jianwen Emperor plays shell-games with his dad's spirit tablet, decides Confucius has had it too good for too long, gets gross in his pursuit for immortality, and tries breath-play with his concubines... oh yes, and fire. So, so much fire. Time Period Covered: ca. 1524-1547 CE Major Historical Figures: The Jiajing Emperor (Zhu Houcong) [r. 1521-1567] Empress Dowager Zhang [r. 1505-1541] Empress Chen [r. 1522-1528] Empress Zhang [r. 1529-1534] Empress Fang [r. 1534-1547] Confucius [551-479 BCE] Minister Xia Yan Minister Huo Tao Major Sources Cited: Works Cited: Geiss, James. “The Chia-ching reign, 1522-1566,” in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 7: the Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644, Part I. Huang, Weibo. “The palace rebellion of ‘Renyin’ and the Jiajing Emperor’s belief in alchemy” in Xiang Chao. McMahon, Keith. Celestial Women: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from Song to Qing. Zhang, Tingyu. History of Ming, Vol. 114, Historical Biography 2, Empresses and Concubines 2. Zhang, Yongchang. “The ‘Renyin’ palace rebellion: palace women sacrifice themselves” in Quanzhou Wenxue. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. 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. Hello and welcome to the History of China. Episode 239, Red Lead Prescription 色镜神,自废品,冲和乐,普恩爱 Hoard the seminal energy, choose fine consorts and ladies, enjoy the fullness of pleasure, and let freely flow the imperial beneficence.

Grand Secretary Zhang Zong to the judging emperor. Well, I first became aware of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love. Yes, a profound sense of it, Mandrake, during the physical act of love. Yes, a profound sense of fatigue, a feeling of emptiness, followed. Luckily, I was able to interpret these feelings correctly. Loss of essence. I can assure you it has not recurred, Mandrake. Women, uh, women sense my power, and they seek my life essence. I, uh, do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I, I do deny them my essence. General Jack D. Ripper to Group Captain Lionel Mandrake from Dr. Strangelove.

Having gone back in time to mostly catch up on the late 1400s and its political goings-on in the regions beyond the Great Wall, today we're going to head back to good old Beijing. In particular, today we're going to be mostly focused on the Emperor of Great Ming himself, our long-standing friend on the Dragon Throne, Zhu Houtong, a.k.a. the Jiajing Emperor. So just as a little refresher, as I know it's been a minute since we've been steeped in the goings-on of the Ming court, Jiajing had come to the throne at the age of 13 or so, and was the cousin of his predecessor, the party boy extraordinaire Zhengde Emperor, who had died airless after drunkenly falling off of his pleasure boat

into the Grand Canal on his way back from playing at War Hero at age 29, back in 1520, and catching his death of illness as a result. Jia Jing had turned out to be the compromise candidate, and was elevated from his relatively meaningless fief as the Prince of Xing to sovereign of the entire realm. The expectation, as you may recall, had been that he would swap out his birth parents with his royal aunt and uncle, as his adoptive parents, in order to ritually keep the order of royal succession intact. That, however, did not sit well with Jiajing, and he resisted any such measure at every opportunity, winning far more often than he lost. For more on that, see episode 234, The Grand Rites Controversy, for a much more thorough breakdown of all that. And so, bearing that klepto's version in mind, we launch back into the Jiajing era today. Jiajing had officially put to bed all further argument about who his parents were and were not

as of 1524. His father was his father, not his royal uncle, and his mother was his mother, not his aunt, the Empress Dowager, thank you very much. He had, however, been at least forced to concede that his father, the late Prince of Xing, had not, in fact, ever been an emperor, and therefore could not be honored as such when it came to rituals and sacrifices. He took this about as well as most 16-year-olds take being told no, which is to say, not very well at all. From that point forward, the emperor would look for various means and schemes to enhance his father's status to where he, in judging estimation at least, rightly ought to be. On several occasions, he had floated the idea, or to be more exact, he had found some random concerned citizen to voice his concerns,

completely unprompted of course, that the Emperor's father should have a spirit tablet constructed and a temple built to house it in the ancestral imperial compound. For the first several years, the emperor would hear the petition and think, wow, that's a great idea, and then look around to his court for ministerial support, only to find precisely zero forthcoming. By 1525, though, he'd had just about enough of asking nicely, and so opted to press the issue rather more forcefully. Deciding that they needed to placate the young sovereign somehow or another,

the Ministry of Rights put forth a counterproposal, a compromised position, that Jia Jing's father could have an ancestral temple of his very own built, but that it should be built next to the official temple rather than within it. Jia Jing, understanding that getting 80% of what he wanted was better than getting 0%, accepted the proposal, at least as a starter position, and construction began as of that summer. Notably, James Geis points out that in drafting its compromise proposal, the Ministry of Rights didn't even bother to find an actual precedent to support it, as was the long-standing convention for doing anything considered

remotely innovative or against the grain. Rather, when they did append a document purported to be precedential, it actually had nothing to do with the issue and was solely for appearance's sake. That May, his father's side temple, deemed still not quite good enough, judging threatened to go against his court and unilaterally decide to place dear old dad's spirit tablet within the imperial ancestral temple, and yet backed down again when he found no support whatsoever for his plan yet again. Instead, he decided that he would order the entrance to his father's temple moved, even though construction had just been completed. No, rather than a separate side entrance, he wanted the

secondary temple attached directly to the main temple, and to be able to enter through the main gate regardless. Likewise, that November, he decided that he wanted to conduct sacrifices to his father on the same days as he did the imperial ancestors. In both cases, his demands were met. The court was still willing to concede these minor points in order to keep the sovereign from grumbling too much. But the idea of actually placing Jia Jing's father's spirit tablet in the main temple still remained an absolute no-go for them. Rebuffed, the emperor was forced to let the issue sit for the time being. Between 1527 and 1530, there was minimal butting of heads between the emperor and his court on the issue of the ancestral temple and its occupants,

and Jiajing conducted all imperial rituals in person. The drama started back up in 1530, when, after successful changes to the formal court attire the year before, Jiajing now suggested some significant reforms to major imperial rituals. This time, though the vast majority of the court was still against any such break from the norms and traditions of old, there were a few who decided to side with the emperor, notably the minister Xia Yan,

who praised the reform proposals as a grand scheme of dynastic restoration. Needless to say, this got him on the ends with Jia Jing, and he ordered Xia to begin making his reports directly to the throne. As for those who continued to stand against the imperial will, Jia Jing was rather less kind. One of the ministers who, until this point, had typically been on the side of the emperor, Minister Huotao, now found himself at odds with the reforms, and thus on the outs with the emperor. On April 7th, 1530, Huo was arrested via imperial diktat. The following day,

Zhao Jing ordered that the Ministry of Rights survey the court and report where each of the ministers stood on the idea of making his proposed changes, a kind of question which, now as then and millennia before, was an exceedingly dangerous thing to answer. Of the 596 ministers surveyed, 192 officials came out in favor of the reforms, with 206 in opposition, and as for the other 198, they officially, and likely wisely, kept mum, saying that they held no opinion on the issue at all. Well, as far as the judging emperor was concerned, an abstention was as good as a vote in his favor, and those 206 opponents of his proposal could all go pound sand. As such, the motion carried, even though the majority of the votes cast were against it,

a concept that makes little sense unless, of course, you've at all followed U.S. presidential elections for the last 20 years or so. After all, at the end of the day, there really was only one vote that ultimately mattered. Henceforth, there would be four separate sacrifices to heaven, earth, the sun, and the moon. But was the emperor done with mucking about with the rituals and sacrifice policies? As you surely know by now, if I ask a rhetorical question like that, the answer is almost definitely going to be a resounding no. Next up on the docket was the question of Confucius. Specifically, what kinds of sacrifices and titles that old fuddy-duddy should go on receiving year after year? Now,

as you may or may not yet be aware, Confucius had been way, way posthumously promoted to a prince by Emperor Suzong of Tang all the way back in the year 738. That being on tops of gobs and gobs of his descendants being honored generation after generation with all kinds of titles and positions, a practice that would go on pretty much uninterrupted all the way until the very end of the Qing Dynasty. For some reason or another, though, Jiajing had gotten it into his head that old Master Kong had been having it too good for too long. Quote, The emperor wanted to stop using the rituals for the imperial sacrifice to heaven and the sacrifice to Confucius, and he wanted to do away with all the marks and titles of nobility that had been conferred on Confucius and his followers. He disliked the fact that he had to bow to the

image of Confucius when he conducted ceremonies at the Confucian temple. He thought it unseemly for an emperor to kneel before a prince, end quote. As with his other personal projects, any hesitance or pushback by the court ministers swiftly gave way to the imperial will. Confucius's sacrifices were shortened and simplified, separated completely from the imperial sacrifices, and his princely title rescinded. Later that same year, Jiajing went one further by separating the sacrifice to former kings and emperors from that of the imperial sacrifice to heaven. In this way, Geis explains, he was elevating his own prestige as the emperor by marking out the imperial sacrifice as different and separate from any other kind of ritual ceremony. So, with all these changes agreed to and now done to his liking, surely the judging

emperor was now happy to go on making these very special sacrifices just as he'd laid out. No. Just two years later, he stopped participating in the sacrifice to earth entirely, and the following year, 1533, he withdrew from the sacrifice to heaven as well. For the subsequent 33 years of his reign, he would never again take part in either ritual. Quote, his interest in court ritual had all along been tied to schemes to make his father a legitimate emperor posthumously. End quote. Once it became clear that all the finagling in the world about ritual details wasn't going to make that more likely, he lost interest completely. The following September of 1534 brought about an interesting opportunity to once again revive Jiajing's long-held desire to honor his father as an emperor.

The prior August, the imperial ancestral temple, way down in Nanjing, had caught fire and burned to the ground, and so discussion in court was brought forth as to what was to be done. The emperor's favorite pet minister, Xia Yan, knowing exactly what his majesty desired, put forward a proposal like the good little toady he was. A plan to not rebuild the ancestral temple in Nanjing at all, but instead move it up to the current and far grander imperial capital at Beijing proper. The design for this new construction would have separate temple chambers for each individual former emperor within the broader complex.

Meeting with swift approval, the project broke ground the following year, and was completed by December of 1536. Quote, The spirit tablet of the founding emperor and his ancestors remained in the central temple, which faced south, while the other tablets of the other emperors were placed in smaller temples, ranged before it, which faced east and west. End quote. With all that done, Jiajing then slipped one little minor addendum into the mix, that his father's own temple, which still stood duly apart from the rest,

would be renamed to fit the style accorded to the other temples within the new ancestral temple complex. And by now you can probably see where this is going. Very clever, Jiajing. Very clever indeed. In mid-1538, at the suggestion of a minor retired official, the emperor revived a long-disused ritual, which allowed the emperor's father to officiate in a sacrifice to Shangdi, the Lord Emperor on High. The hidden catch here was that, in fact,

only the first two Ming emperors, Hongwu and then Yongle, had ever officiated such an event. And, yeah, all due apologies to the Jianwan Emperor, but you kinda got overwritten by your uncle completely. From here on out, quote, this new ritual was to be carried out each autumn and in every administrative district in the empire as well, where the emperor's subjects were to sacrifice to him

just as he sacrificed to the Supreme Emperor, end quote. He thereby managed to achieve two of his main objectives in this single stroke, enshrining his father in a role that was ceremonially reserved only for former emperors, while also enhancing his own prestige across the empire by establishing what amounted to a personal cult to himself. And with that, it was pretty much a Yahtzee. Quote, having thus insinuated his father into the imperial lineage, in October 1538, the emperor awarded him a posthumous title customarily reserved for the second or co-founding emperor of a dynasty, Ming Taizong. End quote. There was just one little catch there.

There was already a Ming Taizong, namely Zhu Di, the Yongle Emperor. And so, it was once again time to play everyone's favorite game, Temple Name Switcheroo. Jia Jing's father became Taizong, and Yongle went from Taizong to Chengzu. This is more than what it might initially appear. By giving Yongle a temple name with the suffix of Zu, meaning progenitor, Jia Jing had thereby, quote, implicitly acknowledged that another emperor in the dynasty had ostensibly succeeded to the throne on the same basis that he, Jiajing, had, as a younger brother replacing an older brother, and had established a collateral branch of the imperial family on the throne, end quote. No one at this point could possibly question the legitimacy or supremacy of the Yongle Emperor, and so by saying, hey, I'm just doing what he did, Jia Jing essentially cut his would-be critics off at the knees. As such, having established himself not as an adopted son of the Hongzhi

Emperor or younger brother of the Zhengde Emperor, but rather the scion of a collateral line of the family who sat the throne in their own right, Jia Jing's father was therefore now eligible, at long last, to receive his posthumous promotion to emperor, and his spirit tablet placed within the imperial ancestral temple. Jiajing even went so far as to make sure that it was installed in such a position that ranked his father above both Hongzhe and Zhengde, something bound to raise eyebrows as, in life, the prince of Xing had of course been a subject of the Zhengde emperor. It had taken some 17 years, but he'd finally done it, all save for one last tiny little detail. The fact that the newly minted Taizong of

Ming's actual temple still sat apart from the other monarchs of the dynasty. That one last little indignity would be sorted out once again by nature's great reset button, fire. On April 30th, 1541, a severe storm caused a conflagration to break out within the ancestral temple complex, resulting in the destruction of all nine temples within. And as a brief aside, we will be noting here, there is a lot of fire going on in this episode. It is really remarkable just how frequently fire serves as a central role in the Ming Dynasty. One of the hazards Dynasty, one of the hazards, clearly, of building your entire palace compound out of wood. But it's easy, in our modern age full of fire-suppressant systems and flame-retardant construction materials and designs,

to forget just how much of our collective past, from ancient Rome to Ming China to the Great Chicago Fire to pre-1945 Tokyo, regularly just caught ablaze and burned down completely, and how much it was all subject to just poof, going up in smoke one day. So, as the embers snuffed out and the smoke cleared off, the ancestral temple was utterly destroyed. Gee whiz, what a tragedy. But what might have been one emperor's catastrophe was Jia Jing's opportunity. We can rebuild it. We have the technology. And so it would be, beginning in 1543, but this time back according to the original pre-1535 design

on all the ancestral tablets being placed together in a single temple. This rebuild was completed mid-1545, with Hongwu's tablet in the center, facing south once again, and the other tablets arrayed to its left and right, facing east and west. Jiajing's father's tablet was conspicuously placed so as to rank above that of the Zhengde Emperor. In all, it had taken only 24 years and two complete rebuilds of the ancestral temple complex, but at last, the Jiajing Emperor finally had things just the way he wanted them, and dear old dad in his proper place.

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this fascinating era of history. Find The Age of Napoleon wherever you get your podcasts. We're now going to go ahead and shift focus to take a closer look at the Jiajing Emperor's still-living family, and specifically his rather fraught marital situation. In fact, as we're about to see, I'm going to need to go ahead and slap a big fat asterisk onto that term, living family members. Yeah. So over the course of his reign, Jiajing had three primary consorts. He wed the first, surnamed Tun, at the behest of his aunt, the Empress Dowager, and she was installed as Empress in 1522. All seemed well enough for the time between 1522 and 1528, until one day the

Empress, then pregnant, became distraught during a lecture on the classic book of poetry. She was apparently quite upset and jealous over two of the other imperial consorts, and proceeded to throw a rather spectacular tantrum in front of all present. The emperor quickly got fed up with this and began shouting at her, enraged at such an outburst. In the course of the argument, Empress Chun grew so upset that she miscarried her pregnancy and then died shortly after. Jiajing's second principal consort entered the imperial household two years prior to that tragic incident, in 1526. She, surnamed Zhang, was the daughter of an imperial guardsman, and held the emperor's fancy due to her ability to conduct elaborate court ceremonies, which was apparently really

a thing of his. It was largely for that reason, when the emperor was advised to take a new empress in January of 1529, callously enough less than three months after Empress Chun's death, that he chose her to fill the vacancy. She was installed that January 8th, and would remain empress until she was deposed some five years later. As empress, Lady Zhang continued to indulge Jia Jing's love of elaborate ceremonies. Geist writes of one particularly interesting occasion, quote,

A sacrificial terrace was built in the northern suburb of Beijing, and on 24 April 1530, an elaborate ritual was staged there for the first and only time. 5,000 unit guards lined the procession route, and 5,000 more surrounded the terrace. All the imperial princesses and court ladies accompanied the empress, and a great banquet followed the ceremonies. The emperor found her deportment in this and other ceremonies very appealing." For all her natural affinity to the emperor's love of rituals, unfortunately for her, Empress Zhang failed to produce an heir.

As a result, and at the suggestion of his grand secretary Zhang Zong, who we quoted at the beginning of this episode, in 1531, the Emperor chose nine additional special consorts in order to increase his chances of siring an heir. In 1534, she was quite suddenly deposed for uncertain reasons, though it's speculated that she may have found herself on the bad end of trying to intercede on the Empress Dowager's behalf against her husband. Stripped of her position, she died less than two years later in 1536. Jiajing's third and final principal consort was selected from those nine special consorts brought into the palace in 1531. She, surnamed Fang, stood apart from the first two empresses as being a southerner from the vicinity of Nanjing,

whereas her predecessors had been northerners local to Beijing. Lady Fang was installed as Jiajing's third empress on January 28th, 1534, get this, a mere nine days after Empress Zhang was deposed. She was chosen apparently because she carried herself well, and she too catered to the emperor's delight in court ceremonies. Now, we're going to circle back around to Empress Fang and her fate, but first a bit more on the Jiajing Emperor's relationship with the rest of his wider family. They tended to be, in a word, strained. At a particular relational nadir was his aunt, the Empress Dowager.

Jiajing had never forgiven her or moved on from his dislike at the way that she had treated his mother when she had first arrived in Beijing, treating her as an inferior and even as a lowly princess rather than co-equal Empress Dowager. As such, Jiajing had decided to make it something of his ongoing pet project to needle his aunt whenever and however the opportunity arose. For instance, in 1524, he refused her a formal audience for her birthday, even after having just weeks earlier arranged an elaborate official ceremony for his own mother's birthday. When officials protested, he had them arrested, and then made it clear to the court that he would brook no criticism whatsoever of what he deemed to be his personal private life. The following year, the Empress

Dowager's residence was destroyed in yet another fire. As such, she was forced to move to a much smaller palace, while arrangements were made to have her own rebuilt. At first, judging approved that it be rebuilt, but smaller than before, making the excuse that most construction materials were already pre-allocated to the ongoing reconstruction of the ancestral temple. Yet less than four months after that, in August of that year, the emperor called for a total halt to the palace reconstruction project in order to quote-unquote ease the burdens of his subjects. When informed that his aunt was uncomfortable and ill at ease in her temporary quarters, Jiajing's attitude was essentially tough cookies. The emperor's campaign of pettiness by no means stopped at delaying his aunt's house reconstruction. In 1533, he ordered that her younger brother be

arrested on charges of a murder that he had committed in 1515, but had gotten the case dropped. The simple homicide charge was upped to treason, however, when it had been found out that he'd put out a hit on an imperial guards commander who had tried to extort Zhang by threatening to reopen the case against him. That was of particular interest to Jia Jing, because treason carried with it an automatic death penalty for the offender's entire clan. Quote, When his aunt requested an audience to beg mercy for her brother, he refused her. The charge of treason was only dropped after Grand Secretary Zhang Zong pointed out

that Empress Dowager Zhang was a member of the Zhang clan and would also have to be executed. End quote. I have to remember there must have been kind of a sidebar conversation where the emperor was like, yeah, I know, but okay, fine. Instead, Jia Jing had the younger brother stripped of title and station, sentenced to death, and then remanded to the imperial dungeon to await his execution. There he would languish for a further 13 years before his sentence was finally carried out in 1546. But the tale of Imperial Woe was still not over for the Zhangs, because he then turned to the Empress Dowager's older brother. Already previously stripped of title and made a commoner in the Nanjing Guard, he was arrested in December 1537 on charges of using sorcery against the emperor,

with implications that, surprise surprise, the Empress Dowager herself might also be involved. Like his younger brother, he too was thrown in prison, but unlike little brother, he didn't last as long. Within a month, he was dead after having been starved by his guards. This death in particular seems to have pushed Empress Dowager Zhang over the edge That is, if she was not in fact already involved in such dealings She resolved to get back at her petty, megalomaniacal nephew And over the course of the next several years

She seems to have tried a variety of different methods of revenge In November 1538, Jia Jing's mother died after taking some sort of medicine Though he lacked the concrete evidence to prove it He deeply suspected that his aunt was behind it and had poisoned his mother. Early the following year, while on a trip to his former principality in Huguang to determine where his mother's body should be interred, a series of mysterious fires, again with the fire, broke out in his temporary quarters. Jiajing was only barely able to escape with his life, and none of his personal staff made it out of the third such blaze.

I mean, it was clearly no accident. This kind of thing doesn't happen three times on the same trip. The Empress Dowager escaped charges of arson and attempted assassination somehow or another, and managed to die of natural causes in 1541. Yet even in death, there was very clearly no love lost between aunt and nephew. Though he could not deny her a funeral, Jia Jing, the pettiest boy who ever lived, ordered that it be a completely minimal and bare-bones affair conducted with the least possible ceremony.

Even the Empress Dowager's death, though, did not spell safety for the Jia Jing Emperor. Because, as it turned out, him being a completely short-fused jackass to everyone around him, surprise, had consequences. As Geist puts it, quote, his short temper and harsh manner had antagonized many people, and even his concubines came to dread his visits. Many people would gladly have been rid of him. End quote. So the lead-in to this next part is strange and pretty gross, so please bear with me, but the details are important to understanding just how very woo-woo the Jiajing Emperor actually was.

Jiajing is sometimes referred to as the Taoist Emperor because of just how far down the esoteric magical he was willing to go in pursuit, ultimately, of eternal life. One of these practices was to have his alchemists refine quote-unquote medicinal pills for him called Xian Tian Dan Qian, meaning literally Heavenly Innate Cinnabar Lead. Sounds yummy. This substance was, in addition to the cinnabar, i.e. mercury, and lead, which, you know, lead, was also at least partially derived from the menstrual blood of the virgin girls within his harem, the urine of young boys and girls, and, quote, various other materials, end quote. From Keith McMahon, quote,

In 1540, Jia Jing formally announced that he would devote himself to the tradition, the intercourse should occur just after the first menstruation, when women were thought to harbor especially full energy, which, if the man could absorb it, would enable him to obtain immortality. The man was to withhold ejaculation. End quote. Needless to say, ew, gross, disgusting. But where it took a turn for the worse, yes, the worse, was that he would force those girls to subsist on a diet consisting solely of mulberry leaves and rainwater in order to maintain their purity of essence. Yeah, mulberry leaves, the leaves that silkworms eat. And that rainwater was to be collected from banana leaves in the Imperial Gardens by the ladies themselves before dawn, resulting in many getting sick from cold. Moreover, any infraction, or even them getting sick from, you know,

going out in the cold to collect rainwater, was severely punished, frequently resulting in those girls' deaths. And we're not talking about, you know, 25-year-olds. We're talking about 8, 10, 12, 14-year-olds. It's really, really odd and awful. It's hardly surprising, then, that in time, a rather murderous mood came to overtake many of these tortured captives in the palace. They began to think that, if only they could get rid of this insane blood-and-urine-drinking monarch, that their own suffering would be at an end.

Not only did they think it, but they began to plan it. And in fact, on the night of November 27th, 1542, one such plot came very close indeed to succeeding. On that evening, Jia Jing had retired to the personal quarters of his very favorite concubine, Consort Duan, to drink and rest, which we can safely say is a 16th century iteration of Netflix and chill. After some period of time, the emperor had dozed off into one of his drunken stupors, and Consort Duan and her maidservants had withdrawn from the chamber. Shortly thereafter, though, a maid called Concubine Ning led more than a dozen palace ladies into the chamber with her. They tied the emperor up hand and foot, unbound one of the silken cords that held the bed curtains, and then slipped it as a noose about the emperor's neck and knotted it as tightly as they could.

Then they pulled out their hairpins while he choked out and proceeded to stab at his groin and abdomen, repeatedly. They must have been confident that the job was done, given what happened next, at least. Quite possibly, the emperor had lost consciousness during the ordeal, but it seems that he either must have revived, at least partially, and resumed his struggles after the ladies had assumed him dead, or else one of those suddenly noticed that, for somehow or another, he wasn't quite dead. In any case, this caused one of them to lose her composure and cry out and then go running for help, raising an alarm within the palace. One of the eunuch night watchmen proceeded immediately to Empress Fang's quarters

and alerted her that the emperor had been attacked. The empress hastened to her husband's quarters and then proceeded to untie the silken noose about his neck. And it seems that none of these would-be assassins had ever earned a badge in knot tying, because they had managed to tie his noose off with a dead knot, or a stopper knot, rather than a proper hangman's knot. This meant that no matter how tight that they'd pulled at the rope, Zhao Jing's airway was never totally cut off. Yeah, he'd lost consciousness, but he'd stayed alive. This was not to say, however, that he was like hunky-dory or A-OK.

Far from it. The imperial physician was summoned immediately and was able to partially revive the emperor with quote-unquote a strong prescription of some unspecified draught. Even so, Jiajing remained mostly unconscious for the subsequent eight hours, until mid-afternoon when he sat up and began to spit out the coagulated blood from his throat and air passages. With his throat substantively damaged, Jiajing rounded up, arrested, and put to an immediate and gruesome death. That is, the most dreaded punishment in the land, ling chi, slow slicing, or death by a thousand cuts. And yes, she meant each and every one of them. That included the one who had gotten cold feet and raised the alarm, and it likewise included Consort Duan, who was by all accounts not at all involved in the plot, save for that it happened to be her quarters in which the emperor had decided to spend

the night that night. All of their hideously mutilated bodies were publicly put on display, for the ten members of their respective families were beheaded, and twenty more were enslaved and gifted to various imperial ministers. Surely, Empress Fang must have expected that her quick and decisive action in punishing all of the women who had attempted to assassinate her husband would result, upon his recovery, in Jia Jing lauding her heroism. She would be bitterly disappointed. As it turned out, Jia Jing was not willing to overlook the fact that Fang had included consort Duan, his very favorite consort, in her list of the condemned. And to be fair, in the historical records, there are distinct indications that the two may well have had a personal beef against each other that the Empress was able to take advantage of in this

instance to get rid of a rival. But Jia Jing wasn't having any of that, and never forgave Fang for it. In fact, some five years later, in 1547, Empress Fang's palace caught fire, again with the fire. But when alerted by one of the palace unit guardsmen, the emperor refused to permit her rescue, instead declaring her fate the will of heaven. As such, Empress Fang burned to death horribly. Jiajing's true rationale for this terrible decision is impossible to say for certain, but it sure seems like he'd never forgiven her for killing Duan. Even so, for whatever it's worth, after she died, he did give her a burial with an elaborate ceremony befitting her position as empress, so that's nice, I guess? Did a cabal of his palace women plotting and darn near succeeding in murdering him result

in Jiajing reconsidering his position on harvesting adolescent menstrual blood for his immortality potions? Absolutely not. In fact, if anything, he decided to double down on the notion, to turn even more towards esoteric, pedophilic Taoist rituals. As of 1552, for instance, Jiajing, quote, recruited 300 girls between the ages of 8 and 14, and in 1555, another 160 under the age of 10. It was said that he grew more urgent in his desire for such things in his later years, end quote. And again, I cannot emphasize this enough. Ew. Where we'll end off today is what he did do as a result of this assassination attempt, known as the Runying Palace Plot. The judging emperor, now in his early 30s,

decided, both from this attempt on his life and his ever-mounting contempt for his ministers, to withdraw completely from participation in court life or affairs. Nor would he ever again agree to live in the Forbidden City itself. Instead, he and his inner circle withdrew to the neighboring Yongshuo Palace, or the Palace of Everlasting Longevity, and thereafter outright refused to have any direct contact with his court or ministers, save for a small number of trusted personal advisors. Even so, he refused to relinquish any of his personal authority over the affairs of state or governance, and continued his autocratic rule via that handful of trusted inner circle members, which quickly came to comprise a sort of court within a court. For the following 30 years, that's how he would continue to rule the Ming Empire.

A man apart, shut away behind multiple walls of his own making, even from his own government, and yet refusing to allow anyone else to take the reins. In this way, the Jiajing Emperor would serve as a powerful, dangerous, and in time, ruinous example for his successors. The idea that an emperor could simply shut himself off from the outside world completely, in perpetuity, and utterly without recourse. And so next time, that's where we'll pick up, Jia Jing shutting himself in to devote himself ever more fully to his Taoist sex and immortality, um, practices, the eunuchs forced to try to hold the whole situation together in a nearly impossible situation, and then, oh yes, the Mongols, riding down in 1550 to demonstrate that they could still very much reach out and touch Beijing itself. Thanks for listening.

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