The History of China - #240 - Ming 27: The Solecism of Power

Episode Date: September 9, 2022

The Jiajing Emperor rounds out the back-half of his interminably long reign by hiding away in his personal palace, and only occasionally coming out to tell everyone what a terrible job they're all doing. The Mongols seize on Ming weakness to basically do whatever they want, and the Ming respond by turtling even harder and building more walls. Without a imperial guiding hand, the ministers are left to their own devices... with predictably selfish and myopic results. Time Period Covered: 1550-1567 CE Major Historical Figures: Ming Empire: The Jiajing Emperor (Zhu Houcong) [r. 1521-1567] Gen. Qiu Ruan [d. 1552] Grand Secretary Xia Yan [1482-1548] Grand Secretary Yan Song [1480-1567] Grand Secretary Xu Jie [1512-1578] Mongolia: Altan Khan [1507-1582] Prince Toghto Major Works Cited: Bacon, Francis. “Of empire” in The essays of Francis Bacon (1908). Geiss, James. “The Chia-ching reign, 1522-1566,” in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 7: the Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644, Part I. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello, and welcome to the History of China. Episode 240, The Solitism of Power. To speak now of the true temper of empire. It is a thing rare and hard to keep. For both temper and distemper consist of contraries. But it is one thing to mingle contraries, another to interchange them. The answer of Apollonius to Vespasian is full of excellent instruction. Vespasian asked him,

What was Nero's overthrow? He answered, Nero could touch and time the harp well, but in government sometimes he used to wind the pins too high, sometimes to let them down too low. And certain it is that nothing destroyeth authority so much as the unequal and untimely interchange of power pressed too far and then relaxed too much. This is true, that all the wisdom of these

latter times in princes' affairs is rather fine deliveries and shifting of dangers and mischiefs when they are near, than solid and grounded courses to keep them aloof. But this is to try masteries with fortune, and let men beware how they neglect and suffer matter of trouble to be prepared. For no man can forbid the spark, nor tell whence it may come. The difficulties in princes' business are many and great, but the greatest difficulty is often in their own mind. For it is common with princes, saith Tacitus, to will contradictories. Sunt plurumque regum voluntates, et inter se contriare.

The desires of kings are often vehement and contradictory with one another. For it is the solecism of power to think to command the end and yet not to endure the mean. Sir Francis Bacon, from Of Empire, 1612. At dawn on October 2nd, 1550, the Jiajing Emperor held an official audience. It was his first time directly addressing anyone outside of his secretive inner circle in more than a decade, since he'd retreated in disgust to his Yongzhou Palace to practice

esoteric Taoist rituals toward the goal of gaining immortality. Yet this highly uncharacteristic audience was not held in the Imperial Throne Room. Instead, Jia Jing addressed his subjects from the top of the Wu Gate, also known as the Meridian Gate, the main entrance of the fortified palace compound facing due south onto what is today Tiananmen Square across the Tongzhimote. In spite of calling for this audience, the emperor still refused to directly address his court officials. Instead, a message was read on his behalf from the battlements to all in attendance, stating simply that, quote, all of the civil and military officials were irresponsible and derelict in their duties, end quote. That was it. That was all.

What could have precipitated the, by this point, notoriously reclusive emperor to not only come out of his fortress of solitude, but do so in order to deliver such a scathing, if somewhat vague and passive-aggressive, rebuke to everyone in his government? What else but, wait for it, the Mongols. It had begun some two years prior, in June of 1548, when Mongol raiders from the Ordoslup region, under the command of Altan Khan, the grandson and successor of Dayan Khan and Queen Mandukai, had attacked Xuanfu Garrison, just northwest of Beijing, the so-called Gateway to the Capital. There, they were able to defeat the imperial army stationed within, and make off with everything, and everyone, that wasn't nailed down.

The raiders returned that October, this time plunging even further south, pillaging all the way to the township of Huai Lai, just a day's ride from the capital gates. In response, the Ming court had, as we've by this point all come to expect, formed a circular firing squad and all blamed one another, while failing to present any viable solutions. By the following month, a third such Mongol raid had broken through the inner lines of defenses and approached the site of the imperial tombs themselves. The raids broke off as the winter set in, but picked right back up where they'd left off the following March, with Altan Khan once again attacking Xuanfu. This time, he not only defeated the Ming Imperial Army garrison, but set it to rout. In the course of this set of successive military failures, several Ming commanders were given due warning slash notice of the Mongol Khan's intent and

expectations. The Ming Empire must open regularized trade relations with the Mongol nation by that autumn, or else Beijing itself would be their next target. Now, as you may recall, this sort of economic warfare had long been the underlying defense policy of Ming China towards the Mongols. That is, knowing that they had neither the military chops nor the spare cash to commit to actually attempting to invade and subdue the steppe riders directly on their own turf, China had instead opted to do everything it could to cut off trade with its northern neighbors. The supposition behind that was simple enough. It's the overriding strategy behind any policy of economic sanctions, to be honest, that this relatively cheap and easy option would choke off Mongolian access to all the precious

and vital materials and goods that they desired, so much so that in due course they'd come groveling on their hands and knees begging to be let back into the fold and willing to do or say whatever was necessary to get them back in. That policy of course tends to rather spectacularly fall apart, however, if the guys being sanctioned are willing and able to commit to raids in force to simply take what you're unwilling to sell them. And it positively face plants when the border guards in charge of enforcing the embargo are busy with their collective side hustle of black market trading with the barbarians that they're supposed to be guarding against. And yeah, both were the case all up and down the Sino-Mongol border in the mid-1500s.

As of March 1550, northern China was in the midst of a massive drought, with no rain or snowfall reported for more than 150 days. Ming spies reported that the Mongols were massing for a large-scale attack. This was exactly the case, as shortly thereafter, the horde moved against Datong, just southwest of Xuanfu. After several skirmishes, the garrison commandant was able to persuade the Mongol raiding force to move on with the help of a sizable bribe. The steppe riders duly proceeded eastward, breaching the Ming defensive lines at Gubei Pass, just 40 miles northeast of Beijing as of September 26th. From there, they turned south, proceeding against Tongzhou, the northern terminus of the Grand Canal, just 15 miles from Beijing, and making camp there on September 30th. Thus, as October opened,

the Mongol army proceeded to pillage the capital suburbs and set up a siege of the city proper. The military registers for the capital garrison listed about 140,000 names, but as was so often the case, what was reported on paper and what the reality of the situation actually was were two very different things. The actual number of defenders in Beijing was something like one-third of the reported troop strength, only 50,000 to 60,000. As for the quote-unquote rest, they'd largely been siphoned off elsewhere to work on various construction projects. The soldiers that were in the capital garrison were assembled and ordered to march out of the city gates to confront the Mongol menace

directly. But to this, they balked. Why in the world would they do that? As was so common in this era, the Ming soldiers, given orders that they did not like, quite simply refused to follow them. I mean, what were their officers going to do? Try to punish them? Everyone was very much aware at just how badly that tended to go for said officers. Well, what about reinforcements from other regions outside of Beijing? Surely they would be riding into the rescue any minute now. And arrive they did, although with an almost comical lack of preparation or foresight. You see, they came with no provisions of their own, apparently expecting Beijing to provide for them. But with Beijing currently,

you know, encircled and under siege and all that, that simply was not going to happen. Quickly enough, these Ming soldiers, who'd been sent to relieve the capital of this foreign threat, were starving and totally unfit for combat, able to stave off their own deaths only by, that's right, looting the surrounding areas that the Mongols had not yet plundered or torched themselves. Well, by this point, the Minister of War pretty much just threw up his hands in impotent frustration. All he could really do was sit behind the city walls with everyone else and basically just wait for the Mongols to get bored and go home. When they finally did let up the city siege and move on, the court opted to order all of the

regional commanders to not pursue or engage the Mongols as they withdrew, which meant that they were able to take their sweet time in pulling back and make sure that they took all the loot that they'd collected with them. And cue backpats all around, well done everyone, just splendid work. So yeah, that was the background for the judging emperor's audience from atop the Meridian Gate. The Mongols literally at the city gates, and everyone in his court and army just pretty much standing around shrugging their shoulders as to what they should actually do about it. Several days after the imperial rebuke of everybody, Jiajing did take more direct action and Admiral Ozzled his Minister of War

for having failed him for the last time. That is to say, he had the guy summarily put to death. Following the Minister of War's execution, the further defense of the capital was entrusted to Commandant Qiu Ran, and just as a measure of what kind of guy Qiu was, he was the very same commander who had just days before bribed the Mongol army to bypass his own encampment at Datong and proceed directly against Beijing. Yeah. He and his forces had also been the ones to arrive outside the capital on October 2nd,

without food or supplies, and pretty much just in time to wave goodbye to the Mongols as they disappeared into the distance, but for which Commander Chieh received imperial congratulations. And not just that, but a promotion. Now in charge of the city's defense, Chieh was tasked with hunting down, engaging, and defeating the withdrawing Mongol raiding band. Qiu and his men did the first two, but ran into a bit of a hiccup on the third. Rather than defeating the retreating barbarians, they suffered a massive defeat. In fact, the Ming force got football spiked so hard that Qiu himself was barely able to escape with his life. The consequence of this massive, embarrassing military failure by Commander Qiu Ran was... a promotion? Wait, what?

Well, you see, knowing that the Imperial Court would not take news of his defeat lightly, Qiu did the natural thing. He just lied his pants off. He reported that his expedition had soundly defeated the Mongols, and that all was well. Everything's perfectly all right here. We're all fine now. How are you? And never let it be said that there's not a significant opportunity for major payoff to just committing to the bit and going for a truly big lie, because Chiu was thereafter appointed as the head of all garrisons and training camps

around the capital. So, now in total command of Beijing's armies, Chiuzhan felt compelled to follow up his great victory against the Mongols by launching an even larger punitive expedition into the northern wilds. This involved recalling some 60,000 troops from the frontier garrisons to the capital in order to train them up A move vehemently opposed by the court ministers as it would leave the borders, you know, extremely vulnerable But Chou would not be denied And he, once again, got his way The training and preparations began

In the meantime, the Mongol leader, Altan, decided to make a peace overture. He sent his adopted son, Tokhto, with an offer that, in exchange for trading privileges with China, the Mongols would cease their raiding activities. Now, both sides were coming at this from almost diametrically opposed perspectives, as in, they both felt like they were the ones winning, and therefore in the stronger negotiating position. For their own part, the Mongols, riding high off of the actual recent victory and more or less triumphal march across northern China all the way to the gates of Beijing itself and back, seem to have really just actually wanted to trade in a regular fashion with the vast and rich southern empire. Ming China, meanwhile, just high on its own fumes, or at least those of Qiu Ran, thought that it had the horse barbarians on the run.

Even so, it needed to stall for time while their grand counteroffensive could be prepared. Or at least that's what Qiu told everyone around him. In reality, knowing that he'd just gotten his butt handed to him, and terrified to live through yet another such combat nightmare, he just wanted to stave off any direct further confrontation for as long as possible, while preserving, of course, his own standing and bravado. In any event, the two sides came to an agreement that in exchange for the Mongols halting their border raids, the Ming would allow them to conduct two horse fairs per year. This is the peace that would hold for all of six months. At that point, the Mongols started pressing to expand upon their trade relationship with China, wanting to begin

trading more than just horses, but also cattle and sheep for staples like beans and grain. The Ming court, however, was in no mood to be negotiated with, and flatly refused the overture. And, as was so often the case in Sino-Mongol relations, if the easy way wasn't available, then the Mongols were only too happy to shift right back to the slightly less easy, but definitely more fun way. That is to say, the border raids resumed. At this, the main court was aghast, and sent a strongly worded letter to Altan Khan, demanding that he make account of this breach of contract. In response, Altan pretty much shrugged and replied that, hey, his people had

horses, cattle, sheep, and basically nothing else. They were starving, and if the Chinese weren't willing to negotiate and trade in good faith, then he couldn't be held responsible for what a bunch of starving, angry Mongols might do. The Mongol messengers bearing this explanation were arrested, and, well, that basically put an end to any semblance of diplomacy between the two sides. To his own mounting horror, General Chiu-Ran was now very much expected to ride out with the force that he'd totally been training for this very moment, and engage the Mongols directly. With what I can only imagine must have been great reluctance and a very bad poker face, this he did in April of 1552. And it turns out, his first encounter with the Mongols wasn't some one-off fluke. Yet again, he was ambushed and soundly defeated on the steppes north of Datong.

And once again, he wrote back to Beijing, lying through his teeth, that he'd once again achieved a great victory against those cowardly barbarians. This time, however, the Jiajing Emperor was rather more skeptical. A skepticism that was affirmed when the raids along the borders showed no signs of stopping, but continued totally unabated. The jig was up, and Qiu Ran's lies had finally caught up with him. Facing mounting criticism of his policies, Qiu had the good sense to die of aggravated ulcers on August 31st, 1552. But as is so often the case in China, a minor thing like death wasn't nearly enough to slow the judicial proceedings down. From Geis, quote,

After having been posthumously convicted of plotting treason, his corpse was exhumed and dismembered on 13 September, and his head was displayed beyond the border. None of this stopped the raiding, which continued into the winter. End quote. Overall, the Raid of Beijing in 1550 and its aftermath previewed a long-term shift in the nature of Sino-Mongol interactions along the border. Altan's Mongols realized that they could raid in force with near impunity all along the Ming border. The Chinese, meanwhile, realized that they could no longer divert forces here and there as needed, but would instead need to massively boost their overall defenses all along the border. Moreover, their defeat on the steppes in 1552 proved that they could not hope to succeed

in any offensive, and that there was no reasonable hope of driving the Mongols away from their borders. As such, they shifted back to that tried-and-true Ming strategy, build more walls. In this case, we're talking about an earthen barrier to protect the southern suburbs of Beijing from further raids like that that had happened in 1550. This was completed in an astonishingly quick seven months, due in no small part to the fact that there had been a large number of people who had recently fled to the capital region in order to escape starvation, and could therefore be employed as a ready-made workforce.

The Jiajing Emperor at this point realized that just like every other aspect of the regular imperial government that he was so utterly disgusted with, the imperial garrisons and regular army command was in no way up to the task of even minimally doing its job. As such, he ordered the creation of a new military unit called the Neiwu Hu, or the Inner Palace Army. The palace army would be comprised solely of eunuchs who had trained in the imperial city and would operate totally independently from the normal military command or court officials. The decade between 1550 and 1560 never much improved for the Ming government. As Mongol border raids continued unabated, costs ticked up ever higher, and with little the government could do to meet them.

Rations and payments for the border garrisons doubled, while revenues remained constant at best. In early 1552, for instance, the Ministry of Revenue and Works reported that the total bill for the expenditures to the border garrisons had come due, and amounted to more than 10 million ounces of silver, with an additional 13 million ounces for disbursements to the troops. When the emperor ordered that, well, okay, create 19 million coins to pay for it, he was told that the cost to mint that much currency would be north of 32 million ounces of silver, and that the imperial treasury currently held less than 2 million ounces, which wasn't even enough to cover the interest on what was already owed.

Then, it got worse. Because of course it did. In January of 1556, a huge swath of both Shanxi and Shanxi were rocked by a series of massive earthquakes, resulting in more than 800,000 reported deaths in the Wei River Valley alone, and a period of years where no taxes at all could be collected all across those regions. The following year, 1557, saw the three main audience palaces and the southern ceremonial gates in the Forbidden City, that's right, burn down yet again. Obviously, that all had to be repaired at once, meaning that when the Dathom Garrison fell under siege in 1558,

the treasury was so depleted that the government couldn't even afford to send supplies to the troops trapped within. And through it all, the Ming border armies managed to win a grand total of one single battle over the course of this entire decade. In 1560, a commandant led a successful raid against a Mongol stronghold at Guihua, which is modern Hohot in Mongolia, and set it ablaze. Yet even this proved to be little more than a minor annoyance. Quote, Raiding continued, and the Mongols did not withdraw from the frontier regions. The garrisons were now expected only to turn back raiding parties at strategic passes that opened into the North China Plain and the imperial capital. No further offensive strategies

were proposed or implemented. End quote. Pretty much none of this was reported to the judging emperor, nor did he care to hear it. This is because, as we discussed at some length last time, judging was far too busy over the 1550s pursuing immortality in a bottle with lead, mercury, and virginal blood. That meant that the actual day-to-day control over the imperial court and its reactions to this compounding series of crises had fallen to someone else, and that someone just so happened to be Yansong. Yen, a longtime supporter of the court, had risen through the ranks over the course of the 1530s and 40s, largely by remaining obsequious to those above him,

and not attracting too much attention to himself, except for occasional derision at his perceived lack of competence or giftedness. This, it would turn out, was a carefully constructed facade, as Yan was actually quite resourceful and astute. So he let his superiors take point, and when they inevitably overstepped their bounds or otherwise got on the emperor's notoriously large bad side, good old Yansong was right there to fill the vacancy and remain upwardly mobile, but always just out of the withering limelight. By 1537, he'd risen all the way to become the Minister of Rights, a post he held for some five years until 1542,

when the Grand Secretary, Xia Yan, was impeached and removed from the post. And, again, there was good ol' Yan Song, willing, ready, and able to oh-so-humbly step in and fill the role. Geist writes, quote, When he became Grand Secretary in 1542, Byun Sung was already in his 60s. Aware that he served solely at the Emperor's grace, he was at first very careful to both oblige him in all things and to refer all matters to him for decision.

At the same time, he took advantage of his new position to remove his enemies from office, end quote. Hi everyone, this is Scott. If you want to learn about the world's oldest civilizations, find out how they were rediscovered, follow the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra's descendants over ten generations, or take a deep dive into the Iron Age or the Hellenistic era, then check out the Ancient World Podcast. Available on all podcasting platforms, or go to ancientworldpodcast.com. That's the Ancient World Podcast.

One of his favorite methods of doing this, something of a dirty trick as it were, was making counter-accusations against anyone who had, or might, level such against him. In 1543, for instance, in order to skate by a charge of taking bribes, Grand Secretary Yan alleged that a satirical question about border policy in the 1543 Shandong Provincial Examination had in fact been drafted by a censor who was one of his accusers. Jiajing, as ever being incredibly touchy and finding such behavior insufferably arrogant, had the censor in question arrested and sentenced to exile at a frontier garrison, but not before the beating of a lifetime.

In fact, the censor would never actually be exiled, as he would die from the beating, which is noted to have been carried out with unusual severity. He would use a very similar tactic to get rid of his old boss and mentor, Xia Yan, once he had been recalled from exile in 1545 and reinstated as one of the Grand Secretaries, at least in part to counter Yan Song's growing influence over the court. After squaring off a number of times, the final confrontation came to a head in 1548, with Yan coming forward with an accusation that Xia had taken bribes in the run-up to that ill-fated campaign in the Ordos Loop that we began today's

episode with. The military screw-up was one thing, something for which the emperor was prepared to rebuke Xia Yan over, but not execute him. But the accusations of bribery pushed it over the line. Quote, the emperor suspected that he had been duped into approving the campaign. These charges were never substantiated. What in fact disturbed the emperor was Xia Yan's arrogance. Although Xia was formally charged with collusion, he was put to death for insubordination. The emperor once again unwittingly executed one of Yan Song's enemies. End quote. Over the course of Yan Song's tenure as Grand Secretary, this sort of punitive demotion of his foes would become so routine as to eventually earn Yan a very

bad reputation across the court. Regardless of any such reputation, with Xia Yan's demise, Yansong held absolute power over the Ming imperial court from 1549 until his own dismissal in 1562. Quote, he made certain that his colleagues lacked influence, and he deferred to the emperor's wishes in even the most trivial of matters. End quote. In fact, his entire tenure in office seems to have been built around a single overriding principle, that the buck always, always stopped somewhere else. All major decisions were deferred to someone else, be it the emperor or to another official, so that if it turned out to have been the wrong decision, Yansong could simply shrug his shoulders and say, wasn't me. It was Grand Secretary Yansong, for instance, who had, in 1550, with the Mongols at the gates of Beijing, first devolved the

decision of trade negotiations onto the Minister of Rights, who had fumbled, and then devolved the decision of the Capital Defense onto the Minister of War, who had likewise epically fumbled and for which he was executed. To all of which, Chancellor Yan went, wasn't me. Unsurprisingly, the other officials of the court quickly came to despise Yan Song and his cheap, underhanded tactics to retain power and influence. Over the course of the 1550s, therefore, they time and again would impeach the Grand Secretary on charges of corruption, bribery, suppressing reports to the throne, and allowing his family members to run roughshod over their own ill-gotten positions for their own gain. Yet time and time again, Yansong was able to skillfully play upon the judging emperor's

own simmering distrust of his own officials to convince him that all of these charges were just them acting on their own venal partisan grudges, or else indirectly criticizing the emperor himself by spitefully attacking his chief minister. An explanation the ever-distrustful and disgusted emperor was only too ready to accept about his own courtiers. Today, we're only going to briefly touch on the goings-on down south in places like the Nanjing garrison, since we'll be looking far more into that next episode. Wink wink. But insofar as it related to the broader financial problems the Ming Empire was facing over the course of the 1550s and beyond, it's at least worth taking a little gander at. As we've already noted, the imperial finances were not doing terribly well.

It's not that there wasn't money to be made in the empire, there absolutely was, and at least some people were benefiting from that profitability immensely. It just generally wasn't the central government. Much of those gains had been effectively privatized, and the imperial court just couldn't ever really quite figure out how to loop itself back into the broader tax schema. How this played into the goings-on at Nanjing centered around the garrison put into place there over the course of the 1550s in an attempt to control and curb the uptick in piracy across the southern waterways. Such a garrison was, as they do tend to be, quite costly to maintain. Well, as of 1558, the court got the bright idea to save some money by

cutting back on the garrison's grain rations, which served as a supplement to the soldiers' already meager pay, as well as taking better care to drop the dead soldiers from their enlistment roles so as to not accidentally continue to pay for them. This reduction, and then further reduction for grain rations, could scarcely have come at a worse time, because as of 1559, the whole of the Yangtze River Delta was gripped in a severe drought, causing grain prices across the region to spike to more than double what they'd been before. The soldiers, predictably, were not happy about this, and so they rioted. The Vice Minister of Revenue was dragged from his office and murdered by a group of angry soldiers, and then hanged

naked from an archway where his corpse was then used for target practice by the archers. From Geis, quote, All the high officials in Nanjing met in the prefectural offices to decide what to do, but when the rioting soldiers surrounded the compound, they were forced to flee for their lives. The troops were finally quieted down after the Ministry of Revenue dispersed 40,000 ounces of silver to them. The situation was so unstable that the court refused to even investigate the incident, and the garrison went unpunished, end quote. Another such incident only served to compound the problem across this decade. The ever-growing demand for stipends from the imperial treasury

from members of the imperial clan from all across the empire. By 1562, for instance, reportedly over 8.5 million don of grain, or its equivalent in silver, was being set aside annually to pay the imperial clansmen. And it spiraled ever higher, year after year, generation after generation. The issue came to a head in 1564, when 140 imperial clansmen surrounded the governor of Shanxi's mansion in order to demand their back pay, which by that point had fallen more than 600,000 dan into arrears.

The governor's officials were only able to come up with a paltry 78,000 dan, less than 20% of the amount owed, which was understandably deemed to be insultingly insufficient. Ultimately, the Jiajing emperor himself stepped in to resolve this crisis, in pretty much the most Jiajing way possible, in that he simply declared that all of the imperial clansmen demanding their money were to be immediately stripped of their status and reduced to tachometers, and then issuing a harsh rebuke to their respective princes that they should not let such a thing happen again. In so doing, he'd put a band-aid on the wound, but had utterly failed to address the infection within. Nor would he.

For the rest of his long reign, Jiajing would do just about nothing to effectively improve the dismal state of his imperial treasury. As of the year 1560, the Grand Secretary, Yan Song, having clutched onto supreme power for nearly two decades at this point, was 80 years old, and feeble in both body and mind. For some time now, he'd been reliant on his own son, Yan Xifan, to accompany him wherever he went, draft his orders for him, and generally act as the actual power behind his title. This canard came to life in 1561, when Yan Song's wife died in the summer, meaning that both father and son were to observe an extended period of mourning.

Over the course of this period, as a matter of course, Yan Shifan could no longer accompany his father on the elder's official visits to the emperor, and frankly, it showed. Yan Song himself could no longer so much as independently read Jia Jing's handwriting, and as such had to carry all such instructions and missives home with him so that his son could decipher them for him. Yen Shafan himself was in a real state as well, processing the loss of his mother by often, quote, being drunk or otherwise debauched and thus unable to prepare something in time. When the emperor sent eunuchs to press for an answer, Yen had to draft something himself, and his drafts were now found wanting. He was simply too old to continue the work. He was, after all, not a Taoist immortal, but a sick old man. He was vulnerable, and soon he was undone.

End quote. This downfall would be sealed by another of the Grand Secretaries, a man named Xu Jie, who had originally been recommended to the Secretariat by none other than the late Xia Yan, who Yan Song had put to death back in 1548. And yes, I know that these court machinations are rather confusing. They always are, and especially so when we're dealing with multiple persons with Yan as part of their name, but please do bear with me as I'm parsing this down as much as it's reasonable. So, Xu Jie had spent much of the prior decade doing his best to undermine

Yan Song, who he'd never liked and basically wanted his job, pretty far for the course all things considered. Yet time and again, his efforts had been foiled and dismissed, though tellingly, Yan Song had never been able to actually pin anything on Xu Jie, a testament to the younger man's own talent at playing this decidedly deadly political game. Now, the Jiajing Emperor had never fully trusted Yan Song, and I mean, who could blame him? And so, in time, and especially given Yan's declining state as he aged, he came to rely more and more upon Secretary Xu instead, ultimately allowing Xu to be put in charge of preparing Jia Jing's personal elixirs and plant-based medicines, a task previously solely entrusted to Yan Song himself.

Geist writes that, quote, Though, admittedly, that seems like less a personal slight against Yan himself than just Jia Jing doing what Jia Jing do. Nevertheless, as Yan's declining abilities became ever more conspicuous, Jia Jing began actively seeking a replacement. Xu Jie had been waiting eight years for this moment. He knew that the Emperor no longer found Yan Song useful and that he despised Yan's son. He tried to exacerbate the Emperor's dissatisfaction wherever possible. When Jiajing's residential palace had burned down, again, for instance, Yan opposed its reconstruction and instead suggested that the emperor take up residence in another palace. But the palace that he had suggested just so happened to be the same one

that Emperor Yingzong had been kept in while imprisoned a century prior in the 1450s. Suffice it to say, that idea did not prove to be a winner. And especially when Xu Jie was right there telling Jiajing to, no, go right ahead, totally rebuild your palace, your highness. When the rebuild was completed in less than four months, there was little Yan could say or do to convince Jiajing that he hadn't completely lost the plot. Less than two months after having taken up residence in his newly built palace, the Jiajing emperor at last dismissed Yan Song from his post. This was all very much helped along, it must be noted,

by a nice little sleight of hand managed by Xu Jie himself. For a period of years by this point, he'd had an in with the new imperial Taoist diviner, since his appointment upon the death of the last one in 1559. At first, the diviner did his job by the book and to the letter, which meant that he would receive sealed questions from the emperor, and then as part of the ritual burn them without reading them, and then write down the questions from the emperor, and then as part of the ritual, burn them without reading them, and then write down the response from the spirits, sight unseen. It will probably not surprise too terribly many of you

that said responses were rather less than satisfactory to the Jiajing emperor, being pretty much as accurate as shaking a magic eight ball. But all that began to change when Xu Jie got on the good side of this diviner, and convinced him that he would make the ever-tempestuous monarch a heck of a lot happier, and consequentially his own job and status much more secure, if he'd just go ahead and take a quick little peek at those imperial messages to the gods before burning them. Lo and behold, all of a sudden, the divine answers became a lot more specific and very much more to the emperor's liking. Wow, what a miracle.

So there was the pledge, and then there was the turn. But of course, we know that that cannot be the end of the magic trick. We still need the prestige. Now came the part where Xu Jie turned those very favorable divine responses against Yansong himself. Again from Geis, quote, Shortly before he was dismissed, Yan was the subject of a series of responses. Again from Geis was not. When this was subsequently confirmed in other divinations, the emperor became very agitated. End quote. When news of this percolated informally throughout the palace, as it does, a censor took it upon

himself to file articles of impeachment against Yansong's son, Yanshifan. And when Yansong tried to intercede on his son's behalf, he was rebuked by the throne itself for exceeding his authority. By that June of 1562, he was summarily retired from office. But the hard times were just beginning for the Yan family. Pretty much immediately after his father was dismissed, Yanshifan was exiled to a garrison in a malarial region. Rather than go to this posting, however, he decided to return to his home region in Jiangxi, and once there, take up a sizable bodyguard force, eventually numbering perhaps more than 4,000 strong. When this was reported to the throne at the end of 1564, Yan Shifan was accused of treason, arrested, and brought back to Beijing for trial.

The judging emperor, as we'd already noted, hated Yan Shifan, and so was only too happy to find him guilty of the charges and sentence him to death, which was carried out that April 1565. As for his father, Yan Song, he was summarily reduced to the status of commoner, and the entire family estate confiscated. Yansong died in squalor later that year, quote, an outcast with no one at court to turn to for help, end quote. We'll leave off today, then, with a summation of the Jiajing Emperor's last years in power. He had, since at least 1560 or so, been suffering from frequent and extended bouts of insomnia, a common side effect of immortality elixir poisoning.

While this at first seemed something of a boon, as in Jiajing would frequently work through the nights reading, commenting, and responding to all manners of reports at a very rapid pace, it inevitably further wore away at his already slipping sanity. Moreover, he began developing more and more wild mood swings, from joviality to depression to melancholy to rage, all seemingly with little, if any, provocation or reason. His attendants tried to humor his mental and emotional decline wherever and however they could. Geist notes that one of their favorite tactics was to secretly place peaches into Jia Jing's bed while he slept, and then act surprised and insisting that they must have fallen in the night as blessings from heaven,

gifts from the immortals. By 1565, it's noted that his mental capacity had certainly diminished, and by mid-March of 1566, told Xu Jie that he wished to return to his birthplace to rejuvenate his life force, as he had been seriously ill for more than 14 months at that point. Xu Jie, however, dissuaded him from doing so, arguing, almost certainly correctly, that the rigors of such a journey would be more than the frail, sick, and, quite frankly, dying, emperor could possibly withstand. As such, Jiajing remained in the Forbidden City for what would be the rest of his life, a mere 10 months, until January 23rd, 1567, when his condition

suddenly worsened, and, after being taken back to his residence, he died around midday. He was 59 years old, and had ruled the Ming Empire for just shy of 46 years. To that point, the longest in the whole Ming Dynasty, and ultimately only surpassed by his grandson, the Wanli Emperor, a generation later. It is always difficult to adequately sum up a period as long and varied as the Jiajing Era. The mid-16th century was an action-packed period for China and the Ming, and any period of almost half a century is going to see its fair share of ups and downs. Nevertheless, that certainly hasn't prevented scholars, historians, and chroniclers from across time from giving it their best shot. Ming historian Tan Qian would write of Jiajing in the early 1600s that Jiajing,

while somewhat better than the various other emperors across time who had also lost their minds and lives seeking immortality via elixirs, was nevertheless, quote, on the whole undistinguished, end quote. The editors of the official history of the Ming, compiled and published in the late 18th century under the auspices of the government of the Manchu Qing dynasty that would succeed it, certainly pulled few punches, citing Jiajing as a, quote, mediocre ruler, end quote. James Geis himself puts forth his own assessment of the Jiajing emperor's time on the throne in the voice of Sir Francis Bacon, himself quoting Tacitus,

on the nature of empire that we open today's episode with. Sunt plurumque regum voluntatis vehementes, et inter se contriariae. The desires of kings are for the most part vehement and inconsistent. And yet, for all that, and in spite of his death, it turns out that we are not yet quite done with the judging emperor, nor his era of rule. Because next time, we head to the rivers and coasts of South China once again, because there's trouble afoot.

Trouble in the form of a topic that I've been eager to get to for some time now. So strap on your peg leg, find yourself a nice parrot, affix your eyepatch, and raise the black flag, because it's time to shiver some timbers and take a look at the pirates of the Chinese coast in the mid-16th century. Yar! 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.