The History of China - #245 - Ming 31: Event Horizon

Episode Date: December 12, 2022

Being the most powerful person in the empire must be nothing but the good life, right? Well... not so much. And especially with the truly dysfunctional Ming system facing the newly-adult Wanli Emperor, it's a system that promises all the perks, but delivers only drudgery, frustration, and disappointment. Not even 5,000 concubines can make up for that... Time Period Covered: 1582-1600 CE Major Historical Figures: The Wanli Emperor (Zhu Yizhun) [r. 1572-1620] Empress Xiaoduan (Wang Xijie) [1564-1620] Noble Consort Wang [1565-1611] Prince Zhu Changluo, "First Imperial Son" [1582-1620] Noble Consort Zheng [1565-1630] Prince Zhu Changxun, "Third Imperial Son" [1586-1641] Grand Secretary Zhang Zhuzheng [d. 1582] Major Sources Cited: Duhalde, Marcelo. “Life inside the Forbidden City: how women were selected for service” in South China Morning Post (July 12, 2018). Huang, Ray. 1587, A Year of No Significance: The Ming Dynasty in Decline. Huang, Ray. “The L’ung-ch’ing and Wan’li Reigns, 1567-1620” in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 7: The Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644, Part I. Toshima, Yoriko [Su Chung]. Court Dishes in China.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. 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. From a revolution of hope and liberty to the infamous Reign of terror. You can't understand the modern world without understanding the French Revolution. So search for the French Revolution today. Hello and welcome to the History of China. Episode 245, Event Horizon

The palace compound was magnificent, but also oppressively monotonous. Even with those balustrades, incense burners, sculptured birds, and bronze lamps on stone bases, the Forbidden City comprised by and large the same architecture and routines over and over again. On fixed dates, the platoons and battalions of attendants changed from fur-lined robes with ear coverings into silk, and then into lightweight gauze for the summer. Flowers were taken out from winter storage, leaves were raked and ditches dredged, all according to a prearranged schedule. Yet palace life remained timeless and seasonless, lacking either thrill of surprise or the excitement of anticipation. As emperor, Wanli could not venture outside the palace

compound. He could not even think of dropping in to visit his courtiers at home. No ritualistic proceeding to govern such behavior had been established in the dynasty's history. From 1587, A Year of No Significance, by Rui Huang I must admit, I've experienced something of a forcible change of heart in the process of researching this specific episode. As has almost certainly been made evident over the course of the past nine or so years, my personal opinion on monarchy, and especially divine monarchy, is that it is, in general, a pretty bad idea that deserves all of the ridicule that the ages have piled upon it. And no, I have not abandoned that particular ideation of monarchy in general. But I certainly did come into the Wanli Emperor's reign era fully expecting to find him a contemptible,

useless placeholder who sat by and zithered while his kingdom burned around him. That would certainly have fit comfortably within the traditional Confucian verdict against this penultimate in-spirit, if not quite numerical order, Ming monarch, as well as that of Maoist revisionists, particularly of the Cultural Revolution era, which would see his tomb and artifacts destroyed and his remains dragged out and burned by a bunch of teenage zealots. And to be sure, I'm not not taking that position either. There definitely is a lot of blame to go around when it comes to the decline and fall of the Ming Dynasty. And especially considering that Wanli sits on the Dragon Throne for just shy of half a century of that period, as it's on its way down towards sinking beneath the waves, he certainly deserves

his fair share of blame. That said, upon reading further into the guy, it's almost impossible to not start, well, pitying him. Which I know is a weird thing to say. Oh, the most powerful guy in all of China, what a sob story. Right. But as we will see here today, and even beginning last episode, in oh-so-many respects, over his entire life, Wanli found himself a beautiful bird locked in a golden cage, and eventually decided to use the example of his grandfather's own intransigence to protest the stifling system that promised him total authority, but never allowed him to use it, in the only way that he could envision, sheer non-participation. And so today we're going to lay the groundwork for that, the events which led up to his decision to retreat from the

government and essentially lock himself in his room for the next 20 years. Reading through Rei Huang's fascinating book, 1587, A Year of No Significance, I couldn't help but personally empathize with the plight of both the emperor and all of the other denizens of the Forbidden City over and over again. The sheer rote stiltedness of their lives was truly suffocating, even maddening, and more than anything, dreadfully boring. All of that in spite of its lavish splendor. It sounds like, well, just about every public space in China even today. Parks are all still very, look but don't touch-touch, please-stay-off-the-grass. Communities go through their seasonal landscaping routines of digging up the last season's plants

and implanting the next season's preferred variety. It's beautiful, it's prepared and prescribed, and it can feel very lifeless, even quite boring. It proceeds like clockwork, and so it can feel very much like one is living inside of a clock. From the outside looking in, being the Emperor of China, or even one of the dynasty's high officials or servants, must have seemed like the ultimate prize. A life of lavish luxury, surrounded by wealth, jewels, wine, women, and excess, all to your heart's desire. Wearing the finest clothes, sleeping in the finest beds with the finest women. Yet all that glittered from afar was not gold. Very little information was ever

allowed out of the Forbidden City about the life or routines of the Emperor or its other denizens. I mean, Forbidden is right there in the name, after all. And for just about everyone outside of a chosen few already within its gravitational clutches, imperial life was a total black box, by design. Very few who ever entered the imperial city, in fact, whether emperor or servant, ever left again while still alive. For all intents and purposes, they'd crossed a point of no return. It's only been with the distance of time and much study by many across the intervening centuries, piecing together what they could, that we know as much as we do about what happened behind those impenetrable vermilion walls.

No one in China ever lived a more rigidly controlled life than the emperor, wrote Yoriko Toshima, specifically about the Qing emperors, with whom her family-in-law had a close tie towards the end of that dynasty. She goes on, quote, Due to strict observances of traditional conventions of the court, the freedom of the emperor was far less than that of an ordinary man. As long as the emperor stayed within the court, he was restricted in every way by tradition, end quote. He was expected to rise at four every morning to prepare for his daily sunrise audience with his court. After this, he had breakfast at seven in the winter and spring, or six in the summer and autumn. After which, he spent the rest of the morning attending his official business. From Huang, quote, On an ordinary working day, the emperor acted upon two or three dozen documents that were brought to his attention. Each was written on a long sheet of paper folded screen fashion to form a pamphlet of four, eight, twelve, or more pages.

The documents differed from one another in format, according to their classification, the number of characters on each page, and the style of writing. But in general, they fell into two major categories. Those submitted by the capital officials in the name of their offices, along with reports and petitions from the provinces, carried imprints of official seals. They had to go through the Office of Transmission. Capital officials, however, were entitled to submit memorials to the Emperor as individuals, sometimes delivered by the writers themselves and received by the palace eunuchs at the Gate of Polar Convergence. Without duplicates until the Emperor's rescript was attached and sent to the supervising secretaries for publication, these personal petitions and their contents remained confidential, unknown even to the writers' superiors. Many a controversy was caused by papers in this latter category."

At noon, there was a second court audience, when the emperor's main duties were to read and write comments on local government memorials or reports. Lunch was at one, followed by an afternoon relaxation period until 3, during which the emperor might de-stress by composing poetry or strolling through one of the Forbidden City's gardens. After that, the day's work resumed. From 3 to 7 in the evening, yet more work was done on memorials presented to the throne, and the drafting of rescripts approving, or, much more often, denying them. At last, at around 8pm, there would be a light supper and snack, after which the emperor could retire at last to his personal chambers.

Day after day after day. Still want the job? With the death of Wanli's Grand Secretary, Childhood Tutor, and in everything but name, Effective Regent, Zhang Zhuzheng, in 1582, the life of the young emperor fundamentally changed. Now nearing 20 years old, he would attempt for the first time in his life to take up the reins of governance himself. He looked upon the legacies of his grandfather, the Jiajing emperor, and of course even further back to those autocrats that Jiajing had modeled his own reign off of, those titans of the dynasty like Yongle and Hongwu, and wished to rule as they did, by direct and personal fiat.

In most respects, that was precisely how the Ming imperial government had been designed to function from the get-go, and indeed, it could not organizationally function in any other more bureaucratized capacity, by law. Yet for all that, such a system could only function as such if the autocrat in question held a sufficiently strong will to rule and direct every aspect of his government, and hold his ministers precariously above the fires of his imperial wrath at all times. And the wanly emperor, he had never been, and never would be, that guy. Gentle and quiet by nature, and with virtually the whole of his childhood and adolescent education bent around the idea of total deference toward Tudor Zhang,

Wanli was a sheep surrounded by a court of wolves. In the brief period of his early solo reign that he tried to assume personal control of his government, the result was disastrous. The death of Zhang Juzang had triggered within the court round after round of denunciations, impeachments, and purges by the various ministers as they vied for more power within the now rudderless government by seeking to out more and more of Zhang's former supposed supporters. Quote, The lack of any effective consensus from his court as an answer exposed the helplessness of the throne, as well as the fundamental organizational deficiencies within the government. That is to say, it was far easier for an official to denounce or censure an

opponent, and thereby almost ensure his removal from office, than it was for the government to reach any agreement on who his replacement might be. This is spelled out in a scene from Wanli's adolescence, again from Huang, quote, One duty Wanli could not delegate had to do with the power of appointment. The problem was solved in this way. Whenever there was a vacancy in a high office, Tudor Zhang and his ministers always submitted more than one candidate to the emperor's selection. When he circled one name with his vermilion brush, that person was appointed, and the emperor had, ostensibly, made a decision on his own. However, he had early on

been indoctrinated to believe that the person whose name topped the list was best qualified. End quote. The monarch, who on paper was supposed to be the ultimate decider, was fundamentally at the mercy of the proposals and selections put forth to him by his own ministers. As such, unless they acted in consort, or unless there was a sufficiently overriding personality to cow them all into a single will, very little indeed could get done. Moreover, by attempting to dip his toe into the murky pool of day-to-day court politics, the emperor inadvertently opened himself up to criticisms from those of his ministers who felt that he was acting against their interests. Quote,

The mystique of the throne had to remain impersonal. By becoming entangled in the machinations of his bureaucrats, the emperor not only damaged his personal reputation, but also impaired the effectiveness of his office. The severity of imperial justice and its unpredictableness had silenced opposition during previous reigns. Yet when the Wanli Emperor exercised this prerogative routinely but indecisively, all was lost, end quote. In essence, young and rising officials were able to figure him out, what got a rise out of him, how he would likely react, and thus whether the juice was worth the squeeze. Many a would-be rising star became willing to risk the imperial wrath

and brave the punishments that went with it in order to achieve instant fame with a certain powerful clique of learned officiants. But more on them later. Eventually, Wanli was convinced by his Grand Secretary, Shen Shixing, to, in the words of many a concerned parent of a bullied child, just ignore the meanies and leave the remonstrating papers and memorials unanswered. Unfortunately for him, and the realm altogether as it would turn out, by that point the damage had already been done. Wanli would be seen by many of his own ministers not as an unknowable quasi-divine sovereign on high, but someone who could be prodded, poked, and baited with only limited consequences risked.

In turn, Wanli's adopted practice of ignoring his ministerial bullies would set the emperor on a path of passive resistance, a campaign of silence and boycott that would last for the rest of his lengthy reign, and with grave consequences for the dynasty as a whole as the 16th century gave way to the 17th. Another issue that has long haunted the Wanli reign era has been the emperor's alleged preoccupation with the pleasure of women. That certainly is a charge worth looking further into, as it would be bandied about both contemporaneously to his life, as well as much later on by 20th century communist revisionists seeking to single him out as a target particularly worthy of condemnation and desecration. So let's take a moment to assess the state of the Ming

inner court, aka the imperial harem. It will hopefully come as no surprise to any of you that plural marriage was standard operating procedure for the imperial house and had been for millennia. You may recall that in the whole of Chinese history, there is only one single emperor, Wanli's great-granduncle in fact, the Hongzhe Emperor of the late 1400s, who was even nominally monogamous. For the rest of the emperors, and especially by the late Ming and Qing, which adopted virtually wholesale its predecessors' customs and observances, the selection process for palace women was a tremendous ordeal. Flashing slightly forward from our current time period to the reign of Wanli's

grandson, the Tianqi Emperor, in 1621, the year following his enthronement, a call went out. All across the empire, though primarily from the localities immediately surrounding the capital itself, the imperial eunuchs fanned out to handpick the finest young women that could be mustered. As it was the Tianqi Emperor's first selection of concubines, it was a particularly grand affair, consisting ultimately of 5,000 girls aged 13 to 16. This age range was somewhat older than was typical in previous times for such selections. During the Wanli era, for instance, the age range was typically between 9 and 14. In any event, each community was assigned a quota of eligible girls

to send forth for presentation. If selected, they would proceed to and through the Great Gates of the Forbidden City, which would become for those selected into the Imperial Service, in every respect, the event horizon of the rest of their lives. During this particularly grand process of the Tianqi Emperor's 1621 selection, however, many more than usual would need to be weeded out. As such, having arrived within the Forbidden City, which for most of these girls was the first and likely only trip they would ever make outside of their family plot or estate in their entire lives. They were ordered to line up in 50 rows of 100, according to age. Once assembled, the evaluations began, based on physical characteristics. On the first day, 1,000 were eliminated for being deemed too short or tall,

or too fat or thin. On the second day, the remaining 4,000 were assembled yet again, with the eunuchs intensively examining the women's bodies, evaluating their voices and general manner. This cut the field in half to just two thousand. The third day consisted of intense examination of the remaining candidates' hands and feet, as well as their grace in motion. Thus, the two thousand became one thousand. This remainder went on to have gynecological exams, which saw a further seven hundred dismissed. The remaining three hundred then officially took up residence in the palace, during which they would undergo a month-long

series of tests and evaluations of their general intelligence, merit, temperament, and moral character. Of these, only the top 50 were selected to remain on, and were subjected to further interviews about their knowledge of such subjects as math, literature, and art, and thereby receiving a ranking. Ultimately, the top three were declared as official imperial concubines, with the remaining 47 being put to work as maids and attendants within the palace. Though it might sound as though these 50 girls had won the lottery, in fact, it was considered by many to be quite the opposite. Huang writes, quote, Those nymphs inside the Forbidden City became a frequent topic of erotic literature.

They were like an esculpted jade, yet said to be freshly fragrant, appearing either as voluptuous as fully blossomed peach trees glowing in the morning sun, or as slender and delicate as jasmine vibrating in an evening breeze. In reality, palace women were never unpleasant to look at. Yet hardly so glamorous and disturbingly beautiful as the romantic poets described them, because eye-catching quality had never been the standard for selection. The tears and loneliness of the girls who grew up within the compound must, however, have been real. Unless a palace woman caught the fancy of the emperor, the only male in the palace, her life was forlorn indeed. Having wasted her flourishing years as a chambermaid,

she either had to find the sympathy of a compatible eunuch in her middle age, or be sent to the northwest corner of the palace to perform miscellaneous labors. Upon her death, her remains would be cremated and buried in an unmarked grave, to assure neither rumor nor legend could arise around one who, theoretically, With so slim a chance of eliciting imperial favor, the lot of palace women was so uninviting that when an impending imperial selection was announced, many thoughtful parents quickly married off their young daughters to eliminate their eligibility. End quote. Well, at least this selection process was beneficial for the emperor himself, right?

Not so fast. Though there certainly must have been at least some level of affirmation in having a palace full of women whom the emperor could theoretically call upon at any time, in truth, imperial polygamy was basically utilitarian. Quote, such pleasure as it yielded was at a low level. The ecstasy of lovemaking, created by a freeing of body and mind in unison, was hardly possible between a demigod and his terrified subject, for the latter had in all likelihood been awed to numbness beforehand. End quote. The Wanli Emperor had been married to the girl who would become his empress in 1578. Him, 14, and her, the just-turned-13-year-old daughter of a commoner surnamed Wang, who had been hastily given an army commission in order to make such a union proper,

was not an exciting event. It was a marriage neither of love nor affection nor of even companionship, but of hard, cold political calculus. Indeed, it was a group event, with Wanli being simultaneously wedded to two other consorts. Wanli's mother, the Empress Dowager, and the Imperial Court all agreed that first and foremost, the young monarch, having finally reached the age of virility, must secure the dynastic line of succession with all due haste and start producing princes. Quote, Quote, In public, the girl, known as Empress Xiao Duan, was celebrated for her ceaseless devotion to filial piety and ritual observance, as she was

expected to take care of the Empress Dowager. Privately, however, she seemingly displayed the frustration of her joyless, loveless, suffocating existence by taking it out on her attendants and maidservants, and she was, quote, better remembered as a ruthless mistress who frequently ordered her chambermaids beaten, sometimes to death, end quote. Empress Xiaoduan would go on to live almost as long as her husband, becoming the longest-serving empress in Chinese history and bearing only one daughter, but never a son. For the emperor, there was at least a relief that, now married, his overbearing mother was expected to officially, mostly, get out of his hair, leading to slightly more freedom in his day-to-day life outside of his official duties.

As such, some four years after his marriage, actually while paying his mother a visit in her section of the palace grounds, he became entranced by one of the countless maidservants of the inner palace, named Lady Wang. The two had, at that point, one or more sexual liaisons before Wan Li grew tired of her and began to ignore her completely. However, in short order, Lady Wang was made aware that she had become pregnant with what would be the first imperial son, Zhu Chongluo. Upon learning that he had at long last produced a male heir, Wanli was, of course, obliged to take the girl as one of his

noble consorts, the second highest rank behind the Empress herself. Though the union would produce another child, a girl, in 1584, as with his Empress and two other consorts, this appears to have been a largely cold, joyless affair all around, at least after the initial passions faded. As luck would have it, it was round about this same period that what we can really call the love of the Wanli Emperor's life came into the picture.

In 1581, a 14-year-old girl surnamed Zheng was selected from the masses of potentials assembled in the imperial courtyard, and, as one of the top contenders, was elevated to the status of imperial concubine. This in itself was of course a very high honor. As a concubine, her father was elevated into the ranks of the Jin-Yu-Wei, or brocade-clad guard corps, and given command of a thousand households. For the girl herself, however, as we've already attested, this meant little, save that she would be tended to by the lesser maidservants rather than join their ranks. Without a marvelous stroke of luck, that would be the remainder of her lonely,

rather meaningless life. That would not, however, be her fate. The relationship between Wanli and Lady Zheng is a curious one, one that has baffled many across the ages. Quote, female within arm's length, prefer a romantic love affair with such an innocent little thing, one among at least a dozen who had been chosen for the sole purpose of providing the dynasty with reserve heirs, to his union with the woman who had infatuated him and given birth to his first son. More inscrutable still was the fact that this love was later said to have lasted throughout the rest of their lives and become a major cause of the constitutional crisis that was destined to make a prosperous empire unhappy, end quote. Zheng was not written of as having been a great beauty, though she was, of course, far from ugly, as any number of initial examinations would have removed her from contention entirely had she been physically unattractive or blemished.

But when everyone else is also physically beautiful, that becomes a rather unimportant quality, or at least secondary. Rather, the very enduring nature of Wanli's attraction to Lady Zheng must certainly have been beyond the physical. She was intelligent, conversational, and learned, yes, but again, so were any number of the other girls who lived in the inner palace, or else they would have been eliminated. In fact, the Wanli Emperor himself would later confide to his Grand Secretary, Shen Shixing, that he felt the way that he did about Lady Zheng because she took good care of him. She provided him with a sense of emotional security that few, if any, others in his lonesome, stilted life would ever match. Again, from Huang, quote,

Lady Zheng had come into Wanli's life at the right moment to fill a void. Overnight, she must have grasped the reality that beneath the dragon robe he wore was a lonesome and defenseless human being. Realizing this, Lady Zheng quickly kept her rendezvous with destiny and attained instant womanhood. While other ladies distanced themselves from the emperor out of submission and fear, she teased him, laughed with him, and joked with him. If she had not put herself on equal footing with him, and appeared as more than his equal, how could she have provided the strength and assurance he wanted so badly? End quote. They were reported to visit temples and villas together, of course all safely within the Forbidden City's confines,

something so unusual for Wanli that he's not known to have ever done so with any of his other consorts or concubines. Within a year or two of having consummated their relationship, Lady Zheng gave birth to their first child, a girl, the Princess Yunhe, and Wanli had her promoted to the rank of noble consort. The following year, she gave birth to a boy, the emperor's second son, though any joy quickly withered into bitter sorrow as the newborn seems to have died the same day that he was born. Nevertheless, the year after that, they would have a third child together, another boy. This time, the infant would thrive. He would be named Zhu Changshun, and throughout the palace, was referred to as the Third Imperial Son. In celebration, Wanli ordered that Lady Zheng be promoted to the station of Imperial Noble Consort,

the highest possible rank within the Imperial Harem beside the Empress herself, above all other secondary wives, even that of the mother of his eldest son, Noble Consort Wang. To his courtiers, his intention was obvious. By so elevating consort Zheng, Wang Li intended to establish his newborn as the heir apparent by using the principle that sons derived their rank from their mothers. This can only be thought of as an act of love for his favorite wife. He wished their son to inherit the realm, and Zheng to, in time, become the Empress Dowager. Yet this act of love for his favorite wife. He wished their son to inherit the realm, and Deng to, in time, become the Empress Dowager. Yet this act of love would come to split his own court in two,

and in so irreconcilable a manner that it would, in truth, never recover. Huang puts it, quote, Some bureaucrats defended primogeniture in principle. They regarded it as an essential Hi everyone. could cost them their own lives and bring misfortune and disgrace to their families when the succession was finally settled. 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. At the heart of this opposition to the imperial will regarding his own succession was an unlikely group of academicians, ministers, and officials who are together loosely remembered as the Donglin Movement, or sometimes the Donglin Party. Now, we have to classify pretty much everything about what I just said. First off, they were not a party in any modern sense of the term. The word that can be translated as party, or dāng, holds more of a negative connotation than it does in English,

as the idea of a formal political faction within the imperial court was officially anathema, to the point of outright illegality. All ministers were to be loyal and serve the emperor above all and alone, and certainly should have no other group to which they would adhere instead. Right. Rather, dāng might be better understood in terms of overall tone as klik, faction, or maybe even gang. Secondly, it hardly even qualifies as that in any traditional sense. Quote, There was no fixed criterion for membership. At the beginning, members received the label from their enemies. As partisan controversies developed, any public figure could earn membership, sometimes posthumously, simply by virtue of his political sympathies or even his social contacts. Eventually, the label came to be regarded as a badge of honor,

end quote. As with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart's attempt to define smut half a world and some three centuries away in 1964, quote, I shall not attempt to define it, and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so, but I know it when I see it, end quote. If nothing else, so-called membership in the Dongling He-Man Woman Haters Clubhouse revolved around a strict adherence to orthodox Confucianism, and in particular, as ever, fastidious observance to proper ethical behavior. When Grand Secretary Zhang Juzheng, for instance, had sought an exemption from the prescribed three-year mourning period for the death of his father. The Donglin troop had marked him out as a man

utterly lacking in principles or virtue. And so it was with the Emperor's astonishing move to replace his eldest son with his third, which they howled was unethical and improper to the point that it flew squarely in the face of the very balance of the universe itself, the upholding of which was, after all, the sovereign's first and primary task, above all other considerations, much less his own personal feelings on the matter. Yet, when their remonstrations and complaints fell upon decidedly deaf imperial ears, they turned to a new tactic. They would encourage and cheer on others, almost exclusively young officiants in low positions, to speak up and criticize the emperor's intransigence, thereby risking, indeed virtually guaranteeing, imperial censure and punishment for them.

These brash young upstarts would often find themselves beaten, stripped of their office and title, and even jailed or exiled. So what on earth could have kept them coming, one after the next after the next, to hop up and down on Wanli's last nerve over and over again? Easy. It made them one of the hyper-cool crowd, with more fame and street cred for having nobly upheld virtue and righteousness, even at the cost of their own bodies and careers. In fact, that made it even cooler. And don't pretend like you don't understand the draw of doing something stupid and dangerous because the cool kids told you to. We all get it. Heck, back in the Yongle Emperor's reign, even I was saying,

man, that Fang Xiaoru, he sure knew how to stick it to the Emperor. And this is kind of like that, except, you know, they just catch a beating and maybe wind up in jail or on the border or something. They didn't even have to get sliced in half after watching their entire family die. I mean, that's a bargain. Wanli, for his part, and quite understandably, loathed the Donglin cadre down to his very marrow. In fact, when sympathizers that he'd pronounced punishments upon had their friends show up later to try to appeal their sentences, Wanli would frequently uphold the appeal, also that he could then slam down on the guy with an

even harsher punishment than the one that had been meted out before. Yet once again, that didn't slow them down, but in fact added fuel to the fires of their hearts. Quote, Little did the sovereign realize that his own emotional antipathy tended to fan the frenzy of their movement rather than cool it off. End quote. As they saw it, the fact that they were being so unjustly punished for trying to uphold virtue and stick to their principles was proof positive that they were the heroes of the story, and fighting the good fight against the evil that was so clearly in control of the Ming government. Thus, increased punishments served as little more than a badge of honor, and by the end of the Ming dynasty altogether, there were more Dongling sympathizers in jail or exile than actually still in office.

Sort of like the Aryan Brotherhood, but instead of Nazi skinhead murderers and drug traffickers, it was a prison gang of hyper-nerdy literaries and poets who were concerned with eating really bland foods and stopping anyone from having too much fun, and whose primary criminal enterprise consisted of loudly complaining that the Emperor didn't display proper ethics. But other than that, totally the same. Now, admittedly, it's really hard to try to get into the heads of the radically reactive Orthodox Confucian ministers who got off on provoking the Emperor, or what exactly made them tick, especially since, for most of us moderns, myself included, Confucianism itself remains a fairly remote philosophy, at best, if not out-and-out alien. But Huang does a pretty good job of getting us most of the way there. He says, quote,

In the late 16th century, orthodox Confucian values had far more appeal than we can, or are willing, to appreciate. Confucius himself had expounded the doctrine that in his love for humanity, a cultured gentleman should be ready to lay down his life, and Mencius demanded that individuals forego their self-interest in deference to the public well-being. The call for self-sacrifice and determination, relentlessly presented in the classics and histories, was thought by such orthodox Confucians to provide a formidable reservoir of inner strength superior to any organizational or operational strength. The death-defying rectitude of

remonstrating officials in front of the emperor, endemic to the Ming dynasty, manifested the same sublimated attitude towards the purpose of life. Song Neo-Confucians had already explained that all such ethical precepts and practices were consistent with natural law as they saw it. The implied appeal of martyrdom gratified those Donglin followers who relished the noble cause of the unjustly persecuted in an era of failures and frustrations." Now, I'll probably lose somewhere between 75 to 90% of you with this upcoming reference, but we've all come this far together, so let's just go with it. If you've ever seen the anime series One Punch Man, it's essentially Moomin Rider furiously peddling into a fight against the Deep Sea King, even though he knows full well that he's about to get turned into a pink mist. Because, in his mind, that's what heroes do.

Such is the mentality of these Donglin Orthodox Confucian ministers. And yet, for all that gusto and gumption, there really wasn't much else for them beyond that insane, self-destructive, do-or-die attitude toward moral rectitude. The Donglin group never developed any actual or even theoretical governing philosophy other than just the vague assertion that, by virtue of their own ethical superiority, they could overcome any obstacle and solve any problem. Instead, throughout what amounts to their entire time in the historical spotlight, they remained almost singularly focused on purging the imperial court of anyone and everyone who were, in their stern

and uncompromising estimation, of insufficient moral character. In 1587, for instance, they took advantage of the precedent established by the late Grand Secretary Zhang Zhejiang to call for the dismissal of the Minister of Works for clearly partisan reasons. The minister had, after all, been in office for barely a month at that point, how in the world could he have even done something impeachable yet? The emperor was, of course, angered. Though he was unable to spare the Minister of Works from being removed, Wang Li subsequently ordered that the four proto-Donglin censors at that point who had issued the complaint be transferred, i.e. exiled, to distant provincial posts, and that the censor-in-chief take an early retirement for having failed to

reign his lackeys in. When two of the imperial secretaries subsequently complained that such an action violated the censorate's immunity, while foolishly also launching separate protests against the throne, the emperor batted them down as well, reprimanding them both in his terse denials of their memorials and docking their salaries for a period. Nevertheless, it proved to be something of a deadlock. The censorate had a near-unlimited power to impeach officials, while the emperor had a totally unlimited power to punish. There was no institutionalized mechanism that could stop this destructive contest for negative influence. Some six years later, the game would begin again with the next imperial evaluations,

this time with even greater intensity. Ultimately, the Donglin squad would manage to implicate the Grand Secretariat itself. In the end, though, the only actual political aim that the gadflies of the Donglin clique were able to truly fulfill was in the stymieing of the Wanli Emperor in his quest to appoint his third son as his heir. Through what amounted to career suicide swarm attacks, Wanli was, highly, highly grudgingly, forced to concede that, without the approval of the bureaucrats, he could never revise what they considered to be fundamental laws of the dynasty, which was absolute agnatic primogeniture. Whether in service or in exile, quote, the leaders of the opposition were able to bring pressure on the emperor, or, failing that, on his chief counselor, and failing that, on the next rank found himself forced to retain his eldest son in his position as the lawful heir to the throne.

The court would simply not allow him to make such an unprecedented change to the roster, and it was something that he would never, ever forgive them for. That brings us right up to the precipice of the year 1600, and as such, we'll leave off there, just as Wanli gets ready to take his imperial ball and go home. Next time, we'll see if the Ming imperial government can effectively function with neither a participatory sovereign nor a strong-willed centralizing high official

to hold down the fort. And spoiler alert, no, it most definitely cannot. Oh boy, this is going to be a real awkward couple of... decades? Really? Oof.

Thanks for listening. The French Revolution set Europe ablaze. It was an age of enlightenment and progress, but also of tyranny and oppression. It was an age of glory and an age of tragedy. One man stood above it all. This was the age of Napoleon. I'm Everett Rummage, host of the Age of Napoleon podcast. Join me as I examine the life and times

of one of the most fascinating and enigmatic characters in modern history. Look for the Age of Napoleon wherever you find your podcasts.