Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
emperor. He was born to very poor peasant parents and was orphaned
at an early age. As a teenager he became a Buddhist monk and then
turned to the wandering life of a beggar when times got bad. He joined
a quasi-religious movement against the Mongols and quickly rose to
leadership. He had established a regime in Nanjing by 1367, and the
next year hemoved northward to Beijing, where he defeated theMongol
rulers and expelled them to Mongolia. He named his dynasty Ming.
Zhu gathered an unprecedented amount of political and military
power into his own hands, more than the Tang or even Song emperors
had. He was an extraordinarily competent and energetic ruler who
attended to a myriad of administrative details himself. He was the
apex of the Ming governmental pyramid, and he made all important
governmental decisions himself. This was the famous “Ming despo-
tism,” which refers not to his harsh treatment of his subjects (Zhu
was in fact a populist who advocated social leveling policies and insti-
tuted soak-the-rich taxation) but to his consolidation and concentra-
tion of power into his own hands, at the expense of the bureaucracy.
In fact, he may have been reacting against the late Yuan dynasty's lack
of effective, centralized power.
Zhu Yuanzhang was a gifted leader, but his shortcomings were star-
tling. Toward the end of his life, he grew paranoid and suspicious of
all those around him, even his lifelong associates and supporters,
and he had many of them dismissed or worse. He was hypersensitive
to criticisms and slights, real or perceived, and touchy about his per-
sonal ugliness.
The Ming government functioned well when a competent emperor
such as Zhu Yuanzhang ruled over it, but when subsequent mediocre
emperors came to power, the results were often disastrous. In such
cases, governmental power often devolved to the eunuchs, the emas-
culated personal attendants of the emperor, and they were not always
the most scrupulous of men. The late Ming period, in particular, was a
time of administrative gridlock and decay as emperors neglected their
governmental responsibilities while eunuchs ran the country as they
saw fit, for their own aggrandizement.
The third Ming emperor, Yongle (r. 1403-1425), moved the capital
from Nanjing to Beijing, where it remained for the rest of the dynasty,
because his power base was mostly in Beijing and because the city was
a convenient base from which to launch periodic raids into Mongolia
and keep an eye on any possible attempts to reestablish Mongol domi-
nation over China. Perhaps because he was nervous about the per-
ceived legitimacy of his succession to the throne, Yongle dispatched
the Muslim navigator Zheng He (Cheng Ho) on seven maritime
