Shih-Shan Henry Tsai
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Perpetual Happiness: The Ming Emperor Yongle
Shih-Shan Henry Tsai
The reign of Emperor Yongle, or “Perpetual Happiness”—which began with civil war and a bloody coup, and saw the construction of the Forbidden City, completion of the Grand Canal, and consolidation of the imperial bureaucracy—was one of the most dramatic and significant in Chinese history. In 1368 Yongle’s father, the Buddhist monk Zhu Yuanzhang, led the rebels who reclaimed China from the Mongol-ruled Yuan dynasty and reigned for 30 years as Emperor Hongwu, establishing the Ming dynasty. But Yongle (Zhu Di, 1360-1424) did not directly succeed his father; the throne first passed briefly to Yongle’s nephew, Emperor Jianwen, whom Yongle drove from the palace (and possibly murdered) in 1402.
The strong, centralized, autocratic government set up by his father and developed by Yongle—which concentrated power in the emperor, his eunuch assistants, and the scholar-advisors of the Grand Secretariat—lasted for more than two centuries. Yongle moved China’s capital from Nanjing to Beijing in 1421, where he constructed the magnificent Forbidden City, in which twenty-three successive…
