Chenghua Emperor

Zhu Jianshen (1447–1487) was the eighth emperor of the Ming dynasty. He came to the throne in 1464 and ruled under the era name Chenghua, usually translated as "accomplished change", from 1465 until his death in 1487. His temple name is Xianzong.

He was a gentle man with a taste for the arts, a capable painter and calligrapher, but a difficult childhood left him indecisive, and he spoke with a stutter. His reign opened with sensible reforms and ended with the court in the hands of favourites and eunuchs. For collectors it is one of the great Ming reigns: the small, delicate porcelain made for his court, above all the doucai chicken cups, has been admired and copied since the sixteenth century.

A Childhood in His Uncle's Shadow

Zhu Jianshen was the eldest son of the Zhengtong Emperor. He was not yet two years old in 1449, when his father was captured by the Oirat Mongols. His uncle took the throne as the Jingtai Emperor, and when Zhengtong was released the following year, Jingtai kept him under house arrest in the palace for almost seven years.

The boy had been named crown prince in 1449, but in 1452 Jingtai replaced him with his own son, who died the next year. Zhu Jianshen grew up in his uncle's shadow, and only in 1457, when his father regained the throne and Jingtai died, was he restored as heir.

Accession and Early Reforms

His father, who had reigned a second time under the era name Tianshun, died early in 1464, and Zhu Jianshen succeeded him while still in his teens.

The first years of the reign were constructive. The court lowered taxes, sent relief to regions struck by drought and rehabilitated officials who had been unjustly punished. Among them was Yu Qian, the minister who had organised the defence of Beijing in 1449 and had been executed in 1457; his name was cleared in 1466. In 1475 the emperor restored the imperial title of his uncle Jingtai, who had been buried as a prince.

The army was reorganised and fought successful campaigns against the Jurchens in the north-east and the Mongols in the north, and in the 1470s a long line of walls was built along the Ordos frontier. At home, peasant uprisings continued, notably among refugee settlers in the mountains of Hubei, and they were put down harshly.

Intellectual life was lively. The Neo-Confucian scholars Chen Baisha and Hu Juren were prominent in these years, and the emperor himself painted and wrote a fine hand.

Consort Wan and the Hidden Heir

The dominant figure in the emperor's private life was Lady Wan, a palace woman many years older than him who had served him since childhood and protected him through his uncle's reign. Once he became emperor she was his favourite consort. His first empress, Lady Wu, was deposed within weeks of her appointment in 1464 after she had Lady Wan beaten.

In 1466 Lady Wan bore the emperor a son, who died in infancy. She had no more children, and for almost two decades she dominated the women's quarters of the palace. Tradition holds that she had eunuchs report any pregnancy among the emperor's other women, and that she forced abortions and had rivals killed. Whatever the truth, the emperor remained without a surviving son.

In 1470 a palace woman named Ji gave birth to a boy, Zhu Youcheng, who was hidden from Lady Wan within the palace with the help of eunuchs and the deposed Empress Wu. In 1475, when he was five, the emperor learned of him, received him with joy and named him crown prince. Lady Ji died suddenly the same year, and tradition blames Lady Wan. The boy was then brought up under the protection of his grandmother, the empress dowager. When he came to the throne as the Hongzhi Emperor, he gave his mother the rank of empress, and she was reburied with that rank in his father's tomb.

Favourites, Eunuchs and the Western Depot

As the reign went on, government slipped into the hands of the emperor's favourites. Lady Wan, eunuchs such as Liang Fang and Wang Zhi, and Daoist and Buddhist clerics at court grew rich. Offices were granted by direct palace order, outside the usual procedures, and titles were sold.

In 1477 the emperor created the Western Depot, a secret police agency under Wang Zhi, alongside the existing Eastern Depot. It watched officials and commoners alike and arrested and punished anyone suspected of disloyalty. It was abolished in 1482, the year Wang Zhi fell from favour, but it set a dangerous precedent and was revived under the emperor's grandson, the Zhengde Emperor.

The Chenghua Emperor tolerated these abuses and never found the resolve to end them. The cost fell on the treasury and on ordinary people, and unrest grew in the provinces.

Death of the Chenghua Emperor

Lady Wan died early in 1487, and the emperor died later the same year, before he reached the age of forty, after a reign of twenty-three years. Contemporaries believed that grief at her death hastened his own. He was buried in the Maoling at the Ming Tombs, and Zhu Youcheng succeeded him.

Chenghua Porcelain for Collectors

The Chenghua court spent heavily on the imperial kilns at Jingdezhen. Early in the reign the kilns largely followed the bold blue and white of the Xuande period. The mature Chenghua style is quite different: small, light pieces potted from a thin, warm white body under a soft, smooth glaze, painted in a gentle, pale blue. Cups, small jars and saucer dishes made to sit in the hand are typical, decorated with flowers, fruit, birds and children at play.

The reign is best known for doucai. The design is drawn in fine underglaze blue outlines and fired; the outlines are then filled with overglaze enamels and the piece is fired again at a lower temperature. The technique had been tried under Xuande, but it was perfected under Chenghua, whose thin, translucent green, yellow, red and aubergine enamels set the standard for all later doucai. Our guide to doucai and wucai explains how the two enamel styles differ.

The most famous Chenghua pieces are the chicken cups: small wine cups painted with a cockerel, a hen and chicks among rocks and flowering plants. Very few are known, most of them in museums, and late Ming writers already counted them among the most sought-after porcelain of the dynasty.

The standard reign mark has six characters, Da Ming Chenghua nian zhi (大明成化年製), "made in the Chenghua reign of the Great Ming", usually written in regular script, often within a double square. Among the pieces we have sold is a blue and white bowl with a Chenghua mark.

Few marks were copied more often. Potters wrote the Chenghua mark on their own wares in the sixteenth century, in great numbers under Kangxi, and in every period since; Japanese potters used it too, and Qing potters made their own versions of the chicken cups. Most pieces with a Chenghua mark were therefore made long after the reign. A mark records what was written, not when a piece was made, so each piece has to be judged by its body, glaze and painting. Our chart of Ming reign marks sets the Chenghua mark beside those of the other reigns.