Reign of the Yongle Emperor
Yongle ruled with great energy and at great cost. The new capital, the palaces, the Grand Canal, the voyages and the wars on two frontiers left heavy burdens for his successors, but they also gave the Ming state much of the shape it kept for the next two centuries.
Purges and Control
His first act was to destroy those who had served his nephew. The most famous victim was the Confucian scholar Fang Xiaoru, who refused to draft Yongle's proclamation of accession. According to tradition, Yongle had not only Fang's family but also his students executed, the so-called extermination of ten degrees of kinship, and hundreds died. Other Jianwen loyalists were killed with their families, and the records of Jianwen's reign were suppressed.
Yongle revived the Embroidered Uniform Guard, the imperial secret police, and in 1420 created the Eastern Depot, a surveillance agency run by eunuchs. His reliance on eunuchs as envoys, commanders and agents set a pattern that later Ming emperors followed.
Scholarship and Religion
Alongside the purges, Yongle presented himself as a patron of learning. Between 1403 and 1408 more than two thousand scholars compiled the Yongle Encyclopedia, a vast collection of existing literature in over 22,000 chapters. In 1415 he issued official compendiums of the Confucian classics with the commentaries of Zhu Xi, which became the standard texts for the civil service examinations.
His closest adviser in the years before his accession was Yao Guangxiao, a Buddhist monk also known by his religious name Daoyan. Yongle was a generous patron of Tibetan Buddhism. In 1407 he received the fifth Karmapa, Deshin Shekpa, at Nanjing and conferred on him the title Great Precious Dharma King. The imperial workshops of his reign produced gilt-bronze Buddhist figures in a Sino-Tibetan style, many inscribed with a six-character Yongle dedication; they are among the most admired Ming bronzes.
Beijing and the Forbidden City
Yongle's power base had always been in the north. In 1403 he renamed Beiping as Beijing, the "northern capital", and began to move the government there. Work on the new palace, the Forbidden City, began in 1406 and was completed in 1420; the court formally moved in 1421, and Nanjing became the secondary capital.
The Forbidden City measures about 961 metres from north to south and 753 metres from east to west, and is surrounded by a wall and a moat some 52 metres wide. It contains close to a thousand buildings. Around it lay the Imperial City, where offices, workshops and palace staff were housed, and around that the walls of Beijing itself; the Outer City to the south was walled in 1553. The Forbidden City remained the seat of the Ming and Qing emperors until 1912.
The Grand Canal
A capital in the north had to be fed with grain from the Yangtze delta. Before Yongle's reign, grain went north partly by sea and partly by a slow combination of river and canal routes that required repeated transfers between vessels. In 1411 the minister Song Li reopened the Huitong section of the Grand Canal in Shandong, and by 1415 the tribute grain travelled to Beijing entirely by inland waterway. The canal remained the main artery between north and south for the rest of the dynasty.
The Voyages of Zheng He
Yongle sent the eunuch admiral Zheng He on six great voyages between 1405 and 1422, with fleets of large ships carrying tens of thousands of men. They visited Southeast Asia, India, the Persian Gulf and the east coast of Africa, and brought envoys and tribute back to court. A seventh voyage followed under his grandson, the Xuande Emperor.
