--- title: "Yongle Emperor (r. 1402–1424): Porcelain and Reign Mark" url: https://realrareantiques.com/ming-dynasty-emperors/yongle-emperor/ language: en description: "Zhu Di, the Yongle Emperor (r. 1402–1424): how he seized the throne, moved the capital to Beijing, sent Zheng He to sea, and the porcelain of his reign." alternates: zh-Hant: https://realrareantiques.com/zh-hant/ming-dynasty-emperors/yongle-emperor/ zh-Hans: https://realrareantiques.com/zh-hans/ming-dynasty-emperors/yongle-emperor/ --- *Portrait: public domain, via [wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Anonymous-Ming_Chengzu.jpg)* Ming Dynasty1402–1424 # Yongle Emperor 永樂 **Reign facts and reign mark** **Reigned:** 1402–1424 (22 years) **Lived:** 1360–1424 **Personal name:** Zhu Di 朱棣 **Temple name:** Chengzu 成祖 **Era name:** Yongle 永樂 1403–1424 年製永樂 ***Reign mark**Made in the Yongle reign. [How to read reign marks](https://realrareantiques.com/ming-reign-marks/)* [Ming Dynasty Emperors](https://realrareantiques.com/ming-dynasty-emperors/) **On this page** 1. Early Life and the Northern Frontier 2. The Succession and the Jingnan Campaign 3. Reign of the Yongle Emperor 4. Military Campaigns 5. The Choice of Heir 6. Death of the Yongle Emperor 7. Yongle Porcelain for Collectors Zhu Di (1360–1424), known by his era name as the Yongle Emperor, was the third ruler of the [Ming dynasty](https://realrareantiques.com/ming-dynasty/). He took the throne in 1402 and reigned until his death in 1424; the Yongle era itself ran from 1403. His temple name is Chengzu. He was the fourth son of the dynasty's founder, the [Hongwu Emperor](https://realrareantiques.com/ming-dynasty-emperors/hongwu-emperor/), and did not inherit the throne: he took it by force from his nephew. Once in power he moved the capital to Beijing, built the Forbidden City, restored the Grand Canal and sent Zheng He's fleets across the Indian Ocean. His reign also produced some of the finest early Ming porcelain. ## Early Life and the Northern Frontier Zhu Di was born in 1360, while his father was still fighting for control of China. Official records name Empress Ma, Hongwu's principal consort, as his mother, and he always honoured her as such. Some historians have argued that his birth mother was a secondary consort, possibly of Korean or Mongol origin, but the question has never been settled. ### Prince of Yan In 1370, at the age of nine, he was made Prince of Yan, the ancient name for the region around modern Beijing. The capital at that time was Nanjing; Yan's seat was the former Yuan capital, renamed Beiping. Zhu Di took up residence there in 1380, with the task of guarding the northern frontier against the Mongols. He had married a daughter of Xu Da, the greatest of Hongwu's generals, and learnt his soldiering alongside Xu Da and other veterans of the founding wars. His brothers who held frontier fiefs did the same, while the eldest son, the crown prince Zhu Biao, remained in Nanjing to assist their father in government. ### Campaigns against the Mongols In 1390 Zhu Di and his elder brother the Prince of Jin led a joint expedition beyond the Great Wall, during which Zhu Di secured the surrender of the Mongol commander Nair Buqa without a battle. The success impressed his father, and in the following years Zhu Di took an increasingly senior role in the defence of the northern frontier. By the late 1390s he was the most experienced field commander among the imperial princes, with a battle-hardened army loyal to him personally. ## The Succession and the Jingnan Campaign The crown prince Zhu Biao died in 1392. Hongwu is said to have considered naming Zhu Di as his heir, but he followed the principle of succession through the eldest line and chose Zhu Biao's son, Zhu Yunwen. When Hongwu died in June 1398, Zhu Yunwen succeeded him as the [Jianwen Emperor](https://realrareantiques.com/ming-dynasty-emperors/jianwen-emperor/). The deaths of the Princes of Qin (1395) and Jin (1398) had by then left Zhu Di as the eldest surviving son of the founder. ### The Reduction of the Princes The young emperor and his advisers regarded the princes and their private armies as a threat. Within a year several of Zhu Di's brothers had been demoted, imprisoned or driven to suicide. Zhu Di, the most powerful of them, was an obvious target. According to the traditional account, he feigned madness to buy time while he prepared. In August 1399 he rose in rebellion, claiming that he was acting to rescue the emperor from evil advisers. The civil war that followed is known as the Jingnan campaign, from a phrase meaning "to quell the troubles". ### Three Years of Civil War Zhu Di's troops were veterans of the frontier wars, and early in the conflict he absorbed the forces of his younger brother, the Prince of Ning, including Mongol cavalry. The court's armies were larger, but many of Hongwu's best generals had died or been executed in the purges of the founder's last years, and Jianwen entrusted his main army to Li Jinglong, who proved an inept commander. The war swung back and forth for three years. In 1402 Zhu Di bypassed the imperial armies and marched on Nanjing. In July, Li Jinglong and the Prince of Gu opened one of the city gates to him. The palace burned, and Jianwen was never seen again; whether he died in the fire or escaped has been debated ever since. Zhu Di was enthroned in the same month. ## 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](https://realrareantiques.com/ming-dynasty-emperors/xuande-emperor/). ## Military Campaigns Yongle spent much of his reign at war, and he led his armies in person more often than any other Ming emperor. ### Wars against the Mongols The Mongols driven out of China in 1368 remained a threat, divided between the Eastern Mongols and the Oirats to the west. Yongle played one group against the other, granting titles and trade to those who submitted, and led five expeditions into Mongolia himself, in 1410, 1414, 1422, 1423 and 1424. The campaigns won victories but never a lasting settlement, and the cost was enormous. He also recognised the value of cavalry and took great trouble over the supply of horses, which China had always had to obtain from the steppe through trade or tribute. ### The Occupation of Vietnam In 1406 a Ming escort accompanying a claimant to the old Tran royal house was ambushed in Vietnam and the claimant killed. Yongle treated this as an intolerable insult and sent armies under Zhang Fu and Mu Sheng against the Ho dynasty, which had usurped the Tran throne. The Ho rulers were captured in 1407, and Vietnam was annexed as the Ming province of Jiaozhi. Ming rule met determined resistance. From 1418 Le Loi led a rising that the Ming could not suppress, and after Yongle's death his grandson the Xuande Emperor withdrew the last Ming troops in 1427–1428. Le Loi founded the Le dynasty, which accepted a nominal tributary relationship with China. ## The Choice of Heir Yongle's eldest son, Zhu Gaochi, was a heavy, scholarly man with little taste for war. His second son, Zhu Gaoxu, had fought beside his father in the civil war and was widely thought to be his favourite. Many of Yongle's generals urged him to choose Gaoxu, but on the advice of civil officials, among them the grand secretary Xie Jin, he named Gaochi crown prince in 1404. Gaoxu, made Prince of Han, refused to go to the distant fief he was given in Yunnan and kept intriguing for the succession. His accusations helped bring about Xie Jin's disgrace; Xie was imprisoned in 1411 and died in prison in 1415. ## Death of the Yongle Emperor In 1424 Yongle led his fifth expedition into Mongolia in pursuit of the Mongol leader Arughtai, who withdrew beyond reach. On the return march the emperor fell ill and died in August 1424. He was buried at Changling, the first of the imperial tombs in the valley north-west of Beijing now known as the Ming Tombs. Zhu Gaochi succeeded him as the [Hongxi Emperor](https://realrareantiques.com/ming-dynasty-emperors/hongxi-emperor/). ## Yongle Porcelain for Collectors The Yongle reign is one of the high points of early Ming porcelain. The imperial kilns at Jingdezhen produced blue and white painted in imported cobalt, which fires to a deep blue with darker concentrations where the pigment pooled, on a fine, slightly bluish-white glaze. Large dishes, flasks and ewers were made in forms that reflect contact with the Islamic world, some copying Middle Eastern metalwork. *Museum exampleA blue and white moon flask painted with flowering plants, dated by the museum to the Yongle period (1403–1424), with the deep blue and darker spots typical of the reign.[Art Institute of Chicago, 2021.30. Public domain.](https://www.artic.edu/artworks/259858)* See [Ming Dynasty Porcelain](https://realrareantiques.com/product-category/antique-chinese-porcelain/ming-dynasty-porcelain/) in our collection, or ask us about a piece. [Ask about a piece](https://realrareantiques.com/contact-us/) The reign is equally known for its white wares, called tianbai ("sweet white"), thinly potted and often decorated with faint incised or slip designs visible only against the light. Reign marks are rare on Yongle porcelain. Where they occur, they are usually the four characters Yongle nian zhi (永樂年製, "made in the Yongle reign") in seal script, often incised or written in blue inside cups and bowls. Regular six-character marks on imperial porcelain begin with the following Xuande reign. Because Yongle marks were copied in later periods, a mark on its own proves nothing; potting, glaze and cobalt matter more. Among the pieces in our collection is a [blue and white bowl with a Yongle mark](https://realrareantiques.com/shop/blue-and-white-ming-dynasty-porcelain-bowl-with-yongle-mark/). ## From the reign of the Yongle Emperor and the Ming Dynasty - Ming Dynasty Porcelain [Blue and White Porcelain Bowl with Birds among Clouds, Yongle Mark](https://realrareantiques.com/shop/blue-and-white-ming-dynasty-porcelain-bowl-with-yongle-mark/)Price on request - Sold Antique Chinese Porcelain [Blue and White Bowl with Doves, Yongle Mark](https://realrareantiques.com/shop/antique-chinese-blue-and-white-porcelain-bowl-ming-dynasty-yongle-mark-1403-1424-a-d/)Sold - Ming Dynasty Porcelain [Blue and White Charger with Two Birds among Bamboo and Grapevine, Early Ming Dynasty](https://realrareantiques.com/shop/antique-chinese-blue-and-white-charger-plate-early-ming-dynasty/)Early MingPrice on request - Ming Dynasty Porcelain [Blue and White Bowl with a Lotus Scroll and a Peony, Ming Dynasty, Xuande Mark](https://realrareantiques.com/shop/xuande-marked-bowl-ming-blue-and-white-porcelain/)Ming DynastyPrice on request [View all Ming Dynasty Porcelain](https://realrareantiques.com/product-category/antique-chinese-porcelain/ming-dynasty-porcelain/)[Ask about a piece](https://realrareantiques.com/contact-us/) Be the first to see new pieces Join our collectors' list for new arrivals, rare finds and private offers.