Early Modern China 87
before being fi lled out. What might have been a simple move toward
effi ciency the Hongwu emperor interpreted as proof of corruption.
In 1380, he discovered that his chief councilor and head of the Con-
fucian bureaucracy, Hu Weiyong, was plotting against him, so he had the
councilor killed, along with perhaps 15,000 other offi cials, including any-
one with any ties to the traitor. He abolished the position of chief coun-
cilor and determined to manage the Confucian bureaucracy himself.
The only person the Hongwu emperor trusted was his wife, Empress
Ma, and after she died in 1382, he became even more paranoid. “In the
morning I punish a few,” he wrote in exasperation, “by evening others
commit the same crime. I punish these in the evening and by the next
morning again there are violations. Although the corpses of the fi rst
have not been removed, already others follow in their path. The harsher
the punishment, the more violations.”^1 Unfortunately, he did not have
the presence of mind to see the self-defeating destructiveness of his own
lethal policies. The “Abundantly Martial” emperor probably executed
100,000 offi cials during his thirty years in power.
When the Ming founder died in 1398, there was no doubt a gigantic
sigh of relief felt throughout offi cialdom, but more blood was soon to
be spilled. Emperor Hongwu had placed on the throne his twenty-one-
year-old grandson, the son of his eldest son, who had died earlier. But
Hongwu’s fourth son, the Prince of Yan, commanded a sizable army
around the former Mongol capital, now Beiping, defending the all-im-
portant northern borders of the empire. As the oldest surviving son of
the founding emperor, he felt he deserved the dragon throne. In August
1399, he announced his intentions to “save” his nephew from corrupt
advisors and commanded his troops to move on Nanjing.
The young emperor was mismatched with his battle-toughened uncle,
and the troops of the Prince of Yan took Nanjing by force in 1402, burn-
ing the imperial palace with the young emperor and his mother in it. The
prince declared himself the Yongle Emperor (Emperor of Perpetual Hap-
piness), presided over the burial of his nephew, and erased his name from
the offi cial records of the dynasty. He was desperate to get the endorse-
ment of one or more high offi cials from his nephew’s court, but they
steadfastly refused, choosing death (and posthumous fame) instead.
Fears about his own legitimacy were to haunt the Yongle Emperor
for the rest of his life, but despite the violent beginning of his reign,
after his nephew’s loyalist offi cials were eliminated, he did not repeat
the terrible and destructive purges of his father. He was a vigorous and
forceful emperor who consolidated the power of the Ming dynasty dur-
ing his reign of twenty-two years and tried very self-consciously to fulfi ll