In 1344, in a small village along China’s Huai River, a gaunt, 16-year-old boy wailed over the bodies of his parents. His name was Zhu Chongba. Within two weeks, a plague — swift and merciless, like a reaper calling roll — had taken his father, his mother, and his eldest brother. The once-large household was…
On a sweltering July day in 1405, the waters of Longjiang Port in Nanjing shimmered under the summer sun. Along the Yangtze River lay 317 massive ships—floating citadels with masts like forests and sails that blotted out the sky. Aboard them stood 27,800 officers and crew, not as an army of conquest, but as an…
Shi Heng held the key to the Chang’an Gate. In the small hours of February 11, 1457, while the Jingtai Emperor lay dying in the retreat outside the south wall, he had it opened a crack, let a column of soldiers through, and shut it again so that nobody outside could follow. The sky was…
The Tumu Crisis, as the Ming court came to call it, began at a relay station with no water. On the fifteenth day of the eighth month of 1449 the army dug two fathoms into the ground and struck nothing. The river south of the walls, the only water within reach, was held by Oirat…
In the old imperial kitchens of Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, more than ten thousand Chinese porcelains stand under the domes. One group is early Ming blue and white, dishes up to sixty-two centimeters across, each with six characters in regular script on the base: Da Ming Xuande Nian Zhi. Made in the Xuande reign of…
In the fourth month of 1425 the granaries of Shandong and the Huai valley were empty, and the local officials were still collecting the summer tax. The Hongxi Emperor called Yang Shiqi to the Western Corner Gate and had him draft an edict on the spot: cancel this year’s summer tax, and half of the…
On the first day of the first month of 1421, the Yongle Emperor held his first full court in the Hall of Receiving Heaven in the new palace at Beijing. Officials stood in ranks below the terrace. Princes and foreign envoys had their places. The hall rang with the ritual cry of ten thousand years….
In 1407 an official of the Ministry of Rites named Hu Ying left the capital. Five years after the Jianwen Emperor was presumed dead, the court was still sending men to find him. His commission, as the History of the Ming records it in the biography of Hu Ying, had three parts. He was to…
In the fifth month of 1615 a man named Zhang Cha walked in through the Donghua Gate with a stick of jujube wood. He crossed the palace grounds and reached the gate of the Ciqing Palace, where Zhu Changluo, the eldest son of the Wanli Emperor and the heir apparent, lived. He struck the eunuch…
By May 1592, one month into the Imjin War, King Yi Yeon of Korea had already withdrawn to Uiju on the Yalu River. His capital was gone, two of his princes were in Japanese hands, and seven of his eight provinces had been overrun. The History of the Ming records what he asked Beijing for…
What Were the Ming Dynasty Emperors? The Ming dynasty emperors were the sixteen men who sat on the same throne between 1368 and 1644. The first was Zhu Yuanzhang, who took it in the southern suburbs of Nanjing on the fourth day of the first month of 1368. The last was Zhu Youjian, who hanged…
On May 17, 1392, the crown prince of the Ming dynasty died. Zhu Biao was thirty-six years old. The impact of the death reached into the next twenty-eight years of Ming history: the founding emperor killed the generals he had been keeping for his son, a grandson lost the throne to his own uncle, and…
In the intercalary ninth month of 1376, after an unusual movement in the heavens, Zhu Yuanzhang issued an edict inviting frank advice. Zhu Yuanzhang’s personality traits show up more clearly in what came back than in anything he wrote about himself. Ye Boju, a scholar from Ninghai who had been given the post of instructor…
A young woman hid a cake straight off the stove in her robe and carried it to the place where her husband was being held. By the time she took it out, the skin on her chest had burned. The History of the Ming tells the whole thing in one line: "She stole a cake,…