Ming Taizu Zhu Yuanzhang, the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty, died in the thirty-first year of Hongwu in 1398 AD. On his deathbed, he chose to pass the throne to his eldest grandson, Zhu Yunwen.
Zhu Yunwen and Zhu Yuanzhang have completely different personalities. Zhu Yuanzhang was born in poverty, has a strong populist spirit, and has a deep love for farmers. His rule was called "harsh government and harsh punishment", not only to protect the interests of the peasants, but also to avoid misjudgment and unjust, false and wrongful convictions.
Although he briefly served as a monk at Huangjue Temple in Fengyang, Anhui Province, where he received a Buddhist education, he was not interested in religion according to historical records at the time.
Being a monk in Huangjue Temple is more like a hard labor. His task was to replace the candle flame, clean the floor, and wipe the golden body of the god and Buddha. Once, when the fruit offerings and snacks in front of the statue of Garan Bodhisattva in the Mahavira Hall were eaten by rats, the old monks severely criticized him for his poor supervision.
He was angry, and he thought that if Garan could protect a piece of land, he should also be able to protect the fruit at his table. So, behind the golden body of Garan, he wrote with an ink pen "Three thousand miles of exile".
Although he was too young to actually exile Garan, after he became emperor, he often exiled his ministers for three thousand miles. Although he was uneducated, he attached great importance to the education of his children and grandchildren, whether it was the late crown prince Zhu Biao or the current emperor Zhu Yunwen, who lived in a family full of Confucian atmosphere, imparted knowledge by the best Confucian masters of the Ming Dynasty.
Although this kind of education does not make them benevolent in their hearts, it will undoubtedly affect the way they govern the country after becoming emperors. However, the Confucian education received by the Zhu royal family had actually been castrated.
After Zhu Yuanzhang became emperor, he liked to read Mencius the most, but he found that some of the ideas in Mencius were not conducive to his rule over the people of the Ming Dynasty.
There is a sentence in Mencius, "The people are precious, the community is secondary, and the monarch is light." Zhu Yuanzhang felt that this had the flavor of challenging the imperial power, so he deleted this sentence. But under such an education, the emperor's eldest grandson, Zhu Yunwen, only learned the surface of Confucianism, but did not learn its deep meaning.
After Zhu Yunwen ascended the throne, he actively carried out innovations, changed the political environment of his grandfather's strict punishment and strict laws, and paid attention to benevolent government, which won the praise of the people. But even so, his presence in the sixteen emperors of the Ming Dynasty was still very low, and he was even regarded as the object of overthrow by his uncle.
This is because the official historical materials of the Yongle period deleted the history of the Jianwen period and extended the era name of Ming Taizu. However, in fact, Zhu Yunwen may have done more in his four years in power than the later Jiajing and Wanli Emperors combined.
Zhu Yuanzhang once deleted and edited "Mencius", but he probably didn't expect that Zhu Yunwen, the emperor's eldest grandson who was humble in his eyes, began to delete and revise his "Da Ming Law" and "Imperial Great Message" soon after he ascended the throne.
After Zhu Yunwen came to power, he made significant changes to the legal and political system formulated by his grandfather, abolishing the harsh punishment laws and redundant officials in the Hongwu period.
He hopes that through these changes, he can improve his relationship with the people and make the Jianwen court more harmonious and stable. However, he did not realize that his grandfather Zhu Yuanzhang formulated these laws and systems precisely to consolidate the unity and stability of the early Ming Dynasty, and his changes plunged the imperial court into a turbulent situation.
In addition, Zhu Yunwen was also keen to revise the names of departments and official positions, as well as to change the name of the palace, these flashy acts did not solve the actual problems of the imperial court.
Behind the restoration model of the palace city of the Nanjing Forbidden City, Zhu Yunwen's Confucian education deeply influenced his decision-making. Most of the reforms he took were derived from the Zhou Li, which is so important in the Confucian classics that everyone knows about it.
However, the author believes that his reforms are mere formalities and lack practical results. He did not realize that the regime of Wang Mang, the previous emperor of the new dynasty who pursued the retro trend, had collapsed after only 14 years, nor did he realize that the contempt for military generals and the abandonment of the basic policy of peaceful coexistence posed a serious threat to the imperial court.
These missteps eventually led to his conflict with Zhu Di, the king of Yan, whose system of power was largely based on the northern border, where a large number of officers and non-commissioned officers were gathered. In contrast, the Jianwen court relied mainly on the lower Yangtze River classes, including peasants, landlords, scholars, and clansmen.
Although they were complex, they all believed that only by improving the authority of Confucian culture and the civil bureaucracy and completely eliminating the feudal kings could the civil power be stabilized. However, the failure of the "Battle of Jingjing" made them understand that their era is far from reaching the realm of "ruling the world with literature", and they still need to solve problems with violence.
Although Zhu Yunwen is not particularly eye-catching on his way to becoming emperor, his story is full of mystery and legend, which makes people full of nostalgia for him. Perhaps it was because of his misery that people sympathized, or perhaps because his fate was so mysterious and fascinating that many people believe that Zhu Yunwen did not die in the palace, but escaped from the Nanjing Imperial Palace in disguise, and occasionally appeared in the next few hundred years.
Since Zhu Di, the ancestor of the Ming Dynasty, destroyed most of the historical materials of the Jianwen period, most of our evaluations of Zhu Yunwen are based on imagination. The ministers who followed him in the martyrdom became tragic figures, and because many ministers were willing to die for him, Zhu Yunwen became a benevolent, gentle, and intelligent king in people's imagination, and his failure was only due to bad luck.
I can completely understand people's sympathy for Zhu Yunwen, but I don't agree with the glorification of cruel history as a research method.
Portrait of Emperor Zhu Yunwen of the Ming Dynasty) Zhu Yunwen's life is full of ideals and disillusionment. He was a naïve idealist who tried to build a fortified castle out of shattered pieces of idealism, but was eventually ruthlessly destroyed by the pragmatist Zhu Di with a cannon.
In this life, Zhu Yunwen constantly pursues his ideals, but he is gradually impacted and disillusioned by reality.