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Zhu Di

Given / Temple NameEmperor Chengzu of MingStyle / AliasThe Yongle Emperor

The Yongle Emperor who seized the throne, moved the capital to Beijing, and sent Zheng He to sea

Holders of the Mandate · Emperors & Kings

The Jingnan campaignThe Forbidden CityThe Yongle Encyclopedia

Who they are

Zhu Di was Zhu Yuanzhang’s fourth son, enfeoffed Prince of Yan to guard Beiping. When the Jianwen Emperor moved to reduce the princes, he rose in arms under the banner of "clearing the emperor’s side," fought four years of bloody war, and took Nanjing, seizing the throne from his own nephew — the Jianwen Emperor’s fate became the foremost mystery of Ming history. To wash away the taint of usurpation, he pushed his achievements to the extreme: five personal campaigns into the Mongol steppe, moving the capital to Beijing and building the Forbidden City, dredging the Grand Canal, compiling the twenty-two-thousand-fascicle Yongle Encyclopedia, and sending Zheng He on six voyages to the Western Ocean (the seventh after his death). Toward the Jianwen loyalists he was pitilessly cruel — Fang Xiaoru, refusing to draft the accession edict, had ten kindreds put to death. Civil and military glory and bloody savagery met in one man; his temple name is Chengzu.

Key stories

Executing the ten kindreds

After taking Nanjing, Zhu Di ordered Fang Xiaoru, the foremost Confucian of the Jianwen court, to draft his accession edict — Yao Guangxiao had warned him, "Kill Xiaoru, and the seed of learning in the realm is cut off." Fang Xiaoru came to court in mourning and threw his brush to the ground: "Death is but death; the edict I will not draft!" Zhu Di threatened to exterminate his nine kindreds, and Fang answered, "Make it ten kindreds — what of it!" Zhu Di did indeed make up ten — adding his students and friends — and had eight hundred and seventy-three people executed before his eyes. The details are disputed, but from then on the paired questions of "the scholar’s backbone" and "the limits of imperial power" had their most brutal reference point.

The Son of Heaven guards the gate

In 1421 Zhu Di formally moved the capital to Beijing — placing the imperial capital on the front line, little more than a hundred kilometers from the Mongol wall, in what later ages summed up as "the Son of Heaven guards the gate of the realm." The move was half strategy (commanding the northern frontier in person) and half private wish (Beiping was the seat of his rise). To sustain this great northern city, the Grand Canal was dredged anew, and grain flowed north from the south for four hundred years without cease. Today’s Beijing — its central axis, the Forbidden City, the Temple of Heaven — is the draft he left behind.