1
Every day, it was not the alarm clock that told Zhu Di to get up and move the bricks, it was the eunuch. At three o'clock in the morning of February 23, 1423, the five eunuchs of the Drum Room sounded the four more drums, and the Ming Yongle Emperor Zhu Di was about to get up.
Sixty-three-year-old Zhu Di had been emperor for twenty-one years. Although it was only announced two years ago that the capital was officially moved to Beijing, it has been based here for more than a decade. As an emperor, there are no weekends, no holidays, no laziness, and every day is this time to get up and start work, even if it is today to sacrifice the sky.
Zhu Di, who got up, left the palace and walked in the direction of the three halls of the Forbidden City. Only a few months after the Forbidden City was officially opened, a fire fell from the sky and burned the Zhensheng Hall, the Huagai Hall and the Fengtian Hall beyond recognition, so the ministers clamored to move the capital back to Nanjing. Zhu Di let them debate freely in the square of the Forbidden City, and after a few days of debate, the ministers understood: debate casually, move back to Nanjing to dream.
Originally, it was usually in the early dynasty of the Huagai Hall, but because today they were going to go out of the palace to worship the heavens, the officials had to wait until the noon dynasty to report on their work. Zhu Di got into the royal dragon car and left the Heavenly Gate in the direction of the Temple of Heaven. There are chang'an left gates and chang'an right gates outside the Chengtian Gate, and the Six Ministries, Qin Tianjian, Tai Hospital, the Governor's Office of the Five Armies, the Communications Department, and the Jinyi Guards are all located on the south side of the two gates, and every day hundred officials enter the Forbidden City from these two gates to work.
Zhu Di's sacrifice was in a rectangular temple, and jiajing demolished it more than a hundred years later and rebuilt a triple-domed hall, which was later the hall of prayer for the new year. In the gong music suite composed of twenty-three instruments, Zhu Di completed the complicated ritual of offering sacrifice to the heavens, and then drove back to the palace, because there was still a lot of work waiting for him.
Zhu Di in the car saw the Huabiao outside the Chengtian Gate and knew that the palace was close at hand, and it was already ten o'clock in the morning. The first thing to do when I go back to the palace is to take a nap. The sleeping Zhu Di did not know that two hundred years later, when the Manchurians entered the pass, his Chengtian Gate was changed to Tiananmen, and the three main halls were also changed to the Taihe Hall and the Temple of Baohe.
2
It was noon when he woke up, and Zhu Di, who had replenished his nutrition in the imperial wine room, urgently needed to start holding the noon dynasty. The first is that the officials report on the work, but the leader of the official Shangshu Jianyi is absent because he angered Zhu Di four months ago and was thrown into prison.
The same is true of The Household Department and the Rebbe, and the Hubu Shangshu Natsuhara Yoshi and the Rebbe Shoshu Lü Zhen are now fellow prisoners. Even Shangshu Wuzhong, who was in charge of the state's criminal law, could not escape Zhu Di's criticism. Four of the six ministries had leaders in charge behind the bars, which made Zhu Di feel a little uncomfortable.
However, Zhu Di didn't care, and let the attendants of the various ministries perform their duties instead of Shangshu. Compared with twenty years ago, when he often skinned Emperor Jianwen's old ministers, threw female relatives into official brothels, and quickly and well cut off countless heads in the form of "melon man copying", the elderly Zhu Di, although sometimes prone to tantrums, was already kind in disposing of the ministers. The ministers also knew in their hearts that as long as they did not commit rebellion, although the emperor was cruel, unnecessary cruelty would not be easily increased.
The last to report on the work is the Governor's Office of the Five Armed Services, which reports on the professional matters of army management. Zhu Di, who grew up on a war horse, was quite proficient in these subjects, after all, he had won the throne with real swords and guns. By the time Zhu Di announced the suspension of the Noon Dynasty, more than four hundred copies of the concerts had been sent to the eunuchs for preliminary screening, and then the necessary ones were transferred to the cabinet.
The Cabinet is an office created by Zhu Di. Unlike his father Zhu Yuanzhang, who grasped everything in every detail, Zhu Di felt that although the taste of power and arbitrariness was refreshing, it was not okay to make himself into a tired work machine every day. Zhu Di selected the talented Hanlin Academy to form a cabinet and served as a secretary to help him deal with big and small matters. Sometimes he thinks of xie jin, the first cabinet member: this editor of the Yongle Canon, a world-famous talent, has been killed by him for eight years.
At two o'clock in the afternoon, Zhu Di walked directly to Dong'an Gate. Three years ago, he set up an institution called Dongchang, which was headed by eunuchs, and directly obeyed him. As the world's earliest secret agency of state secret service, Zhu Di did not know that he had made history again. Zhu Di received twelve secret agents at the East Factory, who monitored specific royalty, military generals, civil officials, and religious leaders. What Zhu Di wanted to hear was all the secret information that he could not know from normal channels, and the authenticity was still secondary.
The Shangshu are also imprisoned here. After a month, Jian Yi and Lü Zhen will be released and reinstated. Xia Yuanji and Wu Zhong, on the other hand, will have to wait more than a year before Zhu Di will be released from prison and reinstated. Later, the West Factory, which was juxtaposed with the East Factory, there was also a series of conspiracies, corruption, cruelty and assassinations, all of which were the sequelae left by Zhu Di.
03
At three o'clock in the afternoon, Zhu Di, who left the East Factory, wanted to see the situation of the Imperial Horse Supervisor. Throughout his life, he had a special fondness for good horses. Unexpectedly, in addition to horses, Zhu Di also saw full-spirited elephants, zebras and ostriches, imported beasts that Zheng He had brought back from overseas for his sixth voyage to the West last year.
These rare animals in Middle-earth reminded Zhu Di, who instructed the superintendent of ceremonies to take charge of the eunuchs and pick a batch of gifts from the inner treasury to give to members of the royal family, meritorious officials, and foreign envoys. So gold and silver jewelry, silk emeralds, and ivory pearls quickly filled a long list. In addition to sending goods and sending people, Zhu Di ordered the selection of dozens of young eunuchs to serve in the various clan palaces—as to whether it was purely a gesture of goodwill or a conspiracy with information about his spying, only Zhu Di himself knew.
At 4:30 p.m., Zhu Di rushed to visit his twenty-four-year-old grandson, Zhu Zhanji, to ensure that the future successor of the next generation would study hard every day. After asking a few questions about the Four Books, Grandpa Zhu went directly to Wenyuan Pavilion. There, he will discuss work over dinner with three Cabinet fellows. Similar to Zhu Yuanzhang, in ten days, Zhu Di and the cabinet probably had to deal with nearly 1,200 pieces of concerts, plus 3,300 other things.
From the end of the Noon Dynasty to the present, the university scholars have carefully reviewed each of the four hundred pieces of music and drafted a proposal for Zhu Di's final decision to deal with it (vote draft). Zhu Di agreed, and it was enough to write a consent; those who had their own opinions would often write very different instructions. And today was a little different, today there were four concerts that were closely related to the security of the empire, so Zhu Di decided to hold a temporary call.
When the officials of the Six Ministries, the Governor of the Fifth Army, and several other important princes were urgently summoned to the conference room at noon, it was already dark. Convener Zhu Di announced tonight's agenda:
1 New defensive policy in the Liaodong region.
2 How to make full use of the contradiction between Vala and Tatars.
3 How to respond to Annan's latest truce request.
4 How to deal with the riots in Liuzhou, Guangxi.
When Zhu Di was in the meeting, all the comments that had been approved by the red had been filed by the eunuch of the Si Li Supervisor, and then immediately sent to the Department of Communications and Politics. Early tomorrow morning, Zhu Di's will would be conveyed to every part of the empire.
04
It was already half past nine at the noon gate, and Zhu Di's energy had already been exhausted. He hadn't seen his sixteen concubines for three days, and tonight he chose Concubine Sun guifei of the Western Palace.
In fact, after a long day of hard work, Zhu Di probably only needs a gentle, beautiful and warm woman to talk to him and massage his old and decaying body. Since the age of thirty-two, Zhu Di has not given birth to a son and a half daughter. Although she was a folk draft girl in the name of the emperor and constantly demanded tribute from Korea, Kunning Palace has been empty since the death of Empress Xu sixteen years ago.
Zhu Di will not spend the night in the West Palace. When he returned to his palace from Sun Guifei, it was already past 10:30 p.m. From a young age, he used to read something before going to bed, or make a note. When the eunuch of the drum room beat the midnight drum, Zhu Di closed his eyes and waited for another day of work after waking up.
The rulers of the Ming Empire fell asleep. He will personally conquer Mobei for the fourth time in a few months, and he will also die of illness on the road when he returns to the dynasty for the fifth time a year later. He seized the throne, moved the capital, opened the canal, repaired the Forbidden City, conquered Mongolia, opened Guizhou, conquered Vietnam, went to the West, compiled encyclopedias... He has done many great things for future generations to remember, and has also left his descendants with the legacy of the cunning East Factory and the eunuchs interfering in politics. He was both diligent and frugal, but also very good at his achievements; he was both wise and courageous, fierce and tyrannical; strong and weak: this is the emperor.
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Reference: Cai Shishan, "Yongle The Great- A Spiritual Portrait of a Chinese Emperor"