In June 1402, Zhu Di led an army to attack Yingtianfu (present-day Nanjing), and Emperor Jianwen was uncertain of his life and death in the chaos of the war. Since then, the three-year "Battle of Jingnan" has ended with a comprehensive victory for Zhu Di, the King of Yan. In the same year, Zhu Di announced his ascension to the throne as emperor in Yingtian, and was known as the Yongle Emperor.
Since Zhu Di's throne was usurped through rebellion, the most important issue for the rest of his life was how to ensure the legitimacy of his throne. In the following two decades, a series of "chaos and rectification" whitewashing campaigns continued to unfold within the Ming Empire.
Zhu Di raised the banner of "Qing Jun's side, Jingguo difficulty" when he rebelled, so immediately after he became emperor, he executed many "traitors" loyal to Emperor Jianwen and restored many ancestral systems abandoned by Emperor Jianwen.
During Zhu Di's reign, he and his henchmen began to revise historical documents extensively to ensure the legitimacy of his throne. The Records of the Ming Dynasty, the Records of the Ming Dynasty, written in 1401, as a record of the life and deeds of Zhu Yuanzhang, the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty. Soon after Zhu Di seized the throne (October 1402), he ordered a revision of the book, and later because the revision of this edition in 1402 was too hasty and had many inconsistencies, it was revised again in 1411, and the final version was completed in 1418.
In the repeatedly processed Records of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Di describes himself as the beloved son of the Hongwu Emperor (Zhu Yuanzhang) and a legitimate heir to the throne. These distorted histories include: Zhu Di was born to Empress Ma (Zhu Yuanzhang's original wife, the first empress of the Ming Dynasty); the Hongwu Emperor originally intended to crown the Prince of Yan; and the Hongwu Emperor wanted to pass the throne to the King of Yan on his deathbed. However, according to later research, Zhu Di was not only not born to Empress Ma, but also not the beloved son of Zhu Yuanzhang. In fact, Zhu Yuanzhang's true beloved son was the crown prince Zhu Biao, the biological father of Emperor Jianwen. Unfortunately, Zhu Biaoying died young, which laid the groundwork for the subsequent struggle for the throne.
In addition to the Records of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Di also ordered the compilation of two works supporting the legitimacy of his ascension to the throne in 1403: The Difficult Records of Fengtian Jing and the Tianhuang Yumu( Tianhuang Yumu).
In the "Difficult Records of Fengtian Jing", the historians of the Yongle Dynasty did their best to slander Emperor Jianwen, accusing him of being a depraved and despicable emperor, the most important of which was: he used "traitors" to mutilate the flesh and bones of his compatriots; he abolished the laws and systems of the Hongwu Emperor and rebelled against him. However, in fact, these "traitors" who were criticized by Zhu Di all became figures in Chinese history, and some of the laws and systems of the Hongwu Dynasty, which were abolished by Emperor Jianwen's order, were some ill-times.
The Fengtian Jing Difficult Chronicle also falsely claims that Zhu Di was born to Empress Ma, so he, as the eldest surviving concubine at that time, should be made crown prince, and the reason why Zhu Yuanzhang would later choose Emperor Jianwen was due to the intervention of those scholars in the imperial court. The book also says that Zhu Di did not raise an army to seize the throne, but to fulfill the instructions in the "Imperial Ming Ancestral Training" (compiled by Zhu Yuanzhang, which was composed of various admonitions for his descendants).
Both the Records of the Ming Dynasty and the Records of Fengtian Jing repeatedly point out that Zhu Di was born to Empress Ma, which is essential for Zhu Di to legitimately inherit the throne, because in ancient times, there was a world of difference between the status of concubines born in the main chamber and those born in the side chambers. Thus there are two versions of the Zhu family's royal genealogy in the Tianhuang Yumu, the first of which says that Empress Ma gave birth to two sons: Zhu Di and Zhu Xi (Zhu Di's own brother, this is the real younger brother).
According to this version, Emperor Jianwen's father, zhu Biao, the former crown prince, actually became a concubine, and Zhu Di was naturally reasonable and legitimate to inherit the throne as a concubine. However, Zhu Yuanzhang's appointment of Zhu Biao as a prince was an ironclad fact, and it was obviously impossible to say that he did not set up a concubine and establish a concubine, so this version of the lie could not even be seen by Zhu Di himself, so there was a second version in the "Tianhuang Yumu", this time it was Empress Ma who had five sons, in the order of elder and young: Zhu Biao, Zhu Zhu, Zhu Tang, Zhu Di, and Zhu Xu. Anyway, no matter which version, Zhu Di was declared to be the son of Empress Ma. The second edition of "Tianhuang Yumu" was later distributed to all members of the royal family as a family tree, and it was obvious that many people knew that this family tree was full of big lies, but if anyone dared to openly question it at that time, it would inevitably be killed by Zhu Di.