Generally speaking, the empress's candidates are from a well-known and prestigious family, and they have received a good education since childhood, so that they can cultivate both virtues, understand things, supervise the emperor to be diligent and serve the people, and also handle the affairs of the harem himself, so as to relieve the emperor's worries.
Among them, the post-election system of the Ming Dynasty is particularly special, and most of the empresses are from the people. From empress Ma of the founding emperor Zhu Yuanzhang to empress Dowager Zhou of the last emperor Chongzhen, basically came from the homes of commoners.
Zhu Yuanzhang's exemplary role
Zhu Yuanzhang herself was born in cloth clothes, and Empress Ma not only knew nothing about piano, chess, calligraphy and painting, but also had big feet. "Ma Dazu" has become synonymous with Empress Ma, but Zhu Yuanzhang and Empress Ma respect each other as guests, setting an example for future generations.
According to the "Biography of the Empress Dowager of the Ming Dynasty", Zhu Yuanzhang once published a book called "Female Training", in which in the selection of concubines, in order to prevent the former dynasty from colluding with the harem, he specially stipulated: "All the heavenly sons, the queen of the princes, the concubines, and the concubines of the palace, carefully select the daughters of the good family, and those who enter the concubines are blessed, so the concubines and the people of the later concubines are more colorful."
Therefore, the ancestors have set the family law, and the descendants can only follow it. In fact, Lao Zhu did this in view of the fact that the later clans represented by the empress in the previous dynasties were too powerful, such as the Yuan Dynasty, where the empress had great power to cover the sky with one hand; for example, in the Tang Dynasty, the empress Wu Zetian directly killed the emperor to be herself.
Prevent harem interference in politics and foreign relations from monopolizing power
As early as the beginning of the founding of the country, Zhu Yuanzhang set the ancestral precepts early. The "Biography of The Later Concubines of the Ming Dynasty" records that Zhu Yuanzhang specially revised the "Female Training" in the first year of Hongwu as the "family law" for managing the concubines, and stipulated that when selecting the concubines, "all the queens of the prince of tianzi, concubines, and concubines of the palace should carefully select the daughters of the good family, and those who enter the concubines will be blessed, and the concubines and the people of the later concubines will be selected."
Zhu Yuanzhang even hung a red card in the palace, on which was engraved the admonition that concubines should not mess with the government. Later, the successive emperors of the Ming Dynasty also took strict precautions against this, so there was a phenomenon of harem interference in the Ming Dynasty, and there was no situation of foreign relations monopolizing power. After all, from the folk concubines, their family background generally has no power, and it cannot be related to the ministers of the DPRK. Therefore, this approach is desirable.
In order to effectively ensure the purity and excellence of the emperor's bloodline
There are strict procedures for the selection of empresses in the Ming Dynasty. Generally, the "step-by-step screening elimination method" is adopted. After the imperial court sent a number of people and horses to all parts of the country to find ladies aged 13 to 16, and after bringing all the ladies back to the capital, the emperor sent eunuchs to make a second selection. In the third screening, the women who remained were still lined up as the last time, and the eunuchs looked at them with extremely critical eyes, screening them one by one in terms of appearance, posture, skin, mouth, voice, etc. In the fourth screening, the eunuchs would measure the hands and feet of the remaining ladies with a ruler and tell them to walk to observe their gait. Finally, he was taken into the secret room by the stable wife for private examination.
Through the above process, it is not difficult for us to see that the selection of concubines in the Ming Dynasty was extremely harsh. The ultimate empress is the best of these people, thus ensuring the excellence of the emperor's bloodline.
On the other hand, the empress is selected from the people, which can also improve the influence of the imperial family in the folk, so that the people feel that the emperor also has half of the blood from the people, which is more easily accepted by the people. This can also be seen from the fact that there are few peasant riots in the Ming Dynasty, and in addition, from the perspective of genetic genetics now, the empress was selected from the folk, which also eliminated the possibility of marriage between close relatives and improved the quality of offspring. This is also one reason why there were no idiot emperors, incompetent emperors or brutal emperors among the emperors of the Ming Dynasty.
Throughout the history of the Ming Dynasty, there were only two empresses who really came from the family, one was The Empress Xu of Ming Chengzu, the daughter of the founding general Xu Da, and the second was the Empress Wu of the Ming Xianzong.
In fact, the selection of the empress is also to pass the heavy selection, its complexity is no less than today's draft, the Ming Emperor needs to go through a total of eight kinds of selection, namely, sea selection, primary selection, careful selection, selection, palace selection, concubine selection, push, and finally King.
It can be seen that the queen selection criteria are strict, under the control of this standard, the internal quality and external appearance of the queen selected in the end can be guaranteed to truly achieve "motherly world".