This incident reflects the "literal prison" of the Ming Taizu Zhu Yuanzhang period, and the course of events is like this.
Volume IV of Ma Po's "Talking About Mistakes" records: "Taizu chu ordered Zhan Xi's original book Taixue Jixianmen. The door word is slightly hooked to the right. Shang: If we want to recruit talents, it is a closed door, and I am a virtuous Luye? Kill them, and paint them with powder. ”
What does this passage mean?
That is, after the Ming Emperor Zhu Yuanzhang ascended the throne, hundreds of wastes were waiting to be rebuilt, and palaces, official buildings, city gates and other places were gradually built, and once Zhu Yuanzhang saw that the Taixue Jixian Gate was repaired, only one plaque was missing, so he ordered Zhongshu Zhan Xiyuan to write the three words "Jixian Gate" on the plaque.
Zhan Xiyuan was a famous calligrapher in the Ming Dynasty, later renamed Zhan Xiyuan, an Anhui native, who learned calligraphy since childhood and studied various fonts, especially palaces, city gates, and plaques are mostly written by Zhan Xiyuan, and his reputation is outstanding.
Therefore, Zhu Yuanzhang deliberately ordered, but after Zhan Xiyuan wrote it, when Zhu Yuanzhang passed through the Jixian Gate, he said that the word "door" had more than the last tick, but this is the Jixian Gate, which is the place to recruit talents, is this hook trying to prevent me from recruiting talents? So Zhan Xiyuan was beheaded and shown to the public, and then the last hook was smeared with powder.
It is also said that Zhu Yuanzhang said that he was the true Dragon Heavenly Son, if he passed through here, wouldn't the dragon scales be ticked off by this hook, and since then, the "door" character on the palaces and city gates of the Ming Dynasty has not been checked, even if zhu Di, the late Ming Dynasty ancestor, moved to Beijing.
So did Zhu Yuanzhang really behead Zhan Xiyuan only because he had a hook in the door letter written by Zhan Xiyuan?
On the surface, it seems to be so, in fact, this is related to Zhu Yuanzhang's origin, as we all know, Zhu Yuanzhang was born as a farmer, and also helped the landlord to work, let go of cattle, and even worked as a thief, a beggar, and finally became a monk forced by life.
Finally, after his own efforts, he sat on the throne, but when he was a monk, he knew some words, but in the end he read less, so he was a little inferior, so he often relied on his own understanding of things, and even by his own ideas, to find words that violated the taboo (ministers who did not fit him) in the folds of these ministers, and then forcibly explained, and those who were slightly unsatisfactory were beheaded.
It can really be said that the eggs are picked inside the bones, many officials of the literati sometimes how to be killed are not clear, many officials really can't stand it on the pretext of resigning from the government and returning to their hometowns, as a result, abandoning officials and returning to their hometowns will also be said to be rebellion, hiding and hiding, in the early years of the Ming Dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang period because of the number of people killed in the text prison as many as tens of thousands, becoming the most people killed in the text prison since Qin Shi Huang.