In June of the fourth year of Jianwen (1402), Zhu Di led a large army to the city of Nanjing, and Zhu Qi, the king of Gu, and Li Jinglong, the Duke of Cao, opened the Jinchuan Gate, one of the inner city gates, to meet the surrender, and the capital division was broken. In the chaos of the Yan army entering the city, the imperial palace was on fire, the whereabouts of the Jianwen Emperor Zhu Yunjiao were unknown, and the "Battle of Jingnan" ended in Zhu Di's victory.
For more than 600 years, the whereabouts of Emperor Jianwen have been an open case in the field of historiography. "The fire in the palace is raging, and the emperor does not know the end." The King of Yan sent the empress dowager's body into the fire, and yue eight days to bury it. Or Emperor Yun died by the tunnel. This is described in the "Ming Shi Gong Min Emperor Benji" compiled by the Qianlong Four-Year Historian.
It can be seen that during the Qing Dynasty, people still had doubts about the whereabouts of Emperor Jianwen. In addition, the historian meng Sen of the Republic of China further explained in the "Jianwen Xun Guo Kao": "Chengzu was destined to use his body in the fire, and the verified Jianwen was buried with a ceremony, so why should he be suspicious of people's words, dispatch Hu Qi, Zheng He, and the sea and overseas, and travel all over the country for more than twenty years?" ”
In contrast, in the Ming Dynasty-themed film and television dramas we watched, Emperor Jianwen escaped through zhu Yuanzhang's death. When the Yan army entered the city of Nanjing, Emperor Jianwen opened Zhu Yuanzhang's bag and found that his grandfather told him to flee immediately, and also prepared him with wooden fish and robes. Emperor Jianwen fled and became a monk, which is the most widely spread folk saying.
Many scholars have claimed that Emperor Jianwen eventually fled to the Lion Mountain in Wuding, Yunnan, and became a monk at the Zhengxu Zen Temple on the mountain. Lion Rock is known as the "First Mountain in the Southwest" because of Emperor Jianwen. On the pillar of the Daxiong Treasure Hall in the Zhengxu Zen Temple, a pair of Yang Lian is engraved, the upper link: "The monk is the emperor, the emperor is also a monk, the mantle has been passed down for decades, and the emperor is aware of the old age", and the lower link: "Uncle negative nephew, nephew does not live up to uncle, eight hundred mile man shoes hiking, lion mountain is higher than Yan Mountain." ”
There is also the Huidi Ancestral Pavilion in the temple, which is painted with three statues of monks, and the one in the middle is draped in robes and backed by a dragon chair, which is said to be Emperor Jianwen. In addition to the Yang Lian and the statues, there are many relics related to Emperor Jianwen in the Zhengxu Zen Temple, such as "Dragon Feng Gubai", "Dragon Hidden Temple", "Crescent Pond", "LiDou Pavilion" and so on.
In fact, when the Qing Dynasty revised the History of Ming, it was already noted that Emperor Jianwen might have fled to Yunnan, "Since then, between Yunnan and Qianbashu, it is said that there were traces of the emperor when he was a monk. And the "Wuding Fu Zhi" during the Kangxi Dynasty also recorded: "Emperor Jianwen ended in the Shishan Zhengxu Temple for several decades." All kinds of signs seem to be on the surface, and Emperor Jianwen may really end up in The Lion Rock in Yunnan."
Finally, historians also cite evidence that the Wanli Emperor Zhu Yijun once asked Zhang Juzheng about the whereabouts of Emperor Jianwen. On October 17, 1574, the second year of the Wanli Calendar (1574), Zhu Yijun, who was only 11 years old, asked his teacher and first assistant Zhang Juzheng a royal taboo question: "Emperor Wen Jianwen fled at that time. ”
Zhang Juzheng did not worry about anything, and directly gave his own answer: "The history of the country does not contain this matter, but the old legend has it that when Yan Jianwen entered the city, that is, he cut his hair and walked out of the middle road, and no one knew." To the orthodoxy, there is a poem inscribed on the Yunnan Postal Wall, which has the sentence "Fallen into the rivers and lakes for dozens of autumns". There is a royal history that feels that it is different, and asks it. The old monk sat on the ground without kneeling, and said, 'I want to return to the old garden of bones.' 'It is known as Jianwen ye. Yu Shi heard about it, so he summoned him to Beijing and entered the palace to test it, and Liang was. It is seventy or eighty years old. I don't know the end. ”
References: Ming Shi Gong Min Emperor Benji, Shenzong Shilu, Wuding Fu Zhi