Yongle Emperor
The Yongle Emperor took the throne from his nephew, moved the capital to Beijing, and sent fleets to the coast of Africa. He was a son of the Ming founder, given the northern frontier command at Beiping and the military experience that came with fighting Mongols. When his father died the throne passed to a grandson, who moved against the princes; he rebelled, took Nanjing in 1402 after a three-year civil war, and had the court historians rewrite the succession so that he appeared as the legitimate heir. The scholar Fang Xiaoru refused to draft the accession proclamation and was executed along with, by the traditional account, everyone connected to him to the tenth degree. What he did with the throne was enormous and expensive. He moved the capital north to Beijing and built the Forbidden City; he reopened and extended the Grand Canal to feed it; he commissioned the Yongle Encyclopedia, the largest compilation of its kind for six centuries; he campaigned personally into Mongolia five times; and he occupied Vietnam, which rebelled continuously and was abandoned twenty years after his death. And he sent out the treasure fleets. Seven voyages under Zheng He between 1405 and 1433 reached Southeast Asia, India, Arabia and East Africa with ships several times the size of anything in Europe, collecting tribute and envoys rather than territory. His successors stopped them, burned the records, and forbade the building of ocean-going ships. The reversal is one of the standard puzzles of world history, and the ordinary answer is that the voyages cost a great deal and the northern frontier cost more.
- Lived: 1360 CE – 1424 CE
- Nationality: Chinese
- Roles: head_of_state
