Fate
Aided by eunuch spies and turncoat generals, the Prince of Yan succeeded in capturing the emperor's Yangtze fleet and entered the capital Nanjing through an opened gate in 1402. Although his propaganda had portrayed him as the Duke of Zhou, who famously supported his young nephew King Cheng by waging war on the king's evil advisors, Zhu Di's entrance to the capital was almost immediately followed by the torching of the imperial palace and the presentation of three charred bodies as the emperor's, his consort's, and his heir's. The Jianwen era was declared void and its records systematically altered or destroyed, while the prince established himself as the new Yongle Emperor. Thousands of scholars and their families who opposed these measures were executed – the most famous were Fang Xiaoru and three others remembered as the Four Martyrs.
Many rumors stated that the Jianwen Emperor – on his own or thanks to the Hongwu Emperor's foresight – managed to escape the sack of Nanjing disguised as a monk. Some records reported that one year after he became emperor, the Yongle Emperor sent two agents to discover him; one did and chatted with the escaped emperor but did not return him. Passages in the official History of Ming even present the initial impetus to Zheng He's voyages as discovering whether countries to the south had provided him haven. Still other records relate that decades later the Jianwen Emperor returned to the imperial palace and lived the rest of his life in obscure retirement.
The bodies presented as the imperial family by the Yongle Emperor were not given a full burial and there is no known grave of the Jianwen Emperor. He was initially denied a temple name and left unhonored at Ming family shrines. The Prince of Fu, self-proclaimed emperor of the Southern Ming, granted him the temple name Huizong (惠宗) in 1644, but this name is not generally remembered or accepted in the official Chinese histories.
Read more about this topic: Jianwen Emperor
Famous quotes containing the word fate:
“Let us imagine a number of men in chains and all condemned to death, where some are killed each day in the sight of the others, and those who remain see their own fate in that of their fellows and wait their turn, looking at each other sorrowfully and without hope. It is an image of the condition of man.”
—Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)
“O divine art of sublety and secrecy! Through you we learn to be invisible, through you inaudible and hence we can hold the enemy’s fate in our hands.”
—Sun Tzu (6th–5th century B.C.)
“I am no Poet here; my pen ‘s the spout,
Where the rain water of my eyes run out,
In pity of that name, whose fate wee see
Thus copied out in griefs Hydrography:
The Muses are not Mer-maids, though upon
His death the Ocean might turn Helicon”
—John Cleveland (1613–1658)