Wanli Emperor - Legacy and Death

Legacy and Death

The Wanli emperor’s reign is representative of the decline of the Ming. He was an unmotivated and avaricious ruler whose reign was plagued with fiscal woes, military pressures, and angry bureaucrats. He also had sent eunuch supervisors to provinces to oversee mining operations which actually became covers for extortion. Discontented with the lack of morals during this time, a group of scholars and political activists loyal to Zhu Xi and against Wang Yangming, created the Donglin Movement, a political group who believed in upright morals and tried to influence the government.

During the closing years of Wanli's reign, the Manchu began to conduct raids on the northern border of the Ming Empire. Their depredations ultimately led to the overthrow of the Ming dynasty in 1644. It was said that the fall of the Ming dynasty was not a result of the Chongzhen Emperor's rule but instead due to Wanli's gross mismanagement.

The Wanli Emperor died in 1620 and was buried in Dingling (定陵) located on the outskirts of Beijing. His tomb is one of the biggest in the vicinity and one of only two that are open to the public. In 1969 fervent Red Guards stormed the Dingling museum, and dragged the remains of the Wanli Emperor and his two empresses to the front of the tomb, where they were posthumously "denounced" and burned. Thousands of other artifacts were also destroyed.

In 1997 China's Ministry of Public Security published a book on the history of drug abuse. It stated that the Wanli emperor's remains had been examined in 1958 and found to contain morphine residues at levels which indicate that he had been a heavy and habitual user of opium.

On the other hand, Emperor Wanli's contribution to the defense of the Chosun Dynasty in Korea against the Japanese invasion has endeared him to Koreans over the centuries. In the late 1990s, Koreans still paid respect to Wanli.

In many ways, he was similar to other Chinese emperors who were initially successful, but whose subsequent poor rule caused the eventual demise of their dynasties, such as both Emperor Gaozong and Emperor Xuanzong of Tang and the Qianlong Emperor of the Qing Dynasty.