Perpetual Happiness: The Ming Emperor Yongle (review)

Biography in Western studies of Chinese history has long been an underdeveloped area. By contrast, a cursory check of an Internet bookseller turns up some twenty-five biographies of the English king Henry VIII, a dozen of Elizabeth I, several for the Spanish king Philip V, and similar multiple volumes for monarchs and ministers from France, Russia, Germany, and other European states. European and American historical publishing is replete with studies of the lives of prominent, and not so prominent, men and women. These studies of individual lives are situated within larger frameworks of social, cultural, intellectual, or political history, and add an important dimension to the broader narratives. The resilience of biography as a field of study does not imply an endorsement of the "great man" view of history; indeed, much of biographical writing in recent years has been oriented toward telling the stories of "ordinary" men and women.

In Chinese historical studies there have been a number of important works examining the lives of individuals, usually scholar-officials, artists, or philosophical thinkers, and these have often made invaluable contributions to our understanding of specific periods and places. One thinks of works such as Charles Hartman's book on Han Yu, Ronald Egan's on Su Shi, Joanna Handlin Smith's study of Lu Kun, or Marie Bergere's volume on Sun Yat-sen, to name only a few. And yet there has been a serious lack of biographical studies of Chinese rulers. There have been some articles and conference presentations on a handful of emperors, such as the Ming founder Zhu Yuanzhang, and a quarter of a century ago Jonathan Spence produced a study of the Kangxi emperor, but by and large Chinese emperors have not had anything like the kind of biographical consideration accorded to Western monarchs. This is in stark contrast to contemporary Chinese historical publishing, where biographies of emperors fill the shelves of bookstores and are regularly portrayed (not always with academic rigor) in the popular media.

Surely it cannot be that Western scholars of Chinese history do not think emperors were important. We routinely follow Chinese conventions of organizing history according to reign periods and dynasties, although we are also concerned with establishing the longer-term secular trends of history across dynastic boundaries. It is evident that the presence of a specific ruler on the throne can make important differences in the governance of the empire and in the overall trajectory of historical events. The history of a period, such as the reign of the Qianlong emperor, will be shaped by the emperor in ways very different from one under a ruler such as Huizong. And yet the study of imperial biography has languished.

Henry Shih-shan Tsai has made a very important contribution to correcting this situation. In his latest book, Perpetual Happiness: The Ming Emperor Yongle, he has presented a full biographical study of one of the most dynamic and influential emperors in the last one thousand years. As the "second founder" of the Ming dynasty, the Yongle emperor, Zhu Di, left a political and institutional legacy that dominated China through the middle of the seventeenth century, and in the city of Beijing he bequeathed to China, and the world, one of the great cities of premodern (and now modern) times. He also was a usurper who overthrew, and almost certainly murdered, his nephew and executed some of the most respected Confucian officials of the early Ming when they remained loyal to their former emperor and to their sense of Confucian propriety rather than serve his morally compromised regime.

Tsai begins his book with a "day in the life" vignette from late in Zhu Di's reign. The mature emperor presides over the ritual and administrative life of his dynasty from the heart of the Forbidden City in the capital he had built to consolidate his hold on imperial power. Tsai then unfolds the story of Zhu Di's life through...