Jiajing

Emperor Jiajing

Jiajing ( Chinese  嘉靖 ; * September 16, 1507 ; † January 23, 1567 ), maiden name: Zhu Houcong朱 厚 熜, temple name : Shizong世宗, was the eleventh Chinese emperor of the Ming dynasty . He ruled China from 1521 to 1567 .

Life

Emperor Zhengde had no sons, so the dragon throne was inherited to Jiajing, whom Zhengde had previously adopted. Jiajing was the descendant of a younger son of Emperor Chenghua and a concubine from Hangzhou . His mother was introduced and trained by a eunuch , e.g. B. she learned to recite hundreds of Tang poems to impress the emperor. Jiajing had been chosen to be the heir to the throne since he was twelve years old, but he was offended by his adoption status, and he tried to erase that fact. It was officially pretended that he inherited the throne solely through his birth parents. He gave his father a posthumous imperial title and made his mother empress widow. He had his parents' mausoleum rebuilt at great expense as an imperial tomb. As the founder of a new branch line of the ruling dynasty, he built his own mausoleum in the Ming tombs as splendid and extensive as that of Emperor Yongle .

Jiajing was seen as moody and quick-tempered, sometimes inconsiderate towards everyone. As a result, he narrowly escaped an assassination attempt by his own concubines in 1542 . Eighteen palace girls tried to strangle the emperor during the night while he slept, but they used the wrong rope, and their plan failed. In addition, one of the girls warned the Empress mother that everyone but her would be executed.

Jiajing's first wife, Chen, died in 1528 after a miscarriage that sparked an emperor's outburst. His second wife, Zhang, was deposed in 1534 for no reason and died shortly afterwards. The third Empress Fang was the one who had given the notice of the assassination attempt. His concubine Du was made empress posthumously after her son Longqing became emperor.

Government style

When Jiajing ascended the throne, with the help of the Dowager Empress and the Grand Secretariat, he cleared the court of those eunuchs who had so blatantly abused their power under Zhengde. From the chief eunuch alone, 70 boxes of gold and 2,200 boxes of silver were confiscated and returned to the imperial treasury. As a devout Daoist , he submitted to the rules of Daoism and followed the maxim of action by non-action . As a result, the emperor withdrew from the affairs of government, but appointed capable ministers and grand secretaries to rule in his stead. The length of the Jiajing rule gave stability to the Middle Kingdom, but the emperor's passivity favored corruption among officials. Major tax reforms such as the reform of the labor service ensured that from now on one could pay for compulsory labor and taxes with coins alone. The financial reforms helped China's economy recover quickly after the severe earthquake in Shaanxi in 1556 , when the Yellow River overflowed and 830,000 people were killed. However, Jiajing could not cope with external problems. In the north, Altan Khan managed to reunite the Mongol tribes and invade China. In 1542, his troops looted the border region within a month, took 200,000 Chinese hostage, stole a million boxes of merchandise and horses, and burned thousands of houses. In 1550 the Mongols even managed to advance as far as Beijing , only the massive troop presence around Beijing kept the invaders off, and the Mongols could only be thrown back into the steppe with difficulty. In the southeast, the Japanese, the Wokou , and other pirates ruled the coasts of China. Trade with Japan was then stopped, whereupon relations with Japan deteriorated. This led to smuggling by the Chinese traders and even more Japanese pirates, as the Chinese goods were valued in Japan. However, the government was unable to control all waters. In response, in 1525, Jiajing ordered the destruction of all junks with more than three masts in order to stop smuggling. In 1550, in the Hai jin decree, he even banned all foreign trade. These restrictive edicts were hardly followed at all, smuggling to Japan continued, and in 1555 a group of only 70 pirates made their way to Nanjing and pillaged the region undisturbed for two and a half months. In 1560, 6,000 Japanese landed and devastated Fujian Province . It was Jiajing's successor, Longqing, who managed to cope with these problems, and he allowed foreign trade again. The second longest reign of the Ming Dynasty, at 45 years old, may have ended with a mercury overdose .

Religious attitude

What is unique among the Ming emperors is that Jiajing was an ardent devotee of Daoism who relentlessly sought the elixir of immortality. He spent enormous sums of money building Taoist temples in Beijing, equipped with special inventory for making elixirs from pearls, ambergris and gold. Thousands of ounces of gold were used to carry out a single Daoist ceremony that lasted over twelve hours. Texts were written from gold dust, which the writers picked up with their writing brushes . The emperor repeatedly sought contact with the spirit world, paying the greatest attention to Omen, but tried to suppress Buddhism . He even had the Buddhist temple in the Forbidden City torn down in 1536. He also banned the use of images in Confucian temples.

literature

• Frederick W. Mote: Imperial China 900–1800. Harvard, Cambridge 2003, ISBN 0-674-44515-5
• Ann Paludan: Chronicle of the Chinese Emperors. Thames & Hudson, London 1998, ISBN 0-500-05090-2
• Denis Twitchett , Frederick W. Mote: The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 7. The Ming Dynasty 1368-1644. Part 1. University Press, Cambridge 1988, ISBN 0-521-24332-7

Web links

• Literature by and about Jiajing in the catalog of the German National Library

predecessor	Office	successor
Zhengde	Emperor of China 1521 - 1567	Longqing