Free Lost on Planet China: One Man's Attempt to Understand the World's Most Mystifying Nation by J. Maarten Troost Page B

benefits, it did little to alleviate this sudden fall from favor. And so when Zhu Di arrived in Nanjing with his army, the eunuchs flung open the gates. We welcome Zhu Di! they squeaked.
    Zhu Di claimed the Dragon Throne for himself, changed his name to Yongle, and set about killing any possible rivals to his reign. The old emperor, Zhu Di’s nephew, Zhu Yunwen, was never found. Some suggest that he may have died in the fire that consumed his palace. Others that he escaped by disguising himself as a monk. In any event, Zhu Di issued a decree ordering the extermination of the ten agnates. Traditionally in China, when killing political opponents, it was acceptable to exterminate the three agnates—the father, son, and grandson of the doomed opponent. Zhu Di extended this to the tenth degree to include pretty much anyone remotely related to the former emperor, excepting of course himself. Some 8,000 family and friends of Zhu Yunwen were killed, often in a gruesome, highly creative manner.
    Zhu Di then moved the capital to Beijing, which had once been the imperial capital of the Yuan Dynasty, which is the polite term for describing the Mongol hordes who ruled China in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The dynastic capital was an itinerant place, having been located as far west as Xian during much of the first millennium, and emperors saw it as their privilege as Sons of Heaven to move the capital according to their whims and needs. The Mongol leader Kublai Khan had made his capital in present-day Beijing, then called Dadu. It was Zhu Di’s father, the peasant Zhu Yuanzhang, who had led an uprising that dislodged the Mongols from Beijing, a feat that enabled him to call himself the Son of Heaven, founder of the Ming Dynasty, without anybody calling him out on it.
    When Zhu Di came to power, trouble still lurked on the northern border. Tamerlane, a Mongol leader who had a notable penchant for stacking the skulls of his slain enemies in enormous pyramids, was threatening to invade China, returning the country to Mongol rule. Zhu Di didn’t much like the sound of that; thus he moved his capital and his million-man army north to Beijing, where he could counter the threat. Fortunately, Tamerlane soon died, and as his descendants began the squabbling that would eventually doom the Mongol Empire, Zhu Di found himself with some idle time on his hands. And so he began to build.
    The scale of building can only be described as epic. Hundreds of thousands of people were forcibly uprooted from towns and villages around the country and sent to Beijing, where they were guarded by the army, since without Mongols to fight they didn’t have anything else to do. The challenge, of course, was feeding such a multitude of people in a region where winters were long and bleak and the growing season was short. Zhu Di’s solution was to enlarge the Grand Canal, which had first been constructed during the Wu Dynasty, way back in the late fifth century. At that point, Europe had descended into the Dark Ages and men like Conan the Barbarian roamed the earth, smiting enemies while reveling in the lamentations of their women, whereas China was already building a canal that would eventually link Beijing with Hangzhou, more than a thousand miles away.
    With the canal enlarged, Zhu Di ordered thousands of barges to deliver the enormous amount of grain needed to feed this city of soldiers and workers. Elsewhere in China people starved, but Zhu Di pushed relentlessly on. He had aspirations. Forests were denuded of wood to build not only the Forbidden City, but the vast number of barges plying up and down the Grand Canal. And then, once the scope of his ambition was realized, he began emptying forests as far away as Vietnam. This was because Zhu Di wanted a navy.
    Not just any navy, but the most powerful and immense navy the world had ever seen. Enormous treasure ships were constructed, each requiring the wood of roughly 300 acres of hardwood forest. Said