Perpetual Happiness: The Ming Emperor Yongle.

• Author: Hsu, Pi-Ching
• Position: Book Review

By SHIH-SHAN HENRY TSAI. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001. Pp. 270, illus. $32.50.

Having presented a remarkably sympathetic picture of eunuchs in Eunuchs in the Ming Dynasty to counterbalance the stereotype of scheming, greedy, and demonic castrati, Shih-shan Henry Tsai takes on another controversial subject of Ming History in Perceptual Happiness: The Ming Emperor Yongle. As suggested by the title of the book, the image Emperor Yongle invokes in this study is primarily that of a sage-king mindful of the everlasting well-being of his subjects and his empire. This pleasurable image is, however, complicated by Yongle's undeniable association with quite a few less happy aspects of Ming China, including political scheming and mass murder. In the eyes of many moralistic historians, Yongle was a usurper and a tyrant, for whom the reign-title "Perpetual Happiness" was a misnomer. But Tsai means no irony in choosing the title. Not attempting at a total revision, the author endeavors to paint a more complete picture of Yongle by adding to the traditional portrait the other, more benign side of him.

Emperor Yongle, as Tsai amply demontrates, embodied great contradictions. He was an overachiever. He should be credited for the construction of the imposing Forbidden City of Beijing, which still stands today to amaze countless visitors from lands afar. He should be applauded for sponsoring the legendary maritime expeditions of the Muslim eunuch, Admiral Zheng He, the legacy of which still lives vividly in the historical consciousness of many Southeast Asians and East Africans. He reinforced the power structure of the absolutist empire his father, the Hongwu emperor, founded, and extended the tentacles of Chinese civilization to Vietnam, Korea, Japan, among other tributary states of Ming China. He smoothed out China's relations with the Mongols, from whom Emperor Hongwu had recovered the Chinese empire. He made possible the compilation of various important Chinese texts, including the monumental encyclopedia Yongle dadian. During his reign, grain production was so abundant that rice rotted in the granaries. In many aspects Yongle's military and civil achievements outshone those of his father. But taking the throne by force from his father's hand-picked heir, his nephew the Jianwen emperor, Yongle was also a usurper, a man who bathed his hands in the blood of numerous political victims. And the bloodshed did not stop there. After ascending...