That year, Mingzong bestowed upon his own birth mother, Consort Chen, the title of Empress Dowager, with the honorific Sheng’an—placing her, in effect, on the same level as Empress Dowager Jiang of Sheng’ren.
The dynasty had a rule: if an Emperor’s birth mother had held a low rank while his adoptive mother was still living, even after the Emperor ascended the throne she could not be called Empress Dowager unless she had passed sixty, at which point the title of Empress Dowager could be conferred.
When the late Emperor died, Consort Chen had still held the rank of only a middle concubine. This year she was merely thirty-five. With one stroke, Mingzong not only elevated her to the rank of Empress Dowager but also gave her an honorific placing her on equal footing with Empress Dowager Jiang.
This action by the Emperor caused an enormous uproar at court. The vast majority of officials, including the Director of the Imperial Clan Court, submitted memorials in opposition—but the Emperor used the pretext that his adoptive mother, the Empress Dowager, had given her gracious permission, and ignored them all. The ministers were powerless.
This was a signal: the Emperor, now an adult and possessing considerable ability in civil governance and military affairs, had begun trying to shake off the shadow cast by his adoptive mother the Empress Dowager and establish his own authority.
In truth, even before this incident, the more perceptive figures at court had already sensed something. Since taking personal control of the government, the Emperor seemed to have grown wary of Empress Dowager Jiang, and gradually began distancing himself from the Jiang family and from the Empress Dowager herself. He also became increasingly cold toward the Liang family, which had become connected to the Jiang family by marriage. Though Empress Liang was honored as Empress, the Emperor was not close to her. In the first year after their marriage, she bore him his eldest son, Li Xuanxin, who was made Crown Prince—but in all the years since, Empress Liang had borne no more children. The Emperor seemed not particularly fond of the Crown Prince either; often several days would pass without him summoning the prince for an audience.
Just when the ministers were growing privately anxious about the relationship between the Emperor and his adoptive mother, Empress Dowager Jiang once again made her decision.
That year, Empress Dowager Jiang—citing illness and the need to recuperate—moved out of the imperial palace’s Changan Palace and into Penglai Palace, a complex built for the retirement of empress dowagers and retired imperial consorts, located twenty li away and connected to the palace by a tree-lined imperial road.
This was the mark of Empress Dowager Jiang’s withdrawal from affairs. True to form, she never again participated in governance, but instead lived quietly in Penglai Palace, taking in as her ward the posthumous daughter of Prince Dingbei—who had died the previous year from illness contracted during travels to deal with troubles on the southwestern border—and personally raised her, regarding her as her own daughter. She was given the title of Grand Princess Jinxi.
Twenty years passed in this way. In the thirtieth year of the Xuanning reign, something worth mentioning occurred.
After decades of peace, with the population growing and the treasury gradually filling, the Li dynasty began to have the national power to strike back against the Northern Di. Meanwhile the Northern Di, after twenty years of lying low, had also begun to stir once more.
“When they come, punish and destroy them; when they retreat, prepare and defend.”
From ancient times to the present, with regard to border threats, every ruler of the Huaxia dynasties who had any backbone at all held this as his guiding principle.
The Ming Emperor, then in his prime, also pursued the ideal of ruling the interior while governing the borders—and he had achieved considerable results. Under his personal coordination and planning, the dynasty had a few years earlier won another military victory against the Northern Di. By this time, the old Marquis Pingyang, Jiang Hu, had died of illness, but his son Jiang Yi had burst onto the scene like a meteor—inheriting not only his father’s marquisate but also his military genius, earning the name of a war god. He took the field at twenty and won another great victory. Though it was not a decisive triumph, it intensified the internal conflicts within the Northern Di, this time directly splitting them into Eastern and Western Di. The Western Di was weak and the Eastern Di strong; the Western Di king wished to reconcile with the Li dynasty to jointly counter the Eastern Di, and in recent years he had frequently dispatched envoys eastward, finally proposing to seek a princess bride for his son.
The prince had come to the capital the previous year with the envoy and, happening to encounter Grand Princess Jinxi, had been deeply taken with her. On his return he could not get her out of his mind, and this was the origin of this marriage proposal.
Grand Princess Jinxi had turned twenty that year—beautiful as flowers and the moon, yet for some reason still unmarried. Having lived secluded in Penglai Palace for twenty years, Empress Dowager Jiang—by then well past fifty—was desperately reluctant to part with her, but in the end she still sent away the Grand Princess she had raised as her own daughter.
It was said that on the night the Grand Princess left the capital through the Western Yongle Gate, the Empress Dowager—who had not left the gates of Penglai Palace in years—stood alone on top of the Yongle Gate until deep into the night.
That night, the cold night air was heavy with dew, and her hair was shot through with threads of silver, her silhouette desolate.
Pu Zhu was born the year after Grand Princess Jinxi’s departure for her marriage at the frontier.
The years flowed like water and time streamed onward; more years passed.
In the thirty-ninth year of Xuanning, Mingzong had been on the throne for nearly forty years. At court, there were four grown imperial sons.
The eldest was Crown Prince Xuanxin, born of Empress Liang.
The second was Prince Jin Xuanji—the current Xiaochang Emperor—born of Consort Chen, the niece of Empress Dowager Chen.
The third was Prince Chu Xuanyi, born of Consort Dong. Consort Dong’s clansman Donggan was talented; seven years earlier, during the campaign against the Northern Di, Mingzong had dispatched Donggan to coordinate provisions and logistics. He did not disappoint the imperial trust, managing the logistics with distinction, and was afterward granted the rank of Commander of the Imperial Carriage Guards and became one of the Emperor’s trusted intimates. From that point on, the Dong family had quietly taken on the bearing of a rival to the Jiang family.
The last and youngest son was enfeoffed as Prince Qin, named Xuandu. His birth mother Consort Que had entered the palace late; by then the Ming Emperor had already been on the throne for more than twenty years and was middle-aged, so Prince Qin’s age differed greatly from his elder brothers—while the elder brothers were all in their thirties, he was only sixteen.
That year, Mingzong was also approaching fifty, and his health had been growing worse. Yet the Crown Prince had long since passed thirty and was in his prime.
In terms of his own qualities, the Crown Prince was intelligent and diligent, magnanimous and benevolent.
In terms of his supporters, the Liang family on his mother’s side went without saying; the young Marquis Pingyang, Jiang Yi, was both a close ally and a friend to the Crown Prince. On the military side he had these battle-hardened figures of real power; on the civil side he had the scholarly-official faction of the capital led by his Grand Tutor, Pu Youzhi.
Pu Youzhi was Pu Zhu’s grandfather. He championed the Crown Prince—as did the capital’s scholars, and by extension all scholars under heaven.
The Ming Emperor undoubtedly held his adoptive mother Empress Dowager Jiang—who had once held the world’s reins and helped him secure his throne—in the greatest respect. Yet this Emperor, who had been so close to his adoptive mother in childhood, had a change of heart as he grew older. His dislike of the Crown Prince born of Empress Liang may also have been connected to this change.
The more dazzling the Crown Prince grew, the more complex the Emperor’s feelings became. Add to this the whispers of those with ulterior motives: if in the early years the Emperor had still restrained his likes and dislikes, as age and physical decline crept in, he gradually dropped all restraint. He frequently used flawed memorials as a pretext to censure the Crown Prince, even delivering sharp rebukes in front of close attendants and ministers.
A vigorous Crown Prince alongside a weakening Father-Emperor—in the face of imperial power’s sharp double-edged sword, this was a problem without solution from time immemorial.
Even more tragic was the fact that the Crown Prince had never enjoyed his father’s affection since childhood.
How many times had Crown Prince Li Xuanxin jolted awake from nightmares, drenched in cold sweat, face wet with tears?
He dreamed that the Emperor drew his sword and thrust it at him; that he collapsed in a pool of blood, pleading and declaring his true heart, while the Emperor did not spare a glance and walked coldly away.
This was not merely a dream. He knew that sooner or later, even if the Emperor did not kill him, he would be deposed.
Of his four sons, the one the Emperor loved most was his youngest brother, Yuli’er.
Yuli’er was the childhood name of his fourth brother Li Xuandu, whose mother, Consort Que, came from the Que nation.
The Que nation lay north of the Central Plains, neighboring the Di peoples—an ancient small northern kingdom. It was said that in high antiquity, the earliest ancestors of the Que people had once lived in the west of the Central Plains; many among them had high noses and light skin, with looks distinct from the norm. In the Zhou dynasty they migrated east, settled, and established a state, after which they intermarried and mingled with the Central Plains. By now, a thousand years later, the Que people—whether in looks, clothing and adornment, civil governance, or law and administration—differed not at all from the Central Plains dynasties.
It was also rumored that the Que people’s ancestors had once come into possession of a copper mountain—inexhaustible and never-ending—amassing astonishing wealth; that Que men were brave and skilled in battle; and that relying on the natural mountain terrain of the lands their ancestors had chosen for the state’s founding, the country, though small, had perpetuated itself from generation to generation without ceasing. Even during the century of turmoil in the Central Plains during the previous dynasty, when the Di people attacked them many times, they had always maintained their independence and never had their gates forced open.
Forty years earlier, when the Northern Di marched south and war was imminent, Empress Dowager Jiang, amid her war preparations, dispatched envoys to meet with the Que king. The Que king, reading the situation carefully, made the resolute decision to send troops to assist Empress Dowager Jiang. After the war, the Que king, leading his nation, submitted to the dynasty and was enfeoffed as the King of Martial Virtue with Heaven’s Blessing, and was granted the imperial surname. In the twenty-second year of Xuanning, the Que king’s daughter came to the capital, was given the title of Noble Consort, and the following year bore a son—the Crown Prince’s youngest brother, Xuandu.
Consort Que was extraordinarily beautiful, and the Ming Emperor doted on her. The son naturally enjoyed his mother’s reflected favor; and to have a son again in middle age after so many years was itself a source of joy. Moreover, it was said that the night before Consort Que gave birth, the Ming Emperor dreamed of a white unicorn treading through snow and coming from the north, and upon waking took it as a good omen. When Consort Que truly did give birth to an imperial son, he immediately gave him the childhood name Yuli’er, and the child was enfeoffed as Prince Qin at the age of one.
From his title alone one could glimpse the Emperor’s degree of favor toward this fourth son. Nor did the fourth son fail his father’s expectations: accomplished in both literary and martial arts, he was commissioned at sixteen as a Commandant of the Eagle-Soaring Guard—one of the four guards of the central imperial army under the Northern Bureau—and was given the important duty of guarding the north palace gates of both the Changan and Penglai Palaces.
The Crown Prince could not forget a scene he had witnessed the previous spring.
The capital was deep in spring, flowers thick and fragrant, grass lush and green. After his visit to his adoptive grandmother Empress Dowager Jiang, he was unwilling to return immediately to the Eastern Palace—where eyes and ears were everywhere—and in plain clothes came to the banks of the Lu River to the west of Penglai Palace to clear his mind.
The spring light was enchanting, but his heart was weighed down, and he could not find ease. He was thinking about what his maternal uncle, Great General Liang Jingzong, had secretly conveyed to him the day before.
His uncle had relayed certain information and again urged him that he absolutely must make thorough preparations as a precaution against all contingencies. So long as he gave the word, the general would exert his full effort to help.
Having been Crown Prince for thirty years, if he were truly deposed, even should he somehow survive, his existence would surely be more miserable than death.
He felt immense anguish at being forced to make such a difficult choice.
He stood on the upper floor of a riverside wine house by the bridge, gazing into the distance out of the window, lost in a reverie. Suddenly he saw a young man come riding from the north—from the direction of Penglai Palace, which he had just left. The young man wore red robes and a golden crown, a jade belt, bow and arrows at his side, green feathers before him and banners behind him. Astride the Great Ferghana stallion that the Western Regions had only last month sent from afar as tribute to the Emperor, surrounded by a retinue of similarly-aged capital nobility’s sons and plainclothes guards, he thundered across the Lu River Bridge and was gone, leaving behind a ground of apricot blossoms trampled into the mud by the horses’ hooves. Behind him, grooms drove a dozen fierce, wild hunting hounds from the imperial stables at a run, the baying of hounds and the young men’s wild, uninhibited cries interweaving, startling passersby who scrambled in all directions, pointing and staring.
The roads within the imperial city, unless there was an urgent courier from outside the city, did not permit galloping.
Yet that mounted party was swift as the wind, with not the slightest easing of pace; led by the red-robed youth, in an instant they reached the city gate.
The city guards, spotting them from afar, recognized the newcomer and had already flung both gates wide open, bowing and crouching by the roadside to wait for the young man to pass before them.
This young man was his youngest brother Yuli’er, who by his look had apparently just come from his grandmother Empress Dowager Jiang and, seizing the fair spring day, was heading to the imperial hunting ground west of the city for sport.
The young man at play: royal sons and noble youth as his escort, the five marquis-families’ sons vying to be his feather-guard. Bells and drums and lavish feasts, dashing hunts and shooting games, galloping his horse through the imperial thoroughfare, casting his eyes over all of jade-bright Yujing.
This was the heaven’s favorite, deeply beloved of his father the Emperor—his own brother.
The older his father grew, the more he favored him.
To what degree?
Two years before, on the fourth brother’s fourteenth birthday, the Emperor, drunk, had said something to the eunuch Shen Gao, who attended at his side.
He said: In former times, the Grand Elder of Zhou set aside Tai Bo to establish Wang Ji; King Wen of Zhou passed over Bo Yikao to establish King Wu. I observe that Prince Qin is very fine indeed.
What the Grand Elder of Zhou and King Wen of Zhou had done was the same thing: defying the rules of succession, setting aside the elder to establish the younger.
Shen Gao was so terrified he kowtowed and remained prostrate for a long while.
The Emperor, after speaking those words, seemed to sober somewhat and regret them; he never raised the matter again thereafter.
This incident eventually made its roundabout way to his ears—and it must naturally also have reached the ears of his two older brothers.
Consort Que had died young, and after losing his mother, the fourth brother had lived alternately in Empress Dowager Jiang’s quarters and in his own mother Empress Liang’s palace, frequently studying and hunting alongside the Crown Prince himself.
So unlike his relationship with Prince Jin and Prince Chu, the Crown Prince had always harbored genuinely deep affection for this much younger brother. And this younger brother had also been extremely close to him and utterly trusting—the Crown Prince could feel it.
Brothers bound by true kinship, though not of the same mother, yet closer than if they were.
He did not know what his other two brothers felt upon learning of those words, but for himself—even upon learning of his father’s drunken utterance—he felt only loss and sorrow: the loss and sorrow of a son who, no matter how hard he tried, could never win his father’s approval. Toward his fourth brother he had not harbored one trace of jealousy.
And yet in this moment, Crown Prince Li Xuanxin knew: he was jealous—truly jealous of his youngest brother.
Because, without doing anything at all, the fourth brother received the supreme love and favor of both his father the Emperor and his adoptive grandmother Empress Dowager Jiang.
Yes—Empress Dowager Jiang also cherished and was close to him himself, always encouraging and guiding him. But in the year when they were seven, after their aunt Grand Princess Jinxi had gone far away in marriage at the frontier, it was only when the fourth brother came to bring her joy that a look of happiness appeared in their grandmother’s eyes. At all other times she sat alone in bed, largely withdrawn from the world.
The Crown Prince was jealous, and also envied the fourth brother’s ability to revel carefree in pleasure. While he himself—from the moment he was old enough to understand anything, from his earliest years of growing up, had never felt one moment of safety. From the time he was first aware of the world, what had accompanied his growth was nothing but constant, unceasing fear and bewilderment.
He was already past thirty, and had seen spring in Yujing more than thirty times like this. Yet had he ever once done something as freely and fearlessly as his fourth brother—unconcerned about inviting a censor’s impeachment?
Never.
Not once.