Yongle Emperor

Zhu Di was a son of the Ming founder, posted to the northern frontier as Prince of Yan, and he was not the heir. When his nephew succeeded and began stripping the princes of their commands, he rebelled, took Nanjing in 1402, and had the records rewritten to make himself the son of the principal empress rather than of a concubine. A throne taken that way needs more than paperwork, and he found the rest of it in Zhenwu, the Perfected Warrior, a Daoist deity of the north whose protection he claimed had been manifest during the campaign.

Between 1412 and 1418 he rebuilt the Wudang Mountains in Hubei as a monumental complex for that god: palaces, monasteries, nunneries and shrines strung along the ridges and up to the summit, with a hall of gilt bronze at the top. Something over two hundred thousand workers and soldiers are recorded as employed on it. The project made a modest regional cult into a state one, and Wudang has remained one of the principal Daoist mountains of China ever since, later acquiring a reputation in the martial arts that has nothing to do with the emperor who built it.

The same logic ran through the rest of his religious policy. He moved the capital north to Beijing and laid out the altars of Heaven and Earth on a scale that made the ritual calendar of the empire visible in architecture. He patronized Buddhist institutions and had scriptures printed. He was not personally devout in any single tradition so far as the record shows, and that is the point: the sponsorship was distributed, because the legitimacy he needed had to come from every direction at once.

In 1407 the fifth Karmapa, Deshin Shekpa, arrived at Nanjing after a long journey from Tibet, having been invited by an emperor who said he had seen the bodhisattva of compassion in a vision. He performed a great rite of universal deliverance for the souls of the dead emperor and empress, was given the title Great Treasure Prince of Dharma, and received gifts on a spectacular scale. A long painted scroll made at the court records the miraculous signs said to have accompanied the ceremony, with captions in five languages.

The Ming did not follow the Mongol precedent of taking one Tibetan hierarch as imperial preceptor. Yongle granted comparable titles to leaders of several schools, which kept any single order from becoming the imperial church and kept all of them oriented toward the court. The arrangement lasted, in outline, for the rest of the dynasty.

The other two projects were of a different kind but the same ambition. The Yongle Dadian, compiled between 1403 and 1408 by a staff that ran into the thousands, gathered what was intended to be the whole of Chinese writing into a single arranged compilation running to more than eleven thousand volumes. It was never printed, only one manuscript copy survived into modern times, and most of that has been lost, so what remains is a few hundred volumes scattered across the world. The seven fleets sent out under Zheng He between 1405 and 1433 carried the same claim across the ocean. Their commander was a Muslim by birth and a patron of Buddhist and Daoist temples in equal measure, and the stelae his expeditions erected on the coast credit their safe returns to the Celestial Consort, the sea goddess of Fujian.