Wanli Emperor (1572-1620): The Longest Ming Reign and Its Decline

The Wanli Emperor was the 14th emperor of China’s Ming dynasty, ruling from 1572 to 1620, the longest reign of the dynasty. It began with a decade of vigorous reform under the Grand Secretary Zhang Juzheng and ended with a monarch who refused to govern, leaving ministries unstaffed and the treasury exhausted. Later Chinese historians saw his reign as the point at which the Ming began its fall.

Background: a child on the throne

The future emperor, Zhu Yijun, was born on 4 September 1563, the third son of the Longqing Emperor. When his father died in July 1572, he succeeded at the age of nine. His reign name, Wanli, means “ten thousand calendars”, a wish for a long and prosperous rule.

Real power lay with three people: his mother, Empress Dowager Li; the senior palace eunuch, Feng Bao; and the Senior Grand Secretary, Zhang Juzheng. Zhang acted as both chief minister and strict tutor to the young emperor.

The Zhang Juzheng years, 1572–1582

Zhang’s administration set out to restore the finances and discipline of the state. He tightened the evaluation of officials, ordered a national land survey and spread the Single Whip tax system, which turned many dues into a single payment in silver. By the early 1580s the treasuries and granaries held large reserves. His programme is described in Zhang Juzheng’s Reforms.

Zhang died in July 1582. Within two years the emperor, now an adult who resented his former tutor’s control, allowed critics to strip Zhang of his honours and confiscate his family’s property. Feng Bao was also dismissed. The message to officials was that firm central reform had been repudiated.

The succession dispute and withdrawal from court

The defining conflict of the reign concerned the heir. The emperor’s eldest son, Zhu Changluo, was born in 1582 to a palace maid. His favourite, Lady Zheng, gave birth to Zhu Changxun in 1586, and the emperor was widely suspected of wanting to make this son crown prince.

Officials insisted that the eldest son be named heir, as dynastic law required. The quarrel, known as the “dispute over the root of the state”, lasted some 15 years. Only in 1601 did the emperor finally appoint Zhu Changluo crown prince.

In response to these pressures, the emperor withdrew. From the late 1580s he stopped attending morning audiences, often left memorials unanswered and refused to fill posts as officials retired or died. By the early 1600s many ministries and provincial offices were vacant. The historian Ray Huang used the year 1587 as a lens to show how this deadlock between ruler and bureaucracy paralysed the state.

The Three Great Campaigns

Despite his absence from court, the emperor did authorise large military operations, usually called the Three Great Campaigns of Wanli:

• Ningxia (1592): the suppression of a mutiny led by Pubei, a Mongol-born officer on the north-western frontier.
• Korea (1592–1598): the defence of Joseon against the invasions launched by Toyotomi Hideyoshi, known as the Imjin War.
• Bozhou (1590s–1600): the campaign against Yang Yinglong, a hereditary chieftain in the south-west, ended in 1600.

All three ended in Ming victory, but together they cost many millions of taels of silver. Estimates vary between sources, but the Korean war alone is usually described as the most expensive.

Society, silver and unrest

The political paralysis at court did not mean the whole country was in decline. The late 16th century was a time of vigorous commerce. Silver flowed into China from Japan and, through Manila, from the mines of Spanish America, paying for Chinese silk and porcelain. Cities such as Suzhou, Hangzhou and Nanjing prospered, and printing, fiction and drama flourished.

Popular novels including Journey to the West appeared in print in the Wanli years, and porcelain from the imperial kilns at Jingdezhen was exported as far as Europe. In 1601 the Jesuit Matteo Ricci was allowed to settle in Beijing after presenting the emperor with clocks and other gifts, as described in Matteo Ricci in China. The emperor never met him in person.

To raise money, from 1596 the emperor sent palace eunuchs into the provinces as mining and commercial tax commissioners. They answered directly to the throne and were widely accused of extortion. Their activities provoked riots in several cities, including Suzhou in 1601.

Discontent among officials also fed the Donglin movement, named after the Donglin Academy in Wuxi, revived in 1604 by the scholar Gu Xiancheng. Its members called for moral government and attacked corruption at court, and the factional struggles they joined continued into the following reigns.

The Jurchen threat and the end of the reign

In the north-east, the Jurchen leader Nurhaci united his people and in 1616 proclaimed the Later Jin state. In 1619 a Ming army was crushed at the Battle of Sarhu, a defeat that opened Liaodong to Jurchen expansion.

The Wanli Emperor died on 18 August 1620. His son Zhu Changluo reigned as the Taichang Emperor for only about a month before he too died. Twenty-four years later, in 1644, the Ming dynasty collapsed.

How historians judge the reign

The official History of Ming, compiled under the Qing dynasty, concluded that the Ming was in effect lost in the Wanli reign rather than under its last emperor. Many later Chinese historians repeated this judgement, stressing the emperor’s neglect of government, his greed for revenue and the factional quarrels he allowed to grow.

Modern scholars add other factors. The late Ming suffered from a colder climate, repeated droughts and epidemics, fluctuations in the supply of silver and rising military costs on the northern frontier. Some historians also note that the bureaucracy itself, bound by rigid rules and precedent, left little room for any ruler to reform it. Wanli’s withdrawal was both a cause and a symptom of these deeper problems.

Dingling: the emperor’s tomb

Like his predecessors, Wanli prepared his tomb in the Ming Tombs valley north of Beijing, where the Yongle Emperor had begun the first imperial tomb, Changling, in 1409. Unusually, Wanli began his own tomb while still in his early twenties and visited the site to inspect the work. Dingling was built between 1584 and about 1590 at enormous cost. Its underground palace consists of five linked stone vaults, built without beams and lying roughly 27 metres below the surface, behind massive marble doors.

From 1956 to 1958 Chinese archaeologists excavated Dingling, which remains the only imperial tomb in the valley to have been opened. They found the underground palace with the coffins of the emperor and his two empresses, and some 3,000 objects, including a gold crown, silks and porcelain. Many textiles deteriorated after excavation, and in 1966, during the Cultural Revolution, the remains of the emperor and empresses were destroyed. The problems at Dingling led to a policy of not opening other imperial tombs.

Timeline

• 1563, 4 September: Zhu Yijun is born.
• 1572, July: He succeeds his father at the age of nine.
• 1582, July: Zhang Juzheng dies.
• 1584: Zhang is posthumously disgraced; work on Dingling begins.
• 1592: Campaigns begin in Ningxia and Korea.
• 1601: Zhu Changluo is named crown prince; Matteo Ricci is allowed to settle in Beijing.
• 1619: Ming forces are defeated at Sarhu.
• 1620, 18 August: The Wanli Emperor dies.
• 1956–1958: Dingling is excavated.

Why it matters

The Wanli reign shows how a powerful bureaucracy and a reluctant ruler could deadlock an empire. Its early reforms brought prosperity, and the period saw a lively commercial economy and the arrival of European Jesuits, but its later decades left the Ming poorly prepared for the crises that ended the dynasty.