Ming Dynasty

Smart and well-behaved, they obey the emperor's orders, are talented and follow the rules, dare to give advice but refuse to rebel even to the death. The scholar-bureaucrats of the Ming Dynasty were a very strange group. How did they become like this? This book attempts to give an in-depth answer by telling the story of the second emperor of the Ming Dynasty who secretly set up two major chess games and his "criminal experience" of two abandoned pieces. These two abandoned sons were the two favorites of Zhu Yuanzhang and his son, and they were two iconic figures that connected the past and the future. One was the last prime minister Hu Weiyong, and the other was the founding assistant Xie Jin. At the same time, they were also representatives of two types of traditional Chinese scholar-bureaucrats. Reading through this book will not only enable readers to gain a glimpse of the domestication and transformation of scholars in the Hongwu and Yongle dynasties, and understand the inside story of the Ming Dynasty's "masters were respected and their ministers humbled", but also the origins of the anti-elimination politics in which Chinese scholars lost their ambition and individuality after the Ming Dynasty, and were reduced from state ministers to retainers, and the overall dualization (enslavement, rigidity) occurred.