AN INTRODUCTION TO

JOURNEY OF THE NORTH STAR

For more than four thousand years, Chinese society has been bound by two contradictory but coexistent theories of government. Confucius held that the ruler’s authority derives from his own moral example, the moral cultivation of those who act in his name, and the moral obligation of each person to place the well-being of the society above her or his own self-interest. The second theory, often called Legalism, is almost equally ancient and advocated that the Emperor direct a wholly totalitarian state based on enforcing harsh laws by means of extreme punishments. The state apparatus here consisted of vast networks of informers, secret police, military personnel, and officials empowered to make swift summary judgments, all enforcing the Emperor’s slightest whim. The first Emperor of China unified the nation by employing these violent means, and no Emperor thereafter, regardless of his intentions, was able to dispense with them.

The Yong Le Emperor, who lived from 1360 to 1424, was one of the exemplary figures in China’s five thousand year history and transformed a society in a state of chaos and depletion into a great and enduring empire. In so doing, he reformed the institutions of China in ways that prevailed until the beginning of the 20^th century. The slave-narrator of this transition, is a fictional character who witnesses and records the Emperor’s life as he seizes the throne, forms his government, initiates his policies, sees them through to fulfillment and suffers his personal decline. The narrator witnesses the Emperor’s life from the point of view of a high-ranking slave whose existence in every aspect is dependent on his complete identification with the Emperor and his intentions even as his experience of the world to which he must accommodate himself is both unique and traditional.

This book is then concerned with the living interplay of two kinds of thinking and how social changes were carried out in such a circumstance. For in reality, the Yong Le Emperor was not simply a well-intentioned man forced to be cruel nor just a cruel and ambitious man forced to cloak his intentions in moral rhetoric.  His way of being involved a far more complex synthesis rooted in an overarching view of time and of the natural world. This view in a general way also becomes that of the eunuch slave who writes down the story of his life.

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Journey of the North Star is a  novel about the twenty-one year reign of Chu Ti, the Yong Le Emperor and third ruler in the Ming Dynasty. When the future Emperor was born, his father, Chu Yuan Chang was still one of a number of warlords vying for the throne of China. And even when he succeeded in becoming the first native born Chinese Emperor in almost four hundred years (The preceding Yuan Dynasty was Mongol.), the country, after a hundred years of increasingly misrule and years of internecine war, was in chaos. The first Ming Emperor brought order by brutal means and left a country whose governmental practices were still unstable to his inexperienced grandson, the Chien Wen Emperor. Though the Founding Emperor may have preferred the vigorous and talented Chu Ti, it was more important to him to ensure the new dynasty’s stability by establishing succession by primogeniture. Chien Wen’s brief reign was marked by humane goals, uncertain administration and inept efforts to eliminate the founding Emperor’s surviving sons.

The eldest surviving son, Chu Ti, who had been given the northeastern fief of Yen with its capital, Beiping, was an experienced general, tireless administrator, and devoted student of the classics. Seeing many of his father’s reforms being overturned and being threatened himself with extinction, the Prince of Yen rebelled and after three years of grueling warfare, defeated Chien Wen.

When, in 1403, Chu Ti ascended the Throne of Heaven as the Yong Le Emperor, China was in a state of almost anarchic depletion. Accordingly, the new Emperor applied himself to realizing his father’s intentions that Chinese culture return to its historical roots, that its governance attend to the people’s security and that it resume the scope of influence it had enjoyed in earlier dynasties. He ordered the repair of the extensive system of canals and roads, expanded the country’s agricultural and manufacturing base. He stabilized government institutions, restored the educational system, produced standard editions of all the major Chinese Classics, and ordered the creation of the largest encyclopedia of all Chinese learning and arts ever made. He strengthened the military and re-enforced the Empire’s defenses. He fostered extensive trade relations with all neighboring states, and he dispatched the largest maritime mission in the world to extend China’s influence to Indian coastal states and kingdoms on the west coast of Africa. The Yong Le Emperor also rebuilt the Imperial city of Beijing and moved his capital there. In his twenty-one year reign, the Yong Le Emperor re-shaped the nation and its institutions in a way that determined the pattern for all future Ming rulers as well as providing a model of governance for the Ching Dynasty that followed. The methods by which he did so are no strangers in the China of today.