red lead redemption
Or, why I would take career but not medical advice from the Jiajing Emperor.
Hello friends!
This week’s dirtbag is a reader suggestion from
that I have been meaning to get around to for an embarrassingly long time. But I am stoked as hell to tell this story and I hope it will be worth the wait!Before we get going, a friendly reminder that you—yes, you, friend!—can always suggest a dirtbag whom you think I should cover. I have a running list from past suggestions and the people I stumble across in my daily wanderings, but I promise that if you give me a suggestion that strikes my whimsy just so, you’ll jump to the front of the line. This is a very unscientific system.
Without further ado, let’s get into this week’s story:
Zhu Houcong, the Jiajing Emperor, a Story in Which You Will Think “Surely This Is the Craziest Part” Only to Be Proven Wrong at Least Three Times I Guarantee It
First, a brief caveat: I am not a classically trained historian even of the time periods I am knowledgeable about, and Ming Dynasty China is not one of those time periods. I’ve done my best to tell the story as I understand it, but if you’re better-informed than I am here, please feel free to tell me where I’m wrong in the comments. I always appreciate a kind correction!
Tiger Beat
Our story begins in roughly 1501 in Zhongxiang, China, when Zhu Houcong was born as a relatively unimportant member of the Imperial family. As best I can follow, his father was the fourth son of the three-emperors-ago Emperor and the first cousin of the current Emperor, so, while he wasn’t exactly no one, the people of China were not looking at this small baby and thinking “ah yes this boy will grow up to be among the dirtbaggiest of our emperors.”
But as we have seen many times before, fate has a way of bringing dirtbags to the seat of power.
Fortunately for this story but unfortunately for the people of China, the emperor at the time of Zhu Houcong’s birth, the Zhengde Emperor, was a real piece of garbage. A quick skim of his biography revealed the following facts:
He was once mauled by a tiger (after fucking around near tigers, unadvisedly) and couldn’t perform his official duties for months due to Tiger Injuries
He burned down the palace playing with gunpowder
He had so many concubines that they couldn’t fit in the palace and some of them starved to death due to lack of supplies
He ordered all his ministers to dress up as merchants and then wandered through the palace pretending to be a commoner going shopping, aka the game I used to make my grandma play with me when I was three, except as a grown man
pre-tiger-mauling, one assumes, although he looks pissed off enough that maybe it’s post
The fact that I’m not writing this newsletter about the Zhengde Emperor may be a sign of how batshit things are going to get. We’re starting off with “mauled by tiger” and that’s the backstory.
Who You Gonna Call? Ghost Emperor!
In 1521, the Zhengde Emperor got drunk and fell off a boat into the Yellow River when he was 29 years old, only to die several weeks later from a parasite in the water. This seems more like the way someone on my hometown local news would die during Fourth of July weekend than a fitting death for the 11th emperor of the Ming Dynasty, but history cares not for dignity.
The Zhengde Emperor had no sons, because of course he didn’t. Therefore, it was time for a classic “rifle through the family tree and find a legitimate male child who looks reasonable” maneuver. And that reasonable-looking male child just so happened to be our boy Zhu Houcong, then all of 13 years old. He moved to Beijing and was coronated, receiving the imperial name of the Jiajing Emperor, as we shall refer to him hereafter.
Jiajing, by the way, translates to “admirable tranquility.” This is hilarious.
According to Ming Dynasty tradition, if the new emperor wasn’t the biological son of the old emperor, the imperial ministers would put together some paperwork to declare the new emperor the adopted son of the old one, just to avoid any dynastic weirdness. But the Jiajing Emperor did not care for this tradition. Instead, he executed a tactic that I think can best be summed up in a brief dialogue.
Jiajing Emperor: y’all remember my dead father, Zhu Youyuan?
Minister 1, nodding sagaciously: of course. nice guy.
Jiajing Emperor: what if I made him emperor
Minister 1: you…how?
Jiajing Emperor: what if I just said he was the emperor. from beyond the grave. ghost emperor. making me Legitimate Son of Ghost Emperor.
Minister 2, slowly: that would be a wild thing to say and do.
Minister 3: literally we all just saw the emperor yesterday, he was a 29-year-old bag of dicks and not your father, who is dead and not the emperor.
Jiajing Emperor: what if I murdered all of you, would that help
Minister 2, starting to edge toward the door: I’m gonna…go
Hereafter followed a period referred to as the “Great Rites Controversy,” in which the Jiajing Emperor exiled or murdered anyone who dared point out to him that it was deeply weird to crown his dead father Retroactive Ghost Emperor. This went on for several months, until people decided it was easier and less deadly to let him have his way.
In Which I Would Like to Read About a Queen Whose Life Was Pretty OK, Just Once
The first 15 years or so of the Jiajing Emperor’s reign seem to have been pretty basic empire stuff. He delegated as much responsibility as he could to his ministers, spending a lot of his time in his out-of-town harem, though my sources tactfully pointed out that he did stay on top of the paperwork.
Throughout his reign, he was married three times, which to me is enough times that you really need to start asking some questions. The fate of his wives was as follows:
Empress Chen: Died shortly following a miscarriage, after which he posthumously shit-talked her for years.
Empress Zhang: Promoted from former concubine to empress, demoted after she yelled at the emperor for trying his weird and maybe-poisonous fertility “cures.”
Empress Fang: Promoted from former concubine to empress but was too old at the time for the emperor to be attracted to (age 15—yikes), died in a house fire after the emperor heard her screaming and forbade anyone from saving her and her dusty 31-year-old uterus
All of these women deserved better. I hope their spirits are haunting him relentlessly.
Not Great. Period.
Like every monarch literally ever, the Jiajing Emperor was very concerned about his ability to have a son. And to assuage his fertility concerns and pressing fear of death, he started getting into Taoism and the occult.
You can imagine my delight upon learning of this, by the way. If there’s one thing I love, it’s a ruler who’s like “I’m going to get extremely into arcane magic and potions and I’m going to make it everyone’s problem.”
Specifically, the Jiajing Emperor was profoundly interested in the concept of immortality. Did this have anything to do either with a) his ghost dad emperor or b) the fact that the previous emperor died of touching water? Idk maybe. The point is, he went ham trying to find a way to live forever.
I regret to inform you, however, that the immortality scheme the Jiajing Emperor got most passionately interested in early in his reign was…the menstrual blood of the virgins who worked in the palace. Which he would collect and have brewed into a special potion called “red lead.” Any woman who said “uh no bro this is weird please stop stealing and drinking from my diva cup” would risk being beaten or executed.
More delightful is the alleged “longevity turtle” the Jiajing Emperor kept as a pet because he thought it would help him live forever. I genuinely believe that if every high school junior was told about the Longevity Turtle, we would have four times as many history majors in colleges as we currently do.
Regrettably, the Longevity Turtle died, so as far as immortality schemes go, not the best one.
My (3,500Country) Emperor (32M) Has Unionized
Occult antics and brutal punishment of wives and dissenters is one thing. But in 1539, the Jiajing Emperor did something that honestly I’ve thought about every day since the moment I learned about it, and which I think we can all use as inspiration in our daily lives:
He went on strike.
THE EMPEROR. Woke up one morning. And said “FUCK THIS I’M ON STRIKE.”
He just decided one day not to emperor anymore, and for twenty-five years did not do a goddamn thing.
Stopped going to council meetings. Did not pass laws. Did not govern the country. Did not abdicate. Just Bartleby the Scrivener-ed his way through two and a half decades like “I would prefer not to.” And didn’t.
He wouldn’t give audiences to his citizens, and whenever he wanted to issue an imperial proclamation, he made one of his eunuchs do it for him. No one saw him. No one spoke to him. He essentially became the Willy Wonka of Ming Dynasty China, remaining inside his chocolate factory slash imperial palace tinkering away while people wondered what on earth was going on.
Might I add? By the way? That throughout this 25-year period, China was consistently getting attacked by pirates? Like, there were warring pirate gangs roving up and down the coastline, marauding and raiding, and the Jiajing Emperor was like “nah babes I’ll stay inside, good luck though.”
Incredible behavior. Legendary. No notes. May we all be such self-care warriors. I might not go to work all week, just to see what it feels like to be emperor.
Gatekeep, Girlboss, Go Kill the Emperor
Not everyone was thrilled about the Jiajing Emperor’s incredible work-life balance, however. One group of people in particular: the palace concubines. I have to assume theirs was a three-part grievance:
He was physically and sexually abusing them
He kept stealing their menstrual blood
He was a useless emperor who by this point hadn’t gone to work in 3+ years
So in 1542, the palace concubines banded together to murder the emperor by strangling him with their hair ribbons during a sexual encounter. We love the Oceans Eight energy of this. I wish I could have been in the planning meetings.
To show just how many people hated the emperor enough to try to murder him, allow me to share this brief excerpt from the Wikipedia page on the Palace Women’s Uprising of 1542:
SEVENTEEN WOMEN. Ten of whom were personally involved in strangling the emperor. Listen. You cannot fault them for thoroughness.
You can fault them for effectiveness, though, because despite the absolute excess of women involved in the plot, none of the ten were apparently very good at strangling. The Jiajing Emperor fainted but did not die, and the empress rushed in and saved him. (One wonders why.) After several days, he revived and made a full recovery. All of the concubines were horribly executed, as were their families, which is hard thing to joke about, so.
Mercury in Retrograde
As far as I can tell, the Jiajing Emperor celebrated surviving his assassination attempt by just…never going to work again. It seems like he just kind of hung out for the rest of his reign? Doing whatever? Becoming increasingly sexually gross with increasingly younger women and girls? And taking increasingly terrible potions in an attempt to live forever, including several made of distilled mercury?
You can probably guess where this is going.
If you want to live forever, readers, let me recommend one quick tip: don’t drink mercury.
The Jiajing Emperor died in 1567 at age 59, presumably from mercury poisoning. He ruled for 45 years, although he spent 25 of those hiding and napping and playing with alchemy &c, so the title of “second-longest reign in the Ming Dynasty” really feels like it’s overstating things a bit.
That’s all for this time, my friends. Thank you as always for joining me for some bespoke nonsense twice per month.
Until we meet again, be well, and go on strike tomorrow, apparently it doesn’t matter what your job is, just stop associating with the public and squirrel yourself away in your home like an eccentric emperor, there are no rules, live your life,
-Allison
"He ordered all his ministers to dress up as merchants and then wandered through the palace pretending to be a commoner going shopping, aka the game I used to make my grandma play with me when I was three, except as a grown man"
"Chinese emperors were traditionally confined to the Forbidden City in Beijing, which served as the imperial palace for over 500 years. While the emperors could technically leave the palace, they rarely did so, as their movements were heavily restricted and they were surrounded by a highly structured and ritualized court life. The Forbidden City was designed to be a self-contained world, with everything the emperor needed available within its walls. However, there are historical instances of emperors leaving the Forbidden City for specific ceremonial events or military campaigns."
A little context https://www.quora.com/Could-Chinese-emperors-leave-the-Forbidden-City
Hilarious and brilliant. This emperor was not only a dirtbag but a douchebag… literally.