Abstract
During the early twentieth century, the Rev. Antoine Mostaert, CICM, the renowned Belgian missionary and Mongolist, acquired a rare Mongol manuscript from the Ordos in Inner Mongolia titled “Book of the Story of How Emperor Yongle of the Great Ming built the City of Peking. The Yuan Prince, The True Prince.” There were two handwritten copies, both were transcribed in 1907 but no date nor identity of authorship was given. The Reverend also recorded from storytellers an oral version of the same story short-titled “The Yuan Prince, The True Prince.” In this fiction-laden story the Yuan Prince refers to the posthumous son of the last Mongol-Yuan ruler Toghon Temür gaghan by his Mongol qatun, who later became an adopted son of the Ming emperor Zhu Hongwu; and the True Prince, his younger brother born later to the same mother. The True Prince inherited the Chinese throne after the Ming emperor’s death, and the Yuan Prince subsequently replaced his brother as Emperor Yongle of the Ming dynasty after the former committed suicide. In actual history, however, the Yuan Prince referred to Zhu Di, the Prince of Yan, Ming Taizu’s fourth son by a Mongol consort from the Qonggird tribe; and the True Prince, to Zhu Yunwen, the grandson of Ming Taizu, who inherited the throne as the Jianwen emperor after his grandfather’s death. The Prince of Yan succeeded by usurping the throne from the Jianwen emperor after a two-and-half years of civil war; their relationship was uncle to nephew, not as elder to younger brother as the story asserted.
In 1972 the Reverend Henry Serruys, CICM, Mostaert’s protégé, introduced this valuable manuscript by publishing a study which includes a Latin transcription and a complete English translation with critical notes under the title: “A Manuscript Version of the Legend of the Mongol Ancestry of the Yung-lo Emperor,” in Analecta Mongolica, Dedicated to the Seventieth Birthday of Professor Owen Lattimore (Bloomington, Indiana: The Mongol Society). In an admixture of legend and history, the story presents several highlights of facts and fiction in a Sino-Mongolian setting. They begin with the anti-Mongol Chinese uprisings on the eve of the Mid-Autumn festival in the 1360s; the Ming emperor Zhu Hongwu’s capture of Dadu and Toghon Temür’s hurried departure; the pregnant Mongol qatun’s marriage to the Ming emperor without revealing her conception; her birth of the posthumous son the Yuan Prince, and another son fathered by the Ming emperor named the True Prince. Following this, concerned about the enmity of his two sons, the Ming emperor dispatched the Prince of Yuan to the land of future Peking to establish a fief; before this, in her sick bed the Mongol qatun gave the Prince two letters in separate sealed envelopes, with the instruction that he opened one in time of suffering, and another one in time of success; now in great distress, the Prince unsealed the first letter, and, following the instruction, pleaded with the emperor for the service of adviser Liu Bowen and his request was granted. After arriving at the designated locality, the Prince of Yuan ran into a burly swarthy-faced rider who took away his bow and arrows, then shot one arrow at each of the four directions, admonishing the Prince to appoint Liu Bowen in charge of building the capital in the area where the arrows had fallen and where caches of gold, silver, and jewels will be found. With the great city thereafter known as Peking being built, the Prince set up his own fief in the region, but soon learned the death of his father in Nanjing and hurried there with a company of soldiers to pay homage. At this time the “True Prince” had already ascended the throne, but upon learning the arrival of his elder brother and remembering the earlier enmity, the Prince was frightened and hanged himself. The story ends with the Prince of Yuan returning to Peking where he enthroned in succession to his late father to become Emperor Yongle of the Great Ming dynasty, and inaugurated a lineage of thirteen generations of successive rulers. In a nutshell, by propagating the legend of the Mongol ancestry of the Yongle emperor, the story imaginatively provided the wistful consolation to the Mongol community that even though the Yuan dynasty had fallen, the rulers of China remained in the hands of the descendants of the Mongol gaghan through the lineage of the“Yuan Prince.”
Despite his pivotal effort, however, Serruys has not closely examined the historical sources and the Mongol and Chinese cultural traditions presented in the story. Besides providing a Chinese translation of the Mongol story, the present paper seeks not only to explore the historical origins of the various episodes, but also examine the Mongol views of history and the intermingling of Mongol and Chinese cultural traditions to shed new light on the manuscript’s contribution to Sino-Mongolian historical studies.
Keywords
Yuan Shundi, Toghon Temür gaghan, The Yongle Emperor, Ming Peking, Liu Bowen (Liu Ji)
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