Both the Mongols and the Ming court maintained false and often silly perceptions of themselves and each other. Every society produces its own cultural conceits, a set of lies and delusions about itself that thrives in the face of all contrary evidence. The Mongols believed that they could not be completely defeated. Even after being driven back north of the Gobi, they still pretended to be the rightful rulers of China and much of the rest of the world. The Mongol royal court was just waiting for a shift in the will of heaven that would propel them back to their rightful place as rulers of the most extensive empire on earth. To fill in the gaps between their beliefs and reality, they sat around the fire telling of clever Mongol concubines, morally lax Chinese queens, oversexed Mongol soldiers, impotent Chinese emperors, and secret pregnancies. All the tales ended with the deception of Chinese court officials and the conclusion that through some form of clever deceit, the Ming emperor was really a Mongol. Thus, the Mongols had never been truly defeated or chased out of China, merely replaced by some of their Mongol kinsmen in another guise. The men chuckled over the stories and then headed out to hunt another marmot and gather some dried cow dung to build a fire.
These stories also served as justification for any type of raid or military expedition. They had a story that while the Ming emperor had been held captive by the Mongols, he fathered a son with a Mongol girl. Thus, if needed, they had yet one more claim to be the legitimate rulers of China and even to have the legitimate heir of the dead Ming emperor. In the intervening years, the identity of the girl and her son had been lost, but they could certainly be found if needed. The justification, however, did not matter until the Mongols had a sufficiently strong military force to rival the Ming. The story of the secret heir might be useful as a propaganda tool for legitimizing their rule if they conquered China, but it had little use in rallying Mongols to fight.
The Mongols undermined the truth of their defeats with sexual intrigue; the Ming courtiers undermined the truth of their failures by renaming and redefining it. The Chinese believed that they had never really been conquered at all. By assigning Chinese names to each of the foreign conquerors, they almost obliterated the unpleasant memory of alien domination. Periodically, the eunuchs of the court invited in a Mongol horse trader, dressed him in elegant new clothes, gave him a letter glorifying the Ming emperor, and ushered him into the court, which accepted his goods as foreign tribute and gave him lavish gifts in return. Later the eunuchs could laugh over the filthy fingers and crude manners of the barbarians as they slurped bowls of hot noodles, and then return to drawing pornographic pictures to give to the next foreign delegation.
After one hundred years in power, the Ming Dynasty had spent its initial vigor and matured into a protracted middle age. Prior to Esen’s capture of the Ming emperor, the dynasty had its confidence, even if it lacked youthful energy. After the capture, the nation suffered from a lack of both, and their traditionally exaggerated fears of the Mongols began to haunt the Chinese once again. The nervous fear clouded every diplomatic discussion and prevented the court from uniting behind a single comprehensive policy of how to deal with the barbarian threat.
As the Ming weakened and the turmoil among the Mongols continued, renegade Mongols began making deeper and more frequent raids into Chinese territory. The renewed raiding seemed closely tied to Bayan Mongke’s coming of age and his expanding prominence at court as jinong, and Chinese chroniclers showed an increasing fear of him and other Mongol raiding parties.
In plotting to attack the Chinese cities, young Bayan Mongke faced an unusual foe headed by a teenage emperor of almost the same age. The Ming heir became emperor in approximately the same year that Bayan Mongke became crown prince. Their lives were marked by similar experiences of near death, years in hiding, and then sudden elevation to power at the center of a powerful court. Esen’s campaigns against their families had been the source of the early suffering for both of them.
But in addition to these odd similarities, there were marked differences as well. The power behind Bayan Mongke was his older uncle; the power behind the Chinese emperor Chenghua was his older nursemaid, Lady Wan, whom he loved.
The new emperor had been born in 1447 just before Esen captured his father. During his father’s captivity, the little crown prince Chenghua lost his position, had his name changed, was shunted aside, and lived in constant danger of being killed. The harsh uncertainty of his perilous childhood left him a nervous and introverted child, made all the worse by a severe stutter when trying to pronounce words beginning with s, zh, ch, and sh sounds. Within the closed world of his nursery, Wan nourished and entertained the shy, vulnerable boy. She dressed herself and him in military uniforms, played elaborate games, and staged colorful and exciting military charades with real soldiers.
In 1464, at age seventeen, the emperor ascended the throne when Lady Wan was thirty-two years old. For as long as he could remember, she had been his most intimate companion and his protector, and at the appropriate time she had initiated him into sex. Although it was common for the servant women to meet an emperor’s sexual needs when required, such women came and went with little more notice than the changing flowers in a vase; but this young emperor seemed inordinately attached to his nurse.
When he became emperor, he married an appropriately aristocratic lady in order to have an official empress. She quickly learned of his attachment to Wan, and she bitterly resented it. Within weeks of being installed in her new status as the highest-ranking woman in the empire, Empress Wu claimed that the nursemaid had been discourteous to her and ordered that she be flogged in a clear show of rank and resentment. Outraged, the teenage emperor stripped his wife of her title of empress after only a month and a day in office, banishing her to a remote palace within the Imperial City, where she lived out the next forty-five years until her death.
Chenghua could not make a servant into an empress, even one as beloved as Wan, but he continued to live openly with her. Two years later, when the emperor was nineteen and Lady Wan was thirty-six, she gave birth to a son, who soon died. After the death, officials began writing memoranda to the emperor, asking him to seek relations with other women in his household in order to produce an heir and, as an intended but not stated consequence, to decrease the power of Lady Wan, her family, and her entourage. The emperor obliged by having a son with one of his wives, but the child died suddenly just after being declared the heir. Suspicion naturally fell on Lady Wan, but the emperor stood fast by her.
Following the loss of their son, the emperor showed no lessening of his commitment to Lady Wan, despite her inability to get pregnant again. Although she could not appear in court as the official empress in the gowns and clothes that accompanied the title, Lady Wan chose her own individual way of marking her identity: She often chose to wear men’s military clothes. As the only woman at court dressed as a general, she flaunted her unique position.
The Chinese sources report that Bayan Mongke of the Mongols came into Chinese territory and met with the local Mongol leaders; they blamed the young prince for instigating the troubles that followed. Soon after the suspicious visit, Mongols on the border revolted against their Ming overlords. They rose up in 1468, exactly one hundred years after the Ming expelled the Mongol khans of the Yuan Dynasty.