YONGLE EMPEROR – MASSACRE OF THE CONCUBINES
Not all eunuchs had suffered amputation of their penises as well as their testicles: sexual liaisons – known as vegetable relationships – with concubines were possible but forbidden. The girls belonged to the emperor. Many concubines enjoyed emotional attachments to eunuchs, some of which led to discreet romances. But courtiers were spied on by the eunuchs of the Eastern Depot secret police.
In 1421, after Yongle had moved into the Forbidden City, a concubine committed suicide after an affair with a eunuch.
Yongle, humiliated by being cuckolded by a half-man, ordered the instant slaughter by slicing of 2,800 girls, some as young as twelve, and their eunuchs. The girls were rent, split, ripped and torn to shreds’. A young Korean-born concubine, Lady Cui, survived because she was recovering from illness in Nanjing, and wrote an account that was preserved. She returned to find that her world had been liquidated. There was such deep sorrow in the palace that thunder shook the three great halls, she recalled. Lightning struck them and, after all those years of toil, they all burned to the ground. The fire chastened the declining emperor.
In 1424, the sixty-four-year-old Yongle dispatched Zheng on a small expedition and then proceeded to the Mongolian front. There he had a stroke caused by overdosing on his immortality elixirs.
Lady Cui, only thirty, and fifteen of his other girls were strangled by white silk nooses then buried with Yongle in his tomb.
Yongle’s ultimate successor, his grandson Xuande, diverted his admiral to other tasks, appointing him to run Nanjing and to the post of Grand Director of the Buddhist Three Treasures – though he allowed him a seventh and final voyage. The last voyages connected many worlds – none more different than that of the Ming of Beijing and the Swahili sultans of east Africa.
Source ~ ‘ The World A Family History’ By Simon Sebag Montefiore
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