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Both Shah Rukh and the Yongle Emperor ruled in the aftermath of strife and war.
In Shah Rukh’s case, he oversaw an empire that his father Timur had built, an empire taking in part or all of Turkey, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and more, a land carved out by a life of conquest and by levels of violence sufficient to make one suspect some mythologization at work, towering pyramids of human skulls stacking up toward the sky and so forth. He had been there for significant portions of that carving out himself. He had been there with Timur in 1402, at the Battle of Ankara, when they had defeated and captured the Ottoman sultan, Bayezid.
With Timur’s death in 1405, that violence was directed inward, from those on the exterior who saw new weakness and also among the would-be inheritors of all that Timur had accrued, the sort of scramble that could so often occur in the wake of such a successful conqueror, particularly at the birth of a dynasty, particularly when there had been no clear plan for succession put in place by the founding ruler.
Timur’s grandson Khalil Sultan was first off the mark, his location and decisive actions allowing him to take Timur’s capital of Samarkand along with the treasury, but there were other claimants, other grandsons in Sultan Husayn Tayichiud, Iskandar, and Pir Muhammad. There was Khalil Sultan’s father, Miran Shah, and his brother, Abu Bakr, supporters of his who fell to outside forces looking to take advantage of the confusion.
There was also Shah Rukh, Timur’s son, ruling from Herat, and he did not need to seize the prize of Samarkand in battle, only to wait, to maintain his strength for a few years until Khalil Sultan’s rule failed and was betrayed, to take that city then left open to him and add it to the empire he was consolidating. Khalil Sultan, his nephew, would come to him in the end to submit, and by 1411 was dead in what is now part of Tehran.
By that point, the rule of the Yongle Emperor, named Zhu Di, was well established, but it had not come about without adversity. He had not simply stepped up and into the throne one peaceful pleasant morning. It had been much more complicated than that, had taken some years to bring his realm back from the devastation and fallout of a civil war.
His father, the Hongwu Emperor, the Ming founder, had tried to avoid such complications, had gone to some effort to do so, seeing clearly the threat they posed to the dynasty he was leaving behind, and having risen from the bottom to participate in driving off the last of the Yuan emperors before, he knew a little something about dynastic vulnerability. He issued documents outlining how the empire ought to be governed, how the princes ought to be governed, how his successor ought to be chosen.
His first choice would have been his oldest son, Zhu Biao, but that son died in 1392, six years before he would. It was his grandson, Zhu Biao’s son, who would become the second Ming ruler, the Jianwen Emperor, but his reign would last less than four years before being swallowed up by rebellion. It would be one of his uncles who marched into his capital in 1402 and burned his palace. That uncle would present a scorched body which he said was that of the dead Jianwen Emperor, though stories would later develop that maybe he had escaped. That uncle took the throne as the Yongle Emperor in the summer of 1402.
Both Shah Rukh and the Yongle Emperor had come to rule through bloody struggles over succession, their nephews suffering as a result. Today, we follow a journey that connects the dots between them.
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast that roams that world in the footsteps of its travellers, its friars, merchants, and liars. And it is of course a podcast that is supported by the generosity of kind listeners such as yourself, maybe actually you yourself listening right now. If you’re not already doing so, for as little as a dollar a month you can enjoy ad-free episodes, early access, and bonus listening at Patreon.com/humancircus, and this time, I want to especially thank onebrownmeece and Chris for doing so. Thank you both very much!
All of that said, let’s get to the story.
Having finished with Abd al-Latif last time, we are onto something new today. This time, the topic is a Timurid expedition to Ming China, the early-15th-century embassy from Timur’s son Shah Rukh to the Yongle Emperor as witnessed by the painter Ghiyāth al-Dīn Naqqāsh.
We have touched a little on this Ming-Timurid diplomatic exchange before on the podcast, on Timur himself trading somewhat belligerent missives with his counterpart far to the east. And when I say we have touched on it, we have done so in the incredibly distant past, in, I believe, the Schiltberger series, the very first one, but also more recently when we followed the embassy of Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo to Timur’s Samarkand and saw Chinese ambassadors there in Samarkand.
At that time, there were murmurs of ill-will, more than murmurs really, open and unmistakable displays, with Timur very deliberately downgrading the Chinese envoys in the seating order and, just in the unlikely case that the subtleties of this gesture had gone misunderstood, explaining to them that this was because their master was “a thief and a bad man.” It was the kind of statement that it was difficult to walk back from.
Timur would not be treated as a vassal, and he would no longer pay tribute either. He would instead be departing for China on his last great military campaign, one which he never completed, dying before ever reaching that goal. Safe to say that it was a relationship with plenty of room for improvements, and since then, things had improved.
First Timur’s grandson Khalil Sultan and then his son Shah Rukh, the eventual victor in the struggle for succession after his father’s death, would act to normalize the relationship. Shah Rukh, in combination with his son Ulugh Beg, would exchange twenty embassies with the Chinese emperor, achieving much greater conviviality and regularity than the Timurid founder. They would release Chinese diplomats that Timur had held captive, would seek and nurture ties in trade, while, for his part, the Ming emperor would reciprocate.
He would send praise, calling Shah Rukh “enlightened, perceptive, knowing, mature, sensible, and greater than all the Muslims” and wishing that “envoys and merchants should constantly come and go, and there should be no interruptions.” The emperor, the Yongle Emperor to use his era name, sent silks, satins, silvers, ceramics, paper, and falcons, as well as special gifts for the princes and lords, receiving in return camels, sheep, jade, and horses. The emperor would be especially pleased with one particular horse and commissioned a painting of it that he sent by way of thanks with a later embassy.
Shah Rukh, even when he’d governed Herat under the rule of Timur, had always shown himself to be a very outward looking ruler interested in communication with his counterparts near and far, and the emperor seems to have also been interested in diplomacy, or at least saw it as a valuable tool, or at least administered as if this was the case, applying it closer to home with the Jurchens and in Tibet and Korea, seeking on his western flank to nurture friendly relations with buffer states between himself and the Timurids.
I should mention that these exchanges between the Timurid and Ming empires did not always go perfectly smoothly. It was not all effortless praise and present-giving, for those would only come a little later. There was the 1412 Chinese embassy and accompanying letter in Turkish, Chinese, and Farsi, in which the emperor declared himself “lord of the realms of the face of the earth,” and, unaware that Khalil Sultan was already dead, demanded that Shah Rukh make peace with his nephew and one-time rival. It was just the sort of thing that Timur had taken offense to, the assumption that the emperor was in any position to issue orders as if to a mere vassal state.
Shah Rukh did not embark on an invasion then, but he did send a pretty strongly worded reply which included the recommendation that the Yongle Emperor convert to Islam. There’s a good possibility that his more abrasive language was softened either by those charged with delivering it—sometimes you need to protect your boss from their own mistakes—or those on the other side who translated and transmitted it, perhaps more intent on conveying what the message should be than what it strictly speaking was.
Either way, that mission was well received, and it was not just undertaken by Shah Rukh’s personal representatives. It included those of a broader collection of Central Asian towns and powers, all of whom stood to benefit from healthy relations and trade with Ming China and those under its sway.
In response to this large diplomatic and trade mission and the tribute it brought, the Yongle Emperor dispatched a series of three increasingly amiable embassies to Shah Rukh’s Herat, emphasizing a desire for commerce, addressing the Timurid ruler much more as an equal monarch of an equal power, and getting to all that complimentary language we already touched on. When the third of these Ming embassies returned to China it did so with a Timurid delegation, and among that delegation was a chronicler and painter named Ghiyāth al-Dīn.
In 1419, Ghiyāth al-Dīn and the others travelled east, and following his written report, noted down to be narrativised upon his return, we’ll go with them.
I have seen various dates given for the departure, but I’ll stick to the one given in the version of the text I’ll be using throughout, and I’ll say that on the 4th of December, Ghiyāth al-Dīn left Shah Rukh’s Herat. Severe weather led to delays on the road, but making his way via Balkh by the 22nd of January he was in Samarkand. The party was supposed to meet up there with the envoys of one of Shah Rukh’s sons, but they had already departed. Still, Ghiyāth al-Dīn would hardly be travelling alone. He himself was there on the behalf of Bāysonḡor, Shah Rukh’s son, but Shah Rukh had sent representatives too, headed by a man named Shādī, and so had his other sons, and so did other lords of the region. There were also the returning Chinese envoys that were to go with them, as well as the merchants who tended to attach themselves to such trips. On February 25th, this large party left Samarkand.
Of the journey itself, there was at first not a great deal to be said, but then increasingly more as they moved into more unfamiliar territory. They passed through Tashkent. They had good weather by May, “and the views afforded by the roads, mountains, and meadows were pleasant beyond description.” There was tension, strife even, as conflict broke out, but the steward of the region negotiated a truce and met them with a letter of safe passage.
Even in June, they found the water frozen, and rain and sleet fell often. They crossed rivers and mountains. They listened with concern to news of an embassy that had been plundered, and they resolved to be more careful themselves. In modern-day Xinjiang, they saw many Buddhists, or in the language of the text in translation, idolaters, with their many temples and one particularly large figure of the Buddha.
Elsewhere, there was a place of dervishes and their hostel. At what is now Hami, there was a large and highly ornamented mosque and just opposite it, a Buddhist temple, where Ghiyāth al-Dīn, an artist himself, admired the artistic mastery evident in a golden statue within and the fantastic forms that had been painted without, the two demons struggling at the doors. Out in the wilds there was a curious encounter with a yak so large and strong it apparently seized a rider from his steed and carried him off on its horns.
During this stretch of the journey they were met by a group of Chinese scribes who recorded their names and the numbers that went with them, keeping an account of such visitors. And then later, in late August, they were greeted by another group, who also took the names and number of merchants or servants who were attached to each emissary, warning them that it was important they did not inflate the number, for if their accounting was found not to match with the truth, then they, the visiting emissaries, would lose credibility. Duly noted in the record, we read that Amir Shadi and Köchkä had 200 people with them, that Sultan Ahmad and Ghiyāth al-Dīn had 150, Arghudaq had 60, Ardawan 50, and Taj al-Din the same. All these people represented different figures of Timurid royalty. Some emissaries had at this point gone ahead, and others had not yet arrived, but along with those who had become separated, the mission Ghiyāth al-Dīn accompanied represented the far flung provinces of Khurasan, Mazandaran, Khwarazm, Badakhshan, Ghazni, Kabul, and Kandahar, along with Transoxiana and Fars.
This greeting party did not just assess the numbers of their merchants and servants. They also welcomed them, offering hospitality, offering food. In a meadow which Ghiyāth al-Dīn likened to a garden of paradise, they set up canopies and seats, served goose and other roast birds, fresh and dried fruit, and other cooked foods. They also provided everyone with the sheep, barley, and flour they needed, for the journey I’m assuming, not the day, and, quote, “all sorts of intoxicants,” probably not to take with them.
The next day there was more feasting, more goose and fruit, along with cake and “delicious bread” in the tent of the local ruler. Opposite his seat was a great kettle drum, and to either side of it performing singers and musicians with strings, flutes, and cymbals, and quote, “Beautiful boys made up like girls with rouge and powder rubbed on their faces and pearls in their ears…” There, in an open square formed of tents and stock-still armoured soldiers, they watched, all receiving a little branch to tuck in their headwear so that the scene became like a forest. They watched as the performers put on animal masks and danced. There was wine, lots of wine, so that Ghiyāth al-Dīn evoked this verse, evidently familiar to him:
“Cast Bahram's lasso of prey, clasp
Jamshid's cup, for I have crossed this desert,
and there is neither Bahram nor onager.”
It is of course not a verse I am familiar with. I’m assuming the onager translation is in reference to the wild donkey rather than the siege weapon, but in any case I tend to think the crossing of the desert and clasping of the cup are the elements to really cling onto here. The company drank with great thirst, and the wine continued to be poured.
Ghiyāth al-Dīn described “Moon-faced, tulip-cheeked boys, holding delicious wine,” and how the servers brought platters of nuts, dates, watermelon, and also pickled garlic and onion to accompany the wine. At some point, they brought out a bird mask, something like a stork but large enough for a boy to climb inside and make the stork dance in every direction. I’m imagining something like a lion dance, not to be confused with a line dance, but I might be way off there. The audience, Ghiyāth al-Dīn wrote, was astonished, and the day, “from morning until evening, was spent in enjoyment and pleasure.”
Not all days on the road were difficult ones, not even then, but the next day was for the desert. The next many days were for the desert, to be taken in several stages.
There was a strong mountain fortress a few days in, only one gate in and one out, where their names were again recorded as they entered, likely the gate fortress in the great wall. There was a large town in what is now Gansu province, with a post-house at its gate where they left their pack animals and belongings and each received food, a bed, silk pyjamas, and a servant.
The town was square, strong-walled, and towered, its bazaars watered and swept. There were pigs kept in many of the houses and mutton and pork in the butcher shops, an indication that they had left the largely Muslim world behind. Ghiyāth al-Dīn’s description is all clean lines, straight streets, neatly cut baked bricks, and coloured tiles comparable to those found in Iran—remember that he was describing these elements to people back home—along with the “beautiful boys” standing before the temple doors, calling out for people to enter.
The next town, or perhaps city, Ganzhou, was larger than the last, and Ghiyāth al-Dīn had eyes especially for the temple, maybe because its artistic value appealed to the artist in him, maybe because he thought that was what would most interest those back home. He described its dimensions, the 50 cubit tall idol at its centre, the figures that seemed to move in such a way you thought them alive, the intricate paintings on the walls, the little buildings all around it, which he compared to the cells of a caravanserai—again, speaking to that audience at home—each with “gold-spun curtains, gilded platforms, chairs, candlesticks, and banqueting vessels.” He noted the representations of demons that were made to hold a pagoda aloft, and the pictures of an emperor enthroned with slaves to either side.
And at the town after that, everything was large, everything excellent. The buildings and people were numerous, the banquet served up to them greater than in any other town before, the temple larger than any between there and China’s borders, and the girls who sat in the taverns the most extraordinarily beautiful, so much so that he said the town might be termed the abode of beauty itself.
The next city was somehow larger still, its size immense, its people innumerable, its bronze idol 50 cubits high and known for its many limbs as the “Thousand Armed,” which is also the name you can find it by if you look up “Thousand Armed Thousand-Eyed Guanyin” at Longxing Temple and see the Song Dynasty cast statue for yourself. Ghiyāth al-Dīn saw the smaller figures, shaped in painted plaster, the images of monks in exercise or meditation, the paintings showing “consummate expertise and mastery” in their depiction of tigers, rams, leopards, and dragons. In this city, the emissaries’ gifts for the emperor were collected, to be brought to Yongle, the one exception being the lion they had with them, for it would need to travel with its keeper.
It was mid-October when they reached the Mongol “Back River,” better known now as the Yellow River. On a bridge of 22 boats, secured at either end by thick iron stakes they went across near Lanzhou, and by boat or bridge they made other crossings throughout November.
They were nearing their destination, and after this break, we’ll reach it with them.
…
As Ghiyāth al-Dīn and the others travelled east, they did so using the system of post-houses. There would be 99 of them all the way to their destination, with chains of beacon towers set between to warn of advancing armies, the signals racing ahead of the relay riders that would follow the beacons east with further details.
Each post-house was almost like a small town in itself, with people who lived there and worked the land, with 450 horses and donkeys to be made available, and, it seems, people for the wagons. Ghiyāth al-Dīn notes that they brought nearly 60 wagons for the emissaries, drawing them along in rope teams. At every station, sheep, geese, fowl, flour, honey, rice, vegetables, pickled garlic and onions, and liquor were provided, in every town a banquet, and as the travelers neared their goal, those banquets improved, the foods and entertainments becoming ever more elaborate as they closed in on the imperial centre.
On December 14th of 1420, just over a year after they’d left Shah Rukh’s Herat, Ghiyāth al-Dīn and the rest reached the place he wrote of as Khanbaliq, the home of the Yongle Emperor of Ming China, the place we know as Beijing. It was the morning and still dark, and they, quote, “beheld a city of inordinate magnitude, made all of stone with walls a league in length,” scaffolds, as is ever the case when you travel, set against those walls for construction or repair.
They did not make the grandest of entrances into this grandest of cities. When they reached the moat, they found the gates were closed, likely due to the early hour, so they were let in by way of a tower that was under construction. Rather like underage drinkers entering an unfinished house, not so very much like official visitors from the Timurid ruler, they entered the imperial city in darkness.
Once inside, they were brought straight to the emperor's palace. They crossed the 700 feet of cut stone on foot, passing by the raised trunks of elephants on either side, and though the sun had not yet risen, they saw a great crowd of people there at the palace gate, 100,000 of them apparently. They saw how the gates revealed a “vast, pleasant, and captivating open area,” saw the emperor’s pavilion there in the courtyard, and before it a high platform with columns atop it, a bell, a dais, and three gates. The middle gate, the largest, was for the emperor himself. Two people awaited him there by the dais, and many more outside the gate.
By dawn, nearly three hundred thousand waited outside, which I think we can read simply as “a lot of people.” There were two thousand singers, praising the emperor in harmony, and two thousand soldiers with halberds, clubs, axes, javelins, swords, and maces. All around the perimeter of that large courtyard were “chambers, balconies, and columns of great magnitude,” perhaps lit by torch, maybe just gradually appearing in the creeping pre-dawn light.
With the rising of the sun, the two atop the platform sounded the bell, joined by drums, horns, and cymbals, and the gates opened, the people on the outside running in, rushing, as was apparently customary, to see their emperor. Ghiyāth al-Dīn, and the rest of the emissaries went in themselves, crossing that open space and coming to another, “also vast and even more pleasing to the onlooker from afar than the first had been,” and with a pavilion larger than the last. This one was in the shape of a triangle and draped in gold-flecked yellow silk, with representations of dragons, phoenix, and winged creatures, and on it sat a golden chair. In lines to left and right, Chinese officers stood in rows, tablets in their hands, the soldiers behind them too many even for Ghiyāth al-Dīn to guess at. They stood at attention, some with spears, and some with drawn swords, all so silent and still that they seemed not even to breathe.
Finally, the Yongle Emperor himself appeared and, climbing silver steps, took his place in the golden chair.
He was of medium height, Ghiyāth al-Dīn observed, with medium features, neither large nor small. He had facial hair, or facial hairs by the wording of this text, two or three hundred of them, gathered in three or four plaits, but all of this doesn’t exactly paint a picture. Ghiyāth al-Dīn actually had more to say of the girls who sat next to the emperor, ready to record what was said with pen and paper, their, quote, “faces like the moon and countenances like the sun, hair of ambergris knotted on top of their heads, their faces and necks exposed, and lustrous pearls in their ears.” The emperor, by comparison, was apparently very medium.
Looking at the portrait that has come down to us, I don’t know that I can do much better, but I will try. He is a heavyset man, at least in his robe. His beard is black and sits lightly on his sternum, almost seeming to lift off into the air, with a kind of double-decker moustache forking out to either side. He is full of chin and cheek with a delicate mouth. His nose is tall but not long. His brows start thin and horizontal from the centre and then settle bushily over the outer circle of his eyes. In the portrait, he appears calmly curious, incredibly unbothered.
In those early hours of December 14th, 1420, he settled into his chair, and the day’s business began. First to be dealt with was a group of criminals and then Ghiyāth al-Dīn and the other envoys, and this might have been quite an intentional pairing, a way of putting them in their place, not letting them think they were too important or that the emperor really cared all that much that they were there. “Oh,” the gesture seemed to say. “It’s you. Come on in, if you feel you must.”
But not just yet. It was to be those accused criminals first, 700 of them according to one version of the text, brought forward together with the emissaries but dealt with ahead of them. The accused were restrained by forked sticks round their necks—I’m imagining something similar to the traditional Japanese tools of arresting—or else secured to boards with their heads through holes in the wood. Up they went before the emperor with their offense written on a board that hung from their neck, to receive his judgement while the envoys watched: prison for this one, death for the other, one after the other until it was the turn of Ghiyāth al-Dīn and the other Timurid representatives.
They were brought up before the emperor, brought to about 22 feet from his dias, and a Chinese official stepped forward to read the particulars of their embassy from a tablet, that they had travelled far, that they had come from Shah Rukh and his sons, and that they had, quote, “brought gifts and tribute for the emperor in order to place their foreheads in obedience upon the ground of servitude and be encompassed by the gaze of favour and grace.”
The travellers might have described matters differently themselves. Shah Rukh certainly would have.
They were addressed by a man named Mawlana Yusuf Qazi, a minister familiar, the text reads, with Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Mongolian, and Chinese, indicative of the way so much of the world came to the Yongle Emperor’s doorstep. He approached them, with several other Muslims, and told them “First bend down and then touch your foreheads to the ground three times.” And they did, almost. They bowed down, but they did not touch their heads to the ground, or so the text says.
Maybe that was just something said in the report home, to reassure those back in Herat that they had not displayed any kind of inferiority in that first audience, or maybe they really had refused to touch the ground, though if so, I wonder if it wasn’t so close to the ground that nobody watching could really tell. Just enough separation to know that you were doing the rebellious thing, not enough that anyone was going to take offense. They probably didn’t really want to cause an unsightly incident on the first day, the very first meeting.
After bending low, who knows how low, the envoys produced letters from Shah Rukh, from his son, from the various princes and emirs who had provided them, all, as they had been directed to do, wrapped in yellow silk. These they passed to Mawlana, who brought them to the chamberlain, who handed them to the emperor himself.
The emperor called for robes then, 3,000 of them to be distributed among relatives, children, and other notables, and to emissaries themselves, seven of them, including our Ghiyāth al-Dīn, who went to their knees to receive them, and to be questioned by the emperor. And I am admittedly viewing the exchange through the fogs of time, transmission, and translation, but it does feel as though it has the flavour of seeing someone’s aging grandparent for the first time in a while.
The emperor asked after Shah Rukh, a kind of “How’s your dad doing?” openner, and then he inquired after another ruler entirely, a Qara Yusuf of the Qara Qoyunlu dynasty, also known as the Black Sheep Turkomans. Would he be sending tribute, the emperor wanted to know. Yes, they replied, he would be sending gifts and tribute.
“What about your country?” the emperor asked next. “Is the grain cheap or expensive? Is good welfare for the privileged few, or for the many?”
“Grain is beyond the boundaries of perfection,” they replied, “and wellbeing is more inexpensive and more widespread than can be imagined.”
The emperor nodded at this, commented politely about the ruler’s heart aligning with the creator, and mentioned he might be requesting some horses from Qara Yusuf, for he had heard that his realm had excellent ones. Then he asked about the roads. Were they safe? The envoys replied that the roads in Shah Rukh’s realm were such that people could come and go with total peace of mind.
“So I understand,” answered the emperor. “You have come a long way. Arise and have some food.”
And with that, their first audience was at an end
It is, of course, difficult to assess the tone of the whole encounter. The Yongle Emperor was 60 years old and would live for 4 more, and I was mostly joking about the comparison to an elderly relative, but he was prone to illness and erratic behaviour, and later scholars have hypothesized “arsenic poisoning, a neurological disease, or … a psychological ailment.” Were his the polite remarks of a disinterested royal? Was there something more pointed to the conversation than it at first appears? What did the Yongle Emperor make of the meeting? Did he make much of it at all?
Perhaps the remainder of the Timurids’ stay in the imperial city will have some answers for us, but for those and for the remainder of Ghiyāth al-Dīn’s observations, we will need to wait for the next episode. I’ll be back with that here soon, and if you are listening on the Patreon feed, then I’ll be back sooner with a little bonus listening.
Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you then.
Sources:
"Report to Mirza Baysunghur on the Timurid Legation to the Ming Court at Peking," in A Century of Princes: Sources on Timurid History and Art, selected and translated by W. M. Thackston. Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, 1989.
Ford, Graeme. "The Uses of Persian in Imperial China: The Translation Practices of the Great Ming," in The Persianate World, edited by Nile Green. University of California Press, 2019.
Lipman, Jonathan N. Familiar Strangers A History of Muslims in Northwest China. University of Washington Press, 2011.
Park, Hyunhee. Mapping the Chinese and Islamic Worlds: Cross-Cultural Exchange in Pre-Modern Asia. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Rossabi, Morris. A History of China. Wiley, 2013.
Rossabi, Morris. "Two Ming Envoys to Inner Asia," in T’oung Pao 62, no. 1/3 (1976): 1–34.
Tsai, Shih-shan Henry. Perpetual Happiness. University of Washington Press, 2011.