15th-century painting of the Ming emperor - (Wikimedia)
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It’s still dark when the emperor wakes up. The eunuchs of the night drum room would have sounded their drum first at nightfall, then again a while later, once at midnight, once more before the sun, and would do so again at dawn. Yongle wakes up with the fourth drum in the pre-dawn morning.
Around him, the many workers upon which the palace-machine depend are buzzing into motion. Some are operating the water clock, others lighting the lanterns, a few collecting the emperor’s fluids, more preparing his bath and breakfast. After he bathes, the emperor pulls on sandals and sits while his hair and beard are dried and combed. Outside, it is cold and wintry but not there in his chamber, warmed as it is by wood and charcoal. He eats his morning meal and has tea. Then he is dressed in a robe, shawl, and shoes. Dawn is breaking, and the palace is becoming busier as he strides out to attend the business of the day.
The director of ceremony is there in his red robe, and so is his assistant. Guards are taking their posts. The various seal bearers are there with the many different seals for this application or that. If the emperor is going somewhere, it will be in a yellow sedan, its dozen eunuchs from the Directorate of Entourage Guards now standing ready. If he were to leave the palace grounds entirely, there is a chariot. Today, though, we know that he is not. He will be giving audiences this morning, and we, by way of Ghiyāth al-Dīn, are there.
The emperor's civil officials are also there, all in rows, the military officers too. A drum sounds, signalling the dawn, and a eunuch robed in red rings the “attention whip.” Voices joined call out as one: “Ten thousand blessings to his majesty.”
And the audience begins.
Hello and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the history podcast that crosses that world in the tracks of its travellers, its friars, merchants, crusaders, and liars. And it is a podcast with a Patreon, a place where you can support the podcast with a regular monthly amount of as little as a dollar and listen to the podcast earlier, more often, and ad free, and you can do all of that at patreon.com/humancircus. This time, I want to especially thank the newest member of the Patreon, Marc Rubin. Thank you very much!
And now, back to the story, the story of Ghiyāth al-Dīn Naqqāsh.
Last time, we talked a little about the backstory to the Ming-Timurid diplomatic encounter, and to Ghiyāth al-Dīn’s personal encounter with the Yongle emperor himself. We talked about the journey overland from Herat all the way to the region of present-day Beijing, then only recently made the Ming capital, the place where he and the others along for the embassy would have that imperial audience.
Remember that the embassy was brought forward along with an assembly of accused criminals, perhaps an order of business with some intention to it. Remember that the emperor brought up horses—he was, as we talked about last time on the Patreon extra, very interested in those. Remember that he brought up the roads they had travelled—I have read that he would often ask foreign visitors about the safety of the routes they had come by, though the example my source for that gives is actually the one in this Ghiyāth al-Dīn account. I trust, but cannot confirm, that they had other such examples in mind.
As we finished up last time, Yongle was dismissing Ghiyāth al-Dīn and the other visitors, acknowledging the long distance they had journeyed and sending them off to food and to rest. That’s where we pick the story back up.
Food, unspecified in the text, would arrive on a tray, but the rations that would follow it up on a daily basis during their stay would include sheep, goose, chickens, flour, rice, halva, honey, vinegar, onions, vegetables, and sweets, along, Ghiyāth al-Dīn wrote, with “several beautiful servants.” That, as you may have picked up on last time, was very much a thing he would notice and comment on.
Rest was to be taken in an assigned chamber, with its assigned bed, bedding, and pillow, rugs, mats, and a chair. Silk slippers were provided along with a bowl and a brazier. That was where they’d sleep for the night, though probably not yet, not right away after that audience. It had, after all, only been dawn when their audience had begun, and they could only have waited for so long while Yongle allotted punishment. Maybe they were given a bit of a tour. Ghiyāth al-Dīn does mention that there were certain people of the palace who would take them to see interesting places. He also mentions that the next morning those people came to their chamber to take them somewhere interesting. The emperor was putting on a feast for them, and Ghiyāth al-Dīn, as he sometimes would, slowed down, zoomed in, and took you, and his readers back home, into the scene in some detail.
We’re there with him at dawn when the palace servants arrive with saddled horses. “Rise and mount,” they tell us, “for the emperor is giving you a banquet.” We follow them to the palace, and when they tell us to go use the washroom now because there will not be another opportunity, we do take their advice. We wait at the gates where 300,000 people gather. When the gates open, we enter.
There was a courtyard of cut stone and beyond it, a long hall, 60 cubits long, and at the end a dais, more than head-high with silver steps leading up to it on three sides. Atop that tall dais structure was a smaller one, all that wood lacquered in a shade of turmeric, and Ghiyāth al-Dīn was, not for the first time on this trip, impressed with the display of craft and artistry, doubting that most accomplished craftsman of Iraq or Khurasan would be its equal. Beside the dais were incense burners and two chamberlains who stood, their mouths covered with what this translation refers to as paper mache, and atop it, sat a chair of many legs under a yellow-silk canopy painted with intertwined dragons. The Timurid envoys took their places to its left.
There were bodyguards near them, with sword, shield, quiver, and, presumably, bow. There were soldiers, some with halberds and others with naked swords. Just outside the hall stood 200,000 arms bearers, some necessarily less “just outside” than others.
Back inside, a cord was pulled at two ends, a curtain drawn, and through a door came the emperor to the playing of many instruments. As he sat, the musicians went silent. Ghiyāth al-Dīn and the others were called forward to bow three times and did so.
Food was brought then, Yongle’s prepared behind a yellow silk enclosure nearby. It came first on trays of sweets and other foods or figurines for the emperor, and when they were brought, the musicians played and the seven-coloured parasols before his dais were spun. Trays were brought to all, their number according to the honour of the diner. Three trays for one of great honour, Ghiyāth al-Dīn says, two for less, less still for one, by his estimate one thousand of them being served that day. On them came wine of rice or grain or other beverages, along with lamb, goose, chicken, and a variety of other foods. With them came performers and singers, boys and girls who Ghiyāth al-Dīn compared to shining suns, all red and white rubbed faces, gold-spun clothes, and pearls, dancing with flowers of paper and silk in their hands.
Next came two boys who leapt forward with long sticks turning flips, performing an acrobatic routine with a bundle of reeds that culminated in one of them seeming to fall from his trick and then the other to leap up from the floor and catch him.
There were rows of musicians who performed too, and “performed” was again the key word, each reaching across to play the instrument of the person to their side while they continued to blow into their own.
There was much to be enjoyed about the occasion, for visiting ambassadors and local birds, for the doves, pigeons, ravens, and crows who crowded in even before people left, showing no fear or hesitation whatsoever as they swooped into the open courtyard to scavenge a feast of their own, a kind of charming little detail for Ghiyāth al-Dīn to include.
It was, all in all, quite an event, an impressive display of imperial luxury, quite an evening, one might say, except that it was not actually the evening at all, no matter how much you might have pictured that for a scene of this sort. You get a lot of feasting and celebrating done when you start at dawn, and that was exactly what they’d done, finishing up the festivities at noon when Yongle distributed money to the performers and gave those assembled permission to disperse. Given that they’d been eating and drinking since shortly after sunrise without the relief of the washroom, that permission was probably very welcome.
The Timurids left Yongle’s presence, very possibly retiring to their chambers to lie down for a bit. It would not be their final feast there in that place. There would often be banquets, and the performers would ever have new tricks and acrobatics to astonish them with. There would be banqueting still to come, and there would be other matters to catch Ghiyāth al-Dīn’s eye.
A week after that welcoming feast it was the punishment of criminals that drew his attention. Maybe all that time waiting for Yongle to deal with sentencing on their first morning had piqued his curiosity, and I guess that it was also the sort of point of cultural difference that you might write about in telling the people back home what you’d seen.
In this case, it’s not totally clear whether Ghiyāth al-Dīn went off and watched the whole thing or maybe just talked it over with people of the palace and got a sense of how it was all meant to work.
Those involved were taken to the place of execution, their crimes recorded in the registry. For each crime, Ghiyāth al-Dīn writes, there was a fixed punishment, but the outcome it seems did not really vary, not for those on that day: decapitation, hanging, chopped to pieces. Our observer only heard about the capital punishments.
While there does seem to have been a lot of “execution is the answer” style justice going on in the report, Ghiyāth al-Dīn does note that there was also an abundance of caution to insure it was not, by the empire’s terms, wrongly done. He says that unanimity among the relevant ministries was required, and if there was a relevant witness, even if they lived at a six-month distance, the execution was delayed until they could be summoned. However, the accused was imprisoned during that whole time, and cold weather could kill them then, even if the executioners would not get to. It happened during the Timurids’ stay there, and Ghiyāth al-Dīn was told that on one occasion more than 10,000 people had once died of cold. Whether those 10,000 were actually all accused criminals is not totally clear, though from the context it does appear that way.
On January 28th, it was New Year’s and the ambassadors were reminded not to wear white, for that was only for funerals. They were sent for at midnight, and everywhere they saw, the shops and houses were lit with lantern, candle, and torch, so that it seemed the sun itself had risen in the city. They were brought to a place that had just recently been completed after 19 years of work, and it was good work, Ghiyāth al-Dīn noted, masterful even, enough for him to comment that the stonecutters, carpenters, painters, and tilemakers of the region were simply unmatched. It was the sort of thing he gave attention to in his writing, along with the beauty of people, and the rituals and ceremonies of the imperial palace.
He would write of how Yongle would stay in seclusion on particular occasions, when he abstained from meat, company, and the presence of distracting images, how on the day the emperor emerged from such a retreat, he was circled by ornamented elephants with seven-coloured banners all around him, 50,000 men before and behind. They “played instruments in such a way that it could not be described.”
There would be mentions of Yongle’s religious practices such as this moment of cleansing seclusion in which Ghiyāth al-Dīn says he “worship[ped] the God of heaven.” There would also be a brief but interesting reference to Ghiyāth al-Dīn’s own religion with the note that at Eid al-Adha, the Timurids along with other Muslims went to the mosque the emperor had ordered built in the city. If Ghiyāth al-Dīn was correct that this mosque had been constructed during the time of Yongle, then it was very far from being the oldest mosque in the city, for that was the Niujie or “Oxen Street” Mosque, traditionally dated all the way back in 996.
During that season was the festival of lanterns, and for a week work was done outside the palace to build a structure of wood. They covered it with cypress branches so that it looked like a mountain of emerald and hung tens of thousands of lanterns all attached to a string. When the moment came, they would light rockets of naphtha that would race along the string and light all of those lanterns at once. It sounds like quite the sight, but Ghiyāth al-Dīn would not actually see it and nor would anyone else on this occasion, for the astrologers had warned that the emperor’s home would be damaged by fire and they did not set off the rockets. Still, the people of the city lit their lanterns, another great banquet was given, and when it was over the emperor’s edict was read as usual, with the Timurids having it translated for them, and Ghiyāth al-Dīn noting down the following.
Quote:
“On the tenth of this month three years have passed since the emperor’s lantern night, and another lantern season has come. Prisoners, criminals, and others held by the ministry are to be released, for I have pardoned their offences, except those who have shed blood. For three years, no emissary is to go anywhere.”
The decree was bound in yellow cord and carried off beneath a parasol. Copies would be made of it to be sent out through the empire.
That last part about no emissaries going out was not quite what it sounded like. I’m assuming it was referring only to the Ming emissaries, for Ghiyāth al-Dīn and the others would not be detained for three years. They would be free to go, but not just yet. There was more for them to see in the imperial city, and after this quick break, we’ll see it with them.
…
To a large extent, Ghiyāth al-Dīn’s reporting concerned interactions within highly structured circumstances. His encounters with Yongle were, as these things tended to go, very much determined by the ceremonies they were part of, formal occasions playing out along lines that the travellers’ hosts guided them through. Now though, as the embassy spent a bit more time in the imperial city, there was going to be an interaction or two that stretched outside those formalities, to seem, for better or worse, more natural.
In March, the emperor called the envoys to him, telling them he would give a falcon to any who had given him a good horse—he did care about a good horse—and to three of them he gave three falcons, which maybe meant he thought they had given him very good horses indeed, if perhaps three falcons was anything like three trays in significance. For another of the envoys he said there would be no falcons because they’d just be taken from him when he got home. To this, the Timurid protested that if the emperor were to be so gracious as to give him a falcon, then no one would take it from him. Yongle told him to wait. He’d give him two falcons. Not three though.
It was the season of hunting then, and the emperor announced his departure for that purpose, telling the envoys to make use of their falcons if they had nothing to do, and also taking a bit of jab, maybe a friendly one, maybe more belligerent, saying they had given him short horses, but he had given them fine falcons.
So there the Timurid ambassadors were, not invited along, which was fine, and maybe with not all that much to do, maybe happy to have not all that much to do—it is nice to get some blank spots on the schedule—but this little break from their duties, from the cycle of ceremonies and events that surrounded the emperor when he was ensconced in his palace, this break would be suddenly interrupted.
The first they heard of it seemed innocent enough. The emperor was returning from the hunt and required that they go meet him. But when they made to depart, when they were mounting horses at the post-house, they saw Mawlana Yusuf Qazi, the man who had directed them in that first audience with Yongle, on that first day of their visit. And Mawlana was looking sad.
“Why so sad?” they asked him, and he explained. “The horse that His Majesty Shah Rukh sent threw the emperor during the hunt. The emperor flew into a rage and commanded that the emissaries be taken in chains… .”
Now the emissaries were also looking sad. They were, understandably, disturbed at the prospect of being taken off in chains, and they set out to meet the emperor with some haste, reaching his camp by midmorning.
I’m sure it was a stressful moment for Ghiyāth al-Dīn, so when his record immediately plunges into a description of that camp, I doubt that was very much on his mind just then. Still, he noted its earthen walls, armed men atop it and the ditch they’d dug that earth from below. He noted the two gateways leading in and the yellow silk tents and canopies, but he wasn’t going in. Mawlana told them to wait there outside the camp while he went in and tried to defuse the situation.
Obviously, Ghiyāth al-Dīn wasn’t witness to how this went. He must have heard later, probably from Mawlana himself, but how it went, or at least how he was told that it went, was that Mawlana along with a few others went to the ground before the emperor and implored him not to follow his anger.
“These people are innocent,” they apparently insisted. “They have no power to command their emperor to send a good horse. If you were to kill them, no harm would come to their emperor’s dominions, but an emperor who is renowned for clemency would gain a reputation for cruelty and tyranny. People would say that he has inflicted harm upon emissaries, whose captivity or imprisonment is licit in no region.”
Whatever they said, Yongle was convinced, or at least calmed. He would not imprison the Timurids, and this was not a forgone conclusion. One often hears about the importance of respecting the sanctity of the ambassador, that this was the rule that would not be broken, though of course it sometimes was. Timur had himself done so with Ming envoys, but that was in the past.
Now, Mawlana rushed to assure the Timurid party that, quote, “The emperor has been merciful and pardoned the crime that you did not commit.” And then came the emperor himself, riding along on another horse that they’d brought with them, a good sign that he was perhaps not so very mad anymore. He was in a gold-spun tunic and a black silk hood, horsemen stretching out for a bowshot to his left and right, and as he pulled up and saw them there, bowing to the ground before him as directed, he called for them to mount up and to come along, not that he’d entirely forgotten about the horse incident just yet.
“Presents, gifts, horses, and animals [that] rulers send each other should be good so that mutual affection may increase,” he chided them. “As an act of favour I rode the horse you brought me during the hunt, but unfortunately it was so old it threw me and hurt my arm.”
How did one reply to such a thing? If you were Shadi Khawaja, Shah Rukh’s own representative and the head of the Timurid embassy, if you were quick on your feet, you smoothly answered that the horse had been a memento from Timur himself, a favourite of his, so yes it admittedly was old, but in a good way, one that conferred great value and honour, not one that showed you just didn’t care enough to send something better or that you had tried to pass off some tired past-its-prime creature as something of quality.
The whole story sounded a bit suspect, like maybe, just maybe, Shadi Khawaja was lying here, but it was enough for Yongle. He praised the Timurid speaker. He did a little falconry, sending one of his birds swooping after a crane, and reentered the city to the shouts and cheers of his people who had come out to greet him.
The emperor seemed to accept the explanation then, and certainly, when they were summoned soon after to be given presents, he gave no sign of being unhappy, distributing silver, silk clothes, and also paper money, something that had been used in China since the Song Dynasty whose 11th-century jiiaozi are generally thought to have been the first paper currency. He seemed happy enough with the Timurids’ presence in his city, but that time was coming to an end, and a few things were going to happen to make him distinctly less happy, though neither had to do with Ghiyāth al-Dīn or the other Timurids.
One of these was the fire. Remember the astrologists’ predictions that had caused such understandable caution around the fireworks of the lantern festival. The concern was sufficient for copper cauldrons of water to be set out at the ready. Now all those worries were going to be realized as lightning struck one night in early May, causing flames to break out in the emperor’s newly constructed palace and then spread, engulfing 250 outbuildings and many people with them.
From night until noon, the fire could not be quenched, but though it struck at his own palace, the emperor paid no attention. He could not, Ghiyāth al-Dīn said, acknowledge such earthly affairs during one of his holy days. He could speak on it immediately after though, crying out, “The God of heaven is angry with me and has burned my throne room, although I have done nothing, I have not vexed my mother or father or done injustice to anyone.” He promptly fell ill, of sorrow Ghiyāth al-Dīn said, and he did have more than just the fire to feel sorrowful about.
One of his wives had died. It was not clear to Ghiyāth al-Dīn when, for it had only become known once arrangements for burial had been made, and once the burial had happened, it was not clear to him where and how, for that was also the day of the fire, and with all the confusion and damage done, he was never able to find out.
In the aftermath of these events, Yongle’s sickness grew, and his son took control, likely his son Zhu Gaozhi who would become the Hongxi Emperor in just a few years. It’s not clear that the Timurids ever saw Yongle again. If they did, there is no mention of it. He only says that at this time they were given permission to depart and that in mid-May 1421 they left the imperial city. They had been there for roughly five months. Long enough for many a morning banquet, more than a few state ceremonies, nothing but praise for his hosts’ mastery of craft and creation, and then that awkward moment when the Timurids were blamed for providing a defective horse to the emperor.
On the return journey, they made use of the same posthouse system that had sped them on their way there. Their names and number were checked against the registry of those who had arrived, and they were given wagons, people and pack animals to assist them, staying at a post station every day and a town every week, banqueting before carrying on. It was not, let’s be honest, the most punishingly difficult journey we have covered on this podcast, but it was also not a short one. It’s about 3,000 miles or 4,800 kilometers between Herat and Beijiing and all the aid of the posthouse system could not make that a short trip for the unmotorized traveller or, necessarily, a safe one. They spent a month in one place for fear of the roads ahead. At another, they opted for the desert for fear of the roads’ insecurity, a pretty damning indictment of those roads I would say.
By March 1422, they were out of the desert and by June in Kashgar. Finally, on August 28th, they, quote, “reached Herat and attained the felicity of kissing the throne of His Imperial Majesty Shah Rukh.”
All told, Ghiyāth al-Dīn and the others had been gone about two years and two months. It may seem that they had not, unavoidable difficulties of a multi-year medieval journey aside, faced the greatest of stakes. They did not go to beg or convince, seeking to win some great advantage in war or trade from the emperor’s hand. There seems to have been a will on both sides of the diplomatic exchange to keep things friendly and to allow and encourage the continued flow of commerce and embassies. Ghiyāth al-Dīn and the others would not poison this particular well, and this may not seem a great accomplishment, but sometimes you just need to show up and not screw up, and that’s good enough.
Besides, the journey did produce the account on which these episodes are based, something I am ever thankful for with all of these different topics. As ever, the text that resulted did not take a straight line in order to reach us, but it would reach us, carried in a number of 15th-century chronicles, such as those of ‘Abd al-Razzaq Samarqandi.
Inside of two years from the embassy’s return to Herat, Yongle was dead, replaced by that son of his. Shah Rukh, a younger man by nearly two decades, would live longer, ruling until his death in 1447. As for our chronicler himself, there is mention of a Ghiyāth al-Dīn in other sources, but there seems to be nothing to suggest it was the same one.
For our Ghiyāth al-Dīn Naqqāsh, we will leave him there in Herat, and we will leave this little series covering his journey from 15th-century Herat to Beijing and back. I hope you enjoyed it.
I’ll be back here soon with more Human Circus, sooner if you’re on the Patreon where there’ll be some bonus listening, and not long after with the next main episode, as we start a new story.
Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you then.