Jiajing Emperor
The Jiajing Emperor was the 12th emperor of China's Ming Dynasty. He was the first to succeed as a nephew, and not a son, of the previous emperor. A great supporter of Taoism, he has been referred to as "the Taoist Emperor."
Jiajing's reign saw the revival of the power of the scholar-bureaucracy, which had been somewhat pushed aside by his predecessor, the Zhengde Emperor. As the scholar-bureaucrats reasserted their power, they worked to diminish the influence of court eunuchs; some were even put to death.
Where Zhengde, in his last years, frequently skipped out on court rituals and daily audiences for lengthy periods, Jiajing is said to have tended to his duties quite diligently, and to have even worked to restore certain rituals to better adhere to older precedents. Like his predecessor, however, in the latter half of his reign, Jiajing similarly shied away from court rituals, retiring to the Inner Palace, and holding audiences only rarely in the final twenty years of his lengthy reign. During this time, he occupied himself with Taoist rituals, some lasting for stretches of up to two weeks, and with the formulation and consumption of Taoist immortality elixirs.[1]
| Preceded by Zhengde Emperor |
Emperor of Ming 1522-1567 |
Succeeded by Longqing Emperor |
References
- Ray Huang, 1587: A Year of No Significance, Yale University Press (1981), 8.
- ↑ Conrad Schirokauer, et al, A Brief History of Chinese and Japanese Civilizations, Fourth Edition, Cengage Learning (2012), 248, 259.
