If The Mongols In Place Of Amusing
Themselves With These Trifles Had Applied Their Energies To The Task Of
Contenting The People, Would They Not Have Preserved The Scepter In Their
Family?" He Then Ordered That This Building Should Be Razed To The Ground.
Nor Did This Action Stand Alone.
He reduced the size of the harem
maintained by all the Chinese as well as the Mongol rulers, and he
instituted a rigid economy in all matters of state ceremonial.
Changtu,
the Xanadu of Coleridge, the famous summer palace of Kublai, had been
destroyed during the campaigns with the Mongols, and Hongwou
systematically discouraged any attempt to embellish the northern capital,
Pekin, which, under the Kin and Yuen dynasties, had become identified with
foreign rulers. Pekin, during the whole of the Ming dynasty, was only a
second-rate city, and all the attention of the Ming rulers was given to
the embellishment of Nankin, the truly national capital of China.
The expulsion of the Mongols beyond the Great Wall and the death of
Chunti, the last of the Yuen emperors, by no means ended the struggle
between the Chinese and their late northern conquerors. The whole of the
reign of Hongwou was taken up with a war for the supremacy of his
authority and the security of his frontiers, in which he, indeed, took
little personal part, but which was carried on under his directions by his
great generals, Suta and Fuyuta. The former of these generals was engaged
for nearly twenty years, from 1368 to 1385, in constant war with the
Mongols.
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