The Ming Family Tree Grew to 100,000 People. The Empire Paid for All.

How did one family end up costing an empire more grain than two of its provinces produced? The Ming dynasty paid every male descendant of its founder for life, and because every son inherited a rank instead of only the eldest, the imperial clan grew from twenty-six sons in 1370 into a genealogy of more than 130,000 names by 1604. This documentary follows the money, and the women the system ran on. It opens with Zhu Yaoying, Princess Yongning, married at fifteen in 1582 to Liang Bangrui, a dying man whose family had bribed the eunuch Feng Bao for the match. She was widowed within weeks, forbidden by Ming law to remarry, and dead at twenty-seven. Covered here: how Zhu Yuanzhang designed the eight-rank princely ladder and the twenty-character generation poems; what happened to his daughters Princess Lin'an and Princess Anqing after their husbands Li Qi and Ouyang Lun were executed; the princedom he gave his grandnephew Zhu Shouqian at Guilin; why the claim that Xu Shou built the Chinese periodic table from Ming princely names is overstated; the recorded fertility of Zhu Zhongyi and Zhu Qizhen, and why Wang Shizhen's hundred-sons account is not the official record, though Sun Nengchuan's genealogy citation is; the consort deaths at Ming funerals until the Tianshun emperor abolished them in 1464, after the funerals of the Yongle and Hongxi emperors; the 1562 memorial of the censor Lin Run, who told the throne that stipends owed came to 8,530,000 shi against 4,000,000 shi of capital grain; Xu Guangqi's calculation that the clan doubled every thirty years; the 1565 clan regulations that capped how many consorts a prince could take, dated in the scholarship of Jerome Kerlouegan; Zhu Zaiyu, heir to the house of Zheng, who refused the title seven times and worked out twelve-tone equal temperament instead; and the collapse, from Zhu Changxun killed at Luoyang by Li Zicheng in 1641, to his son Zhu Yousong enthroned at Nanjing and dead within two years, to Zhang Xianzhong hunting the clan in Sichuan and the execution of Zhu Cunji, Prince of Qin, in 1646. What did it actually mean to be chosen by an imperial house in Ming China? The register that guaranteed a stipend became a list of people to find. The women whose petitions were refused were never written down, and were never traced. Filmed facts checked against the record. Contested figures given as ranges. Legend labelled as legend. Sources Scholarship Craig Clunas, Screen of Kings: Royal Art and Power in Ming China (2013) Keith McMahon, Celestial Women: Imperial Wives and Concubines in China from Song to Qing (2016) Jerome Kerlouegan, on the compilation of the Ming clan regulations of 1565 The Cambridge History of China, Volume 8: The Ming Dynasty, Part 2 Primary documents Ming Shi, chapter 82, on revenue, containing Lin Run's memorial of 1562. Full text at Chinese Text Project Ming Shilu, translated selections at https://epress.nus.edu.sg/msl Da Ming Huidian and the imperial clan regulations Wang Shizhen, Huang Ming Shengshi Shu, a private Ming history Institutional and archival Jingjiang Princes' City, Guilin, built 1372 to 1392, protected national site since 1993, now the Wangcheng campus of Guangxi Normal University Ming princely tomb sites, Henan and Guangxi