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Probably won't develop this into a full TL (not that I've completed any of my previous attempts), but I thought it would be interesting to let this scenario play along for a while.


Ming China, Nanking, 1392


The man brooding in the center of the massive palace in Nanking is the most powerful ruler in the world. Myriads of officials are prepared to relay his commands all across his empire. Over a million soldiers are prepared to march at his relayed orders, supplied by a hundred times that number of peasants and laborers. Scores of his children have been scattered across the frontiers of his vast empire, each commanding their own principality and army dedicated to guarding the frontiers from the Mongol overlords he had overthrown.

He has risen from humble origins on a mountain of corpses. Some of his victims were the Mongolian conquerors of his homeland, but most are rival rebel warlords, previous allies, mentors, plotting subordinates, and even the semi-divine leader of the initial rebellion against the Mongol overlords.
And he can trust no one. Not the other rebel leaders who had aided his rise. They have, or had, their own power bases, and were too dangerous to keep around. Most have been purged, pensioned off if lucky, accused of treason and sentenced to slow slicing if less fortunate. He cannot trust his best Generals. Was he himself not such a general once? And did he not seize power from his titular ruler when he had the chance? Has not nearly every dynasty before the Sung been brought down by a successful and ambitious general?

He can't trust the Confucian scholars who form the backbone of his administration. But nor can he do without them. They are the only people who have the education and skills to manage the empire's records, to collect the taxes and manage the logistics of his military machine. They also are the only group capable of offering ideological justification to his rule and thereby spare him the need to rule solely by terror. But they do not care for him, a man of war rather than contemplation, and he returns the favor.
He cannot allow them to grow too strong. He cannot allow them to diminish the prestige of the military and those who lead it. If he does, will not the Mongols and the Jin return to conquer, as they did under the Sung? But if he does not will not a successful general overthrow his heirs and tear down the middle kingdom in another cycle of civil war?

His heir… his designated heir, Zhu Biao is dead. And he needs to make a choice. Should he name his grandson heir? He is only fourteen, and like his father, has never proven himself on the field of battle. He has been ensconced in the palace for most of his life, and like Zhu Biao has been surrounded by Confucian scholars, ensuring he would be brought up in their own image rather than that of his bloody handed Grandfather.

Is this the man he wishes to reign after him? An inexperienced child who would be unable to rule in his own right for a decade or more, who would be pulled in various directions by competing advisers and in-laws?
Or should he forsake his own established laws of succession and name his favored son, the prince of Yan, as his heir? And if he does, how can he ensure, beyond the grave that beckons him, that his heir will not face rebellion from his jealous fellow marcher lords upon his ascension, and that his heir, in turn, will not suffer from lack of legitimacy in the absence of established rules of primogeniture?

As the paranoid emperor contemplates the prospect of ruin to all he has built a solution comes to mind….*

Pulling on a silken cord to summon a scribe he is already composing in his mind the letters which must be sent to the prince of Yan and to his various other sons.

It is time for a family reunion.

*POD.
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