WI Ming keep the Chinese capital at Nanjing

I'm not sure why alienating a bunch of civilian bureaucrats is such a dangerous thing.His henchmen controls the military and the fiefs of his other brothers have been weakened.
Me neither...

Didn't he have a big thing against eunuch as well? Maybe he just thought they were a bad influence and would rather work undisturbed. Maybe they had quite an ideological hold he wanted to free himself from as well. After all, the confucians became super powerful after he died too
 
Me neither...

Didn't he have a big thing against eunuch as well? Maybe he just thought they were a bad influence and would rather work undisturbed. Maybe they had quite an ideological hold he wanted to free himself from as well. After all, the confucians became super powerful after he died too
He didn't have a big thing against the Eunuchs,the Eunuchs were his major supporters.Under his rule,people like Zheng He came into dominance.Eunuchs also started to staff various secret police forces.This was in direct contrast to the rule set by Zhu Yuanzhang,who expressly forbade eunuchs from participating in government.Zhu Di did this in order to weaken the power of the civilian bureaucrats.It's something that subsequent emperors would do whenever they met government bureaucrats who would refuse to carry out their orders.
 
Over at some of the Chinese websites,some people have argued that having the capital in Beijing is a massive waste of resources since the cost of transporting so much food from the south to the border(where Beijing is) is ridiculously expensive and could have been better spent elsewhere.

On a personal note,I think another problem with the capital being in Beijing is that it made your country more attractive to plunder,since you are obviously going to have to invest heavily in making the capital a wealthy place and this area is just next to the nomads.Sure,the main attraction of making Beijing the capital was to give the central government better control over the army at the front as well as to bolster border defences by adding imperial guards to the defense,but I think it's far more economical if they just left the border impoverished and less attractive to attack.
 
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Note that the Manchus took over, over two centuries after the Ming moved the capital to Beijing, because they were brought into a civil war. Then it was over another two centuries before barbarians sacked Beijing. They approached from the sea, so having the capital at Nanjing wouldn't have helped.

Militarily, the Chinese dynasties in fact did better when the capital was close to the frontiers (various iterations of Xian in the west, Beijing in the North) as opposed to away from the frontiers (Loyang, Kaifing, Nanjing, Hangzhou). However, the cause and effect in this instance was that the dynasties that paid more attention to having a strong military preferred to have their capital where the armies were, while the more pacific minded dynasties had the capital where it made the most economic sense, or were forced to put the capital in the south because they had lost control of the north.

The closest analog of a continental size non-Chinese empire moving its capital to the frontiers is the Russian relocation of the capital from Moscow to St. Petersburg, but that also made considerable economic sense. Once they started getting into really serious wars they moved it back. During the Roman Empire the center of administration tended to migrate to places that were more strategically located than Rome was, but still central, with the Emperors moving to the frontiers when they were conducting wars.
 
Note that the Manchus took over, over two centuries after the Ming moved the capital to Beijing, because they were brought into a civil war. Then it was over another two centuries before barbarians sacked Beijing. They approached from the sea, so having the capital at Nanjing wouldn't have helped.

Militarily, the Chinese dynasties in fact did better when the capital was close to the frontiers (various iterations of Xian in the west, Beijing in the North) as opposed to away from the frontiers (Loyang, Kaifing, Nanjing, Hangzhou). However, the cause and effect in this instance was that the dynasties that paid more attention to having a strong military preferred to have their capital where the armies were, while the more pacific minded dynasties had the capital where it made the most economic sense, or were forced to put the capital in the south because they had lost control of the north.

The closest analog of a continental size non-Chinese empire moving its capital to the frontiers is the Russian relocation of the capital from Moscow to St. Petersburg, but that also made considerable economic sense. Once they started getting into really serious wars they moved it back. During the Roman Empire the center of administration tended to migrate to places that were more strategically located than Rome was, but still central, with the Emperors moving to the frontiers when they were conducting wars.
Chang'an was no where near the front as Beijing was.It's also situated in the highly secure Guanzhong region.During the Qin and Western Han period,Guanzhong was a major economic center.As for why the Tang Dynasty kept Chang'an as capital,it's because the dynasty's main supporters were the Guanzhong elite.They would have deposed the Li family just like they did with the Yang family if they tried to move to Luoyang.Luoyang was the best location as capital in strategic,security and economic sense given it's central location location and the passes that surround it.The Eastern Han dynasty managed to do great things in the Western Regions from there.As for Kaifeng,it's worthwhile to note that it wasn't pacifistic dynasties that chose it,it was chosen as capital during the Five Dynasties period by aggressive warring dynasties,the Song Dynasty just happened to inherit it.The first emperor of the Song Dynasty actually wanted to move the capital to Luoyang but had to back down because his underlings were so used to Kaifeng.
 
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