Yongle Quotes

How can this 'I' be said to have any being other than as a pattern of movement in Heaven and Earth's unfolding union.

the “compendium of learning” set in motion by the Ming Emperor Yongle (1360–1424), which drew on the talents of more than two thousand scholars and filled more than eleven thousand volumes—and remained the largest encyclopedia in the world until Wikipedia surpassed it in 2007.

It remains a matter of conjecture whether that is because Yongle’s military and naval expeditions were expensive or because the emperors believed that they had all they needed within China so there was no need for this exploration.

China’s Ming Dynasty had its own version of the Age of Exploration but abandoned it. Starting in the early 1400s, Ming Dynasty Emperor Yongle empowered his most trusted admiral, Zheng He, to lead seven major naval expeditions—“treasure voyages”—around the world. Though not colonizing expeditions (and historians debate the extent to which they were commercial), these naval missions helped project China’s power abroad. Yongle’s navy was the largest and most sophisticated in the world, featuring larger and better-constructed ships than any country in Europe would produce for at least a century.