Chapter 59: Born of a Name, Doomed by a Name

Zhu Youjian's silhouette, stretched long and thin by the sunlight, looked somewhat frail within the vast imperial throne.

In his left hand he held the list, while his right hand wrote and sketched on a sheet of white paper; something felt deeply wrong.

As a transmigrator from a later age, he carried in his mind a vague and rigid impression of the label "Donglin Faction" — the mouthpiece of the Jiangnan gentry bloc.

Yet the results after sorting through the data were nothing of the sort.

Judged by native place, among the 108 heroes of the Donglin Roll Call, men from the Southern Metropolitan Region indeed ranked first, with Changzhou producing the most by far.

That small cluster from Changzhou, however, was basically made up of people connected to Gao Panlong and the circle around the Donglin Academy.

Yet apart from that… the numbers from Shaanxi, Shandong, and Huguang were hardly negligible.

Even Zhejiang — which in his memory he had assumed to be the so-called stronghold of the eunuch faction — had five men named on the list.

This did not look like a political group formed simply by clumping together on the basis of geography.

The misgivings in Zhu Youjian's mind grew heavier and heavier.

He simply took the other roster — those hundred and thirty-some officials likewise cashiered for "factional bias" but never included in the Donglin Roll Call — and sorted out their native places as well.

When the two rough tables were laid before him, placed side by side for comparison,

that feeling became even more pronounced.

Comparing the two, there was in fact no obvious tendency toward regional concentration.

If one had to point to an anomaly, it might be that the proportion of Zhejiang men among the Donglin Faction was a touch low, but that still fell within the normal range.

As for the Southern Metropolitan Region topping both lists — that happened to match the Ming dynasty's distribution of examination graduates perfectly; the Southern Metropolitan Region had always been a powerhouse province for jinshi, so there was nothing to fault there.

Zhu Youjian set down the writing brush in his hand and lightly tapped his knuckles against the desk, producing a soft tok, tok sound.

A conjecture was already taking vague shape in his mind, but he could not yet fully confirm it.

If it was not about native place, then…

Could it be academic lineage?

Had they gathered together because of master-disciple ties and shared doctrines, and in the end been packaged and defined as one?

He picked up the working copy beside him once more, steeled his patience, and began combing through the officials' curricula vitae, their teachers, and their associates, painstakingly searching for any trace of clues, trying to piece together the academic lineages behind them.

This was truly a vast and tedious undertaking.

Only when his eyes were nearly blurred from reading did he finally manage to draw, on the white paper before him, an exceedingly ugly diagram.

It was covered with all manner of arrows and circles, which he had then scribbled over and altered again and again; ink marks and vermilion brush traces mingled together in a chaotic mess.

And yet it was precisely this diagram that let him see many things clearly.

Gu Xiancheng, the founder of the Donglin Academy, belonged to the Southern Central Wang Yangming school.

The other founder, Qian Yiben, belonged to the Jiangyou Wang Yangming school.

Qian Qianyi, called the "Donglin Faction chief," had studied under Gu Xiancheng in his youth, which made him Southern Central Wang Yangming school, but later he had also studied under the Taishan school.

The Taishan school was the one that produced the famous madman "Li Zhi" — it styled itself the "Left Wing" of the Wang school and was utterly at odds with the other Wang Yangming School of Mind branches.

Beyond these, the list also contained the Guangdong-Fujian Wang school, the Central Zhejiang Wang school, the Central Chu Wang school, the Northern Wang school…

The academic affiliations of the men on this list were nothing less than the full flowering of Wang Yangming's School of Mind in the late Ming, a tree laden with every conceivable blossom, all-embracing and all-encompassing.

And the crucial point was this: the list was not made up entirely of School of Mind disciples!

Ye Xianggao and Zhao Nanxing were standard followers of the Cheng-Zhu School of Principle, while Shen Congwu was a representative figure of the Guanzhong Qi school.

What sort of "Donglin academic oligarchy" was this?

It was practically nothing more than a synchronous cross-section of the ideological chaos of the late Ming!

Zhu Youjian picked up those two native-place tallies, then looked again at the chaotic academic-tracing chart before him, comparing them back and forth, examining them over and over.

Silence filled the hall, broken only by the occasional crackle of the candle flame.

The confusion in his eyes gradually dispersed, replaced by a clarity sharper than any he had known before.

He had figured it out.

First, the so-called "Donglin Faction" — at least at this point in time, the final years of the Tianqi era — was a faction "defined" into existence by its political enemies.

It possessed a "name" but no "substance."

To strike down his opponents, Wei Zhongxian had slapped this label onto everyone who opposed him or refused to submit to him, catching them all in one dragnet.

Within this group there certainly existed small circles bound by ties of scholarship, geography, or friendship, but a unified "Donglin Faction" with a clear platform and organization simply did not exist.

Second, the clustering effect of native place was, in this era, far weaker than later generations imagined.

Each province had its own academic strongholds and its own interest demands; even within a single province, it was not necessarily a monolithic bloc.

Take the Southern Metropolitan Region, for example: the mutual antagonisms among Suzhou-Songjiang, Changzhou, Huizhou, and Huaibei were probably greater than their antagonisms toward Shandong or Shanxi.

To take a case he had seen in the working copy, the "She County Silk Tax Case" — even within the tiny confines of Huizhou Prefecture, the various counties had their own quarrels with one another, to say nothing of the entire Southern Metropolitan Region.

This, in fact, made perfect sense.

One had only to remember that even in the later ages, Jiangsu was famously fragmented; how much more so in the final years of the Great Ming, when transport and communication were both abysmally backward?

Having clarified these two key points, Zhu Youjian's long-furrowed brow finally relaxed completely.

He let out a long breath, feeling as though a great boulder in his chest had come crashing to the ground.

Before this, he had been misled by all those pulp histories from later times, treating the Donglin Faction, the Southern Metropolitan Region, and the landlord class as a single monolithic, colossal force.

And yet this so-called "Donglin Faction" happened to contain many talents he knew well from later history — men he truly could not avoid employing.

This had forced him to constantly ponder: after the Donglin restoration, how should he balance the struggle between Donglin and the eunuch faction? How should he prevent factional strife from erupting again?

Looking further ahead, he had always been thinking: when the reforms advanced to land, taxation, official discipline, and even ideology, how should he handle this vast academic-economic bloc called "Donglin"?

Now it seemed that from the very start, he had been thinking in the wrong direction and applying his efforts in the wrong place.

Name and substance can transform into each other.

The label "Donglin Faction" had been artificially defined into existence, and so naturally its substance would slowly coalesce around it.

Over time, even if there was no Donglin, there would be a Donglin.

Just as in history, after the second year of Chongzhen the Donglin Faction was dismissed wholesale, and they spent over a decade in the provinces as an opposition party.

Targeted and attacked day and night as Donglin, that pressure instead forced them to truly cohere, and from that they began to take the embryonic shape of a genuine political party — to the point that later they could use local literary societies to manipulate the selection of Chief Grand Secretaries…

But that is another matter.

When it comes to the matter of names, shouldn't the one with the greatest authority to speak be the Emperor?

A playful smile tugged at the corner of Zhu Youjian's mouth.

The King of Qin swept through the six directions, taking law as supreme.

Emperor Wu of Han dismissed the hundred schools, venerating only the Confucian arts.

Later, the Zhao-Song dynasty made the Cheng-Zhu School of Principle the official learning; so-called new learning or old learning, all had to seek support from within the Cheng-Zhu framework.

Looking across the dynasties in this way, official learning has always crushed private learning.

Only in these late Ming years, with the state in decline and men's minds turning toward change, has the School of Mind run rampant.

Interwoven among it are the School of Principle, the School of Qi, and Western learning — truly a great vat of strong vinegar and soy sauce!

But We are the new Emperor.

A new Emperor will also bring a new era!

A new era must also have new thought, a new "Dao" to expound!

Let Us see, then, whether your Confucian arts, passed down a thousand years, are stronger — or whether this dragon-slaying art of Ours, come from a later age, is the sharper!

As for the so-called Donglin and the eunuch faction — since they were born of names in the past, then in the future they can surely die of names as well!