Wanli Emperor

Zhu Yijun took the throne at nine in 1572, and for a decade Grand Secretary Zhang Juzheng ran the empire brilliantly—prosperity returned, the military surged, power matched the early 1400s. After Zhang died in 1582, the emperor dismantled his arrangements and faced a cascade of crises: he crushed a rebellion in Ningxia in 1592, then threw 40,000 soldiers into Korea to repel two Japanese invasions, then put down Yang Yinglong's uprising in the southwest by 1599. The Jurchens mauled his forces at Sarhu in 1619 and seized Liaodong. But the rot was internal: for fifteen years his officials blocked…