Zeng Xian

Zeng started his new role with marked energy. Barely a month after he became supreme commander, he had the "Embroidered-uniform Guard" arrest four of his subordinates for incompetence and demoted three others, then took control of their troops and resources.^[3] It was around this time that Altan Khan invaded Shaanxi via Yan'an and Qingyang. Zeng responded by sending a separate force to attack the rear of the Mongols by a circuitous route, which resulted in a slaughter of the Mongol women, children, and the elderly who travelled with the invading army at Mount Maliang (馬梁山). This compelled the invaders to retreat.^[2][3]

After the invasion, Zeng led counter-attacks and strengthened local defences, but soon felt that a permanent solution was needed to deal with the nomadic raids along the border. To that end, he identified the Ordos Loop—a stretch of land that is technically part of the steppe, but south of the Yellow River and capable of irrigated agriculture—as a corridor that the Chinese must retake. On 8 January 1547, he memorialized the throne with a detailed proposal of a military campaign into the Ordos Loop and fortification of the land after chasing the nomads out from there. The militarily-minded Jiajing Emperor initially liked the idea, and ordered the treasury to allocate the funds needed for the endeavour. The Senior Grand Secretary Xia Yan, effectively the head of government under the emperor, placed his confidence and support behind Zeng's proposal such that he might secure his position in the imperial court and associate his name with "an accomplishment of the kind that is seen only rarely in history" (普世之功).^[4] However, legitimate concerns about the costs of the operation were raised, and personal political rivals of Zeng and Xia banded together to use these opposing views to plot their downfall. Yan Song, a rival grand secretary, arranged to have rumours spread in the capital that Zeng had been misappropriating funds to bribe influential officials to support his proposal.^[5]

On 15 February 1548, the Jiajing Emperor suddenly voiced his misgivings about Zeng's proposal and his character. Xia was shocked at the reversal and immediately dropped his sponsorship of the project in order to limit his association with Zeng. The Emperor called for an re-examination of the whole issue, during which he dismissed Zeng's integrity and called the proposal ill-considered. The campaign was cancelled, and Zeng was arrested. Because of the scandal, Zeng's name became so toxic that Xia was compelled to ask for retirement. For a time, the Emperor allowed Xia to retire without reducing his ranks, but Xia's enemies harped on connections of Zeng's crimes to Xia. As a result of these charges, Zeng was executed on 25 April 1548, and Xia too was beheaded on 31 October 1548. Yan became the head of the grand secretariat and controlled the imperial court for more than a decade since.^[6]

The people of the time considered the punishment to be too harsh for the perceived crime, and in 1567, early in the reign of the Longqing Emperor, a motion was filed to review Zeng's case. Thereupon the imperial court granted Zeng the posthumous name of Xiangmin (襄愍) and the rank of minister of war.^[7]