Chapter 2 - When Vondel Looked Eastwards: Joost Van Den Vondel’s Zungchin (1667)

Summary

Introduction

When Xaianga, a lady of the court, recounts the suicide of the Ming royal family, her depiction of the event is tragically beautiful. The emperor Zungchin who commanded the subjects of the fifteen provinces of China now gently swayed in the breeze. He had hanged himself from a plum tree in the royal orchard suspended by a stocking. The empress Jasmine dangled by his side and princess Pao who lay dead in her bedchamber had succumbed to a stab in her chest from the emperor's dagger. This poetic end marks the demise of the three-century Ming rule of imperial China in the play, Zungchin. Credited to the Dutch Republic's greatest playwright, Joost van den Vondel, Zungchin was Europe's “first literary Chinoiserie” and Vondel's only attempt at Oriental drama. And it was a contemporaneous affair that got Vondel's ink flowing. The overthrow of the Chinese dynasty in 1644 (the event he dramatized) preceded the writing of the play by a mere twenty-three years.

As the decline of empires goes, the story of the fall of the Ming dynasty is a familiar one featuring many of the same factors that brought the curtains down on the careers of great imperial dynasties before it. The Ming rulers from the reign of the Wanli Emperor (r.1573–1619) onwards displayed the same perilous reticence as might be expected of rulers of empires lumbering towards their decline. Their reigns were marked by soaring personal expenditure while the empire quietly suffered neglect. Famine and disease wiped out a portion of the population. Those who survived were left disillusioned and willing to throw their support behind anyone who promised a better future. The economic downturn in Ming China came in the form of a contracting silk industry which had formerly flourished. The empire, in addition, was no longer in receipt of the large amounts of silver that had entered her economy as payment for the silk she exported abroad. By the time the Chongzhen Emperor ascended the throne in 1627, the empire was balancing dangerously on a precipice. Internal rebellion mushroomed in various parts of the empire and Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong, who in the 1630s assumed leadership of these violent expressions of anti-Ming sentiment, looted and pillaged the territories they subjugated.