ABC Wednesday - Z

The last word in my dictionary on Z is:
zymurgy |ˈzīˌmərjē|
noun the study or practice of fermentation in brewing, winemaking, or distilling. I therefore dedicate this post to Asbjørn. He tried some years ago to establish a new business within brewing and marketing ancient Norwegian Beer, but I have never tasted his beer so the attempt did not work out with success.

Therefore I have to find something total different.

Z is for the chinese emperors Zhu Yuanzhang and Zhu DiZhu Yuanzhang (posthumous called Tai Zu) 1328 - 1398 was the founder of the Ming Dynasty and well known for being an emperor rising from a poor peasant. He was from Zhongli of Haozhou County. During the peasant uprising by the end of the Yuan Dynasty in 1352 he joined the army and through his competence he three years later was appointed Vice-Marshal and Vice-Premier.
Zhu Yuanzhang made great influence on army discipline. He proclaimed "Treat people with love and soldiers with discipline". He gave grain to the people wherever he went and got support in return.
In 1363 he won great victories, declared himself King of Wu and put the whole South China under his control in a few years. He turned against the Yuan in the north and under the slogan "Drive away the Mongols, restore China to the Chinese, establish law and order and provide relief to the poor" and proclaimed the Ming Dynasty in 1368.
Tai Zu died of illness at the age of 70 in 1398.
Zhu Di (known in history as Cheng Zu) 1360 - 1424 was the third Emperor of the Ming Dynasty. He is known as the emperor that moved the capital from Nanjing to Beijing in 1421. The Imperial Palace were mostly built during his reign.
Zhu Di took the power of Nanjing in 1403 and very soon ordered the scholar Xie Jin to take care of the compilation of A Comprehensive Collection of Classics for the purpose to carry forward the national culture. In 1407 the well-known Yong Le Da Dian (an encyclopaedic collection with more than 22,800 sections bound in over 11,000 books) was finally completed.
Zhu Di was very satisfied with this unprecedented transcript, containing approximately 7,000 to 8,000 types of books and some 370 million words, and the collection was carefully kept in the restored Wen Yuan Ge (The Imperial Library) located at Nanjing. Since then, ‘Yong Le Da Dian’ and Wen Yuan Ge have become symbols of the maturity of the Chinese civilisation signifying the people’s love, treasuring, protecting and inheriting of traditional culture.
Cheng Zu died at the age of 64 of illness on return from an expedition against the Mongols in 1424.

Thanks to Wu Luxing, Wang Xuewen and Wang Yanxi for information to this post and Lu Yanguang for the illustrations.
More ABC = Z posts can be found at Mrs Nesbits Place