Biography
Crown prince and accession Shidibala was the son of Emperor Renzong and Anashshiri. In 1316 （third year of Yuan Yanyou） chose his own son as crown prince. the source describes Shidibala's education in Confucian learning and the appointment of tutors and staff to his princely household. In 1319 （sixth year of Yuan Yanyou）, government offices were instructed to present matters to the crown prince before reporting to the emperor, giving him experience in court affairs. After Renzong died in 1320 （seventh year of Yuan Yanyou）, Shidibala took the throne with the support of Dagi and Temüder. He adopted the era name Zhizhi the following year, but at first Dagi and Temüder limited his control of the government. On November 28, 1321（ninth day of the eleventh lunar month, Zhizhi 1 of Yuan）, officials conferred the honorific title Jitian Tidao Jingwen Renwu Dazhaoxiao Huangdi. ### Conflict with the grand empress dowager's circle Dagi restored Temüder to influence around the accession. Temüder retaliated against officials who had impeached him and sought to replace senior officeholders. Shidibala resisted wholesale dismissal of Renzong's officials and repeatedly opposed the execution of Zhao Shiyan, while compromising with Dagi's faction in other cases. He promoted Baiju, a descendant of Muqali, and made him left grand councilor in 1320 （seventh year of Yuan Yanyou）. Baiju became a counterweight to Temüder. This conflict concerned appointments, prosecutions, and the grand empress dowager's ability to constrain the new ruler. Temüder and Dagi died in 1322 （second year of Yuan Zhizhi）, expanding Shidibala's room to act. He made Baiju right grand councilor and left the post of left grand councilor vacant, relying on him and officials such as Zhang Gui. He stripped Temüder of honors, abolished the Huizheng Office and some institutions attached to the grand empress dowager, restored scholars and former officials, and pressed for investigations of corruption. These measures combined bureaucratic reform with the removal of his opponents' remaining influence. ### Reform, construction, and assassination Shidibala and Baiju advanced land endowments to support corvée obligations, changes in appointments, and a compilation of regulations. In 1323 （third year of Yuan Zhizhi）, the court issued *Da Yuan Tongzhi*, giving official status to legal materials collected since Renzong's reign. The compilation began under his father; its promulgation belongs to Shidibala's reign. ” Wang Yue opposed it, and it was never implemented, so it cannot be described as a reform he enacted. In 1320（eleventh lunar month, Yanyou 7 of Yuan）, Shidibala ordered localities to build halls for the imperial preceptor Phagspa on a scale exceeding that of Confucian temples. In 1321（fifth lunar month, Zhizhi 1 of Yuan）, he ordered the destruction of a Muslim temple in Shangdu to provide a site for such a hall. Inscriptions quoted by the source differ over whether the nationwide order began under Renzong or Shidibala. Substantial construction continued under Shidibala, consuming labor despite his calls to reduce unnecessary expenditure. the source records his trust in Tegshi, a relative by marriage, and says that Tegshi and others feared being implicated as investigations of Temüder's associates continued. On September 4, 1323 （fourth day of the eighth lunar month, third year of Yuan Zhizhi）, Shidibala stopped at Nanpo on his return from Shangdu. Tegshi's party attacked, killing Baiju first and then the emperor. The prince Yesun Temur subsequently succeeded. On March 11, 1324（sixteenth day of the second lunar month, Taiding 1 of Yuan）, the court conferred the posthumous name Emperor Ruishengwenxiao and temple name Yingzong; on May 1, 1324（eighth day of the fourth lunar month, Taiding 1 of Yuan）, it conferred the Mongolian title Gegeen Emperor. The honorific presented during his life is distinguished here from titles conferred after his death. Explanations of the coup concern the interests threatened by reform, guards near the ruler, political distrust, and Shidibala's severe application of law.
Shidibala was born about 22 February 1303, a son of Ayurbarwada (Renzong), and was raised at his father's side; his education was fuller than that of most Yuan emperors, and he came to wish to accomplish much in the world. When Renzong wished to make him heir apparent, Shidibala firmly declined, saying that he was too young and too little able, that his elder brother was still living, and that the brother should be made heir while he himself assisted him; the empress dowager would not allow it. In 1316 he was made heir apparent, given the golden seal and allowed to open a household with its own officers; the investigating censor Duan Fu and the household administrator Guo Guan memorialized that a tutor should be chosen for him, which Renzong approved. In the tenth month of 1319 he received the jade patent, and the court decreed that the business of all offices should first be reported to the heir apparent and then to the emperor. Shidibala told the ministers of the secretariat that the sovereign had entrusted him with the affairs of the realm, that he trembled day and night lest he prove unequal to them, and that they should cleanse their minds, be diligent in their duties and not slacken, lest they add to the cares of their lord and father.
Ayurbarwada died on the twenty-first day of the first month of 1320. On the eleventh day of the third month Shidibala, then seventeen, was enthroned in the Daming hall at Dadu with the support of the grand empress dowager Dagi and others, taking the khan's title Gegeen Khan and the era name Zhizhi, becoming Emperor Yingzong. On Renzong's death the empress dowager Dagi, as grand empress dowager, interfered in the government and brought the dismissed chancellor Temüder back into the secretariat as chancellor of the right, and Temüder took revenge on all who had impeached him, so that the government was for a time in his hands.
In 1322 the empress dowager Dagi and Temüder died one after the other and Yingzong began to govern in his own right. He made Baiju chancellor of the right and carried out a series of new measures: superfluous offices and officials were cut back and the machinery of government simplified; Chinese Confucian officials were employed and the study of the classics encouraged; a law of assisted corvée was introduced to lighten the burden of service on the common households; the Comprehensive Institutions of the Yuan were promulgated, setting the laws in order; and the administration and the finances were reformed in an attempt to correct the abuses of the previous reign. These measures were known at the time as the new policy and were one of the more concentrated attempts at reform in the middle Yuan.
In the eighth month of 1323 Yingzong and Baiju were returning from Shangdu to Dadu and halted at Nanpo. That night Tieshi and others rose in revolt, killed Baiju and entered the imperial tent to murder Yingzong, who was but twenty-one — the coup known as the affair of Nanpo. After it Yesün Temür was set on the throne as Emperor Taiding, and Yingzong's new policy came to an end.
Yingzong was one of the few Yuan emperors who set himself seriously to reform, and though his measures lasted but two years or so they left concrete steps in cutting superfluous offices, unifying the laws and lightening corvée; his murder also broke off the movement to govern by Chinese law in the middle Yuan, after which the dynasty's politics entered another phase. In later discussions of the rise and fall of the Yuan, the Zhizhi reforms and the Nanpo coup are commonly taken as a turning point in its middle years.
In the first period of his reign the government was in fact held by the grand empress dowager Dagi and Temüder. On the third day after Ayurbarwada's death, while Yingzong was still in plain mourning and taking a single gruel a day, Dagi was beforehand in appointing Temüder chancellor of the right; the next month Temüder reached the capital and put to death the former censor-in-chief and others on the charge of defying the empress dowager's will, while officials close to Dagi's group were brought in from the provinces to the secretariat one after another. The men of the Chinese-law party who had stood against Dagi and Temüder in Ayurbarwada's reign had already been purged before Yingzong's accession, and those who escaped were mostly left isolated; the young sovereign could rely on but two men — Baiju, a young chancellor as unworldly as himself, and Tieshi, his wife's kinsman, in whom lay hidden mischief. In the fifth month of 1321 Yingzong gave Baiju a chief post in the secretariat to check the growth of the empress dowager's and Temüder's power; in the same month he ordered the mosque at Shangdu destroyed and a temple of the imperial preceptor built on its site; in the seventh month he gave the prince of Jin, Yesün Temür, a million strings of paper money; and in the eleventh month the ministers offered him the honorific title of emperor who continues the heavenly way, reveres culture and benevolence and greatly illustrates filial piety.
From the first month of 1320, when Ayurbarwada died, until the autumn of 1322, the decrees of the central government show plainly two parties with different policies in conflict: one led by Dagi and Temüder and representing the Mongol and Central Asian nobility, the other the party of Chinese law, which urged the employment of Confucian officials. Only when Dagi and Temüder died one after the other in 1322 could Yingzong and Baiju carry out their measures within a short time; but the enmity of the two parties did not disappear, and the resentment of Tieshi and others was gathering.
The new policy of Zhizhi included the abolition of such offices as the Huizheng yuan, the reduction of superfluous officials, attention to famine relief, the lightening of corvée on common households, the reform of judicial procedure and the encouragement of Confucian learning. In the second month of 1323 the court promulgated the Comprehensive Institutions of the Yuan, the dynasty's first fairly systematic code, divided into imperial ordinances, regulations and decided cases and running to more than two thousand articles covering administration, crime, civil matters and taxes and services — important material for the legal history of the period. Most of these measures could not be carried on for long, but they show that a part of the court and government in the middle Yuan leaned toward the Chinese-law position in governing the state.
In the eighth month of 1323 Yingzong and Baiju were returning from Shangdu to Dadu and halted at Nanpo. That night Tieshi, then censor-in-chief and holding troops in his hand, rose in revolt, killed Baiju first and then entered the imperial tent and murdered Yingzong, who was but twenty-one — the affair of Nanpo. Yesün Temür was then set on the throne as Emperor Taiding, who put Tieshi and his fellows to death but modified and adjusted Yingzong's policy, and the impetus of reform by Chinese law in the Yuan was broken off.
Yingzong reigned less than four years, of which little more than one was government in his own hand. He was one of the few Yuan emperors who set himself seriously to reform along Chinese lines, and his measures left concrete steps in cutting superfluous offices, unifying the laws and lightening corvée; the coup at Nanpo ended his life and with it a concentrated attempt at reform in the middle Yuan. In later discussions of the dynasty's fortunes the Zhizhi reforms and the Nanpo coup are commonly taken as the mark of a turning point in its middle years.
Baiju, whom Yingzong chiefly employed, came of an old Mongol family of meritorious service and was one of the few Mongol ministers inclined to Chinese law; the cooperation of the two was the condition on which the new policy could be carried out, and Baiju's family kept considerable influence in the later Yuan. The emperor's burial followed the old Yuan practice, and the sources say little of the site.