A Study Of The Posthumous Titles Of The Ming Emperors: Centered With Emperor Taizu And Emperor Wuzong

In ancient China, posthumous names, as a kind of titles were given to emperors, nobles and highly ranked ministers after they died, to display their good merits or wicked deeds. As a part of the national Five Rites and an important ritual regulation, the system of posthumous titles gave strong influence to citizen's behavior psychology and public values.Starting with the analysis of the discussion paper on the posthumous title for the late emperor, the dissertation discusses all these papers. And based on the comparative analysis of the characters with high frequency in their posthumous names, the author puts out the conclusion that the repeating appearance of these characters stands for the valuable tendency and moral standards proposed by the emperors in the Ming Dynasty who, with the help of these repeating characters in their posthumous names, hoped to improve moral education and build positive social mores. According to these discussions paper on the posthumous titles, temple names and posthumous names were used together as the comments on emperors. And one special character of the posthumous names for the emperors in the Ming Dynasty is that they obtained their temple names from the rule of conferring posthumous titles, which suggests the institutionalization of the rule.The posthumous names and its rituals gradually became a kind of form for the successor emperor to honor the dead one and to search reasons to support his crown. So many excessively glorified words make it difficult for the later people to clear out the true characters of these emperors just because they left us an image constructed with these beautiful words and complicated rituals in order to show out their superiority and to maintain the social order.