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Peng Shi
Ming grand secretary from Anfu, top palace graduate of 1448, who sat in the cabinet under three emperors and insisted on ritual propriety in the empress dowager disputes of the 1460s
In a council hall, a long table holds an unrolled map scroll, a brass-cornered chest and a brush pot, with tall-backed chairs around it and a bronze lamp at the left; a figure stands with their back turned on the balcony at the right, with palace roofs beyond.
Also known as Zi Chundao · Hao Kezhai
- Roles
- Chief Ministers
Peng Shi, courtesy name Chundao, came from Anfu in Ji'an, Jiangxi, and placed first in the palace examination of 1448. After the Tumu disaster the next year, when the Prince of Cheng took over the government, Peng and Shang Lu were brought into the Grand Secretariat, but in 1450 he was allowed home to complete mourning for his stepmother and did not return to the cabinet under the Jingtai emperor. Recalled in 1457 after Xu Youzhen and others had fallen, he served as a Hanlin academician and grand secretary alongside Li Xian and Lu Yuan. When the Chenghua emperor came to the throne Peng argued that both dowagers should receive equal honours, and when Empress Dowager Qian died in 1468 he pressed for her burial beside Emperor Yingzong in the Yu mausoleum; in both cases the court followed his view. Moving from minister of war to minister of personnel, he died in 1475 at fifty-nine, with the posthumous name Wenxian.
Life and times
Dates 1416 CE–1475 CE