Names accompany people throughout their lives and are very important. Ordinary people have to think about it for a long time when choosing a name, let alone the name of an emperor. However, one emperor invented the method of naming his descendants using the Five Elements Physiology. He was Zhu Yuanzhang. Zhu Yuanzhang was able to use this method to name his descendants, which was also a lot of painstaking effort. In the theory of the mutual generation of the five elements, everything can be transformed into each other and then cycle back and forth. Therefore, by naming in this way, Zhu Yuanzhang hoped that the Ming Dynasty could be passed down forever.
When we look at the names of the emperors of the Ming Dynasty, their names all use the radicals "gold, wood, water, fire, and earth" in the Five Elements. According to this rule, from the names of the descendants of the Zhu family, we can easily tell which emperor has a father-son relationship with which emperor. However, Zhu Yuanzhang still encountered trouble with this method, because there were too many descendants of his Zhu family, and the words "gold, wood, water, fire, and earth" were limited. Faced with this situation, the descendants of the Zhu family could only use some uncommon characters when naming them. Later, when they ran out of uncommon characters, they began to invent new characters. The Zhu family accidentally made some contributions to the invention of new characters. Because these characters were later used in the periodic table of elements, the names of the descendants of the Zhu family also overlap with the names of certain elements.
In the early days, there were so many descendants of the Zhu family that they had to create new characters for their names. However, in the later period, the descendants of the Zhu family gradually withered away. At the end of the Ming Dynasty, the emperor died of heirs and had to be succeeded by his cousin.
It was a very creative thing for Zhu Yuanzhang to name his offspring based on the theory of the Five Elements. It shows that he has great expectations for his offspring, but which family can really survive for generations to come?