[2] During his tenure, Zhu Youjiao was uninterested in court affairs, leaving room for Wei to abuse his power to issue edicts to promote and demote hundreds of officers.
During Zhu Youjiao's reign, Wei would send the emperor's edicts to the Embroidered Uniform Guard led by prison director Xu Xianchun to purge corrupt officials and political enemies.
He is presumed to have been born in 1568 in Suning County (100 miles southeast of Beijing), to have married a girl with the surname of Fang (方), and to have castrated himself at age 21 (Ming dynastic records claim that he did so in order to escape his gambling debts).
[6] Due to his fame in Chinese culture over the past 400 years, other stories of his early life have appeared, many showing him as a ruffian and a compulsive gambler.
As Zhu Youjiao grew older, he became extremely attached to both Madame Ke and Wei Zhongxian, treating them as his de facto parents when his mother died in 1619.
[10] Wei's loyalty to the Tianqi Emperor paid quick dividends – by 1625, he had become the minister of the Eastern Depot, a force of over one thousand uniformed policemen headquartered in the Forbidden City.
[13] As fear of Wei's power became more and more prevalent in China, many local officials commissioned the building of temples in his honor, much to the chagrin of Confucian scholars.
When the Tianqi Emperor proved just as indifferent to his imperial responsibilities as his grandfather was and an illiterate eunuch seemed to be the most powerful figure in the Forbidden City, the Donglin scholars decided that their intervention was sorely needed.
[14] Donglin sympathizer and Ming censor Zhou Zongjian impeached Wei Zhongxian in July 1622, imploring the emperor to remove him from the palace.
[17] In 1625, Xu then arrested six of the Donglin party's leaders, including Yang Lian (Wei's detractor), whom he had accused of squandering public money through their bureaucracy positions.
Over the two-year period of 1625–26, hundreds of other presumed Donglin sympathizers were demoted or purged from the government by Xu and the Embroidered Uniform Guard.
On December 8, the Chongzhen Emperor issued an edict listing Wei's crimes and exiled him south to Fengyang (in present-day Anhui).
Acting on the warning, the Chongzhen Emperor ordered the Embroidered Uniform Guard to arrest Wei and bring him back to Beijing.
[3] Since his death, Wei has been seen by Chinese people and scholars as an instigator of Zhu Youjiao's abuse of power and collective atrocities.
According to historical Chinese scholars, Wei's faults lay not necessarily in his persecution of the Donglin party, but in wielding power that was only supposed to be used by emperors themselves.