The construction of the tomb started in the seventh year of his reign and took five years to be completed. The layout of Chang Ling follows the pattern of Xiao Ling (xiào líng 孝陵) in Nanjing (nán jīng 南京). Of all the thirteen Ming tombs, it is the earliest and most magnificent, with surface structure perfectly preserved. It is the largest one in scale and earliest in construction time with best preserved ground buildings among all the Ming Tombs.

Its main structure, the Ling'en Hall, covers 1,956 square meters, nearly the same as of the Hall of Supreme Harmony (tài hé diàn 太和殿) in the Forbidden City, but it exceeds the latter architecturally as all the columns, beams, etc. are made of nanmu (nán mù 楠木), a durable high quality softwood. The 32 huge 12.58 meter-tall pillars of the hall are each made from a single nanmu tree trunk. This valuable timber came from Sichuan (sì chuān 四川), Hubei (hú běi 湖北), Henan (hé nán 河南) and Jiangxi ( jiāng xī 江西) provinces, all thousands of kilometers away from Beijing. It is said that it took about five years just to transport these enormous treetrunks. This scale of historic project is rarely seen in other parts of the world. The hall is the largest and most magnificent structure of nanmu wood still existing in China. This hall has becomes the exhibition hall for the historical relics unearthed from Chang Ling.