Hongwu Emperor

Zhu Yuanzhang (1328–1398) founded the Ming dynasty and ruled as its first emperor from 1368 until his death in 1398. He reigned under the era name Hongwu, usually translated as "vast military power", and his temple name is Taizu.

Born into a family of poor tenant farmers, he rose through the rebellions that ended Mongol rule in China and drove the Yuan court back to the Mongolian steppe. As emperor he rebuilt government on Chinese and Confucian lines and gave land and tax relief to farmers. He was also suspicious and severe, and tens of thousands died in the purges of his reign. Trusting only his family, he made his sons powerful regional princes, a decision that led to civil war soon after his death.

Early Life

Zhu Yuanzhang was born in 1328 into a family of poor tenant farmers in Zhongli, on the Huai River plain, in what is now Fengyang in Anhui province. He was the youngest of a large family, and his parents gave some of his siblings away because they could not feed them.

In 1344 drought, famine and disease killed his father, his mother and his eldest brother within a few weeks. He was taken in by a Buddhist monastery, but when it ran short of food he was sent away, and for about three years he lived as a wandering beggar, learning at first hand the hardships of ordinary people. He then returned to the monastery, where he learned to read and write, and stayed until he was twenty-four.

Rebellion against the Yuan

By the mid-fourteenth century Mongol rule in China was failing. Famine, floods and epidemics were followed by peasant risings, and the Yuan court was divided by its own struggles for power. The most important rebel movement was the Red Turbans, named for the red headcloths of its members. Linked to the White Lotus Society and drawing on Buddhist and other religious traditions, it grew among peasants forced to labour on the Yellow River and the Grand Canal.

In 1352, after his monastery was attacked by troops suppressing a local rising, Zhu Yuanzhang joined a rebel force under Guo Zixing, one of the Red Turban leaders. He rose quickly, married Guo's adopted daughter, the future Empress Ma, and took over the leadership after Guo's death in 1355. In 1356 he captured Nanjing, which became his base, and he built up an army in the Yangzi valley.

His great rival was Chen Youliang, who controlled the middle Yangzi, and from 1360 the two fought for supremacy. The decisive battle came on Lake Poyang in 1363, one of the largest naval battles in history. Chen's larger fleet was defeated and Chen was killed. From then on Zhu stayed in Nanjing and directed his generals' campaigns rather than fighting himself.

He also set aside the Red Turbans' aim of restoring the Song dynasty in favour of his own claim to rule, and dropped the anti-Confucian policies that had alienated the educated class. He understood that a lasting state needed administrators as well as soldiers.

Founding the Ming

In 1367 his forces defeated Zhang Shicheng, whose state of Dazhou was centred on Suzhou and covered most of the Yangzi delta. With the south secure, he sent his generals Xu Da and Chang Yuchun north.

In 1368 he proclaimed himself emperor of the Ming at Nanjing, with Hongwu as his era name. Rallying the Han Chinese with the call to expel the Mongols and restore Chinese rule, his armies took Shandong and Henan, and later the same year they entered Dadu, the Yuan capital, now Beijing. The Yuan emperor Toghon Temür fled north, and Yuan rule over China came to an end. Yunnan, still held by a Yuan prince, was invaded in 1381, and by 1382 China proper was again united.

The new dynasty set out to undo Mongol rule. Mongol dress and names were abandoned, the classical sacrifices of Chinese rulers were restored, and Han Chinese officials replaced the Mongols who had dominated government. The civil service examinations were restored as the route into office, with the Confucian classics at their heart, and the scholar-gentry whom the Yuan had sidelined returned to the service of the state. Nanjing, the new capital, was enclosed by a city wall more than thirty kilometres long, much of which still stands.

Governing the Empire

Having known poverty himself, Hongwu blamed the sufferings of his youth on corrupt officials and greedy landlords, and he set out to protect the farmers. Land was given to small farmers, dykes and irrigation works were built, and the forced labour that the court and the gentry could demand was reduced. Those who brought waste land under cultivation could keep it free of tax, and by 1393 the cultivated area had grown considerably. In 1372 he ordered the release of all free people who had been enslaved under the Mongols.

To keep taxation fair, he had the population recorded in the Yellow Registers and the land in the Fish Scale Registers, named for their maps of overlapping plots. They protected both the state's income and people's rights to their land.

His law code, the Da Ming Lü or Code of the Great Ming, was begun as early as 1364. He wanted it clear and complete, so that officials could not exploit its gaps. It placed great weight on family relations and protected slaves far better than the Tang code, which had classed them with property. In the 1380s he added the Da Gao, or Grand Pronouncements, a much harsher set of laws aimed above all at corrupt officials. An official who embezzled more than 60 liang of silver (a liang weighed about 37 grams) was beheaded and flayed, and his skin was put on public display. Ordinary people were given the unprecedented right to seize corrupt officials and bring them to the capital. The Da Gao also bore down on idle men and laid down detailed rules on what commoners might own.

To guard the dynasty he relied on his family. From 1370 his sons were made princes and, as they came of age, sent to fiefs across the empire, those on the northern frontier with substantial armies of their own; the most powerful was his fourth son, Zhu Di, Prince of Yan, at Beijing. The army was organised in hereditary military households, given land to farm so that the garrisons could largely feed themselves. Towards the outside world he was wary: private overseas trade was banned from the early 1370s, and contact with foreign states was confined to tribute missions to the court.

In 1380 the emperor accused his chancellor, Hu Weiyong, of plotting against him. Hu was executed, the office of chancellor was abolished, and the ministries came under the emperor's direct control. The investigation went on for years, and together with his campaigns against corruption it cost tens of thousands of lives. Empress Ma, who was remembered for tempering her husband's severity, died in 1382.

He took a close interest in learning and ideas. He tried to remove Mencius from the Temple of Confucius, and when senior officials objected he had an abridged Mencius compiled with 85 passages removed. At the imperial academy in Nanjing students studied law, mathematics, archery, horsemanship and calligraphy alongside the classics. His Six Maxims for the people later inspired the Sacred Edict of the Kangxi Emperor, and around 1384 he had the Islamic astronomical tables translated into Chinese as the Huihui Lifa.

The Succession and the Last Purges

His eldest son, Zhu Biao, was a capable and kind crown prince who had been taught by his father's best generals and ministers and ran affairs at home when the emperor was away. His death in 1392 left Hongwu with the problem of the succession. Rather than choose one of his other sons, many of them experienced soldiers, he named Zhu Biao's son Zhu Yunwen as his heir and ordered the princes to support him.

Fearing that the great generals of the founding wars might overthrow a young emperor, Hongwu turned on them. In 1393 the general Lan Yu was accused of treason and executed, and thousands of others died with him. By the end of the reign many of the men who had helped found the dynasty were dead.

Hongwu died in June 1398, after a reign of thirty years, and was buried in the Xiaoling Mausoleum on Purple Mountain, east of Nanjing. The physicians who had attended him were punished, and several dozen of his concubines were made to follow him in death, reviving a practice that earlier dynasties had long abandoned. Many of his strictest measures against officials were relaxed after his death, and later emperors came to treat the bureaucracy as a partner in government.

His grandson succeeded him as the Jianwen Emperor. The plan to protect him failed: Hongwu had overestimated the loyalty of his sons. In 1399 his fourth son, Zhu Di, Prince of Yan, rebelled, and the civil war known as the Jingnan campaign ended in 1402 with Zhu Di on the throne as the Yongle Emperor.