China

The dynasty’s founder

Zhu Yuanzhang, founder of the new dynasty, came from a family originally from northwestern Jiangsu province who by Yuan times had deteriorated into itinerant tenant farmers in northern Anhui province. Orphaned by famine and plague in 1344, young Zhu was taken into a small Buddhist monastery near Fengyang city as a lay novice. For more than three years he wandered as a mendicant through the Huai basin before beginning studies for the Buddhist priesthood in his monastery. In 1352, after floods, rebellions, and Yuan campaigns against bandits had devastated and intimidated the whole region, Zhu was persuaded to join a Fengyang branch of Han Lin’er’s uprising. He quickly made himself the most successful general on the southern front of the rebel Song regime, and in 1356 he captured and set up his headquarters in Nanjing, a populous and strategically located city on the Yangtze River. There he began assembling a rudimentary government and greatly strengthened his military power. Between 1360 and 1367, still nominally championing the cause of the Song regime, his armies gained control of the vast central and eastern stretches of the Yangtze valley, absorbing first the Han domain to the west of Nanjing and then the Wu domain to the east. He also captured the Zhejiang coastal satrap, Fang Guozhen. Zhu then announced his intention of liberating all of China from Mongol rule and proclaimed a new dynasty effective with the beginning of 1368. The dynastic name Ming, meaning “Brightness,” reflects the Manichaean influence in the Song-revivalist Han Lin’er regime under which Zhu had achieved prominence. Zhu came to be known by his reign name, the Hongwu (“Vastly Martial”) emperor.

The Hongwu emperor, hanging scroll, ink and colour on silk, 14th century; in the National Palace Museum, Taipei.Courtesy of the National Palace Museum, Taipei, Taiwan, Republic of China

Vigorous campaigning in 1368 drove the Mongols out of Shandong, Henan, and Shanxi provinces and from Dadu itself, which was occupied by Ming forces on September 14, and simultaneously extended Ming authority through Fujian and Hunan into Guangdong and Guangxi provinces on the south coast. In 1369–70 Ming control was established in Shaanxi, Gansu, and Inner Mongolia, and continued campaigning against the Mongols thereafter extended northwestward to Hami (1388), northeastward to the Sungari (Songhua) River in Manchuria (1387), and northward into Outer Mongolia beyond Karakorum, almost to Lake Baikal (1387–88). In operations to the west and southwest, Ming forces destroyed the rebel Xia regime in Sichuan in 1371, wiped out major Mongol and aboriginal resistance in Guizhou and Yunnan in 1381–82, and pacified aboriginal peoples on the border between China and Myanmar in 1398. Thus, by the end of the Hongwu emperor’s 30-year reign in 1398, his new dynasty controlled the whole of modern China proper and dominated the northern frontier regions, from Hami through Inner Mongolia and into northern Manchuria.