"Build up the walls high; store grain bountifully; proclaim yourself emperor slowly." This was the advice given by an aged Chinese scholar to a young rebel leader named Zhu Yuanzhang in 1358. The implied message was that power would naturally accrue if Zhu kept his defenses and his supplies well tended, and the emphasis on security and food was understandable at the time. Floods, famine, and drought in the first quarter of the century alone had claimed more than seven million lives, and when these recurrent natural disasters abated, the Chinese people were no less at risk from roaming bands of brigands and the corrupt local administration of the occupying Mongols who ruled their country. For the peasants especially, basic survival was the only realistic goal.
As the son of destitute tenant farmers, Zhu Yuanzhang had experienced the sufferings of the people firsthand. Flis parents and brothers had all starved to death while Zhu was in his teens, and Zhu himself had survived only by entering a Buddhist monastery as a novice. He was courageous, ruthless, and intelligent but could hardly have believed when he first joined a band of rebels in 1352 that he would eventually rid China of its foreign rulers and, as emperor himself, found the illustrious Ming dynasty, which would rule the nation for almost 300 years.
For a man of humble birth, such a destiny was made possible only by the conditions of anarchy and political chaos that had overtaken the Yuan dynasty of the Mongols. The Yuan rulers were descendants of the tribal warriors of the central Asian plateau who, under Genghis Khan a century earlier, had acquired by terror and conquest the largest empire the world had known. By Chinese standards, the Mongols were barbarians. But their rule, at least in its early years, was not totally injurious, and by conquering the northern as well as the southern domains of China, they had reunified a divided empire.
The north of China, ruled in the twelfth century by the Manchurian Chin dynasty, had been overrun quite rapidly. Its arid plains, windswept and bitterly cold in winter, were excellent terrain for the Mongol cavalry. The populous and fertile lands that surrounded the Yellow River had proved alarmingly exposed, and the Mongol horsemen reached the valley of the Huai River, marking the frontier between the two halves of the nation, by 1234.
Southern China, the seat of the native Song emperors, was more difficult to conquer. The climate was warmer and far wetter; there were great lakes and innumerable canals. Substantial barriers against invasion, mountain ranges cut off the tropical southern coast from the Yangtze valley, blocked the way to Burma, and surrounded the fertile basin of Sichuan on the upper Yangtze. In this lusher terrain, the Mongols had to master the techniques of fighting among canals and rice fields. When Kublai Khan—the grandson of Genghis—came to power in 1260, he built fleets of ships to carry his armies across the Yangtze and the great lakes and along the coast. Aided by the technical skills of many of his new Chinese subjects—and also by dissension among the enemy generals—Kublai made steady progress; and in 1271, he proclaimed that the mandate of heaven had passed to his new dynasty, for which he took the name Yuan ("Origin”). The last native armies held out in the deep south for seven more years; rebellions occurred at intervals for far longer; but by the latter decades of the thirteenth century, all of China was firmly a province of the Mongol Empire.
The Yuan capital was in the north, well beyond the Yellow River and almost on the edge of the arid plains, at Dadu (now Beijing). For the Mongols, this city provided easy access to their other steppe kingdoms, which extended westward to Persia and the borders of Catholic Europe. There Kublai built his palaces and pleasure gardens; there he commanded his great hunts, riding in a gilded tower carried by four elephants; and there the wealth of northern and southern China was brought as tribute.
Most of the Mongol troops who had fought for Kublai settled in the north, around Dadu. Strong Mongol detachments were also located along the Grand Canal, which since the seventh century had linked the lower reaches of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers and was essential for transporting grain supplies from the fertile south to the northern capital as well as around Nanjing in the lower Yangtze rice bowl. But apart from these troops, neither the garrisons nor the civilian officials who controlled Yuan China were from the conquering race.
Lacking administrative skills themselves, the Mongols organized Chinese society in such a way as to exploit the talents of their subject peoples. Yuan law recognized four categories of citizens. Very much in the first place were the Mongols themselves, who were encouraged to remain a military aristocracy. Next came other aliens known as the semuren, the "people with colored eyes." For the most part, these were Muslim subjects of Mongol-controlled empires beyond the great deserts; they included Persians, Arabs, Turks, even the occasional European. Their reliability was ensured by the fact that, as foreigners in China, they were wholly dependent on Mongol power; the Yuan used them to control the financial administration. Almost as dependable, and far more numerous, were the hanren, or "people of the north": the Chinese inhabitants of the northern provinces and their non-Mongol neighbors, Khitan, jur-chen, Koreans, and so forth. Last and most numerous were the nanren, the southerners of the conquered Song empire.
The Mongols' knowledge of the country they ruled remained slight, since in routine matters they depended on reports made by the semuren, who themselves often relied on Chinese clerks and interpreters. But China under their rule was not at first ill-governed. Trade and agriculture began to flourish again after the disruption caused by the invasions; canals and waterways were restored and extended; the civilian bureaucracy was permitted to carry out its work without military intervention. And the native Chinese, whose northern provinces especially had been frequently overrun by nomadic barbarians, had long experience of alien cultures and had developed their own ways of coming to terms with foreign rule.
In the past, the Chinese had assimilated and ultimately absorbed their conquerors by converting them to their own traditional principles of government. Derived from the teachings of Confucius, a Chinese philosopher of the sixth century BC, these precepts provided the ethical and political framework for an ordered, hierarchical society in which the general welfare of the people was the central concern of thoughtful and enlightened rulers. The dissemination of Confucian ideas was the responsibility of highly educated scholars who believed that long and thorough study of the Confucian classics and of history would produce a truly civilized person uniquely qualified to hold public office. In practice, the scholars came from a restricted number of families, well under five percent of the population; but even such a minority, in populous China, amounted to multitudes. Before the Mongol conquest of China, the better scholars had been selected from the many aspirants by three competitive public exams, on which recruitment to the civil service depended.
The victorious Mongols at first had no time for Confucian learning. They tolerated Confucianism as they tolerated most of the other beliefs among their diverse subjects: Buddhism; animism; the ancient Chinese blend of philosophy and magic known as
In the early fourteenth century, China was ruled by the Yuan dynasty of the Mongols from their capital at Dadu in the north, close to their original homeland. Following successive floods and famines, rebellions occurred throughout the central and southern provinces. The rebel leader Zhu Yuanzhang seized the city of Nanjing in 1355; after defeating rival leaders at Suzhou and farther up the Yangtze, he confirmed his supremacy by ridding northern China of the remaining Mongol forces. By the time of his death in 1398, Yunnan had been incorporated into the empire and the rule of the Ming was firmly established. The Ming capital was transferred from Nanjing to Beijing in 1420; in the sixteenth century, Ming emperors built the Great Wall, which extended some 1,500 miles inland from the Yellow Sea.
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Under the Mongol Yuan dynasty, native-born Chinese were barred from high office, and the educated classes, who for centuries had provided the nation with its chief bureaucrats, were deprived of their livelihood. Some highborn scholars continued to serve the government in a lowly capacity, but many more adopted reclusive lives in which they devoted their talents to literature or painting. Among the latter was Ni Zan, an artist and poet who, along with other masters of the fourteenth century.
Developed a style of landscape painting remarkable for its purity and delicacy.
Born into a wealthy landowning family, Ni Zan sold or gave away almost all his possessions during the 1350s to avoid the heavy taxes levied by the Mongols, and thereafter he lived as a wanderer on his houseboat. Most of his paintings depicted trees, rocks, and a horizon of distant mountains across an expanse of water; devoid of people, their austerity expressed his detachment from the turmoil of rebellion.
Ni Zan, the subject of this fourteenth-century portrait, prepares to compose a poem. A servant offers water, which will be mixed with ink in the ink-stone on the painter's right. On the screen behind Ni Zan is a landscape typical of his spare and disciplined work.
Daoism; Islam; and the various brands of mostly heretical Christianity—notably Nestorianism, whose doctrines derived from a Syrian theologian of the fifth century— that had penetrated central Asia. But in the generations after the conquest, the Mongols and their allies who were brought up in China came to respect Confucian teachings; had all gone smoothly, the Yuan dynasty might have been thoroughly absorbed into the ancient modes of Chinese government.
Yuan politics, however, were distinctly turbulent. The Mongol throne was always held by descendants of Genghis Khan, but the succession was determined by the methods traditional among the warring tribes of the steppes, which often involved armed force and fratricide. The thirty-nine years after Kublai's death in 1294 saw ten emperors ascend and descend the throne, often very suddenly. Partly, the quarrels among the Mongols were tribal or personal; partly, they reflected a political argument as to whether the Yuan rulers should retain their Mongol identity or whether they should adjust and conform to the native traditions of China.
In 1315, the emperor Ayurbarwada reintroduced examinations based on Confucian texts to recruit officials for the civil service. The Mongols and their allies were allowed to take different examinations from the Chinese and were admitted into the service at higher grades, but to the Chinese scholars who had continued to teach in Confucian academies, the omens seemed propitious. They were given further encouragement when Togh Temur, the nephew of Ayurbarwada, came to the throne in 1329. A poet and calligrapher with a fine appreciation of Chinese culture, Togh Temur ruled through Mongol and semuren generals whose power was concentrated in the Chinese heartlands, and thus China became increasingly detached from the Mongol-controlled empires to the west.
If Togh Temur had lived a normal span, the Mongol dynasty might have become fully assimilated. But he died at the age of twenty-eight, in 1332; and after the customary tumult, the throne passed to his young nephew Toghon Temur. Real power, however, lay with the grand chancellor, Bayan, a Mongol of great ability and with a fierce determination to follow the old ways. In 1335, Bayan abolished the civil-service examinations; he reserved all the higher administrative positions for Mongols and semuren; and he made laws prohibiting the Chinese from learning the Mongol languages or bearing arms.
Bayan had his reasons. Floods, famines, and epidemics, many of them caused by a series of abnormally cold winters, had left much of China enfeebled, and there were frequent rebellions in the southern provinces. Mongol control had been weakened by power struggles among claimants to the imperial throne. The entry into the civil service of examination graduates—in Bayan's eyes, smooth-talking Chinese with no practical experience—had spread discontent. Bayan had a radical economic program to restore prosperity—he aimed to encourage agriculture, close down superfluous government workshops, reduce spending on construction, and cut taxes—and he wanted people he could trust in vital positions.
But such peremptory measures aroused fierce opposition. In 1337, popular rebellions broke out across central and southern China, only to be suppressed with considerable bloodshed by Bayan's troops. Strange rumors then began to circulate about the chancellor's next intentions: He would ban not only weapons but iron tools; he would seize all unmarried boys and girls for government service; most horrifying, he intended to kill all Chinese who bore the names of Zhao, Zhang, Li, Liu, or Wang. This was a large section of the population, and although the ghost of
Genghis Khan might have approved of such a remedy, it is doubtful whether Bayan really had such plans. In any case, his quarrel with the Chinese left him dangerously exposed in Mongol politics, as did his engrossment of all the great offices of state, which brought him temporary security and enormous wealth but left every other contender unsatisfied. In 1340, Bayan was overthrown in a coup led by his own nephew, Toghto. He died on his way into exile.
Painted in ink on silk at the beginning of the fourteenth century, a street peddler hawks bric-a-brac while two young children strike at a toy snake on the ground, itinerant merchants selling food, medicines, household goods, and children's playthings were a commonplace sight in all Chinese towns, where traditional patterns of daily life continued uninterrupted during the years of Mongol occupation.
Toghto sincerely admired Chinese ways. He restored the examinations, cancelled Bayan's persecutions, commissioned a history of the Song dynasty, and in 1344—in a sublimely Confucian gesture—resigned the chancellorship to give his rivals an opportunity to deal with the political problems he confronted. He was eventually replaced by Berke Buqa, a Mongol who was learned in Chinese literature and who intended to govern China by classical precepts. But this triumph of official Confucianism had come too late, for by now Mongol political and military control of China had become dangerously precarious.
Bayan's suppression of the rebellions of 1337 was to be the last great assertion of Mongol power. With no serious foreign enemies, many of the Mongols who held hereditary military office had become indolent and incompetent. The common soldiers were exploited by their commanders; their training was neglected, and some were forced to work at civilian trades, either to replace their military pay after it had been embezzled by the administration or to raise an income for their generals. Some had never learned how to use their weapons. In many garrisons, most of the troops had vanished, leaving their commanders to pocket their pay.
Apart from the imperial guards stationed around the capital, the government could by now command few reliable forces. Bandits infested not only the mountains but increasingly the productive plains. And the local levels of Yuan civil government, beneath the authority but not under the control of Mongols and semuren, had long been distressingly corrupt.
The central government was aware that all was not well. Civil-service examination questions in the 1340s indicated a determination to select candidates with a realistic grasp of the problems: "Some say that if the regulations are strict and salaries adequate, clerks will not become corrupt. But nowadays the regulations are strict and salaries adequate, yet clerks are still corrupt. How do you explain this?" Unfortunately, Confucian principles of government, however well intentioned, were no longer an adequate remedy for the troubles afflicting China.
Among the lower classes of native Chinese, the teachings of Confucius were vaguely respected but hardly understood. More deeply rooted were various brands of popular religion, which had traditionally provided channels for the expression of discontent. The ancient popular dream of returning to a more primitive society free of state interference had always been fostered by Daoism, for example, and Daoists had formed secret societies that encouraged rebellion against the government. Under
The Yuan dynasty, this subversive role was taken over by the Buddhists, with steadily increasing popular support.
The teachings of Buddha had been considerably reinterpreted since their introduction into China in the second century BC. The passive, passionless life preached
By the Indian sages was no longer the ideal. By the fourteenth century, the most popular Chinese version of Buddhism declared that worshipers should hope not for peace in the next world but for salvation in this; and that Maitreya, the Buddha of the Future, would descend to earth and establish the Pure Land in which Buddhists would rule. These doctrines were spread by the White Lotus society, a secret organization that, as discontent under Yuan rule intensified, began to preach that the coming of Maitreya was imminent.
Blended with Buddhism in the teachings of the White Lotus was another creed from outside China—Manicheanism, the Persian religion that sees all things as a conflict between the forces of light and of darkness. Chinese Manicheanism taught that in the final conflict, the Prince of Light, Ming Wang, would appear to redeem the world. In the popular mind, this figure was not entirely distinct from the Buddhist Maitreya.
This clay model of a farmstead, interred in the tomb of a Ming landowner, demonstrates a ground plan typical of all Chinese buildings from the emperor's palaces downward. The living quarters were arranged on a north-south axis, with the main family rooms around an inner courtyard and those of the servants and guests around an outer enclosure. The blank north wall—to the rear of the main two-story dwelling—and the screen behind the entrance in the south wall were intended to prevent the invasion of evil spirits. Most buildings were constructed of brick or clay between load-bearing timbers; (he slopes of their tiled roofs were elegantly curved, and sculptures of animal spirits—believed to protect against fire—crowned their ridges.
At some time during the 1330s, the clandestine religious fraternities became openly political. Unlike the Confucian elite, who were prepared, even anxious, to assist the new dynasty, many of the common Chinese had never seen the Mongols as anything more than foreign barbarians who stank of mutton. The Chinese themselves were pork eaters, and they possessed a far more sophisticated culinary tradition than the nomadic Mongols. The White Lotus now taught that the Mongols were nothing less than the primeval forces of darkness and that the Pure Land could be achieved by restoring the Song dynasty of southern China.
Tradition accords the leading roles in the White Lotus rebellion to a Buddhist monk, Peng Yingyu, and to one Han Shantong, who proclaimed himself the rightful heir of the Song empire. Their disciples met at night in secret; they swore blood brotherhood, took ritual names, and planned to raise an army whose troops would be distinguished by the wearing of red turbans. To the Chinese, this was a symbol of great significance: It recalled two Daoist secret societies that had rebelled against past usurpers, the Red Eyebrows and the Yellow Turbans. In addition, red was the traditional color of the legitimate dynasty.
In the 1340s, a network of Red Turban conspirators developed in the valleys of the Yangtze and the Huai rivers. They were aided by the vagaries of a third waterway, the Yellow River, which in 1344 burst its banks and began to change course, veering north and flooding vast areas. In these floods, the Grand Canal, which ran northward from the Yangtze by way of the Huai, was overwhelmed, silted up, and blocked.
The only route for transporting essential grain supplies to the north was now by sea, around the Shandong peninsula. This voyage had always been perilous and was made more so from 1348 by the activities of one Fang Guozhen. By his own account, this southern Chinese trader in the highly taxed commodity of salt had been falsely accused of piracy and was forced to murder a prominent official. Thereafter he took to piracy in earnest and found the grain convoys an easy target. Unable to suppress him, the Yuan court sought Fang's goodwill by offering him an official title.
In this critical situation, Toghto returned to office as grand chancellor in 1349. He decided to reopen the Grand Canal and to redirect the Yellow River into its original southern course. He acted with determination, enterprise, and administrative skill, but by assembling 150,000 laborers in the Huai valley to clear the vital canal, he played straight into the hands of his enemies.
Floods, famines, brigands, and turmoil had caused great hardship in the valley, and the White Lotus society had its strongest support among the peasants of this region. The conscripted laborers were equally discontented. Tradition holds that the White
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Lotus spread a rumor that the end of the evil empire would be announced by the appearance of a one-eyed giant and arranged for a one-eyed statue to be buried where the laborers would uncover it.
The conspiracy erupted into rebellion when Toghto, aware that trouble was brewing, ordered the arrest and execution of Han Shantong, the Song pretender. Far from disabling the Red Turban forces, this produced a wave of furious rioting. The pretender's son Han Liner escaped from custody, and the summer of 1351 saw the collapse of Mongol authority everywhere in the Huai valley and along the Yangtze. Hordes of central Asian tribesmen sent to restore the situation were routed by the Red Turbans. The Grand Canal, which Toghto's efforts had largely repaired, was blockaded by rebels led by an enterprising salt smuggler named Zhang Shicheng, who declared himself emperor.
Still, the Yuan dynasty commanded considerable loyalty in regions where the Red Turban conspiracy had not penetrated. Although the Red Turbans counted many prosperous Chinese among their ranks, they were essentially a revolutionary movement and as such were automatically opposed by Chinese landowners. And Toghto responded heroically to the crisis. Accepting that the north would have to feed itself, he organized an emergency program of state-sponsored agriculture that brought nearly 154,500 square miles north of the Yellow River under cultivation; he printed enormous amounts of paper money to boost government revenue without raising
Taxes; and by 1354, his loyalist armies had won a string of victories. The only serious resistance came from Fang Guozhen the pirate, inaccessible in his island lairs off the southeastern coast, and from Zhang Shicheng the smuggler, who had shut himself into the city of Gaoyu, which blocked the Grand Canal.
This fifteenth-century painting depicts an informal meeting of officials held in the garden of Yang Rong (seated, third from right), a senior officer in the Ming administration. While servants attend to food and drink, a court painter in the center of the picture records the occasion on a scroll laid out on a table. All these officials had gained their positions by succeeding in the civil-service exams reintroduced by the Hongwu emperor after the Mongol occupation; the emperor also prescribed the scarlet robes of office worn here by Yang Rong and one of his colleagues. The robes of civil administrators were embellished with auspicious birds, such as the white crane and the golden pheasant; military officers sported wild beasts, from lions for the most senior generals to sea horses for the most junior.
During the winter of 1354, the Yuan forces, led by Toghto in person, closed in on Gaoyu. The last of Zhang's armies was defeated; the city was besieged; final victory was in sight. Then a letter arrived from the capital: Toghto was dismissed from his post. His success had aroused envy at court; not satisfied with taking away his position, his enemies had him sent into exile and poisoned. His army subsequently disintegrated, and many of his soldiers joined the rebel forces. Zhang was safe, at least for the moment.
Rebellion now spread rapidly throughout China, and by the end of 1356, the Yuan emperor controlled only the area around his capital of Dadu. Elsewhere in northern China, power lay with Mongol or Chinese generals who were nominally loyal to the Yuan, but who in practice were concerned largely with their own safety. The southern coast was mostly dominated by Chinese leaders loyal to the Yuan, but the pirate Fang Guozhen ruled the coast of Zhejiang south of the Yangtze, and between the loyalist areas, the surviving Red Turbans still controlled the rich Yangtze valley and the Huai. The followers of Han Liner, the "Young Shining Prince" and self-styled Song emperor, held the northern parts of the rebel territory and battled with the forces loyal
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To the Yuan emperor; in the southern parts, in the Yangtze valley itself, four rival centers of power emerged.
The smallest but best organized of these power bases was ruled from Nanjing by Zhu Yuanzhang. Born in 1328 about 100 miles northwest of the city, Zhu was a tall and spectacularly ugly peasant whose beady eyes, pockmarked skin, bulbous nose, and jutting chin made him an obvious butt for jokes on his own name, which sounded the same as the word for "pig” in Chinese. In 1352, he had enlisted in the forces raised by a fortuneteller who believed in the imminent descent of the Maitreya Buddha; he had then recruited his own band of followers, starting with twenty-four childhood friends from his native village, and won a series of victories against Mongol and other Chinese troops. In 1355, he had crossed the Yangtze River with 30,000 men and seized Nanjing. Zhu remained, in name at least, a vassal of the restored empire of the Song pretender.
Around the mouth of the Yangtze, the richest of the rebel domains belonged to Zhang Shicheng, who had moved south after his miraculous delivery at Gaoyu and captured the wealthy city of Suzhou in the same week that Zhu took Nanjing. There, as ruler of 10 million subjects, he lived in a luxury he could not have dreamed of when he had rowed illicit cargoes through the marshlands.
Upstream from Nanjing, in the lands around the central Yangtze, the Red Turban uprising had never accepted the Song pretender's leadership. The rebel armies there were led by a fisherman named Chen Youliang, who awarded himself the title of Emperor of Han, recalling an even earlier dynasty. Needing boats to ferry his army over the wetlands of the Yangtze and the great lakes that it feeds, Chen had formed an alliance with the leader of an inland pirate fleet who armed himself like a Japanese samurai and was therefore known as Two-Swords Zhao.
A section of China's Great Wall, punctuated at roughly 500-foot intervals by watchtowers, follows the twisting contours of a mountain's flank in northeastern China. The high stone wall was built in the sixteenth century to replace an earlier line of forts and earth ramparts. It served as a barrier against Mongol princes who, long after the Hongwu emperor had driven the Mongols out of China, lurked threateningly across the northern border. In addition to its military purpose, the wall fulfilled the administrative function of separating the settled Chinese population—who could be taxed and conscripted—from their nomadic neighbors.
Above the gorges that led to Sichuan, the fourth of the rebel domains in the south was ruled by an isolated army of Manichean rebels.
Except in the north, where the Mongols defeated the Song pretender and forced him to flee south, this patchwork rebellion spent most of its energies in internal disputes. Of the three rival leaders along the Yangtze—Zhang at Suzhou, Zhu at Nanjing, and Chen upstream—the strongest appeared to be Zhang, who had come to terms with the Yuan and arranged to supply Dadu with grain to be transported by the fleet of the pirate Fang. But each was strong enough to repel the Yuan forces or any one rival. All three progressed rapidly from bandit leaders to rulers of organized states, and they modified their zeal for apocalyptic revolution accordingly.
In 1359, Chen Youliang, the "Emperor of Han," determined to break the deadlock by seizing Nanjing in a sudden, waterborne attack. For this he needed Two-Swords Zhao's ships; but he did not entirely trust Zhao, whom he therefore summoned to a conference and beheaded. The fleet was incorporated into the main Han forces, which in 1360 sailed downriver. After landing outside Nanjing, however, they fell into an ambush; Zhao's former followers deserted wholesale, and Chen was lucky to escape with half his troops.
The next year, Zhu counterattacked. He now had sufficient ships to sail up the Yangtze and invade the Han empire. The rival fleets met in a fierce naval battle on Lake Poyang; the Han had the worst of the encounter, losing more than 100 ships, but Chen withdrew upstream with his survivors, and Zhu was prevented from advancing farther by rebellions among his conquered cities. When Zhu returned in triumph to Nanjing, a gust of wind blew a banner around him as he was about to enter
The city; he took this as an ill omen and entered by another gate, thus escaping a band of assassins who had been waiting to kill him. Zhu's senior general, the author of this plot, was executed and his place taken by Xu Da, one of Zhu's childhood friends.
In 1363, while Zhu's forces were engaged on their eastern front against the troops of Zhang Shicheng, Chen Youliang planned a second attempt to seize Nanjing. He assembled a mighty fleet of three-decker galleys; each vessel was painted vivid scarlet, had turrets for archers armored with iron plate, and could carry more than 2,000 soldiers. Chen's armada came down the Yangtze on the spring floods; the western cities of Zhu's territories were besieged.
This lacquer panel from a chest of drawers made for a Ming emperor depicts legendary creatures traditionally associated with the ruling dynasty. In Chinese myth, dragons were not ravaging monsters but beneficent water spirits that controlled the clouds and rain; the five-clawed dragon at right, which was portrayed only on imperial property, symbolized the emperor's power and his care for his people. The plumed bird at left represented the empress; it appeared only in times of prosperity and was thought to be responsible for the warmth of the sun and the abundance of the harvest.
Against the advice of his generals, Zhu gathered all the troops who could be spared from the eastern front—the chronicles say about 200,000—and sailed upstream to attack Chen. Once again the fleets met on Lake Poyang, in a battle that lasted for four days. Zhu was forced to execute several of his commanders before the others would agree to attack the monstrous, seemingly invincible scarlet galleys of the Han fleet. After the initial encounter with the Han, however, the smaller Nanjing vessels escaped to the shallower parts of the lake, from where they attacked using fireships loaded with gunpowder and manned by crews willing to sacrifice their lives. Directed into the tightly packed ranks of the enemy galleys, these fireships caused a blaze in which more than 60,000 Han soldiers perished. Zhu's ships then withdrew by night to the mouth of the lake adjoining the Yangtze; when the surviving Han galleys attempted to break out, they were ambushed and routed. Chen himself was struck dead by an arrow in the eye.
Zhu's victory established him as the strongest of the Red Turban leaders, and in 1364, he proclaimed himself Prince of Wu—the traditional name for the lower Yangtze region. From leader of a band of rebels Zhu had become the undisputed ruler of a kingdom, and the imperial throne itself was now a realistic goal. The remains of the Han empire were incorporated into Zhu's domains; then, reinforced, he turned on Zhang Shicheng in Suzhou. After ten months of siege, Suzhou surrendered to Zhu's general, Xu Da, in 1367; Zhang hanged himself in the ruins of his palace, and Zhu was left supreme in southern China. Earlier that year, the Song pretender had drowned—or had been drowned—while crossing the Yangtze.
In January 1368, the new imperial dynasty was proclaimed at Nanjing. Except for the Yuan, former dynasties of China had taken their names from the estates of their founders, but such a title was not available to the successful bandit Zhu Yuanzhang. He chose instead the epithet of Ming, or "Brilliant"; this had unmistakable echoes of Ming Wang, the Shining Prince whom the Red Turbans awaited to redeem the world. The new emperor decreed that his reign should be known by the title of Hongwu, or "Boundless Martial Valour." (After his death, he was known as Taizu, or "Great Progenitor.") He declared that Nanjing would be the new imperial capital; and from that southern city he set out to conquer the north.
Never bqfore had the north of China been conquered from the south; all previous conquests had been of the south by the north. But the Hongwu emperor's position was so strong that he was able to overcome both the north and the deep south in the same year of 1368. By attacking the Yuan, the Ming ruler claimed the loyalty of all true Chinese. "As for our Chinese people," announced the emperor, "it must be Heaven's will that we Chinese should pacify them. How could the barbarians rule them? I fear that the heartland has long been stained with the stink of mutton, and the
People troubled. Therefore I have led forth the armies to make a clean sweep. My aim is to chase out the Mongol slaves, to do away with anarchy and assure the people of their safety—to cleanse China of shame."
Xu Da, with a quarter of a million men, marched north for an effectual cleansing. The Yuan government in Dadu had little power to fight back. Deprived of revenues, it printed paper money by the cartload; but the troops this should have paid also existed only on paper. Local leaders fought fiercely but with no coordination. The last Yuan emperor, immured in his palace, devoted himself to the esoteric rituals—sacrifices of human hearts and livers and Tantrika ceremonies indistinguishable from common orgies—that were taught by the Tibetan Buddhist monks he favored. As Xu Da's multitudes approached, the emperor fled from Dadu back to Mongolia. Only the Mongol warlord Koko Temur offered stern resistance; he held onto the northeastern provinces and for some years maintained a war on the Ming frontiers.
The conquest of the deep south proved even easier. The pirate admiral Fang Guozheng had made offers of collaboration to the future Ming emperor as early as 1359; now, submitting to Hongwu's imperial power, he offered him ships to transport the Ming army along the coast. The Yuan warlords in the south mostly surrendered on good terms, with one prominent exception. Chen Youding was an illiterate peasant who had been a policeman before the Red Turban uprisings; in suppressing the rebels, he had shown great courage and martial skill, and as provincial governor and commander of an army loyal to the Yuan in the southern province of Fujian, he held out against the invaders until forced to surrender in February 1368. Captured by the Ming army and brought to Nanjing, he was offered a pardon but replied: "The state is demolished, my family is gone. I shall die. What more is there to talk about?" He was put to death, but a shrine was built in his memory, for the emperor admired courage and loyalty even in his enemies.
After 1368, the Ming armies fought only on the frontiers. Mongolia was invaded in 1370; Toghon Temur, the last Yuan emperor, died, and Koko Temur fled into the central Asian desert. The Red Turban state of Sichuan was suppressed in 1371; the defenders had slung chains across the Yangtze gorges from which they hung platforms with stone-throwing catapults, but the advancing Ming fleet smashed these with cannon fire. In 1372, Xu Da led an army across the Gobi Desert as far as Genghis Khan's old capital of Karakorum, but he suffered heavy casualties at the hands of Koko Temur's surviving forces, and the Ming armies did not invade Mongolia again for thirty years. In 1382, they made one final conquest, of the Mongol princedom of Yunnan in the far southwest.
LACQUER FROKI THE IMPERIAL WORKSHOPS
The ingenuity of Chinese artisans was nowhere more apparent than in the transformation of the liquid resin secreted by the lacquer tree into a medium for decoration. The technique of building up many layers of lacquer in which a design could be carved was widely practiced under the Yuan dynasty and reached its peak in the imperial workshops of the Ming emperors.
Over a wood base, a smooth foundation was prepared by applying layers of lacquer mixed with fine clay or ash; these were followed by coats of lacquer mixed with a pigment, which was traditionally red or black. In all, as many as 200 coats of lacquer were required to provide a surface that was deep enough to be carved; each coat—only a fraction of a millimeter thick—took at least three days to dry and was rubbed down with fine pumice to remove any flaws. The carved decoration extended over every part of the lacquer surface; expanses of earth, water, and sky were represented by stylized patterns of squares, diamonds, or interwoven lines that formed starlike shapes.
In factories that were supervised by a member of the imperial household, different artisans specialized in painting on the lacquer, polishing it, and carving the design. These artists supplied not only the court but also private collectors with a range of products that included trays, bowls, and containers for incense, sweetmeats, or cosmetics such as the early-fifteenth-century box shown at left.
Having conquered an empire, the Hongwu emperor now set about ruling it. Concerned to establish the legitimacy of the dynasty he had founded, he performed the traditional ceremony of plowing a furrow of soil at the altar dedicated to Xian Nong, a legendary emperor of antiquity. He regularly performed the religious rites required of the emperor, sacrificing to earth and heaven after the manner of the ancient dynasties; he fasted and prayed for rain at the appropriate seasons; and as a means of ensuring protection, he granted official court titles to the guardian spirits of all the city walls of China. Nor were the walls themselves neglected. Nanjing was rebuilt as the new capital, with a separate imperial precinct enclosing the palaces and temples that were the heart of the Ming realm. The walls of the new capital stood almost sixty feet high and nearly nineteen miles long.
Bolder measures than these, however, were required to restore stability and prosperity. The great rebellion, as well as decades of natural disasters such as floods and famine, had caused much loss of life, and China's population in the 1370s was at least one-third less than it had been in the previous century. The Hongwu emperor forcibly resettled great numbers of families in the northern provinces, where the effects of Mongol rule had produced utter devastation. He imposed heavy taxes on the former domain of his rival Chen around Suzhou, which he suspected of disloyalty. He initiated ambitious irrigation and drainage works that did much to restore the economy, and there was a massive investment in woodlands—more than one billion trees were planted for their fruit and timber.
Confucianism flourished at the new court, although in his heart the emperor always favored the Buddhist teachings of the monastery in which he had served before joining the rebels. Now that he was in power, however, he disassociated himself from the ideas of the Red Turban revolutionaries: He protested that he had never supported their messianic dreams, that he had been compelled to join their forces for reasons of self-preservation, and that the great rebellion had been an appalling and unnecessary catastrophe. At the same time, he maintained that his rise to power through that rebellion was a clear indication of heaven's desire.
The Hongwu emperor's attitude toward his imperial predecessors was equally ambiguous. He offered sacrifices to the spirit of Kublai Khan, but at the same time he banned the use of Mongol names and dress and declared his intention to restore the Chinese civilization that the Mongols had destroyed. He had a clear perception of why the Mongols had failed: The court had lost control over the lower levels of government, which—as he knew from personal experience—had become incompetent and avaricious, destroying the weak and forcing the strong to resort to banditry. This was not to be allowed, but to prevent it, the emperor relied considerably on methods of violent compulsion that hardly differed from those tactics employed by the Mongols before him.
Some of his reforms in government, nevertheless, were constructive and innovative. He set up a nationwide tax system directly responsible to the central administration to replace the corrupt semuren tax collectors employed by the Mongols. He ordered an accurate land survey and census to achieve justice in taxation, and he imposed great order on civil society. All of China was divided into "communities" of 110 neighboring families, of whom the 10 most prosperous took turns to provide a headman to represent the community in its dealings with government officials. The other 100 families were divided into groups of 10, who took turns providing communal labor services. Each community had to provide a school, an altar, and a
Ihoenixes, dragons, clouds, and flowers swirl over this porcelain vase— one of a pair that was presented to a Buddhist monastery in 1351.
World History
