Hongwu Emperor and the Founding of the Ming Dynasty (1368)

The Hongwu Emperor, born Zhu Yuanzhang, founded China’s Ming dynasty when he proclaimed himself emperor at Nanjing on 23 January 1368. Within months his armies drove the Mongol Yuan court out of Beijing, ending nearly a century of Mongol rule. Few rulers have risen from so low a beginning: an orphaned peasant and former monk, he created an autocratic state whose institutions shaped China until 1644 and beyond.

Early life: famine and the monastery

Zhu Yuanzhang was born on 21 October 1328 in Zhongli, near modern Fengyang in Anhui province, the youngest son of a poor tenant-farming family. In 1344, when he was 15, drought, locusts and epidemic disease struck the region. Within a few weeks his father, mother and eldest brother died, and the family could barely afford to bury them.

With nowhere else to go, Zhu entered the nearby Huangjue Temple as a novice Buddhist monk. The temple soon ran short of food, and he spent about three years wandering the Huai region as a begging monk. These travels exposed him to the poverty of the countryside and probably to the secret religious societies, such as the White Lotus, that were spreading ideas about the imminent arrival of the Buddha Maitreya.

From rebel to ruler of the south

In 1351 the Red Turban Rebellion broke out across the Huai valley. In 1352 the temple was burned in the fighting, and Zhu joined the rebel leader Guo Zixing at Haozhou. He proved an outstanding soldier and organiser and married Guo’s adopted daughter, the future Empress Ma, who became his closest adviser.

Zhu built his own army, recruiting childhood friends such as Xu Da and Tang He. In 1356 he captured Nanjing, which he renamed Yingtian, and made it his base. Unlike many rebel leaders, he restrained his troops from looting and recruited Confucian scholars, including Li Shanchang, Liu Ji and Song Lian, to run his government. One scholar, Zhu Sheng, is said to have advised him to build high walls, store grain and be slow to proclaim himself king, and he followed that advice.

Zhu nominally served the Red Turban figurehead Han Lin’er while fighting rival warlords. His decisive victory came at the Battle of Lake Poyang in 1363, where his rival Chen Youliang was killed. In 1364 he took the title Prince of Wu, and in 1367 he captured Suzhou from Zhang Shicheng, uniting the lower Yangtze. Han Lin’er had drowned in 1366, leaving Zhu free to claim the throne.

Founding the Ming in 1368

On 23 January 1368, in the first days of the lunar new year, Zhu proclaimed the dynasty of the Great Ming (Da Ming, “great brightness”) at Nanjing. His reign title, Hongwu, means “vast military power”, and he is often known by that title or by his temple name, Taizu. Many historians link the name Ming to the “Prince of Light” of Red Turban belief, though this is not certain.

Even before the proclamation, his generals Xu Da and Chang Yuchun had marched north. They took Shandong and Henan, and on 14 September 1368 Ming troops entered Dadu, the Yuan capital at Beijing. The last Yuan emperor, Toghon Temür, had already fled to the steppe. Ming armies conquered Shanxi and Shaanxi in 1369, Sichuan in 1371 and Yunnan in 1382. The Mongols, however, remained a powerful enemy beyond the frontier.

Rebuilding the empire

Hongwu set out to restore a society he imagined as stable, rural and self-sufficient. His reforms included:

• Land and population registers. The Yellow Registers of households (from 1381) and the “fish-scale” land registers (completed around 1387) recorded people and fields for taxation and labour service. The census of 1393 counted about 60 million people.
• The lijia system. Rural households were grouped into units of 110 families responsible for collecting taxes and keeping order.
• The military. Soldiers were organised in hereditary military households in garrisons (wei and suo) meant to grow their own food.
• Law. The Great Ming Code, revised several times and issued in final form in 1397, remained the basis of Chinese law into the Qing period. Hongwu also published the Grand Pronouncements (1385–1387), lists of crimes and cruel punishments meant to be read in every household.
• Education and examinations. He founded schools and restored the civil service examinations, although he suspended them between 1373 and 1384 because he distrusted the graduates.
• The economy. He promoted land reclamation, tree planting and water works, issued paper money from 1375 and, in 1371, banned private overseas trade under the haijin sea ban.

He also had Nanjing surrounded by an immense city wall, more than 30 kilometres long, large parts of which still stand.

Terror and autocracy

Hongwu was deeply suspicious of officials, scholars and his own generals. In 1380 he accused his chancellor Hu Weiyong of plotting rebellion, had him executed and abolished the chancellorship and the central Secretariat, so that the six ministries reported directly to the emperor. The purge of Hu’s supposed associates continued for over a decade, and the death toll is commonly put at around 30,000. A second great purge, the Lan Yu case of 1393, killed perhaps 15,000 more.

He created the Embroidered Uniform Guard (Jinyiwei) in 1382 as a secret police and introduced the practice of flogging officials in open court, sometimes to death. Literary inquisitions punished writers for words that seemed to mock his humble origins or his past as a monk.

To protect the dynasty, he enfeoffed his sons as princes with their own armies, especially along the northern frontier. This arrangement was meant to guard against the Mongols, but it later allowed his son Zhu Di to rebel.

Frontiers and foreign relations

The Mongols were Hongwu’s greatest external worry. In 1372 a large Ming expedition under Xu Da advanced into Mongolia towards the old capital of Karakorum and suffered a serious defeat, a reminder that the steppe could not easily be conquered. Later campaigns were more successful: in 1388 the general Lan Yu surprised the Northern Yuan ruler near Buir Lake in eastern Mongolia and captured tens of thousands of people and animals. Even so, the frontier was never secure, and defence of the north absorbed much of the Ming state’s energy for the rest of the dynasty.

Towards the rest of Asia, Hongwu sent envoys soon after 1368 to announce the new dynasty to Korea, Japan, Annam (northern Vietnam), Champa and other states, inviting them to send tribute. Foreign rulers who accepted received recognition, gifts and the right to trade through official missions. This tribute system, combined with the ban on private sea trade, made the emperor the gatekeeper of China’s foreign commerce.

Relations were not always smooth. Hongwu repeatedly demanded that Japan suppress the pirates known as wokou who raided the Chinese coast, with little effect. In Korea, a dispute over the north-eastern border led the Goryeo court to send an army against the Ming in 1388, but its general Yi Seong-gye turned back and seized power, founding the Joseon dynasty in 1392 on friendly terms with Ming China.

In his Ancestral Injunctions, a set of instructions for his descendants, Hongwu listed fifteen neighbouring countries that the Ming should not attack, advising his successors to avoid costly foreign wars.

Death and succession

Empress Ma, who was credited with restraining her husband’s cruelty, died in 1382. His chosen heir, Zhu Biao, died in 1392, and Hongwu named Zhu Biao’s young son, Zhu Yunwen, as successor. Hongwu died on 24 June 1398 and was buried at the Xiaoling Mausoleum on Purple Mountain outside Nanjing.

His grandson reigned as the Jianwen Emperor and tried to reduce the power of the princes. In 1399 Zhu Di, Prince of Yan, rebelled in the Jingnan campaign and in 1402 took Nanjing, becoming the Yongle Emperor.

Myths and facts

• Two faces. Two very different types of portrait of Hongwu survive: a dignified, handsome official image and a series showing a long, pock-marked face with a jutting jaw. Which, if either, resembles him is unknown; the “ugly” portraits may reflect popular legends rather than life.
• The mooncake rising. A popular story says Chinese rebels coordinated an uprising against the Mongols by hiding messages in mooncakes. It appears in later folklore, not in records of the period.
• A peasant emperor. It is true that Hongwu, with the Han dynasty founder Liu Bang, is one of very few Chinese emperors of genuinely peasant origin.

Timeline

• 1328, 21 October: Zhu Yuanzhang is born at Zhongli, Anhui.
• 1344: His parents and eldest brother die; he becomes a novice monk.
• 1352: He joins Guo Zixing’s rebel army at Haozhou.
• 1356: He captures Nanjing.
• 1363: He defeats Chen Youliang at Lake Poyang.
• 1368, 23 January: He proclaims the Ming dynasty at Nanjing.
• 1368, 14 September: Ming forces take Dadu (Beijing).
• 1380: Hu Weiyong is executed and the chancellorship abolished.
• 1393: The Lan Yu purge.
• 1398, 24 June: Hongwu dies and is buried at Xiaoling.

Why it matters

The Hongwu Emperor restored native Chinese rule after the Mongol Yuan and founded a dynasty that lasted 276 years. His registers, law code and military system shaped Ming China, while his concentration of power in the emperor’s hands, and his use of terror, left a lasting mark on how China was governed.