Red Turban Rebellions

Between 1351 and 1368 a wave of uprisings swept across China and brought down the Mongol-ruled Yuan dynasty. Known as the Red Turban Rebellions after the headgear of the religious rebels who started them, they produced a crowd of rival regimes and warlords. Out of that struggle came a former beggar-monk, Zhu Yuanzhang, who founded the Ming dynasty and drove the Yuan court back to the steppe.

By the 1340s the Yuan state was in trouble. Its court was divided between factions favouring Mongol and Chinese styles of rule, its garrisons had declined to the point that small bandit gangs could defy them, and Jurchens in the north-east rose in 1343. The Yellow River flooded again and again, harvests failed, and repeated epidemics struck. One outbreak beginning in Hebei in 1331 is recorded as killing 13 million people by 1333, and in 1358 some 200,000 died in Shanxi and Hebei alone.

The movement grew out of popular Buddhist sects that awaited the coming of Maitreya, a saviour who would end suffering. A monk named Peng Yingyu led an early rising in Jiangxi in 1338, and the sects spread through provinces hit by disaster. The spark came in 1351, when the chancellor Toqto'a conscripted some 150,000 labourers to re-route the Yellow River and open the Grand Canal in Shandong. The Red Turban leader Han Shantong and his adviser Liu Futong recruited among the angry workers. Han was captured and executed, but in 1355 his son Han Lin'er was declared emperor of a revived Song dynasty.

The rebels never formed a single movement. In the north, the Song regime briefly took Kaifeng in 1358 before Yuan forces under Chaghan Temur pushed it out the next year, while other Red Turban bands raided Goryeo in 1359 and 1360, occupying Pyongyang and Kaesong for a time. In the south, Xu Shouhui was proclaimed emperor of Tianwan in 1351; his general Chen Youliang murdered him in 1360 and renamed the state Han. Independent of the Red Turbans, the salt smuggler Zhang Shicheng carved out a realm around Suzhou and the pirate Fang Guozhen controlled much of the Zhejiang coast, both at times accepting Yuan titles. The Yuan court itself was crippled by feuds among its own generals after it dismissed Toqto'a in 1355.

Born in 1328 to a poor farming family in Anhui, Zhu lost his parents and eldest brother to epidemic in 1344 and was placed in a Buddhist monastery. He joined the Red Turban commander Guo Zixing in 1352, built up his own following, and in 1356 captured Nanjing, which became his base. Nominally loyal to Han Lin'er's Song court, he organised a working government, taxing salt and wine and minting coins. In 1363 he defeated and killed Chen Youliang in a long battle on Lake Poyang. He then besieged Zhang Shicheng in Suzhou until its fall in October 1367, and Fang Guozhen surrendered to him the same year.

Han Lin'er drowned in early 1367, possibly by design, leaving Zhu without a superior. On 12 January 1368 he proclaimed himself emperor of the Ming in Nanjing, taking the reign name by which he is known, the Hongwu Emperor. That summer his general Xu Da marched north, and in September 1368 the Yuan capital Khanbaliq fell; the last Yuan emperor, Toghon Temür, had already fled. The city was renamed Beiping. The Yuan court withdrew to the Mongolian Plateau, where it survived as the Northern Yuan, and fighting with Mongol commanders such as Köke Temür continued into the 1370s.

To repopulate regions devastated by war, famine and plague, the new dynasty moved large numbers of people between provinces, including around 500,000 settled in Zhu's home district of Fengyang in 1367. Across China, the migrations entered local legend and fiction.

Our 1300 map shows the Yuan dynasty at its height, and the 1400 map shows the Ming dynasty in China with the Northern Yuan to the north.