Hongwu Emperor

The Hongwu Emperor, born Zhu Yuanzhang, was the founder of the Ming dynasty, ruling China from 1368 to 1398. Born into a desperately poor peasant family, he rose through the rebellions against Mongol rule to drive the Yuan dynasty out of China. As emperor he rebuilt the country after decades of war, concentrated power in his own hands to a degree few Chinese rulers matched, and killed tens of thousands of officials and their families in repeated purges.

Zhu Yuanzhang was born on 21 October 1328 at Zhongli, in Haozhou, today's Fengyang in Anhui province, the youngest son of a family of landless tenant farmers. The Yuan state, founded by Kublai Khan, was by then weakened by court struggles, inflation and natural disasters. In 1344 drought, locusts and an epidemic struck the region, and within weeks Zhu's father, mother and eldest brother were dead. At sixteen, with no means of support, he entered a local Buddhist monastery as a novice. When the monastery could no longer feed its monks he was sent out to beg, and spent about three years wandering through the Huai River region, an experience of hardship he later referred to often. He returned to the monastery and learned to read and write.

In the early 1350s rebellions spread across the Yuan empire, many led by the Red Turbans, a movement linked to the millenarian White Lotus sect, which taught that the Buddha Maitreya would soon come to end the world's suffering. In 1352, after Yuan troops burned his monastery, Zhu joined the rebel army of Guo Zixing at Haozhou. He rose quickly, married Guo's adopted daughter, the future Empress Ma, and soon commanded his own army, recruiting able officers such as Xu Da and Chang Yuchun and scholars who advised him on government.

In 1356 he captured the city of Jiqing, which he renamed Yingtian, today's Nanjing, and made it his base. He nominally recognised the Red Turban claimant Han Lin'er while building his own state in the lower Yangtze. His great rivals were other rebel leaders. In 1363 he defeated Chen Youliang, whose fleet was far larger than his own, in a weeks-long battle on Lake Poyang, one of the largest naval battles in history; Chen was killed. In 1364 Zhu took the title King of Wu, and in 1367 he crushed his other main rival, Zhang Shicheng, at Suzhou. Han Lin'er drowned in the winter of 1366 to 1367 while being brought to Zhu, in circumstances that suggest he was murdered.

On 23 January 1368 Zhu proclaimed himself emperor of the Great Ming, taking Hongwu, "vast military power", as the name of his reign. That autumn his general Xu Da captured the Yuan capital, Dadu, later Beijing, and the last Yuan emperor fled to the steppe, where his successors continued to rule as the Northern Yuan. Over the following years Ming armies conquered the rest of China: Sichuan in 1371, Yunnan in 1381 to 1382 and Liaodong in the 1380s. Campaigns into Mongolia had mixed results. A large expedition was defeated in 1372, but in 1388 the general Lan Yu won a crushing victory near Lake Buir.

Hongwu was the first commoner to found a major Chinese dynasty since the first emperor of the Han, more than fifteen centuries earlier, and he governed with the outlook of a peasant. He wanted a stable, self-sufficient rural society. His government resettled abandoned land, repaired irrigation works, planted trees on a vast scale and kept land taxes low. He introduced the lijia system, which grouped households into units responsible for taxes and labour service, first in the Yangtze basin in 1371 and across the country in 1381, when he also compiled the Yellow Registers, a national census used for taxation. Surveys of land were recorded in the so-called fish-scale registers. Soldiers belonged to hereditary military households expected to farm their own land to feed themselves.

Hongwu distrusted officials, scholars, merchants and above all anyone who might threaten his family's hold on the throne. In 1380 he had his chancellor, Hu Weiyong, executed on charges of plotting a coup. He then abolished the office of chancellor and the Central Secretariat altogether and placed the six ministries directly under himself, forbidding his successors ever to restore the post. The investigation into Hu's alleged conspiracy continued for more than a decade, and those killed in connection with it, including whole families, are traditionally numbered around 30,000. In 1393 a second great purge followed the execution of Lan Yu, with some 15,000 victims. Over his reign, by some estimates, around 100,000 people died in political purges.

He made the Embroidered Uniform Guard, an imperial bodyguard, into a secret police force that reported directly to him, and officials who displeased him could be flogged with bamboo rods in open court, sometimes to death. He issued a strict legal code, the Great Ming Code, and personally wrote collections of grim cautionary cases, the Grand Pronouncements, to be read throughout the country. He promoted Confucianism, restoring the civil service examinations in 1384 on the Four Books and Five Classics, but he also had passages of the philosopher Mencius that stressed the people's right to remove a bad ruler removed from the examination texts.

Abroad, he received envoys from neighbouring states within the tributary system, including the new Joseon dynasty of Korea, founded in 1392. To control piracy and smuggling on the coast he banned private overseas trade, a policy known as the haijin, which later Ming emperors maintained in various forms.

To protect his dynasty, Hongwu made his sons princes with their own armies on the frontiers, especially along the northern border. His chosen heir, Zhu Biao, died in 1392, and the emperor named Zhu Biao's teenage son, Zhu Yunwen, as successor. Much of the purge of 1393 aimed to remove generals who might overshadow the young prince. Empress Ma, the one person widely said to have moderated his temper, had died in 1382.

Hongwu died on 24 June 1398 and was buried at the Xiaoling mausoleum on Purple Mountain outside Nanjing. His grandson took the throne as the Jianwen Emperor and began to reduce the power of his uncles. Within a year one of them, Zhu Di, Prince of Yan, rebelled from his base at Beijing, and in 1402 he captured Nanjing and became the Yongle Emperor.

Hongwu's institutions shaped Ming China for nearly three centuries: the concentration of power in the emperor, the population and tax registers, the hereditary army and the examination system. Historians credit him with restoring order and agriculture after a long period of disaster, while stressing the paranoia, brutality and sheer scale of killing of his later years. His portrait survives in two strikingly different versions, one dignified and one coarse-featured, and stories of his rise from beggar-monk to emperor have remained popular in China ever since. The longer history of his dynasty is told in the History of China.