In the spring of 1368 a former Buddhist novice and one-time beggar climbed the steps of an imperial palace in Nanjing, sat on the throne that had been built for a Mongol Khagan, and proclaimed himself the Hongwu Emperor, the first emperor of the Ming dynasty. His name was Zhu Yuanzhang, he was forty years old, and he had spent most of the last sixteen years at war with the Mongol Yuan dynasty, with rival Chinese rebel regimes, and with the several other warlords who had emerged in the wake of the Red Turban uprising that had broken out in central China in the early 1350s. The proclamation at Nanjing was the formal end of more than a century of Mongol rule over China proper, and the beginning of nearly three centuries of Ming rule that would last, in turn, until the Manchu conquest of 1644. The Hongwu reign, which lasted from 1368 until the emperor’s death in 1398, set the institutional and ideological template for the Ming and, in many ways, for the rest of imperial Chinese history until the fall of the Qing in 1912.
The fall of Yuan and the Red Turban uprising
To understand the Hongwu reign, one has to understand the conditions of late Yuan China. The Yuan dynasty, founded by Khubilai Khan in 1271 and consolidated by his conquest of the Southern Song in 1279, was the most ambitious of the Mongol successor states, and the one with the most direct control of the Chinese agricultural heartland. The Yuan administration, however, never fully integrated with the Chinese gentry class on which previous dynasties had relied, and the Mongol ruling elite remained a separate caste, legally distinct from the Chinese population and subject to different laws and different taxes. The Mongols and their Muslim and Central Asian allies filled the highest positions in the bureaucracy; the Chinese gentry filled the lower ranks; the Chinese peasantry paid the bulk of the taxes. The system worked in periods of strong rule, but it was chronically unstable when the central government weakened, and the fourteenth century was such a period.
The Yuan economy was in serious difficulty through the first half of the fourteenth century. The Yellow River, which had broken its banks repeatedly through the previous century, was finally redirected south in 1344, flooding a vast area of the North China Plain and destroying the irrigation works that had sustained the agricultural economy of the region. The flooding displaced millions of peasants and ruined the tax base of the Yuan government in the heartland. The Yuan administration, distracted by succession disputes and by the expense of military campaigns on the northern frontier, was unable to mount an effective response. The famines that followed the flooding killed large numbers of peasants and drove many more into banditry or into the religious movements that proliferated in the chaotic conditions. The most important of these religious movements, for the history of the Ming, was the Red Turban movement.
The Red Turban movement, called by that name because its members wore red headcloths as a distinguishing mark, was a millenarian Buddhist movement that combined elements of the White Lotus tradition with the Manichaean dualism that had been carried into China through the Tang and had survived in the folk religion of central and southern China. The movement taught that a new era was about to begin, that the Buddhist messianic figure Maitreya would descend to earth, that the existing order would be overthrown, and that a new Buddhist king would establish a just society. The movement was closely related to the more purely Manichaean movement that had produced the abortive Red Turban rising of 1351 in the Yangtze valley, and the Red Turban risings of 1352 in central China were in part a continuation of the same millennial expectation. The Yuan authorities attempted to suppress the movement with the usual vigour of an imperial bureaucracy in decline, and the suppression only radicalised the movement further.
The most important Red Turban rising for the history of the Ming began in 1352, in the county of Anfeng in the Haozhou prefecture of what is now Anhui province. The rising was led by a group of local notables and Buddhist preachers, and was joined by a young peasant from the same region named Zhu Yuanzhang. Zhu was born in 1328, in a peasant family in Haozhou, and had been orphaned by the famine of 1344. He had spent the next several years as a novice in a Buddhist monastery, then as a wandering beggar, and had joined the Red Turban movement in 1352 as a soldier in the militia of one of the local rebel leaders. Over the next few years, he rose through the ranks of the Red Turban militia, married the adopted daughter of one of the senior rebel commanders, and accumulated a following of his own. The trajectory was not unique; many young men of similar background rose to leadership in the Red Turban movement. What was unique about Zhu was the combination of military talent, political instinct, and administrative ability that he brought to the task.
Zhu Yuanzhang’s path to power, 1352 to 1368
The sixteen years between Zhu Yuanzhang’s entry into the Red Turban movement in 1352 and his proclamation as the Hongwu Emperor in 1368 were the period in which the Ming dynasty was effectively made. The period divides naturally into three phases. The first phase, from 1352 to 1356, was the phase in which Zhu rose from a soldier in the militia of one of the local rebel leaders to the commander of his own substantial force. The second phase, from 1356 to 1363, was the phase in which Zhu established his base at Nanjing, consolidated his control over the lower Yangtze region, and absorbed or destroyed his immediate rivals. The third phase, from 1363 to 1368, was the phase in which Zhu defeated the major rival Chinese regime, the Han regime of Chen Youliang, in the decisive Battle of Lake Poyang in 1363, and then turned north to drive the Mongol Yuan regime from the North China Plain. The three phases together constitute the military foundation of the Ming dynasty.
The first phase, from 1352 to 1356, was a period of apprenticeship. Zhu entered the service of Guo Zixing, a Red Turban leader who had established a base in the region of Haozhou and was building up a substantial force. Guo was killed in 1386 by one of his subordinates, and Zhu succeeded him. The succession was contested, but Zhu was able to defeat his rivals in the Haozhou militia and to consolidate his control. By 1356, Zhu was the commander of a substantial force and was looking for a suitable base from which to expand. The choice was between several cities in the lower Yangtze region, and Zhu settled on Nanjing, the former capital of the Southern Tang and one of the major cities of the Yangtze. The capture of Nanjing in 1356 was the turning point of the first phase. From Nanjing, Zhu was able to control the lower Yangtze region, to draw on the agricultural and commercial resources of the region, and to plan the next stage of expansion.
The second phase, from 1356 to 1363, was a period of consolidation. Zhu established his administration at Nanjing, recruited a staff of Chinese gentry scholars, and began to build the apparatus of a serious government. The recruitment of gentry scholars was particularly important, because the Red Turban movement, like most peasant uprisings, did not have the administrative capacity to govern a large territory, and the gentry were the only group in Chinese society with the skills to do so. Zhu’s principal recruiter in this period was Li Shanchang, a Chinese gentry scholar from the Nanjing region, who became one of the most important figures of the early Ming. Li and a small group of similar figures were to provide the administrative backbone of the Ming government for the next three decades.
The second phase was also a period of conflict with rival Chinese rebel regimes. The Red Turban movement had split into several rival factions by the late 1350s, and the factions had begun to fight each other. The two most important factions, for the history of the Ming, were Zhu Yuanzhang’s faction, based at Nanjing, and the Han regime of Chen Youliang, based at Wuchang in the middle Yangtze. Chen Youliang had been a Red Turban leader like Zhu, and had established a substantial regime of his own. The rivalry between the two regimes was the central political fact of the late 1350s and early 1360s, and was to be resolved only by military means. The decisive engagement was the Battle of Lake Poyang in 1363, in which Zhu’s forces defeated Chen Youliang’s forces in one of the largest naval battles in Chinese history. The battle ended Chen Youliang’s regime and left Zhu Yuanzhang as the dominant Chinese rebel leader.
The third phase, from 1363 to 1368, was the phase in which Zhu consolidated his control over the Chinese south and began the campaign against the Yuan dynasty in the north. The campaign against the Yuan was a long and difficult military operation, involving a series of campaigns in the North China Plain and in the Shaanxi region. The campaign was complicated by the fact that the Yuan court, though weakened, was still a substantial military force, and by the fact that several other Chinese warlords were operating in the northern regions. The campaign was not complete until the spring of 1368, when Zhu’s forces entered Khanbaliq (modern Beijing), the Yuan capital, and the Mongol court fled north to the Mongolian steppe. The capture of Khanbaliq was the formal end of the Yuan dynasty in China proper, and the formal beginning of the Ming dynasty.
The founding of the Ming at Nanjing, 1368
The proclamation of the Ming dynasty at Nanjing in the spring of 1368 was a carefully staged event. The proclamation ceremony was held in the imperial palace that had been built for the Mongol Khagan and that Zhu had appropriated for his own use. The proclamation was read out by a senior gentry scholar, in the standard form of a dynastic proclamation, announcing that the Mandate of Heaven had passed from the Yuan dynasty to the Ming dynasty, and that Zhu Yuanzhang had assumed the dynastic title Hongwu, the “Vastly Martial.” The proclamation named the new dynasty Ming, which had been the dynastic name that Zhu had chosen in 1367 in anticipation of the proclamation, and which means “bright” or “luminous” in classical Chinese, and is associated in the Chinese historical tradition with the fire element, the south, and the virtue of clarity.
The choice of Nanjing as the capital was a deliberate one. Nanjing had been the capital of several earlier Chinese dynasties, including the Eastern Jin, the Southern Dynasties, the Southern Tang, and several others, and was the major city of the lower Yangtze region. The choice was a compromise between the desire of Zhu Yuanzhang to base his government in the city that had been his base for the past twelve years, and the desire of his gentry advisers to base the capital in a city with the historical legitimacy of a Chinese capital. The choice was to be controversial in the early Ming, with several of Zhu’s successors considering moving the capital back to Khanbaliq (Beijing) or to Luoyang, but Nanjing remained the capital until the Yongle reign, when the capital was moved to Beijing in 1421.
The first years of the Hongwu reign were a period of intense administrative activity. The Hongwu Emperor, having spent the previous sixteen years at war, was determined to build an administration that would prevent the disorders of the late Yuan from recurring. The administration he built was one of the most centralised in Chinese history, with the emperor personally supervising the work of the central government through a system of secret memoranda and personal audiences that allowed him to keep in close touch with the provinces. The Hongwu Emperor, who had no formal education, was one of the hardest-working emperors in Chinese history, and the administrative apparatus he built was the product of his own direct attention.
The most important act of the early Hongwu reign was the promulgation of the Da Ming Lü, the “Laws of the Great Ming.” The Da Ming Lü, promulgated in 1397 after several decades of drafting and revision, was the dynastic law code of the Ming, and was the basis for the legal system of the dynasty. The code was modelled on the Tang code of 624, which had been the basis for most of the major Chinese legal codes, with adaptations to the conditions of the Ming. The code was a substantial document, with several hundred articles covering criminal law, civil law, administrative law, and the law of the imperial family. The code was promulgated along with the Da Ming Hui Dian, the “Collected Statutes of the Great Ming,” which was the administrative code of the dynasty, and the two together formed the legal and administrative basis of the Ming government.
The Hongwu founding charter: laws, agrarian reforms, and anti-corruption
The Hongwu founding charter, in the broader sense of the policies that the Hongwu Emperor adopted in the first decades of his reign, was one of the most ambitious programmes of state-building in Chinese history. The charter had three main components. The first was the rebuilding of the agricultural economy, which had been devastated by the late Yuan famines and the wars of the Red Turban period. The second was the rebuilding of the central administration, which had been badly weakened by the late Yuan. The third was the rebuilding of the social order, which had been badly disrupted by the wars. The three components together constituted the most ambitious programme of state reconstruction in Chinese history since the founding of the Tang in 618.
The agrarian reforms were the most important component of the Hongwu founding charter. The Hongwu Emperor, who had been a peasant himself before joining the Red Turban movement, had a personal understanding of the conditions of the peasantry, and was determined to restore the agricultural economy to a stable basis. The principal instrument of the agrarian reform was the registration of the population and the land, which had been badly disrupted by the wars. The registration was carried out through a system of household registers, which recorded the names, ages, and occupations of the members of each household, and a system of land registers, which recorded the ownership and use of each parcel of land. The registers were revised periodically, and were the basis for the tax system. The system was not new in Chinese history, but the Hongwu version was more thorough than any previous version, and was the basis for the Ming tax system until the middle of the dynasty.
The anti-corruption campaign was the second component of the Hongwu founding charter. The Hongwu Emperor, who had seen the late Yuan bureaucracy become one of the most corrupt in Chinese history, was determined to prevent the recurrence of that corruption in the Ming. The principal instrument of the anti-corruption campaign was the harsh punishment of corrupt officials. The Da Ming Lü prescribed the death penalty for a substantial number of corruption offences, including the acceptance of bribes, the embezzlement of public funds, and the abuse of office. The penalties were applied with vigour in the early Hongwu reign, and a substantial number of officials were executed for corruption in the first two decades of the reign. The severity of the penalties, combined with the emperor’s personal attention to the cases, had a substantial effect on the level of corruption in the early Ming, and was an important reason for the stability of the early Ming administration.
The most striking feature of the anti-corruption campaign was the emperor’s personal supervision of the cases. The Hongwu Emperor, who had spent his formative years among peasant soldiers and had a deep distrust of the gentry class, took a personal interest in the punishment of corrupt officials, and personally reviewed many of the cases. The emperor’s personal review was assisted by the secret memoranda system, which allowed officials at all levels of the administration to communicate directly with the emperor, bypassing the normal chain of command. The system was an effective instrument of imperial control, but it was also a source of considerable tension between the emperor and the gentry class, and was to be a factor in the political instability of the later Hongwu reign.
The political instability of the later Hongwu reign was the result of several factors. The first was the emperor’s growing distrust of his own officials, which had begun in the early years of the reign and had intensified through the 1380s and 1390s. The second was the succession dispute, which was to culminate in the death of the crown prince, the emperor’s eldest son, in 1392, and the subsequent appointment of the emperor’s grandson, who became the Jianwen Emperor, as the new crown prince. The third was the purge of 1380, in which the Hongwu Emperor executed the Chancellor Hu Weiyong on charges of treason, and then executed several thousand officials and scholars who were associated with Hu. The purge was one of the largest in Chinese imperial history, and was a major factor in the political atmosphere of the later Hongwu reign.
The legacy of Hongwu in the early Ming
The Hongwu reign, despite its political instability, set the institutional and ideological template for the Ming and, in many ways, for the rest of imperial Chinese history. The central administration that the Hongwu Emperor built, with its system of six ministries, its censorate, its bureau of memorials, and its secretariat, was the model for the Ming administration for the next two and a half centuries. The Da Ming Lü and the Da Ming Hui Dian were the legal and administrative basis of the Ming throughout its existence. The agrarian registration system was the basis for the Ming tax system. The Hongwu anti-corruption campaign was the model for several later campaigns in the Ming and Qing. The Hongwu reign, in short, was the foundational period of the Ming dynasty.
The ideological template was equally important. The Hongwu Emperor was determined to rebuild the Confucian social order that had been disrupted by the wars. The emperor revived the civil service examination system, which had been suspended through most of the late Yuan, and made it the principal channel for entry into the gentry class. The examination system, as the Hongwu Emperor revived it, was modelled on the system of the Song dynasty, with the examination held every three years in the capital, and the successful candidates being appointed to the bureaucracy. The examination system was to be the principal channel for entry into the gentry class for the rest of the imperial period, and was to be one of the most important institutions of the Ming and Qing.
The Hongwu Emperor was also determined to restore the prestige of the imperial institution, which had been badly damaged by the late Yuan. The emperor built a new imperial palace at Nanjing, on the site of the Mongol palace, and equipped it with the full ritual apparatus of the Chinese imperial tradition. The emperor also revived the imperial sacrificial rituals, the imperial ancestral temple, and the imperial registers of the population. The restoration of the imperial institution was a major theme of the early Hongwu reign, and was to be continued by his successors. The restoration was to be one of the most important elements of the early Ming, and was to give the dynasty a legitimacy that the Yuan had never quite managed to achieve.
The Hongwu Emperor died in 1398, after a reign of thirty years. His grandson, the Jianwen Emperor, succeeded him, and reigned for four years before being overthrown by the Yongle Emperor, one of the Hongwu Emperor’s sons, in 1402. The Yongle reign, which lasted from 1402 to 1424, was to be one of the most ambitious in Chinese history, with the move of the capital to Beijing, the construction of the Forbidden City, the dispatch of the Zheng He fleets to the Indian Ocean, and the compilation of the Yongle Encyclopedia. The Yongle reign was a major break with the Hongwu founding charter, but it was also a continuation of several of its elements, and the Hongwu legacy was an important factor in the policy of the Yongle reign. The Hongwu reign, in short, set the institutional and ideological template for the Ming dynasty, and was the foundational period of one of the most important dynasties in Chinese history.
The long shadow of the Hongwu reign
The Hongwu reign cast a long shadow over the rest of the Ming. The institutional template that the Hongwu Emperor built survived the Yongle interruption and the later reigns, and remained the basis for the Ming administration until the fall of the dynasty. The legal code that the Hongwu Emperor promulgated remained the basis for the Ming legal system, with relatively minor revisions, until the Qing conquest. The agrarian registration system that the Hongwu Emperor established remained the basis for the Ming tax system until the middle of the dynasty, when it was gradually replaced by a system of silver taxation. The civil service examination system that the Hongwu Emperor revived remained the principal channel for entry into the gentry class, and remained one of the most important institutions of the late imperial period.
The Hongwu legacy also cast a long shadow over the self-understanding of the Ming ruling class. The Hongwu Emperor, who had been a peasant and a Buddhist novice, was the model for several of the most ambitious emperors of the Ming, and the Hongwu reign was the reference point for several of the most important political debates of the dynasty. The debates over the role of the emperor, over the role of the gentry, over the role of the eunuch bureaucracy, and over the role of the military, were all framed in relation to the Hongwu precedent. The Hongwu precedent was the lens through which the later Ming emperors understood their own role, and the lens through which the later Ming gentry understood their own role.
The Hongwu precedent was not uniformly positive. The Hongwu Emperor, who had been a peasant and a Buddhist novice, was also one of the most paranoid emperors in Chinese history, and the political instability of the later Hongwu reign was an important factor in the political atmosphere of the later Ming. The purge of 1380, in which the Hongwu Emperor executed several thousand officials and scholars, was a major precedent for the political purges of the later Ming and the Qing, and was a major factor in the political culture of the later Ming. The paranoia of the Hongwu reign, combined with the severity of the penalties, was a major reason for the political instability of the later Ming.
The Hongwu precedent was also a major factor in the economic history of the Ming. The agrarian reforms that the Hongwu Emperor instituted were the basis for the agricultural recovery of the early Ming, and were the basis for the agricultural surplus that sustained the Ming population growth of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The agrarian reforms were also the basis for the tax system that sustained the Ming administration, and were the basis for the silver economy that developed in the late Ming. The Hongwu agrarian reforms, in short, were the foundation for the Ming economic miracle of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and were the foundation for the Ming economic crisis of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
The Hongwu precedent was also a major factor in the cultural history of the Ming. The Hongwu Emperor, who had been a peasant and a Buddhist novice, was a major patron of the Confucian revival of the early Ming, and was the patron of several of the most important scholars of the early Ming. The Hongwu Confucian revival was the basis for the cultural flowering of the early Ming, and was the basis for the cultural conservatism of the late Ming. The Hongwu Confucian revival, in short, was the foundation for the cultural history of the Ming, and was the foundation for the cultural history of the Qing.
The Hongwu reign, in sum, was the foundational period of one of the most important dynasties in Chinese history. The Hongwu reign set the institutional and ideological template for the Ming dynasty, and was the basis for the institutional and ideological template of the rest of the imperial period. The Hongwu reign was also the basis for the political, economic, and cultural history of the Ming dynasty, and was the basis for the political, economic, and cultural history of the Qing dynasty. The Hongwu reign was, in short, one of the most important periods in the history of imperial China, and one of the most important periods in the history of East Asia. The Hongwu reign was the period in which the Chinese imperial tradition was reinvented for the late imperial period, and the period in which the Chinese imperial tradition was carried into the modern period.
The agrarian registration system in detail
The agrarian registration system that the Hongwu Emperor built was one of the most ambitious programmes of state registration in Chinese history. The system had three principal components. The first was the household register, the yellow book, which recorded the names, ages, occupations, and tax status of the members of each household. The yellow book was revised every ten years, and was the basis for the head tax and the labour service tax. The second was the land register, the fish-scale register, which recorded the ownership, location, and tax status of each parcel of land. The fish-scale register was revised periodically, and was the basis for the land tax. The third was the local militia register, the wei-so register, which recorded the names of the local militia and the local garrison troops. The wei-so register was revised periodically, and was the basis for the local defence and the labour service tax. The three registers together formed the basis for the Ming tax system, and were the basis for the Ming administration of the population and the land.
The implementation of the registration system was the work of several decades. The Hongwu Emperor began the registration in 1370, in the counties around Nanjing, and gradually extended it to the rest of the Ming territory. The registration was carried out by the local administration, with the assistance of the local gentry. The registration was completed in most of the Ming territory by the end of the Hongwu reign, and was the basis for the Ming tax system until the middle of the dynasty. The registration was, in its day, one of the most ambitious programmes of state administration in the world, and was the model for several later programmes of state administration in the early modern period.
The yellow book was the most important of the three registers, and was the basis for the head tax and the labour service tax. The yellow book recorded the name, age, occupation, and tax status of each member of each household, and was revised every ten years. The revision was carried out by the local administration, with the assistance of the local gentry, and was the basis for the assessment of the head tax and the labour service tax. The yellow book was the basis for the Ming head tax, which was the most important tax of the early Ming, and was the basis for the Ming labour service tax, which was the most important form of non-monetary taxation in the Ming.
The fish-scale register was the second of the three registers, and was the basis for the land tax. The fish-scale register recorded the ownership, location, and tax status of each parcel of land, and was revised periodically. The revision was carried out by the local administration, with the assistance of the local gentry, and was the basis for the assessment of the land tax. The fish-scale register was the basis for the Ming land tax, which was the second most important tax of the early Ming, and was the basis for the Ming land administration, which was the basis for the Ming system of land tenure.
The wei-so register was the third of the three registers, and was the basis for the local defence and the labour service tax. The wei-so register recorded the names of the local militia and the local garrison troops, and was revised periodically. The revision was carried out by the local administration, with the assistance of the local gentry, and was the basis for the assessment of the labour service tax. The wei-so register was the basis for the Ming system of local defence, which was the basis for the Ming system of garrison troops, and was the basis for the Ming system of labour service tax, which was the basis for the Ming system of non-monetary taxation.
References
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