The Life and Times of Zhu Yuanzhang

Fengyang, 1344. Zhu Yuanzhang is just a poor boy from a poor family. A dirt poor family, a family so poor they had to start giving away children because even making them work the fields couldn't cover the cost of feeding them, and even then all it took was one bad harvest and yep, they're all dead. Yuanzhang himself only managed to survive by crawling up to a Buddhist temple and becoming a monk for two months until they kicked him out because they also couldn't afford to feed him. You might have noticed, times are hard. Times have been hard for a while in China by this point, nobody's got enough to eat, outlaws are raping and pillaging, but the Yuan dynasty's response has basically been, eh? But hope is on the horizon. A fabled band of rebels called the Red Turbans has risen up across the empire, led by Han Lin'er, who claimed to be the descendant of the Song dynasty, here to return China to the Chinese after a lifetime of Mongol rule. In 1351, they had burst onto the scene in Fengyang calling to arms any man brave enough to throw off his yoke. And Yuanzhang steps forward and says, you know, actually, I've been living off the streets for like three years and I hear that monastery's taking applications again, I just, I could really use a break. Yeah, no, turbans it is. This video is brought to you by Useful Charts. Useful Charts is, well, it's what it sounds like, an incredible small business that produces charts and posters on world history, religion, mythology, and more. I've been working with the owner Matt Baker for two and a half years to create videos on the Useful Charts YouTube channel, so I've seen the insane amount of research and design that goes into making them not only accurate but honestly pretty, which is also why I've got four copies myself. So if you're a lifelong learner looking to spruce up your home or your classroom, use the link in the description to pick up your copy and get up to 30% off at checkout. Yuanzhang quickly rose through the ranks, but quickly discovered the Red Turbans were a little more complicated from the inside. All the top commanders were as focused on outranking each other as they were on actually winning the war, so Yuanzhang decides to keep his head down and come back with results. He goes off on his own to rally more troops and comes back with 2,000 men and a crack team of legendary generals. Together they launch attacks around the provincial capital of Nanjing to isolate the city from the rest of the empire, before sending the entire army to assault the city. Citizens! Pardon the intrusion, please go about your business, you won't even know we're here. There will be no ****ing and pillaging, we're just here to clear out the Yuan. Yuanzhang! This is huge! You're like that peasant emperor! With the resources we have here, we could topple the entire empire! Who, me? No, no, I'm not trying to do anything like that, I'm just a humble farmer trying to restore law and order. And at the end of the day, he handed everything over to his superiors on a silver platter, but they couldn't deny that Zhu Yuanzhang was the lynchpin keeping their entire operation together. Only when Han Lin'er finally died did Zhu Yuanzhang decide it was time to expand his ambitions. But before he could topple the Mongols, he had to clear out the other rebels. Because yeah, Han Lin'er's noble quest of restoring the Song dynasty was only taken up by the northern Red Turban rebels, not the southern Red Turban rebels, the Dazhou Kingdom, the Fujian Muslim rebels, or any other random warlords. In a way, the Yuan government succeeded in making so many different people angry at them that they couldn't effectively unify into a single army, which might explain why they were willing to torch Buddhist monasteries for being subversive but their response to the actual rebels taking over the country was pretty much, eh? Anyway, Yuanzhang names himself emperor and takes on the regnal name Hongwu, meaning great martial achievement, and he couldn't have picked anything more appropriate. He knocked out the other rebels one by one, became the undisputed master of the Yangtze River, and marched north with an army of 250,000. The Yuan dynasty offers practically no resistance. At the exact moment Yuanzhang was capturing provincial capitals left and right, the Yuan crown prince was fighting with his generals, they were both already fighting the emperor, the commanders in the west hated both sides, and the local garrisons just couldn't be bothered to die for any of these assholes. The Yuan emperor fled north beyond the Great Wall where his kingdom would stay for another three centuries. And so, China was freed from the laissez-faire tyranny of the Yuan dynasty, and the Hongwu emperor brought about change for the hard-working people of the land. He created new records to prevent wealthy landowners from shirking their taxes onto peasants, reduced forced labor, even distributed land directly, albeit through forced migration, but shhhh. He restored the civil service exam so that anyone could join the government, then abolished it, then brought it back again. And if he had died right there, doing good for the people, it would have been a storybook ending. And then 1380 happened. In his time as emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang had done a lot to curb the power of the military so that he could continue to fight the Mongols as needed without any upstart generals trying to pull a fast one on him. Soldiering became a hereditary position, most of the time the army was split up into little farming communities, he married his children off to the top generals to keep the army loyal to him, but I guess in the back of his head was the niggling feeling that if it could happen to the Mongols, it could happen to him. There had always been some brutal medieval stuff going on in the government, but the turning point came in 1380 with the case of Hu Weiyong. Hu Weiyong was a powerful and capable counselor, who got accused of trying to usurp the throne, and so the emperor killed him. But Zhu Yuanzhang was a learned Confucian, and he knew that Confucius said the family comes before the state. So Hu Weiyong's family were all accomplices and had to be killed. So began a chain of events that saw almost 100,000 people executed over the course of the next decade. You see, Zhu Yuanzhang had these guys called the secret police, and they could do whatever they want, whenever they want, to whomever they want. People would wake up one morning with a goddamn Dai Li at their doorstep telling them their second cousin once removed got arrested on the other side of the country for conspiracy and it's lights out. All you had to do was accuse someone of associating with someone who had been executed and then you got to execute them and everyone who associated with them. It's like a pyramid scheme of death! And it really is a shame Yuanzhang didn't go to the big palace in the sky like 15 years sooner because he would have been followed as emperor by his son Zhu Biao. While all the other kids were getting scattered across the country like, I don't know what's hip with the kids these days, Dragon Balls? You kids still watch Inuyasha? Crown Prince Zhu Biao got to stay in the capital by the emperor's side and receive the finest education a boy could ask for. He was wise and compassionate and had a deep affection for the history and culture of his people. He was the only person in the palace who could get away with asking, So I can't help but notice, you're killing everyone who risked their lives to create this dynasty for you, what's up with that? Sun China is like a rose, a beautiful and delicate thing I know you'll one day care for with love, but if you don't have the heart to strip its thorns, you will bleed. That's a highfalutin way to kill 100,000 people. Watch it boy! But out of nowhere Zhu Biao died in his 30s and oh sh** the entire family dynamic was structured around this, they can't just swing into plan B. Which is why, even though technically Zhu Biao's son Yunwen became the new crown prince, it was flat out trivial for Zhu Biao's brother Di to take over. One of the generals had tried to blow the whistle on Di, but because, you know, purges, all Di had to do was go, DAD! GENERAL LANYU IS PLOTTING A CONSPIRACY! And then all the secret police go to his house and would you look at that there's 10,000 Japanese swords in here, how did those get there? Bish bash bosh, the general's executed, his family's executed, 15,000 other people are all executed, all because Zhu Yuanzhang was too busy coming up with new capital punishments and castrating people for having bad haircuts instead of noticing he just murdered the only person powerful enough to protect his successor. So when the Hongwu Emperor finally dies, well first of all from beyond the grave he executes all the doctors who failed to save him and also he brings back human sacrifice? All of his concubines get buried with him so they can keep him company in the afterlife. Now it was probably more about making sure they couldn't do all kinds of political maneuvering after his death in order to put their own sons in charge of the empire, but their sons were like 30, they're old enough to do that on their own, just imagine getting the news that your dad died and his last wishes are for you to kill your mom. Oh yeah right anyway, when the Hongwu Emperor finally dies, his grandson lasts 4 years on the throne before being deposed because everything Zhu Yuanzhang did to reform the empire was designed to protect himself but not the office of the emperor. For example, his family married into the military so all the officers were loyal to him. But they're not gonna be loyal to his grandson, hello? You think your family drama's bad? Imagine if there were 200 of you and everyone had their own army. And I didn't even get to mention the way he abolished the most important positions in the empire and took all their jobs by himself which yeah it worked while he was alive, but what happens when the next emperor isn't willing to put up with issuing 200 different documents on 400 different pressing matters every single day which is why… oh wait a second, Zhu Yuanzhang is dead. This is what we in the biz call a story for another day. So long!