The Beggar Who Became Emperor of China: The Rise of Zhu Yuanzhang

In the spring of 1344, a 16-year-old boy buried his father, his mother, and his eldest brother with his own hands. No coffin, no burial clothes, three feet of dirt. He didn't even own the ground they were buried in. 24 years later, that same boy sat on the throne of China. He is the only man in Chinese history to climb from absolute nothing to the throne of all China. History calls him the Beggar Emperor. 1344, the Huai River Valley, eastern China. A land ruled for nearly a century by the heirs of Genghis Khan. The Mongol dynasty called itself the Yuan. To the starving millions beneath it, it was simply the reason no help ever came. First came the drought, then the locusts, then the plague. In the village of Zhongli, people stripped the bark off trees and ate it, then they ate the roots, then the earth itself. In one farmhouse lived a family named Zhu, tenant farmers, the poorest of the poor. Their youngest son was called Zhu Chongba, double eight, not a name, a number. His family was too poor to afford real names, so they counted their children instead. On April 6th, the plague took his father. On April 9th, his eldest brother. On April 22nd, his mother. 17 days, three bodies. Only two sons were left standing over them, Chongba and one surviving older brother. He went to the landlord his father had served for years and begged for a patch of ground to bury them. The landlord's name was Liu De. He screamed at the boy and threw him out. It was the landlord's older brother, a farmer named Liu Jizu, who quietly gave him a corner of a hillside. The two brothers wrapped the bodies in rags, dug, and covered their family with three feet of earth. Then they stood at the graves and said goodbye to each other. There was not enough food for two. The brothers split up to survive. 34 years later, this boy would carve their farewell into stone in his own words. My brother wept for me. I grieved for him. Under the white sun, our cries tore heaven open. Remember that stone? A neighbor took pity on the orphan and got him into a Buddhist monastery as a servant boy. He swept floors, lit incense, and ate for some 50 days. Then the famine reached the monastery. The abbot sealed the granary and turned the monks out to beg. 16 years old, a wooden bowl, a dirt road, alone. For the next three years, Zhu Chongba begged his way across two provinces. He chased cooking smoke in the morning. He slept in ruined temples at night. He wrote later that in his dreams he went looking for his parents and never found them. But those three years were an education no palace could buy. He learned every road, every river crossing, every town gate of the Huai Valley. He learned which villages were starving and which were angry. The empire had shown him exactly where it was rotten. He was memorizing the map. At 19, he walked back to the monastery, shaved his head, and waited. The wait lasted four years. Then a letter arrived, and it nearly got him killed. 1352. Rebellion against the Mongol throne was burning across China. The rebels wore red scarves around their heads, the red turbans. The letter was from a childhood friend who had joined them. It said, come, join us, save yourself. Zhu read it once and burned it. Too late. Someone had seen, and that someone was preparing to sell him to the authorities. Joining the rebels meant death by the government. Staying meant death by the informer. So the monk knelt before the guardian god of his temple, took up two divination blocks, and asked heaven itself, should I flee? The block said no. Should I stay? The block said no. Then he asked the third question, should I take up arms? The blocks fell. Yes. Heaven had refused him every road but one. Later in life, he would write this scene down himself, twice. He needed the world to know rebellion wasn't his choice. It was heaven's. In April 1352, he walked to the gates of Haozhou, the nearest rebel city. The rebel guards took one look at the ragged monk, and arrested him as a spy. They tied him up. They were going to cut off his head. The future founder of the Ming dynasty entered the revolution as a prisoner, 60 seconds from execution. Word reached the rebel commander, Guo Zixing. Curious, he rode to the gate to see the spy for himself. He found a tall, hard-faced young man who looked him dead in the eye, with a rope around his neck. Guo cut him loose and made him a soldier. The army gave him a new name, Zhu Yuanzhang, a name later generations would read as the jade blade that destroys the Yuan. If the pun was intended, he never said so. In an army of plunderers, the new recruit was strange. He fought at the front of every raid, and kept nothing for himself. His share went to the men beside him, and the ex-monk could read, in a camp where no one else could. Within months, the beggar was promoted to Guo's personal guard. Guo Zixing liked this quiet, careful soldier so much, he gave him his foster daughter in marriage, Lady Ma. A year earlier, he was begging with a wooden bowl. Now he was the warlord's son-in-law. It nearly got him killed. Every victory made the son-in-law's name louder, and Guo's own sons made sure their father heard it. He is building his own army inside yours. The beggar had risen too fast. Guo threw his own son-in-law into a cell, and cut off his food. The man who survived the great famine was now being starved, by his own family. It was Lady Ma who kept him alive. She smuggled fresh baked flatbread past the guards, hidden against her chest. It burned her skin. In 1353, Guo went home to recruit. 700 men signed up, starving farmers who remembered him. Then he did something no warlord in China would understand. He gave all 700 away. He handed the troops to other commanders, and left with just 24 men he trusted. Among those 24, a childhood friend named Xu Da, who would one day be called the greatest general of the age. Warlords hoarded men. Zhu understood something better. Men follow the man who feeds them. Numbers can be rebuilt. Loyalty can't. Within a year, the 24 had grown into an army of 30,000. And when Guo Zixing died, his troops and his title passed to the son-in-law he had once starved. But Zhu did not crown himself anything. Above the red turban sat a teenage figurehead, the little king of radiance. For the next 10 years, the most dangerous man in China bowed to a child. He flew the boy's banner, stamped the boy's calendar on every order, and called himself a loyal servant of Song. Other warlords raced to crown themselves, and painted targets on their Zhu understood. A crown is a target. Patience is armor. When 36,000 enemy soldiers surrendered to him at once, his officers warned they could mutiny in the night. Zhu picked 500 of the prisoners, and had them guard his tent while he slept. He slept soundly. By morning, 36,000 men were his, body and soul. In 1356, he took the great city of Nanjing, and with it half a million people. And then the beggar began collecting something no other warlord wanted, scholars. Li Shanchang, Liu Bowen, men who had read every book he never could. He sat with them deep into the night, a farmer's son, learning how an empire is actually run. Taxes, law, grain, order. Every other rebel king was printing money, building palaces, declaring dynasties. He was hiring teachers. From one of those scholars came the strategy that decided everything. Build high walls, stock grain, and do not call yourself king. He was no longer just learning how to win a war. He was learning how to run a country. The other warlords never even knew there was a difference. While rival kings painted thrones, Zhu farmed. His soldiers grew their own grain. His walls grew taller every winter. The starving boy had learned the one lesson every dynasty forgets. Power is not a crown. Power is a full granary. But two other men had climbed out of the same chaos, and the land between the three of them was running out. To the east, Zhang Shicheng, a salt smuggler, turned king, the richest man in China. Upriver to the west, Chen Youliang, a fisherman's son who had clawed out of the same starving countryside, murdered his own leader to take the throne and built perhaps the largest fleet Asia had ever seen. Chen had one belief, the strong take everything. In 1363, he came downriver to prove it, with an armada and an army said to number 600,000. His war fleet blackened the Yangtze. Tower ships three decks high, hulls painted red, iron-plated rams. First target, the fortress city of Hongdu. Defending it, Zhu's nephew, Zhu Wenzheng, a young man written off as a wastrel. The wastrel held the city for 85 days. 85 days against a claimed 600,000. Long enough for Zhu Wenzheng to gather everything he had. 200,000 men in ships a fraction the size of Chen's. When Zhu's fleet arrived, Chen turned from the city to crush it head-on. The two fleets met on Lake Poyang, China's largest lake, one of the largest naval battles in human history. In the opening days, Chen's tower ships crushed everything. Zhu's flagship ran aground, stuck in the mud, surrounded. Chen's fiercest admiral drove his warship straight at the stranded flagship, cutting through the line to kill Zhu himself. The chronicles record that in that moment, an officer named Han Cheng put on Zhu's robes and crown, walked to the ship's bow in full view of both fleets, and threw himself into the lake. The enemy roared, Zhu Wenzheng is dead. The assault slackened, just long enough for the real Zhu to escape. One man died pretending to be him. Remember that trade. It will not be the last. But escape wasn't victory. Chen's giant ships were chained into a floating great wall, unbreakable, unsinkable. Then one of Zhu's officers said the words that decided the age. Our ships cannot match theirs in size, fire can. They loaded seven fishing boats with reeds, gunpowder, and oil. On each deck, they posted straw soldiers in real armor, and they waited for the wind to turn. All day, the wind blew wrong. Then, at late afternoon, the northeast wind rose. Seven burning boats slammed into a wall of chained ships. The fire leapt from deck to deck. Hundreds of ships, tens of thousands of men. The histories record it in a single line. The lake burned red, most of them died. In the burning chaos, one of Zhu's captains was struck ten times and beheaded, and the histories swear his body kept fighting. The corpse stood at the prow, weapon in hand. The enemy screamed that a god had entered the battle. Chen Youliang, watching his armada burn, made the only move he understood. He executed every prisoner he held. Zhu Yuanzhang answered by releasing every prisoner he held. He gave the wounded medicine. Then he held a funeral service for Chen's dead soldiers. Within days, two of Chen's own admirals defected, and thousands of their men followed. Two starving boys had climbed out of the same famine. One learned that terror rules men, the other learned that hunger does, and that the man who feeds you owns you. Then Zhu sealed the mouth of the lake. Chen's surviving giants were trapped behind their own wall, and the food was running out. A month in, starving, Chen tried to break out of the lake. In the running fight, he pushed his head out of a porthole to shout an order. An arrow went in through his eye and out the back of his skull. The great fleet now belonged to a man who had once begged for rice with a wooden bowl. The next year Chen's teenage son surrendered his capital. The boy knelt at the gate, too terrified to raise his head. Zhu Yuanzhang walked over and lifted the child up with his own hands. I hold no crime against you, he said. The boy who buried his family in rags could still remember what mercy looked like. Hold on to this image, it has an expiration date. The salt smuggler was next. Zhu's armies sealed his capital for 10 months and starved it out, while Zhang's palace burned behind the walls. That same winter, the teenage emperor Zhu had bowed to for 10 years set sail to join him in Nanjing at Zhu's own invitation. The ship sank crossing the Yangtze. The official record gave him a single line. The young emperor died. An accident, of course. The official record says Zhang Shicheng hanged himself. Other records say Zhu had him beaten to death with clubs. The Ming wrote its own history. Keep that in mind for later. Now only the dying Yuan dynasty was left. The Mongol empire that had ruled China for nearly a century. In late 1367, Zhu launched 250,000 men north under a proclamation of eight characters. Drive out the barbarians, restore China. On January 23rd, 1368, at the altar of heaven in Nanjing, the beggar put on the crown. He named his dynasty Ming, the Radiant. He named his reign Hongwu, vast military power. 24 years from a straw-wrapped burial to the mandate of heaven, no one in 3,000 years of Chinese history had ever climbed that far. Eight months later, his general Xu Da walked into Beijing, the Mongol capital, without a battle. The last Mongol emperor had already fled in the night through a gate that no one was even guarding. 97 years of Mongol rule ended not with a last stand, but with an empty doorway. Zhu's proclamation had quoted an old prophecy. The barbarians have no hundred-year destiny. 97 years, the prophecy held. Years into his reign, the emperor of China went home to a hillside grave with three feet of dirt. He rebuilt his parents' grave into an imperial tomb, but he refused to move the bodies. They stayed exactly where a grieving boy had buried them. He found the family of Liu Jizu, the farmer who gave him the ground. He made the dead man a marquis, and his descendants would guard the tomb, tax-free, for as long as the dynasty lived. And the landlord who screamed a grieving boy away from his door. By most accounts, the emperor spared him. He even gave him land. But he carved the insult, word for word, into the same stone that holds his brother's farewell. It still stands today. An emperor who forgives, but carves the grudge in stone. That is the man China now belonged to. The beggar had won everything. The throne, the mandate, the largest army on earth. The men who starved beside him, bled beside him, died pretending to be him. They were now dukes and marshals of a new golden age. But a boy who has buried everyone he ever loved, never stops counting what he can lose. The next time he counts, he will be counting the men standing closest to the throne. Welcome to the Dragon Files. Subscribe for more.