Hongwu Emperor

The Hongwu Emperor (1328–1398), personal name Zhu Yuanzhang and temple name Taizu, was the founder and first emperor of the Ming dynasty. He was born into a destitute peasant family in the Huai River region. After famine and disease killed most of his family, he spent time as a Buddhist novice and wandering mendicant. In 1352 he joined the Red Turban rebellion against the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. He rose through the ranks, built a power base at Nanjing, and defeated rival warlords in the 1360s. He proclaimed the Ming in 1368, and his armies drove the Yuan court out of China's heartland. He is one of the few founders in Chinese history to rise from the lowest social stratum to the throne, a path he shared with Liu Bang of the Han.

During his thirty-year reign (the Hongwu era, 1368–1398), he built an unusually centralised and personalised monarchy. In 1380 he abolished the post of chancellor, which left the emperor to direct the six ministries himself. He promulgated the Ming Code and the Great Warnings and used purges and secret police to control officials, generals and local elites. He also carried out a population and land survey, organised villages into a tax-and-service system, and set up hereditary military households. He enfeoffed his sons as princes on the frontiers, and this arrangement later triggered civil war. His rule was marked by recovery from the wars of the Yuan collapse and by an emphasis on Confucian orthodoxy. It was also marked by harsh punishments, large-scale purges, and restrictions on maritime trade.

This article follows his life from his childhood and rebel career to the founding of the dynasty. It then covers his government, legal and fiscal institutions, military arrangements, ideology, foreign relations, family and succession, and the continuing historiographical debate over his legacy.

Names, Titles and Sources

The future founder of the Ming dynasty was born with the infant name Zhu Chongba (重八). Another early name was Xingzong (興宗), and he took the name Yuanzhang (元璋) only when he joined a group of rebels against the Yuan. His courtesy name was Guorui (國瑞). Zhu Yuanzhang is the name used for him as a rebel leader and Ming founder before enthronement. Afterwards he is usually called by his reign title.

Three titles are used for the emperor. After proclaiming himself emperor in 1368, he chose Hongwu ("Vastly Martial") as his reign title and made Nanjing his capital. The Hongwu era formally ran from 23 January 1368 to 5 February 1399. After the Yongle Emperor took the throne, the Jianwen years were folded back into the Hongwu count. The four-year record of the Jianwen reign was appended to the Veritable Records of Ming Taizu under the years Yuan, 2, 3 and Hongwu 35. The Ming adopted the practice of one era name per reign, so the era name came to identify the ruler himself. Hongwu thus became the standard name in English and Chinese. Taizu is nevertheless described as the more strictly correct designation. The temple name Taizu ("Great Progenitor") was also given to the founders of other dynasties, so "Ming Taizu" is used to avoid confusion. The short posthumous title is Emperor Gao (高皇帝). The full formal title was a long string of honorifics, and several differing forms of it are recorded because later reigns revised and lengthened it.

Principal sources

The main narrative source is the Ming Veritable Records (Ming shilu). It consists of 2,909 volumes and more than 16 million words. The Taizu shilu, the account of the Hongwu reign, was compiled after the emperor's death as a kind of official history of the reign. It was built up from court diaries, daily records and collected documents. Memorials, ministerial papers and the Metropolitan Gazette were also used. The transmitted text has 257 chapters. Other primary material includes the emperor's own edicts and writings, among them the Great Warnings (Da Gao) discussed in a later section. It also includes the Huang Ming Zuxun (Ancestral Injunctions), instructions for his descendants. The Ming History (Mingshi) is the main later synthesis. It was published in 1739 and draws chiefly on the Veritable Records of the Yongle reign.

Problems with the sources

The Taizu shilu is not a single contemporary record. Scholars have studied how the Yongle Emperor ordered two revisions of his father's reign records, with the Hanlin academician Xie Jin as imperial propagandist in charge of the first. The revisions were politically motivated, since the Yongle Emperor needed to present his own claim to the throne as legitimate. One example is the 1403 edition. In it, Zhu Di declared himself and his brother Zhu Su to be the only sons of Empress Ma. The claim is regarded as questionable, since the Hongwu Emperor would hardly have left a son by the empress unnamed as successor. Passages on Zhu Yuanzhang's rise, on the princes, and on the Jianwen reign therefore need cross-checking against private writings and collected works from the period. The sources also contain legendary matter. The Veritable Records report that red light shone at his birth, a conventional sign of a man carrying the Mandate of Heaven. Popular biographies, drama and later folklore add further embellishment, especially about his years as a beggar and monk.

Portraits

Two contrasting portrait traditions survive. One is a formal court image, dignified and almost kindly. The other shows a face covered with dark moles and a jutting chin. The National Palace Museum in Taipei holds ten of the "ugly portraits" of Taizu, in crowned, robed and seated forms. The museum reads the features in terms of physiognomy. The protruding cheek and jaw bones and the facial markings seem to match the "unusual appearance" of a true Son of Heaven. One widely held view is that the unusual portraits were an idealised, emblematic image of destiny rather than a likeness. Others treat them as closer to his actual appearance. There is no consensus on which is nearer the real face. The second type is not a later Qing invention, since it emerged in the Ming and continued to circulate in the Qing.

Early Life and Family Background (1328–1352)

Zhu Yuanzhang was born on 21 October 1328 at Zhongli in Haozhou, which is now Fengyang County in Anhui. His father, Zhu Shizhen (known as Zhu Wusi), was a poor tenant farmer. The family moved several times within the Huai region: Zhu was born in the eastern countryside of Zhongli. The family later moved to the western countryside, and finally to Gucunzhuang in Taiping Township. The boy was fourth in his immediate family and eighth among his clan brothers, which gave him the name Chongba. The name is a numerical label, the usual kind for commoners without a literary name. He herded cattle for a landlord as a boy. Much of the detail about his childhood comes from the emperor's own later recollections, in particular the memorial inscription for his parents' tomb, and from the Veritable Records. Both were composed after his accession and shaped by the image of the dynasty's founder.

Late Yuan conditions

The Yuan state of the 1340s was under strain. The Yellow River flooded repeatedly, and other natural disasters followed. The 1344 flood was one of the worst; it caused heavy casualties, displacement, hunger and epidemics. To repair the river and keep grain moving north to Dadu on the Grand Canal, the court mobilised labour on a very large scale. In 1351 about 150,000 farmers were drafted to rechannel the Yellow River. Alongside the heavy tax and labour burdens, this work left a pool of resentful conscripts. Millenarian religion supplied the means to organise them. Red Turban influence appeared in many places along the Huai River from 1340 onward. The White Lotus teachers preached the coming of the Buddha Maitreya, who would end suffering. Fengyang itself was an area under the influence of the White Lotus Society. At the river works, the sect leader Han Shantong claimed to have found a stone figure with one eye and a prophecy of revolt carved on its back. He was seized and executed, but his followers rose in 1351 under Liu Futong. This was the beginning of the Red Turban Rebellion.

The famine of 1344 and the monastery

Zhu's family was struck by the same disaster. In 1344 the Huai basin suffered a catastrophic drought. Famine was soon followed by locust swarms and plague. The Veritable Records place the deaths within a few weeks. In the fourth month, Zhu Shizhen died of the plague, aged 64, and his eldest son died later that night. The mother, Lady Chen, died on the twenty-second day of the same month. The surviving brothers could not afford to bury their parents. Their landlord, Liu Jide, refused them a plot, and his elder brother Liu Jizu finally gave them a patch of land. The episode left a lasting mark on the future emperor's attitude toward landlords and local elites.

With no land and no relatives able to support him, Zhu, then about sixteen, took refuge with the monk Gao Bin at Huangjue Temple and was tonsured. As a novice he swept floors, burned incense, rang the bell, cooked and washed clothes. He is generally held to have learned to read there. The famine soon dried up the temple's income. With no alms coming in, the abbot sent the monks out to wander and beg.

Years on the road

For roughly three years from 1344 Zhu travelled through the Huai region as a mendicant. According to the biographical tradition, he went south from Haozhou to Hefei and west into Henan as far as Gushi and Xinyang. He then went north to Ruzhou and Chenzhou, and east through Luyi and Bozhou. Later accounts treat this period as formative. It gave him direct knowledge of the villages, the social divisions and the popular religion of the Huai plain, and he later spoke of those years in his own writings. The sources are thin and partly literary, so the exact route and the length of the journey are uncertain. At the end of the begging tour he returned to Huangjue Temple, where he stayed until the rebellion reached Haozhou.

Joining the rebels

In 1351–1352 Red Turban bands spread across the Huai valley. In Haozhou, Guo Zixing and his associates seized the city and held it against Yuan forces. The temple was reportedly endangered, and Zhu faced a choice between staying and joining the rebels. His boyhood friend Tang He had already joined and invited Zhu to the Red Turbans. The tradition adds that he consulted divination before deciding. On 15 April 1352 he became a rebel under Guo Zixing's command in Haozhou. He started in the lowest ranks of Guo's following. Within a year he had enlisted twenty-four men from his home district and married Guo's adopted daughter.

The Rebel Career and Rise to Power (1352–1368)

Service under Guo Zixing

Zhu Yuanzhang joined the rebels under Guo Zixing's command at Haozhou in April 1352. Guo was a Red Turban leader from Dingyuan. He was a good fighter but had a rash temper. Guo came to trust Zhu and married his adopted daughter, Lady Ma, to him. She later became Empress Ma. Zhu's fellow villagers from the Zhongli area, among them Xu Da and Tang He, formed the core of his personal following. Haozhou was torn by rivalry among its rebel commanders. In one episode Zhu rescued the kidnapped Guo by raiding the house of the opposing faction's leader. In autumn 1353 Guo gave Zhu an independent commission, which began Zhu's rise. Zhu then captured Chuzhou, crossed the Yangtze in July 1355, and became leader of the force when Guo and then Guo's eldest son died in 1355. Zhu still acknowledged the Song regime of Han Lin'er and its Manichaean-influenced White Lotus ideology. He held nominal allegiance to that regime.

Nanjing and the Yangtze base

On 10 April 1356 Zhu took Nanjing, then called Jiqing and renamed Yingtianfu. The city became his headquarters on the lower Yangtze. He held the river's southern bank and the wealthy lower Yangtze region around it, but his territory was small and enemies lay on every side. Chen Youliang held the middle Yangtze upstream. Zhang Shicheng held the Suzhou region to the east. Fang Guozhen held the Zhejiang coast. Yuan forces remained to the north. Tradition credits the scholar Zhu Sheng with the maxim "building high walls, accumulating abundant provisions, and delaying the declaration of kingship." It meant developing agriculture and avoiding an early imperial title that would draw attacks. Zhejiang scholars joined Zhu around 1360, among them Liu Ji and Song Lian. They supplied strategy, institutional knowledge and the Confucian vocabulary of legitimate rule, and the other Zhejiang scholars, with Song Lian as a leading literary figure, gave the regime a civil elite alongside its Huai-region military men. In 1365 Zhu set up a school staffed by "Erudites."

Defeating the rival regimes

The first great contest was with Chen Youliang. In 1360 Chen murdered Xu Shouhui and seized the throne, renaming the state Han. He attacked Nanjing at once but failed. The Battle of Lake Poyang ran from 30 August to 4 October 1363. Chen besieged Nanchang with a very large fleet. After an inconclusive exchange of fire, Zhu used fire ships to burn the enemy's tower ships and destroyed the fleet. Chen was killed by an arrow that struck his head. His son Chen Li surrendered in 1364. This gave Zhu the middle Yangtze. He had been Duke of Wu since 1361 and promoted himself to King of Wu in 1364.

Zhu then turned on Zhang Shicheng, who had also styled himself King of Wu. Taking Gaoyou on the Grand Canal on 24 April 1366 cut Zhang off from aid from the Yuan in the north. Suzhou was surrounded by late December 1366 and fell on 1 October 1367 after a ten-month siege. Zhang tried to hang himself and was captured. Sources differ on whether he later died by beating or by hanging. Zhu's side used some 2,400 cannon at the siege. Fang Guozhen surrendered in December 1367. Fang was a former salt smuggler who had held the coast of Zhejiang. In November 1367 Zhu had already sent Xu Da and Chang Yuchun north with a large army, which began the campaign against the Yuan described in the next section.

Break with the Song regime and the name "Ming"

In February 1363 Zhang Shicheng's general Lü Zhen captured Anfeng and killed Liu Futong, and Xu Da rescued Han Lin'er in March. Han Lin'er was settled at Chuzhou, where he was a figurehead with no power. He drowned in the Yangtze, an event dated to 1366 or 1367 in different accounts. Later suspicion fell on Zhu, but the sources do not settle the matter. Zhu stopped using the Song era name and began to date documents by his own regime. This marked a shift from a millenarian movement to one that used Confucian language of governance and conquest. He recruited scholars and avoided the language of messianic revolt, and after taking power he denied that he had ever belonged to the White Lotus and suppressed the movement.

The dynastic name "Ming" ("brightness") has several proposed origins. Britannica traces it to the Manichaean influence in the Song-revivalist Han Lin'er regime. Wu Han held this view. Others, such as Hu Axiang, see the White Lotus society as the source. A third view derives it from a phrase in the Book of Changes, a classical source like the one behind the name "Yuan." The debate is unresolved, and the name may have worked for both audiences. Zhu proclaimed himself the Hongwu Emperor on 23 January 1368.

Founding the Ming and Consolidating Control (1368–1382)

Enthronement and the capitals

Zhu Yuanzhang was enthroned on 23 January 1368 and took the reign title Hongwu ("Vastly Martial"). He established his capital at Nanjing, the city he had held since 1356 and which was now styled Yingtianfu. The city was treated as the "southern capital" of the empire. The Ming court did not treat Nanjing as the only centre. For the next few years little was changed in the Nanjing palace, because the emperor concentrated on building a "middle capital" at his home town of Fengyang. The project was costly. In 1375 construction at Fengyang was halted because of expense and waste, and building plans shifted back to Nanjing.

The northern campaigns and the Northern Yuan

The conquest of the north began before the enthronement. Xu Da was commander-in-chief, with Chang Yuchun as his principal subordinate. The campaign moved through Shandong and Henan, then up the Grand Canal corridor. In the autumn of 1368 the Yuan emperor Toghon Temür left Dadu (later Beijing) for the steppe, and Xu Da's army entered the city without a siege. The Mongol court re-formed as the Northern Yuan. The Yuan court retreated to Karakorum, and the Ming sacked Karakorum in 1380.

The steppe war did not end with Dadu's fall. Xu Da's 1372 expedition into Mongolia ended in a serious defeat at the hands of the general Köke Temür. After that, Ming policy relied more on fortified frontier garrisons and on periodic raids to break Mongol concentrations. The campaigns of the 1380s were more decisive:

• In 1387 Naghachu, a Mongol commander in Manchuria, surrendered to the Ming after a devastating famine.
• In 1388 the emperor appointed Lan Yu General-in-Chief and sent him with 150,000 troops against the Northern Yuan ruler Uskhal Khan (Tögüs Temür).
• Lan Yu's force reached Buir Lake, defeated the Mongol army, and captured over 100 members of the khan's family, more than 77,000 civilians and more than 150,000 livestock.
• While fleeing toward Karakorum, Tögüs Temür was attacked and defeated on the Tuul River by Yesüder.

The victory destroyed the Khubilaid line's claim to the khanate, but it did not remove the Mongol threat from the northern frontier.

Sichuan and the southwest

Sichuan was taken in 1371 from the Xia regime of Ming Sheng, the son of the rebel Ming Yuzhen. The remaining Yuan stronghold was Yunnan. Envoys were sent there in 1369, 1370, 1372, 1374 and 1375 to request submission. Some were killed, which became the pretext for invasion. Fu Youde was made commander-in-chief with Lan Yu and Mu Ying as deputies, leading about 300,000 soldiers against an enemy of roughly a third that size. The campaign began in the autumn of 1381. Kunming was taken by January 1382, and Dali followed in April. The Mongol governor Basalawarmi and his associates committed suicide before Kunming fell. The ruling Duan family of Dali lost power, and Duan Ming and his two sons were taken to Nanjing with honorary posts but no authority.

Consolidation of the region depended on garrisons. In 1384 the emperor decided to station Mu Ying permanently in Yunnan. His family remained in power there until the end of the Ming. The garrisons and the military farms that supplied them (see the section on the military system) brought a large settled Han population into the province. Yunnan's Ming administration kept the Yuan-era tusi system of native chieftaincies while pursuing increasing centralisation and Han migration.

The Nanjing walls, palace and legitimising ritual

The new capital was built as a statement of dynastic permanence. The adviser Zhu Sheng's suggestion to build a higher city wall was adopted, partly as defence against coastal pirates. The wall took about 200,000 workers over twenty-one years. A "new city" was laid out east of the old one to hold the palace. The decision to bring Lion Hill in the northwest inside the defences almost doubled the walled area. The palace was substantially expanded and refurbished in the 1370s. By 1377 its construction was complete and the city was designated "Jingshi" (Capital). The layout later served as a model for the Beijing palace.

The court also set up the ritual apparatus of a Chinese dynasty. This included sacrifices to Heaven and Earth at altars outside the city, an ancestral temple, and altars to the soil and grain. Ceremonial dress and court protocol were revised away from Mongol practice. Together these gave the former rebel leader a framework of Confucian kingship, in which he ruled as the Son of Heaven. By 1382 the country had been reunified.

Centralisation of Government and the Abolition of the Chancellorship

The inherited structure

The Ming administrative structure was based on the Yuan model. The Central Secretariat ran the civil administration under two grand chancellors, informally called prime ministers. The Censorate oversaw the administration, and the Chief Military Commission commanded the army. The Six Ministries were subordinate to the Secretariat. The offices went through several title changes. When they were first set up in the Wu year (1364), Li Shanchang and Xu Da held the two posts, and the titles became Left and Right Grand Chancellor in the first year of Hongwu.

Court politics in the 1370s were shaped by rivalries among officials from different regions. Many senior civil officials came from the emperor's home area in the Huai valley, notably Li Shanchang and Hu Weiyong, both from Dingyuan. Others came from Zhejiang, the home of advisers such as Liu Ji and Song Lian. The emperor trusted few of his advisers. He reshuffled or removed his most powerful ministers fairly often. Li Shanchang, the most respected figure in the bureaucracy, fell ill in 1370 and retired the next year. Hu Weiyong became Left Grand Chancellor in 1377. He headed the civil administration of the empire in the second half of the 1370s.

The Hu Weiyong case and the end of the chancellorship

The Hongwu Emperor feared that concentrating so much power in the chancellors' office would threaten the throne. In early 1380 Hu was accused of treason. He was executed on 12 February 1380, together with the Censor-in-chief Chen Ning. The charges, as later recorded, included plotting rebellion and seeking outside support from the Northern Yuan and from Japan. Several historians treat these accusations with caution, because the case was extended and elaborated over the following years. In 1390 the retired Li Shanchang was drawn in and died with his family. The purge spread to distant relatives, associates and protégés. Estimates of the dead run from 30,000 to 40,000. The wider pattern of purges is covered in a later section.

The emperor then abolished the whole institution. He eliminated the Secretariat and the chancellor's posts, and the ministers of the Six Ministries reported directly to him. He personally took control of the Six Ministries and the Five Chief Military Commissions. The six ministers and the head of the reorganised Censorate became known informally as the "Seven Chief Ministers".

Workload and the Grand Secretaries

The new arrangement made the emperor his own chief executive. It burdened him directly with decisions that experienced bureaucrats had formerly made, and it opened the way for personal influence by his entourage, especially eunuchs. The Veritable Records report that in eight days in September 1384 he handled well over a thousand memorials covering more than three thousand separate matters. The first remedy was the Four Supports (sifu guan), introduced in 1380 to advise the emperor in rotation according to the four seasons. That scheme did not last. In 1382, following the Song system, Grand Secretaries were established as advisers to the emperor. He drew these men from the Hanlin Academy to process his administrative paperwork. They held low rank and were not chancellors. They were collectively known as the Grand Secretariat only from the reign of the Yongle Emperor. The later growth of the Grand Secretariat into the real centre of government came after Hongwu's reign.

Military and monitoring organs

The unitary military command was also split up. In 1380 the Chief Military Command was abolished and its functions were distributed over the Five Chief Military Commissions. Command of the army was thus removed from any single central official. The emperor controlled appointments and campaigns himself and named generals for particular operations, as described in the section on the military system.

The Censorate was also reorganised. In 1382 it was renamed the Duchayuan, and its censors were sent out on circuit. In 1383 the supervising secretaries (jishizhong) were attached to the offices of the six ministries. Although junior in rank, they could audit documents and impeach officials. Together with the censors they served as the emperor's means of watching the bureaucracy now that no chancellor stood between them.

The Ancestral Injunctions

The prohibition on reviving the office was written into the dynasty's founding instructions. The Huang Ming Zuxun (Ancestral Injunctions) were first compiled in 1373 and revised in 1395. They ordered that no successor should restore the chancellorship. Any subject who dared to petition for it was to be impeached at once by civil and military officials and severely punished. Later Ming rulers and officials treated the text as binding "ancestral law", and the chancellorship was never restored.

Law, Punishment and Purges

The Ming Code

Legal compilation began before the dynasty's formal founding. A first draft was prepared in late 1367 under the direction of Li Shanchang, and the code went through several revisions during the reign. Before its final promulgation in 1397, the code underwent a number of revisions, and many officials and court advisers took part. The aim was to replace the Yuan practice of ad hoc rulings and case precedents with a fixed statutory code. Chinese law before the thirteenth century rested on the Tang code, and Hongwu sought to revive it soon after taking power. The version of 1389 abandoned the Tang arrangement by topic. It arranged the articles under the six ministries of Personnel, Revenue, Rites, War, Justice and Works, with a general section of definitions and principles in front. On 29 May 1397 the emperor announced the final text to his officials at the Meridian Gate. From 1397 until the fall of the Ming in 1644, it served as the principal governing law of China. The Qing later replaced it with a code that borrowed heavily from it. The emperor ordered that the statutes themselves not be altered, so later reigns adapted them through supplementary regulations and precedents (li). The result was a relatively compact code focused on criminal law.

The Great Warnings and extra-legal punishment

The code coexisted with a second body of law that was far harsher. Between 1385 and 1387 Zhu Yuanzhang issued a four-part edict, the Da Gao (Great Warnings), to warn and instruct his subjects. The fourth compilation, issued in December 1387, was addressed to army officers. The texts collect actual cases of corrupt officials, rapacious clerks and unruly local magnates, together with the penalties the emperor imposed. These included flaying, hamstringing, castration, and exile to labour or frontier service, all of which went well beyond the code's standard penalties of beating, penal servitude, exile and death. Local officials and village elders were made to expound the texts, and schools taught them. Later accounts say that households owning a copy received leniency if they were convicted of an offence. The Great Warnings stood outside the Ming Code in principle, and they were not carried forward as normal law after his death. They show how the emperor used punishment as a tool of moral instruction, in particular against bureaucratic corruption.

Secret police and judicial violence

The Embroidered Uniform Guard (Jinyiwei) grew out of the emperor's personal guard units. In 1382 he abolished the earlier guard offices and formally established it. The guard could arrest and interrogate outside the regular judicial system and run its own prison. The emperor also restrained it. In 1387 he publicly burned its torture instruments and transferred its prisoners to the Ministry of Justice. In 1393 he forbade sending central or provincial cases to the Jinyiwei. His successors restored and expanded its powers, and the Jinyiwei later became entangled with the eunuch-run agencies. Beating officials with bamboo or wooden rods at court (tingzhang) was also used, and deaths from it are recorded.

The major cases

The purges of the 1380s and 1390s are traditionally grouped as the Four Major Cases of the early Ming. They are the Hu Weiyong case, the Lan Yu case, the Kongyin ("pre-stamped documents") case of 1376, and the Guo Huan case. The first of these is covered in the preceding section on the chancellorship. Hu Weiyong headed the civil administration and was accused of treason and executed in 1380. The accusations later expanded to include contacts with Japanese and Mongol forces. The charges were reopened in 1390, when the aged Li Shanchang and a number of marquises were executed. The purge extended to relatives, protégés and the protégés' relatives, with estimates of 30,000 to 40,000 dead.

The Guo Huan case of 1385 began with the discovery that officials in the Ministry of Revenue and in the provinces had embezzled tax grain through falsified accounts. Officials were executed in large numbers, and the traditional figure runs to tens of thousands when family members and associates are included. It was one of the cases that drove the creation of the Yellow Registers and the stricter fiscal supervision described in the economy section.

The last great case involved a general. Lan Yu, a leading commander who was Marquis of Yongchang and then Duke of Liang, died on 22 March 1393 by execution. He was accused of conspiracy and attempted coup. The purge that followed is traditionally put at more than fifteen thousand dead. In the following two years several other veteran generals, among them Fu Youde, Feng Sheng and Wang Bi, died; historians believe they died as part of the emperor's effort to eliminate them. The victims were disproportionately the Huai-region comrades who had risen with the emperor. Wealthy households, particularly in the Jiangnan region, were also targeted through heavy taxation, forced transfers to Nanjing and the prosecution of landlords.

Assessing the evidence

The casualty totals are round figures that come from Ming and later writers, and they include executed relatives and associates as well as principals. Modern historians generally accept that the purges killed many thousands and removed most of the founding-era military elite. They treat the exact totals with caution, and many regard the conspiracy charges against Hu Weiyong and Lan Yu as exaggerated or constructed. The emperor himself gave the later justification that the purges cleared the way for his heir. The Lan Yu purges are linked to preparing the succession of his grandson, and thousands were executed or banished.

The so-called "literary inquisition" is a related and more doubtful matter. Popular accounts describe officials executed because a memorial used words that sounded like "monk", "thief" or "bald", references to the emperor's own background. Several historians question how systematic the persecution was. They note that the best-known stories rest on later anecdote rather than on the Veritable Records, and that some of the writers named were in fact punished on other grounds. The emperor did impose rules on the form of memorials and set fixed formulas for official congratulatory texts.

Economy, Population Registration and Taxation

Registers and the lijia system

The Ming fiscal system rested on two linked sets of records. A first household survey was compiled in 1370 but the outcome was not satisfying. In 1381 the court therefore adopted the lijia system and issued the first nationwide Yellow Registers (huangce). Each li combined 110 households. Ten headmen were drawn from the richest households, and the other hundred households were grouped into ten tithings (jia). The registers recorded household members, arable land, ponds, orchards and livestock, together with the household's occupational category (civilian, military, salt-producing or artisan) and its tax class. They were revised once in each decade. A separate archive was set up in 1381 to store them, and a second survey followed in 1391. Concealing population was made a capital offence in 1381, but many households still left the rolls to escape their obligations. Modern scholars therefore treat the totals as under-counts.

The Fish-Scale Registers (yulin tuce) were the land counterpart. Under the Hongwu reign they were compiled in 1387, when students of the Imperial Academy such as Wu Chun were sent to the prefectures. The land was divided into districts by tax grain, each with four tax captains. A district was a unit of 10,000 shi of tax grain. Surveyors recorded the shape and size of each plot, its boundaries, soil fertility and owner. Together the two sets of registers made it hard to hide land from the assessors, which was their purpose. The lijia headmen were backed by the tax captains (liangzhang), wealthy individuals appointed by county authorities to collect taxes. Villagers were also responsible for corvée labour and for settling minor disputes locally.

Taxation

The land tax was the main source of revenue. It was collected twice a year, with wheat in summer and rice in autumn. Nominal rates were about 3 sheng 3 ge per mu on private land and 5 sheng 3 ge on official land. Rates varied sharply by region, because the Hongwu government kept the high assessments that earlier regimes had imposed on conquered Jiangnan. In 1393, Suzhou prefecture held about 1.1% of the empire's land but owed 2.81 million dan of grain, around 9.5% of a national total of 29.4 million dan. The Jianwen Emperor later reduced these burdens.

Recovery and resettlement

After the wars of the 1350s and 1360s, the government encouraged reclamation. Refugees and people from densely populated regions were given concessions to move to vacant land. The irrigation works damaged in the late Yuan period were also repaired. Military and civilian farming colonies were established, and soldiers in them were required to plant one hundred mulberry and jujube trees each, along with persimmons, chestnuts, walnuts and other suitable species. Newly reclaimed land in the northern provinces was declared permanently exempt from tax, which encouraged settlement in the depopulated north.

Currency

The founder tried to restore a metallic currency but found there was not enough metal, so paper money made of mulberry bark was produced. The Great Ming Treasure Note was first issued in 1375. The one-guan note was valued at a string of 1,000 coins, and the string was pictured on the note. It also carried a warning that counterfeiters would be beheaded. Copper coinage (Hongwu tongbao) circulated alongside it, and private trade in gold and silver was officially forbidden. The notes were inconvertible fiat currency, and the state issued them freely to pay its expenses. The government also largely stopped accepting them, so people lost confidence in them and silver rose in value against paper. The notes lost more than half their value quickly. The resulting inflation continued for decades. Official coin casting resumed in 1433, and silver gradually replaced the notes and copper coin as a store of value and medium of exchange.

Population and tax figures

By 1393 the registers listed 16.05 million civilian households and a population of 60.54 million, with 8.5 million qing of land registered for taxation. A qing equals 100 mu. The official total was 60,545,812 people in 1393. Ho Ping-ti proposed revising it upward to about 65 million, since large areas of North China and the frontier were not counted. The registered population was probably well below the true figure, and later official totals stayed flat or fell even as the real population grew. The 1393 figures are therefore best read as evidence of recovery from the late Yuan collapse, and as a minimum.

Military System and the Princely Enfeoffments

The Hongwu Emperor built the Ming army on hereditary military households. This was a deliberate adaptation of earlier models. Zhu Yuanzhang set up a system of hereditary soldiery inspired by Mongol-style garrisons and the fubing system of the Northern Wei, Sui and Tang. The Yuan precedent mattered in practice as well, because the Ming inherited much of its military machinery from the Yuan. The result was the wei-suo ("guards and battalions") system, which was reorganised in 1384. The standard guard (wei) was about 5,600 men divided into five battalions. Each battalion was a thousand-household battalion (qianhusuo) of about 1,120 men, and these were subdivided into hundred-household companies of about 112. By 1393 the total number of weisuo troops had reached 1,200,000.

Soldiers were registered in separate military households. These households were permanently obliged to serve, with sons succeeding fathers generation after generation. If a household died out or fled, officials were sent to the original place of registration to conscript relatives or supporting households as replacements. The burden was heavy. One estimate puts up to twenty percent of the state's households on the military registers, with almost ten percent of cultivated land held as military farmland. The aim was to make the army self-supporting. Soldiers provided their own food through military farms (tuntian) and rotated into training and military posts such as the capital. The balance between farming and drilling depended on the region. In Yunnan, after the conquest, 30 percent of the military apparatus drilled while the rest took part in agricultural production. Frontier garrisons were meant to keep a larger fighting share than those in the interior.

At the top, the Chief Military Commission was split into the Five Military Commissions in 1380. The commissions held registers and administered the guards, but they could not move troops on their own authority. Troops were mobilised by imperial order, and a general appointed for a campaign was given command only for its duration. He returned his seal and left the troops when it ended, so that no commander built a lasting personal following. Military rank also brought unusual status. Generals enfeoffed as nobles ranked above civil officials at the Hongwu court, received larger stipends, and held hereditary titles. The great field commanders of the dynasty's founding, among them Xu Da, Chang Yuchun and Lan Yu, belonged to this group. Their campaigns against the Northern Yuan are covered in earlier sections, as is the fate of Lan Yu and other founding generals in the purges.

Princely enfeoffments

A second military structure ran alongside the guards and was meant to secure the dynasty within the imperial family. Beginning in 1370, the emperor enfeoffed twenty-four of his sons and his grandnephew Zhu Shouqian as imperial princes, in what became known as a system of princes with stipends but without administrative duties. The model drew on the enfeoffment practices of earlier dynasties, whose failures the emperor wished to avoid. None of the princes controlled the administration of their nominal fief. Their status, promotions and punishments were instead regulated by the Imperial Clan Court in the capital.

Princes had no civil authority, but those on the frontier held real military power. The fiefs of nine of the princes were located in frontier regions for defence. The best known were the Prince of Qin at Xi'an, the Prince of Jin at Taiyuan and the Prince of Yan at Beiping, on the site of modern Beijing. Each prince commanded three auxiliary guard units, ranging from 3,000 to 15,000 men. In his later years the emperor sent the princes of Jin and Yan on campaigns beyond the frontier. They took over duties that had been held by the old marshals, who were dead or purged by the early 1390s. The emperor also expected the princes to act as a check on ministers and on any future ruler who proved weak.

The system had a financial cost. In 1376 a prince's annual allowance was set at 50,000 dan of rice and 25,000 strings of paper currency, later reduced to 10,000 dan of rice. Because the Ming clan grew without limit, stipends became a growing drain on state revenue in later reigns. This was a problem for the dynasty's later history rather than for the founder's own reign.

The immediate tension was political. Zhu Biao, the crown prince, died in 1392. The heir became his son Zhu Yunwen, who was fifteen when he became heir in 1392. Zhu Yunwen's uncles were experienced commanders with their own troops, and the most dangerous was Zhu Di, Prince of Yan, the oldest and most influential of the emperor's surviving sons. The emperor died in June 1398. His grandson, as the Jianwen Emperor, and advisers such as Huang Zicheng and Qi Tai began to reduce the princes. They first cited unlawful acts committed by the princes of Zhou, Qi, Xiang, Dai and Min. The policy led to a rebellion in August 1399 led by Zhu Di. In 1402 Zhu Di took Nanjing and became the Yongle Emperor. After this Zhu Di and his successors gradually removed the princes' military commands. The princes kept their wealth and status but lost their power.

Ideology, Education and Religion

Neo-Confucian orthodoxy and the examinations

Zhu Yuanzhang's regime committed early to the Cheng–Zhu school of Neo-Confucianism as its governing doctrine, although he had little formal schooling himself and distrusted scholar-officials as a group. The school system came first. Edicts of the late 1360s ordered government schools in every prefecture, subprefecture and county, with stipends for state-supported students. Villages were also told to set up community schools (shexue). The Imperial Academy at Nanjing (Guozijian, so named in 1382) trained students for office and was the top of the system.

The examination system was revived in 1370. The emperor was dissatisfied with the candidates it produced and suspended it in 1373, then restored it in 1384 on a regular triennial cycle. Candidates were examined on the Four Books and Five Classics, with the commentaries of Zhu Xi and his school as the standard interpretation. The mature "eight-legged" essay format was codified only later, in the fifteenth century. The result was a close link between state doctrine, schooling and entry into office, a link that lasted until 1905.

The edited Mencius

His attitude toward the Confucian canon is clearest in his treatment of the *Mencius*. Passages that put the people above the ruler, or that treated a tyrant as a mere private individual who could be removed, offended him. He reportedly tried to remove Mencius from the Confucian temple, and officials opposed the attempt. After the examinations were reinstated in 1384, he increasingly felt the need for a censored edition, and in 1394 the Expurgated Mencius (Mengzi jiewen) was published, compiled by Liu Sanwu and fellow Hanlin academicians. As many as eighty-five entries were deleted. Some of the deleted passages held that a ruler's legitimacy should rest on the will of the ruled. Others advocated mutual respect between ruler and ministers, or the moral tutelage of a ruler by upright ministers. The abridgement was tied to the examination curriculum. It did not outlast the dynasty's early decades, and the full text returned to use under his successors.

Moral instruction and ritual codification

The emperor also wanted to teach ordinary villagers directly. In 1397 he ordered the Six Maxims (Liu yu), six short moral injunctions, posted in all villages, and village elders were required to read them publicly six times a month. The injunctions were to be filial to parents, respect elders and superiors, live in harmony with neighbours, instruct sons and grandsons, be content with one's occupation, and do no wrong. Under a related set of village regulations, the message was to be delivered by an old, disabled or blind person led by a child through the li, ringing a bell with a wooden clapper, six times a month. These regulations, issued in 1398 as the Jiaomin bangwen (Placard for Instructing the People), tied moral teaching to the lijia village organisation described elsewhere in this article. Centuries later the Kangxi Emperor's Sacred Edict of 1670 drew on the Six Maxims.

Court ritual was codified in the Great Ming Collected Rites (Da Ming jili). It was compiled by a commission of scholars led by Xu Yikui and completed around 1370. It set out ceremonial for sacrifices, audiences, mourning, ranks and dress, and was a basis for later Ming protocol. It was not printed until the sixteenth century.

Buddhism, Taoism and sectarian movements

Zhu Yuanzhang had a personal tie to Buddhism. He spent eight years after his family's deaths alternating between monastic life and wandering as a beggar. He nonetheless treated both Buddhist and Taoist clergy as a population the state needed to count and control. His reign was marked by aggressive regulation of Buddhism and Taoism. The state issued ordination certificates and capped the number of ordinations. In 1382 it set up registry offices (the Senlu si for Buddhists and the Daolu si for Taoists) to oversee clergy. It sorted monasteries into categories of meditation (Chan), doctrinal teaching and ritual service, and it tried to confine monks to registered temples and keep them out of village life. The emperor himself wrote on Buddhist and Taoist texts, including a commentary on the Daodejing, and he valued the clergy's ritual services for the dead.

Unlicensed movements were treated as a security threat. Buddhist and Taoist secret societies, most prominently the White Lotus society, had fed discontent under the Yuan. Having risen out of that milieu, the Ming founder banned them. The Ming Code made it an offence to organise heterodox sects, which included the White Lotus and Maitreya associations, and to practise unauthorised sorcery.

Removing Mongol customs

The regime presented itself as restoring Chinese practice after Mongol rule. In 1368 edicts ordered court and official dress to return to Tang and Song models. They forbade Mongol-style clothing, hairstyles, names and speech among the population of the capital. The Ming Code later required Mongols and "Semu" (Central and West Asian) residents to marry Chinese partners. Sumptuary rules fixed the colours, fabrics and ornaments allowed to each rank of official, to scholars and to commoners, and they set limits on housing and carriage for each grade. Merchants were barred from wearing silk. The rules were meant to make social hierarchy visible in daily life, and they were applied together with the rites compiled in the Collected Rites.

Foreign Relations and Maritime Policy

The tributary framework

Soon after taking the throne, Hongwu notified neighbouring rulers that the Ming now controlled China. One account describes him as expecting periodic tribute embassies from foreign states and offering in return recognition of each orderly succession, along with a measure of protection. He did not station permanent embassies abroad, but regularly sent envoys and received tribute missions. Participation in what became known as the tributary system also brought official permission to trade with China through legitimate channels. In 1383 a tally system was introduced to facilitate tributary missions from foreign powers. Each mission had to present a matching tally, which allowed the court to verify its credentials. Korea and Ryukyu were treated as especially trusted vassals. Their envoys did not have to show a tally and were allowed more missions, and so more trade, than most other states.

Early embassies went to Goryeo Korea, to Japan, to Annam and Champa in what is now Vietnam, and to Java and other polities of Southeast Asia. Relations with Korea were close but not always smooth. According to one study, Hongwu asked Korea to send women to the Ming court as a way of loosening the old ties between the Korean and Yuan elites, and the request was rebuffed. In Japan, the Ming dealt with the Kyushu-based Prince Kaneyoshi and not with the Ashikaga shogunate. The wokou problem was the main subject of these exchanges.

Ryukyu

Ryukyu became the model tributary. In 1372 the envoy Yang Zai travelled to Okinawa, then divided among local lords, and persuaded Satto, lord of Chūzan, to open formal tributary ties. Satto's brother Taiki then went to the Ming court with local goods. Satto received textiles, ceramics, books, a silver royal seal and documents recognising him as king. The lords of Sannan and Sanhoku followed in the 1370s and 1380s. Hongwu's motives were partly strategic. One historian argues that he meant to channel the smuggling of the Kyushu-based wokou into the lawful framework of tribute trade, and that the Ryukyuan port of Naha could serve as a lawful outlet for Japanese sulphur and horses. In 1392 he sent 36 surnames' worth of shipbuilding experts and skilled navigators to the Ryukyus. These settlers later formed the core of Ryukyu's Chinese-descended maritime community.

Restraint toward expansion

The Huang Ming Zuxun, first compiled in 1373 and revised until 1395, includes a list of states the Ming should not attack. A 1395 statement of the policy says Hongwu would not conquer 15 neighbouring countries, in order to maintain harmonious tributary relations and promote trade. The list is usually given as including Korea, Japan, Annam, Champa, Cambodia and Java, among others. Mongolia was not on the list. The text instructs descendants to defend against foreign "barbarians" and not wage campaigns for glory or conquest. In practice Hongwu declined to intervene when Vietnam invaded Champa, and only rebuked the Vietnamese. This restraint applied to the sea and the south. On the northern frontier the Northern Yuan remained an active military threat, handled by the campaigns and princely garrisons described above.

The maritime prohibition

The maritime prohibition (see Haijin) was the other side of this system. In 1371 Hongwu issued the haijin, which forbade private sea trade and Chinese from going to sea for any reason. The immediate cause was raiding by wokou pirates. His fear of former supporters of the coastal warlords Zhang Shicheng and Fang Guozhen also played a part. Foreign merchants were banned from sailing to China to trade, and communication with anyone defying the ban was punishable by death. All legal maritime trade was to pass through tribute missions under state control. This also fitted Hongwu's preference for agriculture; he favoured farming over all else, including the merchant sector. The ban was written into the Ancestral Injunctions, and continued to be broadly enforced for most of the rest of the dynasty.

The ban could not be fully enforced. Tribute trade was limited by rules on how often each state could send missions, so it fell short of market demand, at home and abroad. Smuggling continued, and later piracy was mostly carried out by Chinese dispossessed by the policy. The ban was lifted in 1567.

Legacy for later voyages

Hongwu's reign left the diplomatic apparatus that his successors used. These were the tributary protocols, the tally system, the vassal relationship with Ryukyu, and the Fujian shipbuilding and seafaring communities. The Yongle Emperor used these in the early fifteenth century to send Zheng He's fleets to Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean and beyond. Those expeditions were an expansion of the tributary diplomacy Hongwu had defined, not a departure from it.

Family, Succession and Death

Empress Ma and the imperial household

Zhu Yuanzhang married the future Empress Ma in 1352, and she remained his principal wife until her death in 1382. The marriage is dated to 1352, and she died in 1382. Traditional accounts present her as a moderating influence. In these stories she intercedes for officials and scholars facing punishment and shares the privations of the early campaigns. Such anecdotes come from sources written after her death, and they may have been shaped by the later image of the "virtuous empress". Even so, the Ming tradition consistently links her death with the harsher phase of the reign, including the purges of the 1380s and 1390s. She was posthumously styled Xiaocigao and was buried in the mausoleum that later received her husband.

The emperor had many secondary consorts, including, according to some accounts, Korean and Mongol women. He is credited with 26 sons and 16 daughters. Empress Ma's sons included the heir Zhu Biao and the princes of Qin, Jin and Yan, the last being Zhu Di, the future Yongle Emperor. Zhu Yuanzhang's genealogical and ritual regulations, set out in the Huang Ming Zuxun, fixed the status of imperial sons and daughters and the allowances paid to them. The princely appanages that resulted are treated in the section on the military system. The traditional accounts also report that dozens of his consorts were made to accompany him in death. The numbers vary from source to source, and later Ming rulers did not keep the practice.

The succession crisis

Zhu Biao, born in 1355, was named heir when the dynasty was founded in 1368. He received a thorough Confucian education, but he died in 1392 at the age of thirty-six, during his father's lifetime. The exact date was 17 May 1392. His death upset the plans the emperor had made for an orderly transfer of power. Other sons were considered, but the older princes were disqualified or already dead. Zhu Shuang, Prince of Qin, was briefly regarded as a possible heir, but his violent temper and abuses of power ruled him out. He died in 1395, and Zhu Gang, Prince of Jin, died in March 1398. This left Zhu Di as the senior prince with extensive military experience on the northern frontier. The emperor nevertheless held to lineal succession through the eldest son's line. He named Zhu Biao's son Zhu Yunwen as his successor. The choice kept the principle of primogeniture, but it passed the throne to a young man with little military experience, while his uncles commanded armies on the frontier.

Death and the Jingnan campaign

The Hongwu Emperor died on 24 June 1398 at the age of 69, and he was buried at Xiaoling on 30 June. His grandson was enthroned as the Jianwen Emperor on 30 June 1398. The new government, advised by officials such as Qi Tai and Huang Zicheng, moved quickly to reduce the power of the princes. In 1398–1399 it deposed or arrested several, among them the princes of Zhou, Qi, Dai and Xiang. In 1399 Zhu Di began an uprising in the name of the "Jingnan" ("clearing the court's side"), claiming to be removing evil ministers in accordance with the Ancestral Injunctions. The war lasted three years. Zhu Di won key victories on the northern plains and then bypassed the fortified cities in a march on the capital. The Jianwen Emperor's reign ended on 13 July 1402. Nanjing fell when one of the gates was opened to Zhu Di's forces, and fires broke out in the palace. His fate remains uncertain, and rumours that he escaped persisted for generations. Zhu Di took the throne as the Yongle Emperor on 17 July 1402. His government restored the Hongwu era name for the remainder of that year, which implied that the Jianwen reign had not been legitimate. The Veritable Records of the Hongwu and Jianwen reigns were then revised accordingly.

The Xiaoling Mausoleum

Work on the Xiaoling Mausoleum began in 1381. Empress Ma was buried there in 1382, and it became the emperor's own tomb. It lies at the foot of Purple Mountain, east of Nanjing. The complex has two parts. One is the Sacred Way approach, and the other is the main tomb area. The Sifangcheng ("Square City") pavilion near the entrance holds a stele erected on the order of Zhu Di, praising his father's merits. The Sacred Way is not straight, unlike those of later imperial tombs. One tradition says the route bends to avoid the tomb of the Three Kingdoms ruler Sun Quan, which Zhu Yuanzhang chose not to disturb. The stone figures along it are of lions, camels, mythical beasts, horses and elephants. Further along are stone statues of civil and military officials, and then the burial mound with the "Minglou" tower in front. Xiaoling set the pattern of layout and ritual that later Ming and Qing imperial tombs followed. The later Ming emperors, from Yongle on, were buried near Beijing instead.

UNESCO first inscribed the "Imperial Tombs of the Ming and Qing Dynasties" in 2000. In 2003 the listing was extended to include the Xiaoling Tomb in Nanjing and the Ming Tombs in Changping District, Beijing. The Xiaoling site is now part of the World Heritage List under that name.

Historiography and Legacy

Traditional Chinese judgments of the Hongwu Emperor set real achievements against real cruelty. The Ming History (Mingshi), compiled under the Qing and completed in 1739, praised his military and civil accomplishments in terms that put him above the founders of the Han and Tang. Ming writers and later Confucian critics also condemned the mass executions, the flaying of corrupt officials, and the extra-legal punishments in the Great Warnings. The Kangxi Emperor visited the Xiaoling Mausoleum in 1684 and left an inscription commending Zhu's governance, which showed that a Manchu dynasty could still claim him as a model founder. The standard image was of a ruler who relieved the peasantry, disciplined the bureaucracy and rebuilt the state after the Yuan collapse, but who did so through terror.

In the twentieth century the anti-Mongol side of his career made him a nationalist symbol. Many Chinese hailed him as a national hero, among them Sun Yat-sen, because the Ming ended roughly a century of Mongol rule and restored Han Chinese rule. Wu Han's biography of Zhu Yuanzhang is the best-known Chinese study of this period. It first appeared in the 1940s and was revised and republished in 1949. The 1949 Beijing edition was long described as the most authoritative account of his life and career. The earlier version was often read as a veiled attack on the authoritarianism of Chiang Kai-shek's government. The post-1949 versions fit the founder more closely into a Marxist framework of peasant revolt, in which the rebel who rose from the poorest class is also the one who rebuilds a landlord-bureaucratic state. Wu Han was later denounced during the Cultural Revolution and died in custody in 1969. The class-based reading of Zhu lost its dominance in China after the 1970s.

Western and later Chinese scholars have moved away from both the heroic and the villainous portraits. Studies such as Edward Farmer's Early Ming Government present him as a "shrewd and far-sighted legislator" who made rules for every social group, including the imperial family, eunuchs, officials, nobles and commoners. Other historians stress his paranoia and despotism. Ray Huang argued that the founder's design for a self-sufficient agrarian society was poorly suited to a later, commercialising empire. Modern scholars also treat the traditional casualty figures, such as tens of thousands killed in the Hu Weiyong and Lan Yu cases, as rough estimates shaped by later Ming and Qing writers. Work on local community institutions, such as village schools and the lijia system, has shown how far his regulations actually reached.

The long-term institutional effects were large. The central government he shaped lasted through the Ming and Qing until the 1911 revolution. Abolishing the chancellorship in 1380 made the emperor his own prime minister. His successors could not keep up with that workload, so the Grand Secretaries grew from advisers into an informal inner cabinet. Hongwu restrained the eunuchs, but his successors let them take over the palace functions that the missing chancellor had once handled. The Embroidered Uniform Guard and later eunuch security agencies grew into the notorious secret police of mid-Ming politics. The Treasure Note lost its value, and by the mid-fifteenth century the economy was moving toward silver, which later required the tax reforms of the sixteenth century. The maritime prohibition (haijin) and the ban on private overseas trade were enforced unevenly, and they helped create the smuggling and wokou problem that lasted until the restrictions were relaxed in 1567. The hereditary military households of the wei-suo system decayed within a century.

Comparisons with other founders usually begin with Liu Bang, the only other major dynastic founder of commoner origin, who also eliminated many of his former comrades-in-arms. The contrast with Zhao Kuangyin is also familiar. He is credited with removing his generals' commands in 961 by negotiation and pensions rather than executions, and that precedent for civilian control shaped the Song. Against this background Zhu's treatment of the Huai-region veterans looks especially harsh.

In popular culture he appears both as the beggar-monk who became emperor and as a tyrant. Folk legends tied him to strategists such as Liu Ji and to prophecy. Jin Yong's martial-arts novel The Heaven Sword and Dragon Saber gives him a villainous role as the man who takes over the rebel Ming Cult. Television dramas have returned to his story repeatedly. One example is Chuanqi Huangdi Zhu Yuanzhang, a CCTV series first broadcast in 2006 with Chen Baoguo in the title role. The series is centred on his 1382 return to Fengyang and his visit to the Huangjue Temple. In Fengyang, memory of him is divided between local pride in the "Middle Capital" and the Imperial Mausoleum and a well-known folk ditty about the region's poverty. In Nanjing, the Ming city walls and Xiaoling are central to the city's heritage identity.

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