The founding of the Ming dynasty was the end product of the anti-Yuanpeasant rebellions of the 1350s. The rebellions themselves were the finalstage of a long history of Chinese resentment against Mongol rule, ex-pressed at the elite level by reluctance to serve in the government and atthe popular level by clandestine sectarian activity. The occasion for therebellions was the failure of the Yuan regime to cope with widespreadfamine in the 1340s. By the time those occurred, paradoxically the Yuanruling elite had largely come to an accommodation with the native Chinesepolitical tradition.
The rebellions inaugurated a period of political flux whose ultimateoutcome might have been a divided China rather than a reunified state.The original rebel movement destroyed the foundations of Yuan authoritywithout being able to erect a stable successor regime. The improvisedmilitia armies which then destroyed the main body of the original rebelmovement in the North China plain and in the central Yangtze, togetherwith the principal rebel survivors of this destruction, mostly became thenuclei of regional warlord regimes after 1353. Chu Yuan-chang, the futureMing founder, gained a decisive victory in 1363; he exploited his victoryby conquering and consolidating his control over the middle and lowerYangtze regions, a process completed by the capture of Soochow in 1367.Afterward Ming military expeditions rapidly conquered the rest of Chinaproper. Szechwan was annexed in 1371. In 1372 a serious Ming defeat atthe hands of the Mongols marked the end of the rapid phase of Mingexpansion north of the Great Wall. The conquest of the southwest in 1382marked the end of the military consolidation of the Ming state.
The breakdown of centralized Yuan authority, with the consequent milita-rization of Chinese society, the fragmentation of regionalized political power, and the widespread emergence of rebellious movements have beendescribed in Chapter 1. Against that rapidly changing background, theYuan government’s attempts to recover its authority and to restore orderthroughout Chinese society led to military policies largely ad hoc in natureand dependent on the shifting personalities dominating its government atTa-tu (on the site of present-day Peking).
Since 1340, the chancellor dominating the Yuan central government hadbeen Toghto of the Merkid tribe of the Mongol nation; he had come topower in a coup supported by the emperor Toghon Temiir (r. 1333—70).Intellectually, Toghto supported Confucian concepts of the state in thecontest between them and traditional Mongolian values. In the context ofthe “Confucian” statecraft of that time, Toghto stood for vigorous govern-ment action “to benefit the people and profit the state.” As chancellor, heattempted to carry out a program of repairing and extending the GrandCanal, which would have permitted the capital, Ta-tu, to be securelysupplied with the surplus grain grown in the Yangtze delta and shipped byeither the canal or the coastal sea route. The failure of the project as firstinitiated and the disorders and natural disasters accompanying it allowedToghto’s regime to be severely criticized by those who adopted the alterna-tive Confucian perspective of opposition to such programs. Faced with thisopposition, Toghto resigned in June 1344.
In the summer of 1344 the Yellow River began to shift its course,breaking through the dikes into the areas of west and northwest Shantungand eventually establishing a new course flowing into the sea north of thepeninsula. Previously the Yellow River had joined its waters with theHuai. After the change of course in 1344 repeated droughts afflicted theHuai River valley in northern Honan, northern Anhwei, and Kiangsu,while to the north of the afflicted region flooding made the Grand Canalimpassable.
The area affected by drought was a center of popular resistance to Yuanrule. This region had been devastated by the Chin invasions of the 1120s.A century later it was exposed to the full force of the Mongol conquest,thus deriving little benefit from the more moderate course introducedbetween the 1260s and the 1290s by Khubilai Khan as he completed theMongol conquest of China. It was again subjected to destructive warfare inKhubilai’s suppression of Li T’an’s revolt in the 1260s. While the Chineseliterary elite sulked and the clerks and soldiers collaborated, the farmingmasses could express their resentment of Mongol rule only through thetraditional routes of banditry and secret society activity, organized aroundheterodox religious expression mixed, in this case, with subversive advocacyof the restoration of the Sung dynasty.
Toghto’s resignation in 1344 had been prompted by popular resistanceto his Grand Canal project, but the succeeding conservative regime domi-nated by Berke Bukha had no program for dealing with the drought, flood,and famine of the following years. In 1348 a more immediate crisis claimedthe court’s attention. With the Grand Canal abandoned and unusable, thecapital depended on grain transported by the sea route from the Yangtzedelta. These shipments had reached a high of 3.3. million tan (piculs) in1329, only to drop to 2.6 million in 1342 and still less in following years.The Mongols had always been dependent on conquered and allied peoplesfor their naval operations. In 1348 Fang Kuo-chen rebelled in Chekiang(see Chapter 1). Fang interdicted most of the grain shipments with hispirate fleet and defeated all the government expeditions sent against him.The Berke Bukha regime tried to influence him by allowing him to “sur-render” nominally, with high official titles, but Fang retained control ofhis fleet, his offshore island bases in the Chou-shan archipelago, and hisstranglehold over the grain shipments.
After a year-long campaign denouncing the Berke Bukha leadership, inAugust 1349 Toghto returned to power, once again with the active supportof the emperor Toghon Temiir. For a time there was no change in thegovernment’s treatment of Fang Kuo-chen, despite the use Toghto hadmade of that issue in bringing down Berke Bukha. Toghto’s basic policy,however, was to outflank Fang Kuo-chen by reviving and finishing theGrand Canal project. The times were now less propitious, in view of whatthe Huai region had suffered since 1344, but something clearly had to bedone; and even the conservative opposition now favored rebuilding theGrand Canal.
In April 1351, Toghto finally felt strong enough to announce his own,more comprehensive plan for accomplishing this. From then until Decem-ber, 20,000 troops and 150,000 commoners from the Huai area worked onthe diking and dredging under the direction of the brilliant water conser-vancy expert Chia Lu. This time their efforts were successful, confining theYellow River in its new course north of the Shantung peninsula and dredg-ing out or bypassing the Grand Canal sections that had become filled withsilt. Toghto’s conservative critics had pointed out the danger of popularrebellion if so many peasants were assembled for public works, especially inan area already known as a center of antidynastic agitation. They werecorrect. Rebel armies seized the opportunity to rouse large popular follow-ings in the Huai region. They put on the symbolic red turbans and came tobe known as the Red Armies or as the Incense Armies, from their Bud-dhist-derived folk rituals.
Initially, the Yuan regular forces were outnumbered and their com-manders were surprised by the scale and ferocity of the Red Turban out-break. Even so, they might have been able to cope with the rebellion hadthey been able to hold the prefectural cities. Here the consistent Yuanpolicy of allowing city walls to deteriorate and not repairing breaches in thewalls of cities originally taken by assault played them false. Temporarilyinvincible, the rebel armies overran city after city. In 1352 one columnfrom the southern T’ien-wan Red Turban revolt in Hu-kuang marchedwest, taking Wu-ch’ang, Han-yang, and other cities farther upstream;another force conquered most of central Kiangsi, starting from Chiu-chiang, leaving only the provincial capital of Lung-hsing (Nan-ch’ang) inYuan hands. Liu Fu-t’ung’s armies overran southern Honan. P’eng Ta andChao Chiin-yung rebelled at P’ei in north Kiangsu and captured Hsii-chou,thus cutting the Grand Canal. By the end of 1352 the area originallyinfluenced by the White Lotus underground movement was in rebellionand out of central government control. Even though the White Lotusmovement was unable to convert its temporary success into a firm territo-rial base for a unified alternative to the Yuan, in the end the reestablish-ment of local control based on refortified prefectural cities did not benefitthe Yuan, but instead provided the basis for the various regionalist re-gimes, all of which were either avowedly rebellious or only nominally loyal.
In addition to the White Lotus rebel movement itself, two other types ofmilitarization arose out of the disorder in South China in the early 1350s.Locally disaffected elements not previously connected with the White Lotusfound this a convenient time to rebel, while locally dominant forces, in-cluding the Chinese literati elite, raised militia units to defend their imme-diate areas against rebels. In practice this secondary militarization tended tobe swept up into the main rebellion, and it added to the fragmentation ofthe Yuan empire.
After the initial rebel victories, newly raised Yuan armies were able todefeat the rebel movements and suppress most of them. In 1353 Yuantroops recovered Hangchow and the lesser prefectural cities of Chekiangand Kiangsi. Other Yuan armies recaptured Ch’i-shui, Wu-ch’ang andHan-yang, thus turning Hsu Shou-hui and the T’ien-wan leadership intofugitives in rural Hupeh. The original Red Turban movement on theNorth China plain also suffered setbacks, eventually losing everything butits capital, which had come to be located at the city of Po-chou in extremenorthwestern Anhwei.
The new Yuan armies that accomplished these feats were composedchiefly of Chinese, recruited and led at first mainly by Mongols and CentralAsians {se-mu jeri) long settled in rural China, together with their Chinesecollaborators. The Chinese literati elite felt bound to support the dynasty against a movement like the Red Turbans, but their support was passiveand lukewarm. The commanders of the new irregular armies were rewardedwhen they succeeded and not punished when they failed, in contrast to thedynasty’s regular military officers, who could expect punishment if theywere defeated. The danger of regional fragmentation among the pro-Yuanforces was offset, for the time being, by Toghto’s own success in dominat-ing the new armies, many of which were led by his relatives and proteges.
Toghto himself led the army directed against the main objective, therecovery of the Grand Canal. In October 1352 he recaptured Hsii-chou;P’eng Ta and Chao Chiin-yung escaped and fled south to Hao-chou,where their careers eventually intersected with the early phase of ChuYuan-chang’s rise to power. Toghto spent all of 1353 increasing andreorganizing his army and restoring routine administration. Late in 1354he moved against Chang Shih-ch’eng; within weeks Toghto had Changpenned within the walls of Kao-yu, which he waited to starve out. Theforces of the dynasty were poised to deliver the death blow to the rebelmovement.1
Spontaneous local militarization, directed at maintaining order and secu-rity, had been a widespread response to the outbreak of the Red Turbanrebellion. In one city, Hao-chou (Feng-yang) in central Anhwei, this re-sponse had more than a local significance because of the role played in it bythe Ming dynastic founder. In the spring of 1352 Kuo Tzu-hsing, SunTe-yai, and three others, with some support from the local elite, raisedmilitia forces and took control of the city. The arrival of the Hsii-chouWhite Lotus rebel leaders P’eng Ta and Chao Chiin-yung, in flight fromToghto’s offensive and quarrelling with each other, associated Hao-choustill more clearly in Yuan eyes with the general Red Turban movement.Kuo attached himself to P’eng, while his four colleagues looked to Chao forleadership. Cities ruled by such unstable military coalitions would be com-mon in China until 1368.
On 15 April 1352, as described in Chapter 1, Chu Yuan-chang came toHao-chou. Chu soon recruited a force of twenty-four childhood compan-ions, all of whom were to become important Ming commanders. By early1353 Chu had expanded this force to 700 men and had become Kuo’s mosttrusted subordinate.
Chu’s early career offers a glimpse of the lower end of the process of armyformation then going on throughout China; he was exceptional only inhaving few relatives. Armies were held together at the lower levels by family relationships and at the intermediate and higher levels by bonds ofpersonal loyalty and trust between commanders and their immediate supe-riors and subordinates. If these personal ties were strained or broken,subordinates might defect with their units. Military planning thus had todeal with essentially political relationships in both one’s own and theenemy armies, as well as with more narrowly military considerations. Mili-tary command in the basic units tended to become hereditary, while themore important warlords tried to integrate their armies by promoting theirown relatives and most trusted original followers to higher positions aslarger numbers of troops joined them.
The rivalry between P’eng and Chao led to open fighting among theHao-chou leadership. Kuo Tzu-hsing was kidnapped by Chao Chiin-yungand Sun Te-yai, who held him prisoner. When Chu Yuan-chang returnedto the city, he and Kuo’s sons raided Sun’s house and released Kuo. Kuobecame more dependent on Chu as a result. Yuan troops blockaded the cityfor several months in 1352—53, during which time the Hao-chou leadershad to suspend their quarrelling.
On the broader canvas of Yuan activities against the rebels, Toghto’scounteroffensive gathered momentum, and by December 1354 Kao-yu wason the point of falling. By permitting the city to starve rather than takingit by assault, Toghto gave his enemies at court an opportunity to impeachhim for dilatoriness. In January 1355 an imperial decree reached Toghto’sheadquarters. It dismissed him from all his offices and assigned his troopsto other generals. His subordinates urged him to rebel, but Toghto obeyedthe emperor. The army besieging Kao-yu promptly fell apart, as did thewhole Toghto edifice of newly recruited armies.
Why the emperor dismissed Toghto can only be conjectured. The initia-tive in Yuan politics since 1328 had rested with the chancellors, andToghon Temiir had seemed to accept this fact since coming to the throne.Toghto had been granted nearly every title and honor the emperor couldgive. Already dangerously powerful, Toghto would have also become super-fluous with the suppression of the rebellions. The court, however, waswrong to believe that these had in fact been suppressed. After the dismissalof Toghto the Yuan could no longer control even their own military forces,let alone the revived rebel movement. By the end of 1355 regionalismbased on autonomous military power was the order of the day everywhere inChina.
His surrender to the Yuan late in 1357 (see Chapter 1) and its imme-diate consequences stabilized Chang Shih-ch’eng’s position. He controlledSoochow, Hangchow, and six other densely populated prefectures south ofthe Yangtze, and his authority extended north of the river as far as Shantung, In the 1393 census his former domains had a total registeredpopulation of about 10,300,000. He received a high honorific title fromthe Yuan and agreed to send to the capital an annual grain tribute of110,000 tan. This was transported north in ships of Fang Kuo-chen’s fleetuntil 1363, when Chang severed his connection with the Yuan and pro-claimed himself Prince of Wu. (Wu will be used here as a designation ofconvenience for his regime, which after 1357 acted as a satiated regionalpower.) Chang Shih-te had been the source of such vision as the Changfamily had possessed, and after his death Chang Shih-ch’eng was happy tolive as a prince in Soochow, making no serious effort to seize supremepower. There was, after all, little reason to believe that China could soonbe reunified. Another brother, Chang Shih-hsin, became generalissimo ofthe Wu armies; three other generals —Li Po-sheng, Lii Chen, and Hsu I —held the major field commands and are described as the “claws and teeth”of Wu. Despite Chang Shih-ch’eng’s passivity, the population under thecontrol of the Wu regime gave it great potential military power. Wu waspolitically strong as well. Chang’s clear lack of White Lotus connectionsand his surrender to the Yuan, coupled with the promotion of Confucian-ism by the Yuan dynasty in its last phase, made Wu the preferred choiceof the scholar-gentry of south China.
With most of the empire either in outright rebellion or under thecontrol of regionalists like Chang who retained locally generated tax reve-nues to support their own armies, the Yuan capital became dependent onthe grain shipped from the south. Small compared to the amounts shippedfrom the south during the peak years of the Yuan system, this grainacquired great marginal importance because of the political, and thereforealso fiscal, disintegration of the 1350s. The Yuan court’s dependence onthe grain shipments added to the importance of Fang Kuo-chen. Fang in1356 established permanent control of three coastal prefectures of Chekiangwith a total population of about 2,500,000 in 1393. Each prefectural citywas ruled by a brother or a nephew, and the coastal territories providedbases and recruits for the Fang fleet, which continued to be supreme at sea.Fang’s Yuan-derived titles eventually rose to Duke of Ch’ii and provincialchancellor of the left. However, Fang’s long tenure (1348-68) in his posi-tion of coastal and naval influence really rested on the regional powerbalance in China and on the condition of the Grand Canal, rather than onFang’s own strength. This was evident to the scholar-gentry of Chekiang,who came to regard the court’s willingness to promote Fang after repeatedrebellions as clear evidence of lack of principle.
The dismissal of Toghto also permitted the T’ien-wan leadership to comeout in the open in the central Yangtze region. By this time the principal leader was a certain Ni Wen-chun, who continued to recognize Hsu Shou-hui as figurehead emperor. Much of Hupeh was reconquered from the Yuanin 1355. Hanyang became the T’ien-wan capital. By 1357 all of Hunan andHupeh were under T’ien-wan control. In that year a leader named MingYii-chen led a T’ien-wan fleet through the Yangtze gorges and conqueredSzechwan. Ming Yii-chen remained nominally loyal to Hsu Shou-hui untilHsu’s death in 1360, but in fact this was the beginning of the independentHsia regime that ruled Szechwan until the Ming conquest in 1371. Thegrowth of the T’ien-wan territories made the original group of T’ien-wanleaders headed by Tsou P’u-sheng resentful of Ni Wen-chiin’s dominance.To secure his own position, Ni attempted a coup to seize Hsu. Ni failed andhad to flee from Hanyang. In Huang-chou he was surprised and murdered bya trusted subordinate, Ch’en Yu-liang.
Ch’en came from a fishing family in Mien-yang and was one of fivesurviving brothers. He was literate enough to become a clerk to NiWen-chun when he joined the rebels; this was a steppingstone to thecommand of troops after he gained Ni’s confidence. As a commander heproved to be brave but also impulsive, headstrong, and brutal. He nowtook over what was left of Ni’s forces, ultimately gained recognition fromHsu Shou-hui, and made his base at Chiu-chiang in Kiangsi. From 1357to 1359 Ch’en concentrated on conquering Kiangsi, remaining autono-mous in the manner of Ming Yii-chen. Meanwhile Hsu Shou-hui reignedunder Tsou P’u-sheng’s tutelage at Hanyang.
Ch’en’s troops took both An-ch’ing and Nan-ch’ang in 1358, after whichthe remaining prefectural cities of northern and central Kiangsi either fellor recognized his rule. A force sent to invade Fukien was defeated by Ch’enYu-ting, who went on to seize supreme power in Fukien for himself. Anattempted invasion of Chekiang also failed. By mid-1359 Ch’en Yu-liangruled all but the extreme south of Kiangsi as well as eastern Hupeh and theAn-ch’ing region of Anhwei. The territories of Chu Yuan-chang and Ch’enYu-ting blocked his expansion eastward, while marching west would haveled to outright civil war within the T’ien-wan “empire.” As it turned out,however, the seeds of the great Yangtze River conflict of 1360 through1365 were sown in An-ch’ing.
The fishing villages of Lake Ch’ao, just north of the Yangtze in centralAnhwei, had fought in the earlier phase of the rebellion. Their leaderChao P’u-sheng, commonly called Two-sword Chao, had been a secretsociety leader even before these uprisings and had known P’eng Ying-yii(see Chapter 1). However, as the Yuan empire began to break up, a localmilitarist named Tso Chun-pi took control of Lu-chou and put pressureon the Lake Ch’ao fishermen, inducing them to migrate. Some of them had joined Chu Yuan-chang, and their boats made possible his crossing ofthe Yangtze in 1355. However, the majority followed Chao P’u-shengand sailed upstream to join Ch’en Yu-liang and the southern Red Turbanrebellion. After capturing An-ch’ing, Ch’en put Chao in command there.Later in 1358 Chao captured Ch’ih-chou on the south bank of theYangtze in southwest Anhwei and from there attempted to overrun south-ern Anhwei. This conflicted with Chu Yuan-chang’s plans for expansion,and Chu sent his strongest commander, Hsu Ta, against Chao. Hsurecaptured Ch’ih-chou in 1359.
The no man’s land between Ch’en and Chu was fully divided betweenthe two warlords, who now had a common frontier. Chu was still lookingdownstream; his initial successes against Chang Shih-ch’eng had been soconsiderable that he still hoped to conquer all of the densely populateddelta region. Ch’en was also looking downstream toward Anhwei. Heintended to expand in this direction, but he no longer trusted ChaoP’u-sheng. In September 1359 Ch’en took his own fleet down to An-ch’ingand had his men cut down Two-sword Chao as the latter boarded theflagship for a conference. The Lake Ch’ao men sullenly accepted the loss oftheir leader and were amalgamated into Ch’en Yu-liang’s forces.
Meanwhile, other complicated evolutions ended by placing most of theT’ien-wan territories under Ch’en’s control. Hsu Shou-hui had wished totransfer his capital to Nan-ch’ang after that city fell. Ch’en put him off.The motives of Ch’en and Hsu do not survive in the sources; one presumesthat Ch’en wished to preserve his freedom of action and that Hsu had somegrievance against Tsou P’u-sheng and his supporters in southern Hupeh. Inany event, late in 1359 Hsu abruptly left Han-yang with his guards andretinue and sailed downstream. Ch’en received him at Chiu-chiang, butlocked his guards outside after Hsu had entered the city gate. Hsu wasplaced in confinement; Ch’en proclaimed himself Prince of Han and intimi-dated the other T’ien-wan leaders in Hunan and Hupeh into recognizinghis authority, though Ming Yii-chen in Szechwan still held aloof. By 1359Ch’en controlled or was acquiring control of areas whose 1393 populationwas over 14,000,000; his regime (Han) was thus potentially stronger thaneither Chu Yuan-chang’s (Ming) or Chang Shih-ch’eng’s (Wu). However,Ch’en was a year or two behind the others in the race to consolidateregional power, and his authority was grudgingly conceded by many localcommanders out of fear alone. Ch’en needed further victories to keep thisfear fresh, but this in turn made it difficult for him to integrate hiswidespread domains.2
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