The vast Red Turban rebellion that, so far as we know, first appeared inKiangsi and Hunan in the 1330s spread within a dozen years throughouthalf of China. It was not like the equally vast T’ai-p’ing rebellion of thenineteenth century; the T’ai-p’ing movement was created in one place,produced one unified corps of leaders, and spread from its point of originby force of arms across many provinces, like a fierce storm cutting a greatswath as it moved. In contrast, promoters of Red Turban doctrine movedclandestinely into several provinces, especially those that were then suffer-ing from famine and epidemics. Their religious teachings spontaneously generated the formation of local sects with broad popular followings. Thepractices of those sects, especially their suspicious-looking (but probablynot orgiastic) nocturnal gatherings of men and women to burn incense andworship the messianic figure of the Buddha Maitreya, were looked upon bygovernment and elite society as heterodox and socially dangerous. Thatforced them to adopt forms of conspiratorial, underground organization.Various politically motivated leaders may have been waiting for this devel-opment. They were now able to take over, making these forms the vehiclefor achieving their goals. Thus, the Red Turbans were from the start amany-headed movement, and in each place they developed strong localcolor.
Eventually there resulted two large, broadly organized wings of rebel-lion. There were what we may call the southern (or western) Red Turbans,centered originally in southern Hupeh. Expanding from this base, theycame to dominate the central and upper Yangtze regions. The other wingwas the northern (or eastern) Red Turban rebellion, centered in the HuaiRiver drainage of modern Anhwei province. This movement spread east-ward into southern Hopei, Shantung, and northern Kiangsu, and westwardinto Honan. These two main arms of the rebellion shared a doctrinalidentity but lacked organizational integration; eventually they warredagainst each other as Chu Yuan-chang, an offshoot of the northern wing,came into conflict with Ch’en Yu-liang of the southern branch.
Furthermore, within each wing there were separate groupings, retainingfeatures of their distinctive local origins and often hostile to each other.The Red Turban phenomenon was thus complex and varied, some of itsbranches eventually different enough to stand as independent sectarianmovements, like that of Ming Yii-chen in Szechwan. But there were otherdoctrine-inspired rebellions or local uprisings that appear to have had dis-tinct characteristics and different origins. Those have largely sunk fromview, in part because traditional historians, generally sympathetic neitherto folk religions nor to rebellions, have tended to apply the Red Turbanlabel to all of them indiscriminately (and have even extended it to nonsec-tarian rebels in some instances).
Here our concern is with those large and important movements thattruly belong to authentic Red Turban history. The broader title “sectarianmovements” is used for this section as a reminder that the Red Turbanswere not the only sectarian rebels on the scene in fourteenth-century China.
In recent years historians of China, seeking a folk hero in the great popularrebellions of the fourteenth century, have resurrected a shadowy figure fromthe margins of history and have credited him with having founded the RedTurban movement and led its armies. He is P’eng Ying-yii, a Buddhist monk from Yiian-chou prefecture (in modern Kiangsi, on the Hunanborder), who is credited with having turned the centuries-old Maitreya cultof the White Lotus sect into a potent movement of social action.2′ Howeverfar-fetched that may be as social history, this strained search for the roots ofabortive class warfare in the late Yuan period has turned up valuable newinformation on the Red Turban rebellion. Whether P’eng himself was theindividual responsible for welding together elements of folk religion and fordisseminating a uniform doctrine throughout several provinces from thecentral Yangtze to Anhwei remains unclear, yet something like that in facthappened.
P’eng first appears in 1338 as the doctrinal leader of an uprising inYiian-chou. At this time a rebel leader, Chou Tzu-wang, was proclaimedemperor; he was quickly apprehended by the regional authorities andexecuted. P’eng fled northward to the region along the Huai and thelower Yellow rivers, where he is said to have been concealed in the homesof humble people for several years, and where he spread the teaching ofthe forthcoming descent to earth of Maitreya, the Buddha of wealth andthe great king of radiance, who would bring the millennium to thesuffering earth.22 Red Turban doctrines appeared in many places in theHuai region from 1340 onward. In 1341 alone, “bandit uprisings by poorfarmers” were reported in more than three hundred places in Hunan andHupeh, Shantung, and southern Hopei.23 The following decade was tur-bulent, particularly in the two regions of the central Yangtze and theHuai where the Red Turbans were on the rise.
In 1351, 150,000 workers were mobilized from among the poor farmingpopulation to perform labor on a vast project to rechannel the Yellow Riverand to reopen the Grand Canal where the two intersected in westernShantung. (That was the great engineering triumph of ChiaLu, hydraulicsexpert, general, and governor.) Han Shan-t’ung was a long-time sectarianleader of Luan-ch’eng (in modern northeast Hopei). His grandfather isidentified as a White Lotus sect leader who had “burned incense anddeluded the masses,” for which crimes he was exiled to the southern tip ofHopei. There, two generations later, we find his grandson a prominent RedTurban leader, the presumption being that the White Lotus family heritagehad merged with the similar, but politically more focused, doctrines of P’eng Ying-yii. Han Shang-t’ung had acquired a political advisor, LiuFu-t’ung, who was to become the driving force in the northern Red Turbaninsurrection. Liu plotted to recruit followers from among the large assem-blage of disgruntled, disaster-afflicted workers on the Yellow River project.He was very successful. An explosive spread of Red Turban activity is observ-able from 1351. Han Shan-t’ung was captured and executed, but his wifeand young son, Han Lin-erh, dubbed the “Young Prince of Radiance” butalso held to be a descendant of the Sung emperors, escaped in Liu Fu-t’ung’scustody. As the protector of the figurehead leader of the revolt, Liu estab-lished a “capital” at Ying-chou, in modern western Anhwei at the Hunanborder, proclaiming it the center of the Red Turban rebel government.
The southern Red Turbans, 1351 — 1363During that same summer of 1351, P’eng Ying-yii or his principal militaryfollower, Tsou P’u-sheng, found the figurehead leader for a new Red Tur-ban uprising in the person of a complacent cloth peddler of heroic statureand mien and safely lacking in other leadership qualities; his name was HsuShou-hui. Several reports of P’eng Ying-yii’s capture and death date fromthe end of 1348 to late in 1352, and one says he was killed by Ch’enYu-liang (see below) in 1358.24 All the accounts are impossible to verify onthe basis of information currently available. It is difficult to believe that hewas not the authority figure who anointed Hsu Shou-hui for the role ofT’ien-wan emperor, but the facts are obscure.
In September the insurgents, led by Tsou P’u-sheng, captured the south-ern Hupeh district city of Ch’i-shui and proclaimed it the capital of a RedTurban dynasty called T’ien-wan (Heaven Consummated), with the impos-ing peddler as its emperor. A new calendar was devised, using the reignname Chih-p’ing (Equable Governing). The new rebellion expanded to thesouth and briefly held Han-yang and the neighboring cities of Han-k’ouand Wu-ch’ang in 1352, and then was driven off. Tsou P’u-sheng wassucceeded as the rebels’ military leader in 1355 by a considerably moreaggressive generalissimo, Ni Wen-chun, who retook Han-yang early in1356 and moved the seat of the rebel government there. From its base atthis strategically important city at the confluence of the Yangtze and theHan rivers, the T’ien-wan dynasty’s territories now expanded rapidly. Latein 1357 Ni Wen-chiin plotted unsuccessfully to assassinate Hsu Shou-huiand take his place; as a consequence he was murdered and succeeded by anew military leader for the entire southern Red Turban rebellion, Ch’en Yu-liang. Under Ch’en’s vigorous leadership, the territories were expandedeastward into Anhwei and Kiangsi and northwest up the Han valley.Another commander, Ming Yii-chen, led the rebel armies into Szechwan,campaigning through the Yangtze gorges upriver to capture Chungking.Within less than two years Ming Yii-chen held all of Szechwan.
Ch’en Yu-liang, like Ni Wen-chiin, was unwilling to remain the actualpower under a useless figurehead like Hsu Shou-hui. In 1360 he suc-ceeded in assassinating Hsu and seizing his throne. He renamed thesouthern Red Turban dynasty the Han and changed the reign name toTa-i (Great Righteousness). He then immediately launched an attack onNanking, but was repulsed and returned to his capital at Wu-ch’angacross the Yangtze from Hsu’s former capital at Han-yang. (Today thethree cities of Han-yang, Han-k’ou, and Wu-ch’ang form the municipal-ity of Wu-han.)
Under Ch’en Yu-liang, a ruthless and restlessly brilliant leader, thesouthern Red Turban state grew rapidly and gained great military power.Expanding relentlessly downriver toward Chu Yuan-chang’s growing butsmaller base at Nanking, Ch’en finally challenged him in 1360. Defeatedthen and ejected from his Kiangsi base the following year, he made hisultimate effort in 1363. Ch’en moved an immense armada of fighting shipsand large armies down the Yangtze and into Lake P’o-yang at Nan-ch’ang,just west of the lake’s southern tip. There, after a long summer’s battle towhich Chu brought most of his water and landborne forces from Nanking,Ch’en was defeated, somewhat by chance, and was killed during the battle,leaving a child as heir and a leaderless state. Chu Yuan-chang still adheredto the northern Red Turban leadership of the Sung dynasty of Han Lin-erh,the “Young Prince of Radiance,” who had been Chu’s ward since thecapture and death of Liu Fu-t’ung. Chu controlled the entire Yangtzedrainage from the gorges west of I-ch’ang in Hupeh all the way toCh’ang-chou, halfway between Nanking and Soochow. The southern arm ofthe Red Turbans had been eliminated.25
The Hsia state of Ming Yii-chen in Szechwan, 1357—1371Ming Yii-chen had taken the southern Red Turban banner into Szechwanin 1357 and conquered that rich, semi-isolated region from incompetentMongol defenders and bandit remnants of the northern Red Turban armies.
He remained loyal to Hsu Shou-hui and did not acknowledge the usurper,Ch’en Yu-liang. He declared Szechwan the independent Red Turban king-dom of Hsia but came under the strong influence of a learned Confucianscholar-official named Liu Chen, who for some years dominated his politicalestablishment, guiding it into curiously antique institutional adaptations.The history of the Hsia state has been little studied; its guiding spiritseems to have remained essentially Buddhist. Ming Yii-chen reigned until1366, when he died of an illness at the age of thirty-five. He had governedprudently, had recruited learned scholars to serve him, and had won theconfidence of the people. But he failed to set into motion any long-rangeplans for the expansion of his state. An attempt to conquer Yunnan fromthe Mongol overlords there failed because it was undermanned and poorlyplanned. After his death he was succeeded by a nine-year-old son, MingSheng. His regime then lost all semblance of forceful, unified leadership,and existed passively until it readily surrendered to invading Ming armiesin 1371.
The northern Red Turban rebellion, 1351—1367The narrative of Red Turban activity must now return to Han Lin-erhand Liu Fu-t’ung at Ying-chou in 1351. In comparison to the southernarm, the northern Red Turban movement retained a stronger ideologicalcontent and a larger measure of nominal adherence to its figureheademperor. Han Lin-erh was declared the emperor of a restored Sung dy-nasty at Po-chou (modern Po-hsien in western Anhwei) on 16 March1355, adopting the reign title Lung-feng (Dragon Phoenix). His northernrebellion was also able to retain a more secure hold over its followers thandid the southern branch. One plausible reason is that Liu Fu-t’ung, themastermind of the movement, retained ideological control for eight years,whereas P’eng Ying-yii had disappeared from the scene in the south.Another is that the ideologically symbolic child-emperor survived until1367; its claim to be a Sung restoration lent a kind of legitimacy andcredibility in the common mind as well as a deeply felt anti-Mongol focusto the movement. The southern Red Turbans projected vaguer ideologicaland political claims, and the cynicism induced by the successively at-tempted and ultimately successful assassination of Hsu Shou-hui, causingdefections and factional struggles, further weakened its psychologicalcoherence.
On the other hand, Liu Fu-t’ung was not successful as a dictator; he could not impose a tight organizational integration on the northern Red Turbans.He clung instead to the ideological unity deriving from Han Lin-erh’smultiple claims as the Sung successor, fourth-generation White Lotusleader, Red Turban emperor, and “Young Prince of Radiance,” the fore-runner of the soon to be incarnated Maitreya Buddha who representedpowerful Buddhist and Manichean folk religious elements. Liu Fu-t’ung didnot wield strong military control and was only briefly successful militarily.On 11 June 1358 he led his army in capturing K’ai-feng. From 960 until itfell to the Jurchen in 1126, this city had been the capital of the NorthernSung dynasty, from whose penultimate emperor Han Lin-erh claimed to bethe tenth-generation descendant. In a surge of support following the victory,he was able to order commanders loyal to him to take important targets inAnhwei and Shantung and to launch an offensive under Mao Kuei againstTa-tu. But on 10 September 1359 Chaghan Temiir’s counteroffensive inHonan recaptured K’ai-feng. Liu and his Sung court were driven back first totheir previous capital, the peripheral and strategically unimportant districttown of Po-chou, and later to An-feng (both in modern western Anhwei).They remained there until Chang Shih-ch’eng sent an army against An-fengin 1363.
The expansive phase of military activity directed by Liu Fu-t’ung from acentral capital of the northern Red Turbans thus had more or less come toan end by 1359. After that, despite the widely acknowledged sovereigntyof Han Lin-erh among the rebels, military and political leadership wasfractured and never again effectively integrated. Important leaders andbases claiming to share the Red Turban banner, constantly warring amongthemselves, existed in many locales throughout the Huai region until thelate 1350s: at Hsii-chou in northern Kiangsu, under Sesame Seed Li, until1352; in northwest Honan and Shensi from 1356 to 1359 until ChaghanTemiir pushed them on into Szechwan; at I-tu in Shantung from 1357 to1362; and in Chahar and Manchuria from 1358 to 1362 in the aftermath ofMao Kuei’s unsuccessful campaign against Ta-tu. In short, in the early1350s they created a line from Shantung southwest to the Anhwei-Honanborder cutting North China off from the Yangtze. At times they expandednorth from that line until Chaghan Temiir checked them between 1358and 1362. After that, the important development for history, and particu-larly for the emergence of the Ming dynasty, is the collapse of Red Turbanpower along that geographic zone, and the rise of the semi-autonomoussouthward extension of its power into the lower Yangtze region, centered atNanking from 1356 onward. For that story, we must turn to the career ofChu Yuan-chang.
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