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.
During 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.
That Chu Yuan-chang is the only founder of an imperial Chinese dynastyborn into a household of destitute farmers, thus coming from the bottomlayer of Chinese society, is one of the best known facts of Chinese history.Born on 21 October 1328 at Chung-li village in Hao-chou district (modernFeng-yang district of central Anhwei, just southeast of the important rail-road intersection and industrial city of Peng-pu), his earliest years were onesof great hardship. His parents and grandparents were tax defaulters who hadfled from place to place in the Huai region, seeking a place to scratch ameager livelihood from the drought- and epidemic-ridden land as tenantfarmers. He was the youngest surviving child among four sons and twodaughters. All but the eldest son had been adopted out or married off becausethe family could not feed them. By the 1330s the Huai region had becomethe cradle of the Red Turban rebellion, its messianic doctrines drawingsupport from the increasing misery experienced by hard-pressed people. Itwas believed that at the moment of greatest darkness and desolation, thelight of Manichean reversal would reappear, and the Maitreya Buddha wouldcome from the Western Paradise to rule in the world, bringing a dramati-cally Utopian reversal of men’s fortunes. The young Chu Yuan-chang’s ma-ternal grandfather, a fortuneteller and veteran of the Chinese army that hadresisted the final phase of the Mongol conquest in the 1270s, had filled theboy’s ears with wonderful stories about magical happenings and high adven-ture. Such was the environment of his earliest years.
In 1344, when Chu was sixteen, an epidemic accompanying a summer oflocusts and drought carried off most of his family —his father, mother, andmarried oldest brother still living at home —within the space of three weeksin May and June. His sister-in-law and her young son and one marriedbrother away from home were the only other survivors. The survivors weretoo poor to bury the dead properly, let alone to provide for ChuYuan-chang. Late in October, therefore, he was offered to a nearby Bud-dhist monastery as a novice to do menial work in fulfillment of a vow madeby his father when he had been a sickly infant. In the meantime he hadbecome a tall, sturdy youth, notable for a rugged pockmarked face domi-nated by a jutting jaw, features so strange that they aroused awe and wereseen to portend unusual qualities. Those he undoubtedly had, yet his risefrom destitute, illiterate farmer’s son to occupant of the imperial throne asthe founder of a great new dynasty is a story that would seem unreal asfiction.
Within a few weeks, in December of 1344, the monks at the Huang-chiieh Temple (or Yu-chiieh Temple, as it possibly was then known)26were forced to send all the novices out to beg for their food. Chu, so faras we know, wandered through the Huai region as a mendicant monk forthree years from 1345 to 1347, but it is also probable that he becamefamiliar with aspects of military life and may have served for some timein an army, possibly a Mongol army. Moreover, it is certain that he cameto know intimately the circumstances of rebellion and of its suppression.In 1347 or 1348 he returned to the temple, remaining there from aboutage twenty to twenty-four. At this time he seems to have been introducedto literacy and to the simple study of Buddhist scriptures. He had a goodmind and a powerful memory.
By 1352 rebellion was everywhere in the central Huai, taking manyforms, albeit mostly Red Turban. The district city of Hao-chou, the nexttown west of Chung-li village, was captured and held by a group of RedTurban adherents on 16 February 1352. Kuo Tzu-hsing (d. 1355), aleader of the insurgents, was the son of a fortuneteller and the blinddaughter of a rich man; the family is described as having been skillfulmoney-makers. Kuo was considered a courageous and able fighter, but aman of rash temper who did not get along well with others. Believing theMaitreya doctrine, he was convinced that the troubled times portendedgreat change. He had prepared for that by spending liberally in order togather a following of like-minded spirits and loyal fighters. Proclaimingthemselves commanders-in-chief, Kuo and four companions led their fol-lowers against Hao-chou. Kuo may have been the nominal leader, but theothers soon became defiant. The relations among them were unstable fromthe beginning.
The Yuan authorities did not immediately attempt to retake Hao-chou.Instead, they sent out undisciplined army units to raid innocent villages,burn Buddhist temples, and capture ordinary people whom they branded asRed Turbans in order to gain credit for their operations. Chu’s rural templelay in the fighting zone; it was burned and plundered by one side or theother in February 1352. Chu and the other monks and novices fled, butthen returned to the damaged buildings, having nowhere else to go. Helater wrote about the experience, saying that he received repeated messagesfrom friends within the rebel forces warning him of danger and urging himto join them. On 15 April the young monk, still six months from histwenty-fourth birthday, presented himself at the gates of nearby Hao-chouand asked to join Kuo Tzu-hsing’s command. That was a fortuitous turning point in his life. He quickly became a favored follower, trusted aide,corporal of a guard squad, and member of Kuo’s household. Kuo had twowives, the older the mother of two sons about Chu’s age. The younger wifepersuaded Kuo to attach this able young man more securely to their familyfortunes by marrying him to an adopted daughter. That young woman,then nineteen, was the daughter of a close friend named Ma who shortlybefore his death had entrusted his only child to Kuo. She was to becomethe future empress Ma. Chu’s relationship with the younger wife of KuoTzu-hsing was to become very important; eventually she sided with him indisputes with Kuo’s sons, and he took her daughter as his concubine.
Yuan forces sent by the court attempted to clear the central and easternHuai River region of rebels in 1352 and 1353. Toward the end of 1352they drove Sesame Seed Li from his base at Hsii-chou in northern Kiangsu,and early in 1353 two of his generals took refuge at Hao-chou, crowdingthe already strained resources of that small city. They used the title ofprince (wang) and arrogated to themselves seniority over Kuo and his fellowcommanders-in-chief. Factions developed. Kuo sided with one and wataken captive by the other. Chu Yuan-chang, returning from an expeditionin the field, discovered the situation. Taking Kuo’s younger wife and herchildren, he went to the camp of the other faction’s leader and was able tobring help that saved Kuo’s life.
From late in the winter of 1352 until June 1353, Hao-chou was sur-rounded by Yuan forces sent from Hsii-chou. The death of the Yuan fieldcommander, the famed hydraulic engineer Chia Lu (who in 1351 haddirected the Yellow River project) caused the siege to be lifted and savedthe Hao-chou base. Subsequently Chu left to return to his village, where herecruited a force of over 700 men led by twenty-four former friends andchildhood companions, including his future chief of staff, Hsu Ta. Thismilitary leadership group formed the core of his personal following for thenext twenty years. Throughout the following months he continued toparticipate in wide-ranging sorties and field commands, practicing general-ship and forming his own tactical sense. In the fall of 1353 Kuo Tzu-hsinggave him an independent commission, allowing him to escape the oppres-sive factional struggles at Hao-chou. This was the beginning of his inde-pendent career; he bore the title of guard commander.
During the campaigns that followed, he first captured the district townof Ting-yuan to the south. Proceeding even farther south, he gained alongthe way large numbers of conquered or defecting soldiers and won severalimportant victories. By the end of the year he was in possession ofCh’u-chou (near the Anhwei-Kiangsu border) and neighboring districts onthe north bank of the Yangtze. He remained there through 1354 and into the first half of 1355. It became his base camp, where he built his ownloyal army, said now to number 30,000, and began to assemble a localgoverning staff. Li Shan-ch’ang (1314—90), the first of his advisors with arural elite and Confucian background, joined Chu in 1354 and began toimpress the lessons of history on the eager young learner. He served as thehead of Chu’s secretariat.
After successfully defending Ho-yang (or Ho-chou, on the north bank ofthe Yangtze in modern Ho-hsien) against besieging Yuan forces throughthe first months of 1355, Chu began to look to the richer south bank. Mostimportant was the great city of Nanking, then called Chi-ch’ing, whichdominated that portion of the lower Yangtze region. Kuo Tzu-hsing haddied at Ho-yang early in 1355. Kuo’s sons considered themselves theirfather’s heirs and successors; Han Lin-erh, the Red Turban Sung emperor,confirmed Kuo’s elder son and one of Kuo’s former officers, his brother-in-law Chang T’ien-yu, in those superior positions, and named Chu theirsecond in command. But Chu in turn was surrounded by his twenty-fourcompanions, to whom were added several important military leaders whohad defected from other rebellions; it was Chu’s personal reputation, notthe Red Turban banner, which drew them to him. Among these wasCh’ang Yii-ch’un, his most aggressive general in the years that followedand second only to Hsu Ta in his trust. Also volunteering to join him werecommanders of the important forces along the Anhwei inland waterways,namely Liao Yung-an and Yii T’ung-hai. Their fleets of small boats andbarges gave Chu the means to cross the river and to fight on broader frontswith both land and water forces.
The long-anticipated crossing of the Yangtze was carried out on 10 July1355. A first attack on Nanking then followed in mid-August. It was notsuccessful, but Chu’s armies remained, vanquishing the surroundingsmaller towns. Late in October, in a second attack on Nanking, KuoTzu-hsing’s elder surviving son and Chang T’ien-yu were killed, removingChu’s court-appointed seniors. The entire command now came under hissole control.
