On 10 April 1356, after repeated engagements, Chu Yuan-chang at lastovercame Nanking and immediately made it his new capital, quicklyrenamed Ying-t’ien (In Response to Heaven). In that same week ChangShih-ch’eng moved across the Yangtze to proclaim Soochow his capital.Earlier that year Ni Wen-chun established Hsu Shou-hui as emperor ofthe southern Red Turban state of T’ien-wan in a new capital at Han-yang on the Yangtze. The following month Han Lin-erh named Chu head ofthe new province of Kiangsi, and Kuo Tzu-hsing’s remaining son becamehis second in command. This son plotted insurrection, was found out,and was executed; Chu now was the unchallenged leader of the northernRed Turban base on the Yangtze and the defender of the figureheademperor of the entire northern arm of the rebellion. He had emerged asone of the ch’iin hsiung, the group of leaders competing for the mastery ofthe realm.
At this point in his career, it is possible to observe a transformation of ChuYuan-chang from leader of a populist sectarian revolt to leader of a politicalmovement aspiring to traditional legitimacy. This has been fully discussedby modern historians and need not be argued at length here.27 It may beuseful, however, to review briefly some aspects of that transformation.
It has been noted that Chu acquired Li Shan-ch’ang, his first literaryassistant, during the year 1354. At that time he was on his way to thecapture of Ch’u-chou and was breaking free from the oppressive bickeringamong ineffectual Red Turban leaders at Hao-chou. In other words, Chuwas setting out to establish himself. Li Shan-ch’ang was from a landlordhousehold of Ting-yuan, the first district city captured by Chu on thatsouthward campaign. Li was at best only marginally to be identified withthe traditional scholar-elite. He was a person of no attainment in learning,but he was clearly quite different from Chu’s other associates up to thattime. He could converse with Chu about history and ritual, the twin pillarsof Chinese statecraft, and he was qualified to head a secretariat, needed byany leader who sought both to conquer and to govern. He remained Chu’schief civil official, and was eventually named the first prime minister of thenew dynasty in 1368.
Li was the first of a growing circle of civil officials who were eagerlyrecruited thereafter. At the capture of each administrative town, localliterati, either officials in the service of the enemy or in private life, wereinterviewed and often appointed to office. This practice was undertaken, forexample, at T’ai-p’ing in 1355, when Chu first crossed the Yangtze andgained the services of the eminent T’ao An. With the capture of Nankinghe enlisted a dozen more scholar-officials and placed them in his new civiladministration for the city and the newly conquered districts close by. Chu was remarkably free of bias against those who served the Yuan, as well asagainst his “class enemies” in the elite. For these reasons, he has been adifficult subject for Marxist historians.
His background was genuinely that of the poorest level of the “oppressedmasses.” His education was rudimentary, and he shared no commonground with the traditional governing stratum. But he was convinced byhis early literati assistants that he too, on the model of the founder of theHan dynasty at the end of the third century B.C. (whose origins, althoughnot as humble as Chu’s, made him a close model), could become a sageemperor. That Chu strove earnestly in these years to acquire such qualifica-tions displays his remarkable educability; that his elite advisors sincerelyguided him toward that development displays their commitment to theideals of the open society.
Some recent historians, however, charge him with having “sold out”his humble class background, because he turned his back on the popularsectarian doctrines that launched his career. Yet not to have done sowould have prevented the integration of the social forces needed to turnrebellion into government. The doctrinal shift was taken cautiously, sincehe recognized the force of sectarian ideas in the minds of his militaryfollowers and among the people in some of his conquered regions. Nev-ertheless, he was gradually able to effect compromises. By the time heactually proclaimed a new dynasty, he could openly denounce Red Turbanideology as foolish heresy that deluded the minds of simple people. Yet tothe end of his life he spoke and wrote proudly of his humble beginningsas a poor farmer’s son from the disaster-ravaged Huai region, and eventu-ally he grew scornful, even bitterly resentful, of those who had knownonly the refined, comfortable life of the elite. In these years from theYangtze crossing in 1355 until the proclamation of the new dynasty latein 1367, however, he appears as the ever-eager open-minded learner,constantly broadening his horizons.
The military history of that period is recounted in the chapter thatfollows. Military tasks ensuring the survival and growth of his incipientstate dominated those years. At the same time, Chu was creating the fullrange of governmental institutions needed to launch a new dynasty. A briefdiscussion of those steps concludes this chapter.
Chu is depicted as having observed with revulsion the senseless destruc-tion of warfare and as having attempted strenuously to impose troop disci-pline in order to win the goodwill of conquered populations. From as earlyas 1354 and the years thereafter come many anecdotes revealing his com-passion for the suffering people and his insistence on rigorous militarydiscipline, a theme running counter to the general conduct of war in that time. These anecdotes have been challenged.28 It has been shown that theyare in some measure later interpolations designed to buttress one of theclaims put forth by the dynasty’s historians to demonstrate the properworking of the mandate: “Heaven sees as the people see; Heaven hears asthe people hear.” In principle the Mandate was to be granted to theclaimant who best embodied the ideals of compassionate governance. Chu’sbenevolence undoubtedly was exaggerated in later tellings. Nonetheless,his earliest literati advisors, from Li Shan-ch’ang in 1354 and T’ao An in1355 onward, constantly lectured him on that theme. That probably boresome fruit in the attention he gave to rehabilitating the lives of ordinarypeople in the farming villages. Especially in these early years, he strove tocreate the image of a wise future ruler, granting tax remissions to war-ravaged regions, punishing looters among his own troops, and rewardingloyal, altruistic service to the Yuan as well as among his own followers.He was able to contrast this image, accurate or not, with the unrestrainedor at best unconcerned behavior of the Mongol authorities and of most ofhis rivals.
Chu greatly honored the virtue of loyalty in those who served his en-emies. He never challenged the legitimacy once possessed by the MongolYuan dynasty, noting only that by his time the Mongols deserved to loseit. Nonetheless, when enemy military leaders died resisting his forces orwhen civilians compromised by capture committed suicide rather thansubmit to him, he granted them honorable burials and frequently estab-lished shrines to venerate their memories. This undoubtedly was effective aspropaganda and in bridging the gulf between himself and the local elitethroughout society. It was a policy surely urged upon him by his literatiadvisors and adopted by him in a cynical combination of pragmatism andidealism.
It has been forcefully argued that Chu did not acutally believe in thedoctrines of folk religious leaders —that is, at least at the level of what wemight today label as gross superstition.29 Nonetheless, he did not dissociatehimself from a large number of hangers-on who had assumed the guise ofvenerated prophets, successful magicians, mad monks, or other more con-ventional religious leaders. Such men lent his cause an aura of divineassistance in the minds of ordinary people. This created problems withinhis circle of literati-advisors and scholar-officials, who would have preferred a cleaner break with all heterodoxy. That he followed his own instincts inhandling such matters is evidence of his independence, his strength of will,and perhaps that his understanding of popular psychology was sounder thantheirs.
Chu’s final break with the Red Turban Sung dynasty was delayed muchlonger than his scholar-advisers would have preferred. In 1363 Chu wasdeeply involved in the upcoming final campaign against his strongest rival,Ch’en Yu-liang. In February his enemy from the other direction, ChangShih-ch’eng, sent an expeditionary force to attack An-feng in western An-hwei. This place was headquarters for Han Lin-erh and the Sung regime’smastermind, Liu Fu-t’ung. It was a double embarrassment to Chu, the loyalprotector of that last remnant of northern Red Turban authority, becausethat moment he was also seriously overextended. Against the stern advice ofLiu Chi (1311—75), his principal scholar-adviser on strategy and statecraft,he nonetheless detached a portion of his field command and led it in person(with Hsu Ta being sent ahead to conduct the actual battles) to rescue HanLin-erh. According to most accounts, Liu Fu-t’ung was captured by Chang’sarmy and killed. Chu then had to move the Sung court of the Young Princeof Radiance to Ch’u-chou, across the Yangtze west of Nanking, where the bynow militarily insignificant Red Turban court could continue to exist insafety.
The risks of this diversion were very great; it was an error of his enemiesnot to have taken greater advantage of it. Nonetheless, the move probablywas necessary to ensure the commitment of Chu’s military leaders while hewas under challenge from the southern Red Turbans. Even his most inti-mate companions from his youthful days appear to have felt the necessity ofdefending their source of legitimacy. Chu continued to use the Sung state’sDragon Phoenix reign period as his official calendar until Han Lin-erh wasdrowned in a crossing of the Yangtze in January 1367, the last lunarmonth of the previous year by the Chinese calendar. But despite his conve-nient release from older forms long associated with the Young Prince andhis now terminated claims, one year later Chu chose to name his dynastythe Ming (Radiant). The word had Manichean denotations suggesting thatnot all the links to sectarian doctrines had been broken.Throughout, we observe the many-sided difficulties of this transitionfrom popular cultural affinities to those of the great tradition and also theskill with which Chu traversed the somewhat devious path from one to theother. None of his rebel rivals displayed similar sensitivity to this complexof problems. outline of the steps taken in the late 1350s and 1360s in creating agovernment at Nanking (in 1356 renamed Ying-t’ien [In Response toHeaven}). At that time he was beginning to claim that the Mandate ofHeaven was shifting, perhaps even to himself. One entry for 1356 states:On the twentieth of July, T'ai-tsu was acclaimed Duke of Wu by his generals andhe established the Kiangnan Branch Secretariat. He assumed personal charge of itsaffairs and appointed officials to assist him and handle documents.3"
Here Chu, while still alive, is referred to by his posthumous templename, T'ai-tsu, sometimes translated Grand Progenitor; that is conven-tional Chinese historiographical usage. The rest is seriously faulty. "Branchsecretariat" is the name used in Yuan times for the provincial-level admin-istrative organs of civil governing. This branch secretariat, or province, wasa new creation of the moment: "Kiangnan" meaning loosely the lowerYangtze region was not the name of a Yuan province. Chu's base atNanking controlled small territories north of the Yangtze that then werepart of the Yuan province of Ho-nan ("south of the Yellow River") andseveral districts in Yuan Chiang-Che (comprising modern Kiangsu south ofthe Yangtze plus modern Chekiang and Fukien). This new rebel provinceambitiously called Kiangnan was one of five founded between 1356 and1359 by the northern Red Turban rebellion to control the outward expan-sion of its territories from its capital, in those years either at An-feng (inmodern Anhwei) or at K'ai-feng. From the point of view of that rebel Sunggovernment, Chu Yuan-chang was but one of the senior leaders on thescene in their newly formed province at Nanking; he was first namedco-commissioner of the province's regional military commission and laterwas promoted to the second-ranked post in the provincial administration.Had he been named Duke of Wu, it would not have been by acclamation ofhis generals, but by appointment from the Sung rebel capital, as actuallyhappened five years later, in 1361.31
In short, the new province was not yet an independent rebel base com-manded by a future emperor already clearly anticipating the bestowal of theMandate of Heaven. It still was part of the later-discredited sectarian rebelmovement from which Chu received his status and authority. Nonetheless,Chu clearly was the rising personality there, and as soon as he couldeliminate his nominal superiors - his old mentor Kuo Tzu-hsing's sons andson-in-law —as he did by the middle of 1358, the Sung rebel regime gradually acknowledged his regional leadership and acquiesced in his initia-tives. When the Young Prince of Radiance, the rebel Sung regime's figure-head emperor along with the northern Red Turbans' organizing figure, LiuFu-t'ung, were driven out of K'ai-feng and forced to flee back to An-fenglate in the summer of 1359 by Chaghan Temiir, the power of the northernRed Turban rebellion quickly waned and all of its provinces were thrownon their own resources. Except for Chu Yuan-chang's Kiangnan, nonesurvived beyond 1362. Gradually, Chu in fact achieved the independenceand stature prematurely attributed to him in most of the traditionalsources.
As Chu Yuan-chang gradually became his own master on the scene inNanking in the late 1350s, he was, we must conclude despite all suspicionsabout the record, unusual among regional rebel leaders in the seriousnesswith which he sought to implement an increasingly full-scale government.Visiting places newly conquered by his rapidly advancing armies, he oftenspoke to community leaders and village elders to reassure them, sent hisrepresentatives to urge them to resume their peaceful, productive ways, andpromised, as a poor farmer's son who understood their needs, to implementa benevolent government. In March 1358 he appointed K'ang Mao-ts'ai,one of the ablest of the former Yuan officials who had surrendered to himafter the capture of Nanking, to an office in his Kiangnan provincialsecretariat that he thought needed upgrading; that was the Superintendencyof the Office for Hydraulic Works and agricultural matters {Tu-shui ying-t'ien ssu). In his charge to K'ang, Chu said:
During the recent disturbances of warfare, dikes and embankments have fallen intodisrepair, so that the people have had to give up their agricultural labors. For thisreason I am establishing this superintendency of [hydraulic works and] agriculture,so that dikes and embankments will be built and repaired and to hold particularoversight over water-control works (shui-li). Just now military concerns are press-ing, and supply needs are urgent; in the ordering of fiscal affairs agriculturecommands the highest priority. As the spring plowing now gets under way, thereare worries that untimely droughts and floods will harm the farmer’s work. Forthis reason I am appointing you to this office to travel and inspect in all places andto ensure that uplands will not suffer drought nor lowlands be harmed by floods.That all depends on keeping water storage and run-off in proper balance. Above allthis office is established for the good of the people; it is not to be a burden on thepeople. Should it ensue that officials were engaged in enlarging and adorning theirquarters and in rushing to and fro to welcome and send each other off , causingdisturbance and trouble wherever they go, they would be of no benefit to thepeople but on the contrary would be of harm. My intent in delegating you toassume these duties is that such consequences should not ensue.32
It is obvious that Chu Yuan-chang was quite pragmatic in observingthat “benevolent” attention to the farming population’s well-being helpedresettle displaced and ungovernable people, allowed them to be productive,and assured his government the grain and taxes needed to support armies.This altruism was not cynical; it corresponded to the facts of life. Whetherthis shrewd, poor commoner’s understanding of base-level society guidedhim or whether these pronouncements and actions showed that the conven-tional ethics and statecraft of his new-found Confucian advisors had pre-vailed is really a moot point: in such matters as these there was no basicconflict there. In any event, his political consolidation through the late1350s and the 1360s shows him to have been more successful than hisrivals in making civil government function broadly for his cause. A fewfurther examples will serve to illustrate this. In 1360 he established newbureaus to levy taxes on wine and vinegar and to improve the managementof the salt monopoly, even though he still did not control the importantsalt-producing regions lying farther to the east. In 1361 he began mintingcopper coins, and by 1363 his mints are said to have turned out 38 millioncoins in one year. A new tea distribution monopoly soon followed. In 1362customs offices were set up to collect the traditional taxes on commercialgoods in transit.
The scope of his Kiangnan provincial administration, in fact his entiregovernment in the late 1350s, expanded as territories adjacent to Nankingon the east, south, and southwest were conquered by his remarkable teamof generals. When large blocks of northern Chekiang fell to his forces in1358 and 1359, he set up a “subprovincial” government and militaryheadquarters at Wu-chou (modern Chin-hua), over two hundred milessoutheast of Nanking and less than a hundred miles southwest of the greatYuan bastion of Hangchow that recently had come under the domination ofChang Shih-ch’eng. Chu traveled to the region and spent the first half of1359 surveying its problems and directing, but not leading, further cam-paigns to extend his holdings. He actively recruited, one might almost saycourted, many of the eminent scholars for which the region was at thattime particularly famous. He courteously invited them to dine in his head-quarters, asked them grave questions about how to obtain guidance fromthe Confucian writings, and sternly (and publicly) warned his generals toavoid unnecessary bloodshed and plunder. He returned to Nanking in June1359; the following April a group of the most eminent scholars, headed bySung Lien and Liu Chi, finally responded to his heavily pressured invita-tions to accept appointments, and reported to Nanking for assignment. Weread in the Basic annals: On the twenty-fifth of June, T’ai-tsu founded the office of Confucian Academiesand appointed Sung Lien as education intendant. He then sent his eldest son, ChuPiao, to receive instruction from Sung in classical studies.33
Chu Piao, the future heir to Chu’s future throne, was then eight yearsold. Although he did not live to occupy the throne, this event foretells theimportant relationship that was to develop between the Chin-hua scholars,with their particular tradition of Confucian statecraft, and the Ming state.
Following his decisive defeat of Ch’en Yu-liang during the summer andautumn of 1363 in the four months’ campaign at Lake P’o-yang inKiangsi,35 Chu Yuan-chang declared a new title for himself and hisgovernment to begin with the new year of 1364. He proclaimed himselfthe Prince of Wu (Wu wang), the same title that his remaining strongrival in the lower Yangtze region, Chang Shih-ch’eng at Soochow, hadtaken for himself the previous October. Chu, however, continued to usethe Lung-feng calendar of his nominal overlord Han Lin-erh, even thoughthis pitiful figure was now his ward, under his protection at Ch’u-choujust across the Yangtze from Nanking. As the head of a princely state,despite continuing but quite nominal subservience to the northern RedTurban movement, he established a fuller structure of offices to which hecould appoint his own chief counsellors, chief administrators, directors ofbureaus that functioned like a central government’s executive ministries,and regional military commissioners.
Titles and ranks all were adopted from the current forms of Yuan admin-istration and gave precedence to the right (chief minister of the right, thecivilian Li Shan-ch’ang, outranked chief minister of the left, the greatgeneral Hsu Ta), in the Mongol fashion. Chu’s ever more imperial sound-ing pronouncements to his newly appointed officials warned against bu-reaucratism and the administrative laxness that he saw as the cause of Yuanfailure. He made such statements as: “Rites and laws (It fa) are the network(chi-kang) sustaining the state. . . . When a state is being newly estab-lished, they constitute the first order of priority.”36 Thus the establishmentof a state and, implicitly, a state of larger claims and pretensions than theprovincial princely state of Wu he had just proclaimed, clearly was in Chu’smind by this time. Moreover, it has been remarked by historians, theformal establishment of his own princely state was an important step in formalizing a new pattern of depersonalized, regularized relations with hisold comrades-in-arms, as well as with new military and civil leaders stillcoming over to his side. They now were all fitted into better-definedpositions, with regulated duties, obligations, and privileges. They were nolonger just his personal associates. This was an important step in achievinga more systematic and readily expandable structure of government.Eventually Chu’s Wu princedom included provincial governments (thatis, in Yuan usage, hsing chung-shu sheng or branch secretariats) for thefollowing areas: Chiang-Che, reorganized in 1366 to supersede his previousKiangnan branch secretariat, absorbed the subprovincial headquarters es-tablished at Wu-chou in 1358; Kiangsi, more or less modern Kiangsi,established in 1362; Hu-kuang, more or less modern Hupeh and Hunan,set up in 1364 to absorb Ch’en Yu-liang’s central Yangtze Han state; andtemporarily, one for Chiang-huai with its administrative center at Lu-chou(modern Ho-fei in Anhwei) to back up the military campaigns between theYangtze and the Huai in 1364 and 1365, leading to the recapture ofAn-feng, the old Red Turban capital, in May 1366. That permitted ChuYuan-chang to make a sentimental journey back to his home village to havedinner with remaining distant kin and former neighbors and to visit hisfamily graves. Shortly thereafter, the final campaign to exterminate thedownriver state of Chang Shih-ch’eng was launched, and as the futureproblems of administering the whole nation appeared somewhat closer, theChiang-huai provincial government was abandoned.
In 1358, while traveling behind his advancing armies in northern Cheki-ang, Chu Yuan-chang had sought out the noted Confucian scholar ChuSheng and gone through the formality of seeking his counsel. The old scholarcould see that Chu Yuan-chang had long-range considerations in mind andso gave him three terse sentences of advice: “Build the walls high [aroundNanking]; store up grain bountifully; proclaim yourself the ruler slowly.”37Chu Yuan-chang appears to have followed that advice. He methodicallyconsolidated his base region for a full decade, accumulated means to ensurehis final victory, and was in no haste to proclaim his own new dynasty. Atthe end of the lunar year corresponding with 1366—67 (actually in January1367), as has been noted above, one of Chu’s trusted military aides was sentto bring Han Lin-erh to Nanking, and in crossing the Yangtze a mishapoccurred that caused the boat to overturn and the Young Prince of Radianceto be drowned. Historians have mostly assumed that the accident wasplanned; its consequences could not have been more convenient for Chu.
With the long-defunct rebel Sung dynasty out of the way and with conflicting loyalties dissolved, Chu could now proclaim his own Wucalendar for the new year that began on 31 January. Yet curiously he stilldid not proclaim his new imperial dynasty, waiting until the siege ofChang Shih-ch’eng’s last bastion, Soochow, succeeded on 1 October 1367,and the campaign against the Mongols in the north was announced. Hehad not begun the reconstruction of Nanking in the form of an imperialcapital until 1366 and only in 1367 announced the establishment of civilservice examinations to recruit officials and a Hanlin Academy to regular-ize the roles of scholar-advisors in his inner court. A shrine to his ances-tors was built in the capital in the proper relationship to the front gatesof his new palace city. Such imperial gestures as granting amnesties basedon signs and portents from nature and building the Round (Heaven) andSquare (Earth) Altars of State also were undertaken. His first law code,prepared by a commission of learned experts, was promulgated in Decem-ber 1367, and a second new calendar, this time called that of the GreatMing dynasty, was promulgated for the near year that began on 20January 1368. On the twelfth of January, after three ritual rejections, heannounced that he had accepted the demand of his court that he ascendthe throne of his own new Ming dynasty. These were all carefully pre-pared steps, undertaken in full consideration of traditional forms to meettime-honored criteria of legitimacy.
This remarkable dynastic founder’s path from the plague-ridden, starv-ing hamlet of Chung-li in the 1340s to the imperial throne in Nanking in1368 had been powerfully forced —by his own driving ambition and ex-panding awareness —into a reasonable semblance of those traditional forms.He had mastered the means of achieving imperial rule. As emperor there-after he was to adapt those means to suit his obsessed vision of the imperialenterprise. The political peculiarities that followed during 270 years ofMing rule will be seen in the chapters that follow to have stemmed in largepart from the personal characteristics of this strange and powerful man.
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