Fall of the Yuan and Founding of the Ming

The Yuan - The Mongol-Chinese empire founded by Kublai Khan, the realm of the Great Khan that ruled all of China. founded by Kublai had ruled China for nearly a century, but by the 14th century, the empire was rotting from within. The greatest issue was at the very top: vicious factional struggles saw nine emperors take the throne in just forty years, leaving the central court entirely distracted and unable to govern the provinces. Furthermore, the once-invincible Mongol cavalry had grown corrupt and soft after decades of comfortable, luxurious living in China, losing their combat edge. The economy was in ruins as well. The court printed so much paper currency, the jiaochao - Jiaochao was the paper currency used across the Yuan empire. Printed on paper made from mulberry bark and stamped with official seals, it served as the state's main money in place of gold or silver. Running so large a territory on paper alone was rare anywhere in the world at the time.The trouble was that whenever revenue fell short, the government simply printed more. When the quantity of money grows, each note is worth less. Prices climbed steeply and people stopped trusting the notes.Since taxes were collected and salaries paid in a currency losing value, officials and soldiers alike found it hard to live, and this became one of the causes of the Yuan's collapse., that it became worthless scrap, leading to hyperinflation. As their salaries evaporated, officials and soldiers turned to brutal corruption, squeezing the peasantry. Combined with severe droughts, epidemics, and the catastrophic flooding of the Yellow River - The Yellow River (Huang He) is the second-longest river in China and the birthplace of ancient Chinese civilization. Often referred to as the 'Cradle of Chinese Civilization,' its fertile loess soil supported early agricultural settlements. However, due to its devastating and unpredictable floods caused by silt accumulation, it was also known as 'China's Sorrow.' Throughout history, dynasties rose and fell based on their ability to control its waters through extensive dykes and channels., the rigid class system that placed the southern Chinese at the bottom made widespread anger inevitable. Stripped of both moral authority and military strength, the Yuan was powerless to stop the storm. When the court forcibly gathered 150,000 starving labourers in 1351 to push the Yellow River back, the long-simmering rage finally erupted into massive rebellion.

The Red Turbans - The Red Turbans were the rebels who rose against the Yuan from 1351. They tied red cloth around their heads, which is how they got the name.They followed the White Lotus teaching, which held that when the world fell into chaos the Buddha Maitreya would descend and open a new age. For starving people that promise carried great force, and red was its sign.The Red Turbans were never one commanded army but a loose set of bands. So once the Yuan was broken they turned on each other, and Zhu Yuanzhang, the winner of that second contest, founded the Ming. spread across the north and the middle Yangtze almost at once. Yuan armies beat them in place after place, but the ministers at court were too busy fighting each other to concentrate their strength, and every suppressed revolt was followed by a new one. Meanwhile a second contest began in the south, as the rebel armies turned on one another. Zhu Yuanzhang - Born to a poor farming family and raised in a monastery, he joined the rebels and ended as emperor, founding the Ming in 1368 and reunifying China., born to a poor farming family and raised in a monastery after his parents died, joined the Red Turbans in 1352, rose quickly, and in 1356 seized Jiqing - Jiqing is present-day Nanjing, China. Under the Yuan the city was called Jiqing Circuit; earlier it went by names such as Jinling and Jiankang, and served as the capital of several dynasties.With the Yangtze at its back and hills on three sides it was easy to defend, and it sat on the route by which the grain of the south was gathered. People of old described such ground as a place where the dragon coils and the tiger crouches.An old legend clings to the city. When word spread that the ground here held the aura of a future king, the king of Chu is said to have buried gold in it to press that aura down — and from the buried gold came the name Jinling, the Golden Mound. Later, the story goes, Qin Shi Huang cut through a hill to sever the same aura and opened a channel for the water. That channel is said to be the Qinhuai River, which still runs through the city.In 1356 Zhu Yuanzhang crossed the Yangtze and took the city. He renamed it Yingtian, and with the rich rice lands of the south behind him he became the steadiest of the rebel leaders. Twelve years later this became the first capital of the Ming. (today's Nanjing) as his base.

In the summer of 1363 Zhu met Chen Youliang - A fisherman's son who rose through the Red Turbans and declared himself emperor, controlling the middle Yangtze with a huge fleet. on Lake Poyang - Lake Poyang, located in Jiangxi Province, is China's largest freshwater lake. During the late Yuan dynasty in 1363, it was the site of the Battle of Lake Poyang, one of the largest naval battles in history. In this decisive clash, Zhu Yuanzhang's forces defeated the massive fleet of his rival Chen Youliang, securing dominance over the Yangtze River valley and paving the way for the founding of the Ming Dynasty.. Chen had chained his towering warships together into a floating fortress, but Zhu refused a head-on fight: he loaded small fast boats with dry reeds and powder and set them alight with the wind behind them. The chained ships could not scatter and burned. After more than a month of fighting Chen was killed by an arrow, and the south had its master. In 1367 Pingjiang - Pingjiang is present-day Suzhou, China. It began as Gusu, capital of the state of Wu in the Spring and Autumn period, and has kept the same site for more than 2,500 years. Under the Yuan it was called Pingjiang Circuit.It sits where the waterways of the lower Yangtze meet the Grand Canal, ideal for moving grain and silk by boat. Canals run through the city itself like a spider's web, so people often took a boat to their own front door instead of walking. All that water is why it was later nicknamed the Venice of the East. Famous for its silk weaving, it counted as the richest city in China.At the end of the Yuan it was held by Zhang Shicheng, a former salt hauler who styled himself Prince of Wu. From the winter of 1366 Zhu Yuanzhang's army ringed the city and cut off its food, and after ten months of holding out the walls fell in 1367. With that, the rebel forces of the south were united under one man.After the city fell, Zhu Yuanzhang is said to have laid unusually heavy taxes on it — payback, people long claimed, for standing by Zhang Shicheng to the end.The most famous thing to carry the name Pingjiang is the Pingjiang Map, carved into stone in 1229. It shows the walls, canals, bridges and temples in fine detail, so the city of 800 years ago can still be seen exactly as it was. (today's Suzhou), the stronghold of the salt merchant Zhang Shicheng - A salt hauler who rose to rule the richest land in the lower Yangtze, forming with Zhu Yuanzhang and Chen Youliang the three great powers of the late Yuan., fell as well.

In the first month of 1368 Zhu took the imperial title at Yingtian - Yingtian is the name Zhu Yuanzhang gave the city of Jiqing after taking it in 1356 — present-day Nanjing, China. Yingtian means 'answering the will of Heaven'. That he chose such a name while still far from being emperor says a good deal about what he had in mind.In the first month of 1368 he took the imperial title here and named his dynasty the Ming. Yingtian became the first Ming capital, and even after the Yongle Emperor moved the capital north to Beijing in 1421 it remained Nanjing, the 'southern capital' — the name the city carries today.Zhu Yuanzhang raised a vast wall more than 35 kilometres long around the city. The bricks are the interesting part: each one is stamped with the region whose kiln fired it and the names of the supervising official and the workman who made it. If a brick proved faulty, whoever was responsible could be found at once. Six hundred years on, those names can still be read on the bricks in the standing wall.On the hills east of the city lies the Ming Xiaoling Mausoleum, where Zhu Yuanzhang is buried with his wife, Empress Ma. The path to the tomb is lined with stone elephants, camels and lions standing guard. and named his dynasty the Ming. That year an army under Xu Da - From the same home district as Zhu Yuanzhang, he led many Ming campaigns and took Dadu at the head of the northern expedition in 1367–68. and Chang Yuchun marched north along the Grand Canal - The Grand Canal is a waterway dug by hand, running some 1,800 kilometres from Tongzhou in the north (near present-day Beijing) to Hangzhou in the south. It is the longest and oldest canal in the world.China's great rivers nearly all flow from west to east, so moving the grain of the south up to the north needed a road of its own for boats. The Grand Canal threaded those east-flowing rivers — the Yellow River, the Huai and the Yangtze — onto a single north-south line. Carrying goods by boat was far cheaper and held far more than carts, so this waterway was in effect the artery joining the empire's granaries.Stretches had been dug in many earlier ages, but it was Emperor Yang of Sui who joined them into one. His enormous works in the early 7th century, driven by millions of labourers, did bind the country together — yet the hardship they cost the common people helped bring the short-lived Sui down. The story goes that when Yang sailed down the canal in a barge shaped like a dragon, the lines of haulers pulling it by silk ropes stretched for miles.Under the Yuan, Kublai Khan cut new channels across Shandong so the canal ran straight to his capital at Dadu, and then opened the Tonghui River so boats from the south could come right inside the walls to the harbour at Jishuitan. Tongzhou, just short of the city, was where cargo was unloaded and transferred — its name means the prefecture through which the grain tribute passes. The new channels shortened the canal considerably — the food of the south fed the people of Dadu. It is also why the Ming northern expedition under Xu Da and Chang Yuchun followed the canal when it marched on Dadu in 1368: with grain and weapons moving by boat, the army could reach the far north without going hungry.Boats still work the southern stretches today, and in 2014 the Grand Canal was made a UNESCO World Heritage Site. and pressed Dadu - Dadu was the Yuan capital that Kublai Khan began building in 1267 on the site of present-day Beijing. Mongols called it Khanbaliq, 'the city of the Khan'.It was a planned city with a grid of straight avenues inside square walls, and the Grand Canal was extended right into it so grain barges from the south could unload at its docks. A ruler of the steppe had built himself a Chinese capital.This is the city Marco Polo is said to have visited. When Ming armies approached in 1368 the last Yuan emperor abandoned it for the steppe; the Ming renamed it Beiping, and it later became Beijing.. By then, the Yuan court lacked a reliable central army due to warlord infighting, and the city was starving with its southern supply line cut. Unlike agrarian dynasties that fought to the bitter end to hold their capital, the nomadic Mongols prioritized preserving their people and horses over static walls. Rather than face a hopeless siege, the last Yuan emperor, Toghon Temür - The last Yuan emperor held the throne for thirty-five years, and in 1368 left Dadu for the steppe rather than stand a siege, carrying the dynasty on as the Northern Yuan., chose a strategic retreat to the steppe where his cavalry held the advantage. The fall of Dadu did not end the Yuan: the court continued as the Northern Yuan - The Yuan court after it lost Dadu to the Ming and carried the dynasty back to the Mongolian steppe. and in 1372 badly mauled a Ming army that pushed to Karakorum. But in 1388, at Buir Lake, the Northern Yuan khan was crushed and lost his life, ending the line of khans descended from Kublai and leaving the Mongols split among rival powers. It was 182 years since Genghis Khan gathered the tribes of the steppe into one in 1206, and 109 years since the fall of the Southern Song in 1279 put all of China in Mongol hands. The age of the Mongols, who had once commanded everything from the eastern sea to the doorstep of Europe, had closed.