A former monk built Ming China after burning Yuan palaces
The Ming dynasty—Great Ming—ruled China from 1368 to 1644 as the last Han-led imperial house. Founder Zhu Yuanzhang, once a penniless peasant and Buddhist monk in the Red Turban ranks, declared the dynasty after leveling Yuan palaces at Dadu and taking the era name Hongwu.
Yuan collapse mixed ethnic discrimination, overtaxation, Yellow River floods, and Red Turban revolt from 1351. Zhu joined in 1352, took Nanjing in 1356, and destroyed rival Chen Youliang at Lake Poyang in 1363—cited as perhaps history's largest naval fight—with about 200,000 sailors beating a claimed 650,000-strong Han rebel fleet using fire ships. The last Yuan emperor fled to Shangdu in 1368 as Zhu razed Dadu (renamed Beiping) and proclaimed Ming rule. He walled Nanjing for 48 kilometres, drafted the Great Ming Code (finished by 1397), and built a weisuo military system modeled on Tang fubing.
Suspicion defined governance. After executing Chancellor Hu Weiyong in 1380, Hongwu abolished the chancellery and ruled as chief executive, founding the Embroidered Uniform Guard; purges killed some 100,000 people. He denounced Mongol "barbarian" customs yet kept hereditary military structures, archery, Mongol clothing styles, and resettled 100,000 Mongols, with Mongols still about one-third of capital-guard officers into the late sixteenth century. The Jingnan campaign put the Prince of Yan on the throne as Yongle in 1402; he made Beijing secondary capital, built the Forbidden City, restored the Grand Canal and exams, and sent eunuch Zheng He on seven Indian Ocean voyages to Arabia and East Africa.
Later Ming life mixed global silver and domestic strain. European trade via Macau brought New World maize, potatoes, and chili peppers; South American silver remonetized an economy whose paper money had hyperinflated. Population estimates for the late Ming run 160 to 200 million even as farmers vanished from tax rolls. The 1449 Tumu Crisis capture of Emperor Yingzong ended naval extravagance; the Great Wall took its familiar fortified form. Little Ice Age harvest shocks, silver-supply disruption, floods, and epidemic paved Li Zicheng's 1644 entry into Beijing and the short Shun interlude before Qing conquest, while Southern Ming remnants lasted until 1662.
Source: Ming dynasty
