An orphaned beggar monk founded China's Ming dynasty
At sixteen Zhu Yuanzhang lost his parents and a brother to epidemic and survived by begging as a novice Buddhist monk. When Mongol troops burned his monastery, he joined the rebels. By 1368 he had renamed his realm Da Ming, Great Radiance, and ruled China as the Hongwu Emperor.
Zhu was born in 1328 in Zhongli village near today's Fengyang in Anhui, the youngest of four sons of the peasant Zhu Wusi and Lady Chen. China was then under the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty, plagued by famine, disease and revolt. In 1344 plague killed his parents and a brother. For three years he wandered eastern Henan and western Anhui begging for alms, learning the land and its people.
Discontent was boiling over. Heavy taxes, famine and disastrous Yellow River floods caused by poor flood control turned many against the Yuan, and Buddhist and Taoist secret societies fanned the anger. In 1352 Yuan soldiers, suspecting his monastery of ties to the White Lotus society, burned it, and Zhu joined the rebels at Haozhou that April as an ordinary fighter. Though considered unattractive, he stood out for leadership and decisiveness.
He rose fast. In 1355 he crossed the Yangtze into the prosperous south, and in 1356, after an enemy commander surrendered with 36,000 troops, he took the city of Jiqing and renamed it Yingtian, in response to Heaven; it is today's Nanjing. He soon commanded some 100,000 soldiers. Crucially, he set aside the Red Turban rebels' sectarian ideology and courted Confucian scholars, recasting himself as a traditional ruler. He kept taxes moderate while rivals seized peasants' grain, and drew on his own village roots to understand ordinary people's needs.
By 1360 he held southwestern Jiangsu, Anhui south of the Yangtze and inland Zhejiang. Early in 1368, having mastered southern and central China, he proclaimed the Ming and adopted the era name Hongwu, Vastly Martial, then spent four more years driving out Mongol forces loyal to the Yuan. He reigned until his death on 24 June 1398.
Source: Hongwu Emperor
