In 1344, a sixteen-year-old in Anhui wrapped his dead parents in nothing because he could not afford coffins. By 1398, that same man ruled China as the Hongwu Emperor and had signed tens of thousands of his own officials to death.
Zhu Yuanzhang was born around 1328 into a landless peasant family in the decline of Mongol Yuan rule. Plague killed his father, mother, and a brother inside weeks in 1344. He survived by entering the Huangjue Temple in Fengyang, then spent close to three years as a wandering beggar-monk across Henan and Anhui. During a second stretch at the monastery he learned to read, a skill almost no peasant’s son ever acquired, and he carried its language of purity and corruption into the Red Turbans, the Buddhist millenarian rebellion he joined around 1352.
In 1368 he took the throne and named his reign Hongwu, meaning vastly martial. An orphan beggar had become emperor of China in twenty-four years. What followed was thirty years of the most documented political killing the Chinese state had produced. He built the Jinyiwei, the Embroidered Uniform Guard, a secret police answering only to him, running its own prison, the Zhenfusi, outside the normal courts.
On 12 February 1380 he executed his Grand Chancellor, Hu Weiyong, and the Censor-in-Chief, Chen Ning, on a coup charge most historians now reject. Then he abolished the office of Grand Chancellor and dissolved the Central Secretariat that had run Chinese civil government for roughly a thousand years, making any attempt to revive the post a capital crime. The Hu Weiyong case became the first of the Four Major Cases and was reopened across a decade, dragging in fresh rings of victims by guilt of association. Edward Dreyer puts the dead between thirty and forty thousand. In 1390 the case reached Li Shanchang, a founding strategist of the Ming, who was ordered to take his own life while more than seventy of his family were executed. In 1393 the same machinery turned on the army through the general Lan Yu.
The comfortable version, a peasant grinding a corrupt scholar class underfoot, falls apart against John Dardess. In Confucianism and Autocracy he argued the literati helped build the apparatus that later consumed them, because a single overwhelming ruler matched their own vision of moral order. Most of the body counts survive through the Ming Shilu, the court’s own veritable records, so the precise totals are contested even where the order of magnitude is not. Zhu died in his own bed in 1398, having cleared the room of nearly everyone who remembered him poor.
📍 TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 — The Boy Who Couldn’t Bury His Parents
1:15 — The Monastery That Took Him In
1:36 — Three Years Begging On The Road
2:10 — The Skill That Rewired Chinese History
2:29 — Joining The Red Turbans
4:09 — From Beggar To Emperor: Hongwu Begins
5:28 — Building The Machine Before The Killing
5:34 — The Jinyiwei: China’s First Secret Police
6:50 — February 12, 1380: The Day Everything Turned
7:47 — Deleting The Prime Minister Forever
8:53 — The First Of The Four Major Cases
9:34 — 40,000 Dead: The Number Historians Trust
11:38 — Li Shanchang And How Far The Purge Reached
13:39 — 1393: Turning The Machine On The Army
15:06 — Why The Easy Version Is A Lie
17:05 — Can We Trust The Numbers?
17:41 — Alone At The Top: Death In 1398
📚 READ MORE:
https://theforgottenhistory.com/journal/zhu-yuanzhangs-atrocities-and-the-brutal-logic-behind-ming-dynasty-rule📚 SOURCES & FURTHER READING:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hongwu_Emperorhttps://www.worldhistory.org/Hongwu_Emperor/https://thechinaproject.com/2023/02/01/a-14th-century-purge-in-the-ming-dynasty/https://www.researchgate.net/publication/269486201_Autocracy_of_the_Early_Ming_Depicted_in_the_Great_Warnings_Da_Gao📋 ABOUT THIS VIDEO:
This video is about Zhu Yuanzhang, the Hongwu Emperor, founder of the Ming dynasty, who ruled China from 1368 to 1398. Born around 1328 near Fengyang in Anhui province, orphaned by plague in 1344, he became a beggar-monk at the Huangjue Temple, joined the Red Turbans around 1352, and seized the throne in 1368. He created the Jinyiwei secret police and the Zhenfusi prison. On 12 February 1380 he executed Grand Chancellor Hu Weiyong and Censor-in-Chief Chen Ning, abolished the Grand Chancellor office and the Central Secretariat, and launched the Four Major Cases. Edward Dreyer estimates 30,000–40,000 dead. Li Shanchang died in 1390 with over seventy family members; general Lan Yu fell in 1393. John Dardess and the Ming Shilu inform the historiography. Covers Ming dynasty purges, Confucian literati, Yuan collapse, and 14th-century imperial China.
#ZhuYuanzhang #HongwuEmperor #MingDynasty #HuWeiyong #ChineseHistory #MedievalChina #ImperialChina #HistoryDocumentary #DarkHistory #Jinyiwei