His staring eyes, pointed jutting jaw, bulging forehead, lumpy pockmarked face, brawny build and unusual height did not condemn Zhu Yuanzhang – the future Hongwu Emperor – but instead, in a strange time of millenarian portents and mystical rebellions, his startling ugliness augured a remarkable future for the man of unrestrained violence and boundless vision. In any other era he might have been a village official, but in times of extreme opportunity, extreme characters thrive.
As the Mongol dynasty of Kublai Khan deteriorated, weakened by the plague, Zhu Yuanzhang was born (at almost the same time as Tamerlane) into an itinerant family so poor that his siblings were sold by his parents. At sixteen, his parents and his last brother perished of the plague. No one could afford to bury them nor feed him and he was given to a Buddhist monastery, whose monks sent him out to beg. As China was torn apart by the millenarian rebellions of the Red Turbans (who awaited the coming of Maitreya, the Future Buddha, King of Light), the begging novice joined an insurgent warlord, who promoted him and married him to his daughter.
In 1356, Zhu, now warlord of his own army, crossed the Yangtze and took Nanjing, making it his capital. He started to recruit distinguished literary scribes as his advisers, learning about history and ritual and modelling himself on the founder of the Han dynasty. Next, fighting his way across China, he waged war on a massive scale, using cannon and gunpowder. In 1363, deploying a flotilla of colossal tower ships, bigger than anything even imagined in the west, and an army of around 300,000, he defeated his enemies – 200,000 strong – on Lake Poyang in a battle that is still the biggest marine engagement in history. Some 60,000 enemy sailors were killed.
‘We are the ruler of the Central Country … we stem from the common people of Anhui,’ admitted the ex-beggar in 1368, explaining how the Mandate of Heaven had passed from the family of Kublai Khan to him. ‘Bearing the Mandate of Heaven and the spirits of the ancestors, we took advantage of the “autumn of chasing the deer” [chaos] … Today the great civil and military officers and the masses join in urging our accession.’ Just as Tamerlane emerged as ruler of Central Asia, Zhu declared himself Hongwu (Vastly Military) Emperor of a new Ming (Radiant) dynasty.
Hongwu, ruling from Nanjing, was as remarkable as he looked. After capturing Dadu (Beijing), he restored imperial power and the Confucian civil service exams, and prosecuted corrupt officials, who were flayed alive. But he was increasingly paranoid and murderous, turning on his own friends who had advised him during his rise and unleashing his secret police, the Embroidered Uniform Guard, which had its own torture chambers. He enforced the collective punishment of Nine Familial Exterminations, meaning that the victim’s families were killed to the ninth degree – in effect all relatives. Leaders climbed with their clans and fell with them too; women faced slavery or death. The principals suffered death by a thousand cuts, the ancient
‘Countless numbers of people’ were killed, he admitted in his edict of instruction, the
His sons, appointed to govern regions, were terrified. When he urgently summoned a son and daughter-in-law, they both committed suicide. Another son overdosed on Taoist elixirs. He appointed his eldest grandson Zhu Yunwen as heir, imposing a rule of primogeniture to avoid the chaos of Mongol successions, but that gravely disappointed his fourth son, the ferociously able Zhu Di (prince of Yan) who had expected the throne.
Zhu Di was appointed guardian of the hottest military sector, the north, where the war against the Genghis family and the Mongols continued. In the south his father campaigned in Yunnan, where among the prisoners taken was a Muslim orphan, Zheng He, who was castrated and given as a present to Prince Zhu Di.
