The Rise and Fall of the Ming Dynasty

Dan Snow's History Hit

This episode traces the dramatic trajectory of the Ming Dynasty, beginning with its foundation by a peasant rebel, Zhu Yuanzhang, following

Key takeaways

• Zhu Yuanzhang rose from an impoverished peasant and monk to found the Ming Dynasty after defeating the Yuan.
• The Yongle Emperor was responsible for much of the Beijing architecture seen today, including the Forbidden City and Temple of Heaven.

Main topics

• The fall of the Yuan Dynasty
• The rise of Zhu Yuan and the Ming foundation

Notable quotes

You can conquer a country on horseback, but can you rule it from the back of a horse?

Conclusion

The episode provides a comprehensive look at how internal instability

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History It and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like how William conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyit.com slash subscribe. Speaker 2 (0:30) Beijing in the early 15th century would have been something to behold. Behind the immense city walls lay the capital of one of the most powerful empires on earth. Its streets teeming with merchants, soldiers, scholars, officials, carts bringing grain and goods into the city from across China. Silk, porcelain, tea all flowing around from an empire which was in turn connected to markets which stretched across Asia and all the way to the Middle East and Europe. And at the centre was something extraordinary. The Forbidden City. Speaker 4 (1:03) A Speaker 2 (1:06) vast imperial world of vermilion walls and yellow tiled roofs. Formidable gates, enormous courtyards and ornate ceremonial halls. All arranged along the great north-south axis. Speaker 2 (1:24) Architecture designed to convey hierarchy, order, the overwhelming, the unshakable authority of the emperor. To the north, that emperor's army's campaign against the Mongols. To the east of China's coast, great treasure fleets sailed through the South China Seas, to the Indian Ocean, to East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula. This was Ming China at its imperial height, and it seemed unstoppable. But of course, everything changes. Prosperity bred corruption. Power creates enemies and dominion. brings forth rebellion. You're listening to Dan Snow's History Hit, and in this episode, we're heading to Beijing to tell the extraordinary story of the Ming. How an impoverished peasant rose up to found a dynasty that would rule China for nearly three centuries. And how this state, one of the most powerful on earth, if not the most powerful, eventually unraveled through rebellion, war, crisis, and environmental catastrophe. Speaker 1 (2:31) The Forbidden City did not offer much protection. It was meant to be forbidden, but not a fortress. Speaker 2 (2:50) China has long been a land of extraordinary ethnic diversity. Over the centuries, dynasties rose and fell, and different people have seized and relinquished power, or had it prized from them. You might be familiar with some of the groups, like the Manchus, the Jurchens, the Khatans. And you get this pattern throughout history since ancient times, alternating between periods of political unification and fragmentation. But for the purposes of our story, what you need to know is that throughout much of its history, the great majority of people living in China's densely populated heartlands were from the ethnic group, the Han Chinese. And that's still the dominant ethnic group today. But in the early 13th century, that ethnic dominance did not mean political power. In 1279, Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan, did what no one else could do. He united a disparate China under Mongol rule. He declared his dynasty as the Yuan dynasty, and it prospered for a time. He moved his capital city to the site of modern-day Beijing, which became the heart of his vast, powerful empire. And there, Yuan elites and horsemen mingled with Persian astronomers and Venetian merchants and Chinese mandarins and diplomats. He created a powerful combination, the rugged military virtues of the steppe with the philosophy of the Chinese court. His realm was a meeting of worlds, a center of innovation, trade, and exchange. The Silk Road hummed with life as goods and ideas and even faiths flowed across continents. Caravans and missionaries and artisans and diplomats moved between China, the Islamic world, and beyond. But as is often the case, the benefits, the rewards fell unevenly. The Khan's government, the elites, did very well. But for the Han Chinese population across those vast heartlands in what we might now call eastern and southern China, well, they didn't benefit quite as much. In fact, they often shouldered the burden for this prosperity. There was heavy taxation, which funded the Khan's extravagant new capital city. There was the forced labor required to build it. The Han Chinese and other ethnic groups suffered persecution under a rigid social hierarchy. Corruption was rife and much of China saw little to no benefit from the boom in trade. And so it's not hugely surprising that within a century of Kublai Khan's death, the Yuan dynasty was crumbling. By the 1330s, Han Chinese rebels were exploiting these cracks. They were determined to establish a new Han rule. empire. And the man who had become their leader, the founder and the first great Ming emperor, has a very, very unlikely origin story. He was a peasant called Zhu Yuanzhong, born on the agricultural plain between the Yellow River and the Yangtze River in 1328. To tell his story, I'm meeting Dr. Jeremiah Jenny, an expert in Chinese history, who you'll have heard many times on this podcast before. Speaker 1 (5:58) Well, I think one of the challenges for the Mongolians is it's the old story of you can conquer a country on horseback, but can you rule it from the back of a horse? And like often happens with these dynasties, these conquest dynasties, where you have people from outside of China taking over. First couple of generations, they have that martial vigor. They're fresh off the step. They're fresh off the horses. They know how to fight. But their sons, maybe they get a little used to life in the capital. They get a little used to life in the palace. And so they lose that thing that makes them special, that thing that makes them fearsome. And without that fear, without that idea that we're this distinctive, powerful enemy that's come in and subjugated this people. Well, you lose a lot of the mystique that's keeping you in power and when things start to really fall apart whether it's infrastructure failures floods famines what have you you have people rising up and You no longer have the power to crush these rebellions. Speaker 2 (7:02) Let's check in with the story of Jew you and John Why does this peasant turn into a figure of destiny? Where is he in the sort of mid 14th century? Speaker 1 (7:13) He's one of many commoners who are suffering in this period because of all the instability that's happening towards the end of the Mongol rule. And like a lot of people, he's just trying to make his way as best he can. He is from a poor family. It was not unusual at the time if you have kids and you're not able to feed them, one of them might become a eunuch, one of them might become a soldier, one of them might become a monk. Or if you have girl children, sometimes it could be even worse outcomes. And Zhu Yuanzhang, he has been turned over to a monastery or becomes part of this monastery. He's an apprentice monk, but that doesn't necessarily mean like he's going to seminary classes. It means here's your beggar's bowl. Go out and make the best of it. And if you survive this, perhaps there'll be a place for you, you know, a bed here for you later on. Speaker 2 (8:07) It's amazing. So this guy is destined to become an emperor. Speaker 1 (8:11) ruler of Speaker 2 (8:12) all Speaker 1 (8:12) under the heavens, he's begging. When we look at his later career, some of the aspects of his role, a distrust of elites, a belief in his own ability, because if you come up from the beggar's bowl to the palace, you develop an immense faith in your own instincts because they haven't led you astray yet. And I think that certainly is part of his legacy when we look back at this era. Speaker 2 (8:38) So he's begging. traveling around begging, he's on the road. What's next for him? Speaker 1 (8:44) Well, at this time, there are many groups that are starting to come together in opposition to Mongol rule. And as is the case in other historical contexts, one of the best ways to do that, right, is through religion. And so many of these rebellious societies, rebel groups, they often have at their core some kind of religious... belief that holds them together. It eventually goes from being a monk to being a soldier member of one of these rebellious societies and ultimately one of the leaders of one of these rebellious societies. The Red Turban Militia. Speaker 2 (9:24) Yeah, Speaker 1 (9:25) this is one of these groups that emerges in the late Mongolian period that fights against the Mongols. One of the largest and most powerful of these groups. One of the reasons why you have these groups that are identified by turbans, for example, is because in the battlefield, that's one of the ways, or on the street even, that's one of the ways that different societies would differentiate each other, kind of like patches in a motorcycle club. You'd have different turbans, different uniforms that would help to distinguish them from their rebel brethren. Speaker 2 (9:52) So that's the context in which his natural charisma, his skill, it just comes out. You Speaker 1 (9:58) know, it does seem that there are certain people... who are able to, in times of chaos and strife, emerge as leaders. He's just that much smarter, just that much more ruthless, that much more cunning. Speaker 2 (10:12) I mean, fighting the Mongols is mind-blowing. And these sort of peasant militias, is it hit-and-run attacks? Are the Mongols pretty stretched to sort of keep this mighty empire garrisoned? Speaker 1 (10:22) One of the challenges the Mongols always have is that there are so few Mongols. And the other challenge they have is that their style of warfare is particularly suited to the steppe, to plains. That works great in North China where there are open spaces. What do you do when you get down to southern China where it's mountains and rivers and gorges and lakes? They don't always prove as successful in those situations. So what do they do? Well, like many aspects of their rule, they staff it out. One of the great things about the Mongols, one of the things that makes the Mongols so special, not just in China but throughout Asia, is their willingness to bring in people from all over, all different faiths, all different cultures, and put them to work. And they do that in China, too. They bring in people from Central Asia to manned garrisons. There's a whole Muslim community, for example, that gets stationed in the far south. But the challenge with staffing out your soldiers is that you don't always have all of their allegiance. You don't always have the ability to coordinate them quite as well as if they're all your own people. And as a result, when these rebellions emerge, the Mongols find themselves on the back foot in a way that they really haven't found themselves in China before. And so, really, less than 100 years after they completed their conquest of China, they're already being shown the door. Speaker 2 (11:41) Nationalism is obviously an anachronistic phrase, but is there a sense that they don't like the Mongols because they are foreign and they are... Is there foreigners they're objecting to, or are they just saying there is chaos, the government is not good enough, we are going to emerge in our local area as an alternative power structure, and they keep sort of going outwards from there? Speaker 1 (12:00) That's such a fascinating question, Dan, because it really gets to the heart of, like, how do people understand difference before we start having all these terms like nationalism, race, ethnicity? Speaker 1 (12:13) It is certainly anachronistic to apply some of these terms back to the 13th or the 14th century. On the other hand, people knew that they were different. For example, one of the things that the Mongols did, even at the elite levels that just the Chinese could not abide by, was the leveret marriage. The idea that a widow would marry the brother of their husband, which was quite common among the Mongols, but for the Chinese is incest. And they were just horrified by this. And then there were more practical things. Like, again, there aren't that many Mongols, so how do they raise taxes? Tax farming. Bid on this province. Raise the taxes you want. Keep your profit and give us whatever your bid was. Well, it's effective if you're the person on top of this pyramid scheme, but if you're the person on the bottom of the pyramid, you're just getting crushed. And so, is it the cultural differences? Maybe. Certainly among the elite, they might use it as a rallying cry. Among the common people? It's the same thing as it always was. It's I'm being overtaxed. The infrastructure is failing. I'm being oppressed. The economy is failing. I am poor. I am desperate. What else is there left to do but to rise up or at least follow somebody who claims they have a better world in this world or the next? Speaker 2 (13:28) Zhu Yuanzhong's rebellion captured the southern city of Nanjing in 1356, and he built a power base around the wealthy Yangtze region. He spent the next decade or so defeating rival rebel leaders. When he felt strong enough, he declared himself emperor. He took the name Hongwu and proclaimed the Ming Dynasty. He then turned north and sent his armies towards the Yuan capital, Dadu, where modern Beijing stands. It's a formidable operation, and the Yuan court sees it coming. They know that the garrison's morale is shaky. They know grain stores are running low. So rather than risk a devastating siege, they decide to abandon their capital and retreat into the steppe, hoping they can regroup in their native grasslands. The Ming take Dadu under their control with ease. But they then decide to establish their own capital in the southern city of Nanjing. The Ming era has begun. Speaker 2 (14:36) Is there a moment when he turns from a sort of a rebel local warlord into a figure who looks like an alternative centre of political power, starts doing things with bureaucracy? How's that transition go? Speaker 1 (14:50) Well, I think once he establishes himself as he's going to be the emperor. So when he becomes the emperor in 1368, he knows he has all the obligations of an incoming emperor, which is, OK, we need to... get control of the taxes. We need to get control of the armies. We need to get control of the officialdom. He has that on his mind. At the same time, he's also, I think, in some ways more aware of the challenges of ruling China than perhaps many of his predecessors, at least for the last thousand or so