Happy Birthday Ming Founder!

October 21, 2024, marks the 696th birthday of Zhu Yuanzhang, founder of China’s Ming Dynasty.

He was born in 1328, founded the Ming Dynasty in 1368, and died in 1398.

To be more specific, he was born in an Earth Dragon year on the Dingchou 丁丑 day of the 9th month of the 1st year of the Tianli 天曆 reign of the Mongol Yuan Dynasty’s Wenzong 元文宗 Emperor Tugh Temur. It’s a date that corresponds to October 21 in the modern Gregorian calendar.

Last year I marked this day by publishing an updated version of my translation of the biography Zhu Yuanzhang wrote in 1378, the tenth year of his reign.

This year, I am marking it with a song.  It’s an incendiary lyric with no title by an anonymous author and it describes, in catchy rhyming phrases, the political and economic breakdown in the 1350s that resulted in the Red Turban rebellion. The same rebellion that Zhu Yuanzhang joined and eventually led, fighting his way from Anhui Province south across the Yangtze River to the city known today as Nanjing, where he established the dynasty that replaced the Mongol Yuan: the Great Ming.

According to the scholar Tao Zongyi 陶宗仪, who lived through this era, the song was soon on everyone’s lips.  He included the words in his vast collection of anecdotes, noting “I don’t know who created this lyric to the Zui Tai Ping tune, but from the capital to Jiangnan, everyone can recite it.” (《醉太平》小令一阕，不知谁所造。自京师以至江南，人人能道之。)

Here’s my translation:

This lyric is referring to two interrelated causes of the fall of the Yuan Dynasty: Chancellor Toghto’s massive project to open up a new channel for the Yellow River, and changes to the depreciating paper money system driven by the government’s increasing need for funds.

It’s ironic that the river project and the paper money system were both, in many ways, historic successes for the Yuan Dynasty. The channel project was intended to put an end to the disastrous cycle of flooding for a river known as “China’s sorrow.” As John Dardess pointed out in his 1973 history of the late Yuan, “Toghto’s desire to accomplish something of genuine historical significance was realized. The rerouting of the Yellow River was one of the greatest hydraulic projects ever undertaken in China in premodern times.” And the issuance of paper money was even more significant. A recent article on paper money in Yuan China in The Economic History Review concludes that, “The Yuan was the world’s first regime that used paper money as the sole medium of exchange, marking a milestone in global financial history.”

However, these achievements came at a cost. Over 150,000 people were rounded up as conscripts and forced to spend months dredging the new path to the sea for the Yellow River.

Out came the red turbans.

It is said that the Red Turban Rebellion, which brought down the Yuan Dynasty, started in the first weeks of the river rechanneling project, among a group working at a section called Huangling Gang 黄陵冈, northeast of Kaifeng. They tied red cloths around their heads to mark themselves as a divine army fighting demons in the form of the Mongol Yuan. They claimed to be driven to rebellion by prophecies about “stirring the Yellow River.” (I have written a short story about this.)

Chancellor Toghto spent the remaining four years of his life chasing down the Red Turbans. He never succeeded. And at the time of his death, an obscure Red Turban leader was emerging in the walled city of Chuyang (today’s Chuzhou in southern Anhui). His name was Zhu Yuanzhang. And his birthday is October 21st.