The History of the Renaissance World (86 page)

Toghto, directing a tight and successful defense against the rebels, fell victim to the emperor’s incompetence. In 1354, Toghon Temur suddenly fired his chancellor. He was apparently annoyed that Toghto had not found the time, between desperate battles, to organize the elaborate ceremonial recognition of his son, Ayushiridara, as Crown Prince and heir; the decision shows just how out of touch with the realities of governing the Mongol emperor was. But Toghto, loyal to the end, stepped down at once. He was in the middle of conducting a siege of the rebel-held city of Gaoyou; it was on the verge of surrender, but when Toghto left, the Red Turbans who held it took heart.
⁶

The failed siege of Gaoyou was a sign of things to come. Toghto took himself into exile and died a year later (possibly poisoned by one of the Crown Prince’s allies). The Yuan army was divided by squabbling generals, each hoping for ultimate command. Spread too thin, fighting too many rebels, the imperial force was unable to wipe any of them out. By the end of the decade, the emperor Toghon Temur controlled only the land directly around Dadu. The Red Turban rebels had shaken themselves out into two major movements; in the northeast, a strong force led by the Buddhist monk Zhu Yuanzhang, who had originally been a follower of Han Shantong’s son; and in the southwest, an uprising under a former Yuan provincial official named Chen Youliang. Chen Youliang proclaimed himself emperor of China in Jiangzhou, adopting the name
Dahan
, “Great Han,” for his era; Zhu Yuanzhang captured Nanjing and declared
himself
founder of the new Wu dynasty. Meanwhile, the pirate Fang Guozhen had seized the southern coast south of Hangzhou for his own.
⁷

In 1363, the now ex-Buddhist monk Zhu Yuanzhang destroyed his competitor on Lake Poyang, near the southern coast. Chen Youliang was the first to enter the lake; a contemporary account describes his bold entrance, at the head of a fleet of three-decker warships, painted with red lacquer, filled with soldiers and horses, surmounted by iron-clad archers’ towers. He intended to lay siege to the shore town of Nanchang, held by Yuanzhang’s men.

To beat him off, Zhu Yuanzhang dispatched a fleet of his own from Nanjing; it took nine days for them to arrive. On August 30, the two fleets faced each other on the surface of the lake and fought for two days without victory. On the third day, Zhu Yuanzhang ordered dummy ships, manned by straw-stuffed uniforms and loaded with gunpowder, to be launched towards the enemy. Set fire with long fuses, the fireships blew into Chen Youliang’s line and exploded.
⁸

This battle, followed a month later by a second short naval encounter during which Chen Youliang was struck in the eye by an arrow and died instantly, gave China to Zhu Yuanzhang. The southern Red Turban movement crumbled. The Yuan court held out at Dadu for four more years, but the country was in the hands of the northern Red Turban leader.

74.1 The Rise of the Ming

In November of 1367, Zhu Yuanzhang mounted a final attack on Dadu and overran it with ease. Toghon Temur fled with his court into the old Mongolian homeland to the north. He still controlled Shangdu, the northern capital of the great Kublai Khan; and he was still boldly proclaiming himself emperor of China. But he had become merely another northern warlord, clinging to a tiny local kingdom. A year later, he would lose Shangdu and be forced even farther into the steppe.

In the south, Zhu Yuanzhang had himself crowned emperor at his capital city of Nanjing. He announced the start of a new dynasty, the Ming, beginning with the New Year of 1368; for himself, he took the imperial name Taizu and named the era of his reign
Hongwu
, “Most Warlike.” He is generally known by his era name: the Hongwu Emperor.
⁹

He was forty years old, and a lot of water had gone under the bridge since his days as a Buddhist monk. He was, says one source, the father of twenty-three sons, whom he installed across his new empire as prince-regents at strategic locations; this seems to be a condensation of a somewhat lengthy process that took place over a number of years, but shows just how determined he was to keep a tight hand on the running of the country.
¹⁰

Which he did, for thirty years. He managed to stay on the throne long enough to revamp almost every part of his kingdom. He appointed a committee of scholars to revise, expand, and reissue the old Tang law code, replacing the knotty tangle of old customs and nomadic practices that the Yuan had followed. He poured money into the Confucian schools and reinstituted the old Confucian civil service tests, as a way of bringing competent officials to his notice: “The empire is of vast extent,” one of his very first decrees read; “because it most certainly cannot be governed by my solitary self, it is essential that all the worthy men of the realm now join in bringing order into it.”
¹¹

His intention was, above all, to bring tranquillity to China. In a letter to the Byzantine emperor, announcing the commencement of a new dynasty, the Hongwu Emperor pointed out that under the Yuan, his homeland had suffered nearly two decades of misery. “We, as a simple peasant of Huai-yu, conceived the patriotic idea to save the people,” the letter explained, “. . . [and we have now] established peace in the Empire, and restored the old boundaries. . . . Although We are not equal in wisdom to our ancient rulers whose virtue was recognized all over the universe, We cannot but let the world know Our intention to maintain peace within the four seas.”
¹²

But he never forgot that he had come to the throne through rebellion, and he never placed too much trust in those worthy men. In 1380, afraid that his longtime friend and chief minister Hu Wei-yung was growing too powerful, the Hongwu Emperor tried him for treason, ordered him executed, and then began a purge of everyone else who might threaten his power. Thousands were put to death. Two years later, the emperor created a secret police, the “Embroidered Uniform Guards,” to be his spies and hit men; they had the authority to arrest and confine, in secret prisons, anyone who might threaten the security and tranquillity of the realm. To break up the power of aristocratic clans that might unite against him, he ruthlessly moved them off their land, resettled them far apart, and took their fields. In payment, he gave them monthly allowances of rice and cloth, making them completely dependent on his goodwill alone.
¹³

His vendettas may have been paranoid, but they were never private or petty, and he was no hypocrite. “An emperor should suppress his desire for self interest, and refrain from indulgence in material enjoyment,” he announced. “Only when the emperor is virtuous, free from material desire, can he rule.” And so he refused to eat meat, wore patched shirts, and ordered the crown prince to plant his own vegetable garden to save money. He was a man of iron self-control and determination, and he was thoroughly determined: the new Ming empire would be peaceful, and no price was too high to pay for peace.
¹⁴

*
See Bauer,
The History of the Medieval World
, pp. 19–20.

Chapter Seventy-Five

After the Mongols

Between 1351 and 1399,
a new nation takes root in southeast Asia,
and a Chinese general uses Chinese weapons
to change the fate of his country

T
HE
M
ONGOLS
had retreated from the south of China, but their invasion had changed the lan
dscape.

The Khmer, weary even before the arrival of the Mongols, had finally become a Mongol vassal to buy peace. Ever since, the power of Angkor Wat had been in decline. The last inscription recording the rule of a Khmer king at Angkor Wat, the obscure Jayavarmaparamesvara, comes from 1327; the kings after him are faceless. Building had almost ceased. Rice fields had grown over with weeds. And now the Khmer faced a new enemy—an enemy that had once been subject to them.
¹

A century before, the western valley, occupied by a vassal people known to the Khmer as the Syam, had slipped out of Khmer control and founded a kingdom centered at the city of Sukhothai. This “Syam” kingdom was the first independent state governed by the people of the valley, known to us as the Thai. Soon it was joined by a handful of other little Thai enclaves, scattered from the Mekong river over to the Irawaddy.

The first Thai kingdom had taken the city of Sukhothai, the largest in the valley, as its capital. But by 1351, a strongman from the Thai city of Lopburi had been “anointed as king” over his own clan; and from Lopburi, he began to build an even stronger rival kingdom.

Some accounts suggest that this ambitious leader, named U Thong, was the son of a Chinese merchant who had settled at Lopburi, one of a number of Chinese expatriates to carry on a lucrative trade with the Thai valley as their home. Other chroniclers call him a native of Lopburi. An early version of U Thong’s own Royal Chronicles notes that U Thong had married into a rich merchant clan at another Thai city-state, Suphanburi, and had claimed leadership of it as well. Whatever his origin, U Thong changed his name to the royal Ramathibodi, and the two cities together became the twin nuclei of his new domain.
²

According to the Royal Chronicles, an epidemic of smallpox then drove King Ramathibodi out of his home city of Lopburi. Leaving it under military rule, he moved the remaining population into the countryside until they found a “circular island, smooth, level, and apparently clean,” at the triple juncture of the Chao Phraya and Pasak rivers. There, U Thong founded his new capital city of Ayutthaya. The Chronicles give an exact date and time: the year 712, on the sixth day of the fifth month, three
nalika
and nine
bat
after sunrise; Friday, March 4, 1351, nine o’clock in the morning.
³

Ramathibodi proved to be an aggressive ruler, worried about possible Khmer retaliation, and in 1352 he led the new kingdom of Ayutthaya into its first out-and-out conflict with the diminishing Khmer. Over ten years of slow, excruciating war followed. Victories were balanced by defeats; Ramathibodi’s own son, the Prince Ramesuan, was taken prisoner by the Khmer and had to be rescued by his uncle. When Ramathibodi died, in 1369, Ayutthaya was thoroughly rooted into the countryside, but Khmer still threatened.
⁴

The Thai kingdoms, like most brand-new states, had no tradition of father-to-son succession. Ramesuan managed to get himself crowned as his father’s successor, but his mother’s brother, Borommaracha of Suphanburi, soon arrived at Ayutthaya and demanded the throne.

Borommaracha, a short-tempered but experienced soldier in his sixties, had almost the entire city behind him. He was the uncle who had rescued the humiliated Ramesuan from Khmer captivity, and had followed this up with an impressive (although temporary) victory outside the walls of Angkor Wat itself. Ramesuan had no victories of his own to boast of; seeing his uncle’s popularity, he left the throne and retreated to Lopburi.

Borommaracha then turned his attentions not towards the Khmer but towards the next-largest Thai kingdom, Sukhothai. Ramathibodi had followed a policy of peace with his Thai neighbors, but Borommaracha spent almost the entire eighteen years of his rule mounting attacks against the Sukhothai borders: “A war-minded ruler,” one contemporary chronicle remarks, “a lover of weapons.” By the time of his death, in 1388, he had managed to force the king of Sukhothai into swearing allegiance to him.
⁵