WU HAN (1965) Biography of Zhu Yuanzhang , citat a MOTE, F. W. (1999). Imperial China, 900-1800. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
 
 

Chapter One: The Young Buddhist Novice

Through the first half of the fourth year of the Zhizheng reign period of the Yuan emperor Shun [1344, the Yuan emperor Shun, Toghon Temur’s twelfth year on the throne], the people of the Huai River drainage suffered grave disasters: drought, locusts, and on top of all that, plague.

For many months there had been no rain. Grain seedlings were scorched dry and yellowed; fields showed cracks like the patterns on a tortoise’s shell. It was obvious that there would be no harvest, and no one could think of any way to manage. Everywhere people were beseeching the gods to make it rain, urging the Dragon King to manifest his divine powers. Old people wearing white linen shirts, barefoot, knelt ever so reverently in the hot sun, kowtowing to the Dragon King to grant their wish. Children wearing on their heads crowns of twisted dr9 willow twigs were running in and out of the Buddhist temple; the blowing of high-pitched horns and the beating of gongs and drums shook the heavens, and all the monks wore wide-eyed smiles [to see all the donations brought them]. After days upon days of such supplications, the sun still blazed fiery hot and not even a tiny trace of cloud appeared. The farming people were like ants frantically twirling in a hot pan. And then came the locusts filling the skies. They quickly devoured the tiny heads trying to form on the millet stalks. All those in the locality who had lived the longest said they had survived to their great age without ever having seen such a year. There seemed no way to live through times like these .

Without warning, in the way that disasters never come singly, in the wake of the drought next came the plague. In Haozhou County (today’s Fengyang in Anhui) the people living in Zhongli village of Taiping township were taken sick in droVes. People who had already been subsisting on grass and tree bark for days collapsed as soon as they contracted the disease. At first they felt their bodies weakening, then developed high fevers coupled with vomiting and diarrhea, and in no more than two or three days they stopped breathing. At first people couldn’t understand it. But when it spread into a village and in one day a dozen or several dozen people would die, people dying in every household, continuing on with more dying every day, they realized that it was a contagious epidemic. Terror began to overtake them. Never mind that old saying, "When your time is up there is no escape"; it was imperative to flee, and in every village people carrying and leading their little ones fled like streams of ants, going to the homes of relatives and friends farther away. In no more than ten days’ time all the ten or so villages in Taiping township were virtually deserted; no smoke came from the chimneys, all the crowing of chickens and barking of dogs stilled—a scene of chilling desolation.

In Guzhuang village, in the house of Zhu Wusi, in less than half a month three persons died. Zhu Wusi, the father, was sixty-four years old; he died on the sixth day of the fourth month. On the ninth his eldest son, Zhu Chongsi, also died, and on the twenty-second Zhu Wusi’s wife, Chen Erniang, died too. Their second son, called Chongliu, and the youngest son, Yuanzhang (also called Chongba, later changed to Xingzhong), saw their elders die one after the other before their eyes. They couldn’t afford to call in a doctor, nor could they lay their hands on any medicines; all the two could do was shed their bitter tears together. The worst thing was that the corpses were still lying there in the house; they didn’t have so much as a single paper note or a crumb of silver, so couldn’t afford coffins, and yet just to leave them there was unthinkable. No matter what, they simply had to come by a plot of ground where the dead could be buried.

But a plot of ground? They didn’t own so much as one hand-spread of land. They thought about it, back and forth, again and again; the only way was to go and plaintively beg their landlord, Liu De. They reminded him that for a number of years the family had been in the landlord-tenant relationship with him, had never been late with rent, nor ever had been in any kind of trouble; now that it had come to this pressing need for a bit of ground, shouldn’t he be able to grant a small favor? Who would have guessed that not only would he say no, but they would have to bear his vicious cursing as well. They were totally at a loss. What should they do next?

Then their neighbors, the elderly couple Liu Daxiu and his wife, Lou Daniang, came to the door complaining that when the two brothers needed help, how was it they had not come to old Uncle Liu but had first gone to seek out someone else? And all for nothing! The fact was that Liu Daxiu’s youngest son, Liu Ying, was a playmate of Zhu Yuanzhang’s, his good friend, and he had lust been at Liu De’s house, where he saw Zhu Yuanzhang and his brother wailing and weeping. It made him so sad that he went home and told his parents. flu Daxiu and Zhu Wusi had been next-door neighbors and members of the same tithing community [i.e., the agrarian tax organization]; moreover they were about the same age, got along well, exchanged small talk. So when their son Liu Ying came to tell them what had happened, the couple put their heads together and came right over to look in on the two boys. Zhu Yuanzhang and his brother immediately knelt down to kowtow to them and express their gratitude; it appeared that the problem of a grave plot had been solved.

But as for burial garments, as for coffins, there still was no solution in sight, and there would be no other place to turn for help. They would simply have to wrap the bodies in a few worn-out old garments, get a carrying pole, and transport the bodies over to the Liu’s field for burial. The two brothers with the carrying pole, weeping as they shouldered the load, struggled with great effort to get the bodies moved to the foot of the hillock. Then suddenly a strong storm blew up. Thunder flashed and lightening roared. It seemed as if the whole sky was falling down upon them. The two brothers crouched under a tree, shivering. After a short time the rain passed and the sky cleared. When they went back to the foot of the hill to look, they were startled by what they saw: the corpses had disappeared. The soil on the hillside was loose, and the sudden downpour had washed it down in a rush of water and mud. Just at the place where the bodies had lain waiting, a thick mound of earth had been formed. In everyday speech that went by the name "Heaven burial." Thirty-five years later, when Zhu Yuanzhang composed his "Imperial Tombs Inscription," he still felt grieved at heart remembering that day: "Buried without inner or outer coffins, the bodies wrapped in worn old garments, placed in a scant three-foot grave, and what ceremonial offerings could we make?"

For some days more Zhu Yuanzhang survived on grass and tree bark. A neighbor woman, Wang Daniang, and her son saw how alone and pitiable he was and often invited him in for meals, and so he scraped by for a time. But he realized this could not go on much longer and decided to try going door to door seeking odd jobs; but of course the better-off families all had fled the drought and plague, while all the poor households were, like him, also starving, so how could they hire anyone? He hustled that way for several more days and everywhere ran into blank walls. One day, returning from the neighboring village where he had been looking for work, he was coming home along the road that ran past his parents’ graves. He didn’t need to hurry on home, so sat down beside the graves to give serious thought to his problems and think how to meet the insistent demands of the stomach.

He was a tall and husky fellow with a dark complexion, high skull ridge and large nose, big ears and bushy eyebrows over large eyes. His chin protruded quite a bit farther out than his forehead. His face, overall, resembled a three-dimensional shan (mountain) character lying on its side, while a prominent bulge on his skull rose up like a small hill. Although his appearance was anything but handsome it was quite compelling, giving the impression that he was both awesome and profound. Anyone who met him once would never forget his odd features . . .

When he was small he had once attended the class of a primary school teacher for a few months. On the one hand, he was fond of play, and on the other, at busy times he had to work in the fields, so he had never really spent a full day properly studying. Yet he had a good memory and had been able to learn a few hundred characters, but even so he was not prepared to take on any kind of clerical work, nor could he write letters or contracts. His father had moved to this village in the first place because there was so much unused land in the locality and a shortage of human labor. It seemed one might be able to make a somewhat better living there. He had not counted on the truism that "all the world’s ravens are equally black"; the more land a landowner possessed, the harder his heart and the stingier his treatment of his tenant farmers. On the three major festivals they had to make gifts, and the rents had to be paid on schedule, while he smilingly manipulated the weights and measures to his advantage, all the time complaining that the moisture content of the grain was too high and that his share of the crop was not enough. In a year like the present one it was an extraordinary act of grace to be granted a small temporary reduction in the amount owed; how would one dare to utter a word requesting a loan to get through the crisis?

As for members of his own more immediate family, all the nearer and farther ones, no matter how hard he thought it over, there was no one to whose home he could now go. So, were there any other places to which he might turn? . .

[Zhu Yuanzhang recollected the vivid impressions gained when he was very young of his maternal grandfather, then a very old man, apparently somewhat literate, who had been a professional fortune-teller and seer, and who had told him stories about his experiences with the Song armies fleeing the Mongols in 1279, all the way to the end; he had been with the fleet carrying the last boy emperor, who perished when pursued out to sea, off the coast of present-day Hong Kong, by the Mongol army and navy, and himself had narrowly escaped drowning. Zhu grew up hearing his mother’s frequent retelling of the story of the Mongol conquest, and the spirit of Song loyalism made a deep impression on the young Zhu. The old grandfather, who lived to the age of ninety-nine, had long been dead. There was no possibility of seeking help now from his mother’s family, if any still survived.]

The wife in the neighboring Wang family knew that Zhu Chongliu [the elder of the two surviving brothers] worried about his youn~er brother, so reminded them that some years earlier [Zhu’s father] Zhu Wusi had made a pledge at Huangjue Temple, offering his young son to Monk Gao Bin to serve him as his novice. Why not go there now and take up the life of a monk? That would, on the one hand, repay the pledge once made, and on the other, it would provide a daily meal, if only a bowl of plain rice. Wouldn’t that be preferable to starving? Zhu’s older brother agreed.

As a baby Zhu Yuanzhang had frequently been ill. In the first three or four days after he was born he couldn’t take his mother’s milk, and his distended stomach had swelled up to look like a tightly stretched drum. He was close to being beyond help. Zhu Wusi was distraught, thinking of all possible ways to save the child. Then he had a dream in which he saw the child slipping away beyond all help, and thinking that only a Bodhisattva could save him, he decided to give the child to a temple. He instantly picked up the baby and ran off with it, entering a large temple where, curiously, not a single monk was to be found. Unable to make any contact, he had no choice but to take the child back home. Then, hearing a child crying, Zhu Wusi awakened from the dream. His child truly was crying and its mother was nursing it; it now was able to take the milk, and in a few days its swollen belly was cured. But as the child grew, he was continually afflicted by ailments that were never overcome. His worried parents, remembering the dream, really took him off to the temple and made a pledge to give him up, eventually, to become a monk.

The Wangs, husband and wife, got together for Zhu Yuanzhang some incense, candles, some other small offerings, and approached Monk Gao Bin about the matter. Consequently, in the ninth month, the Huangiue Temple gained a new young novice. Zhu’s head was shaved clean like a gourd. A worn cassock discarded by an older novice was given to him to wear. Whenever he met anyone he learned to press his palms together and bow. He had truly become a disciple of the Lord Buddha. He swept floors, set up the incense for lighting, rang the bells, beat the drums, cooked the rice, and washed the robes; those were his daily lessons. On meeting persons from within the temple, he would address them "master teacher," "teacher older brother," or "teacher mother" [implying cynically that the monks were not necessarily celibate], and when he encountered persons from outside, he addressed them "gracious donor"; all his ways of addressing people had to be learned anew. Morning and night, when he heard the bells and the drums and the "wooden fish" [the wooden cadence drum struck while chanting sutras] and the sounds of chanting, his thoughts turned to himself and to the lively household in which he had lived only a short time before, and he thought about his bereaved and sole surviving next-elder brother and about his group of young friends, all of whom had been forced to go away to seek some means of livelihood, and in his heart he was deeply uneasy.
 
 

Chapter Two: The Wandering Monk

Huangjue Temple was dependent on its rents to maintain itself. This year the scale of the natural disasters was too great. It collected no rents, though the monks went constantly to their tenants’ houses to try to collect, arguing, threatening, saying that if they were not paid, the debtors would be taken off to the magistrate’s office to be punished, even beaten; but that was of no avail. The temple’s stocks of rice, one could clearly see, would not last many more days. The more mouths, the greater the outlay; the head monk’s wife [!] suggested a plan; first send out all the single monks to wander abroad, then send out all the senior monks of the temple to roam about, depending on voluntary offerings. Zhu Yuanzhang had served as a novice a scant fifty days, but finally he too was sent out, the last to go. He had no choice. Unable to chant sutras and conduct Buddhist ceremonies, he could only pose as a monk. Wearing a tattered bamboo hat, carrying a "wooden fish" and an earthenware bowl, a small pack on his back, he bid farewell to his master and to the temple’s head monk and, trying to firm up his resolve, took grim leave of his home village.

What was called "wandering about" or "roaming everywhere" was a monk’s term; it was also called "seeking donations." In the language of ordinary people, however, it was just begging. It meant asking for food, finding a rich household and asking for money or for something to eat . . .

Zhu Yuanzhang had lived in the temple for only a few weeks, but he had heard the daily conversations about the business of begging, and he had observed it being done, so even if he did not know how, he understood how to go about it. And since he had no choice but to do it, he sought out people for advice, where it would be best to go. Hearing that conditions this year were somewhat better to the south and the west, so because his only objective was to get enough food to survive, it did not matter much to him lust where he went. Nor did he have any schedule. He walked as long as he wanted to walk, went as far as he wanted to go . . . He learned all the tricks of begging, how to sleep in the mountains and in the wilds and to bear all the discomfort~ of wind and cold. He walked all through the Huaixi region [today’s eastern Henan and western Anhui], seeing its famous capitals and great towns, becoming intimately familiar with this region’s rivers and streams, its mountain ranges, its geographic features. Most important, he got close to the population of the area, understood the feelings of the people, learned about products, customs, beliefs. He encountered the face of life, he broadened his mental horizons, he came to understand and to learn about innumerable things. It enriched his knowledge of society and at the same time it tested and toughened him physically . . .

The Huaixi region through which Zhu Yuanzhang roamed for several years was precisely the region in which the subsequent founding figure of the western [or southern] Red Turbans, Peng Yingyu, lived secretly at this time, actively propagating the teachings about the Maitreya Buddha’s imminent descent to earth and organizing his revolutionary [sic; "rebellious"] forces. Peng Yingyu also was a wandering monk, and even if Zhu Yuanzhang may never have met him in person, he certainly must have encountered some of Monk Peng’s followers. Some years later this same region would become the eastern [or northern] Red Turban army’s base area; those seeds also were sown by Monk Peng. Zhu Yuanzhang wandered widely for three or four years throughout the entire region, living with the lowest stratum of society; he accepted the new sectarian teachings, the new ways of thought, the new political education, and became a member of their secret organization. He was a novice who had matured both in mind and in body. After his return to Huangjue Temple, as he began to form friendships, he made a point of seeking out those of strong will and courage, stout fellows who dared to take action. He frequently went into Haozhou city [the county seat, very close by] to ferret out information. At the same time, he determined to improve his literacy, to read some books, to understand more of how things work, preparing to go forth eventually to do great things.
 
 

Chapter Three: The Red Turban Uprising

In the fifth month of the eleventh year of Yuan emperor Shun’s Zhizheng reign period (1351), throughout the whole region of the Yangzi and Huai river drainages the poor farming folk - . . in their short coats and straw sandals, wearing their red headbands and carrying red banners, shouldering their bamboo staves and their hoes, and with long spears and axes, killed the officials, occupied the cities, opened granaries to distribute the stored grain, battered down lails and freed prisoners, set up their own names and titles—they sounded the death knell of the Yuan dynasty. All this is what was done by the historic Red Turban armies’ uprisings . . .

At the temple [in 1351] Zhu Yuanzhang continually received news from the outside. "A few days earlier the Red Turban armies had occupied Xiangyang [in northern Hubei] and the Yuan forces suffered large losses." "Another field force occupied Nankang [in Jiangxi, south of the Yangzi], and the Yuan forces fled without fighting." "‘Sesame Seed’ Li and Community Chief Zhao, in a group of eight men, all dressed up like workers on the Yellow River dredging prolect; in one evening’s effort they captured Xuzhou [the important city of northern Jiangsu]." The persons delivering these news items reported them with great excitement . . . A few days later came the news that Xu Shouhui had set up his capital at Qishui [in southern Hubei], where he was now the emperor of a dynasty called Tianwan, with the reign period name "Zhiping." He had appointed Zou Pusheng his Grand Preceptor, while armies under Monk Peng and Xiang Nu’er were fighting their way eastward into Jiangxi. Yuan armies were being defeated everywhere; with difficulty the government had mobilized 6,ooo Muslim Asud cavalry [units of the Yuan armies from Inner Asia] along with a few units of Chinese soldiers to advance against the Red Turban army based at Yingshang [in the Huaixi region]. The Asud were known for their ferocity and their skills as mounted archers; their discipline was bad, however, and everywhere they went they looted and robbed. A number of their generals overindulged in wine and women; so their minds were clouded as they were on the point of drawing up their ranks to oppose the Red Turbans. Then they saw how large the Red Turban army’s deployment was and were overcome with fear. Their chief general raised his whip and turned his horse to the rear, shouting: "Abu, abu!" "Abu" means "Run for it!" The whole army immediately turned and retreated. The Red Turbans pressed forward, and the Yuan army was ground up. Throughout the Huai region the people all told about that battle as a great joke; everywhere people all knew about it . .

In the second month of 1352 Zhu Yuanzhang heard that nearby Haozhou also had been occupied by the Red Turban army; the leaders there were Guo Zixing, Sun Deyai, and a group including men named Yu, Zeng, and Pan.

Guo Zixing was a famous local bravo from Dingyuan County [in Anhui]. The family originally had come from Caozhou [in Shandong]. Guo’s father had come to Haozhou as a fortune-teller and seer. There was a landlord there who had a blind daughter with no prospects for getting married. Guo Zixing’s father had married her, gained a rich dowry, and had three sons by her, of whom Guo Zixing was the second. The three bothers were clever at calculations, buying goods when cheap and selling dear, buying land, and opening shops. Within the space of ten or twenty years they were among, if not the wealthiest landlords in the locality . . . Angered by officials’ constant slights and demands for money], Guo Zixing joined the Maitreya sectarians, freely dispersed his riches to gain an armed following, took in all the toughs and roughnecks, burned incense and held secret meetings, and waited for the day when he could take the big step toward getting even. After the great Red Turban uprisings, the farmers from Zhongli, Dingyuan, and other nearby places shouldered their hoes and mattocks, and in one sudden wave men gathered by the tens of thousands. Local officials who ordinarily were concerned only about demanding money were now faced with a situation they could not handle, so pretended they were not aware of anything, couldn’t be bothered, and in any event need not meddle. On the twenty-seventh of the second month, Guo Zixing, leading several thousand men, under cover of darkness and by prearranged signal from cohorts within, stealthily entered Haozhou; in the middle of the night, when a signal cannon was fired, they burst through the gates of the county office, killed the magistrate, and with previously negotiated orders from Du Zundao [a higher-level Red Turban leader] the five leaders of this insurrection all received titles of Haozhou Defense Commanders . . .

[One day when Zhu Yuanzhang was away, government troops, suspecting links between the temple’s monks and the Maitreya sectarian rebels, burned the temple. On returning and finding the smoldering ruins, he at last decided to run off and join the rebels at Haozhou under Guo Zixing, from which place one of his childhood friends recently had written to urge Zhu to join them.]

The next day he left Huangjue Temple and went to join the Red Turbans. This year [1352] Zhu Yuanzhang was twenty-four years old.