Hongwu Emperor of Ming 洪武帝: Commissioned Artwork for Vincent Ho

Artwork commissioned by Vincent Ho (Aka: FerrumFlos1st) 

The 洪武帝 Hongwu or "Vast Martial" Emperor of Ming. Gruff, authoritarian, but also diligent, Zhu Yuanzhang (the future Hongwu Emperor) rose from a penniless beggar who lost both of his parents to starvation to become one of the greatest warriors of the 14th century. From illiterate beggar to rebel to warlord to emperor, his life was a kaleidoscope of strife and harsh measures.

Recently I was extremely fortunate to be commissioned by my Patron Mr. Vincent Ho, (aka FerrumFlos1st) to do the portrait of the founding Emperor of the Ming Dynasty. Mr. Ho has been a long time patron of mine and when he recently found a temporary job he commissioned this piece with one of his first paychecks. :') I am proud to announce that after two weeks of work I was able to finish this portrait for him. With love and the deepest gratitude, thank you for your support and most of all your belief in me. You are my hero.

THE AGE OF DESPAIR

It has been almost 7 decades since Kublai Khan remade China as the center of his own empire. In 1344 calamity struck the Yuan dynasty during its twilight days, the Yellow River shifted course and flooded over vast swaths of Central China. Whole areas as large as several European nations combined were inundated and whole communities were blasted away in the mammoth torrent. In total, 7 provinces were ruined, the whole heartland and breadbasket of China was devastated. 

Millions died from the starvation all while the avalanche of muddy water barreled southward in a unceasing gout until it found a new exit some 260 miles at the south end of the modern Shandong Province. The Mongol overlords were powerless to help, and millions would continue to die as a consequence of this national catastrophe. This would be one of the many dominoes that would completely unseat the Mongol Yuan dynasty. Within a decade there would be several great rebellions across southern China, and within two and a half decades the Yuan would be completely driven out of China by its native rebels. The great flood alone was but one of a long series of factors that contributed to the uprising against the Yuan. 

Worldly, sagacious, and ambitious, Kublai Khan was perhaps the single most influential political figure of the the 13th century world. Educated by the foremost Persian, Chinese and Eurasian polymaths he received a level of education that was the envy of nearly all of his contemporary monarchs. The empire that he created in his image reflected his ambition to consolidate the many distinctive people that existed in his domains into a new cosmopolitan identity. He was a great Khan who ruled a newly stylized Sinicize dynasty called "Yuan," whose court was staffed with the best Nepalese artists, Tibetan Lamas, Mongol generals, and Chinese Mandarins. But despite his unequal achievements, he also enshrined many restrictive and oppressive policies toward the citizendry of the vanquished Song dynasty in southern China which one day would lead to the massive rebellion that expelled his successors from China.

Although the Yuan were multi-cultural and was tolerant of all faiths and races, it also had a restrictive racial caste system that hierarchically placed the native Han Chinese at the bottom of the society. The likes of horse-lords such as the Mongols, Turks, even ostensibly foreigners such as the Nepalese and Tibetans benefited at the top and middle of the society and were enrolled in its army and bureaucracy. Northern Han Chinese were barred from having military power, and were restricted beneath the aforementioned races- they were also forbidden from marrying such more privileged races. Southern Chinese (the remnants of the vanquished Song) were subjected to even more restrictive racial restrictions. Not only were they barred from having any political power but they were also forbidden entrance into the rungs of their own local civilian governments as well. Taxes against those already oppressed groups were crippling, and many were sold into slavery because of these debts. 

GONE WITH THE WIND

Music: The Gods Duel

From the late 1340s onwards, people in the countryside suffered from frequent natural disasters such as droughts, floods and the resulting famines, and the government's lack of effective policy led to a loss of popular support. Those who cannot pay taxes were sold into slavery by the Mongols or left to starve, whole regions perished in these great famines. Worse yet- when the great flood happened in 1344, much of the grain reserves were transferred from the local areas to the northern provinces, and those who resisted the confiscations were massacred by the government.

Millions in the south would die- leaving whole regions that were already depopulated and deeply resentful of the Yuan overlords (and still loyal to the vanquished Song) to rise up in full flung rebellion. To them, the great flood might as well have been a sign from Heaven itself- to signify once and for all for a change in the world order. 

THE HONGWU EMPEROR

Gruff, authoritarian, but also diligent, Zhu Yuanzhang (the future Hongwu Emperor) rose from a penniless beggar who lost both of his parents to starvation to become one of the greatest warriors of the 14th century. From illiterate beggar to rebel to warlord to emperor, his life was a kaleidoscope of strife and harsh measures. Because of his early sufferings he had the bearing of a cheerless career soldier. 

Extreme poverty. The young Zhu Yuanzhang was not only an orphan but was repeatedly 

bullied by powerful gang figures who populated southern China. Because of his proximity

to such a state of cyclical violence. Zhu eventually grew up to be a very ruthless man.

Perhaps it was fitting in someway that the person who would rise up and challenge the Khans would be one who was directly affected by those policies. Zhu Yuanzhang was but a poor peasant from southern China, when he was sixteen, Zhu lost his entire family - with the exception of one brother - to the Black Death, and had to scrape and beg to survive for a time. During that time southern China was plagued with famine and millions starved. Thus he took shelter in a monastery to live by the scraps of food he could find there, becoming an itinerant monk & beggar. 

After the death of his parents in the famine of 1344, Zhu Yuanzhang first took refuge in a Buddhist temple, then became a beggar and finally a soldier.

It was during that time that Zhu was first exposed to the revolutionary philosophy of the bandit and rebel group known as the Red Turbans. He joined the Red Turbans at the age of 24, and married a daughter of one of the rebel leaders. In 1355, his father-in-law died, and Zhu succeeded him as head of the Red Turbans, and began launching raids and attacks against the Mongol establishment. 

 Battle of Lake Poyang: One of Zhu's most decisive battles (and supposedly one of the largest naval battles of the world) Zhu's smaller fleet was able to utterly crush his archrival Chen Youliang's larger fleet of massive junks and tower-ships with clever use of fireships. The fluctuating high records of the participants of the battle ranged from 30,000 vs 300,000 to 200,000 vs 650,000. 

Zhu Yuanzhang’s military ability and skill in creating tactical alliances contributed to his victory. As his influence grew he heeded the advice of Confucian advisers and gained a reputation for taking care of lowly peasants. By 1355 he had built a base camp and had organized an army. He took over Nanjing in 1356. In 1363, Zhu destroyed one of his key rivals in one of the largest naval battles ever fought on Lake Poyang, and cemented his position as the head of all the powerful rebels. 

After repelling the Mongols and eliminating half a dozen of other Chinese warlords, in 1368, he had taken Beijing (Khanbaliq,) and toppled the Yuan Dynasty- diving off the Khans to the north. 

Zhu named himself the new Hongwu Emperor, marking the beginning of a new dynasty- the Ming, meaning "Bright" or "Radiant" and came to be known as well as "Ming Taizu," or "Great Ancestor/Founder of Ming" and made Nanjing his capital.

In 1370 the Yuan remnants retreated north until it receded back into the steppe lands of modern Mongolia, where Kublai's name "Great Yuan" (大元) would formally carried on and they would continue to call themselves "Emperor of China," though for historical distinction is would be known as the "Northern Yuan" dynasty because they lost most of their core administrative centers and diverse population.

THE RESTORER EMPEROR

Hongwu is known for his autocratic style of rule, centralizing power in the hands of the emperor even further than it had been previously, by eliminating several of the top ministerial positions; his paranoia against others gaining power extended to the establishment of a powerful spy network, which was used to keep officials in line. 

Because of the suffering that Zhu had personally witnessed that Hongwu Emperor would spent his entire life sympathizing with the little farmers and punishing corrupt officials with equal diligence. Often Zhu would give liberal tax breaks and stipends to the peasantry while killing suspected corrupt officials in the thousands. Zhu would spend most of his tenure as emperor in the saddles and would seek to force his children to emulate his back breaking work schedule. Scholars have suggested it was this extremely demanding work schedule that led to the early death of many Ming emperors. At least half of the Ming emperors would die relatively early in their middle ages. 

Personally, Hongwu was extremely hard-working, looking over thousands of memorials a week, but this put an exceptional burden on his successors. He also created an overarching legal framework known as the Great Ming Code, which was meant to transform and regulate society in a new, Ming, form; it had some considerable lasting impacts, but Hongwu also frequently contradicted or undermined the Code through his judgements on individual matters. In one eight-day period, the emperor is said to have reviewed more than 1,600 petitions dealing with nearly 3,400 separate matters.

Above: 14th century, Hongwu Emperor's Edict to officially conferring the title of General of the Ngari Military and Civil Wanhu Office to Tibetan leader Choskunskyabs in 1373. 

This Code, and Hongwu's policy decisions otherwise, were heavily motivated, however, by a desire to restore the greatness of China after nearly a hundred years of Mongol rule. He restored the civil service examination system, and the National Academy, and oversaw the establishment of a great number of schools across the empire.

The Hongwu Emperor sought to restore, or at least evoke, the glories of the great Chinese dynasties of the past, in particular the Tang Dynasty, and so had many aspects of court protocol, including court costume, patterned after that of the Tang. Even so, many aspects of Ming Dynasty court protocol, and especially governance policies and administrative structures, can be traced more directly to a continuation and/or modification of Yuan Dynasty systems, rather than any more dramatic break from the immediate past or more complete restoration of the more distant past. One example of this is seen in the Chinese imperial examinations, put back into place in 1384, but based on the Neo-Confucianism of Zhu Xi and of the Yuan Dynasty examinations, rather than the classical Confucian forms of the Tang dynasty exams.

STEPPE WARS

At Nanjing, the newly risen Ming would become the dominant power in East Asia although the Mongols would remain a powerful force in the northern steppes.

According to the traditional Chinese political orthodoxy, there could be only one legitimate dynasty whose rulers were blessed by Heaven to rule as Emperor of China, thus the Ming denied the Yuan remnants' legitimacy as "Emperors of China," but the Ming did consider the previous Yuan which it had succeeded to be a legitimate Chinese dynasty. During the rise of the Ming, Zhu Yuan Zhang (the new Hongwu Emperor) and his sons would vigorously attack the Northern Yuan forces until peace was finally struck between the Northern Yuan Khans and the Ming Emperors.

Hongwu Emperor Iphone Case on Teespring.com 

CONTACT: 

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