The History of China - #193 - Yuan 12:Blue Sky, Red Turban, White Lotus, Black Death

Episode Date: June 15, 2020

As Toghon Temur - the eleventh and final Great Khan of the Yuan, takes the throne - the dam holding back the near century of bad decisions back begins to buckle. Things are not helps by a dramatic climate shift, or the outbreak of one of the worst pandemics in human history, either... can we really blame the apocalyptic cults that spring up for thinking it's the end of the world? Time Period Covered: 1333~1344 CE Major Historical Figures: Toghon Temur Khaghan [r. 1333-1368, 1370] Grand Chancellor Bayan Ba'atur of the Merkid [1280-1340] Zhu Yuanzhang [1328-1398] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. Hi everyone, this is Scott. If you want to learn about the world's oldest civilizations, find out how they were rediscovered, follow the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra's descendants over ten generations, or take a deep dive into the Iron Age or the Hellenistic era, then check out the Ancient World Podcast. Available on all podcasting platforms, or go to ancientworldpodcast.com. That's the Ancient World Podcast. It's the single largest massacre in American history, and yet for generations, it has remained

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part of the Agora Podcast Network, wherever fine podcasts are served. And now, on with the show. Hello and welcome to the History of China. Episode 193, Blue Sky, Red Turban, White Lotus, Black Death. Last time, we traced the bloody swath cut through the Imperial Yuan House, from the death of its sixth emperor, Yesun Temur, to the enthronement of its eleventh and what would be final emperor, Togon Temur, in the span of just five years. Upon the tragically early death of his younger brother, the six-year-old Rinjambalkhan,

after just 53 days on the throne, at the age of just 13, Togon Temur had been recalled from exile back to the capital, Dadu, and made lord of all Mongolia and China in early 1333. We'll begin today, therefore, with an overview of Togon Temur's early period of nominal reign, before moving outward and beginning to look at the broader factors and shifts that were already causing the imperial government endless headaches and would soon begin to snowball out of control. We'll also ask the question, what should the Yuan government have done differently to try to avoid its coming destruction? Or indeed, could it have done anything markedly different?

Was its collapse the result of corruption and mismanagement, as is often alleged by many histories, including those of the Ming and later periods? Or were the factors at play in the mid-14th century so utterly overwhelming that they would have subsumed even the strongest and most stable of Chinese dynasties? And just as a bit of a liner note here, as I've just laid out in this outline, this episode might come across as a bit of a more of a setup than outright execution. I've thought and tried a lot of different ways to potentially get all this information across, and this was the best way that I felt that I could lay it out. Trying to do all of one side and then all of the other, it felt very strange because I was

always missing key elements that were all necessary to explain the other side as well, just how and why all the things were happening when and where they were. So this will be my attempt to unravel this particular narrative Gordian knot, to set up all the dominoes this time, and then in the next episode or two, watch them all fall. So let's get right into Togon Temur's reign. Now, as has been my established custom in this particular dynasty, I'm going to keep using his given name throughout this episode. But as of right now, let's get to the name that will be given to him posthumously, his temple or reign name, or rather, his temple names. That's right, he gets two of them, because as we'll get to next episode, Togon Temur will be overthrown, but he will not be captured. Instead, he and his family will flee the rising flames of the Ming back north, back to

Mongolia, and re-establish themselves there as what is known as the Northern Yuan. Within this rump state, his temple name is Huizong, or the Benevolent. Back in China proper, however, the new regime under the Ming founder, Zhu Yuanzhang, will deem Togontemur Xundi, the emperor who submitted. He's also occasionally rendered by his Khanate title, Ukagatsu Khan. But, you know, like, even the Mongol language Wikipedia page doesn't actually call him that, so whatever. Togontemur, as I said, came into nominal power at the age of 13, old enough that the recently deceased Chancellor of the Right, El Temur, had sought out a younger alternative in that of his baby brother, but he was still young enough that there was a considerable regency to look forward to. He was emperor in name and reign, but at least at first, not in rule. As we're all hopefully well aware by now, the Yuan Empire by this point had been long under stress,

nearly four decades of turbulence at this point. Yet for all that hemming and hawing policy, and even the recent massive bloodletting within the royal family, there was no sign as of Togon Temur's accession that things were entering a critical, much less terminal, phase for the dynasty. This actually sets up what will be a pretty ironic circumstance, that Togon Temur will have the longest reign of any Yuan emperor, at 35 years outlasting even his great-great-great-grandfather Kublai on the throne by an entire year, and, well, three years if we count his time as the emperor of northern Yuan. It's significantly less ironic that, as the final emperor of the dynasty, in typical first-good-bad-last style of classic Chinese historiography, his very passive style of rule would serve as a powerful negative example to the builders of the next dynasty, the Ming. We really don't need to much revisit the stresses that the Yuan was under as of Togon Temur's enthronement. We've done quite a few episodes detailing those events already. Suffice it to say, state expenses were

high and ever-rising, and the tax situation was still pretty dismal. The racial caste system continued to provide a constant source of friction between the elite rulers and their multitudinous subjects, and the constant seesawing of state policy at the very highest levels between the pro-Mongol essentialist camp and the pro-Confucian Chinese integration camp was giving pretty much everyone across the board a severe case of policy whiplash. One of the major policy stress emergency release valves had been the reintroduction of the Neo-Confucian imperial service examination system. While still heavily and blatantly favoritist toward the Mongol and Samurain elites, it did at least provide some outlet for the ethnically Chinese literati to reach above

the bottom tiers of governmental service for those positions that they felt they better deserved. John Dardis notes, for instance, that the graduating class of 1333 was actually the first batch to completely fill out its ethnic quotas, that is, 25% each of Mongol, Semu, Northern Chinese Han, and Southern Chinese Nanren, respectively. There's also some other very interesting data from this group, that the Chinese, for instance, were slightly older than their non-Chinese brethren, with median ages of 31 and 28, respectively. 92% of the Chinese candidates were married, whereas only 74% of the non-Chinese were. Probably most interesting, though, is that by the 1330s, those classified as non-Chinese were already heavily intermarried and interwoven with the Chinese, often at the second generation

or beyond. From Dardis, quote, It is important to point out that this certainly does not reflect the wider Yuan society, but only the elite class for whom civil service was an actual goal. Still, it's notable that in spite of the standing policy of racial strata and separation, and in spite of the continued Mongol haughtiness over their own supposed ethnic superiority, in practice there was already a wide degree of mixing between the groups. In that sense, at least, it demonstrated both the ongoing Mongol signification and adoption of their customs, morals, and values of the society that they had colonized,

as well as a Chinese elite that had come to actively and fully participate in the foreign dynasty that ruled over them. This is certainly not to imply that major division points did not still run deeply through all strata of the empire. And in spite of picking up certain traditions from one another in their time together, imply that major division points did not still run deeply through all strata of the empire. And in spite of picking up certain traditions from one another in their time together, more wholly, the Mongols had and continued to exist as a nation within a nation, set apart from and still quite ambivalent to, to the point of near indifference, the Chinese that they ruled over. To a typical Han Chinese subject outside of the capital city or certain other specific and

almost invariably northern metropolises, one could reasonably have expected to live your entire life and never see a Mongol in the flesh over the entire lifespan of the Great Yuan. As a percentage of the total population, the Mongol and Simu elites were similar to the number of foreign residents in modern China, which is something like 0.5 to 1.5% of the overall population, and much like the modern foreign population, extremely concentrated in a few key urban areas, and almost none across most of the rest of the country. Even the ethnically Chinese population, you'll remember, was subdivided between North and South. Indeed, the country itself reflected this stark divide. Northern China had been thoroughly devastated by decades

of Mongol conquest and subsequent heavy occupation. In the aftermath of that initial devastation, its population had been further bled off by a combination of immigration out to the perceived relative safety of the south, along with near-continual strings of natural disasters, including floods, earthquakes, droughts, locust swarms, epidemics, and famines. Writing in 1348, the imperial minister Yang Weizhen probably wasn't exaggerating when he stated that the population of an entire northern county wasn't even as numerous as a single family lineage in the south. Dardis puts the situation in the south, meanwhile, as, quote, much richer and more heavily settled, and was, as a matter

of deliberate policy, more lightly administered. All told, there were only some 20% of the officialdom stationed in the south as in the north, relative to their respective populations, and it had a significantly lighter tax rate beside. The trade-off for this relatively light touch by the Yuan court, though, was that the northern Chinese were officially more favored, especially when it came to bureaucratic postings. Still, that seems a rather dubious bargain. With the death of the former Grand Counselor of the Right, El Temer, in 1333, the way to the throne was finally made clear for the 13-year-old Togon Temer. Helping him to power, and thus rising to prominence along with the new emperor, was the aged war hero general,

Bayan of the Merkid, a figure so revered that he was one of the few to bear in life the honorific Mongol title Baatur, or the Valiant, somewhat equivalent to a knight Templar or paladin, and born only by the greatest of Mongol heroes like Subotai. Bayan would take over the role of Grand Counselor of the Right in 1333, and two years later would become the only possible higher position, Grand Chancellor outright, a position he would hold uninterrupted until his overthrow in 1340. As such, there could be little doubt or debate that though Togon Temur sat the throne, it was Bayan Ba'athur who truly ruled the empire as of the mid-1330s. In fact, it's likely that, much like his late younger brother, Iringival,

Togon Temur's reign was meant to be little more than a placeholder. Dardis writes, quote, That of a temporary figurehead. He was a 13-year-old child, untrained, still officially illegitimate, and easily disposable. Indeed, he was advised to stay in the shadows and take no direct part in ruling his empire. End quote. As the de facto ruler of Great Yuan, Chancellor Bayan would once again dramatically veer state policy away from its former course under its former emperor, Tog Temur. Apparently very much a purist, Bayan wished to, as much as possible, turn back the clock of the regime to the time of Kublai, and he meant it literally. He decreed, for instance, that Togon Temur's initial reign-era title should be Ziyuan, the exact same era title as Kublai's from 1264 until his death

in 1294. In just about any and every aspect he could think of, from the calendar itself to the laws and their implementation, Bayan felt that the Yuan government had drifted dangerously far from the initial course set by the dynastic founder, and he wished to set it all right at once. This occurred in two main ways. The first, and most successfully implemented, was Bayan's attempt to cut the ever-spiraling state expenditures and to redouble the central government's efforts to provide relief to areas afflicted by natural disasters. The second portion of Bayan's efforts centered on a sweeping attempt to As we've already seen, though, that would be nearly impossible to achieve, as those lines had been steadily blurring for nearly

half a century. Quote, cultural and social relationships among the Mongols, other foreigners, and the native Chinese elites of the North and South were now shot through with ambiguities and complex cross-shadings. End quote. Some Chinese had even taken up Mongol names, dress, and language, and the reverse had occurred as well. In the end, Bayan simply could not unmix those two flavors of ice cream. This is not to say, of course, that Bayan didn't try. He enacted strict new measures, which once again prohibited Chinese and Koreans from owning weapons or horses, forbidding them from learning Mongol language or script, and even reserved the highest key positions for Mongols and Simurans

only, actually canceling the imperial examination system altogether from 1335 to 1339. In classic fashion, it seems that some regional and local officials became rather overzealous in their interpretation of these edicts, and pushed things even further, going so far as to confiscate other implements such as iron agricultural tools along with the weapons, and even ban Chinese opera performances in some areas. All these measures were swiftly abandoned when it became clear that they were, one and all, completely unenforceable, and seemingly tailor-made to enrage the populace against their masters. But the damage was done, and rumors quickly swirled across the country that even more monstrous, and it should be said, fictional, policies had been supposedly enacted by the evil Chancellor

Bayan. He, quote, was widely believed to have ordered a nationwide roundup of all unmarried Chinese children, and the extermination of all Chinese bearing the five most common surnames, end quote. As Bai Han's list of enemies, both perceived and actual, grew, so too did his paranoia. He unwisely targeted several princes of the blood for persecution, making himself very powerful foes in the attempt. Small-scale millenarian uprisings across the south provoked a sweeping response against large segments of the entire Chinese populace, only further sharpening their general resentment of the chancellor. An investigation of an apparently lone wolf mass murderer at the capital office of Henan province turned into a broad purge of Chinese officials as a whole across the entire empire, turning them even more against Bayan. So for those of you keeping track here,

that's making enemies out of the royal class, the official class, and the commoner class, which is, you may note, all of the classes. By the close of the 1330s, it was well understood that Bayon of the Mercad's tenure in office had more than run its course. Thus, it came as very little surprise to anyone when, in March of 1340, a carefully planned coup was carried out against him by none other than Bayan's own favorite nephew, Toghto. The disgraced and reviled chancellor was banished to the far south, and he would wind up dying along the way only a month later. Now with Bayan gone and his 26-year-old nephew assuming command of the imperial government as its new chancellor, it was, that's right, time to once again radically swing the ship of state back in the other direction. Togto heavily favored the signification of the UN system. It had become by this point almost comical in its predictability.

A chancellor would veer heavily in one ethnic direction or the other for a term of office, and then his successor would inevitably swing the government hard in the opposite direction. Dardis puts it, quote, Late UN political history, at the central level, came to assume a certain periodic rhythm, with different administrations succeeding each other, each using a different set of guiding ideas, on average about every five years. This would continue like near clockwork right up to the end of Togto's second term in office, in 1355, by which point the entire UN political system was well on its way to breaking down irrevocably, end quote. But for now, let's leave our 19-year-old emperor, Togon Temur, at either of his two capitals,

and move out into the wider empire to get a better feel for the situation out in the provinces. It was not doing so great. In fact, for not only Chinese history, but world history overall, the mid-14th century stands almost alone as perhaps one of the most turbulent, disruptive five decades of all time. Now, I know what you're all thinking. Aha, yes, this is the part where he finally starts talking about the Black Death. And you're right. But hold on, we're going to get there. Because in order to talk about the Black Death, we have to take a look at the broader circumstances. By which, of course, I mean global climactic conditions. Between the mid-10th and the mid-13th century, the Earth's climate had gone through an epoch very boringly called the Medieval Warm Period, in which large parts of the planet were the warmest and wettest they'd been since the 3rd to 4th centuries,

and the warmest that they would be right up until the mid-20th century blew right past them. Now, it's important that I throw in some qualifiers here about what I mean when I talk about global shifts in climate conditions. Number one, they're not uniform. Some places were still cold during the warm period, and some places even colder than usual. Some places were warmer than usual during the cooling period that I'm going to talk about here in a minute. That's the thing with a vast, hyper-complex system like the Earth's climate. It's vast, and it's hyper-complex, and it defies a single uniform answer. What we're looking at here, however, is an overall upward shift in global mean temperature as a whole for a period of several centuries. The second qualifier I'll put here is that the

warmer-cooler dynamic is often accompanied by, or even more directly observed as, wetter and or drier climates. Warming conditions tend to increase moisture in the atmosphere and thus make conditions wetter, and the opposite is true for cooler conditions, leading to increased patterns of drying. If you want to think of it in a really easy-to-picture term, think of an electric air conditioner and how it will also tend to dehumidify the room as it cools it. So, by the 14th century, the world has moved out of the medieval warm period and is well on its way towards plunging into an even longer cold period, most commonly known as the Little Ice Age, which is a bit of a misnomer since it's not an actual ice age, but that would

last more or less until about the mid-19th century. Why did this happen? Well, we don't really know. It could have been a result of a decrease in solar activity or a change to the axial tilt of the Earth so that the northern hemisphere was experiencing shorter summers, and I guess I should put in a third qualifier here that virtually all the data that we have from both of these periods comes from the northern hemisphere, since that's where both the majority of people and the majority of written records of such events were located.

It could also have to do with a possible period of increased volcanic activity across the globe, setting off something like a mildish volcanic winter for a few hundred years. It could even have something to do with changes in the oceanic currents and how they cycled heat around the Earth, although again, it's a hyper-complex system, and the atmosphere and ocean currents both affect each other greatly, so that's probably a bit of a chicken-and-egg situation. Regardless of the hows and whys, this planet-scale cooling and drying does much to explain the difficulties and disasters that were cropping up all across the Earth in the 14th century. Cooler, shorter, drier summers meant lower crop yields, droughts, and increased levels of famine. This general decline in access to sufficient nutrition

over enough time would tend to generally weaken human populations, and especially their immune systems. It would also tend to get people a lot more, oh what's the technical term, hangry, and willing to, say, stop working their failing farms and start more wars to get better access to things like food and supplies, which of course led to yet further suffering, starvation, and overall weakness. It could, and did, become a potent and lethal positive feedback loop of negative outcomes, leading to even more negative outcomes, which in turn reinforced and exacerbated the first negative outcomes, and so on and so forth. That leads us to the main character of the story of the Black Death, that microscopic rider on the pale horse, Yersinia pestis, the little plague bacterium that could. Y. pestis' native home is in the gut of fleas that themselves primarily live and feed on any number of little rodents and fleas, it doesn't tend to overly negatively affect either of those species,

or it at least kills the rodents at a slow enough pace to ensure further transmissibility for the bacteria. Where things go bad is when Y. pestis finds itself, purely by accident, in a familiar, but not that familiar, different species of mammal, such as a human being, which it's not designed to live in. In the absence of any of the usual defenders checking and slowing its growth cycles, White Pestis goes hog-wild within the unprepared body and tends to destroy it rapidly and utterly, aka the Black Death. Napoleon Bonaparte rose from obscurity to become the most powerful and significant figure in modern history. Over 200 years after his death, people are still debating his legacy.

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fascinating era of history. Find The Age of Napoleon wherever you get your podcasts. For the longest time, it was simply understood as a matter of course that the Black Death was transmitted from East Asia, across the Silk Road, and westwards to the Middle East and then to Europe via caravanserais and merchant sailing vessels. And so, ipso facto, it must have been a new disease carried from east to west thanks to increased human interconnectivity. Thanks a lot, globalization. Thanks a lot, Mongols. But as of 2013, new evidence pretty much blew that old explanation out of the water. DNA testing of the bones of the victims of the Justinian plague that devastated the Byzantine Empire and wider Europe in the mid-6th century conclusively

determined that those earlier plague victims had been killed by pretty much the exact same strain of Yersinia pestis that would later grip Eurasia in the 14th century. So it wasn't the Mongols bringing it over to Europe, because it was already there and was lurking around for more than 800 years. So that means we get to blame the Xiongnu and the Huns instead. Yay! So why did the plague go relatively quiet for that long period of time and then absolutely explode in the 14th century? If your answer was, it sounds like he's probably going to say climate change, you get a gold star. You've been paying attention.

A drying, cooling trend in the climate that shrank growing seasons didn't just affect human-grown crops, but their wild counterparts all across the Eurasian grassland as well. It's likely that many of those rodents, and the miniature biting harbingers of doom riding them, would have flocked to areas with more food. Of course, that means areas with much higher populations of people. like, say, medieval farms, cities, and army camps. Yet when we look at the Black Death, even if we go by the old, and now disproved, hypothesis that it came from China via the Silk Road, it's impossible not to notice that the Islamic world and Christian Europe take up almost the entire space of the story of the Black

Death. We rarely ever hear of it causing the sort of absolute devastation in East Asia as we do across Europe, you know, to the tune of 30 to 50% of the entire population dropping dead. It's well worth asking, what's up with that? Well, the climate theory of its rapid spread in the 14th century might help to explain that. At least maybe that conditions in Western Asia and Europe were different enough from East Asia that rodents were somewhat less likely to migrate to cities. That doesn't seem very convincing, though. What seems to be far more likely as an explanation is not that Yuan China was less affected by Y-pestis than other regions of Eurasia, but rather that, though it served as the primary apocalyptic event in the Western world at that time. The outbreak of plague in China was but a single aspect of an even larger

and even more devastating set of calamities. Throughout the 1340s and 50s, the history of Yuan records not a plague, but rather overlapping series of many plagues ripping through the empire one after another, all that on top of recurring periods of drought, flood, famine, and war. By war, I mean that there were the widespread peasant uprisings, millennialist apocalypse cults, and good old-fashioned full-scale rebellions and dynastic overthrows, all in the course of just a few scant decades. The UN had never been very good record keepers. The absolute travesty that is their entire census logs stands as testament to their shoddy workmanship on that account. And we should all be thoroughly not shocked that the process of their regime rapidly declining

and then being forcefully overthrown and ejected from the Yellow River Valley didn't help that record keeping any. All that to say, it's really hard to know exactly how bad the damage was altogether, much less from any specific source, like, say, one particular disease, because the general chaos of the era virtually ensured that no one was stopping long enough to take very good notes. While we're on the topic of population and the data that we have about this period, I'd be absolutely remiss if I didn't bring up once again one of the most frustrating aspects of the Yuan period, its census-taking and population records. They have been, since they were first recorded,

maddening historians trying to piece together what exactly went on and to what extent it affected the population of northern and southern China. The population registry given in the history of Yuan for the year 1346, for instance, gives us the number of 58,834,711 people residing in 13.19 million households. Well, alright, but there are some pretty significant problems with just accepting this number as given. First off, it doesn't include the newly subjugated province of Yunnan in the far south. Neither does it include whole categories of people, such as monks, priests, soldiers, and households under the jurisdiction of the princely Appanage estates. Over the course of the Yuan, the reported figures

stay very stable indeed, always hovering right around that 60 million mark. Indeed, the early censuses of the Ming dynasty that would replace the Yuan seem to back that up. Its 1393 census likewise shows a little over 60.5 million people. Where it gets strange, though, is looking back at the previous dynasty's censuses. Taken together, the final censuses of the Jin and southern Song account for somewhere between 100 to 125 million people, and the final census of northern Song, a century prior to that in 1109, shows more than 100 million people. It's tending to say that the Mongols were just that devastating towards the Chinese populations, especially those of the north, and maybe they did just kill that many people, or at the very least a goodly portion of them,

such that the others ran away or were taken by disease or starvation when the planting cycles were disrupted for years on end. But if the conquests are to be taken as the cause of such a drastic drop in population, the largest ever in Chinese history, if the numbers are to be believed, what could possibly explain that the number of people could be more than halved, and then stay at that smaller size in a stable fashion for the subsequent century? It's difficult to make sense of. And then there are the Ming figures, ostensibly more rigorously and comprehensively collected than the shoddy work of the Yuan, which apparently back those numbers up. At the end of the 14th

century, the population of China was less than 65 million people, as per the Ming records. Historians Qiu Shusheng and Wang Ting published a comprehensive study in 1983 called the Yuan Dai Hukou, or the Preliminary Discussion on the Population Registry of the Yuan Dynasty, which reached a conclusion that the Yuan censuses underreported by some 20%, leading to their conclusion that the total actual population of the empire was more like 90 million as of about 1340, but was reduced again to just over 60 million people by the dynasty's end less than three decades later. Such a drastic second reduction could well be explained by a combination of diseases,

such as the Black Death, and of course the outbreak of a new round of interdynastic strife and the final expulsion of the Mongols from China at great human cost. Mote does note that their figure doesn't explain what kind of factor or factors would have accounted for the population recovery between the 1270s and 1340s, but would have been missing by 1368, leading to a long-term population depression even after the diseases and war had passed. At this point, one might again point to the climate model of the onset of the Little Ice Age, and its potential to have drastically altered the fecundity of large tracts of farmland, especially the rice that had been so critical to the Song population explosion in the 11th century, and would have likely been more negatively impacted by colder, drier, and shorter growing seasons. In any event, the question of how big and how stable Yuan China's population was across the 14th century remains an open question,

and frustratingly so. As Mote puts it, quote, It is troubling to face a large riddle of this kind. If modern historians cannot know with more precision about the size and distribution of the population and the causes of its fluctuations, what can they say with assurance about the social history of the period? End quote. It's a pretty common trope, even today, for chroniclers of the Mongol Empire, and especially its iteration as Great Yuan, as a specific and emblematic failure of the Mongol Empire, and especially its iteration as Great Yuan, as a specific and emblematic failure of the Mongol imperial project as a whole. This is often chalked up to many reasons that to many of us by now seem to have almost come from the very lips of the Mongol step-essentialists such as Kaidu Khan and Khosla. That in ruling, and thereby acclimatizing themselves to, the vast

civilization south of the Gobi Desert, the Mongols thereby lost something essential about themselves that ultimately led to their decline and downfall. They lost Genghis Khan's special juice. They got soft. They got weak, the arguments tend to go. And yet, looking at this period of time and the long-standing problems that the Yuan had been facing since even before day one, that easy explanation doesn't seem to quite pass muster. The mid-14th century, after all, was no typical time. Dardis puts it very well, quote, but it may be worth recalling that the 14th century was calamitous everywhere, within and beyond the various Mongol empires, from Iceland and England at one end of Eurasia

to Japan at the other. Societies were suffering plagues, famines, agricultural decline, depopulation, and civil upheaval. Few societies were spared at least some of these symptoms. China was spared none of them. No fewer than 36 years in the 14th century had exceptionally severe winters, more than any other century on record. In the greater Yellow River region, major floods and droughts seemed to have occurred with unprecedented frequency in the 14th century. Serious epidemics broke out in the 1340s and 1350s.

Famines were recorded almost every year of Togon Temur's reign, leading to great mortality and costing the government vast sums in relief. These natural disasters created huge numbers of uprooted and impoverished people, fodder for the revolts that racked the realm in the 1350s. To each and all of these challenges, the young bureaucracy would strive its utmost to rise to the occasion and meet it head-on. It was, after all, just as interested in its own self-preservation as any other government we might expect. And by all accounts, it typically availed itself rather well, though of course not perfectly. As I mentioned before, any one of these crises the government likely would have been able to resolve without threat to its own underlying stability, probably even a number of them together or in quick succession. But against the historical tidal wave of catastrophe after catastrophe that engulfed the entire world beginning in the 1340s,

it's difficult to truly blame the Mongol Yuan dynasty for its failure to overcome all of them at once. It's difficult to point to any pre-ardis, quote, End quote. This positive feedback loop of catastrophes, of course, quickly pushed the Yuan government to, and then beyond, its own breaking points. And as a reaction to its own failures on that front, it tended to adopt solutions which actually only further exacerbated its own downward spiral. The most obvious example of this was the court's response to the outbreak of numerous acts of rebellion and banditry, especially across the relatively uncontrolled wilds of the southern provinces. The Yuan military, for all its vaunted, though by this point well-tarnished, offensive might, was fundamentally not suited to the task of civil oversight, nor were its administrators suited or capable of deploying their troops in such a way to maximize their effectiveness

in rooting out or preventing rebel elements. To put it simply, the UN military was a weapon of war, but it was now being tasked with keeping the peace. A flying fortress bomber and its crew now tasked with policing a province. It just didn't work well. And are we really surprised? Instead, the officials and administrators tended to do what officials and administrators often tend to do when the going gets tough. They delegated. They decentralized. They passed the buck onto the regional officials, who in turn passed the buck onto the local officials. Defend yourselves, for Tengri's sake. We've got better things to do in the capital. And so, the provinces and localities did what they were told,

and they delegated out the defense of their areas among the locals. I mean, of course, they'd need weapons for such an endeavor. Obviously, you'll send us the weapons, right? And of course, they'd need training to use them. We've got to defend against this rising tide of bandits and rebels. We need to know how to use this stuff that you took away from us decades ago. So give us the weapons and give us the training, and then we'll be more than willing to pull up men from our populations to defend our own regions. And you know what? We won't even need to ask you for anything else from the capital. So are you seeing the growing problem with this situation yet? The problem of decoupling local

defense and administration from a centralized control? It all looks pretty good on paper, right? Make those provinces pay for and train their own guys. But wait a second, what do they need us for then? And also, if some of those trained local soldiers get all brainy about things and decide that they'd rather not listen to you anymore, well gosh, all of a sudden they're a lot more dangerous than just some hee-haw farmers. It's a degenerative process that feeds upon itself, another destructive positive feedback loop. Decentralization leads to the rise of seditious elements and rebels who break away, meaning that the regions have even more impetus to militarize themselves, leading to even less direct imperial oversight, leading to yet more room and justification for seditious elements questioning

the necessity of imperial rule in the first place. Frederick Mote writes, It induced a comprehensive change from a pacific society to a militarized one. Arms, usually not present in village households, came to be universally present. As many males came to possess and to understand arms, those most successful in their use became military leaders. In the competition for military supremacy that ensued from the 1330s onward, a very large number of competent and a few brilliant military leaders were produced from the most humble backgrounds. Most of those remained outside the government's military establishment, in the service of one or another of the rebellions." That's right. By forcing the localities to do it themselves, the UN had unwittingly created

the basis, both philosophical and martial, for its own demise. The rise of an entire crop of effectual warlord states, along with an undeniable undercurrent of popular apocalyptic organizations bent on grinding the old world down to dust and bringing forth a new beginning, in the form of an offshoot of the White Lotus Society, collectively known as the Red Turbans. But more on that in due time. Where I'd like to finish out today is by tracing the early life and rise of one of the central and certainly the most important figure of this period, certainly of far greater import than Emperor Togon Temur, and there really isn't a third place. I mean, of course,

Zhu Yuanzhang, the man who would rise from nothing and go on to completely overthrow and expel the scions of Genghis Khan from China and establish his own fiercely nativist dynasty in its stead. Of all the dynastic founders, Zhu Yuanzhang stands truly alone as the only one to truly come from squalor. Typically, those rebel commanders who ultimately seized the throne commanded legions of the populace against the hated tyrant de Jure, but were themselves very much of the blue-blooded nobility class. If one was inclined to be particularly generous as to their motivations, from Liu Bang to Li Yuan to Zhao Kuangyin, one might best pull a line from the film Gladiator, in which the fictional senator

Gracchus declares, I do not pretend to be a man of the people, but I do try to be a man for the people. Such high-minded aspirations, however so much or little they might have truly existed, certainly tended to fade with startling rapidity as the generations wore on, and even the pretense of governing for the people fell away from sight of the imperial lineages. Not so with Zhu Yuanzhang. Neither a prince, nor duke, nor even general, or of any great familial renown, Zhu was instead the son of a destitute farmer. In Yuan society, as differentiated both from earlier and subsequent dynasties, that marked him out as the absolute bottom-tier lowest of the low. This certainly is one of the most well-known facts about the Ming,

or of Zhu Yuanzhang, or indeed Chinese history altogether, that his founder was himself of common stock, and tragically impoverished besides. And why shouldn't it be? Even at my most cynical, I can see how it's a great story to tell the masses. You know, don't complain too much. Even a farmer's son from Anhui can become the emperor if he really tries hard. It's a classic American dream, anyone can be president sort of kitsch.

So, Zhu Yuanzhang was born on October 21st, 1328, in the village of Zhongli, Haozhu District, Fengyang County, in what is modern Chuzhou City, Anhui, about 60 kilometers northwest of Nanjing, on the north side of the Yangtze River. It was, to put it mildly, not a great time to be born. It's not precisely known as to how many children his parents had, but it's known that he was the youngest surviving child out of four sons and two daughters. By the time of his early childhood, all of his siblings but his eldest brother had been either adopted out to other families or married off, because there wasn't enough food to go around.

This certainly owed much to the broader conditions of the time, but also due to the fact that Zhu's parents were tax evaders who had frequently been on the run from the law and scratching out a bare existence from tenant farming while hopping from place to place. Not exactly building a stable nest egg. As luck would so have it, the Zhu household just so happened to be within the regional proximity of one of the two branches of what became known as the Red Turban Rebellion, specifically the Northern Red Turbans, based out of the Kuai River region of Anhui and Hebei. Now we're going to get more into the Red Turbans as we progress onward, but for the moment it's enough to know that the Northern Red Turbans

had a strong ideological commitment to at least the nominal restoration of the Song Dynasty. To achieve this, a strange blend of Manichaeanism and Buddhism posited that at the hour of greatest need and suffering, a great spiritual and physical reversal would occur, and the Maitreya Buddha would come from the Western Paradise to rule the world, bringing a dramatically utopian reversal to men's fortunes. As a boy, Zhu Yuanzhang's head had been filled with just such tales by his maternal grandfather, himself a fortune-teller of note and perhaps some infamy, as well as a retired veteran from the final phase of the Mongol conquest of China half a century prior.

One can scarcely imagine a more potent mix than that, of a spiritualist storyteller who believes that the cosmic scales will reverse any day now, and absolutely has an axe to grind about who it should definitely turn against. In the year 1344, at the age of 16, Yuan Zhang experienced the unfathomable, and yet, for the time, the altogether too common. The death of his family. No, I didn't skip a word there. Not the death of a family member. His entire family. In the course of that summer, in fact, just three weeks between May and June, amidst drought and locust swarms, his mother, father, and eldest brother one and all succumbed to starvation. Yuan Zhang was left with only his bereaved sister-in-law and her infant son at home. Without money, or likely caloric energy, they were unable to even properly bury the dead, much less continue to feed the survivors.

As such, Zhu Yuanzhang either offered himself or was offered up to a nearby Buddhist monastery by that October, as a servant and novice of the order. Actually, as a fulfillment of a vow that Zhu's father had made to the monks years prior when he'd been deathly ill and they'd nursed him back to health. The boy, or by now rather young man, had, in spite of his dismal conditions, grown into a striking figure. He'd become a tall, sturdy youth, notable for a rugged, pockmarked face dominated by a jutting jaw, features so strange that they aroused awe and were seen to portend unusual qualities. It's almost enough to chalk it up to the posthumous writings of chroniclers seeking to portend his ultimate rise to victory and glory, and yet there's every indication that Zhu Yuanzhang absolutely possessed just such an

unusual and arresting look. Did those features truly portend his rise to victory and glory to follow? Or perhaps did his striking appearance allow him to more easily gain notice, and thus followers, onward towards victory? Next time, we'll delve deeper into that, Zhu Yuanzhang's early life and career, and the origins and ethos of the so-called Red Turban Rebellion against Yuan authority, as well as the further destabilization of the imperial apparatus as error piles upon error piles upon unmanageable tragedy as a terrible, horrible, no-good, very-bad half-century of the mid-to-late 1300s trudges on. Thanks for listening. of the globe and on which the sun never set. I'm Samuel Hume, a historian of the British Empire, and my podcast Pax Britannica follows the people and events that built that empire into a global superpower. Learn the history of the British Empire by listening to Pax Britannica everywhere you find your podcasts, or go to pod.link slash pax.