In 1353, Zhu captured Ch’u-chou (now Ch’u district in Anhwei Province, an area west of Nanking). Zhu married Kuo’s adopted daughter, the princess Ma. In 1352, a Buddhist mendicant named Zhu Yuanzhang joined a rebel band led by Guo Zixing (Kuo Tzuhsing), one of Han Liner’s followers. Among the key leaders of the Southern Red Turbans were Xu Shouhui and Chen Youliang. After that, several other Han rebels in the south of the Yangtze River revolted under the name of the Southern Red Turbans. After his death, Liu Futong, a prominent member of the White Lotus, assisted Han’s son, Han Liner, the “Little Prince of Radiance,” who claimed to be an incarnation of Maitreya Buddha, to succeed his father and establish the Red Turban Army. In 1351, the society plotted an armed rebellion, but the plan was disclosed and Han Shantong was arrested and executed by the Yuan Government. After that, the White Lotus society, led by Han Shantong, in the area north of the Yellow River became the center of anti-Mongol sentiment. The “Red Turban” rebellions began sporadically, first on the coast of Zhejiang, when a Han Chinese named Fang Guozhen and his men assaulted a group of Yuan officials. The name “Red Turban” came from their tradition of using red banners and wearing red turbans to distinguish themselves. Their ideology included elements from White Lotus, a Buddhist sect from the late Southern Song which believed in the imminent advent of the Buddha Maitreya Manichaeism, which originated in Babylon in the third century and adapted to Buddhism when it reached China traditional Confucianism and Daoism. The “Red Turbans,” or “Red Scarves,” was a secret society of peasants whose aim was to overthrow the Mongols and re-establish the Song Dynasty. At the same time, natural disasters such as famines and the constant flooding of the Yellow River caused extreme hardship for the peasants. The Yuan Dynasty required considerable military expenditure to maintain its vast empire, and the burden of additional taxation fell mostly on the Han Chinese, who constituted the lower two of the four groups in the Yuan social structure. Opposition to Mongol rule increased among the Chinese, especially among groups such as the salt workers, who were particularly oppressed. After Kublai Khan died in 1294, internal dissension under less capable leaders caused the efficiency of the government to deteriorate rapidly. Intermarriage among the three groups of Mongols, Chinese, and other ethnicities was forbidden. Chinese were not allowed to possess arms, and the penal code was imposed more severely on them than on Mongols for the same offenses. Kublai Khan gave the top administrative positions in the government to Mongols, allowing large numbers of Han Chinese to occupy the less important posts. In 1279, Kublai Khan completed the Mongol conquest of the Southern Song Dynasty and established the Yuan Dynasty. Yeluchucai, a member of the Khitan royal house, convinced the nomadic Mongols not to destroy the Chinese peasants and their agriculture, but instead to tax them and profit from the products of Chinese mines and industries. In 1209, he began the conquest of Xi Xia on China’s northern border, and in 1215, Beijing fell to the Mongols. The Mongols were pushed to the north of the Great Wall, and by 1382, China was unified again under the Ming.ĭuring the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, Genghis Khan (1167–1227) unified the Mongol tribes into a massive conquering force which spread out across Central Asia, destroying any city that did not immediately surrender. In August of that year, Ming troops entered Pekingand the rule of the Yüan dynasty came to an end. In 1368, Zhu Yuanzhang proclaimed the Ming dynasty, with himself as the emperor Taizu (T’ai-tsu, Grand Ancestor), posthumously known as the Hongwu Emperor. One of the Red Turban leaders, Zhu Yuanzhang, established a military base at Nanjing in 1356, defeated his rivals in southern China, and began to occupy the north. Their ideology included elements from White Lotus (a Buddhist sect from the late Southern Song), Manichaeism, traditional Confucianism, and Daoism. At the same time, there was an upsurge of opposition to the Mongol leadership among the Han Chinese peasants, fueled by inflation and hardship caused by famine and flooding. By the mid-fourteenth century, dissension among the Mongolian leadership and corruption and greed of the government officials had greatly weakened the central government. The Red Turban Rebellion was an uprising in the middle of the fourteenth century by Chinese peasants against the ruling Mongolian Yuan Dynasty, which eventually resulted in the establishment of the Ming dynasty.
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