Hongwu Emperor

• Died: 1398
• Reign: 1368-1398
• Other Names: 明太祖 (Ming Taizu), 朱元璋 (Zhu Yuanzhang)
• Chinese/Japanese: 洪武帝 (Hongwu-di / Koubu-tei)

Zhu Yuanzhang was the first emperor of China's Ming Dynasty, and the first dynastic founder to come from a genuinely humble, peasant, birth. Having led a successful rebellion to overthrow the Mongol Yuan Dynasty in 1368, he named himself the Hongwu Emperor, marking the beginning of a new dynasty, and came to be known as well as "Ming Taizu," or "Great Ancestor/Founder of Ming."

Zhu was born into a poor peasant family, and was the only one of his siblings (six in total) to not be adopted out of the family, or married into another family, at a young age. His parents died from an epidemic when he was sixteen. He later grew up to become a rebel leader, leading a successful uprising against the Mongol leaders of the Yuan Dynasty.

Perhaps because of his peasant origins, the Hongwu Emperor adhered to a conservative Confucian notion of the importance of agriculture as the foundation of the State and of the economy, disparaging the merchant class. In a reversal from earlier policies, he returned the taxation system to one based on agricultural production, reducing or eliminating commercial taxes, and, at times (in 1370 and 1398), banning private overseas voyages entirely. In accordance with these conservative attitudes, the Hongwu Emperor also had tax rates frozen at a given rate, based on land surveys from the beginning of his reign. The country's agricultural production was prosperous enough to support the population, and the State, for a time, but the State's financial needs grew over the course of the Ming period, along with agricultural and commercial production, which the frozen tax rates failed to capture. Meanwhile, coin became for the first time widely available enough that the people shifted from paper money to an all-cash (metal currency) economy by 1450.

References

• Valerie Hansen, The Open Empire, New York: W.W. Norton & Company (2000), 371.