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 family was officially classed as "gold panners" under the Yuan system which required people to continue the occupations of their fathers; this despite the fact that there were no gold mines in that local area. Zhu's 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.

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.

The Hongwu Emperor initially based the structure of the Ming government on that of the Yuan Dynasty, with a chancellor or prime minister overseeing a government divided into Six Boards. However, concerned that the chancellor (potentially) wielded too much power, he abolished that position in 1380. The organization of regional administration - including titles/posts and geographic administrative borders - was left largely intact as it existed under the Yuan.

One major program initiated by the Hongwu Emperor was the restoration of a system of family registers, known as Yellow Registers, inspired by Tang precedent. As under the Yuan, people were expected to perform much the same professions/occupations as their fathers; this, as well as numerous other data about each family was recorded in a system of registers, providing the government with a better knowledge about the population than had existed since the fall of the Tang. This, in turn, allowed for more accurate and thorough taxation, etc. Taxes were collected twice a year - in winter, and in summer - as under the Tang following the An Lushan Rebellion; though the government planned to perform periodical land surveys & population censuses, in order to update the tax obligations, the Ming, like the Tang before them, found they lacked the manpower to do so effectively.

Families were grouped into groups of ten, and groups of one hundred, with the wealthiest families held responsible for ensuring that the other families in their group live up to their occupational and tax obligations. Wealthy families managed, however, to evade these obligations fairly effectively, protecting themselves (and the families under them) from having to pay the full amount of tax to the government; this, of course, harmed government revenues. In addition, though under this occupation obligation, in practice, many families are known to have paid others to do those tasks for them (e.g. farming, or fighting), freeing up the family to pursue some other occupation (e.g. fighting, or farming).

Beginning in 1387, the emperor's government implemented a system of land registration called "fish-scale registers," under which individuals were responsible for the equivalent of one sixth-of-an-acre (mu, 畝) of production for each sixth-of-an-acre they owned, regardless of how much land they actually cultivated. The land surveys associated with implementing this system were successfully completed by 1393.

References

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