627 years ago today, on June 24, 1398 (the tenth day of the fifth lunar month), Zhu Yuanzhang, the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty, passed away.

Zhu Yuanzhang, Taizu of the Ming Dynasty (November 19, 1328-June 24, 1398)(another said he was born on October 21), Emperor of the Ming Dynasty of China (reigned from 1368 to 1398)

Ritual standing and the top and bottom are divided, divided and the name is right, the name is right and the world is ruled; the great disadvantage of Yuan: the ruler cannot bow to the people's government, so the minister can be autocratic and self-indulgent; the people are rich and pro, the people are poor and separated, the people are rich and poor, and the country is resting - Zhu Yuanzhang

The most talked about story of Zhu Yuanzhang, the founder of the Ming Dynasty, is his story from beggar, monk to emperor. Such a huge gap in life is comparable to only a few people from slaves to emperors in world history.

Zhu Yuanzhang was born into a poor family of homesteaders in Haozhou, and his childhood name was eight times heavy. At the age of 16, his hometown was hit by a rare drought, locust plague, and plague. His father, mother, and eldest brother were all killed. Zhu Yuanzhang was forced to become a monk at the nearby Huangjue Temple. He needed to travel around the world to make a living. Four years later, he returned to Huangjue Temple.

In 1351, the peasant uprising at the end of the Yuan Dynasty, initiated by Kaihe Workers, broke out. The uprising army was called the Red Turbans Army. This is the general release of the dual accumulation of ethnic contradictions and class contradictions in the Yuan Dynasty to a certain extent. Zhu Yuanzhang devoted himself to Guo Zixing's army. Due to his outstanding combat capabilities, he gradually became the backbone of Guo Zixing's army and married Guo Zixing's adopted daughter. Zhu Yuanzhang gradually gathered a group of talents under his command, such as Xu Da, Chang Yuchun, Li Shanchang, etc., which became the foundation for his future conquest of the world. In 1355, Guo Zixing died and Zhu Yuanzhang became the right deputy marshal. With the death of two other powerful figures, Zhu Yuanzhang completely took over Guo Zixing's troops. In 1356, Jiqing (now Nanjing) was captured and used as a base. In an era when his power was not yet strong, Zhu Yuanzhang adopted Zhu Sheng's suggestion of "building high walls, accumulating grain extensively, and delaying the king", and adopted the military garrison system to promote production, rapidly improving his strength.

The situation at that time was that the Red Scarf Army of Liu Futong's army was fighting against the Yuan Dynasty army in the north, and the internal Yuan Dynasty was also divided and the internal struggles were endless, while in the south, it was Zhu Yuanzhang, Chen Youming, Zhang Shicheng and other forces from the Red Scarf Army who were fighting. Zhu Yuanzhang first defeated the main force of Chen Youming's army in the Battle of Poyang Lake, and finally won the final victory in the tragic water battle. Then he turned back to deal with Zhang Shicheng's army in the east. After two years of offensive, he finally annihilated it, and then annexed Fang Guozhen's army in the southeast region, which already occupied half of the country. It was 1367, and the Yuan Dynasty also eliminated Liu Futong's army, and the two sides formed a situation of confrontation between the north and the south. In 1368, Zhu Yuanzhang adopted the safe strategy of "taking Shandong first, then Henan and Hebei, guarding Tongguan, and directly taking Dadu". He sent Xu Da and Chang Yuechun, a pair of golden partners, to the Northern Expedition and conquer Dadu in July. Yuan Shundi fled north, and the north returned to the rule of the Han regime after more than 200 years.

During this process, Zhu Yuanzhang remained the mainstay of Han Liner's Dragon and Phoenix regime until 1366, when he felt that the time was ripe for him to declare himself emperor, so he sent people to assassinate Han Liner. In 1367, he became King of Wu, and in the first month of 1368, he officially proclaimed himself emperor, with the country's name Ming.

After the establishment of the Ming Dynasty, it continued to eliminate the remaining separatist forces in the country. In the south, it successively captured the hotbeds of separatism in Sichuan and Yunnan. In the north, it sent large armies to pursue the Mongols who had fled into the desert. These military operations were successful and unsuccessful, but after nearly 20 years after the founding of the country, it basically unified the entire China except for the territory occupied by the northern nomads.

The main reason why Zhu Yuanzhang was included in this ranking was not his legendary experience before claiming to be emperor, but that he established a series of groundbreaking systems after claiming to be emperor, which brought China's feudal society into a new stage, a stage that was more internally stable, but also more autocratic and conservative.

Recovering and recuperating is a must for a country that has been hit hard. As an emperor from a poor background, Zhu Yuanzhang's experience in this regard is deeper. In response to the current situation of large tracts of land abandoned after the great chaos at the end of the Yuan Dynasty, he admitted that the unowned land reclaimed during the war was owned by the cultivators. Newly reclaimed land can be exempted from taxes for three years in some places. In the era of Zhu Yuanzhang, the order to reduce land rents is still in history. Water conservancy was also built on a large scale. By 1394, more than 40,000 of the newly opened Tangyan across the country. The household registration was rectified nationwide, the land was cleared, the yellow books were made up, and the Lijia system was implemented. In the early Ming Dynasty, it was very successful, so tax revenue was increased. Even the number of registered household registrations in the middle and late Ming Dynasty could not exceed that of Zhu Yuanzhang's era for Zhu Yuanzhang also implemented measures to relocate the population, first relocating the landless poor in densely populated areas to places with a large number of abandoned and unowned lands, and later relocating the wealthy households in the southeast to Nanjing and Linhao, which not only filled the capital and made it easier to control, but also removed the basis for their exploitation of laborers in the original places. At the same time, those who had been slaves in the war were released as free people, and the number of slaves owned by officials at all levels was reduced to a small number, which greatly declined the slave storage system that had prevailed since the Yuan Dynasty, and increased the number of small producers in society.

These measures were more or less implemented after the founding of each dynasty, but Zhu Yuanzhang was the one who did it relatively successfully. His more groundbreaking reforms were in the political and military system.

Zhu Yuanzhang's measures in the reform of the political and military system can be summarized as "decentralization and restriction, strengthening control". After the prime minister Hu Weiyong's rebellion, he abolished the prime minister, and at the same time abolished the Zhongshu Province, so that the six ministers were directly responsible to the emperor, so that the prime minister's position was actually held by the emperor. He also established the Imperial Bureau and the Jinyiwei, the former was responsible for supervision and prosecution, and the latter was completely the emperor's minions. This was the beginning of the developed secret service politics of the Ming Dynasty.

In terms of military affairs, he divided the powers of the Grand Dudu into five prefectures: front, back, left, center and right, and also made them check each other with the Ministry of War and be equally responsible to the emperor. At the local level, the Ministry of Administrative Affairs of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China was abolished, and its powers were assigned to the Division of Administrative Affairs of the Chengxuan, the Division of Commanding and the Division of Administrative Affairs of the Communist Party of China, which was in charge of administration, military affairs and justice. The three do not govern each other and are all directly responsible to the central government. At the same time, the vassal kings were also assigned to various places. The vassal kings were all the sons and nephews of Zhu Yuanzhang, and each could have a guard of several thousand to more than 10,000 people. Zhu Yuanzhang's purpose in establishing vassal kings was to enable them to guard the central government and allow the central government to be controlled by "traitors", the vassal kings could play the role of "Qing Jun's side". However, shortly after his death, civil war was quickly triggered due to the problem of the vassal kings 'big tails. Zhu Yuanzhang established a guard station system in border areas. The people in the guard station were all military records, inherited from generation to generation, and allocated them a certain amount of land to implement the military station system.

In the early days of the founding of the People's Republic of China, [] Zhu Yuanzhang mainly punished some unscrupulous heroes to form a deterrent effect, but in the later stage of his reign, especially after 1390, "punishment" turned into animal killing. In the two major rebellion cases (Hu Weiyong case and Lan Yu case), tens of thousands of people were implicated and died. Coupled with other killings, only a few of the founding heroes were able to escape.

In terms of culture, Zhu Yuanzhang also had a great influence, but was more criticized by later generations. One was the establishment of the system of eight-strand recruitment of scholars, which made the imperial examination system enter a stage of self-imposed cocoon; the other was the literary prison, in Zhu Yuanzhang's era, the people who were killed for the prohibition of writing are not lost in history. These systems were inherited by the Qing Dynasty and are considered to be the root cause of the sad situation of "ten thousand horses and horses" in China.

Zhu Yuanzhang also made great achievements in legislation and justice. He ordered Li Shanchang and others to formulate the "Ming Law" and the "Da Gao", and the criminal law of officials should be mainly "strict". During his reign, there were two major cases involving widespread incidents: the Kongyin case and the Guo Huan case, especially the latter case, with tens of thousands of people implicated. Zhu Yuanzhang took great actions against the corruption of officials. All officials who embezzled more than 60 taels were beheaded, skinned and hung on the scarecrow in the ancestral temple next to the yamen to warn the successor officials. The intensity and scope of anti-corruption are unprecedented in history.

Zhu Yuanzhang also compiled his life's experience and ruling experience into "Huangming Ancestral Instructions" in order to educate his successors to become wise masters. This book is worthy of being a valuable political exhortation, but judging from the fact that most of the later Ming emperors were absurd and foolish, its value was not its original intention.

Zhu Yuanzhang's various systems during his reign were either improved on the basis of previous generations or established by himself. Most of them were inherited by the Ming and Qing dynasties, establishing the framework of the political system for more than 500 years. He was undoubtedly the most influential emperor in the later period of Chinese feudal society.

Regarding the evaluation of Zhu Yuanzhang's achievements and crimes, future generations paid more attention to his wantonly killing innocent people. Every time he set up a large prison, he killed tens of thousands of people, which was indeed very cruel. However, the people he killed were all officials and businessmen, and did not involve poor people. However, he paid close attention to people's livelihood and paid great attention to moderation in building projects and launching wars, which reflected his advantage of being a poor peasant and being able to understand the sufferings of the people.

But Zhu Yuanzhang strengthened the centralization of power, especially the authority of the emperor himself. When his successors slowed down the government, this excess imperial power fell to the emperor's close aides, the eunuchs, laying the groundwork for the later political malaise of the Ming Dynasty - the eunuchs' dictatorship. And his establishment of brocade guards and Xingwen Prison was a ruthless violation of human rights, which gradually "precipitated" Chinese culture into a sauce bowl. "Zhu Yuanzhang was diligent, but he was also extremely selfish, with the aim of establishing a system that would benefit him and his descendants for a long and stable rule. The Ming Dynasty was the beginning of China's decline in the world, and Zhu Yuanzhang was responsible for it. As the most important emperor in the late period of Chinese feudal society, Zhu Yuanzhang ranks 35th in this list.

Comments: As an emperor born from a poor person, the seeds of hatred for wealth and officials planted in Zhu Yuanzhang's heart in his early years were fully revealed when he was able to manipulate the power of life and death of others. This made his politics show that he was harsh on officials and relatively relaxed on civilians. Although he must bear the notoriety of strengthening authoritarian rule and control of literati culture, he has achieved good results in improving people's livelihood.