Founding of the Ming dynasty in China
- Date
- 1368 CE
- Category
- Politics & governance
- Region
- China
- Era
- Post-Classical / Medieval
- Significance
In 1368 Zhu Yuanzhang, a former peasant and Buddhist novice who had risen as a rebel commander amid the Red Turban revolts, proclaimed the Ming dynasty and took the reign name Hongwu, meaning vastly martial.
His armies drove the last Mongol Yuan emperor north from the capital Dadu, ending nearly a century of Mongol rule over China and restoring native Han imperial governance. The collapse of the Yuan had been hastened by ethnic discrimination, ruinous inflation, and catastrophic flooding of the Yellow River. From his capital at Nanjing, Hongwu rebuilt a centralised bureaucratic state, revived the Confucian civil-service examinations, restored agriculture and irrigation devastated by decades of war, and reorganised the military and tax systems. The dynasty he founded would endure until 1644, presiding over a flourishing of population, commerce, porcelain and printing, the construction of the Forbidden City, and the consolidation of the Great Wall in its familiar stone form. The Ming founding marked one of the great political restorations of the era, re-establishing China as a stable and powerful state precisely as Europe and the Islamic world reeled from plague, schism and war.
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Empires active in 1368 CE
- Kanem-Bornu Empire700 CE – 1900 CE
- Mongol Empire1206 CE – 1368 CE
- Ming Dynasty1368 CE – 1644 CE
- Ottoman Empire1299 CE – 1922 CE
- Solomonic dynasty1270 CE – 1974 CE
- Byzantine Empire330 CE – 1453 CE
Related politics & governance events
- Founding of the Iroquois Confederacy and the Great Law of Peacec. 1450 (scholarly estimate; oral tradition as early as 1142)
- Kublai Khan founds the Yuan dynasty and conquers Song China1271 CE (conquest completed 1279)
- Rise of Timur (Tamerlane) and his Central Asian empirec. 1370 CE (empire to 1405)
- Foundation of the Vijayanagara Empire1336 CE
- Temüjin proclaimed Genghis Khan, uniting the Mongols1206 CE
- Founding of Tenochtitlan by the Mexica1325 CE
Further reading
The wider story
The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties
Engaging survey of Yuan-Ming China (Harvard History of Imperial China).
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