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FALL OF THE YUAN DYNASTY

Death toll: 30 million missing

Rank: 17

Type: native uprising

Broad dividing line: Chinese vs. Mongols

Time frame: ca. 1340–70

Location: China

Who usually gets the most blame: Mongols

Another damn: Chinese dynasty collapsing

AS THE GENERATIONS PASSED, THE MONGOLS GOT BETTER AT RULING China—but let’s face it, they couldn’t have gotten any worse. Eventually peace and prosperity returned, and a century after Chinggis Khan’s initial conquest, the Chinese population had rebounded somewhat. The khans conquered southern China, settled into Beijing as the Yuan dynasty, and behaved like proper emperors rather than uncouth barbarians. Soon they learned to appreciate the luxuries of the civilized world and the taxes that paid for these.

Even so, the Mongols remained aliens in China and treated the native Chinese as a race of conquered servants. All of the top jobs went to Mongols, who had less familiarity with what was necessary to run a civilization. The Mongols especially fell behind in maintaining the irrigation systems along the Yellow River. The river broke through the dykes in 1288, then again in 1332–33, killing 7 million. Another flood of the Yellow River in 1344 ruined the Grand Canal, which ran almost a thousand miles north to south and connected trade across China’s various west-to-east river networks. This meant that grain could no longer be shipped safely by barge from the rice fields of the south to the capital. Instead, grain shipments went over the open sea, where they were vulnerable to pirate attacks. When the coastal province of Zhejiang rebelled under Fang Kuo-chen in 1348, his pirate fleet began to interrupt these shipments in the waters alongside his territory.¹

Red Turban Rebellion

In 1351, to fix these problems, the Mongol emperor Toghon Temur of China drafted 150,000 peasants and set them to work taming the Yellow River. He also stationed 20,000 soldiers to keep the peasants in line. Forced into slave labor, these disgruntled workers fell under the influence of the militant White Lotus sect of Buddhists and their military arm, the Red Turbans.² The White Lotus focused its worship on Maitreya, the Future Buddha, who would descend from heaven and create paradise after the King of Light had prepared the way. Soon after the leader of the Red Turbans, Han Shantong, launched a rebellion against the Mongols, the authorities caught and killed him, but not before he convinced his followers that his son, Han Liner, would make an excellent King of Light.³

However, the man who would turn out to be the next ruler of China was hiding elsewhere. Among the countless orphans left after the flood of 1344 was a sixteen-year-old peasant boy, Zhu Yuanzhang. The son of a tax evader and the grandson of a sorcerer, Zhu took refuge in a Buddhist monastery after gradually losing his family one by one to flood, famine, poverty, and plague.

Mongol field commanders putting down the Red Turban uprising had an unfortunate tendency to burn random Buddhist temples and report back to Beijing that they had just destroyed another rebel stronghold. After Zhu’s temple was destroyed, the twenty-three-year-old was left homeless, so he joined a nearby Red Turban force commanded by Kuo Tzu-hsing. Within a year, Zhu Yuanzhang was entrusted with an independent command. After Kuo Tzu-hsing died in 1354, his successors launched a couple of extremely unsuccessful attacks against the east-central city of Nanjing during which the rest of the Red Turban leaders in that part of the country were killed. Zhu was the last surviving commander and became the new leader of the war band.⁴ When Nanjing finally fell in April 1356, Zhu made it his capital and proclaimed himself emperor of the new Ming (“Bright”) dynasty, ruling over middle China.

Zhu wasn’t the only claimant to the Chinese throne. In 1355, Han Liner, King of Light among the Red Turbans in the north, was strong enough to declare himself a legitimate successor to the long-gone Song dynasty. Meanwhile the leadership of the Red Turbans in the south went through a string of assassinations that eliminated several claimants and left Chen Youliang in charge. He proclaimed himself emperor of the restored Han dynasty and reached a deal with Zhu Yuanzhang to divide China so they could focus on consolidating control over their territories.

As the Red Turban commanders took over more and more of China, Mongol control shrank to Beijing and little else. The Mongols, however, were not totally out of the picture yet. In 1359, they raided south and broke Han Liner’s power base. Finally, in 1368, Zhu Yuanzhang chased the last Mongols out of Beijing and back across the Great Wall, which allowed the native Chinese to turn to the important business of deciding which of them would be the new emperor of a united China. This required another civil war.

Ming-Han War

Because of the last Mongol attack, Han Liner of the pseudo-Song dynasty was no longer a viable candidate, but to finalize this state of affairs, Zhu arranged a fatal boating accident for him in 1367. This meant that the fate of China came down to either Zhu Yuanzhang (Ming dynasty) or Chen Youliang (Han dynasty), and the battle lines moved to the Yangtze River, where amphibious assaults were conducted up and down the river. For a while, Chen gained the upper hand by using the tall, fortified sterncastles of his massive three-story warships to attack over the walls of riverside cities. Then in 1363, Zhu Yuanzhang arrived with 200,000 men aboard an unknown number of small ships to break Chen’s siege of Nanchang. Chen withdrew his fleet of 300,000 men aboard 150 gigantic tower ships to the deeper, wider waters of Lake Poyang, where an important tributary flowed into the Yangtze River, and where he hoped to have more room (at the time, around 2,000 square miles, or the size of Delaware)⁵ to maneuver.

The subsequent fight on the lake, which stretched from late August to early October 1363, is usually considered the largest naval battle (in terms of personnel) in history. Throughout September, the heavy Han ships huddled in the center of the lake, chained together for added solidity, harassed on all sides by the smaller, more numerous Ming vessels, which looked for an opportunity to board or set fire to the enemy. At first the Han vessels inflicted more damage than their attackers, but under the late summer sun, water levels fell and the shallows turned to swamps, shifting the advantage from Chen’s giant ships to Zhu’s lighter vessels. Eventually, Zhu’s fleet moved upriver and got a favorable wind and current. They sent fireships packed with gunpowder downwind and downriver into Chen’s fleet, blowing up dozens of ships and killing 60,000 men. The fleets continued to skirmish until finally, a month later, Chen Youliang tried again to break out of the lake. This time, he was killed by an arrow in the skull during the ensuing battle.

Zhu Yuanzhang soon mopped up all remaining opposition and established his undisputed control of China as the Hongwu (“Vastly Martial”) emperor.⁶

Necrometry

According to The Cambridge History of China, the post-Mongol recovery of China’s population peaked in 1340 at 19.9 million households and 90 million people, but was reduced by late Yuan warfare to 13 million households and 60 million people by the end of the dynasty in 1368.⁷ In other words, 30 million people disappeared in the mayhem. Even though that source specifically blames the population crash on warfare, I still feel obliged to split the body count among floods, famine, bubonic plague, and war. Let’s assign one-fourth (7.5 million) of the total to each of these causes.