Red turbans

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The social-religious uprising of the Red Turbans from 1352 to 1365 overturned Mongol rule over China and initiated the transition to the Ming Dynasty under Zhu Yuanzhang . Her name comes from her red headscarves.

First appearance

The believers first appeared in Jiangxi and Hunan in the 1330s and then spread through half of China. Aided by famine and epidemics, they created local sect centers in the provinces. In 1324 the Yellow River had shifted its course, eight million people died from the subsequent famine, and in the 1330s the flooding of the Yellow River worsened, causing persistent instability in the affected regions. Also in 1344 there was another great flood of the Yellow River. The Yuan administration was unable to handle the problem.

The sects had nightly gatherings of women and men, burned incense and worshiped the future Buddha Maitreya (Buddhism with Manichaean influences). The rejection of the usual authorities, conspiratorial cohesion and uncompromising attitude were added. As a result, they were pushed underground because the government considered them dangerous. With the outbreak of the uprising, they or their military arm were summarized and identified under the term "Red Turbans".

More recent research sees the Buddhist monk Peng Yingyu as the spiritual crystallization point of the rebellion. After an unsuccessful uprising in Yüan-chou in 1338, he had to flee northwards and then wandered for several years along the lower Huanghe and the Huai . Then, in the 1940s, the ideologies of the Red Turban appeared in the Huai region. For the year 1341 alone, peasant rebellions or the "bandit mischief" in general were recorded for 300 places in the areas from Hunan to Shandong . Peng Yingyu is credited with making the centuries-old Maitreya cult of the White Lotus sect suitable for the social mass movement. He is said to have been killed sometime between 1348 and 1358.

Riot breakout and riot spots

outbreak

When the dams of the Huanghe broke in 1351 , the Mongolian Chancellor Toghta had a new canal built by the official Jia Lu in the already impoverished and troubled region south of the Shandong Peninsula. The White Lotus sect succeeded there for the first time in organizing resistance among the 150,000 or so forced laborers. The diversion of the Huanghe was successful, but immediately afterwards an uprising of unprecedented proportions began in the afflicted regions. The Yuan commanders lost control on several occasions, and Toghta was forced to take over the command himself. Despite initial successes, he was dismissed by Emperor Toghan Timur in 1355 , with which his army disbanded in front of Kao-yu (in Jiangsu) and the central government lost its influence on the Mongolian warlords in the north, who subsequently created their own bases of power.

The north wing

Among the rebel organizations, the red turbans (hóngjīn 红巾) had the greatest reputation, they were the strongest military arm of the rebels. The first leader of the Red Turbans was Han Shantong , the grandson of a White Lotus leader who led the uprising in the Huai area, believed to be the incarnation of the future Buddha Maitreya and passed off as the descendant of the Song . He was then joined in 1352 by Guo Zixing , the son of a fortune teller, who died in 1355. Han Shantong himself was captured and killed by Mongolian troops, his wife and young son Han Lin'er escaped.

Han Lin'er was then proclaimed emperor of the "Sung" by Liu Futong , his "first minister", under the title "Ming-wang" in 1355 , of course also as an apparition of Maitreya . His troops occupied Kaifeng in June 1358 and threatened the capital Beijing (then: Dadu or Khan-balyq) itself when disputes broke out among his generals. The successful general Mao Kuei , who had established himself in Shandong , was killed and the faction leaders fell upon each other. The Mongol warlord Cayan Timur (in Taiyuan , Shanxi ) saw his chance and in 1359 advanced simultaneously with three armies to Kaifeng. Liu Futong was soon killed. Han Lin'er alias "Ming-wang" escaped and in 1367 drowned in the Yangtze.

With the defeat of 1359 the cohesion of the "northern" red turbans was broken and independent centers of insurrection arose in Shandong , Liaoning and Anhui , the most important being that of Zhu Yuanzhang , who later became the first Ming emperor.

The southern wing

There were also other leaders of the Red Turbans, in particular the former draper Xu Shouhui on the central Yangtze, who after his victory over the Yuan fleet in the Han-chuen Shallows in 1356 occupied several cities (including today's Wuhan ) and also as a Incarnation of Maitreya was issued. He proclaimed the "Tianwan" dynasty and is considered to be the head of the so-called "southern" (or: western) wing of the Red Turbans. Xu Shouhui was trapped between two gates in 1359 by his deputy Chen Youliang and his supporters and killed after a hail of arrows. The latter proclaimed himself prince of the "Han" dynasty in Hubei and Jiangxi .

The southern wing (that of Xu Shouhui) and the northern wing (that of Han Lin'er) shared the same ideology, but no common organization. The lack of cooperation was perhaps also due to the lateral drift of Zhu Yuanzhang , a subordinate of the northern wing who operated in the south.

A separate branch of the south wing existed in Sichuan under Ming Yü-chen (died 1366), who also did not recognize Xu Shouhui's murderer Chen You-liang.

Zhu Yuanzhang

However, the next man among the rebel leaders was Zhu Yuanzhang , a tenant farmer's son, ex-monk and son-in-law of Guo Zixing. Zhu Yuanzhang soon did not want to have anything to do with the social-religious ideas of the Red Turbans, thought them foolish and instead relied on proper civil servants and established social structures. With the conquest of Nanjing in 1356, Yangzhou and the surrounding area by 1359, Zhu Yuanzhang brought the supply routes of the north under his control and thus cut off supplies to the capital. He started to set up a regular administration in Nanjing. As early as 1363 he issued 38 million coins.

The rise of Zhu Yuanzhang - combined with the elimination of his rivals under the Red Turbans and other rebel leaders - led to the establishment of the Ming Dynasty . The most dangerous opponent was certainly Chen Youliang , who was defeated in the naval battle on Lake Poyang in 1363 and killed by an arrow shot. Between 1363 and 1367, Zhu defeated Zhang Shicheng , a former salt smuggler who was not part of the red turbans and who had established himself in Jiangsu . The pirate Fang Guozhen in Zhejiang submitted in late 1367 and was spared, as Zhu Yuanzhang quickly needed his naval help to conquer the south coast, where two other warlords were staying.

After the more significant part of the south came under Zhu Yuanzhang's control, he sent his army north under Generals Xu Da and Chang-yu-chun. In 1368 the Yuan dynasty fell and the Emperor Toghan Timur fled Beijing.

literature

  • Frederick W. Mote, Denis Twitchett (Eds.): The Cambridge History of China. Vol. 7, The Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644, Part I. Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge 1988, ISBN 0-521-24332-7
  • Jeremiah Curtin: The Mongols. A history. Greenwood, Westport / Conn 1972 (Reprint of the original 1908 edition)
  • Jacques Gernet: The Chinese World. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1979, ISBN 3-458-05503-7