INTRODUCTION

The character of the Yüan dynasty, through which the Mongol conquerors from Khubilai Khan onward ruled China, has been interpreted in many ways and at present is still much at issue among scholars. Nonetheless, one fact about it is unambiguous. Its ability to govern –to maintain order in society, to administer provincial and local government, and to collect taxes – was eroding well before the middle of the fourteenth century. Chu Yüan-chang (1328–1398), the founder of the Ming dynasty, was born into a family of desperately poor tenant farmers in the Huai River plain of modern Anhwei province on 21 October 1328. He never experienced the normal conditions of China's stable agrarian society until, as emperor forty years later, it fell to him to rule over the empire and to guide its rehabilitation. The Ming dynasty was spawned during a half-century of intensifying chaos, an age of breakdown in which throughout most of the country the conduct of daily life increasingly depended on direct recourse to violence. It provides a classic example of the gradual militarization of Chinese society and, because of that, of the struggle among potent rivals to succeed the Mongol regime by imposing, through military force, a successor regime that could claim the Mandate of Heaven. Despite the traditional Chinese penchant for subsuming this into the stylized pattern of breakdown and regeneration provided by their dynastic cycle theory, the way the Yüan dynasty disintegrated and the Ming dynasty emerged is by no means typical of the dynastic changes that punctuate imperial Chinese history.