Zhu Chao accompanied me to watch short videos

Chapter 159 Zhu Yuanzhang Appears

The messenger brought the news that Mengge had died in Diaoyucheng, Sichuan, and urged Kublai to return north. At this time, the 45-year-old Kublai was planning to cross the Huai River and enter the Song Dynasty. Just when Kublai was hesitating, he received a message from his wife.

The letter said that his younger brother, Ariq Böke, was mobilizing troops to seize the Khanate. Kublai Khan smelled the scent of rebellion, so he agreed to the Southern Song's proposal to pay tribute in exchange for the two countries to draw a river as the boundary, and turned back to Mongolia to focus on dealing with the Khanate dispute that was about to escalate into a civil war. This also allowed the Southern Song to continue to survive for 20 years.

What faced Kublai Khan at this time was that Ariq Böke declared himself emperor in Khara Khorum in western Mongolia, and the ruler of the Golden Horde, Berke, became his mortal enemy due to religious and territorial issues.

The empire was in danger. In order to save the empire, Kublai Khan convened the Kurultai in Kaiping and ascended the throne as the emperor of the Mongol Empire with the support of some princes and ministers. He changed the old Mongolian system, adopted Chinese law, and established a centralized feudal regime that was compatible with the economic foundation of the Central Plains. Relying on the abundant human and material resources of the Han area, he sent troops to defeat Ariq Boke.

Not long after, Berke of the Golden Horde, Berke of Southern Russia, and Alukhu of the Chaktai Kingdom died one after another within a few months. Kublai, no longer worried, set his sights on the south again, and his legendary life had just begun.

Kublai Khan was well aware of the importance of ruling from the Central Plains, so he called Kaiping Shangdu, and issued an edict to name Yanjing Zhongdu, and abandoned the traditional Mongolian capital of Karakorum.

Traveling between Shangdu and Yanjing in summer and winter, Yanjing became the best place for Kublai Khan to control both worlds, which is also one of the reasons why Yanjing is the capital of China today. Today, the Forbidden City in Beijing was built on the basis of Kublai Khan's capital.

When everything was ready, the 57-year-old Kublai Khan took the meaning of "至哉坤元" from the Book of Changes and changed the country's name from the Great Mongol Empire to the Great Yuan, and changed from the emperor of the Great Mongol Empire to the emperor of the Great Yuan.

In order to legitimize his rule, Kublai Khan introduced Buddhism and established a religious system and a state system in parallel. With everything on track, Kublai Khan will restart the war to conquer the world.

The territory of the Southern Song Dynasty was completely different from the ancient cities in Mongolia and northern China. There were numerous rivers and a complex urban layout. The natural barrier of the Yangtze River made Lin'an, the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty, easy to defend but difficult to attack.

The city was well stocked with gunpowder and food, which made it even more difficult for the Mongols, who were not good at siege warfare. Kublai Khan decided to build a navy to attack the Song Dynasty from the north along the Han River.

In 1273, Xiangfan fell, and the Southern Song Dynasty's defense system collapsed. Three years later, Empress Dowager Xie Daoqing of the Southern Song Dynasty surrendered on behalf of Emperor Gong of Song Dynasty, presented the imperial seal and a surrender letter, and the Southern Song Dynasty's capital Lin'an fell.

After that, the Yuan army began to eliminate the remnant forces of the Southern Song Dynasty. It was not until the 65th year of Kublai Khan that the Song and Yuan sides fought the final naval battle off the coast of Yashan, known in history as the Battle of Yashan. The Song army was defeated and the Southern Song Dynasty perished, officially realizing another great unification since the Tang Dynasty.

While conquering Xiangyang, Kublai Khan also launched the Sino-Japanese War because the then ruler Hojo Tokimune refused to submit to him. He appointed Marshal Xindu to lead 2 Mongolian and Han troops, together with 1 Goryeo troops, and set sail from Masan on the southern coast of Goryeo on 300 warships and 500 small boats, crossing 50km of sea to reach Tsushima Island.

Tsushima Island has always been a stepping stone for attacking Japan from the mainland, and it is a place of strategic importance. On the shore, the Mongols beat the Japanese warriors, and the blood dyed the sea red. Although the Japanese put up a tenacious resistance with the samurai spirit, the Mongolian army was far superior to the Japanese in terms of combat effectiveness and tactics.

With the powerful gunpowder weapon Thunder Bomb, they quickly won the battle. The next stepping stone of the Mongolian victory, Iki Island, 50km away underwater, met the same fate.

After taking Iki Island, the Mongolian fleet arrived in the bay controlled by Hakata City, which is today's Fukuoka. Kublai Khan's army was like a no man's land on the sea, and landed on the beach easily.

During the battle, Xiaozi suffered the first attack of explosive weapons. The disorganized defense and the bravery of the people allowed the Mongols to break through easily, and they quickly penetrated deep inland and burned many nearby villages.

However, although the Mongols suppressed the Xiaori on the battlefield, they were not good at mountain warfare and could not break through the rugged terrain of Kyushu Island and enter the hinterland of Kyushu.

In addition, the commander Liu Fuheng was injured in the heavy sword, so the Mongols could only temporarily withdraw to the ship, and Xiao Rizi fled to the beach for refuge and hid in the capital Dazaifu. Just as the Mongols were planning how to attack Xiao Rizi the next day, the weather became worse and worse. An unexpected typhoon that night overturned more than 200 warships of the Mongolian army, and many people drowned. Xindu had to lead the remaining ships to retreat back home.

After conquering the Southern Song Dynasty, the 65-year-old Kublai launched a second war against Xiaori in the spring of 1280. The scale of the Yuan army's invasion of Xiaori was much larger than the first, with as many as 15 troops and nearly 5000 ships of various sizes.

But the result of the war was beyond everyone's expectations. In order to gather enough warships, Kublai Khan asked the King of Goryeo to build him 2000 warships within half a year, otherwise he would be punished. The King of Goryeo had to use flat-bottomed boats instead of V-shaped sea boats. The entire bottom of the boat did not have a complete plank, but was made of small wooden blocks.

This indirectly led to the lack of overall structural strength of the ships. The Yuan army, which had no experience in naval warfare, took these flat-bottomed boats on the rivers and launched a sailing expedition. This was also the largest sailing fleet in history, and the record was not broken until the Normandy Landing.

However, the Yuan army soon found that the stone walls built by Xiaori within 20km around Tsushima Island blocked their way to land. The fierce battle lasted for more than a month, and at this time, a hurricane blew on the sea for several days in a row, destroying almost all of the Yuan army's warships, and about soldiers died in the sea. This directly led to the failure of the second eastward expedition of the Yuan army.

Kublai Khan’s legend was drawing to a close. At the age of 67, his favorite queen died before him. Five years later, his chosen heir also died. As a result of these personal tragedies, Kublai Khan’s health deteriorated, as he had always suffered from foot problems. In 5, Kublai Khan became seriously ill and died in the Red Sandalwood Hall in Dadu.

As a conqueror, Kublai Khan brought great suffering to the people in the war-torn areas, but after the war he adopted extremely effective policies to restore the social economy and heal the pain caused by the war. He was a relatively wise and intelligent emperor.

He valued the Han people, imitated the Han system, and established the Yuan Dynasty. This played a positive role in the economic recovery and political stability of the Central Plains. Although they were a nomadic people, they attached great importance to the development of agriculture and also wrote a strong and colorful stroke for the historical process of China.

[Starting with a bowl, the Ming Dynasty lasted for 3000 years, and you can understand Zhu Yuanzhang's life in one breath. Original history of the Ming Dynasty]

He was the emperor with the lowest birth in Chinese history. He had been a beggar and a monk. He rose from a poor cowherd to the founding emperor of the Ming Dynasty, defeating many heroes in the troubled times.

At the same time, he was also the only emperor who unified the country from south to north. In this video, let us walk into the legendary life of Zhu Yuanzhang, the first emperor of the Ming Dynasty, in chronological order, and take a look at the "Establishment History" of the Ming Dynasty.

Zhu Yuanzhang was born in a poor peasant family. He followed his parents from childhood and lived in a place without a fixed address. He made a living by farming for the landlords. Because Zhu Yuanzhang was the eighth among his brothers, and most of the lower-class people in Huaixi at that time were named after numbers, Zhu Yuanzhang's father named his son Chongba.

When Zhu Yuanzhang was sixteen, his hometown was hit by drought and locust plagues. Four years later, famine and plague broke out. Under the combination of hunger and disease, Zhu Yuanzhang's parents and elder brother died within a month. However, Zhu Yuanzhang had no money to arrange funerals for his parents and brothers, so he had to ask the landlord Liu De for a piece of land to bury his family.

But Liu De coldly rejected him. The kind-hearted neighbor Liu Jizu lent them a hand and gave them a piece of land for burial, so they buried their parents.

In order to survive, Zhu Yuanzhang and his second brother, eldest sister-in-law and nephew were forced to separate and escape separately. With the help of his neighbor Aunt Wang, Zhu Yuanzhang came to Huangjue Temple to become a monk. But after only 50 days, there was no food left in Huangjue Temple, so Zhu Yuanzhang had to leave the temple and start traveling around.

He walked and begged, and went south from Bozhou to Feihe, then turned west to Henan, and after arriving in Xinyang, he went north to Ruzhou, Chenzhou and other places. He returned to Huangjue Temple at the age of 21. During the three years of Zhu Yuanzhang's travels in Huaixi, he saw all kinds of worldly affairs under the rule of the Yuan Dynasty, and returned to the temple to concentrate on studying.

At this time, the Yuan Dynasty was already in a state of great unrest. The people were oppressed, social contradictions became increasingly fierce, and the bursting of the Yellow River sounded the final death knell for the Yuan Dynasty.

Soon after the Yuan Dynasty conscripted 15 laborers to control the Yellow River, a poet with two words engraved on his back broke out: "Don't say that the stone man has only one eye; he stirs up the Yellow River and the whole world rebels." The curtain was raised on the peasant uprising at the end of the Yuan Dynasty, and the poor peasants who had nowhere else to go took risks.

As Han Shantong and Liu Futong rose up in Yingzhou, the soldiers wrapped their heads in red scarves and called themselves the Red Scarf Army. They also elected Han Shantong as the Ming King. The next year, local rebel armies also raised the banner of anti-Yuan. The local tyrant of Dingyuan County joined forces with Sun Deya and other cavalrymen to gather and burn incense, becoming the leader of the local White Lotus Society.

At this time, Zhu Yuanzhang, who was still studying at Huangjue Temple, also received a letter from his childhood friend Tang He, inviting him to join Guo Zixing's rebel army. Although Zhu Yuanzhang had nothing, he was full of hesitation and hesitation in the face of this unknown road.

However, the monks in the temple were afraid of being implicated by Zhu Yuanzhang, so they reported him to the government. Zhu Yuanzhang had no choice but to make up his mind and become a captain of nine men under Guo Zixing. This year, Zhu Yuanzhang was 25 years old.

After Zhu Yuanzhang joined the army, he fought bravely, was smart and flexible, and had some knowledge of culture. Guo Zixing saw that Zhu Yuanzhang was not an ordinary person, so he simply kept him by his side as a personal soldier and married his goddaughter Ma Xiuying to him.

On weekdays, he would consult Zhu Yuanzhang on all matters, big or small. From then on, the soldiers in the army called him Zhu Gongzi. It was also at this time that Zhu Yuanzhang took on his new name.

When he was 26 years old, Zhu Yuanzhang saw the generals in Bozhou City fighting for power, so he decided to create a new situation with his own strength.

He used his prestige to recruit a group of his own team, who were later the founding heroes of the Ming Dynasty. In terms of civil affairs, there were a group of Huaixi civil officials such as Li Shanchang, and in terms of military affairs, there were capable generals such as Xu Da and Chang Yuchun.

Although in the eyes of the Yuan Dynasty at that time, Zhu Yuanzhang was just a small and unknown character among the various rebel forces, in the near future Zhu Yuanzhang would be a name that would scare them to death.

Two years later, Guo Zixing passed away, and Zhu Yuanzhang was finally able to let go and do something big. He set his sights on Jiqing Road, which is the ancient capital of the Six Dynasties that we are familiar with. At that time, Jiqing Road was the center of wealth in the southeast, with fertile land, developed commerce, and dense population. It was an excellent place to build a capital.

But the Yangtze River blocked his way. Coincidentally, at this time, the Chaohu navy wanted to come to Zhu Yuanzhang to get rid of the threat of the Luzhou Zuojunbi. Zhu Yuanzhang immediately led his troops across the river and prepared to capture the south of Beijing. Chang Yuchun took the lead and took Caishi first.

Afterwards, Zhu Yuanzhang imitated his predecessors and cut off the boats, forcing the generals to continue the march. In the second year, he successfully captured Nanjing and renamed it Yingtian Prefecture. From then on, he got the ticket to compete for the world.

However, the strength of Zhu Yuanzhang's territories around Nanjing at that time was far from strong. There was Chen Youliang in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, Zhang Shicheng in the lower reaches, and Fang Guozhen in the southeast.

In Fujian, there is Chen Youding. Fang Guozhen and Chen Youding all aim to maintain their territory and maintain their rule. Zhang Shicheng does not have much ambition to vacillate between the Yuan Dynasty and the Yuan Dynasty. Only Chen Youliang is the strongest and is the most dangerous enemy Zhu Yuanzhang encountered after occupying Yingtian.

So who would be the ultimate winner in this chicken-eating competition at the end of the Yuan Dynasty? Although history tells us that it was Zhu Yuanzhang, there was another person at the time who thought he was the one who could unify the world, and that person was Chen Youliang.

In 1360, Chen Youliang killed Xu Shouhui and proclaimed himself the emperor of the Han Dynasty. The original Tianwan regime was torn apart, and the generals defected one after another. Ming Yuzhen even established himself in Qingzhong and refused to obey Chen Youliang's orders. In order to establish his authority, Chen Youliang, who was in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River, chose to attack Zhu Yuanzhang, who was nearby. But unfortunately, Chen Youliang would soon find that he had chosen the wrong person.

Chen Youliang was marching towards Yingtian with great momentum, but Zhu Yuanzhang used a strategy to defeat Chen Youliang's army at Longwan outside Yingtian City, and also let Xu Da counterattack back to Hanyang, which was only a stone's throw away from Chen Youliang's capital, Wuchang.

Although Hanyang was not captured by Xu Da, Chen Youliang had lost face and his generals and soldiers were alienated. Hu Tingrui even surrendered to Zhu Yuanzhang with the entire Jiangxi province.

Chen Youliang was very angry when he saw his territory shrinking day by day, so he used all his strength to attack Hongdu to recapture Xijiang. However, he was once again strongly blocked by Zhu Yuanzhang's nephew Zhu Wenzheng.

Three months later, after sufficient preparation, Zhu Yuanzhang led a fleet to rescue Nanchang and fought a decisive battle with Chen Youliang on Poyang Lake.