Red Turban Rebellion

By the 1340s the Yuan court was divided by factional strife, the Yellow River had broken its dikes, and famine and epidemics struck the north. Sects preaching the coming of Maitreya, the future Buddha, and of a ‘King of Light’ spread along the Huai. In late April 1351 the court ordered the river returned to its old bed and, according to the History of Yuan, set 150,000 labourers and 20,000 soldiers to work under the minister Jia Lu. Han Shantong and Liu Futong, who proclaimed Han an eighth-generation descendant of the Song emperor Huizong, swore an oath with the sacrifice of a white horse and a black ox; the plot was discovered, Han was seized, his wife and his son Han Lin'er fled, and on 28 May Liu rose in revolt and took Yingzhou. Later that year another Red Turban movement arose on the middle Yangtze, where Xu Shouhui was proclaimed emperor of Tianwan.

In 1355 Liu Futong enthroned Han Lin'er at Bozhou as emperor of a restored Song dynasty. His armies took Kaifeng, the old Song capital, in 1358, raided towards the Yuan capitals and twice invaded Goryeo, holding Kaegyeong until early 1362, but commanders loyal to the Yuan drove them back, and in 1363, by the usual account, Liu was killed at Anfeng by the army of Zhang Shicheng, a salt smuggler turned warlord on the lower Yangtze — although, according to the Dictionary of Ming Biography, he may have survived and drowned with Han Lin'er in 1367. In the west Chen Youliang murdered Xu Shouhui in 1360 and founded a kingdom of Han. Historical records portray the Red Turbans as treating captured Yuan officials and soldiers with great violence.

The eventual victor was Zhu Yuanzhang, an orphaned peasant and former novice who joined the Red Turban commander Guo Zixing at Haozhou on 15 April 1352 and took Nanjing on 10 April 1356. Nominally a servant of Han Lin'er’s Song, he defeated Chen Youliang on Lake Poyang between August and October 1363, took Suzhou from Zhang Shicheng in 1367 and brought the coast under his control. Han Lin'er drowned while crossing the Yangtze in January 1367, possibly by design, and in 1368 Zhu proclaimed the Ming dynasty and drove the Yuan court out of China.