The history, culture, and origin of the Ming Dynasty

He's good, and that's what happened in the Ming Dynasty.

In the last years of the Yuan Dynasty, the Mongol rulers were brutal and unscrupulous. In 1351, the Yuan court conscripted more than 100,000 peasants and soldiers to control the floods of the Yellow River. "Governing the river" and "changing money" led to the outbreak of the Red Turban Army uprising.

In 1367, Zhu Yuanzhang captured Pingjiang, Zhang Shicheng committed suicide, and later destroyed Fang Guozhen in Zhejiang. On the fourth day of the first month of 1368, Zhu Yuanzhang proclaimed himself emperor in Yingtian (Nanjing), with the country name Daming and the year name Hongwu.

Zhu Yuanzhang rebelled, defeated Chen Youliang and Zhang Shicheng, established the Ming Dynasty, and overthrew the rule of the Yuan Dynasty.

1. During the Ming Dynasty, ancient Chinese literature and art showed a trend of popularization and secularization, and literature and art flourished unprecedentedly. The Song and Ming Dynasty also reached perfection in the Ming Dynasty. In terms of literature, the more distinctive judgments are manifested in three aspects: poetry, **, and opera.

2. The Ming Dynasty mobilized a large number of manpower and material resources to carry out a large-scale collation of Chinese classical culture from many aspects, including class books, political books, book series, anthologies, general collections, dictionaries, dictionaries, bibliographies, etc. Among them, books of this kind and series are the most numerous, with their grand scale and precise compilation, which are unprecedented not only in China, but also in the history of world culture.

3. During the Ming Dynasty, the vigorous summary of ancient science and technology was mainly done by private scholars, which once again illustrates the defects of traditional Chinese culture and Chinese feudal dynasties that emphasized humanities and neglected science and technology.

The Ming Dynasty was far ahead in the world in terms of heavy industries such as iron, shipbuilding, and construction, or light industries such as silk, textiles, porcelain, and printing, accounting for more than 2 3 percent of the world's industrial output, much higher than the proportion of agricultural output in the world.

In the Ming Dynasty, the private industry continued to grow, while the government-run industry continued to shrink.

The Ming Dynasty completed the evolution of the Song Dynasty's handicraft industry from government to private in a relatively short period of time, and the changes were more thorough.

By the end of the Ming Dynasty, except for a few industries such as the salt industry, which were still implementing the salt introduction system with merchants as the main body, most handicraft industries were freed from the control of the government and became private handicrafts.

Therefore, if the privatization of Chinese agriculture appeared in the Warring States and Han dynasties, then the complete privatization of Chinese handicrafts was later than the Ming dynasty.

In the late Ming Dynasty, China's private economic power was far stronger than that of the West in the same period, when the British merchant handicraft owners had tens of thousands of pounds sterling was considered a huge wealth, the Ming Dynasty private merchants and capitalists used millions of taels of silver for ** and production has been very common, Zheng Zhilong's economic strength reached tens of millions of taels of annual income, and the Dutch East India Company could not compete with it at that time.

In terms of the scale of commercial development, population urbanization and marketization: European cities in the 16th century were smaller, and between 1519 and 1558 they were called "big cities" with a population of 20,000 to 30,000.

According to calculations by the German geographer Albrecht, before 1600, the urban population of Europe was less than 5 of the total population.

At the beginning of the 16th century, there was no city in Europe with a population of more than 200,000, and there were only five cities with a population of 100,000 to 200,000. It was not until the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the l7th century that the number of commercial cities with a population of more than 150,000 rose to four.

In terms of urban size and population ratio, the degree of urbanization in late Ming China was slightly higher.

According to Imaco, China's urban population accounted for 6% of the total population in the last years of the Ming Dynasty.

According to Cao Shuji's estimates, China's urbanization rate had reached 8 by 1630.

Zhu Yuanzhang was one of the rebel armies at the end of the Yuan Dynasty, and he was developed by inheriting Guo Zixing, who belonged to the White Lotus Sect Brigade Organization. The White Lotus Sect proclaimed that "the darkness is about to pass, and the light is coming" to inspire the people to oppose the dark rule of the Yuan Dynasty, so it is also called the "Light Religion".

Han Shantong, the leader of the White Lotus Sect, is called the "King of Ming", reflecting the purpose of his teachings. Zhu Yuanzhang not only once believed in the White Lotus Sect of Sun Zhen, but also admitted that he was a member of the White Lotus Sect's rebel army. So after Zhu Yuanzhang took power, the country was called "Ming".

The Ming Dynasty (1368-1644) was the last dynasty in Chinese history to be founded by the Han Chinese. After 12 and 16 emperors, the state was 276 years old.

In 1368, Zhu Yuanzhang, Taizu of the Ming Dynasty, was proclaimed emperor in Nanjing Yingtianfu, and the country name was Daming. Because the emperor of the Ming Dynasty was surnamed Zhu, he was also called Zhu Ming. At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, the capital was set in Yingtianfu, and the capital was moved to Shuntianfu in 1421, and Nanzhili was established in Yingtianfu.

In the early period of the Ming Dynasty, the national strength was strong, and it created the prosperity of Hongwu, Yongle, Renxuan, and Hongzhi, and the prosperity of Zhongxing, and the national strength reached its heyday and the territory was vast. In the middle and later periods, political corruption and natural disasters led to a decline in national strength, and large-scale popular uprisings broke out. In 1644, Li Zicheng invaded Beijing, and Emperor Chongzhen Zhu Youzhen hanged himself in the coal mountain.

The Ming Dynasty established the Southern Ming regime in the south of the Yangtze River, and then the Manchu Qing took advantage of the chaos to enter the customs and defeated Li Zicheng's peasant army and the Southern Ming regime, and in 1662, the Yongli Emperor Zhu Youlang was killed, and the Southern Ming Dynasty fell. In 1683, the Qing army ** Ming Zheng ended.

The territory of the Ming Dynasty included the scope of the eighteen inland provinces, and in the early years, the northeast reached the Sea of Japan, the outer Xing'an Mountains, and the tribes of the Heilongjiang River basin had a sect ** and later shrunk to the Liao River basin; In the early years, it reached the Gobi Shuxin Desert in the north, and then withdrew to the Great Wall; northwest to Hami, Xinjiang, later changed to Jiayuguan; and once set up detention institutions in present-day Manchuria, eastern Xinjiang, * and other places. During the reign of Chengzu of the Ming Dynasty, Annan was briefly recovered, and in 1424, the territory of the Ming Dynasty reached about 10 million square kilometers.

During the Ming Dynasty, the handicraft and commodity economy developed and prospered, and commercial market towns and capitalism sprouted. Culture and art are becoming secularized. In terms of population, the Ming Dynasty had a population of more than 7,000,000,[20] but many scholars believe that it was actually more than 100 million,[21] while others point out that the population was close to 200 million at the end of the Ming Dynasty.

The Ming Dynasty was a powerful Central Plains dynasty after the Han, Tang and Song dynasties. Duan Bi Tang Ming Dynasty, no Han relatives, Tang Dynasty Town, Song Dynasty coins, the Son of Heaven guards the country, and the king dies. In the Qing Dynasty history book "History of the Ming Dynasty", it was evaluated as "Zhilong Tang and Song Dynasty" and "Yuanmai Han and Tang Dynasties".