#195 - Yuan 13: The Lords of Light

The History of China

Chris Stewart

History

4.6 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 11 July 2020

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

As the cataclysmic decade of the 1340s rolls in to the 1350s a planned rerouting of the Yellow River will trigger a massive uprising by what the Yuan authorities call the Red Turban Rebels. But who are they really? What do they believe? Why are they fighting? And how do they tie in with the eventual overthrow of the Mongols from their hegemony over China? Major Historical Figures: Maitreya Buddha, Successor to Gautama Buddha [???] Mani the Last, Prophet of Manichaeism [ca. 216-277 CE] Red Turbans: Peng Yingyu, Buddhist Monk, "Father" of the Red Turbans [d. ca. 1348-1358] Northern: Han Shantong, Lord of Light [d. 1351] Han Lin'er, the Young Lord of Light [1340-1367] General Liu Futong (AKA "Liu Fangshi") [1321-1363] Guo Zixing, Leader of Red Turban Army, Lord of Haozhou [d. 1355] Zhu Yuanzhang, Buddhist mendicant monk, Guard Commander of the Red Turbans [1328-1398] Southern: Xu Shouhui, cloth-merchant, Emperor of Tianwan Kingdom, Maitreya Incarnate [1320-1360] Qing Dynasty: Huang Yupian, Qing Dynasty Magistrate and White Lotus Hunter [mid-19th century] Major Sources Cited: Brook, Timothy. The Confusions of Pleasure: Commerce and Culture in Ming China. Buckley Ebrey, Patricia and Anne Walthall. Pre-Modern East Asia: A Cultural, Social, and Political History, Volume I. Chao, Wei-pang. “Secret Religious Societies in North China in the Ming Dynasty” in Folklore Studies, Vol. 7. Farmer, Edward L. Zhu Yuanzhang and Early Ming Legislation: The Reordering of Chinese Society following the Era of Mongol Rule. Flower, Theresa. “Millenarian Themes of the White Lotus Society.” Hung, Hing Ming. From the Mongols to the Ming Dynasty: How a Begging Monk Became Emperor of China, Zhu Yuan Zhang. Lin, Wushu. “A Study On Equivalent Names of Manichaeism in Chinese” in Popular Religion and Shamanism. Lin, Wushu. Manichaeism and its Dissemination in the East. Ma, Xisha. “The Syncretism of Maitreyan Belief and Manichaeism in Chinese History” in Popular Religion and Shamanism. Mote, Frederick W. Imperial China: 900-1800. Mote, Frederick W. “The Rise of the Ming Dynasty, 1330-1367” in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 7: The Ming Dynasty. Overmeier, Daniel L. “Folk-Buddhist Religion: Creation and Eschatology in Medieval China” in History of Religions, Vol. 12, No. 1. Shek, Richard. “Religious Dissenters in Ming-Qing China” in Religion and the Early Modern State: Views from China, Russia, and the West. Tan, Chung. Across the Himalayan Gap: An Indian Quest for Understanding China. Ter Haar, B.J. The White Lotus Teachings in Chinese Religious History. Wang, Kristen. “Scandalous Tales Behind Nanjing’s 70 Ancient Names” in The Nanjinger, 07/04/2019. Waterson, James. Defending Heaven: China’s Mongol Wars, 1209-1370. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to an airwave media podcast. Hello and welcome to the history of China.
0:15.0	Episode 195, The Lords of Light.
0:22.0	Last time we had an overview of the not so wonderful decade that was the 1340s,
0:27.0	its impacts on the already wobbly stability of Togon-Temmer's Yuan Dynasty.
0:32.0	We finished off with a brief account of the young life of one
0:34.9	Ju Yuan Zhang along with a promise that we'd get more into the origins and beliefs of the
0:39.7	Red Turban rebellion that would rock the middle regions of the Empire this time.
0:44.5	And so that is indeed where we'll begin today, by me doing my level best to explain the
0:48.9	chaotic garden salad of syncretic belief systems that were taken up by the hodgepodge of
0:53.5	disaffected Chinese in the mid-14th century as a call to action against the
0:58.0	status quo. Yeah, wish me luck. All right, so first let's get a functional understanding of some of the more baseline terminology
1:06.6	out of the way.
1:08.0	The red turbans, in their theological quasi-basis within the greater white lotus society sect umbrella thing are known most often as a
1:16.4	millinarian or millennialist movement. That's a word that gets tossed around a fair bit, but
1:21.0	it is worth taking the time to define. It's not quite as simple as
1:24.9	believing in the apocalypse or being a death cult. I found that Norman Cohen's attempt
1:30.1	at laying out a standard set of ground rules for so-called
1:33.0	melonarian sects outside of the Christian world serves as a pretty good
1:36.7	baseline.
1:37.7	He says that there are five chief beliefs that qualify a movement for being as such.
1:42.0	They're listed as being a movement inspired by a dream of salvation, which would be, one, collective in the sense
1:47.8	that it is to be enjoyed by the faithful of the group, two, terrestrial, in the sense that it is to be realized on this earth and not in some otherworldly
	...

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