From the Huangjue Temple to the imperial palace
At seventeen, drought, locusts, and plague swept Haozhou, and Zhu Yuanzhang’s father, mother, and eldest brother starved or sickened to death within half a month, too poor to bury, relying on a neighbor’s gift of a patch of ground. He entered the Huangjue Temple as a monk, and fifty days later the temple ran out of food and sent him out to wander and beg for three years. He later recounted this in his own hand on the Imperial Tomb Stele, without embellishment: "No noble clan, but a commoner of the Huai region." Among China’s founding rulers, no other rose from so deep a bottom.
Abolishing the chancellorship
In 1380 Zhu Yuanzhang executed the chancellor Hu Weiyong on a charge of treason, implicating over thirty thousand, then declared the office of chancellor abolished forever and wrote it into the Ancestral Injunctions: any later official who dared petition to restore it would be executed by slow slicing. The fifteen-hundred-year balance of imperial and chancellor power since the Qin was cut off at a stroke — the emperor now directly commanded the Six Ministries and read every memorial himself. He could handle it; his descendants could not, and so the Grand Secretariat and the palace eunuchs of the Directorate grew great in turn: the scourge of Ming eunuchs had its seed sown in this very year.