The Ming Taizu ( 明太祖 ) , personal name Zhu Yuanzhang ( 朱元璋 ) , was the founder of the Ming Dynasty of China , and the first emperor of this dynasty from 1368 to 1398 .

Among the Chinese populace there were strong feelings against the rule of "the foreigners" under the Yuan Dynasty which finally led to a peasant revolution, led by Zhu Yuanzhang , that pushed the Yuan dynasty back to the Mongolian steppes and established the Ming Dynasty in 1368 . Zhu Yuanzhang , the founder of the Ming Dynasty, was one of the only two dynasty founders who emerged from the peasant class.

As a teenager, he entered a Buddhist monastery to avoid starvation. Later, as a strongwilled rebel leader, he came in contact with the well-educated Confucian scholar gentry from whom he received an education in state affairs. He acquired training in the Red Turban Movement, which was a dissident religious sect combining cultural and religious traditions of Buddhism, Daoism, and others. No longer a Buddhist, he positioned himself as defender of Confucianism and neo-Confucian conventions and not as a popular rebel. Despite his humble origins, he emerged as a national leader against the collapsing Yuan Dynasty. Defeating rival national leaders, he proclaimed himself emperor in 1368, establishing his capital at Nanjing and adopting Hongwu ( 洪武 ) as his reign title.

Having fought off the calamities of the Mongol invasion, and given the realistic threat to China still posed by the Mongols, Taizu reassessed the orthodox Confucian view regarding the military as an inferior class to be subordinated by the scholar bureaucracy. Simply put, maintaining a strong military was essential since the Mongols were still a threat.

Taizu attempted to, and largely succeeded in, consolidating control all aspects of government so that no other group could gain enough power to overthrow him and to buttress the country's defenses against the Mongols. As emperor, Taizu increasingly concentrated power in his own hands and abolished the Imperial Secretariat, which had been the main central administrative body under past dynasties, after suppressing a plot for which he had blamed his chief minister. When the emperorship became hereditary, the Chinese recognized this and established the office of prime or chief minister. While incompetent emperors could come and go, the prime minister could guarantee a level of continuity and competence in the government. Taizu , wishing to concentrate absolute authority in his own hands, abolished the office of prime minister and so removed the only insurance against incompetent emperors.

Taizu noted the destructive role of court eunuchs under the Song Dynasty , drastically reducing their numbers, forbidding them to handle documents, insisting that they remained illiterate, and liquidating those who commented on state affairs.

The emperor's role this became even more autocratic, although Taizu necessarily continued to use what he called the Grand Secretaries to assist with the immense paperwork of the bureaucracy, which included memorials, imperial edicts in reply, reports of various kinds, and tax records. During his rule he also laid out the foundation of organizations resembling modern-day secret police. The role of state support is the focus of much of this debate on the official downgrading of commerce. Taizu laid the foundations for a state uninterested in commerce and more interested in extracting revenues from the agricultural sector.

With little understanding of economic processes of markets, Taizu , backed by the Confucian scholar gentry, just accepted the Confucian viewpoint offhand that merchants were solely parasitic. In a typically Confucian viewpoint, he felt that agriculture should be the country's source of wealth and that trade was ignoble and parasitic. Perhaps this view was accentuated because of his background as a peasant. As a result, the Ming economic system emphasized agriculture, unlike that of the Song dynasty , which had preceded the Mongols and relied on traders and merchant for revenues. With an aversion to trade, he also supported the creation of self-supporting agricultural communities.