All events · The Medieval World

Early Ming State-Organised Resettlement under the Hongwu Emperor

1368–1398 · East & Southeast Asia

Displacement

Displaced

3 million

Estimates for state-organised resettlement under Hongwu and his son Yongle range from roughly one million to more than seven million people; Cao Shuji's multi-volume Zhongguo yimin shi is the standard reconstruction and sits within that range. The evidence is imperial edicts recorded in the Ming shilu — which document specific transfers such as the removal of 5,300 wealthy households to Nanjing in 1391 — together with county gazetteers, land-registration records and later lineage genealogies. There was no migration register, and the ubiquitous north Chinese family tradition of descent from migrants gathered at the great pagoda tree of Hongdong in Shanxi is a folk memory rather than a record.

Share of the population affected

5.0%

of the population of Ming China at the census of 1393, 1393

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What happened

The wars that ended Mongol rule left large parts of the North China Plain and the Huai region depopulated. The Hongwu emperor's response was compulsory resettlement on a scale that reshaped the demography of northern China: households were moved from crowded Shanxi and from the lower Yangtze into the emptied prefectures of Hebei, Henan and Shandong, given land, tools and tax remissions, and forbidden to return; wealthy and potentially troublesome families from the Yangtze delta were transferred to the new capital at Nanjing, 5,300 households in a single order in 1391; and hereditary military households were settled in self-supporting agricultural colonies along the northern and southwestern frontiers. The policy was administrative rather than punitive in intent, but it was compulsory and enforced. The totals are reconstructions: the edicts survive, the migration itself was never counted, and the folk tradition of the Hongdong pagoda tree, from which millions of north Chinese families trace descent, is a memory of the process rather than evidence of its scale.

Parties

The Hongwu emperor's government moved peasant households from densely settled Shanxi and the Yangtze delta into war-devastated north China, transferred wealthy families to the capital, and settled hereditary military households in frontier colonies

Disputed

The scale of early Ming resettlement is reconstructed from edicts, gazetteers and genealogies rather than from any register, and estimates differ by several million; the Hongdong pagoda tree tradition, though nearly universal in north China, is folk memory and scholars debate how much historical migration it encodes.

The denominator

The Hongwu registration of 1393 recorded 60,545,812 people in 10.65 million households. Modern historical demographers regard this as an undercount produced by a tax register: Martin Heijdra and Cao Shuji put the true figure at somewhere between 65 and 85 million.

Where the baseline comes from

Hongwu Emperoropen-edited
Ming dynastyopen-edited

On the death toll

No significant death toll is associated with the resettlement programme itself, which was intended to restore agricultural production and came with land grants and tax remissions. Deaths on the moves are not recorded.