John Eliade’s Reviews > Ming China, 1368–1644: A Concise History of a Resilient Empire > Status Update

Orphaned, unschooled, and lacking resources of any kind, the teenaged Taizu was taken in by a Buddhist temple, issued a robe and bowl, and sent begging ... Looking back many years later on his earlier days, the founder himself was amazed at the unlikelihood of what he had accomplished. How could someone ... "with only my shadow for company," as he put it, ever have risen so high as to become emperor of all of China?

The likelihood that the baby born in 1328 to the Zhu family in the drought-stricken and locust-infested flatlands of central China would one day found an enduring regime encompassing all of the Chinese-inhabited East Asian landscape was very close to nil. Taizu was one of six children of a poor peasant tax-evader. An epidemic in 1344 killed off all of the founder's immediate family.