The rising under Chu Yuean-chang,
which steadily gained impetus, was at first a purely social movement;
indeed, it may fairly be called revolutionary. Chu was of the humblest
origin; he became a monk and a peasant leader at one and the same time.
Only three times in Chinese history has a man of the peasantry become
emperor and founder of a dynasty. The first of these three men founded
the Han dynasty; the second founded the first of the so-called "Five
Dynasties" in the tenth century; Chu was the third.

Not until the Mongols had answered Chu's rising with a tightening of the
nationality laws did the revolutionary movement become a national
movement, directed against the foreigners as such. And only when Chu
came under the influence of the first people of the gentry who joined
him, whether voluntarily or perforce, did what had been a revolutionary
movement become a struggle for the substitution of one dynasty for
another without interfering with the existing social system. Both these
points were of the utmost importance to the whole development of the
Ming epoch.

The Mongols were driven out fairly quickly and without great difficulty.
The Chinese drew from the ease of their success a sense of superiority
and a clear feeling of nationalism. This feeling should not be
confounded with the very old feeling of Chinese as a culturally superior
group according to which, at least in theory though rarely in practice,
every person who assimilated Chinese cultural values and traits was a
"Chinese". The roots of nationalism seem to lie in the Southern Sung
period, growing up in the course of contacts with the Juchen and
Mongols; but the discriminatory laws of the Mongols greatly fostered
this feeling. From now on, it was regarded a shame to serve a foreigner
as official, even if he was a ruler of China.

2 _Wars against Mongols and Japanese_

It had been easy to drive the Mongols out of China, but they were never
really beaten in their own country. On the contrary, they seem to have
regained strength after their withdrawal from China: they reorganized
themselves and were soon capable of counter-thrusts, while Chinese
offensives had as a rule very little success, and at all events no
decisive success. In the course of time, however, the Chinese gained a
certain influence over Turkestan, but it was never absolute, always
challenged. After the Mongol empire had fallen to pieces, small states
came into existence in Turkestan, for