Ming dynasty
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The Ming dynasty ruled China from 1368 to 1644, restoring native rule after the Mongol Yuan and leaving Beijing, the Forbidden City, the brick Great Wall and the blue and white porcelain of the world's markets. Zhu Yuanzhang, born into famine as a beggar and monk, led the Red Turban armies that drove out the Yuan, proclaimed the dynasty at Nanjing and had his own history written with care. His successors moved the capital to Beijing, where the imperial city was built in the 1420s, and the palace complex that survives today was laid out on a north-south axis. The eunuch Zheng He led seven great treasure voyages to India, Persia and east Africa between 1405 and 1433, carrying silk and porcelain and bringing back giraffes, before the court turned inward and the ships were allowed to rot. The state was governed by a grand secretariat and six ministries staffed by scholars selected through the civil examinations, whose eight-legged essays were memorised by millions. Population doubled to perhaps 150 million, tea, cotton and silver flowed, and the single whip reform simplified taxation. But eunuch factions, Manchu pressure beyond the wall, silver shortages and the peasant revolts of Li Zicheng brought the dynasty down in 1644, when the last emperor hanged himself on Coal Hill.