and all his relatives had died from a plague, leaving him destitute.  He had first entered a monastery and become a monk.  This was a favourite resource—­and has been almost to the present day—­for poor sons of peasants who were threatened with starvation.  As a monk he had gone about begging, until in 1353 he returned to his home and collected a group, mostly men from his own village, sons of peasants and young fellows who had already been peasant leaders.  Monks were often peasant leaders.  They were trusted because they promised divine aid, and because they were usually rather better educated than the rest of the peasants.  Chu at first also had contacts with a secret society, a branch of the White Lotus Society which several times in the course of Chinese history has been the nucleus of rebellious movements.  Chu took his small group which identified itself by a red turban and a red banner to Kuo, who received him gladly, entered into alliance with him, and in sign of friendship gave him his daughter in marriage.  In 1355 Kuo died, and Chu took over his army, now many thousands strong.  In his campaigns against towns in eastern China, Chu succeeded in winning over some capable members of the gentry.  One was the chairman of a committee that yielded a town to Chu; another was a scholar whose family had always been opposed to the Mongols, and who had himself suffered injustice several times in his official career, so that he was glad to join Chu out of hatred of the Mongols.

These men gained great influence over Chu, and persuaded him to give up attacking rich individuals, and instead to establish an assured control over large parts of the country.  He would then, they pointed out, be permanently enriched, while otherwise he would only be in funds at the moment of the plundering of a town.  They set before him strategic plans with that aim.  Through their counsel Chu changed from the leader of a popular rising into a fighter against the dynasty.  Of all the peasant leaders he was now the only one pursuing a definite aim.  He marched first against Nanking, the great city of central China, and captured it with ease.  He then crossed the Yangtze, and conquered the rich provinces of the south-east.  He was a rebel who no longer slaughtered the rich or plundered the towns, and the whole of the gentry with all their followers came over to him en masse.  The armies of volunteers went over to Chu, and the whole edifice of the dynasty collapsed.

The years 1355-1368 were full of small battles.  After his conquest of the whole of the south, Chu went north.  In 1368 his generals captured Peking almost without a blow.  The Mongol ruler fled on horseback with his immediate entourage into the north of China, and soon after into Mongolia.  The Mongol dynasty had been brought down, almost without resistance.  The Mongols in the isolated garrisons marched northward wherever they could.  A few surrendered to the Chinese and were used in southern China as professional soldiers, though they were always regarded with suspicion.  The only serious resistance offered came from the regions in which other Chinese popular leaders had established themselves, especially the remote provinces in the west and south-west, which had a different social structure and had been relatively little affected by the Mongol regime.