In the 1340s, a teenage beggar wandered a plague-devastated Chinese countryside in rags, his family wiped out. Decades later that same man sat on the imperial throne, founder of the Ming dynasty, orchestrating the execution of roughly 100,000 people to protect his grip on power.

Zhu Yuanzhang, the Hongwu Emperor, turned the trauma of his youth into the blueprint for an entire empire. He redistributed land, built welfare systems, and championed farmers, while also freezing society in place with passports and travel bans, dismantling the office of chancellor, and unleashing a secret police and brutal purges driven by escalating paranoia.

• The crumbling Yuan dynasty and famines that set the stage for rebellion
• His years as a wandering monk that became an accidental master class in statecraft
• Rising through discipline  ...