Toghon Temur orders Yellow River re-channeling

1351

The Yuan court mobilized hundreds of thousands of peasant laborers to restore a northern course for the river after catastrophic flooding that had devastated Shandong and Henan. Conditions were brutal, workers dying by the thousands. Among the corvee workers, secret societies circulated prophecies of a coming Maitreya Buddha and a stone-eyed Buddhist icon that would signal rebellion.