Who was the first emperor of the Ming Dynasty?
Hongwu Emperor
Supported by the scholar-bureaucrats, he accepted the Confucian viewpoint that merchants were solely parasitic. He felt that agriculture should be the country's source of wealth and that trade was ignoble. As a result, the Ming economic system emphasised agriculture, unlike the economic system of the Song dynasty, which had preceded the Yuan dynasty and had relied on traders and merchant for revenues. The Hongwu Emperor also supported the creation of self-supporting agricultural communities.