Zaoqiang immigrants in Hong Tong, Shanxi Province

1368, Zhu Yuanzhang established the Ming Dynasty and finally overthrew the rule of the Yuan Dynasty. Only the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River, suffering from the flood of the Yellow River, is an important battlefield in the struggle against Yuan, with a vast territory and few people. How to rebuild this area in ruins has become an important task of the Ming court. 1388, a letter from Dr. Liu Jiugao from the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, put forward suggestions on immigration. Specifically, Hebei and other places are sparsely populated, while Shandong and Shanxi have large populations, so they can immigrate to Hebei to promote development. Zhu Yuanzhang attaches great importance to the suggestion of immigration, but he thinks that Shandong has a large territory and a relatively small population. Therefore, he approved Shanxi's plan to emigrate to the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River.

In fact, the hardest hit areas with sparse population are today's Hebei and Henan. At that time, the population of central and eastern Shandong was acceptable, while the population of Luxi, located in the lower reaches of the Yellow River, was relatively small. Therefore, Dongchangfu in Shandong (now Liaocheng) and Heze in Yanzhou, like Hebei and Henan, have become destinations for immigrants. 1389 and 1392, the Ming government organized Shanxi immigrants to move to Dongchangfu counties and Heze twice, which was a famous locust tree immigrant in Hongtong County in history.

There are also many Shanxi immigrants who have been moved to Jinan and northern Qingzhou, that is, Binzhou, Dongying and nearby areas today. Here is the mouth of the Yellow River, and the population is naturally sparse. But the genealogy of immigrants in this area records that they are from Zaoqiang, Hebei. Considering the small population of Zaoqiang in the early Ming Dynasty, it is likely that Shanxi immigrants moved to Zaoqiang and then moved from Zaoqiang to Shandong (some genealogies are also recorded in this way).

If Zhu Yuanzhang immigrated from Shanxi to the middle and lower reaches of the Yellow River to solve the problem of too few people in the relevant areas, then the migration of people from southern Jiangsu to northern Jiangsu is more to consolidate his rule. In other words, Zhang Shicheng and Zhu Yuanzhang compete for the world's base camp in southern Jiangsu. Because Zhang Shicheng was very kind to the people, although he died, the people in southern Jiangsu still remember him. Because of the small population in Huaibei, Zhu Yuanzhang, who was worried about the rebellion of prominent families in southern Jiangsu, killed two birds with one stone and moved hundreds of thousands of people from southern Jiangsu to Huaibei. This is the famous "Hongwu Drive Away". Some of these immigrants from southern Jiangsu moved to Linyi and Zaozhuang in southern Shandong. At this point, there are also Jiangsu immigrants in Shandong.