structural:scholar_edition
Religious and ethnic policies

Mongol and Central Asian Semu women and men (with the explicit exclusion of all Hui Hui people and Kipchaks due to their different racial features) were required by the Code of the Great Ming to marry Han Chinese, with the voluntary consent of both spouses and families after the first Ming emperor Hongwu passed the law in Article 122, with the Mongols and Semu forbidden from marrying their own kind.

The Hongwu Emperor married off his own son Zhu Shuang to the Mongol consort Minlie of the Wang clan (愍烈妃 王氏; d. 1395), the primary consort, younger sister of Köke Temür. David M. Robinson indicated it is unknown whether the Ming marriage laws were actually enforced. At the same time, the Hongwu Emperor also wanted to segregate barbarians like the Mongol and Semu and force them not to use Han names so they could maintain their distinctiveness and not assimilate or get mistaken for Han.

Ming Chinese officials above all regarded Mongols under their rule as a separate ethnicity registered in official hereditary Mongol households, regardless of their lifestyle, dress or language, making it irrelevant whether their culture survived, the Ming viewed everyone who was registered in an official Mongol household (most of which were classified as part of Ming military households) as a Mongol legally.

Hongwu ordered the construction of several mosques in Nanjing, Yunnan, Guangdong and Fujian, and had inscriptions praising Muhammad placed in them. He rebuilt the Jinjue Mosque in Nanjing and large numbers of Hui people moved to the city during his rule.