The History of China - #255 - Ming 39: It's the End of the World As We Know It

Episode Date: June 18, 2023

For the once-great Ming, the 1630s... suck. Manchus are battering down the creaky northern defenses, foreign silver has dried up, the treasuries are empty, famine, plague and locust swarms are ripping through the populace, and bandit warlords are causing a ruckus in the west... with an increasing eye on the capital itself. Time Period Covered: ca. 1638-1644 CE Major Historical Figures: Great Ming: The Chongzhen Emperor (Zhu Youjian) [r. 1627-1644] Xiong Wencan, Supreme Commander of Bandit Pacification [d. 1639] General Yang Sichang [d. 1641] General Sun Chuanting [d. 1643] General Wu Sangui [1616-1678] Great Qing: Hong Taiji [1592-1643] Prince Abatai [1589-1646] Prince Dorgon [1612-1650] Rebels/Bandits: Li Zicheng, "The Dashing King" [1606-1645] Zhang Xiangzhong, "The Yellow Tiger" [1606-1647] Major Sources Cited: Atwell, William. "The T'ai-ch'ang, T'ian-ch'i, and Ch'ung-chen reigns" in The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 7: The Ming Dynasty, 1368-1644, Part I. Brook, Timothy. The Troubled Empire: China in the Yuan and Ming Dynasties. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast. History isn't black and white, yet too often it's presented as such. Grey History, The French Revolution is a long-form history podcast dedicated to exploring the ambiguities and nuances of the past. From a revolution of hope and liberty to the infamous Reign of Terror. You can't understand the modern world without understanding the French Revolution. So search for the French Revolution today. Hello and welcome to the History of China. Episode 255.

It's the end of the world as we know it. Banditry everywhere. And every day worse than the day before. Communication between North and South has been almost completely cut off. The poor flee and become brigands, while the rich slip off undetected. Merchants are not moving goods, and all the roads are blocked. Official reports to the Ming throne from the mid-Grand Canal region, 1632. Massive droughts, locusts, the price of millet soared The corpses of the starved lay in the streets

Grain reached three-tenths to four-tenths of an ounce of silver per peck Normally one-thirtieth of an ounce of silver per peck From the Shanghai Xinzhe Gazette here, 1641 The great majority of the people have died Of every ten homes, nine are empty From From the Yun Zhongzhe, 1652. Hey everyone and welcome back. Sorry for the bit of a delay there. Unfortunately, due to a bad chest cold, which seemed like it might have been but then turned out wasn't COVID-related, thankfully, I had my voice completely stripped from me for the most part for the better part of, oh, about a week and a half,

which meant that recording was just not in the cards. Fortunately, we're all back to better. For the most part, you might hear a little bit of a frog still in my throat, but I think I'm mostly back to good. Good enough to record, at least. All right, so let's get into it. Last time, we bore witness to the birth of a new dynastic regime poised to sweep down from the north and begin its period of glorious rule, that of the Manchu Qing under the dragon banners of the Aizenguro ruling house. But right before the crowning moment of victory, we pulled up and I said, patience, patience, have patience, and you've had a lot of it. Because today we're going to look at the same time and place, but not from the

glorious, not from the victorious side of things. Today we're back to the late dynastic slog of the Ming, and let me tell you, the 1630s and 40s Ming China are absolutely not where you would want to head with your time machine, in case that has not already been made very clear. So, let's launch in. Ah, here we are. Northern China, currently beset from the north by Manchus, from the northwest by banditry, and from everywhere else all at once by supply and financial problems a mile thick. Manchu's successes in the northeast during the late 1630s and early 1640s adversely affected the government's campaigns against the rebels in the northwest. Ming official Yang Sichang was particularly discouraged. During 1637 and 1638, there had been a considerable optimism

that the rebel problem would soon be solved. Zhang Xianzhong and the other rebel leaders had campaigned with moderate success in northern Nanjia Li for several months during 1637, but by autumn, most rebels had returned to southern Henan or northern Huguang, which had become the major staging ground for their operations. Not long afterwards, Zhang was attacked by Ming forces in southwestern Henan, and over the next few months, he was driven up and down the Han River Valley until he finally established himself in the town of Gucheng in northwestern Huguang. In early 1638, Zhang entered into negotiations with the new supreme commander, or Zongli,

of bandit pacification, Xiong Wenzhan, famous because a decade earlier, he had persuaded the pirate leader, Zhang Jilong, to surrender and serve the Ming cause instead. Despite vigorous protests from some of his subordinates, Xiong remained convinced that this approach to pacification was effective. In May 1638, Xiong accepted Zhang Xianzhong's surrender and installed him as a government commander in the Gutong area. This arrangement lasted for nearly a year, during which time Ming forces brought substantial pressure to bear on rebel groups operating in Shanxi, Henan, and Hukuang, and in particular on the still-obstinate rebel leader Li Zicheng.

Late in 1638, Li suffered a severe defeat on the Shanxi-Henan border, and had to spend most of the next two years rebuilding his shattered forces. So, let's pull back and give a little bit more information on these two rebel leaders, Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong. Both Li and his fellow outlaw chief Zhang hailed from small communities in northern Shaanxi, a region perennially prone to severe drought. Both born on or around the same year, 1605, both would have been in their early to mid-30s by this point in the late 1630s. Early in his career, Li got a job at a government postal station circa 1627, but lost it when the station closed two years later thanks to Ming monetary cutbacks. He thereafter worked as a tax collector with a brief stint in the soldiering life,

but in time drifted into the life of banditry. As time went on, his skills on horseback and ability to ride with rapidity here and there would earn him the moniker of Chuang Wang, or the Dashing King, a title which he apparently inherited from a fellow outlaw upon his death in 1633. Zhang, meanwhile, boasted a significantly more dramatic background. He was notable for his pockmarked face, possibly from surviving a bout of smallpox as a child. As a teenager, after apparently killing a classmate in the course of a dispute, he was disowned by his family and exiled from his community. How much of that tale is true is unknown, but at least him attending school for a time seems to be true,

as two Jesuit missionaries who met Zhang later in life affirm that he was indeed literate. A young man with a short fuse and a bent toward violence only had a few possible outlets in life in the 17th century, and Zhang Xianzhong found that his, at least for a time, was in the army. While serving, he was given the name Huang Hu, or Yellow Tiger, on account of, quote, his yellow appearance and his tiger chin, end quote. However, in 1629 or 30, Zhang was accused, perhaps falsely, of plotting mutiny against his commander, and was spared from execution, the tale goes, only by the intercession of another officer. He was nevertheless drummed out of the military, and without any skills other than fighting, turned to the only quote-unquote

career option left open to a man such as him, banditry. He soon thereafter set himself up as a rebel lord in northern Shaanxi, calling himself Badawang, or the Eighth Great King. Li and Zhang were among the many peripheral young men across northern China who formed, dissolved, reformed, and merged innumerable bandit gangs over the subsequent decade. Gradually, and especially as times went from bad to worse, these gangs loosely organized into larger and larger groups, eventually amounting to ragtag armies. Large armies of bandits consumed large amounts of resources, which they stole from large numbers of people. This tended to attract a large amount of attention from the Ming military,

who sent increasingly large suppression forces to contain and stamp out the problem. Though they tried over the 1630s, none of the bandit lords proved able to establish a permanent base of operations, and in 1638, both Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong suffered major defeats at the hands of Ming commanders. In almost any other time and any other place, this would have been the end of the road for them, and neither would have been given the opportunity to revive their military fortunes. But it was 1638 in North China, and so just when victory over the rebels seemed within reach, the Manchu forces invaded. As city after city in Beizheli and Shandong fell to the invaders, the government was forced to withdraw men and materials from the northwest.

Within months, its pacification efforts there were in ruins. In June 1639, Zhang Xianzhong repudiated his agreement with Xiong Wenshan, and less than three months later, scored a spectacular victory over government forces in the far northwestern portion of Huguang. This disaster would seal Xiong's fate. He was stripped of official rank,

arrested, and eventually sent to Beijing for trial. His powerful friends in the bureaucracy would do nothing to save him, and he was executed in November 1639. Xiong's replacement in the field was his former patron, Yang Sichang, who'd come under intense pressure to make good his promises of military success. Arriving in northern Huguang during the autumn of 1639, Yang was immediately met with hostility from his two most important generals, who not only opposed his pacification strategy, but also disliked him personally. Although he had some success against the rebels in early 1640, Yang was unable to deliver the final blow, and by the summer of 1640, Zhang Xianzhong and several other rebel leaders had broken through Yang's defensive lines on the Yangtze River and pushed into eastern Sichuan.

From there, Zhang in particular made destructive sorties well into 1641. Yang Sichang's problems worsened in 1641 when Li Zicheng began to operate again in western Henan. Severe famine in that province provided him with willing recruits for his cause, and during the first three months of 1641, Li took a number of important cities, including Luoyang, which fell to his armies early in March. Among the captives taken at Luoyang was a notoriously profligate imperial prince who was executed, dismembered, and apparently eaten to demonstrate the rebels' deep animosity towards those who lived in luxury while their countrymen starved. As these events were taking place in northern Henan, Zhang Xianzhong made a lightning strike from Sichuan into Huguang,

where he captured and executed another imperial prince at Xiangyang. Zhang's bold move took Yang Sichang completely by surprise. Unable to counter the rebels, Yang committed suicide. As for the bandits, within two years of what should have been career and life-ending nadirs, they had rebuilt their mobile war machines to such an extent that both Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzong began to see themselves as more than just bandits, but warlords, perhaps with even dynastic ambitions. While banditry raged across the west and north, further economic and trade problems were happening along the coastal regions of Ming.

In 1639, events in Japan and in the Philippines combined to create serious difficulties for key sectors of the Ming economy. During the summer of 1939, the Tokugawa authorities refused to permit merchants from Macau to trade at Nagasaki. This abruptly ended nearly a century of lucrative trade that had brought vast quantities of silver from Japan to Canton and other Chinese markets. And while Dutch and Chinese traders continued to ship Japanese silver to China through the 1640s, the amounts involved were much smaller than they had been during the heyday of Sino-Japanese trade earlier in the century. Several months after the Portuguese had been expelled from Japan, Sino-Spanish trade in the Philippines, already greatly reduced, came to a virtual standstill.

Tensions between the Spanish and the Chinese in Manila exploded into violence, leaving more than 20,000 Chinese dead. As a result, very little New World silver flowed into China from the Philippines during the next few years. Since domestic bullion production could not meet the demand for specie, these developments had a powerful deflationary effect on an economy already beset with problems. In the advanced regions of the southeast, the value of silver increased sharply in the early 1640s, while silver prices for many cash crops and manufactured goods plummeted to previously unimagined lows. This, in turn, led to increased hoarding. Substantial quantities of silver were removed

from circulation as people prepared for worse times ahead. The crisis became more severe during the summer of 1639, when the Chongzhen Emperor agreed to increase taxes once again to finance Yang Zetong's grandiose bandit pacification program. Whatever additional revenues this increase may have raised, and many were unable to find sufficient silver to pay the old rates, much less the new ones, the government's military needs further complicated the money supply problem by drawing more bullion out of the private sector. As if that weren't bad enough, there was also the weather. To say that the climate and weather conditions across the 1630s were bad would be a phenomenal understatement.

Timothy Brooks summarizes the suffering across China, but especially northern China, during this decade, succinctly as follows. Quote, The first of the serious famines began in 1632, the fifth year of the Chongzhen era. The court that year was inundated with memorial after memorial, reporting on extraordinary conditions all over the country, and the extreme social dislocation that came along with it. After 1632, the disaster only deepened. Locusts began to appear on a massive scale in the 8th year, 1635. Then, finally, the dry weather turned to full-scale drought in the 10th year, 1637.

For seven years running, the Ming suffered droughts on an unprecedented scale. During the Great Drought that devastated western Shandong in the summer of 1640, the famished stripped the bark off of trees to have something to eat, then turned to rotting corpses. In the commercial city of Linqing in northwestern Shandong, the desperate resorted to cannibalism. Famine spread its pall southward over the Yangtze Delta over the next summer. The drought continued for another two years, end quote. As noted, this intense and ever-worsening decade of suffering was only exacerbated with a general tax increase as of 1639, even as the deadly weather expanded to bringing terrible suffering to many areas of the country

previously untouched or only slightly affected by the natural disasters of the 1620s and early 1630s. In northern Zhejiang, there were serious floods in 1639 and 1640, drought and devastating locust attacks in 1641, and both drought and floods in 1642-43. Eyewitness accounts of conditions in this region during the early 1640s tell of mass starvation, hordes of beggars, infanticide, and cannibalism. Similar descriptions can be found for other parts of eastern and southeastern China during this period. And in many areas, famine was followed by outbreaks of epidemic disease. The situation was made worse by widespread hoarding and speculation of grain, which drove food prices up just when the amount of silver in circulation was contracting sharply. Although the droughts, floods, and locust attacks were calamitous, there still is evidence that rice was available in many famine areas in the

southeast during the 1640s. The problem was, it was too expensive for most people. With famine, drought, and cold, there most certainly would follow disease. Known variously as the Chongzhen Plague, the Great Plague of the Late Ming, or the Great Plague of Jingxue, it is traced within the Chinese population as early as 1633 in Shanxi, and by 1641 had spread to the capital region where it killed more than 200,000 in 1643 alone, about a quarter of the total population of the metropolis. Across other regions, the results were similarly apocalyptic. alone, about a quarter of the total population of the metropolis. Across other regions, the results were similarly apocalyptic.

Zhejiang province, south of the Yangtze, reported in 1642 that half of its population had contracted the illness, and more than 90% of the infected had died. Some modern sources speculate that this could have been caused at least in part by smallpox, but the consensus, especially given the monumental death rate, seemed to point almost inescapably at one primary disease agent. That's right, our old friend Yersinia pestis, the Black Death. It would be called in contemporary Chinese chronicles both the pimple plague and the vomit blood plague. The cases that align with both bubonic and pneumonic forms of the plague

were accompanied by that other great scourge of humanity, smallpox, as I mentioned. And in this at least, the Chinese got the better end of the bargain compared with their Manchu foes. An early form of inoculation, called variolation, had been pioneered in China less than a century prior. Eminent sinologist Joseph Needham puts it somewhere between 1567 and 1572, based on the alchemical principles that were at the forefront of Chinese medicine at the time.

Named after the disease it was most commonly used against, smallpox or variola, it involves inserting or rubbing powdered smallpox scabs or fluids from infected individuals into scrapes made on the uninfected person's skin. Though this does sound disgusting, since the disease was introduced topically rather than through the respiratory tract and into the lymphatic system, it resulted, usually, in a significantly milder localized infection, with far less morbidity, while also rendering full immunity to further smallpox outbreaks. As such, though the Chinese populace suffered greatly from the plagues ripping through their

towns and cities in the 1630s and 40s, they were able to bear the costs of the infection far better than their Manchurian counterparts. From Brooke, quote, several key moments in their military incursions throughout the 1630s, they fell back from an area in which contagion had been reported. Fear of smallpox was partly what ended Hong Taiji's foray into the North China Plain in 1629-30, end quote. In 1639, an outbreak occurred in Shandong at such a scale that it convinced the Manchus to completely cancel that winter's scheduled raid into northern China. Nor were these rolling series of plague epidemics confined to northwestern China alone. Shanxi was devastated in 1633, with it spreading three years later northwest through Shanxi and into Inner Mongolia. In 1640, the totality of Shanxi was infected, with provincial officials estimating that 80 to 90 percent of the provincial

population had died. This is most likely an exaggeration, but still demonstrates the scale of the ongoing catastrophe. Nor was the South unaffected. The Yangtze Valley was struck with disease in 1639 amidst a mysterious explosion in the rat population, and returned two years later, infecting the whole eastern half of the empire. One particular Shandong county reported in 1641 that well over half its residents had died from the diseases that year. And what disease did not claim, the following summer's locust swarms did. The plagues of insects stripped the country bare, ravenously devouring everything and leaving the devastated populace with nothing at all to eat. One gazetteer added a personal, desperate

note to his reports from the region, quote, among all the strange occurrences of disasters and rebellion, there has never been anything worse than this, end quote. From Fort Sumter to the Battle of Gettysburg. From the Emancipation Proclamation to Appomattox Courthouse. From the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Compromise of 1877. From Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman. To Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson. The Civil War and Reconstruction was a pivotal era in American history. I'm Rich. And I'm Tracy.

And we're the hosts of a podcast that takes a deep dive into that era, when a war was fought to save the Union and to free the slaves. And when the work to rebuild the nation after that war was over turned into a struggle to guarantee liberty and justice for all Americans. Look for The Civil War and Reconstruction wherever you find your podcasts. These natural calamities took their toll on government finances. Taxpayers in Jiangnan, coastal Fujian, and other formerly wealthy regions of the empire defaulted and abandoned their properties. Tenants attacked landlords and rent collectors. Indentured servants rebelled By 1642, the great city of Suzhou was in visible decline,

with many homes vacant and falling into ruins, while the once-rich countryside had become a no-man's land in which only armed men dared to enter. Desperate to turn the tide, the Chongzhen Emperor on June 24, 1643 issued another edict, commanding all his subjects, from the highest official to the most menial peasant, to purge the evil thoughts lurking in their hearts so that heaven might be persuaded to end the punishment of drought and bring back the rain. Their prayers, however, would prove to be in vain. Though the sweeping epidemics seemed to pause briefly in 1642, they came roaring back with a vengeance each year thereafter,

devastating communities as far south as Jiangnan and Nanjing to the northernmost borders of Ming China. Quote, it was understood at the time that Beijing was the epicenter of these waves of sickness, and that the Grand Canal, once the great avenue of national prosperity, was now a highway for the infected to spread the disease from the north. End quote. This rolling series of apocalyptic calamities, one atop the next atop the next, is what Timothy Brooke terms, quote, the Chongzhen Sloth, the most prolonged series of disasters since the Tiding Sloth in the 1320s, end quote. Crops withered, food supplies dwindled, and the

commercial economy shut down, driving the price of grain to unprecedented levels. People had nothing with which to pay their taxes. Bad enough for them, it was still worse for the Ming government overall, which found itself without the means to do things like pay its soldiers guarding the borders, or the couriers who delivered vital messages to every corner of the empire. The imperial court tried every austerity measure it could think of. As early as the 1620s, Beijing had been adopting stringent new rules about who could use the courier system in order to limit its costs. In 1629, when that proved insufficient, they took the further step of closing some of its courier stations to save on staffing costs, but this was, in effect,

putting a band-aid on a severed artery. Ultimately, the mean state was forced to play its final card, the economic card that, if not used extremely carefully, can spell the swift doom of whoever employs it. They were going to start raising taxes. From Brooke, quote, Realistically, no amount of tightening was going to meet the unrelenting costs of waging war in Manchuria. The state sought no alternative to levying heavier and heavier taxes to keep pace with the soaring military costs. Black humor punned on the word chongzhen and chongzhen, meaning double levy, and called it the double taxation Era. When 1644 arrived, 80% of the counties had stopped forwarding any taxes at all. The central treasury was empty.

Five months after Yang Zichang's suicide in April 1641, the Chongzhen Emperor ordered another prominent Donglin opponent, former Chief Grand Secretary Shui Guo Guan, to commit suicide. Shui had been implicated in a corruption scandal that led to his dismissal in 1640. Although Donglin involvement in the affair is not clear, Shui's last words implicate one of the group's members. Just over a month later, in October, Zhou Yanru returned to Beijing to become Chief Grand Secretary, an appointment in which the Donglin faction once again had a hand. Since he had been instrumental in Qian Qianyi's dismissal during the early Chongzhen reign,

Donglin's support for Zhou might seem extraordinary, but his return to office resulted from a compromise between warring factions at court who were trying to solve their differences so that the government could turn its undivided attention to the military and fiscal difficulties threatening the dynasty's very survival. The compromise, however, would prove to be a failure. It failed because certain idealistic Donglin partisans were unable to accept the pragmatic deals that kept the compromise alive. Early in 1643, some of these idealists tried to remove Zhou from office, and although he retained the emperor's confidence for some months to come, his bitterly divided administration

failed to make much headway against the overwhelming problems that confronted it. Following his successful invasion of Huguang early in 1641, Zhang Xianzhang had suffered some temporary setbacks, but by the end of the year, he had recovered enough to join with other rebel leaders in attacks on the western portions of Nanjili. He spent 1642 in this area, overwhelming Luzhou, Tongchun, and several other cities. However, he was unable to hold any of them for very long. Early in 1643, Zhang put aside his plan to attack Nanjing and moved west into Huguang,

where government control was rapidly disintegrating. City after city surrendered to him, including the provincial capital, Wuchang, which fell on the 15th of July 1641 after a short siege Zhang toyed with the idea of establishing a permanent bureaucracy in Wuchang, but government forces from the east forced him to leave and push further south He captured Changsha and Hangzhou early in October and spent the next few months in the area, directing brief campaigns into northern Guangdong and central Jiangxi. Once again, imperial armies forced him to retreat, and early in 1644, he was back in northwestern Huguang, poised for another invasion of Sichuan. Meanwhile, Li Zicheng achieved even greater success further north. By the autumn of 1641, a number of independent rebel commanders had submitted to Li's leadership,

and during the last three months of that year, he had raided large portions of eastern and southern Henan without encountering serious opposition. Li then moved to the north, and in mid-January 1642, laid siege to Kaifeng, a provincial capital that he had tried and failed to capture in 1641. He failed again. During the second week of February, he turned his attention to the area south and east of the city near the Shandong border, where he remained for several months, crushing local defenses and gathering supplies for another siege of Kaifeng that began in May. This would last nearly five months, and when it was over, several hundred thousand people in the city were dead, some of starvation or disease, others in floods that swept through the city when

the rebels cut key dikes on the Yellow River in early October. The devastation in Kaifeng was such that Li remained there only briefly before moving on to more promising areas. By November, he was back in the vicinity of Nanyang, 60 miles southwest of Kaifeng. After quickly disposing of an imperial army sent from Shanxi to surprise him, Li turned east and overcame the few remaining government forces in Henan that posed any threat to his dominance over the province. He then moved into northern Huguang. In January 1643, he easily defeated the poorly disciplined and thoroughly demoralized units

under the command of Zhou, and his men retreated in disarray down the Han River Valley while Li took the strategic city of Xiangyang. During the next few months, Li consolidated his power in the rebel movement by purging potential rivals and establishing a skeleton government to serve as an alternative to Ming rule. The name of Xiangyang was changed to give the city an imperial air. Officials were appointed to a traditional bureaucracy, and Li himself took even grander titles, although for the time being, he refrained from proclaiming himself emperor. The conquest of the dynasty was very much on his mind, however, and late in the summer of 1643, Li moved back into Henan to prepare for a strike against Beijing itself. First, he had to deal with the supreme commander, Sun Chuanting,

whom he had defeated at Nanyang in 1642. Since that time, Sun had built up a respectable fighting force in Shaanxi. Although he questioned the wisdom of taking the offensive against Li, Sun obeyed his orders from the capital and during late autumn entered Henan just south of the Yellow River. To the delight of the military planners in Beijing, Sun had considerable success against the rebels in the early stages of the campaign. Logistical and other problems prevented him from sustaining this offensive, however, and by early November, he was in full retreat. Li pursued him through the Tong Pass into Shanxi, and in mid-November, Sun was killed in a valiant last stand. On November 22, 1643, Li took the provincial capital at Xi'an, and within two months had brought most of the province under his control.

The stage was now set for his advance to Beijing. In this push, he was aided, as he had been many times before, by the Manchu threat. The Manchus forced the Ming to commit men and resources to the northeastern frontier that otherwise could have been employed against the rebels in Shanxi and elsewhere. In September 1641, the Ming supreme commander, Hong Chengchou, who had been transferred from the northwest to counter the Manchu invasion in Beijia Li and Shandong during the winter of 3839, was trapped by Hong Taiji's forces 100 miles northeast of Shanhai Pass while attempting to aid the Ming general, Zhu Daxiu, who was besieged at nearby Jinzhou. All rescue attempts failed, and both generals surrendered within three weeks of each other in March and April of 1642. With the fall of Jinzhou on April 8, 1642, Ming defenses north of the Great Wall virtually collapsed. Late in the summer of 1642, following the failure of secret peace negotiations with the Ming court, Hong Taiji pressed his strategic advantage by sending his elder brother, Prince Abatai,

and other commanders on an extended campaign into eastern China that reached as far south as northern Nanjia Li. This campaign lasted for nearly seven months. When it was over, Ming control in many areas had been seriously impaired. Countless officials and local leaders had been killed or had committed suicide during the fighting. Prince Abatai alone is reported to have taken 94 towns and cities, 360,000 prisoners, and vast amounts of loot. However much these figures are inflated, there can be little question that the destruction in Beijia Li, Shandong, and Nanjia Li crippled the Ming Dynasty's chances of staving off its now inevitable defeat. This campaign also brought an abrupt, ignominious end to Chief Grand Secretary Zhou Yunru's political career.

In May 1643, when Manchu units moving north from Shandong were thought to pose a threat to Beijing, Zhou grandly offered to direct defensive operations at Tongzhou, a few miles east of the capital. His offer was promptly accepted by the emperor, but at Tongzhou, he apparently decided to engage the enemy only if it became absolutely necessary. And since the Manchu forces were withdrawing to the north of the Great Wall, there was very little fighting to be had. Zhou nonetheless claimed a major victory, and on his return to Beijing late in June was handsomely rewarded for his efforts. Less than three weeks later, though, when the emperor learned about the truth of this quote-unquote victory, Joel was removed from office. Later in the year, he was arrested on corruption charges and, as a mark of imperial

favor, permitted to commit suicide on January 15, 1644. By this time, the court faced a very bleak prospect indeed. One scholar has aptly described the situation. Quote, In early 1644, arrears in army pay had accumulated to several million tails of silver, while tax payments from the south arrived only in small parcels of several tens of thousands. The imperial granaries were now practically empty. Unable to meet the ration requirements with husked rice, the Ministry of Revenue purchased small tonnages of miscellaneous beans in its place.

When Beijing itself was besieged, the garrison had not been paid for five months. Troops were called to duty without cooking utensils. Each soldier was issued 100 copper cash and told to purchase food as he could. Morale and discipline sank to such a low point that a general reported, When you whip one soldier, he stands up, but at the same time another is lying down. It was not surprising that the dynasty was about to fall. It was a wonder indeed that it had survived until then. End quote.

For the majority of people in North China at the time, and for most historians subsequently, the end of the Ming Dynasty came shortly after midnight on April 25th, 1644. When, accompanied by a loyal eunuch, the Chongzhen Emperor climbed a small hill in the palace compound and hanged himself from a tree in a pavilion that housed the Imperial Hat and Girdle Department. Eleven weeks earlier, in Xi'an, Li Zitong had announced the establishment of a new dynasty, the Xun. During the intervening weeks, his forces had overwhelmed the last vestiges of imperial resistance in Shanxi, crossed into northwestern Beijia Li, and by April 24th were camped on the outskirts of Beijing itself. The Chongzhen Emperor,

having rejected suggestions to flee south and lend his legitimacy to a resistance movement already being organized there, at the last moment changed his mind and tried to escape, dressed as a eunuch. When this failed, he is said to have gone to his death less than nobly, blaming nearly everyone but himself for the disasters that had befallen his dynasty. Some of his ministers behaved with more dignity, accepting their share of their responsibility, and committing suicide to repay the emperor and the dynasty for the benefits they had received. Some accounts tell it that, before acceding to the inevitable, the Chongzhen emperor penned a final letter saying,

I die unable to face my ancestors in the underworld, dejected and ashamed. May the rebels dismember my corpse and slaughter my officials, but let them not despoil the imperial tombs, nor harm a single one of our people. Yet other accounts have it that the only thing written near the body when it was found the following morning were the words Tianzi, son of heaven. On the morning of April 25th, 1644, when Li Jitong's soldiers finally appeared in the capital's streets, they went about their assigned tasks with a remarkable degree of restraint. Violence against civilians was not tolerated. Looters were summarily executed. And by the time Li arrived at the imperial palace in the early afternoon,

an atmosphere of calm had begun to settle over the city. Much of this disciplined, orderly transition was due to a number of former Ming officials and Confucian advisors who had joined Li's cause during the last years of his campaigns in the northwest. These men were determined to help him establish a new dynasty, in fact, as well as in name. Anything that might detract from Li's dignified and, to their minds, inevitable accession to the throne had to be prohibited. Li himself seems to have been genuinely sad when he learned that the Chongzhen Emperor was dead. Frederick Wakeman suggests that this was because he, quote, was aware of the horrible onus attached to regicide in Chinese political judgments,

and he may also have realized that usurpers seldom hold the throne for long, usually being succeeded by one free of blame for overthrowing the previous ruling house, end quote. This may explain why Li repeatedly postponed the ceremonies that would have made him emperor, preferring instead to retain the title Prince of Xun, which he had taken in Xiangyang in 1643. Whatever Li's qualms about acceding to the throne, organizing and staffing his bureaucracy could not wait. Although most of the key positions went to men who had surrendered to Li before 1644, an acute shortage of qualified personnel in his own ranks forced him from the very outset

to draw the talent and expertise of thousands of Ming bureaucrats and clerical workers who were still in Beijing. It proved an uncomfortable arrangement for both sides. Much of Li's earlier anti-government propaganda had been directed against the Beijing establishment, and neither he nor his aides were in any mood to forgive or forget. For this reason, most of the men selected to serve in the new administration were low-ranking bureaucrats, who, in theory at least, had not been directly involved in formulating the policies that had led to the Ming's collapse. Some of those who did not obtain posts in the Xun government soon faced a fate far worse than unemployment. Within a week of his arrival, Li Zhisheng was facing the

same problems that had confronted the Chongzhang emperor during his final months on the throne, how to pay his troops. The vast wealth Li had expected to find in the imperial treasuries turned out, surprise, had actually dried up long ago. In early May, he approved the suggestion that funds should be collected from the large number of Ming officials who were under arrest in various military camps in the city. Knowing that voluntary contributions would be difficult to obtain, the generals in charge of these camps began a systemic and horrifying regimen of torture to obtain what they wanted. Many prisoners died as a result. By May 12th, even Li realized things had gone too far and stopped the proceedings. The generals, however, had been gratified by the

fruits of their labors, and when instructed to release the remaining prisoners, they quickly turned their attentions to Beijing's large merchant community. These, ahem, irregular activities led to a slackening in military discipline. Before long, Xun soldiers were looting shops and homes in broad daylight and terrorizing the very people they'd come to liberate from the cruel and corrupt Ming government less than a month earlier. Li's attempts to restore order were unsuccessful, and when he rode out of the capital on May 18th to direct a campaign in eastern Beijia Li, his dynastic mandate looked decidedly tarnished. It looked even worse two weeks later when he

returned to Beijing, having been badly beaten by a force under the control of the last Ming commander in the northeast, Wu Sangui, and the Manchu general, Prince Dorgon. On June 3rd, in the midst of one last frenzied orgy of looting and bloodletting, Li finally proclaimed himself the Emperor of Shun in a hastily organized ceremony in the Wuying Palace. The next day, he abandoned Beijing and left for Xi'an to prepare for the many battles that he knew lay ahead. As for Zhang Xianzhong, he would withdraw even further west and south to Sichuan, where he proclaimed himself the first king and then dynastic emperor of Great Xi. On the morning of June 5th, 1644, Prince Dorgon's vanguard reached the outskirts of the capital,

and by late afternoon, he and his entourage were ensconced in the Forbidden City. After nearly 30 years of open warfare, Manchu rule in China had finally begun. And that is where we will leave off for today. Li Zicheng, the self-styled Xun Emperor, has fled west to Xi'an, the Manchu Qing rule the north, and in the south, the last remnants of the self-styled Xun Emperor, has fled west to Xi'an. The Manchu Qing rule the north. And in the south, the last remnants of the once-invincible Ming Dynasty will now prepare their desperate final defense against the northern onslaught from their ancient original capital, Nanjing.

Thanks for listening. Hi everyone, this is Scott. If you want to learn about the world's oldest civilizations, find out how they were rediscovered, follow the story of Mark Antony and Cleopatra's descendants over ten generations, or take a deep dive into the Iron Age or the Hellenistic era, then check out the Ancient World Podcast. Available on all podcasting platforms or go to ancientworldpodcast.com. That's the Ancient World Podcast.