THERE WERE FEW CLEANER BREAKS IN imperial China’s long history than that between its last two dynasties. The switch was so abrupt as to leave the historians with little scope for dynastic elastication and so dramatic as to appear almost staged. Some time after midnight on 25 April 1644, accompanied only by an old eunuch, the Ming Chongzhen emperor, grandson of the Wanli emperor, ascended Coal Hill, an eminence within the Forbidden City, surveyed Beijing’s unmanned walls and the fires that raged in the still-dark suburbs beyond, and then, retiring into a nearby pavilion – it was the headquarters of the Imperial Hat and Girdle Department – hanged himself from a cross-beam. On 5 June Manchu forces entered the city, quickly occupied the palace and, declaring the Mandate forfeit, arrogated it to their own pre-declared Qing dynasty. The deer had been loose, as the saying had it, for just six weeks. In the same decade, around six hundred weeks of godly ferment followed the removal of the crowned head of Charles I of England and Scotland. But in China, so short was the interregnum between Ming and Qing that it served only to betray the capital and precipitate the conquest of the empire. Resistance, though sometimes heroic, would prove marginal. For once there would be no enduring north–south split, no long multi-state ‘Period of Disunion’, and no excruciating free-for-all among incoming warlords and competing regional dynasties.
After a six-week bloodbath an indigenous lineage was again being displaced by an alien one. High-cheeked warriors on horseback clattered through the Beijing streets, their Inner Asian origins ferociously advertised by incomprehensible languages, soft-soled boots and the shaven fore-crowns and long greasy queues of Geronimo lookalikes. Besides the Jurchen, who called themselves Manchu, there rode in the ranks of the incomers large contingents of ‘Mongols’, a term now denoting language, lifestyle and attachment to the memory of Chinggis Khan and which comprehended peoples once identified as Turkic and Khitan as well as Mongol. The steppe and the forest were reinvading the sown; it was as if all those who had previously savoured Chinese dominion were back for a banquet of lasting empire.
The Ming’s nearly twenty-seven decades were up, the Qing’s nearly twenty-eight just beginning; a tired and now ineffectual regime looked to have succumbed to a fresh and still-dynamic one. The eclectic society of the later Ming would soon be superseded by a more rigid social and cultural conformity. Likewise, the Ming flirtation with the wider maritime world would appear repudiated in favour of a typically Inner Asian obsession with territorial conquest. Zheng He’s voyages, the 1557 accommodation of the Portuguese at Macao, the interest taken at court in well-primed foreigners like the Jesuit Matteo Ricci, and the economy’s growing dependence on the exchange of silk and ceramic exports for bullion from Japan and the New World – these things could not be reversed. But their aftermath might have been better managed had priority not been given to territorial expansion into the unproductive wastes of Mongolia, Tibet and Xinjiang. By the late eighteenth century, thanks to the Qing, China would have acquired the subcontinental girth that it rejoices in to this day. On the other hand the price for neglecting its seaboard and underestimating the foreigners who increasingly frequented it would be national humiliation, and not just by trading companies, upstart empires and ‘great powers’ but by domestic revolutionaries, opportunistic neighbours and itinerant ideologues.
Not surprisingly, then, the year 1644 – or less explicitly, the first half of the seventeenth century – is taken to mark an important milestone in China’s historical marathon. Hereabouts period-conscious histories flag the end of one era, or ‘world cycle’, and the beginning of another, though whether ‘late feudal’ is superseded by ‘proto-capitalist’, ‘late imperial’ by ‘post-imperial’ or ‘pre-modern’ by ‘early modern’ is a matter of mouth-watering debate. Many recent works carry their narratives up to the 1600s, after which others take over for the homeward stretch. In the changeover from Ming to Qing, the tradition, hallowed by China’s historiography, of chopping the past into dynasty-size lengths looks for once to have been justified. And yet change is seldom so sharp, transition never so tidy. Arguably a chronology inflexibly based on dynasties and reign periods imposes artificial divisions, or ‘conceptual barriers’, that truncate and obscure more deep-rooted trends in society, culture and government.1 The thematic continuities, within Jurchen-Manchu society as well as Chinese, though they play havoc with a date-dependent narrative, may be more rewarding than the comings and goings of dynasts.
Travelling from Nanjing to Beijing in 1598, the Italian Father Matteo Ricci had opted for the Grand Canal. He was no stranger to the country. He had been in Guangdong for sixteen years, had mastered the language and was now superior of the small Jesuit mission based on Portuguese Macao. He was nevertheless amazed by the volume of shipping on the canal. It was said that 10,000 vessels were engaged in transporting the tax produce of Shandong and the Yangzi provinces to Beijing, and Ricci saw no reason to doubt it. He was equally impressed by the ‘great number of well known cities’ he passed. As for the banks of the canal, they were lined by ‘so many towns, villages and scattered houses that one might say the entire route is inhabited’. Throughout a distance of around 1,700 kilometres (1,060 miles), the commercial activity never ceased.
Later, returning south by land because in winter there was insufficient water and too much ice for the canal to function, Ricci stayed in Suzhou. Like Polo he was reminded of Venice; ‘the city is all bridges’, he wrote in his journal, ‘very old but beautifully built . . . [and] the water fresh and clear, unlike that of Venice’. As a location for a Christian mission, though, Suzhou had a major disadvantage: it was subject to ‘a tremendous tax’. Reportedly an indemnity dating back to the Ming conquest, it meant that fully half of what was grown in and around the city passed to the imperial treasury. ‘Hence it may happen in China that one province pays twice as much as another in taxes.’2
There was nothing new in all this. The size and ubiquity of towns and cities, the commercialisation of agriculture as farmers concentrated on specialised crops for market rather than food grains for subsistence, the consequent development of local networks of commercial, manufacturing and socio-political activity, and the extremely uneven nature of tax liabilities are all discernible in earlier accounts like those of Ennin, Polo and Ibn Battuta. But in no small part thanks to the survival of more in the way of documentation – tax registers, local gazetteers, genealogies, unofficial histories – provincial conditions during the Ming and Qing periods have attracted greater scholarly scrutiny.
China-ware being packed in crates for export, as depicted by a Chinese artist in gouache on paper. Loose tea was crammed between the pots to prevent breakages. By the nineteenth century tea far exceeded the value of all other Chinese exports, including the porcelain it once protected.
An oil painting of the Cantonese school shows the waterfront of Shamian Island (Guangzhou) in the eighteenth century. Otherwise known as Canton, Guangzhou was the multi-national hub of the tea trade and subsequently of the traffic in opium.
While under intense pressure from the foreign powers in the late nineteenth century, the Chinese empire was further destabilised by two massive rebellions. In 1851–65 Taiping armies swept north as far as Tianjin, where a Taiping encampment is shown in a contemporary scroll painting. And in 1900 Beijing itself succumbed to what foreigners called the Boxer Rebellion. Qing ambivalence towards the Boxers failed to save their leaders from the public executions demanded by the foreign powers by way of reprisal.
Cixi (1835–1908), empress dowager of the Qing Xianfeng emperor and regent for both of his successors, presided over the fate of the dynasty for forty-five years. A controversial figure who antagonised the foreign powers and stifled the 1898 ‘Hundred Days’ reforms, she yet supported the self-strengthening movement and outlawed the practice of foot-binding. (Portrait of 1905 by Hubert Vos.)
Pu-yi (1906–67), also known as Henry, was ‘the Last Emperor’, though he scarcely reigned. Reared in the Forbidden City, he was obliged to abdicate following the 1911 revolution. Restored for a few weeks in 1917 (and given a British tutor), he was forced to flee into Japanese custody in 1924 and made titular emperor of Japanese Manchuria in 1934. After the Second World War he underwent re-education and ended his days working for the Beijing parks department.
In 1930 the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek (right) and the young Manchurian warlord Zhang Xueliang (left) formed a joint front against the Japanese and the communists. Six years later Zhang took Chiang Kai-shek hostage in a bid to end the Nationalist vendetta against the communists and unite all China against the Japanese.
Shanghai’s waterfront of hotels, banks and shipping companies was more cosmopolitan than anywhere else in China. In 1937 Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist government chose to open a new front against the Japanese. No enemy vessels were sunk but the erratic Chinese bombing killed 2,000 Chinese civilians in a single day.
From Shanghai, Japanese troops pushed west up the Yangzi. Nanjing, the Nationalist capital, fell in December 1937. Suspecting Chinese troops of having donned civlian clothes, the Japanese then conducted a horrific massacre that included using prisoners for bayonet practice.
After the fall of Nanjing, it was Chongqing, above the Yangzi gorges in Sichuan, that became the Nationalists’ last redoubt. Though heavily bombed (as here), the city held out and with Allied support remained the Nationalist capital throughout the Second World War.
A youthful Mao Zedong (1893–1976) addressing troops at Yan’an in Shaanxi, to where the communist forces had withdrawn in the Long March of 1934–35.
‘Rivers and Mountains are Charming’ is the title of this 1980s poster celebrating the four-man leadership of the 1949 communist revolution – Xu De, Mao Zedong, Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai. All had died in 1976 except Liu, who, though a victim of the Cultural Revolution, had been posthumously rehabilitated. Not so the conspicuously absent Lin Biao.
Security became an obsession following the Sino-Soviet rupture of c.1960. By 1970, when this poster appeared, strategic industries were being relocated inland for fear of a US assault. Entitled in English ‘Survey the Enemy’, the poster urges vigilance and surveillance (rather than surveys) even in the lotus beds.
A 1980s poster promotes the one-child-per-family policy, while the Yangzi’s Three Gorges Dam (with its staircases of shipping locks) provides the world’s largest output of hydro-electricity. Both projects have their critics; but the stabilisation of China’s population and the provision of green energy may be accounted sensational sucesses for any regime.
The gelugpa monastery of Labrang Tashikyil in Amdo (Gansu) was one of many that, nearly half a century after the Dalai Lama’s 1959 flight to India, was still staging protests against Beijing’s interference in Tibetan affairs and against Han settlement in Tibet itself.
The main conclusion of this scrutiny is predictable, if disconcerting: generalising about the empire is shown to be a dangerous exercise. Not only taxation but crops, productivity, patterns of landownership, standards of law and order, and levels of social well-being varied enormously from province to province, prefecture to prefecture, and county to county. Yet communications being excellent, social as well as commercial linkages between the cities, towns and countryside were highly developed. Government officials were forever returning to their rural roots to attend ancestral festivals, observe the long mourning periods for a deceased parent, nurse the wounds of censure and demotion, or simply retire for good. Nor were they starved of appreciative company once they got there. Since the supply of graduates now greatly exceeded official demand, and since living with kin in a village was cheaper than keeping up appearances in a city, local society had acquired a whole new tier of cultivated office-seekers and opinionated mentors. Genealogical researches by such underemployed scholars contributed to the formation of local clan associations that might own land, offer social and educational support to their members, actively engage in local affairs, and disconcert official bureaucrats. The urban exiles, mixing more freely with landowning, military and mercantile families now that they too included degree-holders, augmented a gentrified local elite that, in an age of bureaucratic ‘sclerosis’, could exercise considerable influence.
This influence was far from consistent, however, and local society anything but coherent. Differences convulsing the late Ming court would be exposed by the Qing conquest as common throughout the empire. Mostly they were couched in the high moral terms of a controversy that pitched latter-day disciples of the hands-on, ‘thought as action’ Wang Yangming and his ‘innate sense’ of what was right (which all too easily became what was convenient or permissive) against those who, true to Zhu Xi’s emphasis on ‘the investigation of all things’, insisted on the cultivation of moral integrity as the prerequisite for office entitlement and for the empire’s salvation. The latter, at first overwhelmingly disappointed junior officials, were vociferous, even suicidal, in challenging the Grand Secretariat and bombarding the emperor with remonstrances; as the Donglin faction (named after an academy in Wuxi near Suzhou) they suffered persecution in the 1620s; as the Fu She (‘Restoration Society’) they fared slightly better in the 1630s; but as a component in Ming resistance to the Qing conquest in the 1640s they failed dismally. Many other shades of opinion were represented; some brave spirits would wonder whether abstract speculation of any sort was appropriate at a time of growing crisis. But all schools of thought were tainted by deep personal and professional animosities, were exercised by the age-old rivalry between the palace and the bureaucracy, and were susceptible to competing opinions about the post-Wanli succession.
As for the bureaucracy itself, its plight had little to do with the calibre of its personnel. Loyal and devoted public servants were no rarer in the early seventeenth century than formerly; indeed, the Qing conquest revealed some quite exceptional officials. But because of the rivalries and suspicion engulfing the government in Beijing, central direction was lacking. Instead the provinces were bombarded with ever more demands for revenue. Partly these impositions and levies were needed to defray the expense of war against the Japanese in Korea in the 1590s, against Jurchen advances in Manchuria after 1615, and increasingly against rebellious subjects in China itself, who were often driven to take up arms by the severity of the very same impositions. But new taxes were also needed because the existing ones, and the liabilities on which they were assessed, had come to bear little relationship to actual landownership, population totals or theoretical liability. The later Ming had bartered such extensive exemptions to the imperial clan, the Buddhist clergy, the military, office-holders, degree-holders and anyone else with influence that the tax burden now fell overwhelmingly on small landholders and sharecroppers who were least able to support it.
This placed local officials in an unenviable position. Should they side with those powerful interests accustomed to exemption or evasion, or with downtrodden cultivators not unreasonably inclined to violence? Worse still, as of the late 1590s the local administration had become increasingly sidelined; poor returns from the new taxes had led the emperor to entrust the collection of the most detested levies – or more accurately, their extortion – to that alternative bureaucracy of palace officials that constituted the ‘eunuchracy’.
Ricci observed this phenomenon with dismay. As he understood it, in the past emperors had obtained sufficient in the way of precious metals – principally copper and silver – from mines within the empire. But these mines had long been officially closed because ‘thieves and robbers’ had taken to despoiling them. Now the Wanli emperor, out of dire necessity, had ordered their reopening, had imposed a 2 per cent tax on ‘all merchandise sold in every [mineral-yielding?] province’ and, bypassing the regular officials ‘who always administer the laws with moderation’, had dispatched eunuchs to enforce compliance. These ‘semi-men’, of whom Ricci was as scathing as any unemasculated Confucianist, had then gone berserk, ‘their greed turning them into savages’.
The tax collectors found gold mines, not in the mountains, but in the rich cities. If they were told that a rich man lived here or there, they said he had a silver mine in his house, and immediately decided to ransack and undermine his home . . . Sometimes, in order to secure an exemption from being robbed, the cities and even the provinces bartered with the eunuchs, and paid them a large sum of silver, which they said was taken from the mines for the royal treasury. The result of this unusual spoliation was an increase in the price of all commodities, with a corresponding growth in the general spread of poverty.3
Regular officials protested, even resisted, but to no avail; they were either dismissed or imprisoned. The eunuchcrats had the emperor’s full backing and grew ever ‘more insolent in their attitude and more daring in their depredations’. In the eyes of the inarticulate masses the entire government apparatus was at risk of being discredited by the scandal.
All of which, while attested elsewhere, overlooked the underlying problem: besides inadequate revenue receipts, the Ming faced a serious monetary crisis. Paper money had first run into problems under the Yuan dynasty. Insufficiently backed by silver, copper or even silk, new issues of notes had been declared non-convertible by the Mongol regime. As a result they rapidly lost their face value and were generally shunned; those who could preferred to hoard metals. The Hongwu emperor, founder of the Ming, had persisted with paper and shut down mining operations to cut off the supply of metals. But this merely boosted their value, especially that of silver. By 1400 the purchasing power of silver was higher in China than anywhere else in the world, and would remain so. The country ‘had entered a new monetary age in which unminted silver traded by weight, and copper coins both legal and counterfeit, were the dominant forms of currency’.4
The Ming Yongle emperor – he who championed the Zheng He voyages – continued issuing notes. Salaries were paid in them, and all those foreign tribute missions were plied with them; since they were worthless outside China – and soon worthless within China – recipients did well to spend them quickly. The Yongle emperor also reopened the mines. For a time the supply of precious metals had improved, and in 1436 some taxes became payable in silver, others in copper. This trend away from paper money accelerated in the sixteenth century so that by the 1550s most taxes were payable in silver. Meanwhile, judging by government receipts from mined silver, the yield from domestic sources had either dramatically declined or was being wilfully misrepresented. As of the sixteenth century by far the largest source of silver, and so of China’s money supply, was foreign trade. Against exports, the silver initially came from eastern Europe by way of Indo-Muslim and then Portuguese merchants; as of mid-century, it came from Japan and was shipped mainly by the Portuguese; and after the 1570s, it came substantially from the Americas, carried across the Pacific by Spanish galleon to Manila and thence to the coast of China in Chinese vessels, a development made possible by the 1567 lifting of that ban on Chinese participation in maritime ventures imposed after the Zheng He voyages.
Curiously, though silver was mined in China, it was never minted in China. The only coins in circulation remained copper cash that were strung together through their central hole into ‘strings’. As late as the 1870s overland explorers, such as those of France’s Mekong Exploration Commission, having bartered their way to some remote Chinese frontier with a variety of trade goods and currencies, were amazed to learn that on entering the Celestial Empire they must convert their resources into silver ingots. From these ingots, as from a cheese, chunks were cut or slivers pared, then weighed and essayed, for every substantial cash transaction. Though silver, its weight expressed in terms of liang or taels (37.6 grams, 1.3 ounces), was the standard unit of currency, there were no silver coins and no units of guaranteed weight and purity. In theory the metal retained its original function as a reserve and tax currency, handier to transport and store than copper, silk or grain. It was meant as the medium of the state, of its servants and the financial community, not of the black-haired commoner.
So long as silver was abundant worldwide, its high purchasing power in China acted as a magnet. (An embarrassingly favourable balance of payments is no novelty in China.) But from about 1600 to 1620, and again post-1630, the silver supply was interrupted by a combination of factors – declining production in the New World, ructions in Manila and hiccups on the high seas as Dutch and English shipping challenged the Iberian powers. This seems to have determined the Wanli emperor and his successors to maximise the revenue from domestic mines by imposing the new tax mentioned by Ricci and by entrusting its collection to eunuchcrats, many of whom were already in the provinces as tax overseers in connection with the salt monopoly. ‘Mines’ soon became just a generic euphemism for any enterprise or individual suspected of having large silver reserves. Since local administrations were notoriously ambivalent about this wealth, it could reasonably be assumed that little or no tax had already been levied on it; an equitable redistribution of the fiscal burden was indeed highly desirable and long overdue. But this was not it; and Ricci was right to highlight the abuses and hardships that resulted. Hoodlums were hired to terrorise those targeted; commercial life was interrupted; casual labourers were laid off; with silver in short supply, the silver-to-copper ratio rose in silver’s favour; so did prices; and hardest hit were those who sold their produce for copper but must pay their taxes in silver.
Urban unrest and tensions within the provincial elite were soon widespread. The death of the Wanli emperor in 1620 brought a respite in respect of the mining tax but not of the eunuchcrats, who continued to harry the rich and antagonise the righteous. Resentment was most evident in prosperous Jiangnan, a term denoting the region of ‘the Yangzi south’ and principally applied to the booming Nanjing–Suzhou–Hangzhou corridor. But it was more obvious upheavals within the heavily militarised society along the Great Wall in the far north which heightened these tensions and finally overwhelmed the Ming.
Throughout the empire in the 1620s and ’30s a succession of unusually cold summers brought crop failures and famines. Smallpox and possibly some form of plague were also rampant. As so often, dynastic change would take place against a background of widespread dislocation and hardship that was no less ominous than it was catastrophic. Simultaneously Mongol and Jurchen incursions into Liaodong (now Liaoning), the Ming province in southern Manchuria, necessitated the dispatch of ever more troops beyond the wall’s easternmost extremity. This weakened the garrisons to the west, creaming off their manpower, supplies and even wages. Here, and especially in Shaanxi, goaded by hunger and neglect, deserters formed gangs of roving ‘bandits’ that by 1630 were snowballing into rebellious armies. They coordinated their movements to avoid clashing with one another and roamed ever farther east, west and south (so panicking Jiangnan) to commandeer supplies and recruits. Though amenable to amnesties and occasionally defeated by imperial troops, they displayed remarkable resilience, in part because the imperial forces hastily raised to oppose them often proved no more disciplined – and rather less fair-minded when it came to sharing their spoils with the oppressed.
By 1641 these rebels had gelled into two main armies, one operating principally in Hubei and Sichuan, the other in Shanxi and Henan under a self-styled ‘Prince of Shun’. The ‘dashing prince’, as he was popularly known, was otherwise Li Zicheng, a man in his mid-thirties with little education or military experience but a commanding personality and soaring expectations. In 1642 Li Zicheng captured Luoyang and then, after flooding it, Kaifeng; millions are said to have drowned, including 10,000 of his own men. He could afford the loss; his forces now supposedly numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Late in 1643 he added to his bag of ancient imperial capitals the city of Xi’an, renaming it Chang’an as in Tang times. In the same year he took Xiangyang, one of the twin cities from which the Southern Song had once defied the advancing Mongols by running their blockade with paddle-boats. There, like the Ming Hongwu emperor at Nanjing in his own pre-imperial days, Li Zicheng began setting up a rudimentary administration with the help of assorted officials attracted as much by his success as by his populist sentiments.
The extent of his ambitions was as yet unclear. The rebels had generally executed members of the extended Ming family along with senior Ming officials; indeed, rumour consistently had it that, in doing so, Li Zicheng was merely asserting his legitimacy, he being none other than the direct descendant of the Ming Jianwen emperor (the grandson of the founding Hongwu emperor who had either disappeared into the Western Ocean, where Zheng He had failed to find him, or been burnt to death when the Yongle emperor stormed Nanjing and usurped the throne). Yet Li Zicheng’s personal propaganda, like that of insurgents in the past, tirelessly stressed his loyalty to the present emperor; he was supposedly intent only on liberating him from self-seeking officials and dependants who abused his authority and frustrated his efforts to deal with the Jurchen-Manchu threat. There was something in this. Not mere rhetoric for once, it tallied with the views of many, including the Jurchen-Manchu themselves, who proclaimed equally loyalist sentiments to justify their own advance from the east, though of course they would rescue the emperor from his rebellious subjects. On the other hand, the weight of unmistakably imperial precedent building up behind Li Zicheng can hardly have gone unnoticed. As with theQin First Emperor and Han Gaozu, his trail of conquest began in Shaanxi; like Han Gaozu and the Ming Hongwu emperor he had overcome the handicaps of humble birth; and as with the Tang emperors his surname was the auspicious Li. In conscious imitation of the Tang, he had reinstated Chang’an and awarded his officials Tang-style titles. All options were being kept open.
The year 1644 had begun with Li Zicheng’s elevation as ‘Great King of the West’, another ambiguous move, followed by his immediate departure for the east. After storming Taiyuan, the Shanxi capital, half his army had made straight for Beijing, the other half going via Datong to pre-empt attack in the rear from the Great Wall garrisons. Neither encountered much resistance; Manchu incursions into Liaodong had siphoned off the bulk of the imperial troops. By 22 April Li Zicheng was bivouacking among the imperial Ming tombs, singeing their architecture but not actually ransacking them. He was two days’ march from the capital. A Beijing Spring beckoned.
What precisely followed – or which of the several accounts deserves the greater credibility – is uncertain. As the rebel army entered the suburbs, the defenders melted away and the Ming simply bowed to the inevitable. The granaries were bare, the treasury empty, the depleted garrison unpaid and unfed. The government, riven by factional struggles, was as impotent as ever; senior ministers who could well afford to contribute to the defence of the realm turned a deaf ear to appeals for donations; and as for the Chongzhen emperor himself (r. 1628–44) he seemed more cut out for tragedy than heroics. In his early thirties at the time, he was neither an idiot nor an invalid; he worked hard and worried incessantly. But distrustful – he had got through fifty Grand Secretaries in seventeen years – and chronically indecisive – for months he had been havering over a possible retreat to Nanjing – he inspired neither confidence nor respect.
Some accounts have him summoning his ministers to a last-minute audience; no one turned up. Did he then get drunk? Order his empress to commit suicide? And stab to death his other womenfolk to save them from dishonour? Or did he simply put on his ceremonial robes, tramp up Coal Hill and hang himself? Was it in fact called ‘Coal Hill’? Or was it ‘Prospect Hill’, otherwise the ‘Hill of Ten Thousand Years’? And was it really from a beam in the Hat and Girdle pavilion that he hanged himself, or was it from a tree outside? No two accounts agree. ‘For this set of events’, writes Jonathan Spence, the most candid of Ming-Qing chroniclers, ‘the historian can usually decide for himself which are the likeliest versions.’5
Either later that day or the next Li Zicheng’s forces entered the Forbidden City. They were practically unopposed; someone had even left the gates unlocked for them. Over the next few weeks, as the blossom fell and the trees put out new leaf, Li Zicheng could conceivably have made good his usurpation. A horrific purge of officialdom was eventually scaled down, the torture sessions to extract confessions and reveal treasure were stopped, and some senior officials were re-employed. Looting continued, but when, a month after the capture of the city, there came news of a loyalist army preparing to attack from the east, Li Zicheng was still able to extricate the bulk of his forces for a pre-emptive strike against this new threat.
The decisive battle took place on 26 May (1644) near Shanhaiguan. About 300 kilometres (185 miles) from Beijing, Shanhaiguan is the massive gateway in the Great Wall nearest to the sea and commanding the eastward approaches from Liaodong. Before the fall of Beijing, Wu Sangui, Liaodong’s senior Ming general, had been withdrawn there to keep the Jurchen-Manchu forces out; but so dire was the news now coming from Beijing, including word of his own family’s detention by Li Zicheng’s rebels, that General Wu invited the Jurchen-Manchu in; they were to fight alongside his Ming forces to disperse the rebels, reclaim the capital, restore order and bury the deceased emperor.
It was to pre-empt such a hostile conjunction that Li Zicheng had hurriedly marched out of Beijing; and he did indeed reach Shanhaiguan before the arrival of the main Jurchen army. But he had underestimated General Wu Sangui. At the head of his Ming troops, and with or without decisive help from the first Jurchen contingents – this is another set of events about which the historian ‘can decide for himself’ – General Wu prevailed. Thus the first major battle in defence of the Great Wall was fought not against alien attackers from without but against Chinese attackers from within. And when the Manchu-Jurchen arrived in force, they passed through the Shanhaiguan unopposed, in fact keenly welcomed.
Li Zicheng, after defeat at Shanhaiguan, fell back on Beijing. In what was almost an afterthought, he stayed there just long enough to declare himself emperor and torch the palace; then he fled west with what remained of his army. Wu Sangui went after him. As a native of Liaodong himself, General Wu knew and respected the Jurchen; with the death of the Ming emperor and with an imperial heir nowhere to be found, he was ready to serve the newcomers as loyally as were other senior figures, including some of his own family, who had already changed sides – and as countless more soon would. Hence his departure from the scene with orders to pursue and annihilate the rebels; and hence, on 5 June, the Jurchen-Manchu host rode alone and unannounced into the still-smouldering Forbidden City. When their leader announced that they had come to avenge the Ming, a mystified crowd listened in fear and silence. Some supposed the speaker must be the descendant of a child fathered by the Ming Zhengtong emperor while he was in Mongol captivity following the Tumu Incident; few realised they were witnessing a transfer of the Mandate. Though all Chinese dynasties might reasonably be described as conquest dynasties, none had conquered less of China before gaining the throne than the Manchus.