Fall of Beijing (1644): Li Zicheng and the End of the Ming

The fall of Beijing on 25 April 1644 marked the end of the Ming dynasty’s rule over China. The rebel leader Li Zicheng entered the capital with his peasant army, and the Chongzhen Emperor, the last Ming ruler in Beijing, hanged himself on the hill behind the Forbidden City. Li’s triumph lasted barely six weeks: the Manchu Qing dynasty, invited through the Great Wall by a Ming general, seized the city in June and went on to rule China until 1912.

Background: a dynasty in crisis

The Ming dynasty had ruled China since its founding by the Hongwu Emperor in 1368. By the early 17th century it faced problems on many fronts. Expensive wars, including the defence of Korea against Japan in the 1590s and campaigns against the rising Manchu state in the north-east, drained the treasury. To pay for them the court added new surtaxes on land, which fell hardest on farmers.

Nature made things worse. The late 1630s and early 1640s were among the coldest and driest years of the period climate historians call the Little Ice Age. North China suffered repeated droughts, locusts and famine, and epidemics swept the region in the early 1640s. In 1643 a severe epidemic struck Beijing itself, killing a large but uncertain share of its people and soldiers.

The Chongzhen Emperor (1611–1644), who came to the throne in 1627, was hard-working but suspicious and quick to blame others. He went through some fifty grand secretaries in seventeen years, and in 1630 he had his ablest frontier commander, Yuan Chonghuan, executed on charges of treason. Factional quarrels paralysed the court, while unpaid soldiers deserted or mutinied.

Meanwhile the Manchus under Nurhaci and his son Hong Taiji, who proclaimed the Qing dynasty in 1636, held the lands beyond the Great Wall and raided deep into northern China. The Ming had to keep its best armies on the north-eastern frontier, leaving the interior exposed to rebellion.

Li Zicheng’s rise

Li Zicheng was born in 1606 in Mizhi, in the poor north-western province of Shaanxi. He worked as a courier in the imperial postal relay service until around 1629, when the government cut the service to save money and many men lost their jobs. Li joined the rebel bands that were then forming among starving peasants and mutinous soldiers in Shaanxi.

For years the rebellions rose and fell. In 1636 the leading rebel chief Gao Yingxiang was captured and executed, and Li took over his title, Chuang Wang, often translated “the Dashing King”. In 1638 Ming forces almost destroyed him, and he escaped with only a small band of followers.

His fortunes changed in 1640–1641 in famine-stricken Henan. Li attracted huge numbers of recruits with promises to share land and abolish taxes, and some educated advisers helped him organise a more disciplined movement. In 1641 he took Luoyang and killed the Prince of Fu, an uncle of the emperor. During his siege of Kaifeng in 1642 the dikes of the Yellow River were breached, by which side is still disputed, and the resulting flood destroyed the city and killed a large part of its population.

In 1643 Li defeated the last major Ming field army in the north-west and took Xi’an. At the Chinese New Year in February 1644 he proclaimed a new dynasty there, the Shun, and began to appoint officials and issue coins as a ruler rather than a rebel.

The march on Beijing

Li’s army then crossed the Yellow River into Shanxi and advanced on the capital from the west. Taiyuan fell in March 1644. At the frontier town of Ningwu the Ming commander Zhou Yuji resisted fiercely and died fighting, but most other strongholds surrendered. The great garrisons of Datong and Xuanfu opened their gates, and the commanders at Juyong Pass, the last barrier north-west of Beijing, gave way without a fight.

In Beijing the court debated what to do. Some officials urged the emperor to move the government south to Nanjing, the Ming’s secondary capital, but the plan came to nothing amid mutual suspicion. The emperor ordered Wu Sangui, commander of the strongest army on the north-eastern frontier, to abandon his position at Ningyuan and come to the capital’s defence, but the order came too late.

The city’s walls were long and its defenders few. Many soldiers had not been paid, many had died in the epidemic, and the treasury was nearly empty. Appeals to nobles and wealthy officials for contributions brought in little.

25 April 1644: the city falls

Li Zicheng’s army reached the suburbs of Beijing on 23 April 1644. The next day the rebels broke into the outer city, and early on 25 April the gates of the inner city were opened, according to many accounts by eunuchs and officers who had decided to surrender.

During the night the Chongzhen Emperor rang the palace bell to summon his ministers, but almost none came. He sent his sons into hiding and ordered Empress Zhou to take her own life, which she did. He then struck at his daughters with a sword, killing one and severely wounding another, Princess Changping, who survived.

In the early hours of 25 April the emperor climbed the artificial hill north of the Forbidden City, then called Meishan and now Jingshan, accompanied only by the eunuch Wang Cheng’en. There he hanged himself, and Wang did the same. A final message attributed to the emperor blamed his ministers for misleading him, accepted his own failure before his ancestors and asked the rebels to spare the people. The wording differs between sources, so its exact text is uncertain.

Li Zicheng rode into the city later that day. The emperor’s body was found a few days later and displayed before being placed in a simple coffin. It was later buried in the tomb of one of his consorts in the Ming tombs north of the city.

Forty days of Shun rule

At first many residents and officials accepted the new regime, and some former Ming officials offered their services. Others, perhaps several dozen with their families, killed themselves rather than serve the rebels.

Li’s administration soon lost the goodwill it had won. Short of money to pay his army, Li allowed his commanders, among them Liu Zongmin, to extract funds from Ming officials and nobles by imprisonment and torture. Discipline among the troops broke down, and looting spread through the city.

The most important unresolved problem was Wu Sangui, whose army stood at Shanhai Pass between Beijing and the Manchus. Li held Wu’s father hostage and invited Wu to submit. Wu instead turned to the Manchu regent Dorgon for help. Li marched east with his army and was routed at the Battle of Shanhai Pass on 27 May 1644, when Qing cavalry joined Wu’s troops.

Li retreated to Beijing and executed Wu’s father and other members of his family. On 3 June he held a hurried ceremony proclaiming himself emperor, and on 4 June he abandoned the capital, setting fire to parts of the palace. Qing forces under Dorgon entered Beijing on 6 June 1644.

Key people

• Chongzhen Emperor (Zhu Youjian, 1611–1644): the last Ming emperor to reign in Beijing, from 1627 until his suicide.
• Li Zicheng (1606–1645): rebel leader and founder of the short-lived Shun dynasty.
• Wu Sangui (1612–1678): Ming frontier general whose alliance with the Manchus brought down Li’s regime.
• Liu Zongmin: one of Li’s leading generals, notorious for the extortion of officials in Beijing.
• Dorgon (1612–1650): Manchu prince and regent who led the Qing into Beijing.

Consequences

The Qing presented themselves as avengers of the dead emperor. Dorgon ordered mourning for Chongzhen and gave him imperial burial rites, a gesture that helped win over many Ming officials. In October 1644 the child Shunzhi Emperor was installed in Beijing, and the Qing began their conquest of the rest of China.

Li Zicheng fled west through Shaanxi and then into Hubei, pursued by Qing armies. He died there in 1645, probably killed by local militia, although the circumstances remain unclear and legends claimed he survived as a monk.

In the south, Ming princes set up a loyalist court at Nanjing in 1644, known as the Southern Ming. It fell to the Qing in 1645, but other claimants fought on. The last Ming pretender, the Yongli Emperor, was captured and executed in 1662, and Ming loyalists on Taiwan held out until 1683.

Some key figures of the collapse are summarised below.

Myths and facts

Myth: Li Zicheng was simply a bandit, or simply a peasant hero. Qing writers portrayed him as a bandit chief, while 20th-century Chinese historians often celebrated him as the leader of a peasant revolution. Modern scholars see a more complex figure: a capable commander who exploited real grievances but whose movement relied on plunder and failed to build a stable government.

Myth: the exact place of the emperor’s death is known. Visitors to Jingshan are shown a tree marking the spot, but the present tree is a replacement and contemporary accounts differ on precisely where on the hill he died. The site commemorated today follows later tradition.

Myth: Wu Sangui changed sides only for love. The famous story that Wu joined the Manchus because rebels had seized his concubine, Chen Yuanyuan, became popular through poetry. Historians see his decision mainly as a response to the destruction of the Ming court and the threat to his army and family.

Timeline

• 1627: The Chongzhen Emperor comes to the throne.
• 1629: Cuts to the postal relay service leave Li Zicheng without work; he joins the rebels.
• 1641: Li captures Luoyang and kills the Prince of Fu.
• 1643: Li takes Xi’an; an epidemic devastates Beijing.
• 1644, February: Li proclaims the Shun dynasty at Xi’an.
• 1644, 23–24 April: Rebel forces reach Beijing and break into the outer city.
• 1644, 25 April: Beijing falls; the Chongzhen Emperor hangs himself on Meishan.
• 1644, 27 May: Li is defeated at Shanhai Pass by Wu Sangui and the Qing.
• 1644, 4–6 June: Li abandons Beijing; Qing troops under Dorgon occupy the city.
• 1645: Li Zicheng dies in Hubei.

Why it matters

The fall of Beijing ended 276 years of Ming rule from the capital and opened the way for the Qing, the last imperial dynasty of China. It is also a classic case of state collapse, in which climate shocks, fiscal crisis, factional politics and war combined to bring down one of the largest empires in the world in a matter of years. The rebels who destroyed the Ming did not inherit its power; a frontier people did.