Yangzhou Massacre (1645): The Qing Sack of a Ming Loyalist City

The Yangzhou massacre took place in May 1645, when Qing troops stormed the Ming loyalist city of Yangzhou on the Grand Canal and then killed and plundered for about ten days. The city had been defended by the minister Shi Kefa, who became a symbol of loyalty to the fallen Ming. The massacre helped break southern resistance, but it also left one of the most bitter memories of the Qing conquest.

Background

After Qing forces took Beijing in June 1644, following the Battle of Shanhai Pass, Ming officials in the south enthroned a Ming prince, Zhu Yousong, as the Hongguang Emperor in Nanjing. This regime is known as the Southern Ming. It controlled the rich Yangtze region but was weakened by court factions and quarrelling generals.

Shi Kefa, the Minister of War, was sent to Yangzhou to coordinate the defence north of the Yangtze. The city was wealthy, a centre of the salt trade, and guarded the approach to Nanjing along the Grand Canal. Many of the generals nominally under Shi’s command were unreliable, and some defected.

In the second half of 1644 the Qing regent Dorgon wrote to Shi Kefa, inviting the southern court to accept Qing rule in return for generous treatment. Shi’s reply rejected the offer and defended the Hongguang Emperor as the lawful heir of the Ming. Both letters circulated widely, and Shi’s answer became a celebrated text of Ming loyalism.

The siege

In spring 1645 a Qing army under Prince Dodo, a brother of the regent Dorgon, advanced south. At the same time a Ming general, Zuo Liangyu, turned his army against the Nanjing court, drawing troops away from the northern front. Shi Kefa was left to hold Yangzhou with limited forces.

Dodo’s army reached the city in mid-May and sent several letters urging Shi to surrender. Shi refused. After a short siege and bombardment by artillery, the walls were breached and the city fell on 20 May 1645. Shi Kefa was captured and executed when he again refused to submit. His body was never identified.

The massacre

Once the city was taken, Qing soldiers, many of them former Ming troops who had recently changed sides, were allowed to kill and loot. The best-known account comes from Wang Xiuchu, a local resident, whose “Account of Ten Days at Yangzhou” describes families hiding in houses and on rooftops, ransom demands, rape and mass killings over roughly ten days.

Wang reported that monks cremating the dead counted more than 800,000 bodies. Historians generally treat this figure as far too high, but the city was packed with refugees, and the death toll was certainly in the tens of thousands and may have been much larger. No reliable count exists.

Key people

• Shi Kefa (1601–1645): Minister of War of the Southern Ming and commander at Yangzhou. An honest but hard-pressed official, he could not control the generals assigned to him, yet his refusal to surrender made him the most admired loyalist of the conquest era.
• Dodo (1614–1649): Manchu prince, son of Nurhaci and brother of the regent Dorgon. He commanded the Qing campaign against the Southern Ming and took both Yangzhou and Nanjing in 1645.
• Wang Xiuchu: a Yangzhou resident who survived the massacre with part of his family. Little is known of him beyond his account, which remains the main eyewitness source.
• Zhu Yousong, the Hongguang Emperor (1607–1646): the Ming prince enthroned in Nanjing in 1644, whose short reign collapsed weeks after Yangzhou fell.

Consequences

Yangzhou’s fate frightened other cities. Qing forces crossed the Yangtze soon afterwards, and Nanjing surrendered without a fight in June 1645. The Hongguang Emperor fled, was captured and was taken to Beijing, where he died the following year.

Resistance did not end. When the Qing ordered all men to adopt the Manchu hairstyle in the summer of 1645, under the Queue Order, towns such as Jiangyin and Jiading rose in revolt and suffered massacres of their own. Loyalist regimes held out in the south for years afterwards.

Memory and legacy

Under the Qing, the Yangzhou killings were rarely discussed openly, and Wang Xiuchu’s account was suppressed. Yet the dynasty also honoured loyalty: in 1776 the Qianlong Emperor granted Shi Kefa a posthumous title, praising him as a model servant of his ruler. A memorial hall and a symbolic “clothes and cap” tomb stand at Meihualing in Yangzhou.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, revolutionaries opposed to the Manchu dynasty reprinted the “Account of Ten Days at Yangzhou” as propaganda. The massacre thus became part of the anti-Manchu nationalism that fed into the overthrow of the Qing in 1911.

Timeline

• 1644, June: Qing forces occupy Beijing; Ming loyalists enthrone the Hongguang Emperor in Nanjing.
• 1645, spring: Prince Dodo leads a Qing army south towards the Yangtze.
• 1645, mid-May: Qing troops besiege Yangzhou; Shi Kefa refuses to surrender.
• 1645, 20 May: Yangzhou falls; Shi Kefa is executed.
• 1645, 20 May to late May: killing and looting continue for about ten days.
• 1645, June: Nanjing surrenders to the Qing.
• 1776: the Qianlong Emperor posthumously honours Shi Kefa.

Why it matters

Yangzhou showed the violent cost of the Ming-Qing transition and helped decide the fall of the Southern Ming capital. Its memory, preserved in a single survivor’s account, shaped how later generations of Chinese understood the Qing conquest.