Excerpted from: Triptych Bookstore Triptych
Nurhaci created the eight flags system, and the Manchus, Han Chinese, and Mongols outside the Guanwai were organized into the Eight Banners, all called the Flag People, so there were the Eight Banners of Manchuria, the Eight Banners of the Han Army, and the Eight Banners of Mongolia. The flag bearers were all soldiers, with a total strength of less than 200,000 troops, plus less than 600,000 family members.
The Ming Dynasty had 120 million people, and it was not a miracle that 200,000 eight bannermen conquered such a large country? Moreover, the Qing Dynasty settled the whole country in less than twenty years after entering the customs, which is indeed a great miracle of world history. On the eve of the fall of the Ming Dynasty, Li Zicheng's army approached the city of Beijing, and no one yet believed that the Manchus could establish a strong and lasting new dynasty. So it's impossible to say.
We must look at any historical event with the eyes of global history, first of all because the history of mankind itself is global. Some people think that the ancestors of our modern people came out of Africa eighty thousand years ago, and from the Bering Strait to the Americas thirty thousand years ago, they were all walking around. So no nation has ever been in one place, but has been constantly migrating. Therefore, human history is global history from the beginning, and in the process of understanding the changes in human history, we must have a global perspective.
The traditional northern threat
Of course, in the case of inconvenient transportation in ancient times, what happened to various peoples was not necessarily a global phenomenon. But among the factors that govern the lives of peoples, one factor has always been global — climate. The climate is never limited by national borders and administrative boundaries. In today's China, Hebei is the place with the worst smog. However, the smog produced in Hebei not only affects the local area, but also affects Beijing, Affecting Henan, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Hubei.
Some time ago I went to Xi'an, took the high-speed rail all the way back to the smog, and then went to Wuhan, it was the same, and the smog has drifted to South Korea, Japan. Of course, there are microclimates and larger climates, with microclimates affecting a smaller region and larger climates affecting a larger range.
In the 17th century, a major global crisis occurred, and an important factor was the major changes in the global climate in the 17th century, which has been verified by science. We are in the Northern Hemisphere, and the climate in the Northern Hemisphere began to turn cold from the 14th century (the last year of the Yuan Dynasty) and reached its peak in the 17th century. We are afraid of warming today, but cooling is more harmful. Since the 15th century (mid-Ming Dynasty), there have been several warm and cold periods.
The 16th and 18th centuries were warm periods, and the 17th and 19th centuries were cold times. The 17th century was cold, and the Ming Dynasty was on its way to collapse; in the cold of the 19th century, the Qing Dynasty was in decline. In the 17th century, the temperature was 2 degrees lower than the current average. The average temperature is high or 2 degrees lower, and the consequences are very significant. At 2 degrees higher, the snow in the Himalayas will melt a lot, the Arctic ice sheet will shrink a lot, and the polar bear will have no place to live.
During the fall of the Ming Dynasty in the 1640s, temperatures were at their lowest, and they were low in the 1650s. This is information obtained in archaeological terms, such as from the rings of trees and pollen in the soil. An analysis of the written records of the time also shows that China became very cold around 1600, entering the Xiaoice Sichuan period.
It reached its peak during the Chongzhen period, and then warmed very slowly, until the twenty-sixth year of the Kangxi Dynasty, when it returned to normal time. In general, the climate during the Ming Dynasty was cold and arid. In particular, the second half of the late Ming Dynasty (Wanli 28 to Chongzhen 16, 1600-1643) became the fifth Xiaoice river period in Chinese history.
Because China has a monsoon climate, temperature is closely related to rainfall. If the temperature rises by 1 degree, China's rainfall line will push hundreds of kilometers from southeast to northwest; if it is lowered by 1 degree, it will retreat hundreds of kilometers in reverse. Temperature and precipitation are fundamental to agriculture. Today, in the case of using high technology, pesticides, fertilizers, and fine seeds, the average annual temperature will drop by 1 degree, and China's agriculture will reduce production by 10%.
Temperature changes can also cause changes in the boundaries of agricultural regions. Successive dynasties have been repairing the Great Wall, but the location of the Great Wall built by each dynasty varies greatly, the weather is relatively warm during the Qin Dynasty, and the Great Wall of the Qin Dynasty is much farther than the Great Wall of the Ming Dynasty. The Great Wall is the dividing line between farming and nomadic areas, and the movement of this line will have a huge impact on China.
When the temperature is high in North China, there is a lot of precipitation, and the northern part is also very suitable for plant growth. In the early days, there were elephants in Beijing because there was a lot of food in this place and it could survive. But the climate has become colder, the plants have not grown so much, and coupled with human activities, China's elephants have gradually retreated south.
The lower temperatures in the Ming Dynasty led to less rainfall, so drought was particularly frequent. These are several climate zones in China, and when the temperature changes, the climate zones will also change. This change has less impact on the south, but it has a great impact on north China and more on the Mongolian plateau. The temperature dropped, and the people on the Mongolian plateau could not survive, so they had to run to the south with better conditions.
However, it is not easy for the locals to make a living, and so many people have come to grab jobs, of course, they must resist, but if the new people have a more powerful force, the locals cannot fight, so they can only run south. In this way, wave after wave, wave after wave, like a snowball, formed a wave of large-scale, long-term population migration to the south. The continuous southward shift of this line is disastrous for the socio-economic development of China, especially North China.
In times of drought, locust plagues can also form. The great locust plague caused by the drought at the end of the Ming Dynasty began in the ninth year of Chongzhen (1636), mainly in the eastern part of Shaanxi, southern Shanxi and the Kaifeng area of Henan; the Tenth Year of Chongzhen extended westward to the Guanzhong Plain, eastward to Shandong and northern Jiangsu with Xuzhou as the center, and then extended to a vast area from the Huai River in the south to Hebei in the north; in the eleventh year of Chongzhen, a major disaster area of thousands of kilometers from east to west and 400 kilometers to 500 kilometers from north to south was formed, and began to spread to the Yangtze River Basin;
In the twelfth year of Chongzhen, it expanded northward to the north of Shaanxi and Shaanxi provinces and southward to the Jianghan Plain; in the thirteenth year of Chongzhen, the middle and lower reaches of the two major rivers of the Yellow River and the Yangtze River and the entire North China Plain became the hardest hit areas; in the fourteenth year of Chongzhen, the locust plague in North China began to decline, but the locust plague in the Yangtze River Basin continued to develop; in the fifteenth year of Chongzhen, due to major changes in the climate, four consecutive years of exceptionally large locust plagues ended.
Climate change can also cause widespread epidemics of plague. A major feature of agricultural society is the relocation of land. Farmers in the village all kinds of acres and acres of land, when necessary, to the small market to buy something. Except for the frequent movement of merchants and schoolboy exams, the vast majority of people live in one place for generations and do not go anywhere else.
Fernand Braudel said that in an era of long-term isolation from each other, residents of different places have their own special adaptations, resistance and weaknesses to different pathogens. Once they come into contact with each other and become infected, it can bring unexpected disasters. The Tibetan Plateau and the Mongolian Plateau are the main birthplaces of plague, and locals are often exposed to this germ and produce antibodies, so they are not very afraid of plague. But people elsewhere don't have this antibody, and once the rats bring the germs to these places, they don't get it.
In the 14th century, one-third to half of Europe's population died of plague. After Columbus discovered the American continent, the Spaniards brought several infectious diseases in the Eastern Hemisphere - plague, smallpox, measles - there, and the Indians had never been exposed to these germs, had no resistance, so they died of infection. Before Columbus discovered the New World, the Indian population was about the same as that of Europe. But plagues and massacres killed 90 percent of the Indians.
In the late Ming Dynasty, due to a great drought and a great locust plague, a large number of people in the north fled the famine. Huge crowds of people are on the move, and of course infectious diseases from all over the world will spread everywhere. In particular, Li Zicheng's uprising originated in northern Shaanxi, a place where pastoral and agricultural areas were mixed, and was the fringe of the birthplace of plague. The northeast is closely related to the Mongolian steppe and is also the fringe of the source of plague. Therefore, li zicheng, Zhang Xianzhong, and the army of Later Jin/Qing also brought the plague with them after entering north China.
According to the "History of Ming", from 1408 to 1643, a total of 19 plagues occurred, of which the plague of 1641 spread throughout Hebei, Shandong, Zhejiang and so on. Wu Yousheng, a famous physician of the Ming Dynasty, said that in 1641, the epidemic was a pandemic: "Shandong, Zhejiang Province, and the north and south have been straight, and there are many people who feel it." It is even more beneficial until May or June, or until the door is closed. In fact, the Great Plague of the Late Ming Dynasty began in the sixth year of Chongzhen (1633) in Shanxi. Chongzhen spread to Hebei in the fourteenth year, and spread to more regions with the armies of Li Zicheng and the Qing Dynasty.
Death map of the famine at the end of the Ming Dynasty (Yang Dongming)
The outbreak of plague in Beijing caused a large number of deaths. In February of the sixteenth year of Shi Zai Chongzhen, "the plague of The Beijing Division, the pillow of death, the ten rooms and nine emptiness, and even the exhaustion of households, no one converged." When the Qing army occupied Beijing, they drove the Han people in the northern city to the southern city and vacated the northern city for the qi people to live. The Han people were driven to Nancheng, and everyone had a place to live, why? It is because the original residents are almost dead, and the remaining people have enough place to live, so. This policy of the Qing Dynasty did not encounter any resistance.
The worst natural disasters and plagues at the end of the Ming Dynasty were Shaanxi, Gansu, Henan, and Hebei. The Henan official Zheng Lian recorded in the "Chronicle of Yu Change" that from the third year of Chongzhen to the fifteenth year of Chongzhen, every year was a famine. Henan is the center of the Central Plains and is densely populated. Encountered the great famine, the red land is thousands of miles, and many people have died.
Lu Weiqi, a former soldier who lived in Henan, wrote to the imperial court: "For several years, the subjects and villagers have not been bitter for many years, and there have been no months and no soldiers. "Every year there are famines and military service, and the government still has to collect taxes. People had nothing to eat, so they had to fight each other and began to eat people. Because there were hungry people everywhere and bandits were rampant, there were no barking dogs in the village, but the officials still had to collect taxes.
In northern Shaanxi, the situation is even more serious. An official named Ma Maocai wrote to the emperor in his recital "The Great Famine of Beichen":
"Yan'an Province, a subject township, has not rained for a year since last year, and the grass and trees are scorched. In August and September, the people competed to collect grass in the mountains and eat it. Its granular chaff skin has a bitter and astringent taste. Eating, can only be prolonged to not die. After October, when it is exhausted, the bark of the tree is peeled off and eaten. Of the trees, only the elm trees are good, and they mix the bark of the trees for food, and they can also slow down their death. At the end of the year, when the bark of the tree is gone, it digs stones in the mountains and eats them. Its stone name is green leaves, the taste is fishy and greasy, less food is full, and within a few days, it will be bloated and fall to death. ”
The people's hardships have reached such a level that no matter how wise the Chongzhen Emperor is, he cannot save the country, let alone he is not wise.
Song Yingxing, a great scientist at the end of the Ming Dynasty, summed up the situation in the world at that time and said that "the people are exhausted and exhausted" four words. Only Jiangsu, Zhejiang, and Fujian are in a slightly better situation in the whole country. In other places, there is not a single tree for twenty or thirty miles, and with the prevalence of rogues, how can the people live?
The same is true in Europe, which is no better than China, and the people of various countries cannot survive and can only rebel, so uprisings, rebellions and wars continue to break out. Insurrections, rebellions and wars exacerbate already serious socio-economic crises, creating a vicious circle.