In the last years of the Ming Dynasty, the building will fall, and the Chongzhen Emperor will be exhausted, but he will not be able to stop the pace of the country's collapse. The court at the end of the Ming Dynasty was already decayed, and there were not many officials in the entire Ming Dynasty who could be entrusted with heavy use, whether civilians or military generals, who were preparing for their own retreat after the fall of the Ming Dynasty.
Li Zicheng, the king of the Chuang Dynasty, set out from Xi'an and fought under the city of Beijing in less than three months, and the hundreds of thousands of Daming in the middle of Shaanxi and Shanxi basically had no resistance and surrendered to Li Zicheng. However, Li Zicheng was not without obstacles along the way, and the Zhou Yuji he encountered brought him a huge blow and almost made him retreat. It can be said that among all the Ming generals that Li Zicheng has encountered, Zhou Yuji may not be the most powerful, but he is the one that Li Zicheng is most afraid of.
Zhou Yuji was a fierce general who fought all the way from the army, he grew from a pawn to a general of an army, fighting fiercely without fear of death, governing the army well, and being loyal to the Ming Dynasty. In the last years of the Ming Dynasty, the Ming army lost more than the Qing army, but Zhou Yuji did not have the slightest fear when he encountered the Qing army, he had several heavy blows to the Qing army, and in the yang liuqing area, he also achieved the brilliant record of the Ming army winning more victories against the Qing army with less.
In the winter of the fifteenth year of Chongzhen, the Chongzhen Emperor appointed Zhou Yuji as the chief military officer of Shanxi. This was originally a position of high power, but at that time, no one in the Ming Dynasty's civil and military officials wanted to sit in this position, after all, everyone knew that this would be the front line against Li Zicheng's army. However, Zhou Yuji did not have the slightest fear, and after he took office, he immediately eliminated the old, weak, sick and disabled in the army, recruited new soldiers, reorganized armaments, and actively prepared for war.
The following year, due to the repeated defeats of the Ming army and the loss of the main force, Li Zicheng felt that the time had come, so he led hundreds of thousands of troops from Xi'an. Zhou Yuji knew that he could not stop Li Zicheng with his own troops, so he asked the capital for help, but the capital also had no troops to adjust, and could only symbolically let Xiong Tong lead two thousand soldiers to support Zhou Yuji. However, as soon as this Xiong Tong encountered Li Zicheng's army, he immediately surrendered, and he also persuaded Zhou Yuji to surrender in turn.
After Zhou Yuji saw Xiong Tong, he scolded loudly, he beheaded Xiong Tong, and sent his head to the capital to show his determination. Li Zi saw that Zhou Yuji was unwilling to surrender, so he sent an army to attack Dai Prefecture. Zhou Yuji fought with Li Zicheng in Dai Prefecture, but eventually ran out of ammunition and retreated to Ningwu Pass.
The terrain of Ningwu Pass was dangerous, and Zhou Yuji, with his artillery, inflicted heavy damage on Li Zicheng's peasant army, which made the peasant army feel frightened. However, Ningwuguan was an isolated city after all, because there was no support, failure was inevitable, some people persuaded Zhou Yuji to surrender, but Zhou Yuji vowed not to surrender, and continued to lead the whole army and Li Zicheng in a bloody battle.
Due to Zhou Yuji's stubborn resistance, Li Zicheng once retreated, did not want to attack Ningwuguan again, and even wanted to withdraw his army back to Shaanxi. However, due to the heavy casualties of the peasant army, many people hated Zhou Yuji to the bone, and they forced Li Zicheng to continue the attack, and Li Zicheng could only continue to attack Ningwuguan with a hard scalp. In the end, Li Zicheng led his army to attack Ningwu Pass, and Zhou Yuji resisted to the death, and was eventually captured. The enemy hated Zhou Yuji so much that they beat him to death and dismembered his body. Zhou Yuji's wife led her family to fight the enemy, and was eventually burned to death.