We all know that "Chong Guan's anger is red", which is the love story of Chen Yuanyuan and Wu Sangui, but the story behind it may not be true.
Who concocted "Rushing Crown angry into a red face"?
On the first day of the first lunar month in the seventeenth year of Chongzhen (1644 AD), a sandstorm swept through the city of Beijing, and for the Ming Dynasty, there seemed to be an ominous omen that "the mountain rain was about to come and the wind was full of buildings". Sure enough, in the ninth year of the first year, the military department received a letter of war from the "Emperor Dashun", and Li Zicheng said that he was going to invade the city of Beijing.
The Chongzhen Emperor was impatient, there were not many cards in his hand, and the biggest trump card was the 10,000 iron horse in the hands of Wu Sangui, the general of Ningyuan in the northeast. But if it is transferred back, it means that the Qing cavalry will pour into Guannei.
A few days later, when Li Zicheng completed the siege of Beijing, Chongzhen could no longer care about the Qing army, and he ordered the Ming army along the Shanhaiguan line to withdraw to the King of Guannei.
However, Wu Sangui, who had received the Holy Order, was not in a hurry, and it was okay to give up Guanwai and The King of Qin could also, but the crux of the matter was that the best time to return to the army had been missed.
The officers and men of the Guanning Iron Horse were basically Liaodong people, and if they wanted to be transferred back to Beijing, it would take several days just to mobilize. Moreover, as soon as Wu Sangui's army moved, it was bound to cause disturbances in the states and counties along the Ming Great Wall, they were the people's dependence, and now they would leave when they said they were leaving, and if they did not want to be slaves to the country, they would certainly retreat with the Ming army.
Therefore, Wu Sangui's retreat team was huge, including large and small officials, officials and civilians in Liaodong, totaling about 100,000 people. Just as this team was on the way back, the Chongzhen Emperor in Beijing could not resist, and Li Zi rushed to invade the city before Wu Sangui, and Chongzhen chose to hang himself.
After getting this news, Wu Sangui did not cry bitterly, but thought deeply about his way out. At that time, Li Zicheng occupied most of the Central Plains, including the city of Beijing; the Manchus also claimed the founding of the emperor in Shengjing; and in the south there were remnants of the Ming Dynasty and several peasant rebel armies such as Zhang Xianzhong.
Where should Wu Sangui go? Did he accept the olive branch thrown by Li Zicheng, or did he voluntarily surrender to the Manchu Qing? He's going to think about it. Li Zicheng was very attentive to Wu Sangui's Guan Ning Tie horse, and in order to recruit Wu Sangui, he invited Wu Sangui's father and his concubine Chen Yuanyuan to write letters to persuade him to surrender, and in addition to playing the family affection card, he also sent money.
It seemed that Wu Sangui's surrender to the Dashun Dynasty was a natural thing, but the Qing Dynasty's Dolgun did not think so. After he captured the area outside Guanwai, he took advantage of the great turmoil in Guannei and decided to make a big deal of Ming, but to his surprise, he had not yet gained any benefits, and Li Zicheng had preconceived notions.
Dorgon did not want to flinch, but he did not dare to think about conquering the hard bones of the Ming Dynasty, after all, the skinny camel was bigger than the horse. At that time, the Qing Dynasty was located in a corner of Liaodong and had a population of less than one million, which was still several times worse than the Ming Dynasty, which had thousands of miles on the ground and a population of tens of millions.
But Dorgon was lucky, the gates of Shanhaiguan were not open, and Wu Sangui changed the direction of the wind and surrendered to the Qing army. The reason for this was that Liu Zongmin, a general of the peasant army, had plundered Wu Sangui's concubine Chen Yuanyuan. When Wu Sangui learned of this news halfway, he was furious and shouted, "What is the reason that the big husband can't protect himself?" So, he turned the spearhead and opened the door of Shanhaiguan for the Qing army.
Later, Wu Meicun, a poet of the early Qing Dynasty, wrote a "Round Song", which contained "Weeping six armies are full of susu, rushing the crown and becoming angry with a red face." Since then, people have also been accustomed to attributing Wu Sangui's rebellion to "chong guan's anger into a red face."
But in fact, Wu Sangui's repetition cannot be completely attributed to Chen Yuanyuan's robbery. Wu Sangui chose to surrender to Wu Sangui, not out of sincerity, but only for self-preservation. However, it was obvious that the peasant army was too radical, and before Wu Sangui arrived in the capital, he made the Wu family restless, detained Wu Xiang, and plundered Chen Yuanyuan, and the persecution of the Wu family really touched Wu Sangui, because he seemed to see his tragic experience after arriving in the capital.
And if he returns to Shanhaiguan at this time, and then cooperates with hundreds of thousands of remnants of the Ming Dynasty in the south to suppress Li Zicheng, then he will become a hero in recreating the Ming Dynasty. Therefore, Wu Sangui took the initiative to contact the Qing Dynasty, and its main purpose was to use external forces to attack the peasant army, that is, to ask for help rather than surrender.
Some people say that Wu Sangui originally wanted to be "Shi Jingyao's second", but unfortunately Li Zicheng's peasant army was too strong, wu Sangui was not his opponent at all, and he had no choice but to turn to the Qing Dynasty to surrender to the Qing Dynasty.
Therefore, we have also seen that Wu Sangui, whether it is the surrender of Dashun or the Qing Dynasty, is his expedient measure. This made Dorgon pick up a big bargain, and with the assistance of Wu Sangui, the Qing army occupied Beijing without bloodshed, and in one fell swoop accepted the Ming Dynasty's demotions left in Beijing, and quickly established its own ruling regime.
So, where did the snatched Chen Yuanyuan go?
Where did Chen Yuanyuan's soul return?
After Li Zicheng's defeat, he killed all 38 members of the Wu family and then abandoned Beijing and fled. But fortunately, Chen Yuanyuan was not among them.
After Wu Sangui entered the city of Beijing, he and Chen Yuanyuan were reunited, but Chen Yuanyuan saw no longer a great general of the Ming Dynasty, but the "King of Pingxi" who had led the Qing Dynasty into the Pass.
Later, Chen Yuanyuan followed Wu Sangui from Qin to Shu, and then to Guizhou and Yunnan. Wu Sangui was authorized by "Yongzhen Yungui" again, and in the southwest region, his power reached its peak. But at the same time, he also became a traitor to the Ming Dynasty, and the Ming immigrants regarded him as the number one sinner of the subjugation of the country, and everyone could kill him.
Chen Yuanyuan was also notorious for being a traitor to Wu Sangui, and even after she developed with Wu Sangui, her mother and brother were reluctant to associate with him.
Wu Sangui was overwhelmed by desire, and in the seventeenth year of the Kangxi Dynasty (1678 AD), he rebelled against the Qing Dynasty and called Emperor Jian da zhou, but soon died of illness in Changsha. After Wu's death, his grandson Wu Shipan succeeded to the throne and retired to Yunnan. Kangxi was besieged in Kunming for twenty years, Wu Shipan committed suicide, and the rest surrendered.
So where did Chen Yuanyuan go? There are more legends about Chen Yuanyuan's life after the fall of the Ming Dynasty than historical sites. Some people say that after Wu Sangui was promoted to the throne, he originally planned to make Chen Yuanyuan a concubine, but Chen was unwilling. As a result, Wu Sangui had to marry another woman, and gradually developed a deeper estrangement from Chen Yuanyuan, and even wanted to murder her at one point. After Chen Yuanyuan learned of this, he cut his hair and became a nun, and from then on he lived in the Huaguo Temple in Wuhua Mountain, and served as a female Taoist soldier in Yunnan.
Some people also said that Chen Yuanyuan was indeed a monk, and changed his name to Silence, the word Yu'an. After Wu Sangui's death, she sank herself into the lotus pond outside the temple and was buried on the side of the pond.
There is also a more outrageous statement that Chen Yuanyuan has no confidence in Wu Sangui's rebellion against the Qing, and in order to save his life, he built more than ten nunneries around Kunming in advance, and carefully selected women who were close to him and entered the nunnery as the host. And she herself went to these nunneries from time to time to practice, so that every nunnery said that Chen Yuanyuan was in their place, which also played a confusing result, and no one knew which nunnery Chen Yuanyuan was practicing in, which was equivalent to protecting Chen Yuanyuan.
In 1983, Cengong County, Guizhou, participated in the compilation of the "Catalogue of Famous Places in Chinese Dynasties" and began to search for Chen Yuanyuan's tomb. They went to Majiazhai in this county to investigate, because this place was the settlement of Wu's descendants, and found a couplet on a tombstone of Wu Sangui's descendants:
Yu Shang inherited a generation of tongxu and hid here for a hundred years.
What does this couplet mean? According to the descendants of the Wu family, the character 阭 was created by themselves at that time, which means the meaning of the hidden word, indicating that the Wu family's descendants are hidden here, and the tomb of natural Chen Yuanyuan is also here. Under the guidance of the descendants of the Wu family, the searchers found Chen Yuanyuan's cemetery.
So why did Chen Yuanyuan end up here? After Wu Sangui's death, the Qing army went south to destroy its nine tribes. In order not to leave Wu Sangui without a queen, Chen Yuanyuan took his son Wu Qihua, grandson Wu Shijie and other family members, escorted by Wu Sangui's former confidant and military master Ma Bao, and fled all the way to a primeval forest in Guizhou to take refuge.
In order to commemorate the benefactor Ma Bao, and also to avoid people's eyes and ears, the Wu family called the place of refuge Majiazhai, but in fact, the people who lived there were the descendants of the Wu family. For their lineage, Majiazhai has been preserved in the form of secret transmission, passing on only one or two people at a time, passing it on from generation to generation.
This statement is also recorded in the "Chronicle of Cen Gong County", so the Wu family's statement is the closest to the question of Chen Yuanyuan's final destination. However, unfortunately, since the Wu family in Damajiazhai gradually revealed their identities to the outside world, they also attracted a group of tomb robbers, robbing Chen Yuanyuan's tomb, and a generation of famous ji finally left only a skeleton and 36 teeth.
Time has passed, and people will always remember the story of "rushing the crown and turning angry into a red face", but they may not care about the story behind the story.