What is history: it is the echo of the past to the future, the reflection of the future on the past. - Hugo
Everyone has their own way of life, and so does the Son of Heaven. But even the Son of Heaven can hardly do everything smoothly in his life. Even more unfortunate people, such as Emperor Ming Sizong Zhu Youjian of the Ming Dynasty, not only did not live well, but even the ending was stifling. Especially in the last forty-eight hours of his life, the emperor was still trapped in an endless quagmire.
The approaching Da Shun army
In the seventeenth year of Chongzhen (1644), on March 17, Li Zicheng's Dashun army marched to Xizhimen in Beijing. At that time, Xizhimen was one of the nine gates of the inner city of the Ming Dynasty, which was not only second only to the Zhengyang Gate in scale, but also a throat of the imperial palace in terms of use. It is the passageway through which the water of Yuquan Mountain enters the Imperial Palace. Therefore, if the Great Shun Army takes a step forward, the death knell of the Chongzhen Emperor will ring once.
And when Li Zicheng really knocked on the palace gate, the Dashun regime had been negotiating with the Chongzhen Emperor for a long time. The year before, in the sixteenth year of Chongzhen (1643), Li Zicheng, who had just captured the Yulin defense line in Beijing, began to recruit Daming's important ministers and persuade Daming to abandon resistance. On March 18, Li Zicheng sent Du Xun, a eunuch who had previously surrendered, into the palace to negotiate with the Chongzhen Emperor, and clearly gave the order of Bao Chongzhen and even the conditions of the Ming regime: "Break into the people and horses to strengthen the masses, negotiate to cut off the king in the northwest and reward the army with millions, and retreat to Henan... Since he was enthroned, he was willing to suppress the group within the imperial court, especially to help suppress the Liao Domain with strong troops. But not commandments and ears. "
The negotiations, of course, were not successful. Mingchen, who only felt that there was no hope for the road ahead, increasingly chose to turn to Li Zicheng. In the early morning of March 19, the pro-Li faction led by Zhang Jinyan, the head of the Bingbu Shangshu, took the initiative to open the Zhengyang Gate, and Beijing was officially taken by Li Zicheng. When the city gate was opened from the inside, the Chongzhen Emperor was standing at the top of the Coal Mountain accompanied by Wang Cheng'en.
A back road that does not exist
Chongzhen just watched the courtiers rebel? Just choose to die? In fact, he also saved himself, but his self-help means were really suicide.
Since succeeding to the throne, in order to strengthen the military force to control the chaos, Chongzhen has repeatedly increased taxes nationwide. After another tax increase in the spring of the twelfth year of Chongzhen (1639), the total tax paid in the country doubled exactly as it had when he had just taken the throne. Although Chongzhen's tax increase is also helpless, the people really can't afford such oppression. Therefore, the effect of army building is average, but it is obvious that there are more and more uprisings everywhere. Li Zicheng, in the final analysis, was just an insurgent forced out by Chongzhen.
In addition, when Li Zicheng approached Beijing, Although Wu Sangui was still a Ming chen, he had already had contact with Li Zicheng about cooperation. Even though Wu Sangui eventually chose to surrender to the Qing Dynasty, before Chongzhen's death, the people in Beijing who wanted to fight against Li Zicheng knew that Wu Sangui could not be counted on. As for the other clan kings or generals, either the distant water could not save the near fire, or they were even more unreliable than Wu Sangui. Therefore, in the case that there was no hope of cooperation between the two sides and Li Zicheng's troops were far superior to those defending the city, the Chongzhen Emperor had no way to retreat.
Ming Sizong's conceited self-hanging
So what made the Chongzhen Emperor choose to end with himself hanging in Coal Mountain? We may find many reasonable reasons, and this is bound to include chongzhen's extreme personality.
I wonder what kind of personality Chongzhen is in your eyes? Smart? generous? mercy? In fact, most of these positive words have nothing to do with Chongzhen. He was indeed intelligent, and at a young age he overthrew the once powerful eunuch Wei Zhongxian. But it is precisely because the results were too bright at the beginning that Chongzhen later became a self-absorbed person. At the beginning, Lu Xiangsheng and Sun Chuanting and other generals were suddenly transferred from the pingkou battlefield in the interior to the north to fight against the Qing army, so that Li Zicheng and other rebels had a chance to breathe, and it was Chongzhen himself who made the decision.
Suspicious and suspicious, mean and unkind, is also Chongzhen's character. Chongzhen grew up in a court where the party was fiercely strife. He reigned for seventeen years, and the first assistant of the cabinet could be changed in a few months. Some people count that the Chongzhen dynasty has a total of forty-four phases, which is still the smallest version in total. Even Yuan Chonghuan, who chongzhen himself had plucked, could not escape his suspicions and was executed by Ling Chi after being imprisoned for eight months.
In fact, speaking of this, if you still know the German Nazi leader Hitler during World War II, you can understand Chongzhen's self-hanging. From a personality point of view, the two are very similar. Such a conceited "proud son of heaven" was finally defeated at the hands of the enemy he once despised, and lost in his own decision-making, which was bound to be uncomfortable. Chongzhen was able to die with only one attendant, thanks to the implicit traditional Chinese education he received from childhood, so that his bad character could be slightly restrained. Otherwise, the courtiers in the capital, already his heirs and most of the concubines, would not have failed to go to the coal mountain.
Although in 1944, the third hundredth anniversary of the Chongzhen Emperor's self-hanging, people erected a stone stele in Jingshan, saying that "Yu Sizong, Yun Ding Yangjiu, resolutely sacrificed his life to martyr the country, and the suicide note asked for the lives of all the people, and his tragic feelings were reduced to the hearts of the people, and they had not foamed for thousands of years", but the terrible calamity of Daming "starving and recommending Zhen, taxation is rampant, the people are overwhelmed, and the people are in exile" also has a part of Chongzhen's strength.