From a veteran pawn who almost starved to death on the side of the road to the leader of the rebel army who overthrew the Ming Dynasty, Li Zicheng's life is like a legendary movie, and behind the rise of the process, there is also a faint hint of tragedy.
As the pace of the Dashun army entering Beijing became faster and faster, Li Zicheng's expression became more and more relaxed, because he knew that the Ten Thousand Miles of Rivers and Mountains would soon become the bag of the Dashun Dynasty. However, like Murphy's Law, things tend to move toward the worst-case scenario. Li Zicheng envisioned his career as an emperor, but he did not expect the end of the upheaval and exile until he died.
Jia Shennian was a very special year for Li Zicheng, when he finally ascended to the coveted golden chair and sat on the Golden Ruan Hall and looked down on Cangsheng. However, he lived such a life for only one day. For this day, his nearly twenty years of hard work were in vain.
In the third year of Chongzhen, Li Zicheng gave up the last glimmer of hope for the Ming Dynasty and joined the ranks of the rebel army. In this year, the Chongzhen Emperor Zhu Youjian, who had just passed the year of the weak crown, promoted Yang He to the position of governor of the three sides and used the method of Enwei and Shi to suppress the rebels in various places. However, although the policy adopted by Zhu Youjian was effective, on the other hand, he intensified the payment of Liao salaries, which completely chilled the hearts of the common people.
The peasants everywhere suffered from no harvest, and in order to cope with the imperial court, they had to sell their children and daughters, but they still could not fill the gap in taxes. Everyone's neck was put on a rope that was constantly tightened by Chongzhen, and people had no way to go but to struggle. Just as the so-called "gold shines everywhere", Li Zicheng is a genius, a genius of rebellion.
In the era of peace, his "talent" may be covered, but the chaotic world seems to give Li Zicheng the space to play freely, making him like an awl in his pocket, sooner or later he will be sharp and show his claws to this pathological society. Before the uprising, Lee was a small role to be ravaged. The rank of a pawn was much lower than that of the regular army, and his presence was no different from that of an ant in the eyes of the imperial court.
However, after joining the wave of uprisings, Li Zicheng finally stopped being unknown. As we all know, most of the leaders who led peasant uprisings in history were illiterate and inferior "grass-headed generals" in their bones, but Li Zicheng was obviously not ordinary. Even the Qing revision of the Ming Dynasty, which scorned the Dashun Dynasty, recognized Li Zicheng's personal ability.
"Not good wine color, shedding millet and coarseness, and sharing happiness and bitterness with it", this passage from the qing Dynasty historian's record fully shows that Li Zicheng was born to eat this bowl of rice. Because of this, he was able to stand out among dozens of hundreds of rebel teams in the world and become a well-known "king of intruders", leading the toiling masses of the whole Central Plains to the capital.
However, it has to be said that Li Zicheng still has shortcomings, and his vision is still slightly short-sighted compared to the strategists in history. He did not realize that the capture of the capital and even the Forbidden City was the first task to establish the Dashun Dynasty, and he still had many hard battles to fight, and there were still many difficulties and obstacles to face.
However, Li Zicheng and his brothers simply believed that as soon as they entered the Forbidden City, their revolutionary work would be completed. Perhaps, from beginning to end, they regarded the task of "revolution" as "planting crops", and as long as they saw the fruits and harvests, what awaited them was the abundance of grain.
In fact, this concept is very well understood, the days of fighting the world are like spring seeds, since it took thousands of days to spell out hope with the head, and now that the emperor has been killed and the capital is sitting, is it not a good day for the harvest? Mr. Guo Moruo summed up this tragedy in an all-round way in the "Three Hundred Years of Jiashen Festival", which can be described as extremely pertinent:
"In a short period of time, it has achieved excessive success, but this has made the likes of Niu Jinxing and Liu Zongmin seem to have sunk into excessive intoxication." After entering Beijing, Zicheng entered the imperial palace, and what Jinxing was busy with was preparing for the ceremony of the ascension, recruiting protégés, and opening elections. The general Liu Zongmin was busy with torturing and killing officials, collecting stolen money, and torturing and killing people. Everyone was like they thought the world was already too peaceful. Near the elbow of the outer enemy, they seem to care nothing. ”
Li Zicheng's peasant army is fundamentally different from the grassroots forces in history, and it can be said that the Dashun army is a very disciplined team. Whether it is the slogan "The king will not pay grain" or the criterion of not violating the common people, the peasant army has always implemented it very well, of course, this is only before entering Beijing.
Because of this, Li Zicheng won a decisive victory in fighting against many teams, including Zuo Liangyu, because they were more supported by the common people and had a more solid mass foundation than any other team. However, no one expected that all this was abruptly reversed after "entering Beijing", and Li Zicheng's team actually changed to the other extreme like a pair of skins, which also made them lose the people's hearts and minds they had accumulated hard.
More and more ordinary people saw that the Dashun army they had been hoping for in the early days was just a group of rogues who had changed their appearance, and they were not fundamentally different from the robbers who killed liang and risked their deeds.
At the beginning, under the banner of justice, king Chuang put on trial the old courtiers, nobles, and rich people, and the people of the whole capital cheered and rejoiced. However, within a few days the subject of the torture became an ordinary resident, which is more detailed in the Jiashen Transmission. When the Da Shun army first arrived in the capital, it quickly mingled with the local residents, often borrowing pots, stoves and other daily necessities from the nearby people. It didn't take long for the object of their borrowing to change from a daily necessity to someone else's wife and daughter.
In the face of these great Shun army with knives licking blood, how can the common people cope with a sentence of "no borrowing"? They can only think that they are unlucky and cry.
The situation of robbing the people's women and robbing the people's wealth has happened one after another, and more and more ordinary people have seen through the essence of this team - robbers. When an army goes from being in the mood of the people to being reviled by everyone, their end is just around the corner. From a certain point of view, Wu Sangui's act of inducing Qing soldiers into the customs and eliminating this group of robbers may be called a good deed. Although this historical episode was the first cause of the collapse of the king, it is conceivable that even if the Qing army did not go south, it would be difficult for the Dashun army, which had lost its mass base, to establish a complete political power.
What's more, from the perspective of modern people, Li Zicheng, who is already half sitting on the dragon chair, still has four major things that have not been done well, which is enough to make his unstable country collapse rapidly until it collapses.
First of all, Wu Sangui's team is the ace army of the Ming Dynasty, they are still sitting at Shanhaiguan, and they are still in the stage of "wall head grass". At that time, Wu Sangui's family was all pinched in the hands of the Da Shun Army, and it can be said that it was only a matter of time before Wu Sangui was surrendered. However, Li Zicheng made a bad move, threw out all the chips in his hand, and killed Wu Xiangmanmen.
Secondly, the Manchus were dominating the outside of the pass, and there was a possibility of going south at any time, whether it was fighting or talking about peace, It was necessary for Li Zicheng to make arrangements. After all, after solving the main force of the Ming army and occupying the capital, the only thing that could fight with the Dashun army was this tiger and wolf division that was outside the pass. However, Li Zicheng did not seem to be ready to negotiate with the Qing army.
Third, the Nanming government was just a "skinny camel", but it could not be ignored. Although the kings of the Southern Ming Dynasty were busy with infighting and could not organize their forces for the Northern Expedition in a short period of time, they would always be the sworn enemies of the peasant army. Therefore, even if Li Zicheng was not prepared for the southern expedition, he should put pressure on the Southern Ming government to prevent the remnants of the former dynasty from counterattacking the Dashun army.
Finally, although the peasant army had the banner of "Da Shun", the trumpet of the king of Chuang wang was not convincing. To gain a foothold in the Central Plains, Li Zicheng was one step away from taking a crucial step — establishing his own regime. Whether it is to support a puppet emperor or to engage in a "Fengtian Carrier" like the founding emperors of previous dynasties, this is very necessary, but Li Zicheng did not consider this at all.
These four major events can be said to be much more important than Li Zicheng's frenzied accumulation of wealth in Beijing.
However, what Li Zicheng and his men saw was only the countless gold and silver treasures in the capital. Personally, the author believes that after entering Beijing, Li Zicheng finally recovered his nature - a rogue proletarian through and through. This was not highlighted during his conquest of the world, and it was only then that we could discover that he was not a "great achiever", but just a rogue who could dominate one side.
After thinking about this, I can finally understand the two strange things that happened to Li Zicheng.
First, when it was only a matter of time before Li Zicheng reached the outskirts of Beijing and took the whole capital, he actually made a proposal to the desperate Chongzhen - to divide the country and become a king. This is enough to show that Li Zicheng did not have a lofty goal in his mind, and like Song Jiang of Liangshan, his most lofty ideal was zhao'an, but it was higher than the standard of liangshan's good man Zhao'an;
Second, the Da Shun army spent more than forty days in the capital, and during this period of more than a month, Li Zicheng did not make himself a set of dragon robes and complete the last step of changing the dynasty, but only remembered to sit on the dragon chair when he was about to be repulsed by the Qing army. Obviously, all this behavior has nothing to do with "premeditated political activity" and is more like a "horseback fighting" game played by children.
To put it bluntly, Li Zicheng is just a rat who inadvertently climbed into the rice jar. A mouse who has been hungry for a long time, when he sees the rice mountain next to him, the first thing he thinks of is not to move the rice away and eat it for a lifetime, but to let go of his hands and feet and eat it madly, and when he eats the rice tank to the bottom, it is impossible to climb out. In the final analysis, Li Zicheng still lacks foresight, just a reckless.
Resources:
[History of the Ming Dynasty, Vol. 399, Biography of Li Zicheng, General History of China, Vol. 9, Medieval Times, Ming Dynasty (Vol. II) Li Zicheng]