In 1644, the Chongzhen Emperor committed suicide at Coal Mountain, marking the end of the Ming Dynasty. In the same year, Li Zicheng led a peasant rebel army to capture the capital Beijing, and Dolgun borrowed Wu Sangui to surrender to Shanhaiguan. On the surface, the "man-made disasters" caused by these two eventually pushed the Ming Dynasty to an end.
However, Li Zicheng's uprising in Yulin, Shaanxi, and Dorgon's leadership of the Qing army south to the Liaodong border, were forced by the two initiators of the overthrow of the Ming Dynasty. The reason for forcing them to raise an army is another word in front of "man-made disaster": natural disaster.
First, the natural disasters at the end of the Ming Dynasty began in the north
Since the more than two thousand years after the common era in China, the ming dynasty has the highest frequency of natural disasters, and the natural disasters at the end of the Ming Dynasty began to appear as early as the Wanli period. Although after the Hongwu Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty established a perfect relief system, but in the late Ming Dynasty, internal and external difficulties and dynastic weakness led to the system failing to significantly solve the increasingly serious problem of famine, and finally a war broke out to destroy the Ming Dynasty.
Here, we have to mention the early effects of this natural disaster on the Ming Dynasty.
The end of the Ming Dynasty coincided with the "Ming and Qing Cosmic Period" (1500-1700) of the "Xiaoice Period", which made the climate in the northern part of the late Ming Dynasty colder than in previous years, and led to frequent floods and droughts. Natural disasters broke out in Shaanxi and other places, where the economic and cultural conditions lagged far behind those in the Guanzhong region, and the natural environment was also very harsh. In addition, Shaanxi is also close to the northern border, often disturbed by foreign invasions, the Ming Dynasty set up a large number of military tuns here to defend the border, and the supply of the four border towns was supported by a province in Shaanxi, and the financial pressure was quite large.
Shaanxi was thus the province with the worst drought in the Ming Dynasty, and the sudden drought in Shaanxi in 1616 caused a locust plague in Lantian County the following year, and by 1643, nearly 46 prefectures and counties in Shaanxi had locusts, of which the locust plague reached its peak in 1639, and Shaanxi's farming was almost grainless in this year. During this period, there were floods and frosts in Shaanxi in 1628, followed by four consecutive years of drought in the important town of Xi'an in Shaanxi, which eventually led to the famine in Shaanxi in 1633.
Plagues followed, and famines greatly reduced people's resistance to diseases. The "Chronicle of Pucheng County" records that in the fourteenth year of Chongzhen, the epidemic caused a sharp decline of 70% of the county's population. During the famine period, wolves were plagued by wolves, and due to the loss of food caused by drought, wolves had to enter the city to harm. In the "Disaster Xiang", it is recorded that "during the Chongzhen years, there was a serious phenomenon of wolf cannibalism in Shaanxi for several consecutive years."
2. Hungry soldiers and displaced people
After the disaster occurred, the local government "reported the disaster" to the imperial court for the first time, but the imperial court was already empty after the "Three Great Marches of the Wanli Calendar". The Ming Dynasty had perfected the system of "preparing for the waste of storage", but this system was already "virtual" at the end of the Ming Dynasty, because at that time, due to the extremely tight national treasury and the rampant natural disasters, it was difficult to find a reserve warehouse in various places. In desperation, the task of saving the famine had to be undertaken by the grass-roots social warehouses and yicangs.
However, at the end of the Ming Dynasty, the imperial court was extremely corrupt, and officials had the behavior of encroaching on the private warehouse, which greatly weakened the enthusiasm of the people to donate grain, and eventually the righteous warehouse was unable to maintain. Since the defeat of Salhu, the imperial court has continuously dispatched troops to the border to increase the amount of Liao, and when Shaanxi pleaded to intercept Liao's salary for disaster relief, Chongzhen had no choice but to refuse in the name of military supplies. The corruption of the state system also increased the difficulty of relief, chongzhen seven years, the Ministry of Works said to allocate 100,000 taels to support Shaanxi, Shaanxi only got 50,000 taels.
Such a severe famine at the end of the Ming Dynasty also led to the emergence of two special groups: "hunger army" and "displaced people".
The Ming Dynasty invaded for the imperial nomads and set up a nine-sided important town on the first line of the Great Wall. However, jiubian is a desert land, where a large number of permanent troops are supplied by the Beijing division and Kannai support, and it is recorded that the problem of unpaid borders during the apocalypse years is very serious. It coincided with the year of Chongzhen's great famine, and the grain was not paid for many years. The Chongzhen Long Edition mentions that "soldiers gathered at the door of the general's house and threw their armor on the ground to start a cajoling", and it seems that the "starving army" may mutiny or rebellion almost at any time.
At the same time, the phenomenon of displaced persons is also intensifying at this time.
Since the Ming Dynasty, the problem of fleeing households caused by heavy taxation and servitude has been very serious, and the number of this group has only increased during the famine years. However, during the Chongzhen period, the government adopted the method of compensation by the fleeing households, and apportioned the conscription to other people who were not fugitives, and the burden of the non-fleeing households made the more fleeing households, and eventually formed a vicious circle, which could only force the people to fall into the grass.
Wu Yong, a court official who went to Shaanxi to relieve the disaster, mentioned in the song that "the hungry people are vying for thieves." Natural disasters exacerbated this phenomenon, so that a large number of displaced people appeared in the northern region of the late Ming Dynasty, and the displaced people could easily cause civil unrest if they could not be appeased, and eventually evolved into "exiles".
3. Man-made disasters
During the Chongzhen period, most of the provinces of the country were plagued by disasters, but the number of enlistments increased. At this time, Shaanxi was almost the province with the worst famine in the late Ming Dynasty, while the neighboring province of Shanxi implemented a grain blockade strategy for self-preservation, cutting off trade with Shaanxi and completely banning river transportation. Under such circumstances, the people were hungry and clothed, so there had been a peasant uprising since the end of the Wanli Calendar.
▲ The peasant rebel army attacked the city gate map
Until the seventh year of the apocalypse, there was even a peasant uprising in Chengcheng County, Shaanxi Province, against grain and officials. To sum up the reasons, Chengcheng was originally a poor land and the population was withered, and the county order did not care about the people's life and death, and urged the people to pay taxes, and the county people rose up to resist and work together to kill the county order, and Chengcheng thus raised the banner of the uprising, which also marked the outbreak of the peasant war at the end of the Ming Dynasty.
In 1601, the Liaodong region also suffered a major drought, which forced Nurhaci to borrow grain from Minghu and Korea to survive the famine. However, the floods of 1609 and 1613 caused another drought, and even the Jurchen capital Jianzhou suffered famine, and the newly established state suffered such natural disasters that Houjin had to repeatedly ask for help from the local authorities in Liaodong. However, the Ming Dynasty often used the threat of closing the market when dealing with the relationship with the Jurchens, repeatedly intensifying ethnic contradictions, and finally laying the fuse for the subsequent wars.
▲Ming Dynasty and Later Jin Territory
In 1626, houjin again encountered a rare snow disaster, and successive rebellions occurred in various subordinate departments, and houjin since entering Liaodong was now hovering on the verge of economic collapse. Two years later, in 1628, the Ming Dynasty would give the years of the grassland departments to the revolution, and when the Later Jin Dynasty was at the end of the road, it had no choice but to venture west, crossing the Great Wall in the north into the plunder of Guanzhong, targeting xuanfu Datong, and the Eight Banners launched an all-out war against the Ming Dynasty.
At the end of the Ming Dynasty, there were almost no disasters, although the famine triggered peasant wars, but the continuous famine in the Central Plains was the main reason for the growing peasant uprising. The outbreak of the two-front war at the end of the Ming Dynasty was not accidental, social contradictions, corruption and other problems piled up layer by layer, and natural disasters were the fuse for intensifying their problems. At first, the rulers of the late Ming Dynasty did not pay enough attention to the peasant uprising, which also enabled the scale of the uprising to continue to expand, and at first it was mainly used to suppress the means of suppression, until the twelfth year of Chongzhen, when they began to suppress the rebel forces with all their might, but it was too late, and natural disasters eventually pushed the entire Ming Dynasty to the end.
Reference materials:
"History of Ming" [Qing] Zhang Tingyu
"Ming Shilu" [Ming] official repair
"Chongzhen Long Edition" [Qing] Wang Kai
"Shaanxi Tongzhi" [Ming] Zhao Tingrui
"Disaster Relief Strategy" [Ming] Chen Zilong
《Puzhou County Chronicle》
Chronicle of Anding County