The next great unified dynasty after the Ming Dynasty was the Qing Dynasty, and the general impression is that the Qing Dynasty also inherited the status of the Ming Dynasty. But in fact, the Ming Dynasty actually died in civil strife, because the Qing army had not yet entered the Guanning Defense Line when Chongzhen was martyred. The rebel army that killed the Ming Dynasty was Li Zicheng's Dashun army, but unfortunately Dashun Dashun failed to follow to the end, and finally let the Qing army pick up a big bargain. However, to say that Li Zicheng failed, in fact, to a large extent, was his own reason, and the reason for this had to start from the forty-two days when he led his troops into the capital.
In the 34th year of the Wanli calendar (1606), on the 21st day of the eighth lunar month (September 22 of the Gregorian calendar), Li Zicheng was born in Mizhi County, Yulin, Shaanxi. Coincidentally, Zhang Xianzhong was also born in this year, just a few days before Li Zicheng. When he was young, Li Zicheng's life was not smooth, and during the apocalypse years, northern Shaanxi was plagued by famine, but the government did not do much. The life of the Li family was very difficult, so Xiao Zicheng was sent to the temple to work as a small monk, and had to shepherd sheep for the landlord.
When he reached the age of ten, his parents died, so he had to go to Yinchuan Station as a pawn at the age of twenty-one. Unexpectedly, in August of the seventh year of the Apocalypse (1627), Zhu Youxiao died, and since he had no sons, he ordered his younger brother Zhu Youjian to inherit the throne. On the third day, Zhu Youjian ascended the throne and set the name of Chongzhen for the second year, which was the last emperor of the Ming Dynasty. Poor Chongzhen took over the mess of his grandfather and brother, and seeing that the treasury was empty, he decided to streamline the reform.
The first target was the station, and Li Zicheng happened to lose his official documents, so he was dismissed. Unemployed, the ass debt he owed could not be repaid, and the creditor Ai Zhao tortured him. Li Zicheng, who was really intolerable, killed him, only to find out that his wife was committing adultery, and then killed his wife. After doing everything, he did not want to wait for the arrest of the government and joined the army himself. I thought I could have a way to live, but the army's general Kingdom actually withheld grain and did not pay, which is not to break the way for the big guys to live.
In a fit of rage, Jinxian County's order reversed, and Li Zicheng followed suit. The first half of Li Zicheng's life was actually very similar to Zhu Yuanzhang, a peasant who joined the peasant army in order to survive, and he was much luckier than Zhu Yuanzhang. At dawn on March 19, the seventeenth year of Chongzhen (the first year of Dashun Yongchang, 1644), Bingbu Shangshu opened the Zhengyang Gate to welcome the Dashun army, and the Chongzhen Emperor committed suicide by looking at the capital from the coal mountain. Chongzhen's death was skeletal, but it also meant that the Ming Dynasty had died, and Li Zicheng began his forty-two-day reign in the capital.
But in the end, he is not Zhu Yuanzhang, Zhu Yuanzhang's entrepreneurial road is step by step, and Li Zicheng is from a poor person to get rich. His mentality was completely different, as soon as he entered the capital, he began to think of making no progress, and spent all day fighting with the warblers and swallows in the harem. There was no control over the army, and the original order was not to burn and loot, but as a result, on the twenty-seventh day, the Dashun army began to make trouble everywhere. Arrest of Ming dynasty officials, raids everywhere, 100,000 in the middle hall, 70,000 or 530,000 in the jingtang jinyi of the ministry, and so on.
There is a slight dissatisfaction, punishing at every turn, preparing extremely cruel poison, and not dying endlessly. There is also a saying about robbing Mingchen, but Dashun robbed not only Mingchen, but also innocent people. Originally you said that the king had come and did not pay for the grain, but now that he has rebelled, the resentment of the people is even heavier. It can be said that Li Zicheng and his Da Shun army have thoroughly offended everyone in Beijing, and for a while they are angry and resentful. Some of Da Shun's courtiers advised him to run a good business, how could he possibly listen to it?
Da Shun did not win over Wu Sangui, so Daming's internal and external troubles eventually reached Li Zicheng's head. Forty-two days after the capital, he fled to Xi'an with his army, and the Qing army was in a state of disarray. In early May of the second year of Shunzhi (Da shun yongchang II, 1645), Li Zicheng led people to explore the way along the foothills of Jiugong Mountain in Hubei Province, and was killed by local militia. His failure was doomed from the beginning, and the most important thing to enter the capital was to win people's hearts and minds, referring to Liu Bang at that time.
The ancients can carry boats and overturn boats, this sentence is not a joke, Li Zicheng himself relies on this point to have such achievements. Unfortunately, seeing how far he could go, the shortcomings of small wealth and short-sightedness were fatal, and he could not become the second Zhu Yuanzhang in the end.
Reference: History of the Ming Dynasty