According to the Records of the Eternal Calendar of Wang Fuzhi of the Late Ming Dynasty, Li Chengdong was a native of Ningxia, Shaanxi, who was born as a thief and was later recruited by the Ming Dynasty officials and soldiers. Obviously, this good man was the leader of the great uprising at the end of the Ming Dynasty, and he was a subordinate of Li Zicheng's brave general and Gao Jie, the "mountain harrier".
Li Chengdong himself also has a nickname, the name "Li Haozi". Although he was born as a thief, Li Chengdong's time in the "rebel army" should not be long. This can be inferred from his immediate boss, Gao Jie.
Gao Jie was booby-trapped and killed by Xu Dingguo in Suizhou, and as a subordinate, Li Chengdong and others led troops to slaughter Suizhou and kill People, but they were still regarded as internal contradictions by the Hongguang imperial court, and coupled with the surrender of Xu Dingguo, who caused trouble, the imperial court did not pursue Gao Jie's generals, and still ordered them to lead troops to guard Xuzhou, Yingzhou and other places, and Li Chengdong was also appointed as the commander-in-chief of Xuzhou.
Before and after the fall of Yangzhou, Li Chengdong led his army to surrender to the Qing army. In the future, as a Qing court eagle dog, the biggest evil thing he did in the Jiangnan region was the "Three Massacres of Jiading", which owed a heavy blood debt to the people of Jiangnan.
After the brutal "Three Massacres of Jiading", most of Jiangnan began to shave their hair, and the bloody suppression finally extinguished the flames of resistance. Because of these "great" merits, Li Chengdong was promoted to inspector of Jiangnan. Soon, the Qing court transferred him to the southeast and sent him to quell another emperor of the Southern Ming, Emperor Longwu.
After offering the heads of the three members of the Longwu family, Li Chengdong was even more favored by the Qing court. The Qing court ordered him to garrison Fuzhou together with Tong Yangjia.
Before Emperor Longwu's "Imperial Conquest", he left his fourth brother Zhu Yulei to stay in Fuzhou. In August of the second year of Longwu (1646), Fuzhou fell, and Emperor Zhu fled by ship to Guangzhou.
Soon, the news of The death of Emperor Longwu came out. In October, Qu Shiyun, Ding Kuichu, and others supported the Yongming King Zhu Youluo (later the Yongli Emperor) in Zhaoqing to "supervise the state".
Su Guansheng, a scholar of the Longwu Dynasty, had a festival with Ding Kui Chusu, and when Fuzhou fell, he was recruiting troops in Guangdong, and out of personal grievances, he proposed the idea of "brother and brother", and in November he established Zhu Yulei as the "supervising state" in Guangzhou. Three days later, the group held an enthronement ceremony and changed the yuan to "Shaowu". In less than half a month, Zhu Youluo, the king of Yongming, also proclaimed himself emperor in Zhaoqing and changed the yuan to "Yong Calendar".
During the reign of Emperor Longwu, there was Zhu Yihai, the King of Lu, who was called the Overseer of the State. Now, the situation of the coexistence of the two emperors has emerged in the Southern Ming Dynasty, and the situation is so severe that these people still do not change the accumulated habits of the late Ming Dynasty, forming friends with each other and supporting factions.
The most lamentable thing is that Su Guansheng also ordered the killing of the envoys of the Yongli Dynasty, which provoked the Yongli Emperor to send Lin Jiading, the right attendant of the military department, to raise troops to "crusade", and Emperor Shaowu also sent Chen Jitai to Set out for Zhaoqing, and the banner was also "crusade". At the end of November, two Southern Ming "crusading armies" met in Sanshui, Guangdong. The Yongli army won the victory first, attacking and killing more than 800 Shaowu soldiers, and Chen Jitai fled in a daze. Lin Jiading was overwhelmed and waved his army straight to Guangzhou to kill.
Emperor Shaowu was suddenly panicked, but Su Guansheng had an idea, and he sent Lin Cha to lead tens of thousands of pirates (now recruited to become Shaowu's army) to meet the enemy.
Lin Cha and Lin Jiading were old acquaintances, so they sent someone to surrender. Lin Jiading believed it to be true, ignored Lin Cha's soldiers, and led the warship to pursue the remnants of Shaowu's army fleeing in the direction of Haikou.
The former pirates led by Lin Cha were brave and experienced in naval battles, secretly set up ambushes, and suddenly fired firearms at the Yongli warships. The Yongli soldiers were horrified and defeated, either drowned by water, burned to death, or killed by their own Ming army. Lin Jiading was shelled and died without a corpse. In the end, only about thirty horsemen and horses of the Yongli Army escaped from this movement.
After a great victory in the "Nest Fight", Emperor Shaowu was fluttering, thinking that he was "the emperor of heaven", and began to engage in flower racks in Guangzhou. A group of monarchs and courtiers were at ease, rewarding them in a big way and giving them officials arbitrarily. In fact, Emperor Shaowu was only the "emperor" of a city in Guangzhou, "outside the seven gates, the order is not enough" (Huang Zongxi's "Records of the Dynasty").
At the time of the bloody battle between the Yongli and Shaowu armies in Haikou, the Qing forces of Li Chengdong and Tong Yangjia had already taken Zhangzhou under the leadership of the subordinate Gu Zhaojian (a Teochew native and retired Ming official), attacked Chaozhou, and lured the thief Chen Yao to conquer Huizhou. The biggest obstacle in Li Chengdong's Qing army's journey was the rugged mountain road, and the real resistance was hardly encountered. The Qing army often had a column of soldiers under the city, the Southern Ming defenders opened the city gates, and the prefectural and county guards held books and respectfully surrendered.
In order to paralyze Emperor Shaowu and Su Guansheng in Guangzhou, Li Chengdong asked local officials to write letters to send to Guangzhou, reporting that no Qing soldiers had arrived, causing the Shaowu junchen in Guangzhou to think that there was no imminent danger.
On December 14 of the second year of Longwu, Li Chengdong sent three hundred elite cavalry from Huizhou to travel westward overnight and sneak into the north of Guangzhou from Zengcheng. More than a dozen Qing troops disguised themselves as Gong Gong and swung into the city by boat from the waterway. After these Qing troops came ashore, it was not until they were in front of the Cloth Administration Office that they lifted the cloth on their heads in front of everyone, revealing their full hairstyles, wielding swords and slashing indiscriminately, shouting: "The Great Qing soldiers have arrived!" A cry of exclamation, the city was boiling, and the people rushed to avoid it, turning into a pot of porridge.
It is really strange to say that the Great Shun Army that can recruit good warriors such as Li Zicheng, the Great Western Army that kills people like Zhang Xianzhong, even the brave soldiers and warriors of the Ming Army who were born into death and fought bloody battles countless times, as long as they hear a "Tartar is coming", every soul will fly and immediately collapse.
Emperor Shaowu was "seeing" with Su Guansheng and others in the Guozi Prison, when suddenly a guard urgently reported to the Qing army to enter the city. Su Guansheng was very angry: "Yesterday there was a letter in Chaozhou saying that everything was fine, how could there be Qing soldiers coming here today!" He waved his hand to kill the Messenger Guard.
The Qing soldiers who entered the city quickly killed the guards at the east gate of Guangzhou, opened the city gate, and hundreds of Qing soldiers rushed in on horseback, and the big red top rushed through the streets. Shaowu Junchen knew that the Qing soldiers had really been killed, but the large army under Emperor Shaowu had not returned from the battle with the Yongli Army, and the Suwei Forbidden Soldiers were not completely assembled for a while. The Ming army in Guangzhou scattered for a while.
In a panic, Emperor Shaowu fled in disguise, but he was eventually captured by Qing soldiers outside the city, surrounded by heavy troops, and imprisoned in the palace.
Probably because the city of Guangzhou was too easy to conquer, Li Chengdong was in a good mood, and neither ordered the slaughter of the city, nor did he immediately kill Emperor Shaowu. He sent food to Emperor Shaowu to express his "condolences" to him.
Emperor Shaowu, who had always been faint and incompetent, had a backbone, and he refused to accept it, saying, "If I drink a spoonful of water, why would I see my ancestors underground?" In the evening, when the guards were not prepared, the Shaowu Emperor Zhu Yulei hanged himself with a belt of clothing and died, and like his brother, he achieved "the death of the monarch", which was a good man.
Shooting an emperor and capturing another emperor, at this point, Li Chengdong's efforts to extinguish the Ming Dynasty reached its peak.
Finally, I would also like to explain to the university scholar Su Guansheng.
Calling the heavens should not be, the summons were not effective, Su Guansheng ran to his life and death friends and officials who were "promoted" by his hand to ask Liang Feng for advice. Liang Feng looked loyal and said calmly, "Dead ears, what words!" So the two agreed to divide into the east and west rooms on the left and right of the hall, and prepared to hang themselves and martyr the country.
After Liang Feng entered the room, he grabbed his neck and screamed a few times, kicking over the stool to "dub". Su Guansheng in the next room believed that this friend had committed suicide and was martyred, so he put a pen on the wall and wrote a big book, "Daming loyal ministers and righteous soldiers should die"! Then hanged himself for suicide. Liang Feng listened carefully and immediately rushed into the house to order the servants to clean up the aftermath, carrying Su Guansheng's body to surrender to the Qing army, claiming to be a "pseudo-scholar". This move was deeply commended by Lee Sung-dong.
The world is chaotic, life and death are a touchstone, loyalty and adultery, good and evil, family and friendship, beauty and ugliness, good and evil, all the worldly appearances, are vividly expressed! Liang Feng was definitely a reader of history books, so he was able to rehearse the "drama texts" of loyal and righteous soldiers to the fullest. Later, he also "begged for the revision of the History of Ming", which was approved by the Qing people. I don't know how he should describe his "drama" behavior in the "History of Ming"!
(Source| "Nanming: Lamentations of Exile" by | Meiyi, Published | Tiandi Publishing House)