On the 21st day of the eighth lunar month in the 34th lunar month of Wanli, that is, September 22, 1606, Li Jiqian Village, Dianshi Town, Mizhi County, Shaanxi Province (also known as Lijiazhan by locals, passed down by generations in the village as a descendant of Li Jiqian), a baby boy fell to the ground.
His father, Li Jing, dreamed that a man in a yellow robe entered the earthen kiln where his family lived, so he named the baby Huang Lai'er (also known as Huang Wazi). This baby boy is Li Zicheng, the famous king --- Chinese history.
Joined the army and was promoted, and the mutiny started
When Li Zicheng was a child, because of the poverty of his family, he went to the temple to become a small monk, named Huanglai Monk, and survived by herding sheep for the landlord. By the time Li Zicheng was just in his early twenties, his parents had already died, and Li Zicheng became a livelihood, so he was called to Yinchuan, Gansu Province as a pawn, responsible for delivering official documents.
In the first year of Chongzhen (1628), Emperor Zhu Youjian of Ming Si carried out a reform to streamline the post station, and Li Zicheng lost his errand because he accidentally lost the official document on the way to transmit it. In the winter of the same year, Li Zicheng was paraded through the streets by the government because of his debts, and the embarrassed Li Zicheng was saved by relatives and friends and killed the creditor. Immediately afterwards, Li Zicheng learned that his wife had an affair with other men in the village, and the bloody Li Zicheng also did not stop doing anything and killed his wife who cuckolded him.
Li Zicheng, who was in a lawsuit for two lives, knew that if he was caught by the government, he would be sentenced to death, so he fled to Ganzhou (present-day Ganzhou District, Zhangye City) in the following year, in the late winter and early spring of 1629. Soon, he was promoted by the then Ganzhou general Wang Guo to the rank of lieutenant general (a junior officer of the Ming border army, managing about 440 soldiers).
In the winter of the second year of Chongzhen (1629), Jin soldiers went south to invade the Daming border, and the imperial court urgently sent Li Zicheng's troops to Beijing to defend. Passing through Yuzhong, Gansu, because the kingdom withheld military salaries, causing a riot among soldiers and people, the kingdom was killed, and Li Zicheng officially led his troops to start his life of conquest.
Repeatedly defeated and retreated into the mountains
After the incident, Li Zicheng's own strength was too weak, and he had to turn to forces everywhere. The peasant armies of Wang Zuohang and Zhang Cunmeng who had defected to the Hanzhong region were soon defeated.
In the sixth year of Chongzhen (1633), the defeated Li Zicheng led the remnants of his troops to flee from the Hanzhong region to Shanxi, and his uncle Gao Yingxiang was also the leader of the peasant army in Shanxi, known as the "King of Chuang", that is, the first generation of King Chuang. Li Zicheng came to Shanxi here, that is, he came to join this uncle.
However, Li Zicheng, who defected to his uncle, did not usher in a turning point in the war. The imperial court's army defeated the peasant army several times in Shanxi, and Gao Yingxiang, Li Zicheng, and Zhang Xianzhong fled to Henan, where they were immediately surrounded by the Ming army.
In the seventh year of Chongzhen (1634), the Ming army that besieged the peasant army was transferred to resist Jin, and the peasant army broke through the siege, but lost its way and strayed into the Xing'an Chexiang Gorge, the terrain was dangerous, the Ming army blocked the only exit, and Li Zicheng was trapped again. Li Zicheng did not sit still, and used the advice of his subordinates to blackmail and bribe Chen Qiyu, the governor of the Ming army, to join the army, and finally Chen Qiyu accepted the suggestion to join the army and chose to send the peasant army back to his hometown.
When the Ming army deportation officer supervised the peasant army out of the gorge, Li Zicheng immediately killed the deportation officer and pacification officer and led his troops to escape. The Battle of Chexia Gorge became Li Zicheng's battle of fame.
The following year, in 1635, Li Zicheng's peasant army captured Fengyang, burned the "Huangjue Temple" (the temple where Zhu Yuanzhang became a monk) and dug up the ancestral tomb of the Ming imperial family. However, both Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong wanted to obtain the wealth and prisoners of the Fengyang Palace, and they clashed. Li Zicheng immediately led his subordinates to separate from Zhang Xianzhong and Gao Yingxiang.
In the ninth year of Chongzhen (1636), Li Zicheng's uncle Gao Yingxiang was defeated and killed, and the remnants defected to Li Zicheng. Immediately, Li Zicheng was elected as the new "King of Breaking In" and continued to conquer the Shaanxi-Gansu-Shu area. However, the good times did not last long, and Li Zicheng's peasant army was ambushed by the Ming army in Weinan. Li Zicheng only took the remaining 17 people to stand out and surround, and fled to Shangluo Mountain and disappeared. The pursuing Ming army was transferred to guard against the Qing army at this time, and Li Zicheng, who fled in a hurry, was able to rest and recuperate in a cottage deep in the mountains and old forests.
Take advantage of the chaos to kill and enter Beijing to plunder
In the twelfth year of Chongzhen (1639), Li Zicheng led several thousand troops to revolt again, and took advantage of the Ming army to pursue Zhang Xianzhong in Sichuan to enter Henan to fight. After several victories, Li Zicheng expanded the size of the army and established its prestige, put forward the slogan of "Equal fields are exempt from endowment", opened up the granaries of Henan, and took in the hungry people, and then Li Zicheng's peasant army grew to tens of thousands. The folk song "Welcome the king, do not pay food" is also circulating among the people.
In the seventeenth year of Chongzhen (1644), Li Zicheng, who had already occupied all of Shaanxi, proclaimed himself emperor in Xi'an, with the national name "Dashun", and at the same time set up official posts and made him a marquis and prime minister.
Li Zicheng's first goal after becoming emperor was naturally to conquer the city of Beijing. So he kept going, and the handsome army rushed straight to the capital, and where he passed, the Ming army fell in the wind. In March of that year, he was killed under the city of Beijing.
Li Zicheng first sent people into the city to negotiate secretly with the Chongzhen Emperor, and wanted to split the land with the Chongzhen Emperor. After negotiations broke down, Li Zicheng led his army into the Forbidden City. Seeing that the general trend had passed, Emperor Chongzhen took the eunuch Wang Chengen to Jingshan, and then hanged himself on a crooked neck tree.
When he first entered Beijing, Li Zicheng strictly ordered the army not to disturb the people, and life in the capital was the same as before. This policy was even praised by the old officials of the Ming Dynasty. However, because the Dashun army had a large number of soldiers and insufficient salaries, in order to raise salaries, the Dashun army set its sights on the old officials in Jingming.
Immediately, the Dashun army began to loot the private property of officials in the Jing and Ming Dynasties, donating military salaries according to the size of the rank, and even resisting if they did not obey. As a result, officials in the Jingming Dynasty complained, and more than 1,000 people were killed because their family assets were not enough to donate military salaries. Li Zicheng, on the other hand, did not restrain the soldiers and adopted a tacit attitude.
The Dashun army robbed and wounded Wu Sangui's family, who had just been named Pingxibo by the Chongzhen Emperor and was on his way back to King Qin, and abducted Wu Sangui's concubine Chen Yuanyuan. This made Wu Sangui, who heard that the emperor hanged himself and was considering whether to surrender Li Zicheng, became angry and returned to Shanhaiguan.
Victory underestimated the enemy, defeated and killed
In April 1644, Li Zicheng led an army of 100,000 to Shanhaiguan to conquer Wu Sangui. Wu Sangui pretended to send someone to ask for surrender, but in fact delayed time, and secretly wrote to Dolgon, asking Dolgon to send reinforcements to support. Li Zicheng, who was carried away by a series of victories, slowed down his military speed and missed the most favorable fighters because of Wu Sangui's request.
On 22 April, when Wu Sangui was defeated and negotiated with Li Zicheng, Dolgon, who had been on a rapid march, arrived and caught Li Zicheng by surprise. Finally, in the Battle of Shi, Li Zicheng was defeated by Wu Sangui and the Qing army.
By the time Li Zicheng fled back to the capital on 26 April, there were more than 30,000 men left in the army. The Qing army, on the other hand, was on the lookout and could kill under Beijing at any time. Enraged, Li Zicheng retaliated by slaughtering 34 members of Wu Sangui's family, and the next day hastily led his army to retreat to Xi'an.
In October 1644, the Qing court sent troops to pursue, but the Dashun army retreated all the way, and many city passes were lost one after another. By the first month of the following year, the entire territory of Shaanxi was about to be occupied by Qing troops, Li Zicheng abandoned Xi'an, and Xi'an was lost.
In April 1645, after several battles, the Dashun army was cut off by the Qing army from Wuchang to the east, which also disrupted Li Zicheng's plan to use the southeast as a base to resist the Qing. As a last resort, Li Zicheng could only change his plan and march southwest.
In early May, while passing through the foothills of Jiugong Mountain in Hubei Province, Li Zicheng led more than 20 light cavalry to explore the road, and was ambushed by local militia forces.
Li Zicheng, a generation of kings, has experienced the ups and downs of life from the peak of his prosperity in just a few years, and he has also hastily ended his life.
Li Zicheng managed the army rigorously and disciplined the army in the early stage, which made the army full of combat effectiveness, and the Dashun army was also good at fighting and daring to fight. In the later period, Li Zicheng gradually relaxed the requirements for military discipline, so that military discipline was loose and combat effectiveness was declining, which eventually led to the rapid defeat of the Dashun regime.
At the same time, limited by the limitations of the times and the peasant class revolution, Li Zicheng did not jump out of the historical cycle of uprising and then became emperor. But on the whole, Li Zicheng's ideas and practices in the peasant war also left valuable wealth to future generations and promoted the development of the historical process.