In November of the third year of Shunzhi (1648 AD), due to the betrayal of the traitor Liu Jinzhong, Zhang Xianzhong, the famous leader of the great western army of the peasant rebel army in the late Ming Dynasty, was shot dead by the Qing general Yaburan, and the remnants of the great western army were led by the Pingdong general Sun Kewang, the Anxi general Li Dingguo, and the Funan general Liu Wenxiu. Sun Kewang, together with Li Dingguo and Liu Wenxiu, led his troops south into Yunnan and Guizhou, and joined forces with the Southern Ming Dynasty to persist in resisting the Qing, and Sun Kewang was promoted to the head of the whole army.
In 1651, the Southern Ming Dynasty, under the pressure of the Qing army, had reached the point of exhaustion and precariousness, and the king of the country, King Gui, was forced to make Sun Kewang the King of Qin, and the power of the government was controlled by him.
In 1652, the Great Western Army went north to resist the Qing, setting off another climax of the anti-Qing struggle. Li Dingguo, who had outstanding military ability, led an army to attack Sichuan, defeated Wu Sangui, forced him to retreat to Hanzhong, and recovered most of Sichuan, and then passed through Guizhou, Wugang in Hunan, Quanzhou in Guangxi, and directly attacked Guilin. Kong Youde, the King of Dingnan who was stationed in Guilin by the Qing army, was forced to set himself on fire after defeat, and the people of Guangxi responded one after another, and the Great Western Army recovered all of Guangxi in just ten days. Then, Li Dingguo took advantage of the victory to swing his division of Hunan, Take Changsha in the north, sweep Jiangxi in the east, and in only seven months, he conquered sixteen counties and thirty-two prefectures and counties, and recovered three thousand miles of lost land, achieving brilliant results.
The rulers of the Qing Dynasty were greatly shocked by this, and immediately ordered King Nikan to be the general of Dingyuan, leading 100,000 troops to march into Huguang. In November of that year, the resourceful Li Dingguo led an army to fight the Qing army at Hengzhou (present-day Hengyang, Hunan), and he set up an ambush and used a clever knife to cut Nikan under the city of Hengzhou, beating the Qing army to the ground and collapsing. After Li Dingguo defeated the Qing army in Hunan, he marched from Guangxi into Guangdong and recovered all the lost territory in Liangguang. In this campaign, Li Dingguo successively recovered the territory of seven or eight provinces, and "two famous kings shook the world", thus greatly shaking the rule of the Qing Dynasty and effectively promoting the rapid rise of the anti-Qing struggle throughout the country.
However, Li Dingguo's achievements and merits aroused great jealousy from Sun Kewang, a narrow-minded and unscrupulous careerist, and Li Dingguo's victory made Sun Kewang intolerable and angry, and he was deeply afraid that Li Dingguo's excessive military strength, excessive merit, and prestige would threaten his own position, so he went from Guiyang to Hunan in an attempt to compete for merit, sabotage Li Dingguo's battle plan, and plotted to cut down Li Dingguo's military power and kill him.
In 1653, Sun Kewang led his army to the east and arrived in Yuanzhou in February. Sun Kewang sent someone to deliver a letter to Li Dingguo, inviting him to Yuanzhou to discuss things. Liu Wenxiu knew that Sun Kewang had bad intentions, so he secretly sent someone to tell Li Dingguo that Sun Kewang had called him shangyuan prefecture in an attempt to poison him. After Li Dingguo received Liu Wenxiu's secret report, he wrote to Sun Kewang and sincerely advised him that "it is not appropriate to listen to rumors and kill each other." In order to take into account the overall situation and avoid armed conflict with Sun Kewang, Li Dingguo took the initiative to lead 50,000 troops to retreat from Hunan into Guangxi. However, Sun Kewang still refused to spare him and sent troops to Liuzhou to attack Li Dingguo, causing internal carnage.
Later, Li Dingguo was pursued by the Qing army and was defeated and retreated, and in 1655, when Li Dingguo retreated to Nanning, Guangxi, there were only about 6,000 people left. After Li Dingguo retreated from Hunan, Sun Kewang asked for credit and engaged the Qing army in Hunan, but was defeated by the Qing army and had to lead his troops back to Guiyang.
After Sun Kewang expelled Li Dingguo, his ambitions were even more inflated, and he was not willing to become a courtier of the Southern Ming Dynasty, and if he wanted to become emperor, he colluded with some courtiers and forced The King of Gui to make concessions. King Gui was not willing to lose his throne, so he secretly ordered Li Dingguo to lead his troops into the guard. In the first month of 1656, Li Dingguo and Liu Wenxiu welcomed King Gui back to Yunnan, and King Gui made Li Dingguo the King of Jin and Liu Wenxiu the King of Shu.
In 1657, Sun Kewang, driven by strong jealousy, provoked a larger civil war and led 140,000 troops to attack Yunnan to fight Li Dingguo to the death. However, sun Kewang's action was completely unpopular, and his subordinates did not want to kill Li Dingguo's army, so they shouted "King Yingjin" in front of the battle, turned against each other, and rushed into Li Dingguo's camp. Sun Kewang never expected such a situation of rebellion and separation, and when he saw that the situation was not good, he fled in a hurry, taking only dozens of horses, running to Changsha, and shamelessly surrendered to Hong Chengyu. In order to use Sun Kewang to disintegrate the army of the Southern Ming government, the Qing court specially made Sun Kewang the "Righteous King", and the title was higher than that of the traitor Wu Sangui.
After suffering a shameful defeat, Sun Kewang became even more jealous of Li Dingguo. Therefore, after he surrendered to the Qing army, he repeatedly gave advice to the Qing army, and told the Qing court all the facts of Yun and Gui Li Dingguo's troops, persuading the Qing army to attack Yun and Gui, in an attempt to kill Li Dingguo by borrowing the qing army's knife.
Because the Qing army had mastered the virtual reality of Yungui, it was convenient for the Qing army to attack Yungui in February 1658. The first route was Wu Sangui as the general of Pingxi, and together with Li Guohan, he commanded the army from Sichuan to the south; the other route was Zhuo Butai as the general of Zhengnan, and the unified army was marched from Guangxi to the west; the other route was Bei Ziluotuo as the general of Ningnan Jingkou, and the same route was led by Liu Hongcheng, and the army was marched west from Hunan. Three-way date in Guizhou. Li Dingguo led the generals to meet the battle in Guizhou. However, due to the old department of Sun Kewang within the army, after hearing the news of the Qing army's large-scale attack, he was suspicious and panicked, so he surrendered to the Qing army one after another. Li Dingguo rushed to meet the battle, outnumbered, and defeated back to Kunming. The Gui government took the wrong position and decided to retreat to western Yunnan, and then fled to Burma in a hurry. Li Dingguo set up an ambush three times at Mopan Mountain in Yongchang to wait for the Qing army, but the ambush plan was sold to Wu Sangui by the Ming Dynasty official Lu Guisheng, but it did not work, and the ambush suffered serious casualties, and the Qing army soon occupied Yun and Gui.
Li Dingguo led the remnants to the border of Yunnan, and repeatedly wrote to the king of Gui to return to Yunnan to persist in resisting the Qing, but the king of Gui refused to return, and as a result, he was detained by the king of Burma in the city of Awa, and was humiliated, and many of the officials in his entourage were killed. In 1661, Wu Sangui led the Qing army to attack Burma, and the King of Burma was deeply frightened and sacrificed the King of Gui. In April of the following year, King Gui's father and son were hanged by Wu Sangui in Kunming. Li Dingguo repeatedly sent troops to intercept the Qing army in an attempt to rescue King Gui's father and son, but they failed to do so. After the news of King Gui's death came, Li Dingguo became angry and died in June of that year in Mengla, on the border of Yunnan, at the age of forty-two.
In this way, Li Dingguo, the outstanding leader of the peasant rebel army and the hero of the anti-Qing Dynasty and the last "god of war" of the Ming Dynasty, was finally ruined by Sun Kewang, a shameless villain who was jealous of merit and sold his life for glory, and colluded with the strength of the Qing soldiers to ruin the future of the anti-Qing struggle.