When we read the history of the last years of the Ming Dynasty, we always feel a very complicated feeling, there is doubt, there is anger, there is regret, and there are many unspeakable feelings. A lot of history seems so difficult for us to understand from today's point of view, especially when the Ming Dynasty faced the Qing army outside guanwai and the peasant rebel army in Guanxi, the early Ming Dynasty had an overwhelming advantage, but it was always unable to completely eliminate these two major threats inside and outside Guanxi, while the contradictions within the Ming Dynasty were getting bigger and bigger, so that the Qing army outside Guanwai and the rebel army in Guanxi continued to grow, and finally made themselves completely destroyed.
The fate of Sun Chuanting, the governor of the late Ming Dynasty, is a microcosm of this deeply complicated history of the fall of the Ming Dynasty. Sun Chuanting passed the imperial examination at the end of the Wanli Calendar and entered Beijing during the Apocalypse, but two years later, because he was dissatisfied with Wei Zhongxian's dictatorship, he resigned and returned home. Sun Chuanting's early experience can be said to be the performance of a standard civilian official, but he would not have imagined that the next time he stepped on the political stage, he would become a general who would shoulder the life and death of the Ming Dynasty.
In the eighth year of Chongzhen (1635), Sun Chuanting, who had been away from politics for a long time, returned to Beijing. The following year, he took the initiative to go to Shaanxi to serve as the governor of Shaanxi and went to the front to fight the intensifying peasant uprising. Although the rebel army at that time was defeated by the Ming army many times, it could not be completely suppressed, and often surrendered and then rebelled again, and the situation of suppressing the peasant uprising was not clear.
In the same year that Sun Chuanting returned to the political arena, the peasant rebel army represented by Gao Yingxiang, Zhang Xianzhong, and others realized the meeting division, determined the strategy of dividing troops to attack everywhere, and captured Fengyang, the ancestral land of the Ming Dynasty, excavated the ancestral graves of the Ming Dynasty, and also burned the Huangjue Temple where Zhu Yuanzhang had once been a monk, which made the Ming Dynasty lose face.
Sun Chuanting went to Shaanxi to take up his post under these circumstances, and he quickly formed an army, known as the "Qin Army". At this time, Gao Yingxiang's rebel army suffered a crushing defeat in battle against Lu Xiangsheng, the new governor of the five provinces, and could only choose to turn to Shaanxi and hope to capture Xi'an. Sun Chuanting, who was guarding Shaanxi, expected that Gao Yingxiang would try to sneak into Xi'an from the Meridian Valley, so he ambushed him with Yi Waiting, and as Sun Chuanting expected, Gao Yingxiang did indeed enter the ambush circle, was defeated and captured, and was sent to Beijing for execution.
Sun Chuanting became famous in this battle, and then Sun Chuanting continued to lead his subordinate Qin army and other Ming armies to fight in coordination, at this time the Ming army had an absolute superiority in strength, the rebel army was continuously defeated, and the situation in the Guanzhong area was calmed. After Gao Yingxiang's defeat and death, Li Zicheng succeeded him as king of Chuang and continued to fight, but because the Ming Dynasty adopted a strategy of restricting the flow of rebel troops and breaking through each other. Li Zicheng was also inevitably targeted, and under the combined encirclement and ambush of Hong Chengzu and Sun Chuanting, Li Zicheng suffered heavy losses, almost all of his army was destroyed, and only eighteen horsemen were left to break out with him.
At this time, Sun Chuanting can be said to have unlimited scenery, but he would not have thought that Li Zicheng, who was killed by himself like a dog that lost his family at this time, would defeat himself five years later, and he would die at his hands, and there would be no bones left. Why, in just five years, Sun Chuanting could not defeat Li Zicheng?
There were many reasons for this, and the first reason was that the Qing army outside the Guanwai once again detoured into the south of the Great Wall, which immediately diverted the attention of the Ming Dynasty to guard against the attack of the Qing army, because Beijing was too close to the Qing army. As a result, Lu Xiangsheng, Hong Chengzuo, Sun Chuanting, and others who had made great contributions to the neutralization of the peasant rebel army were all recruited to Beijing to defend the Qing offensive. This gave Li Zicheng a chance to breathe, allowing him to take the opportunity to regain his strength.
One of the reasons is that Sun Chuanting was unable to play a role after he arrived in Beijing. Because he disagreed with Yang Sichang, a soldier who advocated peace with the Qing army, coupled with the Chongzhen Emperor's reluctance to see Sun Chuanting, Sun Chuanting remained sullen. Later, because the imperial court was obstructed by Yang Sichang in transferring the military affairs of his governors Baoding, Shandong, and Henan, Sun Chuanting was angry and unable to dispatch it, so he used the excuse of illness to prepare to return to his hometown.
As a result, this gave Yang Sichang an opportunity, and he told the Chongzhen Emperor that Sun Chuanting was shirking his responsibility by returning home from illness at this critical time. This made the Chongzhen Emperor, who was already anxious because of various things, not fight, he was busy here to die, and you Sun Chuanting was actually ready to run. Therefore, he directly reduced Sun Chuanting to a commoner, which was not relieved, and also put Sun Chuanting in a big prison, which was three years.
During these three years, Li Zicheng was not idle, and after being defeated by Sun Chuanting, he fled to the Shangluo Mountains in southeastern Shaanxi, where he gained respite and married and had children. The year after Li Zicheng was defeated, Zhang Xianzhong, who had already surrendered to the Ming Dynasty, rebelled again, and Li Zicheng also took this opportunity to kill from Shangluo Mountain, and by this time he had once again gained thousands of troops. Another year later, in the thirteenth year of Chongzhen (1640), Li Zicheng took advantage of the good opportunity when the attention of the Ming army was focused on the Qing army outside Guanwai and Zhang Xianzhong in Guannei and turned to Henan.
At this time, Henan was starving because of famine, and Li Zicheng immediately chose to open the granary and help the victims. For the starving people in the feudal period, who can feed themselves is really politically legitimate, so the hungry people near and far heard the news that Li Zicheng had opened a warehouse and released grain, and they all went to him with hoes, day and night, and the momentum became more and more huge, and it was almost a burning trend. Li Zicheng's army quickly grew from a few thousand to tens of thousands.
Another year later, Li Zicheng conquered the important town of Luoyang in Henan this time, and Zhu Changxun, the Prince of Fu, who had been favored by the Wanli Emperor and even wanted to be crown prince, was killed by Li Zicheng. Li Zicheng even stewed the meat of The King of Fu with the venison to make a so-called "Fulu Feast" and shared it with the soldiers. Later, Li Zicheng also used the gold, silver treasures, grain and other materials of the local wealthy merchants to help the hungry. This move allowed Li Zicheng to completely open up the situation, and the number of troops reached hundreds of thousands.
The Chongzhen Emperor did not expect that in just three years, Li Zicheng's power had actually developed to such an extent. At this time, Li Zicheng had already surrounded Kaifeng, another important town in Henan, and Kaifeng was in danger. Reluctantly, in order to save the emergency, the Chongzhen Emperor remembered Sun Chuanting, who had defeated Li Zicheng and was now imprisoned by himself. In the fifteenth year of Chongzhen (1642), Sun Chuanting was released from prison, and before he could rest, he was ordered by the Chongzhen Emperor to lead troops to rush to Kaifeng.
However, due to the rapid change of the situation, the attack of the Ming general Zuo Liangyu caused Li Zicheng to abandon the siege of Kaifeng and attack Zuo Liangyu instead, and when Wang Qiao, the governor of the three sides of Shaanxi, went to support Zuo Liangyu's sneak attack on Xiangcheng a few years ago, Wang Qiaonian was captured and killed due to the escape of his subordinates and the poor response of Zuo Liangyu. So Sun Chuanting was sent to Shaanxi, where he first joined the army. However, before Sun Chuanting could re-pass through Shaanxi, Li Zicheng besieged Kaifeng again, and the Chongzhen Emperor urgently ordered Sun Chuanting to go out of the customs to rescue Kaifeng.
Sun Chuanting had only been in Shaanxi for a few months at this time, and although he had a certain amount of capital, he had not yet reached the level of confronting the rebel army, but due to the constant urging of the Chongzhen Emperor, Sun Chuanting had to go to Henan with newly recruited recruits to Henan to rescue Kaifeng. Because his own side was at a disadvantage in terms of troops, Sun Chuanting chose to secretly march to sneak up on the rebel army and catch the rebel army by surprise. Sun Chuanting's initial plan was successful, and the Ming army obtained certain results by luring the enemy deeper, but due to weather reasons, it failed to expand the results and did not get time to rest
Because the rebel army was numerous, a small defeat did not have a devastating impact on the rebel army, and the rebel army quickly organized the main force to kill. In the case of the absolute inferiority of the troops and the lack of people, the Ming army was defeated, and Sun Chuanting could only lead the remnants of the army to flee back to Shaanxi. In this battle, Sun Chuanting not only did not gain benefits in Li Zicheng's hands, but also suffered heavy losses.
Sun Chuanting, who withdrew and returned to Shaanxi, realized the gap in strength between the two sides, so he vigorously expanded his military strength and developed production at the same time, and the Ming army in Shaanxi was significantly strengthened in more than half a year. However, Emperor Chongzhen's eagerness to suppress the rebel army made him constantly urge Sun Chuanting to send troops, and he constantly handed over all the military affairs of Shanxi, Hubei, Guizhou, and even Jiangnan and Jiangbei to Sun Chuanting, and renamed him as a superintendent and promoted to Shangshu of the Bingbu Department. Sun Chuanting was helpless and chose to go out to fight.
However, due to the long battle line, the Ming army could not get effective supplies in time, coupled with continuous combat and weather and other reasons, the morale of the Ming army gradually declined, and deserters began to appear. In addition, the rebel army took the opportunity to cut off the Ming army's grain route. Sun Chuanting could only personally lead his troops to open up the grain route, and left Cheng Yongfu, the commander of Henan, to stay behind, resulting in suspicion within the Ming army, chaos, and the original deployment was all disrupted.
The Ming army, which had been driven to Ruzhou by the rebel army, finally came back to its senses, and the two sides began a decisive battle. Originally, the Ming army broke through the rebel army's triple battle line in a row, and in the fourth heavy battle line, it was in a stalemate with the elite of the rebel army, and when the train battalion on the Ming side collapsed, the Ming army's rout was like dominoes, and the situation became a unilateral massacre. Li Zicheng did not give Sun Chuanting another chance this time, and he sent troops to pursue and kill the Ming army for more than four hundred miles. In the end, Tongguan was breached, and Sun Chuanting was killed in battle during the retreat, and finally the bones were gone.