Li Zicheng

Li Zicheng took Beijing in April 1644, ended the Ming dynasty, and ruled China for forty-two days. He was a shepherd and then an ironworker's apprentice from famine-stricken Shaanxi, worked as a postal courier until the government abolished the service to save money, and joined the rebellion that unemployment produced. Northern China in the 1630s was the worst of a cold climatic period: harvest failure, epidemic, and a tax system that kept collecting. He was a competent organiser rather than a bandit chief, forbidding his men to loot the peasantry and promising to abolish the grain tax, and the slogan about killing nobody and eating for free brought him hundreds of thousands. He proclaimed the Shun dynasty at Xi'an in 1644 and marched on the capital, which fell almost without a fight because the garrison was unpaid. The Chongzhen emperor hanged himself on a hill behind the Forbidden City. What destroyed Li was the Ming general Wu Sangui, who held the pass at Shanhaiguan against the Manchus and, rather than submit, opened it to them. The combined force broke Li's army at Shanhaiguan in May; he burned the palaces and fled, and was killed the following year, probably by villagers whose food he was taking. The Qing entered a capital somebody else had captured and stayed 267 years. His forty-two days in Beijing are the shortest reign of any Chinese dynasty that is counted at all. The Ming loyalist courts in the south held out until 1662. Whether Wu Sangui opened the pass for dynastic loyalty or because Li had taken his concubine is a story the sources tell with relish and cannot support; what is certain is that a general made a decision at a gate and changed three centuries.

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