Introduction
In the spring of 1644, three men claimed to rule China at the same time. In Beijing sat the Chongzhen Emperor, the last ruler of the Ming. In Xi'an, a former postal worker named Li Zicheng had just crowned himself emperor of a new dynasty, the Dashun. And beyond the Great Wall, in Manchuria, a six-year-old boy named Fulin had been installed as the first Qing emperor. Within a year, the Chongzhen Emperor was dead by his own hand, Li Zicheng was dead on a hillside in Hubei, and the boy's regents were measuring the palaces of Beijing.
The collapse of the Ming is one of the great hinge events of Chinese history, and Li Zicheng is its most human character. This is the story of how a dynasty that had stood for 276 years fell in a season — and why Chinese leaders still quote the lesson.
The Man Who Was Not Supposed to Matter
Li Zicheng was born in 1606 in Mizhi, Shaanxi, to a poor family in a poor province. His early life was unremarkable to the point of insult: he tended sheep for a landlord, then took a steady job as a runner at a government postal station — the kind of low-status, low-pay position that kept a man alive. When the cash-strapped Ming state cut postal staff in the 1630s, he lost even that.
He joined the waves of rebellion already sweeping a famine-struck north, rose under the warlord Gao Yingxiang, and when Gao was captured and executed in 1636, Li inherited his title: Chuang Wang, the "Dashing King." It is worth pausing on how improbable this was. Nothing about Li's origins suggested he would end a dynasty. The Ming did not fall because one genius plotted it; the Ming fell because a million hungry people had nothing left to lose.
The Slogan That Built an Army
Li's genius was not military genius in the conventional sense. It was finding the right words at the right moment. In the early 1640s, as famine spread across Henan, his advisers promoted a slogan that traveled faster than any army: 均田免粮 — "divide the land, cancel the grain tax."
For peasants crushed by taxation, it was electric. A popular rhyme spread across the countryside, inviting people to slaughter a sheep and warm some wine, to open the city gates and welcome the Dashing King. Crucially, Li ran something close to a disciplined force: he restrained his troops, punished looting, and distinguished himself from the more savage warbands by protecting the ordinary villagers who fed him. His army swelled into a movement of hundreds of thousands.
In 1641 his forces stormed Luoyang and killed a Ming prince, seizing the wealth of a royal estate and distributing part of it. The symbolism was devastating. The Ming could no longer protect its own blood.
The Road to Beijing
The final campaign was shockingly fast. In 1643 Li took Xi'an, the old imperial capital, and in early 1644 he declared the new Dashun dynasty with a reign era of Yongchang. Because the Ming court in Beijing dated 1644 as the seventeenth year of Chongzhen while the Manchus declared their own Shunzhi era, the same months carried three competing calendars — the clearest possible sign that everyone understood the game was up.
His march east met real resistance at only a handful of points, most notably the fortress of Ningwuguan, where a loyal Ming general and his garrison inflicted heavy losses before being overwhelmed. After Ningwuguan fell, the will to fight evaporated. Datong surrendered, then Xuanfu, then the great pass at Juyongguan simply opened. On the night of March 19, 1644, with the rebels inside the walls, the Chongzhen Emperor walked to Coal Hill — today's Jingshan, just north of the Forbidden City — and hanged himself. The Ming, as a ruling dynasty in the north, was over.
As later analyses in Chinese outlets such as Guangming Daily's history pages note, Li entered Beijing believing the empire was his. It was the first of two fatal misjudgments.
Forty-Two Days
The Dashun regime in Beijing lasted roughly six weeks. Two failures sealed it.
First, he ignored the north. Li did not move decisively to secure the Shanhaiguan pass and the Ming armies still in the northeast. The Manchu-Qing state beyond the Wall was not a rumor — it had been the Ming's most dangerous adversary for decades — yet Li treated it as an afterthought.
Second, he alienated the very class he needed. To feed his army, the Dashun government turned on the Ming bureaucracy and nobility, extracting money through a brutal process of forced "donations" and confiscation. Senior officials were arrested, ransomed, or killed. The result was predictable and catastrophic: the administrative class that could have run the new dynasty for Li instead regarded it as a plunder operation and waited for an alternative.
That alternative came dressed as a Ming general. Wu Sangui, commander at Shanhaiguan, had personal reasons to hate the new regime — reports differ on exactly what happened to his family and his property — and he opened the pass to the Qing regent Dorgon. In a single afternoon of battle outside the pass, Li's army was broken between the Ming remnants and the Manchu cavalry. He abandoned Beijing, retreated west, briefly declared himself emperor in the city as he fled, and was hounded across Shaanxi and Henan. In 1645 he died on the Jiugong Mountain area of Hubei, killed by local militia who did not even realize, at first, who they had killed.
Why It Still Matters
The fall of the Ming is not just a dusty succession story. It became a political parable, quoted across the ideological spectrum.
Chiang Kai-shek blamed the collapse on "roving bandit" rebels and invading Manchu forces. Mao Zedong used Li's factional indiscipline as the founding example of what he called liukou zhuyi — the "roving-bandit mentality" of opportunism and lack of discipline — and warned his own movement against it. The 1950 incident is the one most often cited: visiting Shenyang as the newly founded People's Republic struggled with official extravagance, Mao reportedly admonished local leaders with "You can be Liu Zongmin if you like, but I do not intend to become Li Zicheng" — referencing Li's general and the regime's sudden fall into luxury. The story is retold today, including by the website of the Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, as an object lesson in the danger of a victorious movement losing discipline.