Trampled Earth

6 ( Trampled Earth For over half a century, from roughly 1620 to 1680, the southwest fron- tier was in turmoil, much like the rest of China, and despite Zhu Xie- yuan’s best-laid plans for Shuixi the Ming state was incapable of restor- ing political authority over Guizhou and Yunnan following the She-An Rebellion. Subprefecture, prefecture, and even several provincial offices remained unstaffed during the 1630s and 1640s, and with the demise of the Ming in 1644, so, too, went the notion of civilian rule. “The Ming civilian bureaucracy,” as Lynn Struve noted, “was eclipsed by military organizations which originally had developed outside Ming control.”1 As one might suspect, many of these military organizations harbored anti-Ming sentiments. Gao Yingxiang (d. 1636), the godfather of several of China’s most notorious anti-Ming rebels, was able to channel popular antipathy due to years of economic decline, bureaucratic inepti- tude, and bone-jarring famine toward establishing a sprawling base of anti-Ming resistance in North China. Gao’s uncanny ability to consis- tently outwit his Ming adversaries distinguished him from many of the other small, regional warlords roaming the North China countryside, and his “national” stature attracted both the capable and desperate who hoped to capitalize on Gao’s potential. Two of Gao’s most notable lieu- tenants were Li Zicheng (1605?–45) and Zhang Xianzhong (1605–47). As a postal courier in Shaanxi, Li had proven himself to be a skilled horseman, expert marksman, and leader of men by the time the great famine of 1628 engulfed Shaanxi and forced him to abandon his government job. To survive, Li led a small band of followers into the neighboring hills, and from there they attacked merchant caravans, 190 Trampled Earth government officials, and people of wealth. Government soldiers and local militias quickly responded to Li’s growing menace, so in 1631 Li decided to increase his power by joining forces with the renowned “dashing king” (chuang wang), Gao Yingxiang. Cultivated for years by Gao, Li became part of Gao’s loosely coordinated military organization that stretched over much of North China. According to most contem- porary accounts, this organization consisted of thirteen leaders com- manding seventy-two smaller units, and it purportedly comprised over half a million men. The leaders met in 1635 at a meeting presided over by Gao in Rongyang, Henan, after which each leader was granted an exclusive sphere of operation. Li, who now styled himself the “dashing general” (chuang jiang), was given control over his home turf in Shaanxi. Follow- ing Gao’s capture and execution in 1636, the remaining leaders selected Li to assume the title of dashing king, but it was not until early 1641, when Li ordered the execution of the prince of Fu (Zhu Changxun; 1586–1641), burned his palaces, and redistributed over 2,000,000 mu of his land to the poor and hungry, that Li began to attract the following necessary to ascend the national stage.2 In the spring of 1644, Li an- nounced the founding of the Da Shun kingdom, and by April 1644 his army entered Beijing and forced the Ming emperor Chongzhen (r. 1628–44) to commit suicide.3 As the drama of Li’s campaign against the Ming unfolded in North China, Zhang Xianzhong, a participant at Gao’s conference in Rong- yang in 1635, had appointed himself in 1643 king of the Great Western (Daxi) kingdom, and in the spring of 1644 Zhang was leading his followers west from Huguang into the fertile Sichuan basin. From Chengdu Zhang sought to utilize the region’s economic wealth to ex- tend his political-military reach beyond the basin, hoping some day to unify China under his rule. But, Zhang’s ambitions were never realized. First, many of the major cities in Yunnan, northern Guizhou, and east- ern Sichuan were still under the authority of Ming loyalists who stead- fastly resisted Zhang’s overtures, and, despite the collapse of Ming rule in Beijing, Ming forces surrounding the Sichuan basin were stubbornly opposed to Zhang’s imperial pretensions. Second, the rapid and unan- ticipated defeat of Li’s army in Beijing brought the Shun-Qing battle to the Sichuan basin’s northern edge, as fleeing Shun troops filtered back into Shaanxi and Sichuan in a desperate attempt to escape pursuing Qing forces. .

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