How did only a few hundred thousand Eight Banners conquer the Ming Dynasty?

In A.D. 1644, that is, in the seventeenth year of Chongzhen in Ming Dynasty, under the leadership of Dourgen, Nuzhen fighters entered the Central Plains for the first time and successfully occupied Beijing. Almost all Manchu people still don't believe that they can really conquer the whole Ming Dynasty, but they just intend to "use this military power to slaughter and detain the kings and towns; The soldiers will either stay in Shenyang or surrender to Haishan, but there will be no future trouble. " Although Dourgen did not adopt this short-sighted suggestion and immediately moved the capital from Shenyang to Beijing in strict accordance with Huang Taiji's legacy, he did not dare to expect to conquer the world further. He himself said, "What is reunification?" But an inch is an inch and a ruler is a ruler. "

In fact, according to their objective conditions at that time, the Manchu people's ideas were logical. According to various research estimates, the population of the Ming Dynasty should be between 1 100 million and 200 million. At the same time, after decades of merger and integration, the entire Jurchen tribe is only a few hundred thousand, including many Mongolians and Han Chinese, and the population ratio is roughly close to that of the mainland and Hong Kong. You know, just about two years ago, during the Song and Jin Wars between the Ming and Qing Dynasties, when both sides gambled on the National Games, the Qing army put almost all its troops into the battle, but only incorporated hundreds of thousands of troops. Only two years later, the Qing dynasty took out its troops to conquer the whole of the Ming dynasty, not to mention fighting. Even if every city was occupied, there was no manpower. Judging from the situation at that time, the Qing dynasty could not conquer the whole Ming dynasty, just as Mexico could not conquer the whole North America.

However, the subsequent development of the situation surprised everyone, and the whole situation was almost one-sided. The subsequent westward and southward advance of the Manchu Dynasty was smoother than expected, and the number of former troops who surrendered and surrendered in large numbers even exceeded the population of the Manchu Dynasty, becoming the deep-water charge and main force of the Manchu Dynasty. Although, the resistance of Nan Ming once had an effect, which made the war locked repeatedly in some areas, and even showed signs of turning defeat into victory. However, constant internal friction finally destroyed the last strength of Nanming.

1662, Wu Sangui captured Li Yong, the last emperor of the Ming Dynasty, from Myanmar, and strangled him with a bowstring. The huge Ming Dynasty that ruled for 300 years finally became history completely. At this point, Manchu ancestors created a legend and myth in the history of human civilization. It only took them about 60 years to conquer the world's largest dynasty with a population of 200-300 times that of their own with a small tribe with only a few hundred thousand people who just invented their own characters, and thus ruled for nearly 300 years. This has never happened in nearly 5000 years of human history.

If you trace the source, you still have to start from the beginning. Let the time return from the tragic scene of A.D. 1644 to A.D. 1368. 276 should be one of the most celebrated years in China's history. That year, Zhu Yuanzhang's Northern Expedition team entered the capital of the Yuan Dynasty effortlessly, announcing the official collapse of the Mongolian Empire. In the same year, Zhu Yuanzhang ascended the throne in Nanjing and proclaimed himself emperor, changed to Hongwu, and formally established Daming. The land ravaged by Mongols for nearly a hundred years has finally returned to the hands of the Han people, and its territory is larger than that of any Han dynasty in history. It is by no means empty talk to say that "the territory is vast and far away from the Han and Tang Dynasties" in Ming history. After the war quickly subsided, the country ushered in a rapid recovery of productive forces. For a time, the whole country was prosperous, and the Ming Dynasty quickly reached its brilliant peak in the first few decades of the founding of the People's Republic of China.

However, even after this brief peak, the whole country gradually degenerated, not only being surpassed by western European countries in science and technology, but also being completely defeated by the rebels and the Manchu Dynasty in the military because of political collapse and economic bankruptcy, and finally unable to extricate itself from its own crisis. The root of all these bitter fruits was actually deeply buried at the beginning of the founding of the Ming Dynasty.

If you ask me what is the biggest crisis of the Ming Dynasty in 300 years, I can only answer: The biggest crisis is actually that the Ming Dynasty has hardly encountered any real crisis in the whole history. Throughout the nearly 300-year history of the Ming Dynasty, it can actually be said that the Ming Dynasty was a very lucky dynasty. At that time, there was no power around it that could directly threaten its regime.

The Mongols in the north have long lost the glory of Genghis Khan, and no separatist tribe can compete with the Ming Dynasty. Even though Timur swept Persia in the early years of the Ming Dynasty and the arrogant cripple died on the road of the Ming Dynasty, neither Anda nor Dānlín really possessed the strength to dominate the Central Plains. Although the Mongols rode south from time to time for 300 years, in the eyes of the Ming people, they were always just "thieves". If they have robbed enough, they will go back, and the big deal is to sell some land in the Hetao area with them, and things will be smooth.

At that time, although Western Europe gradually got rid of the darkness and began the great revival of the Middle Ages, the strength of Europeans at that time was far from spreading the war to the eastern land thousands of miles away. Although Europeans gradually eroded the governors around the Ming Dynasty with the continuous improvement of navigation technology in the middle and late Ming Dynasty, and even "leased" Macao, it did not really threaten its political power for the Ming Dynasty. Not to mention Japan, until the Meiji Restoration, Japan's military strength never threatened China. Even if its invading army was blocked in North Korea occasionally, there was no chance to burn the war to the Central Plains. Frequent Japanese pirates can only undermine peace in some areas and have no influence on the whole regime. Although the Miao people in Yunnan, Guizhou and other places rebelled from time to time, it was easy to pacify China's army, and a Wang Shouren in the Ming Dynasty could easily fix everything; As for other countries, they are all vassal countries. In the impression of the Ming people, they are just barbarians who send messengers to the Golden Temple to knock their heads every year, and they don't even care about these.

Therefore, in this long-term seemingly peaceful and serene environment, the Ming Dynasty naturally suffered from the disease of wealth. Now, we usually call this disease "big company disease". Because there was no external threat, the political situation of the Ming Dynasty was in a strange stable state for a long time. Although it was full of hidden dangers in political system, economic model and military affairs from the beginning, it has never been improved in any real sense.

Since there is no threat, it seems that the problem will never break out. The method of perfunctory or procrastination is often more effective than facing the problem squarely. When the benefits brought by system reform are far less than the cost of eliminating interest groups, all problems will not be completely solved, but will gradually accumulate and wait for the moment of outbreak. I began to suffer from this disease at the beginning of the founding of the Ming Dynasty, and I was very ill. After hundreds of years of accumulation, the dynasty was finally killed.

Shortly after Zhu Yuanzhang, the Ming emperor, ascended the throne, he did one thing, that is, he established a political system and a military system with the interests of his Zhu family as the core. As we all know, the salary paid to officials in the Ming Dynasty is the lowest in history, and there is not even one. The annual income of a senior official is hundreds of thousands less than the current banknotes, not to mention the grassroots officials below. Officials have to rely on these salaries to support a large family, but also to hire a whole set of teams such as teachers and followers, and of course to deal with various social relations. Few officials can survive without foreign funds; Maybe Harry did it, but the price was that his children starved to death, and he didn't even have funeral expenses when he died. Even Gu in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties lamented that "the salary of officials has never been so thin since ancient times".

However, Zhu Yuanzhang, who was born in the bottom farmers, didn't realize this at all. On the one hand, he distributed a lot of study materials and educated officials to be honest and frugal. For example, in "Wake Up the Corruption", he carefully calculated how much labor an official's salary would cost. On the other hand, he used all kinds of cruel means to punish those exposed corrupt officials, and even came up with torture such as stripping grass to scare officials. Guo Heng, the biggest corruption case in Hongwu alone, was executed by Zhu Yuanzhang in one breath, and tens of thousands of local officials were involved in prison. As the founder and commander-in-chief of the empire, Zhu Yuanzhang doesn't like to reflect on the defects of his own system. Instead, he likes to blindly blame all the causes of the problems on junior officials, and then violently use various forms of torture to deal with them, but it is almost ineffective. The air printing case, one of the four major cases in the early Ming Dynasty, is the most obvious example.

But Zhu Yuanzhang's treatment of his descendants of Zhu surname is completely another set of practices. The six ministers who made the greatest contribution to the founding of the Ming Dynasty only enjoyed the funeral of being crowned king after their death, and their descendants were also relegated. Zhu Yuanzhang's own 26 sons, except one who was a prince, died at birth, and all the others were kings without exception, even if one of them only lived to be three years old. That doesn't count. In the next 300 years, as long as they are descendants of Zhujiajia, they will enjoy free financial support from the state from birth, and they will not need or engage in any work, and they will get the same amount of subsidies if they have children. The direct descendants of emperors in previous dynasties can enjoy more, directly own the fief and enjoy the tax preferential treatment of the whole fief.

Of course, all kinds of humiliation encountered in the late Qing Dynasty have already wiped out these martial arts. Here, I want to ask a question: What was the reason for the demise of the Ming Dynasty? In the history of China, the population and territory of the Han Dynasty are second to none. How did this dynasty, which once sailed seven times to the West, fall apart almost overnight and be bullied to such an extent by a small tribe? What is all this about? What is the reason for all this?

Take the son of Emperor Wanli, Axe King, as an example. At the time of fief, Wanli intended to give him 40 thousand hectares of fertile land as welfare, but under the opposition of ministers, it was reduced to 20 thousand hectares. Generally, Zhu's descendants are also supported by Zonglu, and all expenses are solved by local finance. With the passage of time, the population of Zhu clan grew rapidly. By the middle and late Ming Dynasty, the problem of Zonglu had become a huge financial burden of the Ming Dynasty, and even an equal event with the national frontier defense. The same is true of the so-called "frontier defense outside, vassals inside". According to Records of Food in the History of Ming Dynasty, at the end of Jiajing, Lin Runyan, an imperial envoy, said, "There is nothing in the world that is inferior to Zonglu's concern. The world provided 4 million mangoku for the food in the capital, while the government provided 8.353 million mangoku. At that time, hundreds of millions of agricultural people in the Ming Dynasty worked hard, which really made these parasites unable to eat and chew. It can be said that the finance of the Ming Dynasty was largely dragged down by this moth group.

What is even more frightening is that the main tax revenue of the Ming Dynasty came from the bottom farmers. On the one hand, elites and local tyrants continue to annex land, on the other hand, they further pass on the taxes they should bear to the poor by "flying". At the end of the Ming Dynasty, when the agricultural harvest in the northwest was completely destroyed by the phenomenon of small glaciers, a large number of farmers who could not survive finally began to revolt, including a famous person named Li Zicheng. Moreover, in order to suppress bandits, the court further increased taxes, which led to more farmers going bankrupt, and finally turned the rebellion into a movement that was almost universal. As a result, the luck of the Ming dynasty was almost here.

In fact, there was a world-famous protective barrier in the Ming Dynasty-the Great Wall. Although it is well known that Qin Shihuang built the Great Wall, in fact, almost all the Great Wall we see now was built in the Ming Dynasty. The Great Wall, also known as the side wall in the Ming Dynasty, was a strategic fortification built by the Ming Dynasty to prevent the Mongols in Mobei from going south. In its nearly 300-year history, the conquest of the Ming Dynasty almost never stopped the construction of the Great Wall, with a total length of more than 6,000 kilometers. This was an amazing project under the technical conditions at that time, and it also brought great pressure to the finance of the Ming Dynasty. Unfortunately, this expensive project doesn't seem to bring them the stability they expected. Due to the simple and rude management policy of the Ming Dynasty towards ethnic minorities, Tatar, Wala and Jianzhou Nuzhen in the north often entered the customs and harassed them. The Great Wall of Wan Li is like a broken sieve, which can't stop riding from the north, resulting in the land in the north of the Ming Dynasty being repeatedly ravaged and even occupied for a long time. Since Yongle, the military strength of the Ming Dynasty has been weakened and corrupted due to serious institutional defects, which has aggravated this situation.

One of the most famous events in the history of the Ming Dynasty should be the "Civil Revolution" in Ming Yingzong. An elite unit of 200,000 troops led by the emperor himself (Beijing battalion) was wiped out by more than 20,000 Mongolian cavalry on his own territory, and the emperor himself was captured alive. This is a unique joke in the world military history, but it happened vividly in our history. Before the Qing dynasty entered the customs, Beijing, the capital of the Ming dynasty, was directly threatened by the enemy for three times, and the Great Wall, known as the eighth wonder of the world, was almost completely decorated. The Ming Dynasty has long since perished, but the majestic Great Wall still stands. When countless tourists climbed the Great Wall and lamented its majestic momentum, what would they think if they knew these historical truths clearly?

In the nearly 300-year history, the Qing Dynasty, which replaced the Ming Dynasty to rule China, hardly added a brick or tile to the Great Wall. But Mongolia has no chance to enter the Central Plains through aggression. The Qing Dynasty did not rely on the so-called Great Wall guards, but organized troops to put the battlefield outside the Great Wall, truly defeated the enemy, and then incorporated the whole of Mongolia and Xinjiang into its own territory.

Therefore, there is no hope for large companies that have lost their enterprising spirit and lie behind the so-called barriers of technology, patents and market share. There is no fortress that will never fall, and attack is the best defense.

Since the death of Yongle Emperor Judy, his descendants have different personalities, but few truly talented people can act arbitrarily and reorganize the rivers and mountains. On the contrary, there are many stooges like Zheng De, Jiajing, Wanli and Apocalypse. The Ming dynasty lasted for more than 200 years, entirely because of its well-off family. Unfortunately, at the end of the Ming Dynasty, the building was crumbling and about to collapse, but another abolished emperor, Chongzhen, was ushered in. God's eyes are really wide open.

To be exact, Emperor Chongzhen was diligent in his attitude, but he was just a mediocre monarch because of his huge defects in character and ability. If he changed to a relatively stable era, he might be able to become Emperor Taiping with the shadow of his ancestors, and his reputation in history was not bad, but when the Ming Dynasty came into his hands, it was already a mess. So he had to work hard to deal with it. Unfortunately, the harder he works, the more chaotic he becomes. Apart from killing Wei Zhongxian at the beginning of his administration, his other work hardly played any positive role, if not made things worse.

Killing Yuan Chonghuan is one of the most famous examples, and the famous story that he was in power 17 and the cabinet assistant changed 50 times reflects his mentality of quick success and instant benefit. Not only that, he is also a person in power who likes to evade responsibility. At the beginning, in the case of erosion in the Ming Dynasty, there was a great opportunity to talk to Huang Taiji. It was a very shameful thing to say at that time, but it was of great benefit to relieve the military pressure of the Ming Dynasty and gain breathing time. Chongzhen secretly planned peace talks with Chen Xinjia, the minister of the Ministry of War, but the news leaked out. When the opposition questioned, Chongzhen put the blame on Chen Xinjia and killed him. As a result, border affairs have been nibbling away, and on the other hand, no minister is willing to work for him.

Due to the incompetence and evasion of responsibility of the top decision makers, the whole Ming Dynasty was almost in a state of semi-paralysis. During this period, not only Li Zicheng, Zhang and other insurgents were overwhelmed, but also the Manchu army outside the customs continued to invade the mainland. Before Wu Sangui opened Shanhaiguan, Huang Taiji's troops had made five detours to enter Shanhaiguan. Apart from the attack into the city from the north, Ren Hezheng had little real resistance. Especially in the ninth year of Chongzhen, after the Qing army entered the customs, it was 12 city, and all 56 battles were won, winning179,800 people and livestock. Under such circumstances, the Ministry of War of the Ming Dynasty personally led the army, and did not dare to resist, just followed the Qing army. In order to humiliate the Ming Dynasty, the Qing army deliberately "decorated vehicles with bright colors and played music to go home" when calmly escorting the plundered 6.5438+0.8 million people and animals, and cut off the bark of the tree and wrote "All officials are free to send". The whole process lasted for 4 days, but Chongzhen was still sitting in Beijing. When the senior leaders of a huge organization have serious problems, the whole organization will be like a stranded whale, seemingly powerful, even extremely difficult to turn over, and will only be slaughtered.

Funnily enough, Chongzhen finally made up his mind to use personal expedition. However, when he issued a document saying that "I was the head of the Sixth Division and the state took care of the Prince", Li Zicheng's troops had already breached the outer city of Beijing. Just a few hours later, he hanged himself.

In fact, when Li Zicheng's army approached Peking, the situation was not so bad. The Ming Dynasty still had a chance to withdraw its capital from Nanjing to save half of the country, and then waited for an opportunity to fight back. However, the struggle and wrestling of various interests once again played a huge role, pulling the Ming Dynasty into the abyss. Chongzhen originally wanted to escape to Nanjing to save his life, and then he dared not make a decision alone at such a critical moment. In order to save face, he hoped that the minister could help. According to his idea, it is best for ministers to collectively petition him to move to Nanjing, so that he can escape with some face. Then the ministers have their own plans. "The emperor to ministers say a word. Ministers are afraid of the emperor and dare not make any noise. They are worried that if the eviction belongs to the left-behind, or if the capital can't keep after eviction, the emperor will blame the Lord. No one has made a decision. "

In their respective positions, some ministers insisted that the emperor stick to the country, some suggested going south, and some suggested that the compromised prince should go to Nanjing to be in power first, but they could not reach an agreement. Chongzhen's personal thoughts and ministers' small abacus are intertwined and wrangled with each other, and precious time is finally spent in various prevarications and delays. When Li Zicheng's army occupied Beijing, Chongzhen's body and his sons fell into the hands of Wang Chuang, and the trough boat already prepared outside the city floated on the sea alone, waiting for its owner no longer.

Because all the children in Chongzhen were caught, they failed to escape to Nanjing, which caused great trouble for Nan Ming's counterattack. Without the legal heir recognized by the world, there were many Nanming emperors at once, but there was no unified command. Undoubtedly, the strength of Nanming was constantly consumed in various internal struggles, and was finally eaten by the Manchu army one by one. There was no chance to turn over in the Ming Dynasty.

To be fair, in the 60-year-long confrontation between Ming and Qing Dynasties, the Ming Dynasty did not have the opportunity to solve the Liaodong problem in one fell swoop. In fact, although the cavalry of Jianzhou Jurchen was brave, the Manchu had a fatal weakness, that is, the population was thin. As I said before, the population before the Manchu entered the customs was less than one million, and only a few hundred thousand people were available for combat. It can be said that as long as the Ming Dynasty can seriously organize a campaign and completely defeat the Manchu once, it will lead to the failure of Jianzhou Jurchen in the next 20 years, which is likely to be completely eaten by neighboring Mongolia or North Korea. However, in the "wonderful" Ming dynasty, in fact, in the whole 60 years, no victory was achieved. The two battles of Ningyuan and Ningjin, which were barely victories, only stopped the momentum of the Manchu attack, and although it also seriously reduced its offensive edge, it failed to give it any substantive blow.

16 19 The Battle of Salhu was the first large-scale battle in the Ming and Qing Dynasties, and it was also a battle that completely exposed the military strength of the Ming Dynasty. It can be said that all kinds of disadvantages accumulated in the military system over the past 200 years broke out in the Ming Dynasty. At that time, there were about100000 troops in the Ming Dynasty, and the number of Jurchen was about 60000, which had certain advantages over the Ming Dynasty, and the Ming Dynasty had all kinds of advanced firearms at that time. Although Manchu occupied a favorable geographical position, the Ming Dynasty still had a slight advantage in comprehensive conditions.