In 1559, Gao Guiying was born in an ordinary Shanxi farming family. With her extraordinary intelligence, she gradually grew into a beautiful, generous, and well-informed intellectual woman. However, the good times did not last long, and the tragedy of the death of both parents made Gao Guiying, who was still a child, face this cruel world alone.
This huge painful blow did not break the young Gao Guiying. Instead, she relied on her tenacity to thrive in these turbulent times. Until 1630, Gao Guiying fell into the tragic whirlpool of fate again, and her second husband was also killed in the war.
At this time, Gao Guiying was no longer the powerless little girl she was back then. She chose to continue to support herself with her two young children and find her own way out of this troubled world. When he heard that Li Zicheng's rebel army was coming nearby, Gao Guiying resolutely decided to marry this iron-blooded warlord. Because she realized that this might be a great opportunity for her to repay the country.
Since then, Gao Guiying and Li Zicheng have become husband and wife. In this long-distance love run through ups and downs, Gao Guiying is not only Li Zicheng's loyal partner, but also his most powerful assistant. It can be said that this legendary woman used her life to write this immortal epic of resistance.
With the assistance of Gao Guiying, Li Zicheng's rebel army grew in momentum. In 1641, he defeated the Ming army and other rebel forces in Shaanxi, and his prestige was greatly enhanced. A year later, Gao Guiying made great contributions and helped her husband capture the strategic Tongguan. This marked the beginning of Li Zicheng's de facto rule over Shaanxi.
However, the good times did not last long, and soon after Li Zicheng occupied Xi'an in 1643, he was hit by the Qing soldiers entering the customs and the traitors. The Great Shunyi Army was defeated and retreated, and Gao Guiying and her husband also had to face the possibility of failure in the uprising. So Li Zicheng decided to make a desperate gamble and led an army of 20,000 to directly attack the Forbidden City in Beijing and seize the throne of the Ming Dynasty.
In this fateful battle, Gao Guiying once again stepped forward and became Li Zicheng's staunchest supporter. Sure enough, they captured the city of Beijing as scheduled, and Li Zicheng established the country and became emperor. However, the days of the Great Shun Empire's hegemony in the Forbidden City were soon interrupted by enemy forces. The Manchu Qing Dynasty entered the customs and the alliance of the traitors made Gao Guiying and Li Zicheng have to flee in a hurry.
In May 1644, Li Zicheng was captured in a bloody battle with the enemy and was killed soon after. This was undoubtedly a heavy blow to Gao Guiying, but she did not give up the idea of resisting. led the remnants of Dashun to hide in Taihang Mountain, Shanxi, and Gao Guiying still cared about the unfinished cause of independent nation-building.
Soon the Qing army, with 150,000 troops, arrived, intending to completely annihilate the rest of Li Zicheng's army. In the face of such a huge disparity in the power of the enemy and the enemy, the normal choice is to surrender or flee for your life. But Gao Guiying is unwilling, she doesn't want to be the ghost of this troubled world.
So Gao Guiying, dressed in red, led a few hundred people to confront the mighty Qing army. It was definitely a battle that was doomed to fail. When Gao Guiying understood that the general trend had gone, she chose the heroic act of igniting the ** without the slightest hesitation, even if it meant a catastrophe.
It should be noted that Gao Guiying, as a generation of heroines, could have let go of her obsession with the dream of founding the country and lived. But her integrity and pride finally made her choose to accompany her husband and end the curtain with peerless beauty. This is certainly singable and crying, but it also makes people sigh that Gao Guiying's fate is ill-fated, and fate eventually becomes a victim of this troubled era.
Gao Guiying's life is both a legend and a tragedy. She and Li Zicheng lost not only their lives, but also their ideals and expectations for the country. They may have failed, but it was absolutely blazing and shaking this troubled world.
Just like the last swan song of Gao Guiying's life, we should also respect the choice of every life. Because behind every choice, there is a thousand sails of ambition.
Gao Guiying's proud and free life is really worth learning from and remembering Xi. What do you think of the life of this legendary woman in troubled times?What does her choice mean to you?