In the first month of 1644, Beijing was hit by a rare gale, which shook the house and lifted sand, and it was not visible at hand. Three and a half months later, on the day Li Zicheng broke through the city of Beijing, Zhu Youzhen, the Chongzhen Emperor of the Ming Dynasty, hanged himself on the coal mountain, accompanied only by a eunuch, Wang Chengen.
It was a bleak scene. And in the fifth lunar month of 1645, the Qing army approached Nanjing. Liu Ru persuaded Qian Qianyi to throw himself into the water with her to die for the country, but Qian Qianyi said that the water was too cold.
This history seems to be only ruthless and unforgettable.
The famous historian Shi Jingqian once said that the Chinese Empire in 1600 was the most extensive and experienced country in the world at that time, but it only took less than 50 years to destroy its dynasty under violence.
In the last years of the Ming Dynasty, social unrest and frequent natural disasters caused people to worry about the future of the dynasty.
According to statistics, during the 17 years of the reign of Emperor Chongzhen, there were 14 major droughts throughout the country, and there were records of "starvation all over the wilderness" and "cannibalism" all over the country, which were shocking.
While droughts are not uncommon in Chinese history, the scope and severity of droughts in the mid-to-late Ming Dynasty were greater than in any previous dynasty.
The 13-year drought in Chongzhen reached the 1800 year, making it the worst drought event in China since the Han Dynasty.
The two drought events before and after this period were also extremely serious: the drought in the 12th year of Chongzhen was once in a century, and the drought in the 14th year of Chongzhen was once in 500 years. The drought has affected North China and Northwest China, and the affected population is extremely widespread.
Many localities have been hit by disasters year after year, and the people's production and life have suffered four, five, and even nine consecutive blows.
The drought in the north was severe, and the official memo depicted the disaster in northern Shaanxi, with scorched vegetation, inhabitants eating bark and even stones, babies being abandoned, cannibalism in famine, plague spreading, and many deaths.
The success of Li Zicheng's rebellion was inseparable from the catalysis of extreme weather. At the end of the Ming Dynasty, China was in the cold period of the Xiaoice Age, and the temperature was about 2 lower than now. This has hit agricultural production hard and weakened the country's economy.
In this case, many people choose to take risks and get together as thieves. The peasant uprising broke out first in northern Shaanxi, the hardest-hit country.
After Li Zicheng defected to Gao Yingxiang, whenever the regular army of the imperial court was about to succeed in suppressing the bandits, the cold and famine would push more people into the lineup of the rebel army, forming a situation of "wildfires are inexhaustible".
Li Zicheng's team continued to expand, and his actions in Henan made the slogan of "Welcoming the King, Not Paying Food" have great power.
Overall, extreme weather played a catalytic and amplifying role in the success of Li Zicheng's rebellion.
The reason why Nurhachi waged war against the Ming Dynasty was to flee famine and plunder resources. During that period, the Jurchen people in the northeast rose strongly under the drive of the cold climate, and finally realized the change of dynasties in the Ming and Qing dynasties.
This process may seem accidental, but in fact it is inevitably linked. Long before Nurhachi established the Houjin regime, his army and people were already threatened by a severe food crisis.
This continued until the Qing army entered Beijing. Scholars have found that climate change is closely related to the southward migration of nomadic peoples.
During the cold climate, the land was prone to desertification, the growth of pasture grass was affected, and the survival of nomadic people was threatened, and they had to move south in order to survive, which brought a threat to the agricultural peoples of the Central Plains.
Similarly, Huang Taiji also used the war to obtain more food, and formed a good relationship with the Han Chinese, winning the support of the Han in Liaodong.
February**Dynamic Incentive Plan Chongzhen, by contrast, was too stubborn, demanding donations from ministers and relatives of the emperor, but these people were unwilling to give generously.
After Li Zicheng's rebel army captured Beijing, these magnates were forced to hand over large sums of money. "The king is not the king of the dead country, and the ministers are the ministers of the dead country", this is the reason why the Ming Dynasty ushered in a famine in the changing minds of the people.
In the face of natural disasters, different ways of dealing with them led to diametrically opposite outcomes, which is the key password of the Ming and Qing dynasties.
Was Emperor Chongzhen responsible for the demise of the Ming Dynasty? Some historians have studied the fall of the Ming Dynasty as part of the "global crisis of the seventeenth century". This period was indeed one of the most turbulent in the history of the world.
According to incomplete statistics, between 1635 and 1666, there were large-scale rebellions and revolutions around the world, including 27 in Europe, 7 in the Americas, and 15 in Asia and Africa, including the Li Zicheng uprising.
Climate change was the cause of the "seventeenth-century global crisis", entering the cold period of the Xiaoice Age. Some scholars combine natural disasters with man-made disasters in the context of climate change, analyze the death of the Ming Dynasty from a quantitative perspective, and calculate that natural disasters account for 55 factors, of which drought, locusts, and water contribute to each other. Man-made war factors accounted for 45 of them, of which the contribution rates of internal rebellion, inter-ethnic war, and foreign war were respectively.
The North China Plain and its environs during the Ming Dynasty were sensitive areas in response to climate change. The cold climate at the end of the Ming Dynasty led to frequent disasters, sharp reductions in resources and environmental degradation, which directly led to the reduction of grain production, soaring rice prices and the spread of famine, and indirectly triggered wars and financial collapse.
For agricultural societies with underdeveloped productivity, the alternative path is to adapt the structure of human society to changes in the external environment, such as changing dynasties.
The wheels of history are rolling forward, and it is not difficult to find that the fall of the Ming Dynasty was not an isolated event. In fact, the rise and fall of the Ming Dynasty regime is inextricably linked to climate change.
During the period of cold weather around 1350, a peasant uprising broke out at the end of the Yuan Dynasty, laying the foundation for Zhu Yuanzhang's ascension to the throne. In the following 1368, Zhu Yuanzhang captured the capital of Yuan, and a new dynasty was born.
Similarly, other important dynasties have not escaped the influence of climatic factors. For example, the decline of the Tang Dynasty was caused by droughts caused by the cold period, while the Jin Dynasty and the Song Dynasty occurred during periods of sudden cold weather.
Here, we are only providing an interpretive perspective on the change of dynasties, in addition to the human factor, climate change is also one of the important influencing factors.
But this does not mean that abrupt climate change was the only cause of the fall of the Ming Dynasty or the decline of other dynasties.