Chongzhen Emperor Zhu Youzhen as the Ming Dynasty's emperor of the country, he is very different from other emperors in history, Chongzhen reigned for 18 years, during which he worked hard, diligent and loved the people. However, during his reign, the heavens were not beautiful, and during his reign of 18 years, 9 years of drought and 9 years of waterlogging, the people were miserable, and the court was helpless in the face of such a serious natural disaster. The people couldn't bear it anymore, and they rose up against the Ming Dynasty, and finally Li Zicheng broke through the capital, and Chongzhen also hanged himself in the coal mountain. In fact, in addition to drought and flood disasters, there was also a huge plague disaster in the Ming Dynasty, and this plague disaster also had a significant impact on the direction of the Ming Dynasty.
Relying on the progress of modern science, we know that the so-called plague is actually a disease caused by a bacterium called "Yersinia pestis", which originally existed in mice, but because rats often haunt the daily living places of human beings, fleas on rats may become a springboard for the spread of this bacterium, thus entering the human body, and after being infected, it will cause bubonic plague, pneumonic plague and septicaemic plague and other epidemics, which are basically incurable under the medical conditions at that time. The mortality rate of people infected with bubonic plague is as high as 75 percent, and the mortality rate of those infected with pneumonic plague is an astonishing close to 100 percent.
Generally speaking, the plague exists, but it is not so simple to break out. The outbreak of such a huge plague in the last years of the Ming Dynasty was actually foreshadowed very early. As early as the Wanli period, due to the global iceberg activity, the climate in North China changed, and there was a nationwide lack of rainfall, and droughts became frequent. During the Wanli period alone, there were three major droughts, in which the dead animals and the corpses of people led to the spread of plague and disease.
At the same time, due to the large reduction of grain production, many people moved north to some places that were originally grasslands to reclaim land, but some rats that originally lived in the northern grasslands invaded the fields in the south as alien species, and these rats multiplied. However, the subsequent drought not only starved the people, but also caused a large number of rats to flee in search of food, and even many hungry homeless people chose to eat rats to satisfy their hunger. Eventually, the plague was triggered, and then the plague-infected homeless people traveled everywhere and spread the bacteria.
The plague first broke out in Datong, Shanxi, and then spread to Taiyuan, Xinzhou and other places in Shanxi, many people chose to flee in order to avoid the plague, and many places even became an empty city, but this practice instead exacerbated the spread of the plague, and finally even spread to the capital, according to incomplete statistics, the number of people who died of the plague at the end of the Ming Dynasty was as many as 10 million, and almost a quarter of the population of the capital Beijing died, and the reason for the demise of the Ming Dynasty was not only the war factor, the plague was also one of the important reasons.