Early Modern China 95
sixteenth century, the “Single Whip Tax Reform,” combining land and
labor taxes into one annual payment in silver, increased effi ciency but
did little to ease the growing tax burden on the poor.
To make matters worse, the Ming government in the early seven-
teenth century became increasingly paralyzed by deadly factional strug-
gles between powerful eunuchs and crusading scholar-offi cials. Wei
Zhongxian, the most notorious eunuch of the late Ming, gained control
of the court in 1625. He lashed out against the Donglin Movement
(named after the Donglin Academy where moralistic, reform-minded
scholars studied) and had thousands of scholar-offi cials jailed, tortured,
and killed. When a new sixteen-year-old emperor came to the throne in
1627, he soon arrested Wei, who then hanged himself in prison. This
gave offi cials some hope that the dynasty might be saved, but the Ming
decline had progressed too far to be reversed. The state was nearly
bankrupted already in the 1590s by providing aid to Korea to help it
resist attacks from Japan, and by the 1620s, the Ming government had
lost the capacity to keep peace within its own borders.
Famines in northwest China provoked peasant uprisings beginning
in 1628, and by 1634 large areas were under the control of rebel bands
of peasant soldiers, led by two different bandit leaders, Li Zicheng and
Zhang Xianzhong. In 1639, Japanese and Spanish merchants both
stopped shipping silver to China, which quickly drove up the price of
silver and led to many riots by peasants against high rents and high
taxes. In 1642, anti-Ming rebels destroyed the dikes of the Yellow River,
leading to extensive fl oods, famine, and a smallpox epidemic.
All the unrest came to a head in 1644, when Li Zicheng’s forces cap-
tured Beijing and the last Ming emperor hung himself on a hill overlook-
ing the Forbidden City. Li’s forces were badly disciplined and proceeded
to terrify the population of Beijing and surrounding areas. The strongest
military commander under the Ming, Wu Sangui, guarded the Great
Wall north of Beijing. Although the details remain murky, Wu invited
a powerful army of Manchu troops to join him in taking Beijing back
from the rebel forces. The Manchus were descended from the Jurchen
Jin dynasty rulers who had taken north China during Song times. They
had already declared a Chinese-style Jin dynasty in 1616, and in 1636
they changed the name of their dynasty to the Qing, meaning pure.^5
Wu Sangui surely knew of the power and ambition of the Man-
chus, though his initial invitation to them to breach the Great Wall was
stated in terms promising only wealth in exchange for helping defend
the Ming state. In any case, it quickly became apparent that the Man-
chu forces were the most capable and well-disciplined in the empire.