The ancient city of Kaifeng, as the Tokyo of the Great Song Dynasty, the most prosperous and wealthy dynastic capital in Chinese history, once left the Han nation with painful memories of the "shame of Jingkang".

More than 500 years later, this majestic city in the Central Plains was once again naked under the front of the peasant uprising. Little did he know that destruction was doomed. From then on, he could only be reduced to a foil for other cities in the Central Plains.

The thirteenth year of Chongzhen, in the history of the Ming Dynasty, was the culmination of natural disasters.

This year, the famine spread almost all over the country. Henan, as the hinterland of the Ming Dynasty, became the core of the famine. Three consecutive years of drought and locust plagues have caused a sharp contraction in agricultural production, and in many places there has even been no harvest. The increase in distribution and taxation of the imperial court continued unabated, and this terrible atrophy created a vicious circle.

The final result was that even though the drought and locust plague in Chongzhen's 14 years had improved, there was still no land and no people, and it was still barren.

In many counties with 10,000 households, more than 8,000 people died or fled, and the population loss reached 80 percent, and the remaining 20 percent had to bear 10 percent of the tax (Note 1).

This is naturally impossible, so the remaining 20% of the population has no choice but to flee with their families.

The grain prices in various counties in Henan range from 1,000 yuan to 2,700 yuan to 2,700 yuan to rice, and 2,900 yuan to 2,900 yuan to rice. As for the other staple food wheat in Henan Province, it is more expensive than rice, and there are many counties with about 3,000 wheat buckets.

In the vast countryside, there is no one during the day, and the crying rises and falls at night; A small number of state capitals, tens of thousands of displaced people at the city gates, can hardly intervene; On several avenues in the province, bones can be seen everywhere.

Fathers eat their sons, wives eat their fathers, brothers, friends, neighbors eat each other, abound;

Died of starvation on the side of the road, and turned into a skeleton in the blink of an eye.

If no one is gone, he must be in the pot;

Passers-by are in the wild, and every booby trap is fed.

Cao Cao's poem: "The white bones are exposed in the wild, and there is no rooster crowing for thousands of miles." The people are left behind, and the thought breaks people's intestines. It has become the most appropriate portrayal of Henan in this era.

Under natural and man-made disasters, if the people did not want their families to starve to death, they either joined the army of refugees and poured into various cities; Either rise up and take up arms to become a "thief" in the mouth of the imperial court.

Of course, those who are forced to rebel by survival can be broadly divided into two categories. One mainly robbed the court and the gentry, and used the money and grain to feed more poor people; One category mainly robs people who are weaker and poorer than them. The logic of these people is that either I eat people or people eat me. Eat people in the morning and evening, it's better to start first.

was called a "thief" by the imperial court, and Li Zicheng, the king of Chuang, was probably the former type of person; In Henan Province, all kinds of poles and bandit armies are surging, and there are 10,000 people in ten days. They are either the former or the latter.

……

After Li Zicheng's defeat at Tongguan Nanyuan (Note 2), he disappeared between Shangshan and Luoshui.

Around September and October of the thirteenth year of Chongzhen, Li Zicheng led hundreds of people from Shangluo to Yu to carry out his first tentative attack after his hibernation. This tentative attack was only one or two months earlier than Zhu Pingjian, the son of Shu, who crossed the Ming Dynasty. The resounding victory of the offensive surprised Li Zicheng. Breaking more than 10 walled forts in a row not only solved the food problem, but also accompanied by more than 100,000 hungry people.

But after Li Zicheng won the first battle, he still carefully hid again, and then saw the situation clearly and attacked again. This time, he joined forces with poor leaders such as Yidougu and Clay Jar, and even the five prefectures of Kelushan, Jiaxian, Yiyang, Yiyang, and Yongning (now Luoning County) took Zhu Caiyuqing, the king of Wan'an, who was captured in Yongning, and the landlord Hao Gentry to Xiguan to "pass the hall", and executed them after interrogation.

After that, Li Zicheng connected the county towns of Keyanshi, Lingbao, Xin'an, and Baofeng to clear the periphery of Luoyang and prepare for the attack on Luoyang in one fell swoop.

On the twenty-first day of the first month of the fourteenth year, Li Zicheng achieved a great victory:

Under the response of the mutinous officers and soldiers, they occupied Luoyang, the "ancient capital of the Nine Dynasties", in only one day, and captured Zhu Changxun, the king of Fu.

In history, Zhu Changxun, the blessed king, was captured, "terrible, begging for his life", but he still did not escape the fate of being stewed.

The great victory in the Battle of Luoyang allowed Li Zicheng to gain huge benefits. In addition to economic and military gains, there are also gains in political prestige. From then on, the rebel leaders who were older than him, or who were his contemporaries, gradually looked up to him; And the poor and the poor, who had benefited from the benefits, gathered under his command. As for the various armed forces in those places, they have taken refuge in him one after another, like hundreds of rivers to the sea.

Li Zicheng, who came back, reappeared on the land of the Central Plains with a dazzling attitude:

His army grew at a rate of almost double in ten days, and he himself changed his previous practice of destroying cities and slaughtering people, not only keeping his official position, but also consciously and voluntarily taking himself as the spokesman for the poor people.

To this end, he put forward a famous slogan: "Whoever kills one person is like killing my father, and whoever fornicates one is like adultering my mother!" ”。

Zheng Lian recorded Li Zicheng's lightning rise since then, as well as his ambition to win the world, in his record of "The Chronicle of the Yu Change", in his "Yu Change Chronicle":

"Those who are hungry near and far respond to the flags, day and night. One call for millions, and its momentum is unstoppable. Since then, there is no strong city that has passed, and there is no strong enemy encountered, and all the generals are looking forward to the wind. That is, those who uphold the Yue promise themselves with their own reputation, but they only give their bodies to the enemy. ”

Zheng Lian's description of the situation is roughly accurate, except in one place: Kaifeng.

……

When he learned of the attack on Luoyang, the hapless governor of Henan, Li Xianfeng, was chasing down local thieves in the Huaiqing area, north of the Yellow River. Chen Yongfu, the Kaifeng garrison who was worried about the accident of the Fu Domain, hurriedly went out of the city and led the army to reinforce Luoyang. However, no one expected that Luoyang Xiongcheng would fall overnight.

Li Zicheng learned that Kaifeng's official army was coming to Luoyang, and Kaifeng was empty, so he immediately made a bold decision: abandon Luoyang and attack Kaifeng.

After three days and nights of rapid marching, Li Zicheng led an army of 30,000 to Kaifeng in mid-February. More than 100 peasant troops disguised as official soldiers had rushed to the west gate.

However, the surprise attack plan was ruined by an inexplicable traffic jam near the city gate. The gates slammed shut, allowing the daring surprise attack to fail.

Li Zicheng had no choice but to turn a surprise attack into a strong attack. But this time, he encountered two important and unexpected headwinds.

First, the clans, civil and military, gentry and citizens in Kaifeng City share the same hatred and hatred for the thieves.

The peasant army's wanton looting in Henan caused many state and county gentry to flee into the provincial capital. They hated the peasant army to the core, and there was no way back here, so they acted as the backbone of the anti-thief vanguard.

The citizens of Kaifeng are another anti-thief force. Kaifeng is a consumer city, and the industry is dominated by the service industry and commerce of the Zhou Wangfu. Once the Ming Dynasty clan and government are finished, it will inevitably have a disastrous impact on Kaifeng's industry. Besides, since the Chongzhen years, Henan Province has not been peaceful. The impression of provincial and urban residents of the thieves has long been ingrained, and it is not something that can be changed by Li Zicheng shouting a few slogans in Luoyang. Therefore, the citizens of Kaifeng, under the organization of the Henan government, actively went to the city to participate in the war.

IN TERMS OF UNITING INTERNAL FORCES, ZHU GONGQI (XIAO), KING OF ZHOU, ALSO PLAYED AN EXCELLENT LEADING ROLE. The king of Zhou was ruthless, moved the silver in the palace to the city, and issued a shocking high reward: go out of the city and behead fifty taels of the first class; Shoot a thief thirty taels; Ten taels of wounded thieves. In order to get rich, and also to buy food with silver to save their lives, the displaced people in the city went to the city one after another to hold on.

The second is that the city of Kaifeng is strong, the city is large and rich, and the troops of the army are insufficient.

Kaifeng City was once the former capital of King Xiaoming. Since the first year of Taizu, he has also been a companion for nearly ten years. Therefore, the construction scale of Kaifeng City is very large: one hundred and ninety steps in twenty-one miles around the city, three zhang and five feet high, and two zhang and one foot wide. The moat is one zhang deep and five zhang wide. There are five gates, and each gate is built with three moon castles (urn castles). There are four corner towers in the city, eighty-four enemy platforms, and eighty-one police shops.

During the three hundred years of the Ming Dynasty, Kaifeng, as the capital city of Henan Province, was quite prosperous. The population was dense, originally three or four hundred thousand, and the influx of displaced people is unknown. All industries are prosperous and rich in accumulation.

There were only more than 30,000 people in the army, and it was impossible to make a comprehensive siege of a fortified city like Kaifeng, so it could only focus on Xicheng in the direction of the march. In order to dare to take Kaifeng before the arrival of reinforcements, the Chuang army once used bows and arrows to open the way to attack the city, and "arrows were inserted into the city like hedgehogs" one day and night.

At this time, Chen Yongfu, who was reinforcing Luoyang, learned that the nest had been attacked, and was shocked, so he retreated from Luoyang at a faster speed, and entered the city from Kaifeng Water Gate in only two days and nights.

The fleeting opportunity was lost, Li Zicheng was anxious, and took a closer look at the Kaifeng city defense, and was shot in the left eye by a random arrow, and since then he has been blind in one eye and has become Li blind.

The commander was seriously injured, and the army had to take the initiative to retreat and return to the areas of Dengfeng, Mixian and Song counties in western Henan to rest and recuperate. After the defeat of the first battle of Kaifeng, Li Zicheng used the remaining eyes to re-examine the mobile troops of the official army. He knew in his heart that as long as the living force of the official army was eliminated, Kaifeng City would mature sooner or later.

……

In July of the 14th year of Chongzhen, when Zhu Pingjin, the son of Shu, was reorganizing and training the army in Songlin Mountain, the combined forces of Li Zicheng and Luo Rucai defeated the soldiers and horses of Fu Zonglong and Yang Wenyue, the two governors, in Xiangcheng. In the months that followed, the combined forces of Li and Luo took advantage of the victory to pursue, swept through the prefectures and counties of Nanyang, Henan, and Kaifeng, killed the Tang king, and the time was ripe to attack Kaifeng again.

In the second attack on Kaifeng, the Li and Luo coalition armies, who were determined to win, came to take revenge with 500,000 soldiers and horses. Among them were 30,000 elite soldiers, as well as a new siege method that they had been preparing for a long time: the method of digging and blasting the city.

However, this time Kaifeng City is also prepared.

At the end of December of the 14th year of Chongzhen, the combined army of Li and Luo arrived at the city of Kaifeng. Outside the northern city, there are 3,000 Nanyang reinforcements brought by the superintendent Ding Qirui. As soon as the battle was engaged, the Nanyang soldiers were defeated. Most of them surrendered to the intruding army, while the other rushed into the city with their pursuers.

When Wang Xie (XIE) of Xiangfu Zhixian County saw that something was wrong, he hurriedly ordered to throw earth and plug the door to block the pursuers. When the superintendent Ding Qirui was still hesitating to deal with the thousands of men and horses in the urn city, Wang Xie had already ordered everyone to throw the torch together, burning the officials and thieves in the urn city to the black.

The end of the deserters is like this, and the end of the surrender is even more tragic.

Wang Xie was not afraid of hurting Tianhe, and made a decisive move, because he was worried that the thief army would sneak into the city. Li Zicheng also had this concern, so he ordered all the troops to be beheaded. As a result, the army that Inspector Ding Qirui brought to Kaifeng ended completely with such a tragic ending.

In recent days, nearly 10,000 peasant troops have taken turns attacking and digging the city wall under the cover of more than 100 cannons. In the face of the enemy towers in the city, the stones and gunpowder bags thrown from the overhangs, the peasant army suffered heavy casualties. However, King Chuang issued a strict order that each person must bring back three city bricks every day, and those who are not enough will be corrected. Last night, dozens of stones of gunpowder had been filled into a large hole under the city wall that was more than 10 zhang deep and more than 10 zhang wide.

In the early morning of the thirteenth day of the first month of the fifteenth year of Chongzhen, the general attack on Kaifeng began.

Li Zicheng and Luo Rucai's peasant army lined up in the southeast corner of Kaifeng City, and more than 1,000 elite cavalry infantry were deployed in front of the city.

Facing the newborn morning sun in winter, a tall man wearing a felt hat, a cloak, and riding a black horse appeared on the high ground outside Kaifeng City. He was surrounded by a large group of generals and scribes. He squinted one eye, glancing coldly at the city that had left him with pain, an incomparable fortitude frozen in the angular face.

He stopped and carefully inspected the deployment of the army, feeling very satisfied. The soldiers were gearing up and their fighting spirit was flying. So he nodded slightly, and a junior colonel who had been watching him immediately took action, speeding forward and waving the small flag in his hand.

Dozens of breaths later, with an earth-shattering loud bang, the tall walls of Kaifeng City were like volcanoes, erupting red flames, black smoke and white dust, and they flew into the sky with bricks, lumps of dirt and many human stumps.

The walls are groaning! The earth is trembling!

The uncontrollable uncontrollable release of the power of nature made this tall man from northern Shaanxi who did not believe in gods and fearless the sky feel deep fear for the first time.

Note 1: A large number of local chronicles and other historical materials prove that the population loss in Henan at the end of the Ming Dynasty was extremely staggering. However, due to Henan's location in the Central Plains, the population is highly mobile, and it is relatively easy to replenish, so the loss of population is likely to be seriously underestimated in the assessment of historians.

Note 2: Some historians deny the defeat of Li Zichengtong Guan Nanyuan. There are many reasons for this, and there is also some evidence. But it is undeniable that Li Zicheng did face the danger of destruction.