The Ming Dynasty: Last Native Han Chinese Rule

In the year 1344, a 16-year-old boy in eastern China buried his mother, his father and his older brother, all within a few weeks of each other. The family was so poor he wrapped the bodies in straw mats because they couldn't afford coffins. Then he walked to a monastery, begged the monks to take him in just so he could eat. 24 years later, that same boy was crowned Emperor of China. This is the complete story of the dynasty that boy built. The dynasty that built the Forbidden City. That built most of the Great Wall of China as we know it today. The dynasty that, at its peak, was the richest society on earth. It was so rich that silver mined in the mountains of Bolivia was crossing the Pacific just to end up in Chinese tax offices. This is the story of the Ming dynasty, the last native Chinese dynasty. This story starts in the 1340s when China is falling apart. You should have a peek into this if you saw my last video on the Yuan dynasty. For almost a century, the country has been ruled by the Mongols, the Yuan dynasty, founded by Hubilai Khan, grandson of Chinggis Khan. By the 1340s, the magic is long gone. The government is printing paper money so recklessly it's becoming worthless. Then, in 1344, the Yellow River floods, drowning farmland and setting off famine across the plains. Disease follows the hunger, like it always does in almost all other Chinese dynasties. In a dirt-poor village in Anhui province, that famine wipes out almost the entire family of a teenage boy named Zhu Yuanzhang, the same boy from the intro of this video. Zhu was the youngest son of a tenant farmer, about as low as you could be born in medieval China. With his family dead, he showed up at the local Buddhist monastery and became a novice monk, sweeping floors in exchange for food. Within weeks, the monastery ran out of food too, so they handed him a begging bowl and sent him out the door. For roughly three years, Zhu Yuanzhang wandered central China as a beggar monk. This was probably the best education he could have gotten. He saw the whole country from the bottom, the famine, the banditry, the fury building against the Mongol government. He learned how ordinary people thought, because he was one of them. Meanwhile, that fury was organizing. A rebel movement called the Red Turbans, Hongjin Jun, was spreading, powered by religious prophecies that a savior was coming to sweep away the darkness. In 1352, when a Red Turban army came through his region, Zhu put down the begging bowl and picked up a weapon. He was 24, and he was a natural. Brave, sharp, and, rare among rebel commanders, disciplined. He kept his troops from looting, which meant towns actually welcomed him. His commander, Guo Zixing, noticed, promoted him, and gave him his adopted daughter in marriage. A woman remembered as Empress Hao, who'd remained Zhu his closest advisor for life. By 1356, Zhu had captured Nanjing, one of the great cities of the south, and made it his base. A scholar gave him advice that he should build high walls, stock up on grain, and don't be in a hurry to call himself a king. In other words, let the other rebel leaders paint targets on their own backs. Zhu listened. He quietly built the best-run territory in China while his rivals fought each other. Eventually, there was a showdown he couldn't avoid. His biggest rival was Chen Youliang, a warlord with a massive navy. In the summer of 1363, their fleets met on Lake Poyang, China's largest freshwater lake, in what became one of the biggest naval battles in world history. Chen brought the medieval equivalent of battleships, huge tower ships, several decks high, painted red. Zhu's fleet was smaller and outgunned. So he used fire. His forces packed boats with gunpowder and straw, waited for the wind, and sent them blazing into Chen's anchored giants. The lake burned, and weeks later, as the battle ground on, Chen Youliang stuck his head out to give orders and was killed by an arrow. Just like that, the contest for southern China was decided. By 1367, Zhu had crushed his last major rival. And in January 1368 in Nanjing, the beggar from Anhui proclaimed a new dynasty. He called it Ming, meaning bright or brilliant. His armies then marched north. And here's the remarkable part. The Mongol court didn't even make a final stand. As the Ming general Xu Da approached, the last Yuan emperor simply packed up and fled back to the steppe. After a century of Mongol rule, China was back in Chinese hands. Zhu Yuanzhong took the reign title Hongwu, vastly martial, and he ruled for 30 years. Those 30 years show you both the best and the absolute worst of the man. Starting with the best. Hongwu had lived through famine, so he governed like a man haunted by it. He resettled refugees on abandoned farmland, cut taxes for those bringing wasteland back into cultivation, and ordered tree planting on an almost unbelievable scale. Mulberries for silk, fruit trees for food, tens of millions of them. He rebuilt the paperwork of an entire civilization. The yellow registers, Wang Che, recording every household in the empire, and the fish scale registers, Yu Lin Tu Che, mapping every plot of farmland. It was named that because the drawings of overlapping fields looked like fish scales. A ruined country recovered fast. Now the worst. Hongwu never stopped thinking like a survivor surrounded by enemies. He trusted almost no one, and the longer he ruled, the shorter the list got. In 1380, he accused his own chancellor, Hu Weiyong, of plotting treason. Whether the plot was real is still debated, but what happened next isn't. Hongwu didn't just execute Hu. He abolished the position of chancellor entirely. A job that had existed in China for over a thousand years, the closest thing to a prime minister, gone. From now on, the emperor would personally run the entire government. In one ten-day stretch, records show him personally handling over 1600 documents. The man worked like a machine. The whole system now only functions if the emperor is a workaholic genius. Keep that in mind. It's going to matter, a lot, about 200 years from now. The Hu Weiyong case also kicked off something darker. Over the following years, the investigation metastasized, and by the time it ended, roughly 30,000 people had been executed. Officials, their families, anyone connected. In 1393, there was a second Great Purge, this time around the general Lan Yu, killed perhaps 15,000 more. Hongwu created a secret police force, the embroidered uniform guard, Jin Yiwei, with the power to arrest, torture, and try officials outside the normal courts. Ministers were beaten with heavy rods in open court, sometimes to death. It got to the point, one account says, that officials would say goodbye to their families in the morning, not knowing if they'd come home. When Hongwu died in 1398, he left behind a rebuilt, disciplined, prosperous empire, with a loaded weapon of absolute one-man power sitting at its center. The only question was, who'd pick it up next? And the answer to that question triggered a civil war. Hongwu's chosen heir, his eldest son, had died before him. So the throne skipped a generation and went to his grandson, a gentle, scholarly young man in his early twenties. He was crowned as the Jianwen Emperor, or Jianwen Di. Hongwu had also given his other son's huge princely estates along the frontiers, with real armies. So the new emperor, barely in his twenties, and his borders are held by a row of battle-hardened uncles who all think, deep down, that the throne skipped them. Jianwen's advisors told him to strip the uncles of their power before they use it. So he started doing exactly that, demoting princes one by one. Driving one to suicide. Every move sent a message to the most dangerous uncle of all, Zhu Di, the Prince of Yan, based in the north at what's now Beijing. A veteran commander of wars against the Mongols. Zhu Di could count. He knew he was next. So in 1399, he rebelled. He called his campaign Jingnan, clearing away the troubles. Framing himself as rescuing the young emperor from evil advisors. For three years, civil war tore through northern China. And in 1402, Zhu Di's army reached Nanjing, where defectors simply opened the gates. That's when the palace caught fire. When the flames died down, bodies were recovered. But no one could ever prove one of them was the Jianwen Emperor. Officially, he died in the fire. Unofficially, rumors spread for decades that he'd escaped disguised as a monk. There's even a persistent story, probably legend but a great one, that later ocean voyages were partly meant to search for him. Either way, the rightful emperor of China simply vanished from history. Zhu Di took the throne as the Yongle Emperor, Yongle Di. Perpetual happiness, which is a bold name for a man who'd just burned his way to power. He demanded that the empire's most respected scholar, Fang Xiaoru, write the proclamation legitimizing him. Fang refused. According to the traditional account, he told Yongle he wouldn't write it even if the emperor exterminated ten degrees of his kinship. Yongle took him up on it. Fang was executed, along with his relatives, students and associates, traditionally numbered at 873 people. That's who Yongle was, a usurper and utterly ruthless, which makes what comes next so strange, because this same man was about to give China one of the most spectacular eras in its entire history. Yongle had a legitimacy problem, and he solved it by building things so enormous that heaven itself would seem to approve. First, he moved the capital. Nanjing was full of people who remembered how he'd taken power. So he relocated the whole imperial government north, to his own power base, and closer to the Mongol frontier he intended to dominate. He renamed it Beijing, the northern capital. At its center, starting in 1406, hundreds of thousands of laborers and craftsmen spent about 14 years building the Forbidden City. For more detail on the Forbidden City, go see the video I made on that. The Forbidden City became China's political center for nearly 500 years, and you can still walk through it today. In 1421, Beijing officially became the capital, and it still is. Of course, northern China couldn't feed a giant new capital, so Yongle had the Grand Canal dredged and rebuilt, a man-made waterway system hauling grain over a thousand kilometers from the rice-rich south. He also collected knowledge on the same scale. Over 2,000 scholars compiled the Yongle Dadian, an encyclopedia of essentially everything ever written in Chinese, running to around 11,000 volumes. It was the largest encyclopedia in the world for almost 600 years. He also personally led five military campaigns deep into Mongolia, and died on the march home from the last one in 1424. He invaded Vietnam too, and annexed it in 1407, though that turned into a two-decade quagmire that drained money until the Ming finally pulled out in 1427. But none of that is what Yongle is most famous for, because his biggest project didn't point north, toward the steppe. It pointed at the ocean. To tell this part, we need to meet one of the most remarkable people of the entire Middle Ages. He was born around 1371 as Ma He, a Muslim boy in Yunnan, in China's far southwest. When he was about 10, a Ming army conquered the region. He was captured, castrated, and sent to serve a young prince. That prince was Zhu Di. The boy grew into a giant of a man, by all accounts physically imposing, brilliant, and fearless. He fought beside Zhu Di in the civil war, earned his total trust, and received a new name, Zheng He. When the new Yongle Emperor decided to send China's power out across the seas, this was the man he put in command. In 1405, Zheng He's first expedition left China with a reported 317 ships and nearly 28,000 men. That is 87 years before Columbus crossed the Atlantic with 3 ships and roughly 90 men. Columbus's flagship, the Santa Maria, was about 19 meters long. The chronicles claim Zheng He's largest treasure ships, Bao Chuan, were over 130 meters long. Modern historians think those figures are exaggerated. The real ships were probably a good deal smaller. But even the cautious estimates describe wooden ships bigger than anything Europe would build for centuries. This fleet carried soldiers, translators, doctors, astrologers, shipwrights, cooks. It was a floating city. Between 1405 and 1433, there were seven of these voyages. They visited Vietnam, Java, and Malacca, Sri Lanka and Calicut on the coast of India, Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, Aden and Arabia. Some crew members even made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and all the way down the East African coast to Mogadishu and Malindi in modern Somalia and Kenya. These fleets conquered almost nothing, no colonies, no trading empire carved out at gunpoint. The point was tribute and prestige, showing every ruler on the Indian Ocean that the Ming Emperor was the most powerful man on earth, and inviting them to send envoys and gifts. Dozens of kingdoms did. When force was used, it was rare. Most famously in Xi'an, where Zheng He got into a conflict with a local ruler and simply brought him back to Nanjing as a captive. My favorite from all of this is from 1414, when envoys from Bengal presented the fleet with a gift for the Emperor, a giraffe. Nobody at the Chinese court had ever seen one. It was paraded into Beijing and celebrated as a Qilin, a mythical creature whose appearance was said to signal a sage ruler on the throne. Which, if you're a usurper with a legitimacy problem, is fantastic publicity. Zheng He died around 1433, probably during or just after the seventh voyage, possibly at sea. After that, China stopped. So, why would the greatest naval power on earth just walk away from the ocean? The popular version says China The real answer is money and politics, which is more relatable. The voyages were staggeringly expensive and ran at the same time as Yongle's other money pits, Beijing, the Vietnam War, five Mongol campaigns. When Yongle died, his successors looked at the books and winced. The scholar officials who ran the government had also always hated the voyages, partly on principle. Confucian thinking ranked overseas adventures as wasteful vanity, and partly because the fleet was run by their political rivals, the palace eunuchs. Yongle's son suspended the expeditions almost immediately. His grandson allowed one final voyage in 1431. After that, the great shipyards were left to rot, and over time the official records of the voyages went missing. There's a famous story that a minister deliberately destroyed them, though that's probably legend. On top of this, the dynasty maintained strict bans on private overseas trade, the so-called Haijin, sea prohibitions. There was another reason to look away from the ocean. In 1449, a Mongol leader named Eisen, head of the Oirad, was raiding the frontier. The emperor at the time was a young man in his early twenties. His closest advisor was his old tutor, a palace eunuch named Wang Zhen, who had a fantasy of military glory. Wang convinced the emperor to do something no one had done since Yongle, personally lead the army into battle. The campaign was thrown together in days. The court chronicles claim half a million men marched out, though modern historians think the real number was far smaller, but it was still enormous, and it was a mess from day one. Rain, mud, supply failures, dead soldiers lining the road before the enemy was even sighted. The generals begged to turn back. Wang Zhen overruled them. On the retreat, the army camped at a postal relay station called Tu Mu, on high ground, with no water source. The Mongols surrounded them and waited. Then, when thirst broke the Ming lines, Eisen's cavalry tore the army apart. Wang Zhen died in the chaos. Hundreds of thousands of men were killed or scattered. The emperor of China was captured alive. This is arguably the most humiliating single day in Ming history. Eisen suddenly held the most valuable hostage on the planet, and he expected a fortune in ransom. Beijing's response was ice cold. A war minister named Yu Qian took charge, rallied the capital, and, with the empress Dowager's backing, simply installed the captured emperor's brother on the throne. The message to Eisen was, essentially, keep him, we have a spare emperor. When the Mongols attacked Beijing itself later that year, Yu Qian's defenses held. Eisen was now stuck feeding a hostage worth nothing, and in 1450, he just gave the ex-emperor back. The returned emperor was locked away in a palace compound for seven years, until 1457, when the sitting emperor fell gravely ill and a faction of schemers broke the old one out and restored him in a dawn coup. One of the first things the restored regime did was execute Yu Qian, the man who had saved Beijing, on invented charges. Even by the standards of palace politics, it was a disgrace that later generations honored Yu Qian as a martyr. But the deepest consequence of Tu Mu was strategic. The Ming never really went on the offensive against the steppe again. Instead, they turned to defense. That decision is why the Great Wall looks the way it does. Construction of the Great Wall ramped up after the Tu Mu disaster and surged again in the 1500s, when a Mongol leader named Altan Khan was raiding at will. In 1550, his horsemen burned the suburbs of Beijing itself. The court's answer was stone and brick. Walls, forts, garrison towns, and thousands of beacon towers running along the frontier. I already talked about this in my video about the Great Wall. The signaling system was clever. Smoke by day, fire by night, with a number of signals indicating roughly how many raiders were coming, so warnings could outrun any horse. A modern Chinese government survey measured the Ming-era wall system at about 8,850 kilometers, counting the walls, trenches, and natural barriers stitched together. The cost, in silver and human lives, was immense. Did it work? Historians still argue. The wall building was partly the product of a court deadlock. The Ming couldn't decisively beat the Mongols in the field, but hardliners also refused to simply open trade with them, which was often what the Mongols actually wanted. So the empire split the difference and built. In 1644, when the dynasty's fate was decided, the wall's most important gate wasn't breached. It was opened, from the inside. We'll get there. Before the fall of the Ming dynasty, we need to talk about its richest, the 1500s, when this empire quietly became the center of the world economy. Under Hongwu, the registered population was around 60 to 65 million. By 1600, historians estimate it had grown to 150 million or more. Nobody knows exactly, but it had likely more than doubled. Cities boomed, books got cheap thanks to a printing explosion. This is the era that produced some of the most beloved stories in Chinese history. Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Sanguo Yanyi, Water Margin, Shuihu Quan, and in 1592, Journey to the West, The Monkey King, Sun Wukong story, that's still spawning movies and games today. It's also when Li Shizhen finished the Benkao Gangmu, a gigantic medical encyclopedia, cataloging nearly 1,900 drugs and remedies. Then, there's the product. In a city called Jingdezhen, entire districts of kilns burned day and night, producing porcelain, including the blue and white ware, Qing Huazi, that became arguably the world's first global luxury brand. Kings in Europe collected it. Sultans in the Ottoman Empire collected it. To this day, we call fine porcelain China. That's Ming marketing, still working. But the strangest part of this boom is what powered it, silver. The Ming had inherited paper money, and early on, they printed so much that it collapsed. People stopped trusting it, so the economy shifted onto hard silver. One problem, China mined very little silver, which meant the world's biggest economy needed to import its own money supply. First, the silver came from Japan's mines. Then, in 1557, Portuguese traders were allowed to settle at Macau on the south coast, and in 1571, the Spanish founded Manila in the Philippines and connected China to something unprecedented. Spanish galleons began sailing from Acapulco across the Pacific, loaded with silver from the mines of Potosi in modern Bolivia. In Manila, that silver was traded for Chinese silk and porcelain. By some estimates, a third or more of all the silver dug out of the Americas ultimately ended up in China. Silver mined by forced laborers in the Andes was crossing the Pacific to pay for teacups in Madrid, and eventually, taxes in Beijing. Without any Ming emperor planning it, China had been wired into the first truly global economy. Then the state made a fateful choice. In the 1570s, the brilliant chief minister Zhang Juzheng pushed through the Single Whip Reform, Yitiao Bianfa, rolling the empire's messy taxes and labor duties into streamlined payments, in silver. Absolutely. But it also chained the government's finances to silver flows controlled by Spanish shipping schedules and Japanese trade policy, half a world away. File that away. It's a loaded gun on the wall. One more scene from this era, because it's a great one. In 1582, an Italian Jesuit named Matteo Ricci arrived at Macau. He spent years mastering Chinese, the language, the classics, the etiquette, and slowly worked his way north, dazzling scholars with maps of the world, mechanical clocks, and feats of memory. In 1601, he became one of the first Europeans ever admitted to Beijing. When he died there in 1610, the emperor granted him a burial plot in the capital, an almost unheard of honor for a foreigner. Two civilizations, meeting through one very patient man. That's the Ming at high noon, rich, cultured, connected to the whole planet. Now let's watch the sun go down. Remember Hongwu's design flaw we talked about earlier, the system where everything depends on the emperor personally doing the work? Here's where it detonates. In 1572, a nine-year-old boy came to the throne as the one-li emperor. He would reign for 48 years, the longest of any Ming ruler. For the first ten, things actually went brilliantly because the adult in the room was Zhang Juzheng, the reformer we just met. Zhang audited the bureaucracy, surveyed the empire's land to catch tax cheats, disciplined the frontier armies, and filled the treasury. He was also the young emperor's strict, overbearing tutor. Then, in 1582, Zhang died, and only discovered his beloved teacher had preached frugality while living large. The emperor's grief curdled into rage. He had Zhang posthumously disgraced, his family's property seized. Then came the fight that broke the reign. Wanli wanted to name his third son, the child of his favorite consort, as heir. The bureaucracy insisted on the eldest son, as tradition demanded. Officials hammered him with protest memorials for years. Wanli eventually gave in on the succession, but his revenge was that he went on strike. For roughly the last 25 years of his reign, the Wanli emperor essentially ghosted his own government. He stopped holding court audiences. He left key offices vacant for years. At points, entire ministries had no minister. Memorials went into the palace and never came out. The historian Rui Huang famously captured this era in his book, 1587, A Year of No Significance. A portrait of a great empire slowly seizing up, one ignored document at a time. Hong Wu had built a machine that only ran with an emperor at the controls. Now the seat was empty. Yet, and this is what makes the period so strange, the 1590s handed this dysfunctional court a genuine world war. In 1592, the Japanese warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, having just unified Japan, launched an invasion of Korea with well over 150,000 battle-hardened samurai and soldiers. Korea was only step one. Hideyoshi's declared plan was to conquer Ming China itself. The Japanese took Seoul within weeks, then Pyeongyang. Korea's king fled to the Chinese border and begged for help. To his credit, Wanli acted. Ming armies poured into Korea, tens of thousands at first, far more over the course of the war, and in early 1593, they stormed and retook Pyeongyang. What followed was six years of brutal seesaw fighting, failed peace talks, a second Japanese invasion in 1597, and at sea, the legendary Korean Admiral Isun-sin shredding Japanese supply lines. When Hideyoshi died in 1598, the Japanese withdrew, mauled in a final naval battle on the way out. The Ming-Korean alliance had won. But the bill wasn't smiling. The war consumed millions of tiles of silver and chewed up the Ming's best frontier armies, especially in the northeast, where someone was watching. His name was Nu-er Hachi, a chieftain of the Nujen tribes of Manchuria. While the Ming was distracted and broke, he spent decades unifying the Nujen into a disciplined military state. In 1616, he declared his own dynasty. In 1618, he published his Seven Grievances, Qi Da Hen, against the Ming, basically a declaration of war. In 1619, at the Battle of Sarhu, he took his smaller, faster force and destroyed a Ming campaign of roughly 100,000 men, smashing its divided columns one by one. It was the worst Ming defeat in generations, and the frontier never recovered. Wanli died the next year. His successor died within a month. The throne passed to a teenager, the Tianqi Emperor, who was mostly interested in carpentry. He was reportedly a genuinely gifted woodworker and happy to leave governing to his eunuch, Wei Zhongxian. Wei ran the state like a mafia boss. Purging the reformist Donglindang faction, torturing critics to death, and having temples built across China in his own honor. While the Manchus gathered strength, the government devoured itself. In 1627, Tianqi died, and his younger brother took the throne at 17, the Chongzhen Emperor. Within months, the teenager outmaneuvered Wei Zhongxian and drove him to suicide. Chongzhen was serious, hardworking, and desperate to save the dynasty. He was also about to face a storm no emperor could have survived. In the 1630s and 40s, everything went wrong at once. I mean everything. The 17th century sat in the depths of what historians call the Little Ice Age, one of the coldest stretches in centuries. Growing seasons shrank. Then, from 1628, catastrophic droughts hit northern China, starting in Shanxi province and spreading. Harvests failed year after year. Local records from these years describe famine so severe that people ate bark, then earth. And in the worst-hit places, there are repeated reports of cannibalism. Then came locusts. Then, in the early 1640s, a horrific epidemic, plague, swept through northern China. Gutting whole regions, including the area around Beijing. Now let's talk about money. Remember the loaded gun, the tax system that ran on imported silver? In the 1630s and 40s, the flow sputtered. Japan clamped down on its trade, and the Spanish silver network hit its own crises. Historians still debate how big the monetary shock was, but there's no debate about the result on the ground. The government was broke. The Manzhou in the northeast was devouring the budget, so the court raised taxes on farmers who were already starving. You can guess how that went. Then there's my nominee for the most consequential budget cut in history. In 1629, scrambling to save money, the court slashed the imperial courier system, the network of postal relay stations across the empire. Thousands of couriers lost their jobs overnight. One of them was a tough young man from drought-ravaged Shanxi named Li Zicheng. Unemployed, in debt, in a province full of starving people and deserting soldiers, Li joined the rebels. Over the following decade, he rose to lead the largest rebel army in China, calling himself Chuang Wang, the Dashing Prince. His program was simple and, to a starving peasant, irresistible. His forces promised an end to grain taxes, and a folk rhyme spread ahead of his armies. Open your gates and welcome the Dashing Prince and pay no taxes. Meanwhile, another rebel warlord, Zhang Xianzhong, was carving a path of destruction through the West. Outside the wall, the pressure kept building too. Nuer Haci's son, Wang Taiji, took the project further. In 1636, he renamed his people the Manzhou and his dynasty the Qing. And his armies repeatedly punched through the frontier to raid deep into China, once reaching the outskirts of Beijing itself. The Chongzhen Emperor, hardworking as he was, kept making things worse. During that first Manzhou raid scare in 1630, he became convinced, with help from what may have been planted disinformation, that his best general, Chong Huan, the man who'd actually beaten the Manzhous in battle, was a traitor. He had him executed in Beijing's marketplace with slow slicing, while crowds who believed the charges jeered. The Ming had just killed its own shield. The pattern repeated everywhere. Chongzhen trusted no one, blamed everyone, and burned through roughly 50 grand secretaries in 17 years. Famine, plague, bankruptcy, rebellion, invasion, and a court at war with itself. There was only one way this could end. In early 1644, Li Zicheng proclaimed his own dynasty in Xi'an and marched on Beijing. It was barely a fight. Garrison after garrison surrendered or defected. The soldiers hadn't been paid and the plague had hollowed out the capital's defences. On April 24th, the rebels reached Beijing and men on the inside opened the gates. That night, in the city, the Chongzhen emperor understood it was over. What happened next comes down to us from accounts written in the aftermath, and the details vary. But the outline is grim. He drank with his remaining attendants. He ordered the empress to take her own life, and she did. Determined that his daughters not fall into rebel hands, he attacked them himself with a sword. The teenage princess Changping survived, losing an arm. At dawn on April 25th, 1644, the last Ming emperor to rule from Beijing walked out the back of the palace and climbed the small hill just behind it, today's Jingshan Park. One loyal eunuch, Wang Cheng'en, went with him. There, the son of heaven hanged himself from a tree. Accounts speak of a final message, blaming his ministers for the catastrophe and begging the rebels to spare his people. He was 33 years old. After 276 years, the Ming dynasty had fallen. But the story has one last, brutal twist. Because the man who took Beijing didn't get to keep it. Northeast of the city, at Shanghai Pass, the point where the Great Wall meets the sea, the single most important gate in the empire, stood the last effective Ming field army, under General Wu Sangui. He was now trapped between two fires. Li Zicheng's rebels holding Beijing and the Manchu Qing armies waiting outside the wall. He had to choose a master. Legend says his decision was sealed when he learned a rebel commander had seized his beloved concubine. A great story. Though the harder truth is that it was cold political survival math. Wu Sangui opened the gates of Shanghai Pass to the Manchu. On May 27th, 1644, Wu's troops and the Manchu cavalry under Prince Duo Ergun crushed Li Zicheng's army in a battle fought in a blinding dust storm. Li fled, looted Beijing and abandoned it. Within about a year, he was dead. In June, the Manchu entered Beijing, presenting themselves as avengers of the fallen Ming and placed their child emperor on the throne. The Qing dynasty, China's last, had begun. Ming loyalists didn't vanish overnight. A series of southern Ming courts resisted for years, retreating ever further south until 1662 when the last claimant, the Yongli Emperor, was dragged back from Burma and executed by Wu Sangui of all people. In present-day Taiwan, a Ming loyalist known as Lord Guo Xing here founded a new state and named it Dongdu Eastern Capital and held out until 1683. Only then was the last Ming banner finally lowered. So, that is the 276-year story of the Ming dynasty, the last time China was ruled by a native Han Chinese dynasty. The Qing who followed were Manzhou and their story is for another video. If you made it this far and enjoyed it, do me a quick favor. Hit that like button. It genuinely helps the channel more than you'd think. 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