The history of the
Southern Ming period is rather complicated, and is not treated in any detail in general histories of
China, or even of the
Ming and
Qing dynasties. So far as I know, it is the subject of only one monograph in
English,
Lynn Struve’s
The Southern Ming, 1644-1662, published in
1984, a decade after her thesis on the subject.
As the
Ming dynasty began to decline, the
Manchus, who occupied the area of northeastern China that subsequently became known as
Manchuria, began to move southwards, finally capturing
Peking in 1644 (one month after the city had fallen to the rebel
Li Zicheng 李自成) when the new
Qing dynasty was proclaimed. The last Ming emperor
Chongzhen 崇禎 hanged himself, but supported by groups of loyalists, some of the Ming princes held out for several decades in south China as emperors of a regime which historians know as the “Southern Ming” 南明.
One of them was the
Prince of Tang 唐王,
Zhu Yujian 朱聿鍵, who with the support of
Zheng Zhilong 鄭芝龍, set up court in
Fuzhou, capital of the coastal province of
Fujian, in August 1645. Zheng Zhilong was a pirate and trader who had grown rich from his activities in the
Taiwan Strait and commanded considerable naval power. Under the
Chongzhen emperor he had even been officially charged with coastal defence. But when the
Qing armies approached Fuzhou, he accepted a bribe to change his allegiance and abandoned the Prince of Tang, who was captured and executed having reigned for little more than a year.
Against the wishes of his father,
Zheng Chenggong used the family’s military and naval power to bolster the regime of another of the Ming princes, the
Prince of Gui 桂王,
Zhu Youlang 朱由榔.
The Prince of Gui had fled to the southwest following the overthrow of the Prince of Tang, and established another Southern Ming court at
Zhaoqing 肇慶 (
Guangdong Province) in 1647 with the reign name
Yongli 永曆. His reign survived much longer than that of the Prince of Tang, but after some initial success in driving the Qing back north, he was eventually forced to flee to
Burma. The Qing pursued him, took him captive, and executed him in 1659.
Although the government of
Taiwan by the Zheng family was largely military, the civil apparatus of imperial government was established at least in name. The family continued to use the Yongli reign title of
Prince Gui, holding the Southern Ming empire in trust, as it were, pending the arrival of better days. The
production of calendars was one of the most important imperial functions in traditional China, something I have already touched on in this blog, and was used by the Southern Ming to bolster the legitimacy of the expatriate regime. The extant examples all date from the time of
Zheng Jing, and are printed in indigo (lan 藍), which
Frances Wood has told me was used as a
sign of mourning for the passing of the
Ming Dynasty on the mainland.
why
South Ming Dynasty cannot defend against
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- published: 30 Aug 2014
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