Wu Sangui

Wu Sangui in Manchurian imperial costume

Wu Sangui ( Chinese  吳三桂 , Pinyin Wú Sānguì , W.-G. Wu San-kuei ; * 1612 ; † October 2, 1678 in Hengzhou , Hunan Province ) was a commander at the Great Wall who lived after the fall of the Ming Dynasty defected to the Manchu side and supported their seizure of power in China.

Life

Wu Sangui was born in Gaoyou, Jiangsu Province , and quickly made a career as a Ming Dynasty military leader on the Great Wall.

On April 25, 1644, the rebel leader Li Zicheng entered Beijing after the Nankou Pass was surrendered without a fight , a eunuch opened the gates, and the abandoned last Ming Emperor Chongzhen hanged himself in a pavilion. The entry of the rebels into Beijing was peaceful; attacks against the civilian population were immediately punished with death. However, Li Zicheng had a problem: he could not pay his troops, so his officers systematically and cruelly tortured former Ming supporters to collect funds. There were also acts of violence in the open countryside.

At the time, Wu Sangui was the only remaining Ming troop leader in the north. He had moved his troops to Shanhaiguan to aid the emperor but kept them intact. Li Zicheng expected his submission because he had both his father and his concubine, a former singer named Chen Yuan, under his control. The representations differ about the following events.

Either Wu Sangui was too slow in responding to Li Zicheng's request, whereupon he had his father executed, or the father demanded absolute loyalty to the Ming in order to avoid the family shame. The concubine was apparently raped during the execution of the father, whereupon Wu Sangui turned back and stood against Li Zicheng. On May 18, Li Zicheng took to the field against Wu Sangui. At the same time, on May 13, the Manchu Prince Regent Dorgon set out to conquer Beijing without knowing that it had already fallen into the hands of the rebels. On May 20th, Wu Sangui's ambassador reached him with the offer of joint action, on May 27th they met, and on May 29th, the battle with Li Zicheng near Shanhaiguan took place. The Manchu cavalry decided the battle, and Dorgon entered Beijing. Li Zicheng fled south with the remnants of his troops, pursued by Wu Sangui and two Manchu princes , to Honan , until he was slain by peasants in October 1645.

In the following years Wu Sangui fought against the southern Ming , became governor in Yunnan in 1659 and recorded the capture of a heir to the throne, the so-called Yongli emperor, in 1662 . For a time he was the only general who achieved success in the south of China, so that he was highly honored and also raised to the rank of prince.

Together with two other defectors, the marshal ruled the south of China almost independently. But soon he became too powerful for the new Manchu emperor Kangxi , so that in 1673 he ordered him to disband his troops. The answer was an uprising of the three feudal princes Wu Sangui, Shang Kexi (or his son Shang Zhixin) and Geng Jingzhong 1674-81, which at least initially spread quickly to the Yangtze and Gansu and might have cost the Manchu dynasty the throne if there had been more unified leadership. Wu Sangui proclaimed his own Zhou dynasty in 1678, while the other two rebel leaders capitulated. Wu finally died of illness on October 2, 1678 in Hengzhou, Hunan Province. The uprising ended in 1681 with the suicide of his grandson Wu Shifan.

literature

• Frederic Wakeman: The Great Enterprise: The Manchu Reconstruction of Imperial Order in Seventeenth-Century China. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 2 vols. ISBN 0520048040 (engl.)