Southern Ming

The Southern Ming was the dying light of the great dynasty, the succession of refugee courts that kept the Ming name alive for eighteen years after Beijing fell. In June 1644, two months after Li Zicheng took the capital and the Chongzhen emperor hanged himself, the Nanjing ministers enthroned the Prince of Fu as the Hongguang emperor, and the southern provinces, still whole, seemed capable of reconquest. The chance died with the factionalism: the four great generals of the Huai quarrelled, Shi Kefa died defending Yangzhou in 1645, and the Hongguang emperor was taken at Wuhu. What followed was a map of rival claimants, the Prince of Lu guarding the southeast coast, the Longwu emperor at Fuzhou backed by the Zheng family's silver and ships, the Shaowu emperor at Guangzhou, each denying the others, each falling in turn to Qing columns advancing province by province. The longest-lived was the Yongli court of Zhu Youlang, which fled from Zhaoqing to Guilin to Kunming and finally into Burma, pursued for a decade while Koxinga, Zheng Chenggong, held Xiamen and dreamt of a Nanjing landing that failed at its walls. In 1662 Wu Sangui's men dragged the Yongli emperor from Burmese custody and strangled him at Kunming; the prince of Lu died the same year at Kinmen. The Ming cause passed to Taiwan, where the Zheng line kept its calendar for twenty more years.