FOR MOST OF THE seventeenth century, China was in an almost constant state of political upheaval. After nearly 300 years of rule, the Ming Dynasty was collapsing under the weight of widespread corruption, domestic rebellion, and foreign invasions. This turmoil was exacerbated by a series of droughts and famines that swept through the land. A semi-nomadic people from northeastern Asia known as the Manchus first invaded China in 1618 and eventually established the Qing Dynasty, which would go on to rule China until 1912. But before the Qing leaders solidified their control over the country in the 1680s, China was riven not just by conflicts between the Qing forces and the Ming armies, but by peasant rebellions led by self-proclaimed kings. These events are described in the Qing-era work The History of Ming, which relied on Ming Dynasty annals compiled by court historians after the death of each emperor. Unofficial accounts left by Ming-era Chinese scholars also describe the country’s descent into chaos.
In the southwestern province of Sichuan, one of the most notorious peasant rebel leaders, Zhang Xianzhong, established a short-lived state in 1644. He called it the Daxi, or Western, Kingdom, and later that year proclaimed it to be an empire. He soon found his realm under constant threat from Ming armies in the south and Qing forces quickly advancing from the north. Zhang was running out of food to feed his soldiers, and he decided to abandon his capital city of Chengdu in the summer of 1646. Before he evacuated his forces from the city by way of the Jin River, Zhang ordered his men to load boats with gold,
