As a general of the Ming Dynasty, Wu Sangui also participated in some battles in the confrontation between the Ming and Qing Dynasties, but he lost more than he won. Surprisingly, however, at the moment of political upheaval in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, he repeatedly speculated in various political forces and became a "new star" on the political stage.

First of all, the Ming government attached great importance to Wu Sangui. At the beginning of the seventeenth year of Chongzhen (1644), after a long battle with the rebels in Li Zicheng, the main force of the Ming army was completely annihilated. At this point, Li Zicheng insurgents were divided into Xi 'an and crossed the Yellow River in the north. In a short time, it even joined Linfen, Taiyuan, Calm, Fu Xuan and Datong, aiming at Beijing. Facing the fate of extinction, the Ming Dynasty bet on Wu Sangui, who was armed to the teeth outside the customs. Many courtiers, such as, Wu, etc. , has been at large, demanding the withdrawal of Ningyuan's division to defend the capital. Driven by this public opinion, Emperor Chongzhen summoned Wu Sangui's father, Wu Xiang, for the first time in February to ask about Wu Sangui's military strength and promoted Wu Xiang to commander-in-chief of China's military government. Then on March 5th, Wu Sangui was named Pingxibo and flew to Weijingshi. For a time, public opinion in the ruling and opposition parties almost unanimously regarded Wu Sangui as the only savior to save the Ming Dynasty.

Before Wu Sangui received the imperial edict to withdraw Ningyuan, Ningyuan was already an isolated city surrounded by the Qing army, because it lost three cities: Housuo, Qiantunwei and Zhongqiansuo. In order to save his own life, Wu Sangui has given up Ningyuan. Therefore, only ten days after Beijing issued the withdrawal notice, Wu Sangui has evacuated 500,000 soldiers from Ningyuan to Shanhaiguan. Then, he led his troops from Shanhaiguan to Beijing and arrived in Yongping on the 20th. However, at this time, the situation in Beijing has undergone earth-shaking changes. The decadent Ming Dynasty was overthrown by the rebels in Li Zicheng on March 19, and then Wu Sangui led his troops to Beijing. The demise of the Ming Dynasty made Wu Sangui lose trust. In order to find a new owner, Wu Sangui speculated among various political forces for more than a month.

Yongping and Beijing are hundreds of miles apart. When Wu Sangui arrived in Jizhou on March 23rd, he learned that Li Zicheng had gone to Beijing, and Emperor Chongzhen hanged himself. Soon, the news that most Ming officials in Beijing surrendered to Li Zicheng came one after another. Facing the military and political situation of disparity between the enemy and ourselves, in order to maintain its privileged position, Wu Sangui initially decided to surrender to Li Zicheng. At this moment, Li Zicheng sent angel lee, Chen Yi also came to the Wu Sangui army. Wu Sangui then "decided to return to Li" and led his men to continue westward. On the way, he posted a big notice announcing that he would "meet the new owner" in Beijing. A few days later, Li Zicheng also claimed in his memorial to Zuo Liangyu and others: "Tang Tong, Wu Sangui, Zuo Guangxian, etc. Knowing the existence of fate has turned a new page. " Visible, at the beginning of Li Zicheng into Beijing, Wu Sangui did surrender to Li Zicheng.

Wu Sangui's "determination to surrender Li" is not a change of position, but a speculative move under the disparity between the enemy and ourselves. He hopes that his surrender can at least guarantee the existing privileges and the safety of his small property in Beijing. Maybe he has the fantasy of becoming a hero of the new dynasty. However, Wu Sangui's fantasy was shattered by the revolutionary measures after the peasant army entered Beijing. Shortly after Wu Sangui decided to surrender to Li Zicheng and sent envoys to Beijing, from March 25th, Liu Zongmin and Lee Guo, leaders of the peasant army, began to torture and hunt down captured Ming officials in Beijing, including Wu Xiang, the father of Wu Sangui. This action violated the vital interests of the bureaucratic landlord class, and rumors of slandering and attacking the peasant army began to spread from Beijing to other places like a plague. Wu Xiang also privately wrote a letter to Wu Sangui, asking him to "come and save his father". Two or three days later, these messages arrived with Wu Xiang's private message in Wu Sangui's army which was marching westward. This was a blow to Wu Sangui's Mei Jiang campaign. Dramatically, just as Wu Sangui learned that his father was handcuffed, or earlier, Li Zicheng also noticed the importance of Wu Sangui's consolidation of political power, instructed Liu Zongmin to release Wu Xiang, and ordered him to write to persuade Wu Sangui to surrender. At the same time, Tang Tong, Wang Zeyao, Zhang Ruoqi, Zuo Maotai and others were sent to carry Wu Xiang's calligraphy and a large number of silver coins until the Wu Sangui army further surrendered. In terms of time, this group of people arrived in Wu Sangui's army only one or two days later than Wu Xiang's private letter to Wu Sangui (about March 29th), but the contents of the two letters were diametrically opposed, which made Wu Sangui think that Li Zicheng's surrender was just a scam, and he wanted to lure himself into Beijing to be eliminated again. So he immediately stopped westward and led his troops back to Shanhaiguan. In his reply to his father Wu Xiang, he expressed his break with Li Zicheng. The rebellion in Wu Sangui was caused by the exile of Chen Yuanyuan. Many historical records in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties recorded that Chen Yuanyuan was occupied by Liu Zongmin, an important general of Li Zicheng, during the Shen Jiazhi Rebellion. When Wu Sangui learned about this, he betrayed Li Jiangqing in a rage. These records regard the struggle for a woman as the main reason for Wu Sangui's rebellion against Li Jiangqing, which is obviously one-sided. But it did trigger Wu Sangui's feeling. At the end of the Ming Dynasty, it became a custom for feudal literati to spend a lot of money on beautiful concubines. Chen Yuanyuan was bought by Wu Sangui with his daughter's money, and he himself is a tens of thousands of government officials. When his special property is violated, he can't cooperate with it emotionally in any case. Therefore, it is one-sided to deny or ignore the influence of Chen Yuanyuan's capture on Wu Sangui's invasion against Li.

The political break with Li Zicheng left Wu Sangui between Scylla and Charybdis. To the west of Shanhaiguan, Li Zicheng is armed to the teeth, and a fierce battle is imminent. To the east of Shanhaiguan, there are powerful Qing soldiers approaching their old enemies. Because the road to surrender to Li was blocked, Wu Sangui was forced to look to the Qing regime in the northeast for his own survival.

As far as the situation at that time was concerned, although it was inevitable for Wu Sangui to vote for the Qing Dynasty, there were still many practical difficulties in putting this idea into practice. First of all, for decades, the Ming and Qing dynasties have been in a state of serious military war. Not only Hong Chengchou, Zu Dashou and other demoted military and political dignitaries were despised by literati, but also Yang Sichang, Xin Chen and others who advocated a truce and peace were reviled. Now they will follow in the footsteps of these people. Will this create an excuse for the Li Zicheng regime to mobilize people from all walks of life to attack itself? Secondly, due to the long-term vendetta between the two regimes, the hatred in their own army is also quite strong. At this moment, if they fall to the Qing dynasty politically, will it cause a mutiny in the army? Also, when Huang Taiji was alive, he tried to surrender to himself many times and was rejected. When he was desperate, he hurried to ask for help. Will the Qing dynasty promise to burn incense to attract ghosts and put itself in a more difficult position? Therefore, after Wu Sangui broke with Li Zicheng at the end of March, it first made a fake military intelligence to test the reaction of all sectors of society, including the Li Zicheng regime. Later, leaflets were distributed everywhere, which greatly restored public opinion, preached that "Zhou's life has not changed, Han De can think" and "Try to see the return of Chixian County, and it is still the Zhu family's reunification", inciting Beijing gentry bureaucrats to mourn for Emperor Chongzhen.

In the first year of Shunzhi, the Qing army did not capture Shanhaiguan. So this is a fake military intelligence created after Wu Sangui and Li Zicheng broke up.

After he knew that the former didn't cause ill feelings of people from all walks of life, while the latter got sympathy or support from most bureaucratic gentry and even some Confucian scholars who died in the Ming Dynasty, Wu Sangui began to implement his plan to jointly clear and cut down Li.

Wu Sangui's first letter for help to Dourgen showed his initial basic position on the important issue of Lian Qing's felling of Li. In this letter, Wu Sangui called the Ming Dynasty "our country" and "our dynasty" many times, and called the Qing Dynasty "the Northern Dynasty". That is to say, Wu Sangui, as a courtier of the Ming Dynasty, sought help from the Qing Dynasty. The purpose of recruiting soldiers was to "destroy hooligans" and "revive" the Ming Dynasty, instead of letting the Qing Dynasty enter the Central Plains. After the peasant uprising army was destroyed, "children's jade and silk" and part of the land will be used as rewards and rewards for the Qing Dynasty to send troops. On the issue of the Qing army's entry route, Wu Sangui asked the Qing army to "take the Chinese Association and the Western Association directly", but he himself "led the troops to join forces and reached the gate of the capital". That is to say, only the Qing soldiers are allowed to enter Ming territory from xifengkou, Longjingguan, Qiangziling and Miyun. These places are not only the old way for Qing soldiers to enter the mainland in the past, but also the places where Li Zicheng's troops are stationed at present. According to this regulation, we can not only protect our own safety and prevent the Qing army from taking the opportunity to kill us falsely, but also promote the merger of the Qing army and Li Zicheng's main force, so that he can reap the benefits of the fishermen himself. This was Wu Sangui's initial policy to crack down on Li. Because the situation in Shanhaiguan was tense at that time, Li Zicheng's army had not advanced eastward, and Wu Sangui had not reached the end of its tether, so I still had doubts about the Qing Dynasty. Soon, when the messengers sent by Wu Sangui began to deliver letters, the military confrontation between Li and Wu had a new development. After Wu Sangui's losing streak to Tang Tong and Bai Guangen in early April, Li Zicheng began to notice the seriousness of the situation in Shanhaiguan and put more military pressure on Wu Sangui. On the sixth day of April, Li Zicheng sent 10,000 people to the east to help carry the cannons out of the city. Two days later, it sent tens of thousands of people riding eastward. The news should have reached Shanhaiguan ten days ago. Li Zicheng's army is coming from the east, and Shanhaiguan will be the main battlefield. In this way, even if the Qing army entered China from the Chinese Association for the Advancement of the West, it could not save Wu Sangui's imminent demise. Under the pressure of the situation, Wu Sangui was forced to change his original intention, no longer forbidding the Qing soldiers to enter the customs, but urged the Qing soldiers to enter the customs in order to confront the upcoming peasant army head-on. According to "Shen Ting Lu" for seven years, Wu Sangui's emissary conveyed his urgent request: "The thief's front points to the east, and the fierce army collapses. Only Shanhaiguan is immune, but the soldiers are weak and the situation is unstoppable. I heard that the king has sent troops. If we can send troops to save him at this time, we should open the gate of Shanhaiguan to meet the king. As soon as the king closes the door, Beijing can decide on another day and is willing to enter the army quickly. " Dourgen, the head coach of the Qing army, accepted his request to use troops, "that is, send Zhan Ba, a bachelor, to Jinzhou and ask the Han army to take the red gun to Shanhaiguan." The next day, all the troops led by Dourgen also turned to Shanhaiguan. This shows that Wu Sangui temporarily changed his decision on the route of Qing soldiers entering the customs because of the change of the military confrontation between Li and Wu, and the new decision made temporarily was conveyed orally by the emissary.

For a long time, Shanhaiguan has been an important obstacle for the Qing army to enter the customs. This time, Dourgen led the troops into the customs. At first, his marching route was still Miyun and Jizhou. At this time, Wu Sangui offered to offer customs, which provided great convenience for the Qing army. So as soon as he received a letter from Wu Sangui, Dourgen immediately decided to transfer troops to the south. The next day, he quickly wrote back to Wu Sangui, telling him to make amends with * * *, promising to "seal his land and make A Jin a vassal" and "enjoy life forever". In order to suppress the peasant uprising army, the Qing-Wu United front was initially formed.

Shortly after Wu Sangui sent messengers for help, on April 13th, Li Zicheng led sixty thousand troops into the customs. At this time, Li Zicheng was carried away by a series of victories since the beginning of the year and underestimated the seriousness of military confrontation at that time. In his view, not only his military strength far exceeds that of Wu Sangui, but even Wu Sangui's father Wu Xiang and his family are under his control. Wu Sangui did not surrender on the way eastward, but it will be easily destroyed in the war. He didn't even think about the realistic possibility that Wu Sangui colluded with the Qing soldiers to enter the customs. So when the army set out, he also took two sons of Emperor Chongzhen and Wu Xiang, taking Wu Sangui's political surrender as the main purpose of this trip. Li Zicheng's thought of underestimating the enemy and his fantasy of political settlement were just used by Wu Sangui. Knowing that Li Zicheng personally led the army eastward, he immediately sent six men, namely Shanhaiguan gentry, Confucian scholar Li Yousong, Tan, Liu Tailin, Liu Taishan, An, and so on, to meet Li Zicheng's army in Sanhe County, not far from JD.COM, and surrendered to delay the time and wait for the Qing soldiers. After the messenger sent to the Qing army for help returned to Shanhaiguan with Dourgen's reply, Wu Sangui immediately wrote to Dourgen, asking him to "speed up the Tiger Brigade and go straight into the mountains and seas". Li Zicheng didn't discover Wu Sangui's real intention of false surrender until he went to the customs and Wu Sangui sent representatives to contact him to surrender and escape, but it delayed the favorable opportunity for light soldiers to quickly enter the customs and seize the customs. However, after receiving Wu Sangui's second letter for help, Dourgen, after a day-and-night forced March, arrived 15 miles away from the city gate on the 21st. At this point, Wu Jun has been fighting with the peasant army in Shihe for a day. Li Zicheng failed to capture Shanhaiguan before the arrival of the Qing army, leaving it in a passive position. The arrival of the Qing army made the Qing and Wu allied forces surpass in number. In this way, although the two armies have not yet confronted each other, the outcome of the war has been roughly decided.

On April 2 1 day, the night when the Qing army arrived near Guanmen, it began to carry out intense combat deployment. "The sound of moving in the middle of the night is everywhere." The commander-in-chief of the Qing army, Dourgen, took advantage of the critical situation in Wu Sangui to force Wu Sangui to abandon the policy of attacking Li and completely surrender to the Qing Dynasty. To this end, the Qing army entered the next day and was forced to close the door for five miles. "That is, the soldiers are not allowed to enter." Station troops and rejoice in the ridge, hold high the banner and wait. At this time, due to the powerful offensive launched by the peasant army recently, Shanhaiguan was in danger, and there were signs of disintegration inside Wu Jun. At this extremely urgent moment, Wu Sangui learned the news of the arrival of the Qing army and immediately "sent an envoy to ask, but the nine kings still did not believe, and the inviter repeatedly asked, but the nine kings began to believe, but it was not enough." Wu Sangui sent messengers to invite him for the first time, but Dourgen refused to go forward, of course, because he didn't know the real meaning of Wu Sangui and the actual situation in the city, which was a kind of military caution. However, after the "inviter repeatedly asked", that is, after knowing the above situation, it is obviously an opportunity to force Wu Sangui to make greater concessions. Sure enough, at the critical moment of life and death, after the "eight round trips" between Qing and Wu, Wu Sangui made a new concession to the Qing army, that is, he shaved his hair and surrendered to the Qing Dynasty, ceding a large territory north of the Yellow River, including Beijing. At the same time, Wu Sangui also proposed "no harm to the people, no violation of the Mausoleum, visiting the East Palace and the location of the two kings, and establishing Nanjing" as a condition for allowing the Qing soldiers to enter the customs, which was agreed by the Qing army coach Dourgen. In this way, on the one hand, Wu Sangui was cleared by politics, on the other hand, the Qing Dynasty allowed him to establish the last prince of the Ming Dynasty. Although the two aspects of this agreement are directly contradictory, it is a new breakthrough of the Qing-Wu alliance and plays an important role in ensuring the failure of the peasant army in Li Zicheng.

On the afternoon after the Qing army entered the city, the Qing-Wu allied forces and a few peasant troops in Li Zicheng fought on a stone outside Shanhaiguan. The next day, April 22nd, a fateful Stone River War broke out. According to the agreement between Qing and Wu, first of all, Wu Sangui led his men to confront Li Zicheng's army. At the most tense moment of the battle, the Qing army suddenly bypassed the rear of the battle and launched a fierce attack on Li Jun. Li Zicheng knew nothing about the entry of the Qing army in advance and fought for days. Li's morale is in a state of decline again. Although we fought hard for World War I, we were unable to resist the fierce attack of the Qing army and Wu Jun, and suffered serious losses. The peasant army was defeated, and Li Zicheng was forced to lead the rest of the Western Expedition. The Shanhaiguan War, which decided the fate of the three parties, ended with the victory of the Qing and Wu joint operations and the failure of the Li Zicheng peasant army.

Shanhaiguan has been the gateway and barrier of Beijing since the Ming Dynasty. Now that the pass is owned by Qing and Wu Jun, Beijing is at stake. In an unusually passive military situation, Li Zicheng was forced to retreat to the west. On the way, he killed Wu Sangui's father, Wu Xiang, and more than 30 members of his family. On 26th, I returned to Beijing. On the 29th, I hurried into Wuying Hall. On the morning of the 30th, I left Beijing in a hurry and led the army westward to Shaanxi. At the same time, the Qing and Wu allied forces followed closely and marched in. He entered Beijing on May 2, and soon announced that he would move his capital here. In this way, with Wu Sangui's dedication to customs and the Qing Dynasty as the turning point, China society began to enter a new period. Wu Sangui's offering of customs and surrender to the Qing Dynasty provided great convenience for the Qing Dynasty to occupy the Central Plains, and Wu Sangui was awarded the highest prize by the new owner: just after the Shanhaiguan War, Regent Dourgen took control of the army and made Wu Sangui the king of the day. He set out to defeat Li Zicheng, realized the common aspiration of the literati who perished in the Ming Dynasty, and gained the appreciation of the Nanming regime: at the beginning of the establishment of the Nanjing regime, he was named the auspicious Lord from afar, and sent envoys to the north to take the silver army. For a time, Wu Sangui, who struggled to survive in the political whirlpool and repeatedly speculated, was crowned as a "great man in the world" with "loyalty and filial piety, hatred of serving the country and leaving the country" and became a popular figure in the Ming and Qing Dynasties!

Kill the late Lord, Prince Jin Jue.

After the Qing soldiers entered the customs, the contrast of various political forces changed greatly. The Qing government implemented the policy of bribing senior officials with high salaries, and bureaucrats who died in the Ming Dynasty surrendered to the Qing Dynasty. Wu Sangui also gave up the idea of establishing ming prince. Nevertheless, as the representative of the landlord class of Han nationality, Wu Sangui still has a considerable distance from the Qing government. First of all, Wu Sangui's beggars attacked Li under the banner of "revenge for his father". At the beginning of the Qing soldiers' entry into the customs, this banner was once allowed by the Qing rulers because it was beneficial for the Qing government to unite with the Han landlord class to suppress the rebels in Li Zicheng. But in the long run, this banner contradicts the general goal of the Qing government to replace the Ming Dynasty and establish national rule. Secondly, Wu Sangui maintained a certain relationship with the remnants of the Ming Dynasty in the early Qing Dynasty. He even said to the Axe King regime in Nanjing, "I can't bear to add more details." Third, unlike other relegated officials, Wu Sangui also has an army under its own independent command. Therefore, at the beginning of entering the customs, the Qing government showed its favor and suspicion, and did not grant it the right to do things. In addition to strictly guarding him politically and militarily, he just used his hatred for the rebels in Li Zicheng to lead troops against Li. According to the instructions of the Qing government, in June of the first year of Shunzhi (1644), Wu Sangui left Shandong to pacify the rest of Li Zicheng, and in September, he went to Li Zicheng from King Azige of England. After the main force of Li Zicheng was basically eliminated, in August of the second year of Shunzhi, the Qing government transferred it back from the front line and "left Jinzhou". Wu Sangui was well aware of this arrangement of the Qing government. From then on, he never mentioned "revenge for his father" again, but turned the tables and called Emperor Chongzhen "the old master" and repeatedly declared that he was "loyal to the new dynasty". Three years later, the Qing government transferred Wu Sangui to the customs, and together with Li Guohan, the general of the Eight Banners, took Hanzhong Town and wiped out the remaining anti-Qing rebels in the northwest. During this period, in order to show his loyalty to the "new dynasty", Wu Sangui not only brutally suppressed the remnants of the peasant army, but also spared no effort to exterminate some descendants of Zhu Ming who rose up against the Qing Dynasty. The changes in Wu Sangui's thoughts and actions made the central government of Qing Dynasty more dependent on him. After the remnants of the anti-Qing rebels in the northwest were eliminated, in the eighth year of Shunzhi, the Qing government ordered Sangui and Li Guohan to lead troops into Sichuan to attack the remnants of Zhang Yijun. In the past few years, Chongqing, Chengdu and two other important towns in Sichuan have been pacified. In the 14th year of Shunzhi, he became the general of Pingxi, and went south to Yunnan and Guizhou to attack the last regime of Nanming-Wang Gui Li Yong regime. In the sixteenth year of Shunzhi, I went to Yunnan. In eighteen years, he left Myanmar and captured Wang Gui. For more than ten years, Wu Sangui led his troops from northwest to southwest, making a special contribution to the Qing Dynasty's rule of the whole country. So the Qing dynasty also changed from controlling the use of him to letting go. Not only after Li Guohan's death, he was put in charge of all aspects, but also in all military activities, "fake and cheap, no longer neutral, employers, officials and soldiers must not be bound, and money and households must not be late." At the same time, in his position, he was promoted again and again. After capturing Yunnan in the 16th year of Shunzhi, he was ordered to set up a provincial government to guard Yunnan and take charge of the military and political affairs. In November of the first year of Kangxi (1662), he was appointed as the Prince and the Prince of Jin Jue, and was also in charge of Guizhou. His son Wu also chose the Shang princess known as "Heshuo forehead", and added Shao Bao and Prince Taibao. In this way, Wu Sangui won the trust of the Qing government with the heads of millions of anti-Qing rebels, and also made himself climb to the peak of power in life.