Southern Ming Dynasty - The Prince of Tang and The Longwu Reign

The Prince of Tang and The Longwu Reign

In 1644, Zhu Yujian, a ninth-generation descendant of Zhu Yuanzhang who had been put under house arrest in 1636 under the Chongzhen Emperor, was pardoned and restored to his princely title by the Hongguang Emperor. When Nanjing fell in June 1645, he was in Suzhou en route to his new fiefdom in Guangxi. When Hangzhou fell on July 6, he retreated up the Qiantang River and proceeded to Fujian from a land route that went through northeastern Jiangxi and mountainous areas in northern Fujian. Protected by general Zheng Hongkui, on July 10 he proclaimed his intention to become regent of the Ming dynasty, a title that he formally received on July 29, a few days after reaching Fuzhou. He was enthroned as emperor on August 18, 1645. Most Nanjing officials had surrendered to the Qing, but some followed the Prince of Tang in his flight to Fuzhou.

In Fuzhou, the Longwu Emperor was under the protection of Zheng Zhilong, a seatrader with exceptional organizational skills who had surrendered to the Ming in 1628 and recently been made an earl by the Hongguang emperor. The Longwu emperor, who was childless, adopted Zheng Zhilong's eldest son, granted him the imperial surname, and gave him a new personal name: Chenggong. The name Koxinga by which this adopted son is still known to Westerners was a distortion of his title "Lord of the Imperial Surname" (Guoxingye 國姓爺).

In October 1645 the Longwu emperor heard that another Ming pretender, the Prince of Lu Zhu Yihai, had named himself regent in Zhejiang, and thus represented another center of loyalist resistance. But the two regimes failed to cooperate, making their chances of success even lower than they already were.

In February 1646, Qing armies seized land west of the Qiantang River from the Lu regime and defeated a ragtag force representing the Longwu emperor in northeastern Jiangxi. In May of that year Qing forces besieged Ganzhou, the last Ming bastion in Jiangxi. In July, a new Southern Campaign led by Manchu Prince Bolo sent the Zhejiang regime of Prince Lu into disarray and proceeded to attack the Longwu regime in Fujian. Zheng Zhilong, the Longwu emperor's main military defender, fled to the coast. On the pretext of relieving the siege of Ganzhou in southern Jiangxi, the Longwu court left their base in northeastern Fujian in late September 1646, but the Qing army caught up with them. Longwu and his empress were summarily executed in Tingzhou (western Fujian) on 6 October. After the fall of Fuzhou on 17 October, Zheng Zhilong surrendered to the Qing and his son Koxinga fled to the island of Taiwan with his fleet.