Spring in Beijing ought to have meant willow-green newly washed, the city's dust turned light.
But that year the wind carried a restlessness that would not name itself—like a coal fire not quite extinguished, smothered beneath the roof tiles, growing hotter the longer it was kept.
Inside and outside the gates, refugees and grain carts crushed together into one heaving knot.Some sold heirloom copper locks as if they were silver.Some shoved whole sacks of rice into the hands of gate-guarding soldiers, bribing passage with the very thing that kept a family alive.Most absurd of all, the busiest shops in the city were not the Ministry of War but—coffin makers.
If you ask, "Why?"The answer is simple: famine, pestilence, unpaid soldiers, vagrants, rebel armies… Taken one by one, these words sound like weather far off; but when they arrive together beneath a city's walls, they become thunder at arm's length.
That evening someone cried from the battlements, "The Dashing King's troops are here!"The shout was a blade, cutting away the last shred of hope.
The defenders were not men who had forgotten how to fight; they were men who had not eaten.They loosed arrows with hands that trembled.They worried at their matchlocks until the fuses would not catch—damp, useless.And the men outside—those were the ones who had truly starved, truly died, and clawed their way back from heaps of corpses.They did not fear death, because they had long since run out of anything to lose.
In the end, the capital fell.
That night firelight licked the palace walls, an untimely red—too bright, too wrong for the hour.Word from within the Forbidden City traveled fast and came apart in the telling: some said the Emperor had fled; some said the eunuchs had yielded; some said the ministers had run.I will not linger here on the manner of departure. I record only this: when a great house collapses, what gives way first is not the beam, but the human heart.
The next day, new banners appeared in the streets.Beneath them stood new men, speaking new words.But the common people could not take them in. Their eyes fixed on only two things:whether there was rice in the pot, and whether there were soldiers outside the door.
And just then, another army—farther, colder—was gathering beyond the passes.They were in no hurry. They were waiting for the moment when the realm would be so乱 that anyone could walk in and call it theirs.
At Shanhai Pass, a Ming general in armor stood in the wind, watching the iron studs on the gate catch the light.
—A historian's brief judgment: the loss of the capital does not necessarily mean the loss of all under Heaven; but if the gate is opened, then most likely the world will be forced to learn a different way to live.
(End of this chapter)