![]() | On the Trail of the Yellow Tiger: War, Trauma, and Social Dislocation in Southwest China during the Ming-Qing Transition The Manchu Qing victory over the Chinese Ming Dynasty in the mid-seventeenth century was one of the most surprising and traumatic developments in China's long history. In the last year of the Ming, the southwest region of China became the base of operations for the notorious leader Zhang Xianzhong (1605-47), a peasant rebel known as the Yellow Tiger. Zhang's systematic reign of terror allegedly resulted in the deaths of at least one-sixth of the population of the entire Sichuan province in just two years. The rich surviving source record, however, indicates that much of the destruction took place well after Zhang's death in 1647 and can be attributed to independent warlords, marauding bandits, the various Ming and Qing armies vying for control of the empire, and natural disasters. Kenneth M. Swope is a professor of history, director of graduate studies, and senior fellow of the Dale Center for the Study of War and Society at the University of Southern Mississippi. He is the author of A Dragon's Head and a Serpent's Tail: Ming China and the First Great East Asian War, 1592-1598 and The Military Collapse of China's Ming Dynasty, 1618-44 . |
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