Some people call it 'Karma Cheng', some people call it 'Jia Kang'' and four hundred years ago, in Yan'an, Shaanxi Province, there was a person who would throw his head and spill blood for the country in the future, called 'Dingguo', 'Li Dingguo''. It's just that the name is always just a beautiful sustenance for people's future lives, and it doesn't always become a reality.
Li Dingguo, although he has such a good allegorical name, he still failed to make the Ming Dynasty immortal.
Li Dingguo, the character Hongyuan, or the word Ningyu, a person, etc., was originally named Rujing. He was not a Ming courtier in the full sense of the word, because his allegiance was mainly to Zhang Xianzhong, one of the leaders of the peasant revolt in the late Ming Dynasty, and the Yongli regime of the Southern Ming Dynasty.
In the first year of the Apocalypse (1621), Li Dingguo was born into a poor peasant family in present-day Yan'an, Shaanxi. The poor life forced the teenager to go out early to earn a living, so in the third year of Chongzhen (1630), Li Dingguo, who was only ten years old, joined Zhang Xianzhong's rebel army.
Coincidentally, the number of rebel troops was not small, but Zhang Xianzhong found the extraordinary-looking teenager in the crowd. Out of love, Zhang Xianzhong adopted Li Dingguo as a righteous son. Zhang Xianzhong had four righteous sons in his lifetime, the eldest being Sun Kewang and Li Dingguo ranking second.
Following Zhang Xianzhong for more than ten years is a rare opportunity for Li Dingguo.
As his righteous son, Li Dingguo was given high hopes by Zhang Xianzhong and got many opportunities to hone himself.
At the age of seventeen, Li Dingguo was able to lead an army of 20,000 and follow Zhang Xianzhong in Hubei and Henan. In the fourteenth year of Chongzhen (1641), Li Dingguo, who was just in his early twenties, disguised himself as a Daming official army, and led only more than twenty people and horses to rush to Xiangyang City and take it. And this great victory in Xiangyang can be described as an important turning point in Zhang Xianzhong's march to victory since he rose up.
In November of the seventeenth year of Chongzhen (1644), Zhang Xianzhong established himself in Chengdu and established the Daxi regime. Li Dingguo, who had distinguished himself, was given the title of General of Anxi and was ordered to supervise sixteen military camps. At the age of twenty-four, Li Dingguo was revered as "Little Lieutenant Chi" and "Ten Thousand Enemies" in the rebel army for his military merits and virtue.
It can be seen that at this time, although Li Dingguo has not completed the great cause of "fixing the country", he has also achieved achievements that many people have difficult to achieve in their lifetime.
In the second year of The Great Ming Dynasty (that is, the third year of Qing Shunzhi, 1646), Zhang Xianzhong, the big tree on which Li Dingguo relied, died of casualties. Zhang Xianzhong's death not only caused a huge blow to Li Dingguo, but also caused his rebel army to become a pot of porridge for a while, and was gradually defeated under the attack of the Qing army.
Sun Kewang, Li Dingguo, Li Wenxiu, and Ai Nengqi worked hard to integrate thousands of soldiers and more than 10,000 families. Later, in the dilemma of few people and lack of food, the party made concerted efforts not only to eliminate Wang Zhaolin, a sinner in Zhang Xianzhong's army, but also defeat more than 100,000 remnants of the Ming Dynasty, and gradually find a new direction of development from adversity.
There is no doubt that as a heavy minister of The Great West, Li Dingguo is a hard worker. And further, for the sake of the Ming Dynasty, he actually did more.
As early as after Zhang Xianzhong's death and the collapse of the Great Western Army, Li Dingguo advocated the integration of the army to support the Southern Ming. At that time, Sun Kewang advocated going to the Guangdong area in order to go to the sea to seek a livelihood when he was in crisis. However, Li Dingguo insisted on Zhang Xianzhong's last wish, willing to work with the Daming officials to resist the Qing army invading the south. Clashes broke out between Sun and Li, and eventually Li Dingguo threatened to die, and the Great Western Army gradually turned to Lianming to resist the Qing.
In April of the first year of the Ming Dynasty (i.e., the fourth year of Qing Shunzhi, 1647), the Great Western Army occupied Yunnan and stationed itself in Kunming. Sun, Li, Liu, and Ai would be crowned kings in Kunming, and Li Dingguo would be the king of Anxi.
The entire Great Western Army continued the tradition of the past, and the final arbiter of major events was Sun Kewang. However, Sun Kewang sat in a high position for a long time, and gradually had the idea of a single family. He and Li Dingguo therefore had a new vendetta and an old grudge, and the gap between them was getting bigger and bigger.
In the second year of Ming Longwu (i.e. the third year of Qing Shunzhi, 1646), the last regime of the Southern Ming Dynasty, the Yong calendar, was established in Zhaoqing. However, at this time, Sun Ke was expected to change his mind and did not want to support the Ming regime, but instead wanted to rely on Yunnan to stand on his own.
Li Dingguo, who was bent on uniting the Ming Dynasty to resist the Qing Dynasty, became more and more disappointed in the Great Western Army under Sun Kewang's control, and finally formed an anti-Qing alliance with the Ming chancellor Huang Yingyun in the fourth year of the Ming Yong calendar (that is, the seventh year of Qing Shunzhi, 1650) to show his determination to resist the Qing firmly and not to join Sun Kewang.
In order to realize his wish to repel the Qing army, Li Dingguo organized production in Yunnan, trained soldiers and horses, and also held an imperial examination to select civilian ministers, which for a time made Yunnan show a thriving scene.
In the sixth year of the Ming Dynasty (that is, the ninth year of Qing Shunzhi, 1652), when the Qing army attempted to attack the Great Western Army, Li Dingguo led 80,000 soldiers and 50 war elephants to march, and the Qing army in Keyuan, Jing, Baoqing and other prefectures was even more vigorously taken back to Guangxi.
The achievements handed over in Guangxi allowed Li Dingguo to gain the support of many Ming dynasty generals.
The Ming generals Hu Yiqing, Zhao Yinxuan, and Ma Bao successively threw themselves under his command. And this strengthened Li Dingguo's determination to resist the Qing Dynasty.
At the end of the year, about 3,000 miles of land in Hunan, Jiangxi, Guangdong and other places returned to the control of the Southern Ming regime under the leadership of Li Dingguo.
However, when the Qing army gave birth to a truce with Li Dingguo and let half of the world be given to Nanming, Li Dingguo's old rival Sun Kewang did not want him to make any more miracles. At that time, Li Dingguo was gradually advancing on the front line, but Sun Kewang was full of thoughts about how to frame Li Dingguo. In the seventh year of the Ming Dynasty (i.e., the tenth year of Qing Shunzhi, 1653), Sun Kewang plotted to deceive Li Dingguo into killing him in the army. In order to save the overall situation, Li Dingguo, who saw Sun Kewang's face clearly, had to back down again and lead a large army to fight elsewhere to avoid Sun Kewang's front.
The infighting between Sun and Li gave the Qing army an opportunity to take advantage of it. In the face of the desperate onslaught of the Qing army afterwards, Li Dingguo was temporarily defeated and retreated to Guangxi. In order to reverse the situation, Li Dingguo contacted Zheng Chenggong again, hoping to unite against the Qing. However, due to the distance and the difference in interests of both sides, Li and Zheng United ultimately failed to achieve the desired effect of Li Dingguo. After the defeat of The First World War in Xinhui, Guangdong, Li Dingguo had only 6,000 troops, and there was no hope of opposing the Qing Dynasty from then on.
After that, Li Dingguo experienced a series of struggles and chaos within the Daxi and Yongli regimes, and Sun and Li finally tore their faces and fought each other. Only at this time, the more turbulent the Nanming was, the more unfavorable it was to its resistance to the Qing. In the thirteenth year of the Ming Dynasty (i.e., the fifteenth year of Qing Shunzhi, 1658), the Battle of Mopanshan broke out. Although this bloody battle made the Qing army dare not send troops at will, it almost exhausted the strength of the Yongli regime, resulting in the Yongli Emperor being held hostage to Burma.
After the Battle of Mopanshan, Li Dingguo, who had more than a thousand troops, spent all his efforts on how to save the Yongli Emperor from Burma. After several dispatches, Li Dingguo not only failed to take back the Yongli Emperor, but also died of the plague prevalent in the army.
The once spirited general, after learning that the Yongli Emperor had been hanged by Wu Sangui, was distraught and died on June 27, the sixteenth year of the Ming Yong calendar (that is, the first year of the Qing Kangxi Dynasty, 1662).
And Li Dingguo's dream of resisting the Qing Dynasty for decades was completely destroyed at this moment.
As an anti-Qing soldier, the world knows that his hard work is high. It's just that although Li Dingguo is talented and ambitious, he is ultimately difficult to change the fate of a country, and finally dies with Daming in the step-by-step pressure of the Qing army.