Chapter 799: The Fate of Liaodong

Beside him lay heaps upon heaps of corpses — Ming officers and soldiers, Jurchen soldiers too, but more than either, the Han commoners he had ordered seized from surrounding villages and hamlets to dig the trenches. Yet he did not spare them a single glance, striding straight over those bodies, head high as he advanced.

"The Great Khan has decreed: take Liaoyang, and the Han people's wealth, their women and children, are yours to claim! Push harder!"

Then, he suddenly sensed something was off.

Column after column of soldiers in armor, bearing white banners, abruptly burst out from beside his own troops and threw themselves into the assault on the city.

These were soldiers of the Plain White Banner!

An uncontrollable fury ignited in Amin's heart.

That bastard Hong Taiji — nowhere to be seen just moments ago, and now that he himself had broken the city, here he came scrambling to join the attack!

Shock and rage boiling over, he lashed his whip viciously at the personal guard beside him, splitting the man's face open and covering it in blood.

"What are you waiting for, pass the order! Tell them to press the attack harder, get into the city now! Don't let the Plain White Banner men snatch the spoils!"

At the rear of the Jianzhou Jurchen Jin army's formation, the Later Jin Khan Nurhaci was likewise watching the battle raging atop the city walls.

Under his gaze, the Jianzhou Jurchen Jin troops easily drove the Ming soldiers from the ramparts and were now swarming into the city.

Too easy. Far too easy.

His original intent to use the Ming army to weaken both Amin and Hong Taiji had been thwarted — thwarted by the sheer feebleness of the Ming forces.

How had the Han become less and less able to put up a fight? Even he could not help but wonder at the sight before him.

"Have the Han truly run out of men?" The Great Khan, now sixty years of age, let out a sigh, half in delight, half in regret.

In his youth, he had witnessed the ferocity of the Li family's armies; even when he first raised his troops, a certain unease had always lingered in his heart. He had never imagined that twenty years later, the colossus that had once seemed so immovable would have grown this feeble, allowing him to rampage unchecked across Liaodong, utterly powerless to stop him!

A moment later, he rallied his spirits — whatever else, Liaoyang City would soon fall, and he was about to become the Great Khan who ruled Liaodong. That was, after all, good news.

"Pass the word down: do not harm Yuan Yingtai. Take him alive!" He then issued a new order to the personal guards beside him.

If he could capture a Grand Coordinator of the Great Ming alive and force him to submit, it would surely be a colossal humiliation to the Ming Son of Heaven and to all Han people, he thought coldly.

With the Ming army's collapse, the battle for Liaoyang's walls had entered its final stage. By evening, under the Jianzhou Jurchen Jin army's relentless assault, the gate tower was ablaze. The Jurchens swarmed into the city through the Lesser West Gate; chaos reigned within, the air filled everywhere with the sounds of slaughter and weeping.

Liaoyang City was already doomed to fall into Jurchen hands.

On the gate tower, the Ming Grand Coordinator Yuan Yingtai still stood there, staring blankly at everything unfolding before him.

Dressed in the full official robes of a Grand Coordinator, gripping the sword bestowed by the Emperor, he stood as if at an ordinary inspection, staring vacantly at the queue of braided soldiers flooding in.

Knowing the Jianzhou rebels as he did, he understood all too well the fate that awaited Liaoyang after its fall: this great city, the fruit of a million Liaodong people's century of painstaking labor, would become a bandit's den for the Jianzhou rebels, its splendor lost for who knew how long before it would again be Han land; the Han soldiers and commoners within would face an unprecedented sack, many dying amid the Jurchen soldiers' plunder, and those who survived would be reduced to slavery, subjected to torments worse than death.

"We are worthless, we have failed the sacred heart, brought calamity upon the people — our crimes deserve ten thousand deaths..."

Zhang Quan's muttered words from earlier suddenly echoed ceaselessly in Yuan Yingtai's mind.

He was right. We all deserve ten thousand deaths!

The military officers of Liaodong who feared the enemy like tigers, the civil officials whose empty talk ruined the state, the army supervisors who fled before battle, the grand lords in the imperial court still locked in endless factional strife — which of them did not deserve death? Without people like us, how would the myriad souls of Liaodong have ever suffered such a monstrous calamity!

"Our crimes deserve ten thousand deaths..." His heart surging with emotion, he too could not help but murmur the words to himself.

The gate tower was already on fire. Though the flames had not yet leaped to the top, they were enough to threaten his life. But he did not care, for he had already resolved to end his life right here.

Yes — in two hundred illustrious years, even though an Emperor had once been captured, the Great Ming had never seen a high-ranking civil official surrender to barbarians. Perhaps surrender could preserve one's life, but Yuan Yingtai absolutely refused to be the first to bear that shame. The Grand Coordinator of the Great Ming must never fall into Jurchen hands, must never become a tool for them to humiliate the Emperor, to humiliate the Great Ming.

Several feet of white silk already hung from the beam, ready at any moment for him to take that final, fatal path.

So he was in no hurry.

He was still thinking — how could a barbarian tribe so small in number push him, push the Great Ming — the most enlightened, most prosperous realm under heaven — to such a desperate state? What had they done wrong?

If only Li Chengliang had killed Nurhaci back then...

If only troops had been dispatched earlier to exterminate this Jurchen tribe...

If only every civil and military official, instead of harboring selfish motives and obstructing one another, had striven with all their might for the country...

If only any of these ifs had come true — how could it have come to this!

Yuan Yingtai stared at the shifting, flickering red flames below the tower, and in an instant, countless thoughts flashed through his mind.

When he had first arrived in Liaodong, he too had been full of soaring ambition, but once he began to act, he found a thousand tangled threads and obstruction on every side, and in the end, accomplished nothing at all.

To have fallen to such a state now — he supposed he had only himself to blame. Yuan Yingtai gave a bitter smile.

No word had come yet from Zhang Quan over on his side. How was his defense holding? Had he done a little better than himself? Had he killed a few more Jianzhou rebels?

Probably so — Yuan Yingtai rather admired Zhang Quan's ability.

Still, given the current situation, no matter how well Zhang Quan held his position, there was no way to reverse the larger outcome. All that awaited him was final defeat.

In the end, he would meet the same fate as himself — indeed, knowing Zhang Quan as he did, Yuan Yingtai was certain the other man would make the same choice: to give his life for his country.

Give his life for his country.

Four simple, effortless words — yet how much unbearable weight they carried!

Regional Commander He Shixian, Regional Commander You Shigong, Mobile Corps Commander Xia Guoqing, Mobile Corps Commander Zhang Gang, Department Magistrate Duan Zhan, Deputy Prefect Chen Fuguang, Sichuan-Zhejiang Regional Commander Chen Ce... one by one, figures flickered through Yuan Yingtai's mind.

These men had all been his colleagues, and all had fought the Jurchens to the death and given their lives for their country in the earlier Battle of Shenyang.

They had all done it. As Grand Coordinator, how could he possibly fail to do the same?

The corner of Yuan Yingtai's mouth twitched slightly, forcing out a difficult, bitter smile.

Having long since come to terms with his fate, he did not fear death, yet his heart was now filled with a kind of dread — a nameless dread of the future.

From the blurred and twisted faces of the Jurchen soldiers below the tower, faces brimming with the exhilaration of slaughter and plunder, he sensed a dread — a vague, indistinct dread for the future of Huaxia itself.

The splendor of robes and adornments is called Hua; the grandeur of rites and ceremony is called Xia. If these people fight their way inside the Pass... will there still be a Huaxia?

How many flourishing cities and towns will be reduced to rubble? How many Han commoners will become aggrieved ghosts and bleached bones? How much of Huaxia's finest essence will be drowned in barbarian stench?!

We who have ruined the country — to meet such an end today, our deaths are not worth regretting. But the Great Ming realm inside the Pass, the countless millions of living souls — what will become of them when the time comes? Who will come to save them?

Who will come to save them!

He could only hope that the court's next Grand Coordinator would be able to turn the tide with sheer force of will. No — he surely would! If he could not, then all was utterly lost! The Great Ming still possessed ten thousand li of territory inside the Pass, still had countless millions of subjects. As long as the Son of Heaven roused himself, the three armies did their duty, and civil and military officials neither coveted wealth nor clung to life, what worry was there that a trifling Jianzhou rebel band would not be wiped out? The aging Grand Coordinator of the Great Ming told himself this over and over.

Though his long years at court told him just how laughable this notion was, at this moment, he could only use such thoughts to comfort himself.

Time was running out. The Jurchens had already flooded into the city in great numbers and were now fighting their way toward the gate tower. The personal guards below the tower were still struggling to hold them back, but against these Jurchen soldiers whose eyes had gone red with slaughter, it was clear they could not hold out much longer.

It was time.

Yuan Yingtai let out a long sigh, as if lamenting for himself, for the people of Liaodong, and for the fate of the Ming court.

Then, forcing his already stiffened body to move, he slowly knelt in the direction of the southwest, and from afar apologized for his own failings and those of others to the Son of Heaven of the Great Ming, far away in Beijing.

"O endless blue heavens, open your eyes!" Then he murmured to himself, then stepped onto the stool, and then kicked the stool away.

Liaodong had suffered a great defeat. Yuan Yingtai, the Military Commissioner of Liaodong, had taken his own life. The two great cities of Shenyang and Liaoyang had been seized by the Jianzhou Jurchens. When word reached the capital, it stirred none of the shock of the Battle of Sarhu; high and low alike seemed numb.

By all accounts, the Donglin faction now held power at court — this was precisely the season of "the righteous filling the court." The books all said that whenever the righteous fill the court, the state is prosperous and the people strong, no worthy man is left hidden in the wilds, and the surrounding barbarians all submit. Any Jurchen caitiffs would be beneath mention. The reason they still ran rampant and insolent was surely that they had not yet been touched by the civilizing influence of the Donglin worthies and virtuous ministers. Once they felt that civilizing influence, they would naturally cease harassing the border garrisons and would instead declare themselves subjects and offer tribute.

So such trifling afflictions of scabies were not worth worrying about. Getting His Sacred Majesty to purge the host of villains at once and appoint Donglin worthies — that was the proper business.

In the Palace Removal Case, the Donglin partisans had rendered great service, and naturally had to be rewarded for their deeds. All the critical, prestigious posts in the Grand Secretariat, the Six Ministries, and the Chief Surveillance Bureau must be filled by Donglin men.

This had been manageable enough when the Tianqi Emperor first ascended the throne, but now it was growing harder by the day, because the Son of Heaven of Tianqi, like several emperors before him, had begun letting his trusted eunuchs take part in state affairs.

Eunuchs who had worked their way up from the Inner Script Hall to the Twenty-Four Agencies, tempered by ten or twenty years of experience, were no callow young emperor. Apart from their physical mutilation, they were far more adept than the outer court's scholar-officials — who knew only how to form cliques and fight one another — in both political strife and administrative affairs.

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