Li Zicheng in the context of "Transition from Ming to Qing"

The Ming dynasty, officially the Great Ming, was an imperial dynasty of China that ruled from 1368 to 1644, following the collapse of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty. The Ming was the last imperial dynasty of China ruled by the Han people, the majority ethnic group in China. Although the primary capital of Beijing fell in 1644 to a rebellion led by Li Zicheng (who established the short-lived Shun dynasty), numerous rump regimes ruled by remnants of the Ming imperial family, collectively called the Southern Ming, survived until 1662.

The Ming dynasty's founder, the Hongwu Emperor (r. 1368–1398), attempted to create a society of self-sufficient rural communities ordered in a rigid, immobile system that would guarantee and support a permanent class of soldiers for his dynasty: the empire's standing army exceeded one million troops and the navy's dockyards in Nanjing were the largest in the world. He also took great care breaking the power of the court eunuchs and unrelated magnates, enfeoffing his many sons throughout China and attempting to guide these princes through the Huang-Ming Zuxun, a set of published dynastic instructions. This failed when his teenage successor, the Jianwen Emperor, attempted to curtail his uncle's power, prompting the Jingnan campaign, an uprising that placed the Prince of Yan upon the throne as the Yongle Emperor in 1402. The Yongle Emperor established Yan as a secondary capital and renamed it Beijing, constructed the Forbidden City, and restored the Grand Canal and the primacy of the imperial examinations in official appointments. He rewarded his eunuch supporters and employed them as a counterweight against the Confucian scholar-bureaucrats. One eunuch, Zheng He, led seven enormous voyages of exploration into the Indian Ocean as far as Arabia and the eastern coasts of Africa. Hongwu and Yongle emperors had also expanded the empire's rule into Inner Asia.

The Later Jin, officially known as Jin or the Great Jin, was a Jurchen-led royal dynasty of China and a khanate ruled by the House of Aisin-Gioro in Manchuria, as the precursor to the Qing dynasty. Established in 1616 by the Jianzhou Jurchen chieftain Nurhaci upon his reunification of the Jurchen tribes, its name was derived from the earlier Jin dynasty founded by the Wanyan clan which had ruled northern China in the 12th and 13th centuries.

In 1635, the lingering Northern Yuan dynasty under Ejei Khan formally submitted to the Later Jin. The following year, Hong Taiji officially renamed the realm to "Great Qing", thus marking the start of the Qing dynasty. During the Ming–Qing transition, the Qing conquered Li Zicheng's Shun dynasty and various Southern Ming claimants and loyalists, going on to rule an empire comprising all of China, stretching as far as Tibet, Manchuria, Mongolia, Xinjiang, and Taiwan until the 1911 Revolution established the Republic of China.

The Shun dynasty, officially the Great Shun, also known as Li Shun, was a short-lived dynasty of China that existed during the Ming–Qing transition. The dynasty was founded in Xi'an on 8 February 1644, the first day of the lunar year, by Li Zicheng, the leader of a large peasant rebellion, by proclaiming himself "emperor" (皇帝) instead of the title "king" (王) before founding the dynasty.

The capture of Beijing by the Shun forces in April 1644 marked the end of the Ming dynasty, but Li Zicheng failed to solidify his political and military control, and in late May 1644 he was defeated at the Battle of Shanhai Pass by the joint forces of Ming general Wu Sangui (who had defected to the Qing dynasty), with Manchu prince Dorgon. When he fled back to Beijing in early June, Li finally proclaimed himself the Yongchang Emperor of the Great Shun and left the capital the next day after setting the palace ablaze and ransacking the government offices. He may have intended to resume his Imperial claims later on by proclaiming his accession in the Forbidden City. After the death of the emperor, Shun remnants joined with the Southern Ming in Nanjing, while continuing to refer to Li as their "deceased emperor". The Shun dynasty weakened dramatically after the death of Li Zicheng in 1645. The successors, his brother Li Zijing and nephew Li Guo, could not fight back and the dynasty ended in 1649 when Li Guo died in Nanning, Guangxi.

Wu Sangui (Chinese: 吳三桂; pinyin: Wú Sānguì; Wade–Giles: Wu San-kuei; 8 June 1612 – 2 October 1678), courtesy name Changbai (長白) or Changbo (長伯), was a Chinese military leader who played a key role in the fall of the Ming dynasty and the founding of the Qing dynasty. In Chinese folklore, Wu Sangui is regarded as a disreputable Han Chinese traitor for his defection over to the Manchu invaders, suppression of the Southern Ming resistance and execution of the Yongli Emperor. Wu eventually double-crossed both of his masters, the Ming and the Qing dynasties.

In 1644, Wu was a Ming general in charge of garrisoning Shanhai Pass, the strategic choke point between Manchuria and Beijing. After learning that Li Zicheng's rebel army had conquered Beijing and captured his family, including his father Wu Xiang and concubine Chen Yuanyuan, Wu allowed the Manchu to enter China proper through Shanhai Pass to drive Li from Beijing, where the Manchu then set up the Qing dynasty. For his aid, the Qing rulers awarded him a fiefdom consisting of Yunnan and Guizhou provinces, along with the title "Prince Who Pacifies the West" (平西王).

The Battle of Shanhai Pass, fought on May 27, 1644 at Shanhai Pass at the eastern end of the Great Wall, was a decisive battle leading to the beginning of the Qing dynasty rule in China proper. There, the Qing prince-regent Dorgon allied with former Ming general Wu Sangui to defeat peasant rebel leader Li Zicheng, founder of the short-lived Shun dynasty, allowing Dorgon and the Qing army to rapidly conquer Beijing.

The Southern Ming (Chinese: 南明; pinyin: Nán Míng), also known in historiography as the Later Ming (simplified Chinese: 后明; traditional Chinese: 後明; pinyin: Hòu Míng), officially the Great Ming (Chinese: 大明; pinyin: Dà Míng), was an imperial dynasty of China and a series of rump states of the Ming dynasty that came into existence following the Jiashen Incident of 1644. Peasant rebels led by Li Zicheng who founded the short-lived Shun dynasty captured Beijing and the Chongzhen Emperor committed suicide. The Ming general Wu Sangui then opened the gates of the Shanhai Pass in the eastern section of the Great Wall to the Qing banners, in hope of using them to annihilate the Shun forces. Ming loyalists fled to Nanjing, where they enthroned Zhu Yousong as the Hongguang Emperor, marking the start of the Southern Ming. The Nanjing regime lasted until 1645, when Qing forces captured Nanjing. Zhu fled before the city fell, but was captured and executed shortly thereafter. Later figures continued to hold court in various southern Chinese cities, although the Qing considered them to be pretenders.

The Nanjing regime lacked the resources to pay and supply its soldiers, who were left to live off the land and pillaged the countryside. The soldiers' behavior was so notorious that they were refused entry by those cities in a position to do so. Court official Shi Kefa obtained modern cannons and organized resistance at Yangzhou. The cannons mowed down a large number of Qing soldiers, but this only enraged those who survived. After the Yangzhou city fell in May 1645, the Manchus started a general massacre pillage and enslaved all the women and children in the notorious Yangzhou massacre. Nanjing was captured by the Qing on June 6 and the Hongguang Emperor was taken to Beijing and executed in 1646.