Later Jin forces besieged and captured the fortified northern Ming city of Dalinghe (大凌河; present-day Linghai) in Liaoning.
Whereas the Later Jin had previously relied primarily on their own Eight Banners cavalry in military campaigns, after the siege of Dalinghe the Chinese infantry would play a larger role in the fighting.
Slipping through friendly Mongol territory, the Jurchens attacked to the west through Xifengkou Pass (喜峰口) in Hebei province, aiming towards the capital at Beijing in what became known as the Jisi Incident.
Before his death, however, he had used the prestige resulting from his previous victory over Nurhaci to rebuild Jinzhou, Songshan and Dalinghe into military colonies (屯, tun) protected by heavy fortifications as part of a forward defense policy that called for building strongholds north of the Great Wall, in particular at Ningyuan, which had served as his base of operations.
[4][5] Hong Taiji was able to capture several cities in northeast China in the 1629 campaign, including Luanzhou, Qian'an, Zunhua, and Yongping (present-day Lulong County).
The surrender of the Yongping garrison gave the Jurchens access to the so-called "red barbarian" and "generalissimo" cannons (大將軍炮), European designs that Shandong's Christian governor Sun Yuanhua had proposed for adoption by the Ming military.
Tong Yangxing (佟養性), a former Ming officer, was given command of three thousand Chinese troops and the responsibility of managing the artillery experts captured at Yongping.
News of the slaughter enraged Hong Taiji, who had been cultivating relations with the Chinese population to pacify captured cities and encourage defection by Ming officers.
Personally leading a unit of 200 guards (bayara) with Dodo, Hong Taiji ambushed an encampment of 7,000 vanguards of the relief force near the banks of the Xiaolinghe (小凌河, Xiaoling River).
The two sides then engaged in a field battle hours later, and again Hong emerged victorious, returning to the accolades of Daišan and the other beile encamped at Dalinghe.
Making use of Tong Yangxing's gunners, Hong Taiji broke the Ming lines after losing many of his Jurchen cavalry on several inconclusive head-on charges.
[17][1] On November 5, Yuzizhang (于子章), the largest of the forts surrounding Dalinghe, surrendered after being pounded for several days by the "red barbarian" and "generalissimo" European cannons of Tong Yangxing.
When asked why the Chinese continued to pointlessly defend a now-empty city, Zu Kefa responded that the officers all remembered what had happened at Yongping, where Amin had slaughtered the population the previous year.
Knowing that his army was in no condition to mount another major attack, Hong Taiji agreed to a plan in which Zu himself would return to Jinzhou, of which he was still the commanding officer, under the pretense of having escaped from Dalinghe.
[21] Wu Xiang, whose relief force was defeated at Dalinghe, was killed in 1644 in Beijing by the anti-Ming rebel Li Zicheng, who had captured the Ming capital.
Whereas the Ming had initially been reluctant to adopt foreign technology in the form of the Portuguese cannons, the Jurchens readily made use of them to address their relative weakness in siege warfare.