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.

The Prince of Ningjing, in the Kingdom of Tungning (based in present-day Tainan, Taiwan) claimed to be the rightful successor to the throne of Ming until 1683, although he lacked real political power.

The need to implement change on an empire-wide basis complicated any effort to reform the system, leaving administrators helpless to respond in an age of upheaval.

While they might be adapt at citing precedents from the Zhou dynasty of righteous and unrighteous behavior, they were rarely as knowledgeable when it came to contemporary economic, social, or military matters.

The Hongguang court proclaimed that its goal was "to ally with the Tartars to pacify the bandits," that is, to seek cooperation with Qing military forces in order to annihilate rebel peasant militia led by Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong.

[29][30] The official history, written under Qing sponsorship in the eighteenth century, blames Ma's lack of foresight, his hunger for power and money, and his thirst for private revenge for the fall of the Nanjing court.

In Fuzhou, the Prince of Tang was under the protection of Zheng Zhilong, a Chinese sea trader with exceptional organizational skills who had surrendered to the Ming in 1628 and recently been made an earl by the Hongguang emperor.

[37] In October 1645, the Longwu Emperor heard that another Ming pretender, Zhu Yihai, Prince of Lu, had named himself regent in Zhejiang, and thus represented another center of loyalist resistance.

[38] In February 1646, Qing armies seized land west of the Qiantang River from the Lu regime and defeated a ragtag force representing the Longwu emperor in northeastern Jiangxi.

[41] On the pretext of relieving the siege of Ganzhou in southern Jiangxi, the Longwu court left their base in northeastern Fujian in late September 1646, but the Qing army caught up with them.

[44] The Longwu Emperor's younger brother Zhu Yuyue, who had fled Fuzhou by sea, soon founded another Ming regime in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province, proclaiming the era of Shaowu (紹武) on 11 December 1646.

[48] Li Chengdong suppressed more loyalist resistance in Guangdong in 1647, but mutinied against the Qing in May 1648 because he resented having been named only regional commander of the province he had conquered.

In early August 1652, Li Dingguo, who had served as general in Sichuan under bandit king Zhang Xianzhong (d. 1647) and was now protecting the Yongli emperor, retook Guilin (Guangxi province) from the Qing.

[55] Headquartered in Changsha (in what is now Hunan province), he patiently built up his forces; only in late 1658 did well-fed and well-supplied Qing troops mount a multipronged campaign to take Guizhou and Yunnan.

[55] In late January 1659, a Qing army led by Manchu prince Doni took the capital of Yunnan, sending the Yongli emperor fleeing into nearby Burma, which was then ruled by King Pindale Min of the Toungoo dynasty.

Koxinga's grandson Zheng Keshuang surrendered to the Qing dynasty in 1683 and was rewarded by the Kangxi Emperor with the title Duke of Hanjun and he and his soldiers were inducted into the Eight Banners.

The Tokugawa Shogunate decided to allow Tagawa Matsu, his Japanese wife to violate the ban, leave Japan and reunite with him in China.

[62] Zheng Zhilong informed the Tokugawa Bakufu on how his son Koxinga rose through the ranks of the Ming military and asked for ten slaves and ...... in waiting and Shichizaemon to be allowed to come to China from Japan to help take care of his wife Tagawa Matsu.

Food and financial shortage led to abandonment of the Jiangxi-Fujian and Zhejiang-Fujian mountain passes by Zheng Zhilong because he could not afford to pay salaries or feed his soldiers all over Fujian.

Koxinga referred to the queue order, saying "no person, wise or stupid, is willing to become a slave with a head that looks like a fly" and he wanted revenge against the Qing for the death of his mother.

Wang Zhongxiao and Li Maochun, who were gentry of Minnan, and Xu Fuyuan, a bureaucrat in the Ming government were among the number of people in Koxinga's organization.

[70] The Qing and Ming dynasty were based on the continent and stymied the activities of the coast while shipbuilding, cash cropping, sea trade, salt, and fishing were stimulated by Koxinga's rule.

Koxinga rejected the queue order and said that he would accept the same status of Korea, maintaining their hair and clothing and to "adopt the Qing calendar ... if not for the sake of the land and its mortals, then to bend on behalf of my father."

The Zheng organization started the Six offices as a regional variation of the central Ming Six Boards with the Yongli emperor's permission, they were personnel, military, revenue, punishment, rites, and works.

Koxinga had 10 firms which sold and purchased products for his Celestial Pier company, which relied on funding from silver deposits with interest from the Warehouse for Nourishing the Country.

[77] Travel distance and vessel size were factors in the price of Koxinga's permits which he sold to people who wanted to engage in overseas commerce like when Zheng Zhilong ruled.

The Tokugawa bakufu gave asylum to Ming refugees, and allowed into Nagasaki to trade "only those Chinese merchants under anti-[Qing] auspices" after the Manchu invasion since the majority of Japanese were pro-Ming and supported Koxinga.

At the Malay peninsula around Johor, Chen Zhenguan, a Zheng agent whose junk was headed to Japan, was attacked by several Dutch ships in June 1657.

[85][86][87][88] The Nguyễn court of southern Vietnam allowed Yang (Duong) and his surviving followers to resettle in Đồng Nai, which had been newly acquired from the Khmers.