Zu Dashou
[4] In November 1629, the Qing army under Hong Taiji invaded the Ming dynasty, bypassing the heavily defended Ming fortress at Ningyuan north of the Great Wall, where Hong Taiji's father Nurhaci had been defeated three years earlier at the Battle of Ningyuan.
Slipping through friendly Mongol territory, the Manchus attacked to the west through Xifengkou Pass in Hebei province, aiming towards the capital at Beijing.
In response, Amin ordered a massacre of the civilian populations of Qian'an and Yongping, plundering the cities and abandoning them to the Ming.
News of the slaughter enraged Hong Taiji, who had been cultivating relations with the Han Chinese population to pacify captured cities and encourage defection by Ming officers.
[6][7] The Manchu forces focused their efforts on capturing the castles surrounding Dalinghe, sending messengers to each inviting their surrender.
In October, a larger Ming army of 40,000 men arrived near Jinzhou under the command of Zu's brother-in-law, Wu Xiang.
[8][9] 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" Portuguese cannons of Tong Yangxing.
By mid-November, supplies were low in the Manchu camp, but the situation was far worse inside the walls of Dalinghe, where the population had resorted to cannibalism.
When asked why the Ming 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.
[12] Shortly after surrendering to Hong Taiji, Zu was dispatched to Jinzhou along with 26 retainers to execute his plan to capture the city.
Despite leaving his sons and nephews in the care of the khan, Zu Dashou had returned to the Ming to once again command the Jinzhou garrison.
[18] When the rebels of Li Zicheng captured Beijing in 1644, prompting the suicide of Zhu Youjian (the Chongzhen Emperor), Wu allied with the Qing dynasty.
He opened the gates of Shanhai Pass to the Qing army under Dorgon in order to mount a joint campaign to oust the rebels from the capital.
[20] In 1921, Charles Trick Currelly, the archaeological director of the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, Canada, purchased a set of Chinese artifacts from the fur trader George Crofts.
