Background
Qin Liangyu was born in 1574 in Zhongzhou (present-day Zhong County, Chongqing). She was the daughter of Qin Kui and the sister of Qin Bangping and Qin Minping.
Qin Liangyu was born in 1574 in Zhongzhou (present-day Zhong County, Chongqing). She was the daughter of Qin Kui and the sister of Qin Bangping and Qin Minping.
Qin Liangyu's father began teaching his children martial arts, military strategy, and Chinese classical literature to prepare them for the chaos that he sensed would be coming soon.
In 1599-1600 Qin accompanied her husband in the suppression of a local rebellion, the Bozhou campaign in the southwest of China, with an elite corps of 500 soldiers under her personal command, which is her first recorded combat experience. After Ma's death in 1613, she took over his title and office as well as the command of the local troops, in accordance with hereditary leadership rights under the Ming court.
When Liaodong in northeastern China was threatened by the Manchus in 1620, Emperor Guangzong ordered her to send a detachment. She sent two of her brothers with several thousand recruits, and after they suffered an overwhelming defeat, she went personally in 1621 with 3,000 elite soldiers. After victories at Shanhai Pass, she returned to Sichuan on imperial orders to raise more troops for the support of the northeast. Back home, she immediately helped suppress the riots of local bandits, for which she was given the post of regional commander of Sichuan and was promoted to the assistant commissioner in chief. After the Manchus had taken several cities near Beijing in 1630, Emperor Sizong again summoned Qin to send an army to strengthen the defense at the capital. Her encampment in Beijing was known as Sichuan Camp until recent times.
When in the mid-1630s Sichuan was again shaken by local uprisings and invading bandits, Qin was entrusted with exterminating them. Her troops initially won several victories, but in 1640 they were defeated, mostly owing to errors on the part of Qin's superiors in administrative civil offices. She tried in vain to prevent one of the main leaders of the peasant rebellions, Zhang Xianzhong (1605-1647), from conquering the province but did succeed in protecting Shizhu from devastation.
Qin's bravery, loyalty, and military skill attracted the attention of several Chinese historiographers, and her biography, which appears in the section on military officials, is the only biography of a woman in a section other than the biographies of women in the official history of the Ming dynasty. Because Qin Liang-yu fought to put down peasant rebellions in late Ming times, writers in Communist China have been ambivalent in their treatment of her. In one historical novel of the 1970s, her role was even changed to acting as a partisan of the peasant class.
Qin married Ma Qiancheng, the military commander in Shizhu, southwest China's Chongqing Municipality, at the age of 24. Ma was descended from a general's family. Both Qin and Ma were brave, intelligent and physically attractive. They loved and respected each other. They had a son Ma Xianglin.