Zhang Xianzhong is infamous for his cruelty to the inhabitants of Sichuan province. He was briefly educated, conscripted into the Ming army and then court-martialled for an unknown offence. In 1630 Zhang Xianzhong became the leader of an insurgent band and quickly rose to prominence among the bandits.
Background
Zhang Xianzhong was born in 1606 to a well-to-do family in Yan'an.
In 1646, marching to Shaanxi to meet a Qing force led by Prince Haoge, Zhang Xianzhong was finally either killed by an arrow or captured and immediately executed by the Qing soldiers.
Career
In 1630, when Shaanxi suffered a serious famine caused by unussually severe drought, Zhang Xianzhong became the leader of an insurgent band, one of many such groups of peasant armies in nothern China.
In 1635, the Ming government moved several crack troops from southern Manchuria to suppress the peasant insurgency. The battle-hardened frontier troops defeated nearly all insurgent armies, forcing their leaders,inckuding Zhang Xianzhong, to surrender in 1638. However, when the Ming moved these top units back to Manchuria to confront the rising Manchu threat, Zhang Xianzhong and others rebelled again. Zhang Xianzhong's bandit army became the first insurgent group to capture and kill a Ming imperial prince, in Hubei in 1641.
Zhang Xianzhong also became the sworn enemy of Li Zicheng, a more charismatic insurgent leader whose following grew much stronger. Pressured by Li Zicheng, Zhang Xianzhong led his troops westward into Sichuan in the spring of 1644. During the next few months, Zhang Xianzhong defeated the Ming forces in Sichuan and occupied the province.
Zhang Xianzhong declared himself the "King of the Country of the Great West" in Sichuan capital, Chengdu. His regime had little local support.
Almost immediateky, Zhang Xianzhong started a campaign of mass killing as a collective punishment for local opposition. For example, a whole city quater was eliminated because one resident, sent by Zhang Xianzhong as a messenger to Shaanxi, didn't return to live under his rule or terror. Zhang Xianzhong often ordered his victim to be skinned alive. If the victim expired during the process, the executioner himself would be killed. When his favourite executioner died of illness, Xianzhong killed the physician who had treated him. He then killed another hundred doctors as a sacrifice to the dead executioner. He didn't spare women and children, and was even reported to enjoy killing a pregnant mother to verify the gender of the foetus.Women were usually savageky raped before being killed.
After recovering from malaria, he ordered the killing of many women by chopping off their bound feet, as a thank offering.