Yangzhou massacre

The Yangzhou massacre in May, 1645 in Yangzhou, Qing dynasty China, refers to the mass killing of people in Yangzhou by Manchu and defected Han Chinese Ming soldiers (Han made up the majority of the Qing army at Yangzhou), commanded by the Manchu general Dodo.

Yangzhou massacre
An artist conception of the massacre from the late Qing dynasty
Traditional Chinese	揚州十日
Simplified Chinese	扬州十日
Literal meaning	Ten Days of Yangzhou
Transcriptions Standard Mandarin Hanyu Pinyin Yángzhōu Shí Rì

The massacre is described in a contemporary account, A Record of Ten Days in Yangzhou, by Wang Xiuchu. Due to the title of the account, the events are often referred to as a ten-day massacre, but the diary shows that the slaughter was over by the sixth day, when burial of bodies commenced.[1] According to Wang, the number of victims exceeded 800,000, that number is now disproven and considered by modern historians and researchers to be an extreme exaggeration.[2][3][4][5] The major defending commanders of Ming, such as Shi Kefa, were also executed by Qing forces after they refused to submit to Qing authority.

The alleged reasons for the massacre were:

• To punish the residents because of resistance efforts led by the Ming official Shi Kefa.
• To warn the rest of the population in Jiangnan of the consequences of participating in military activities and resisting the Qing invaders.

Wang Xiuchu's account has appeared in a number of English translations, including by Backhouse and Bland,[6] Lucien Mao,[7] and Lynn A. Struve. Following are excerpts from the account in the translation by Struve.[8]

Several dozen people were herded like sheep or goats. Any who lagged were flogged or killed outright. The women were bound together at the necks with a heavy rope—strung one to another like pearls. Stumbling with each step, they were covered with mud. Babies lay everywhere on the ground. The organs of those trampled like turf under horses' hooves or people's feet were smeared in the dirt, and the crying of those still alive filled the whole outdoors. Every gutter or pond we passed was stacked with corpses, pillowing each others arms and legs. Their blood had flowed into the water, and the combination of green and red was producing a spectrum of colours. The canals, too, had been filled to level with dead bodies.

Then fires started everywhere, and the thatched houses...caught fire and were soon engulfed in flames...Those who had hidden themselves beneath the houses were forced to rush out from the heat of the fire, and as soon as they came out, in nine cases out of ten, they were put to death on the spot. On the other hand, those who had stayed in the houses—were burned to death within the closely shuttered doors and no one could tell how many had died from the pile of charred bones that remained afterwards.

Books written about the massacres in Yangzhou, Jiading and Jiangyin were later republished by anti-Qing authors to win support in the lead up to the Taiping Rebellion and Xinhai Revolution.[9][10]

Qing soldiers ransomed women captured from Yangzhou back to their original husbands and fathers in Nanjing after Nanjing peacefully surrendered, corralling the women into the city and whipping them hard, with their hair containing a tag showing the price of the ransom.[11] Han bannermen were responsible for most of the atrocities in Yangzhou but they were nevertheless labelled as Manchus by other Han.[12]

There was a Hui Muslim community in Yangzhou during the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties with historic mosques like Crane Mosque and the tomb of Sayyid Puhaddin.[13][14][15]

Accounts of atrocities like the Yangzhou massacre during the transition from the Ming to Qing were used by revolutionaries in the anti-Qing Xinhai revolution to fuel massacres against Manchus.