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The period following the collapse of the Empire of the Great Ming 大明 was a time of apocalyptic destruction, disorder, and despair. Crops failed, weather became erratic, trade was interrupted, the imperial system collapsed and the social order had been thrown into turmoil. The rigid structures of the late Ming world were swept into a traumatic whirlwind and dashed into the dust. All that was once certain had become unsure; all that was once right had been shown to be in error. A new generation of intellectuals and rulers bloomed in the burning death.

The quixotic episode of Li Zicheng's 李自成 rise to power led to the foundation of the short-lived Shun Empire 大順. China was reunified briefly following Li's victory at Shanhai Pass 山海關 and his destruction of the Southern Ming 南明, which had fortuitously entered into an internecine civil war between forces loyal to three rival Zhu 朱 (ruling house of Ming) emperors. This unification would last only for two decades, however, as the death of the Yongyuan Emperor 永源 in 1668 heralded the revolt of his general Hao Yaoqi 郝搖旗, the Duke of Yin 殷公, whose loyalty had lay with Li Zicheng and not his 19 year old upstart son, Li Bing 李禀 whom Hao thought was far too inexperienced and academic, unfit for the task of a martial emperor, destined to lead the Great Shun to ruin.

Many among the officers agreed with him. Pondering that there was not a generation of princes ready to take back the throne like there had been when the Jianwen Emperor 建文 was overthrown by the Yongle Emperor 永樂, he believed that the Shun state facing a weak succession so early in its history, with only a few very young descendants of the Emperor Gaozu 高祖 in existence, was such a bad omen for the future that he felt it his only choice to rebel with his forces in the south and attempt to establish his own dynasty, naming it the Great Yin 大殷

Zuo Liangyu 左良玉, meanwhile, was a former Southern Ming general on the run from the Shun who saw an opportunity when local peasants revolted and took it, becoming a warlord in Ganzhou 贛州 after Hao's revolt. Hao, seeking to shore up his power as best he could, allied himself with several former Ming warlords and bandits like Zuo. The Great Shun was at first able to contain Hao's army in the southwest as a result of a costly war from 1668-1673, forcing him on the retreat into the highlands of Yunnan 雲南, and into the service of the Tibetan Dzungar Sargal, who had declared himself Khan of the Later Yuan 後元 in Kunming 昆明 years before. However, Hao's death coincided with Zuo usurping the title of Emperor and establishing his own Great Wu 大吳 in 1676 in what remained of Hao's state. Gathering yet more forces and securing the help of the Yuan Khan, he would renew his efforts against the Shun. His outlook hardened by the failures of the late Ming, he thought to reestablish rigid order in the land through the expulsion of foreign forces seen as corrupting the country and state. Ironically, Zuo appealed to the fears of the people of chaos and anarchy to attain power, even though his war caused great disruption.

The Great Wu's armies came down from the highlands of Guangxi 廣西in a lightning invasion, catching the Shun state off guard whose military was still stretching itself thin pacifying the vast population centers of the south-east while also waging war in the southwest. Zuo quickly moved to occupy Chengdu 成都 and the Sichuan 四川 valley and from there marched eastwards with a force of some 150,000, composed of the last resisting regular military units of the Ming Empire (many of whom had by this point served Hao, Zuo, Zhang Xianzhong 張獻忠, and even the Shun) mixed into ad hoc formations and armed with what remained of the Ming's vast arsenal supplemented by the valor that comes from desperation; of knowing that one must do or die.

Venturing down the Chang Jiang 長江, they aimed to link with the forces led by Ming loyalist Zheng Chonggong 鄭成功, numbering 100,000, which had taken the fortifications of Hangzhou 杭州 and were marching westwards. Hearing of the defeat of garrisons, peasant uprisings, a Formosan invasion and a new rebellion growing in the ashes of Hao's even after so much bloodshed and sorrow, Shun general Liu Zongmin 李宗閔 immediately marched south from Beijing 北京 with a Shun force of 200,000 with the aim of destroying south China's ability to rebel once and for all.

Liu took little heed of the peasantry or the cities as he burned his way across the countryside on the road back to Wuchang, a city which he had just pacified not a year before, which had risen in revolt once more to greet the great saviour Zuo who would "Restore the Ming through the Wu" 复明藉吳. The people of Wuchang would find little mercy when Liu's army got there first, and (is said to have) stayed a week murdering and looting even as Zuo's forces approached and the local people joined him. By the end of 1677, Liu had died in the fighting and his army was besieged in the remains of Wuchang by Zuo and Zheng, where they were massacred. The streets were red rivers. Following this, Great Wu would occupy most of south China, being foiled only by the small garrison of the Shun fortress city of Yangzhou 揚州, which led by Shi Dewei 史德威 repelled several attempts at a siege. From 1679 onwards, the Shun Empire ruled only north of the Huai.

Li Zicheng's son, the Shengshou Emperor 聖壽 of Shun, though for his first several years of independent rule controlled the south via Shun loyalist general Liu Zongmin, lost that control following Liu's death and defeat, reigned in the north and attempted unsuccessfully to raise an army strong enough to dislodge Zuo. The Shengshou Emperor did repel a second Manchu invasion, negotiated peace with the Chakar Mongols, and reestablished Shun control over the Hexi Corridor 河西走廊 for a decade and a half.

The ailing Shun dynasty as a major power would not outlast its second emperor, however, as in 1685, the Shengshou Emperor would be assassinated on the orders of a clique of state bureaucrats who had been demoted after the emperor restored the class of the court Eunuchs, which had been abolished under his father's rule. The imperial administration fractured between three successor regimes ruled by factions of the perennially unstable Shun court:

- Ruling Shandong 山東 via an army of mercenary Oirat paid for by the lucrative sea trade reopened by the Shun, the Lu dynasty was the work of ruthless political opportunist Mao Mu, the Zhenning Emperor 真寧 of Great Lu 大魯 whose personal wealth grown through corruption and mercantile profits as the Shun governor of Shandong gave the highly intelligent and cunning man a base of military might, money, and a network of loyal officials with which he constructed his state's framework.

- The Great Dai Empire 大代 was ruled by the Yonghong Emperor 雍宏, a minor official by the given name of Deng Xiongju 鄧雄居 of the former Ming, who had been influenced by the thought of Emperor Taizu of Wu and an esoteric interpretation of Confucian philosophy surrounding a Xinguosi 新國思 regime. Deng Xiongju believed that what had gone wrong in China could be set right through change in the institutions of the state to fit with the circumstances of the times, guided by a class of academics trained in the Shun dynasty's university system.

In further refinement of the ideals of Xinguosi, or New State Thought, a political philosophy which emerged during late Yongyuan Era, Deng believed that he had brought together the best of Chinese philosophy into a single harmonious political program, combining Qin 秦 Legalism with Confucian 儒家 familialism and Mohism's 墨學 zealous philanthropy. In the north, he reformed land ownership and championed peasant commons, while streamlining imperial religious ceremony and equalizing access to the communal food stores of every city. He was even able to begin rebuilding the devastated Beijing.

Following the assassination of the Shengshou Emperor and the murder of the Shun Eunuchs, the class of academic technocrats that had been raised by Li Zicheng through his university system to replenish the state bureaucracy after his abolition of the eunuchs once again ruled the empire in Beijing as they had in Yongyuan generation. They briefly enthroned the four year old son of the Shengshou Emperor, Li Sang 李磉, as the Duanding Emperor 端定 for a few weeks in late 1685, but quickly panicked as a clique of powerful Shun generals failed to side with the Mandarins as expected, and instead sided with the former emperor's nearly illiterate but highly wealthy and well-connected younger brother Li Liang 李亮, then living in the Shun southern capital of Chang'an 長安. There, he declared the mandarins outlaws and made himself emperor with the era of Xiaxing 夏興. Venturing north with his powerful backers to Beijing where the Mandarins who murdered his brother were besieged and massacred, throwing the Shun state into even further disarray. Seeing his nephew as an innocent pawn, his life was spared, though he was placed under the care of the Empress Dowager Gao Guiying 高桂英 under house arrest.

The Xiaxing Emperor died in February, 1686 of a sudden bout of double pneumonia following a night of drinking, while the generals split into factions after attempting to form a regency council for the succession of the emperor's deposed relative, restored as the Duanding Emperor. The general of the garrison in Taiyuan, a personal friend of the Xiaxing Emperor, suspected that the Empress Dowager had something to do with the emperor's death. He understood Li Liang to be a troubled and challenged but ultimately good-hearted youth, and believed that the older generations were strangling the dynasty's future. Seeing little hope in the Shun, he acted to strike and form his own dynasty, suddenly and boldly declaring himself Emperor of Great Ji 大薊 and marching on Beijing. The Nongbao 濃保 Emperor chose to take up residence in the Forbidden City and largely ignore the outer provinces he had once ruled.

Within this vacuum, Deng Xiongju's pro-Ming rebellion gained functional independence in its mountain nest of north Shanxi 山西. Deng, nominally serving the defunct Southern Ming dynasty as the Duke of Dai 代公, launched his own expedition in 1688 which took Beijing from the Great Ji. Deng believed that the Shun had briefly gained, but in failing to secure order and the needs of the people lost, the mandate of heaven, and that it had thus passed to him. In Beijing he declared himself King of Dai 代王, and when he successfully defended the city from a Lu-Manchu alliance which sought his destruction, he named himself Emperor of Dai 代皇帝. Many in the era believed that the Great Dai was the most capable of reunifying the country, and numerous northern warlords and former officials flocked to his banner. At its height in the 1690s, the state controlled much of northern China from Manchuria to Shanxi, while exerting control over Ordos and Inner Mongolia through marriage alliances with the Chakar.

- The (Later) Sui Empire 後隋/大隋 was established by general Sha Centong 沙岑銅 who dreamed of ruling all of Asia from China, recreating the glory days of Sui and Tang by monopolizing trade in the western regions once again. Taking the Hexi corridor from the Shun and the Tarim Basin (which had briefly been under Shun control) from the rival Tang 大唐 and Jin 大晉 states established by former Shun governors years earlier, Sha's campaigning would lead him from lake Balkhash to Manchuria, from Baikal to Hubei, Kashmir and Tibet during his decades-long quest for the mandate of heaven; adventurous, glorious, daring, and completely pointless. Though he achieved great victories, he failed to rule anywhere very long and when he died on campaign in the east he was the emperor only of Gansu and Shaanxi.

Aside from these, a remnant of Shun ruled by the Empress Dowager Gao Guiying and her child grandson the Tiantong Emperor 天統, both of whom had been baptized into Roman Catholicism under the influence of a catholic missionary ruled in the city of Luoyang. They had lived in fear in Beijing following the coup of the mandarins and the counter-coup of the emperor's brother, despite that the scholar-bureaucrats had allowed the young boy to be briefly enthroned as the Duanding Emperor following his death. They both escaped from Beijing ahead of the army of the rogue general who had named himself Emperor of Ji, knowing the fate they faced with capture. Gao herself led loyal Shun soldiers in the defense of the emperor on their journey, in what was called her last campaign. first to what had been the Shun's southern capital of Xi'an/Chang'an, and then, fleeing from Sha Centong, to Luoyang. The Tiantong Emperor, as he was now called in his third reign still ruled the cities of Luoyang and Zhengzhou under the protection of the Shun loyalist general Gao Jie 高傑, who along with the empress dowager had seen the dynasty he had helped to build crumble into dust within his lifetime.

(Li Zicheng, for his part, figured something like this would happen. He gave all of his sons one character names as a mercy to his subjects. Only one character would have to be taboo no matter which of his sons became the next emperor following the inevitable power struggle.)

This further bleeding between north and south China after such a long period of death and despair created an atmosphere of fatalism and nihilism among a generation of intellectuals. One of which, a mysterious fugitive scholar only ever attested under the bizarre name of Meng Shangmou 梦尚牟, gave excoriating and unprecedented criticism of the pointlessness of ritual, vanity, politeness, and propriety; the Buddha, Confucius, the ancient masters of all times not escaping their caustic wit. They blamed the fall of Ming on the dynasty's holding on to values that had no worth or meaning, declaring that all human beings existed within a sea of nothingness and uncertainty with nothing of their own but themselves. Their greatest contribution to Chinese philosophy was their thesis in rejecting Confucius.

That, unconsenting to this existence, they conceived of humans as owing nothing to their parents, but parents being obliged to care for their children within the ethical burden of having brought them into being in a world of death and pain. Naturally, this put them at odds with virtually every state in China, and they were apparently forced to board in the houses of sympathizers. No authority ever managed to track them down, but their prolific work found listening minds wherever it managed to enter.

Meng, known also as Guzi 孤子 (the "lonely master" as it would be popularly translated), and their philosophy had a great impact on these traumatized generations in China.
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