Three Massacres of Jiading

Timeline

1. 1645Jiading · JiadingAfter occupying Jiangnan the Qing enforced the queue order; Jiading's gentry and people refused to comply, and jinshi Huang Chunyao and gentryman Hou Dongzeng were put forward to lead the city's defense. Wu Zhikui's relief force was annihilated outside the south gate, the Loutang militia also fell, and Li Chengdong completed his encirclement of the county seat.
2. 1645Jiading county seat · JiadingLi Chengdong's troops tunneled in through the northeast corner and Jiading fell. Hou Dongzeng drowned himself in a river; Huang Chunyao hanged himself. The Qing massacred the city; Zhu Zusu's Jiading Yiyou Jishi records over 20,000 dead. The Qing army withdrew shortly after, leaving the city ruined and deserted.
3. 1645Gelong and Waigang, outskirts of Jiading · JiadingAfter the Qing withdrew, militia reassembled at Gelong and Waigang. Li Chengdong returned to suppress them and massacred both towns. Some accounts fold Zhu Ying's failed uprising on the twenty-seventh day of the seventh month and the second breach of Jiading into the second massacre, or count it as a separate one.
4. 1645Jiading · JiadingFormer Ming bazong Wu Zhifan rose against the Qing again; after his failure Jiading was once more massacred and plundered. The combined death toll of the three massacres was later perhaps inflated to over 100,000, while early accounts treat the 20,000-odd of the first massacre as the more verifiable figure. Many Jiading gentry lineages were wiped out, and the queue order was thereafter forcibly imposed locally.