Qing forces entered Beijing in 1644 after the fall of the Ming to rebel armies, and spent the following two decades subduing the south. Where cities resisted they were stormed and sacked: Yangzhou fell in May 1645 after a short siege and was given over to a massacre that a survivor, Wang Xiuchu, described in a memoir that became one of the most reproduced texts in Chinese history; Britannica reports the traditional figure of 800,000 dead while noting it is 'probably quite exaggerated'. Jiading and Jiangyin were similarly treated later that year, in both cases after resistance provoked by the order of July 1645 requiring every adult man to shave the front of his head and wear the Manchu queue, enforced with the slogan that one might keep one's hair or one's head. The conquest was accompanied by the collapse of the registered population, the devastation of Sichuan in the wars associated with the rebel Zhang Xianzhong and the Qing campaigns that followed, and famine and epidemic across large areas. Aggregate mortality for the Ming-Qing transition is often given in the tens of millions, but those figures are derived from fiscal registers that undercounted before the wars and were not restored for decades, and specialists treat them as unreliable.
Qing armies conquered Ming China, sacked cities that resisted, and imposed the shaving of the forehead and the wearing of the queue on all adult men on pain of death
Ming fiscal registers understate population badly because they counted tax units rather than people. Ho Ping-ti's reconstruction, still the standard, puts China's population around 1600 at roughly 150 million; other estimates for the late Ming range from about 100 to 160 million. The conquest and the accompanying famines and epidemics are thought to have cut it substantially before recovery under the Qing.
No defensible total. The traditional figure of 800,000 for Yangzhou alone is reported by Britannica as probably much exaggerated, and estimates of total mortality in the Ming-Qing transition, sometimes put at tens of millions, are extrapolations from registered-household figures that are tax records rather than population counts and that were disrupted by the wars themselves. Deaths came from storming and massacre, from the campaigns in Sichuan, and from the famine and epidemic that accompanied two decades of war.
The massacres at Yangzhou, Jiading and Jiangyin, including killing, rape and the burning of the cities, are described in survivor memoirs, above all Wang Xiuchu's account of Yangzhou, and the queue order imposing Manchu hairstyle and dress on pain of death is recorded in Qing edicts.
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