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Ta T’ung-fu, this same eunuch commander-in-chief refused to fight and, quickly turning his coat, abjectly agreed to the town’s surrender. When the rebels finally appeared before the gates of the capital itself, Tu Hsun fired a message in a quill into the city, in which he advised his late master that the rebels must win and that the Emperor’s best course of action was to commit suicide.
    Even this treachery did not bring the Ming Emperor to his senses. He appointed yet another eunuch, Wang Ch’eng-en, as commander-in-chief of the Beijing defences. The result was predictable. One by one the city’s strong-points fell to Li’s forces. But in the face of this disaster the court still could not free itself from the obsessive dream of Ming invincibility: on the day the first gate of the outer city fell, just two miles away (and with no line of defence between him and the rebels) a eunuch grandee was entertaining guests with a theatrical extravaganza.
    Li’s rebel troops surged forward and with very little fighting took the Chien Men, the main southern gate into the northern half of the city, making speedily for the last bastion of Ming power, the purple-walled enclosure of the Great Within. Suddenly realising the hopelessness of his position, the Emperor attempted to send his two sons to safety, dressing them in the ragged clothes of the ‘stupid people’ (the demeaning aristocratic term for Chinese hoi polloi). ‘Today you are Heir to the throne,’ he is reported to have told his eldest son ‘tomorrow you will be...a wanderer on the face of the earth. Reveal not your names and dissemble as best you may. If perchance your lives should be spared, remember in time to come to avenge the wrongs which your parents have suffered. Forget not these my words.’ With that, the boys were spirited away out of the city. His daughters were to share an altogether different fate.
    The Emperor now proceeded to get drunk, quaffing bowl after bowl of wine. Then, filled with the Chinese equivalent of Dutch courage, he assembled his harem and told the ladies bluntly, ‘All is over. It is time to die.’ His senior concubine, Lady Yuan, tried to flee, panic-stricken, but the Emperor cut her down with his sword. The Empress Consort was made of sterner stuff: she retired immediately to the Palace of Feminine Tranquillity, and there hanged herself. Altogether some two hundred of the Emperor’s women committed suicide.
    The Emperor’s eldest daughter, the Princess Imperial, was waiting at the ironically named Palace of Peaceful Old Age. Crying, ‘By what evil fortune were you born into our ill-starred house?’ the Emperor cut off her right arm and left her dying on the ornate tiles of the palace floor. He then made his way to the pavilion of Charity Made Manifest, and slew his second daughter.
    Dawn was breaking. Some loyal follower, remembering palace routine, rang the bell for the morning audience, where in happier times the Emperor had received homage and reports from across his wide domain. No one arrived. Most of the palace servants had fled, but the Celestial Prince was attended by Wang Ch’eng-en, the one eunuch who remained faithful to him to the end. Frenzied and distracted, the Emperor changed from his Imperial robe into a short tunic with a dragon motif and, with a shoe on the right foot and his left foot bare, made his way to Coal Hill, a towering mound surmounted by pavilions, just to the north of the Forbidden City. Once again, his departure was not without irony, for he fled by way of the Gate of Divine Military Prowess. Mounting to the top of Coal Hill he stopped; and there in the Imperial Hat and Girdle pavilion the last of the Ming Emperors hanged himself. As custom demanded, his last act had been to compose his valedictory message. Lacking writing materials, he set it down on the lapel of his tunic:
    I, feeble and of small virtue, have offended against Heaven; the rebels have seized my capital because my ministers