page_title: Yangzhou
section_title: Early Qing
hierarchical_section_title: Yangzhou / History / Early Qing
caption_attribution_description: A late Qing era depiction of the massacre of Yangzhou
context_page_description: Yangzhou, postal romanization Yangchow, is a prefecture-level city in central Jiangsu Province, China. Sitting on the north bank of the Yangtze, it borders the provincial capital Nanjing to the southwest, Huai'an to the north, Yancheng to the northeast, Taizhou to the east, and Zhenjiang across the river to the south. Its population was 4,414,681 at the 2010 census and its urban area is home to 2,146,980 inhabitants, including three urban districts, currently in the agglomeration.
  Historically, Yangzhou was one of the wealthiest cities in China, known at various periods for its great merchant families, poets, artists, and scholars. Its name refers to its former position as the capital of the ancient Yangzhou prefecture in imperial China. Yangzhou was one of the first cities to benefit from one of the earliest world bank loans in China, used to construct Yangzhou thermal power station in 1994.
context_section_description: After the fall of Beijing and northern China to the Manchus in 1644, Yangzhou remained under the control of the short-lived Southern Ming based in Nanjing. Qing forces led by Prince Dodo reached Yangzhou in the spring of 1645, and despite the heroic efforts of its chief defender, Shi Kefa, the city fell on May 20, 1645, after a brief siege. The ten-day Yangzhou massacre followed, Wang alleged that the number of victims was allegedly close to 800,000, that number is now disproven and considered by modern historians and researchers to be a ridiculous exaggeration. Shi Kefa himself was killed by the Manchus when he refused to switch his allegiance to the Qing regime.
  The city's rapid recovery from these events and its great prosperity through the early and middle years of the Qing dynasty were due to its role as administrative center of the Lianghuai sector of the government salt monopoly. As early as 1655, the Dutch envoy Johan Nieuhof described the city (Jamcefu, i.e. Yangzhou-Fu, in his transcription) commented on the city's salt trade as follows:
  This Trade alone has so very much enrich'd the Inhabitants of this Town, that they have re-built their City since the last destruction by the Tartars, erecting it in as great splendor as it was at first.
  Famed at that time and since for literature, art, and the gardens of its merchant families, many of which were visited by the Kangxi and Qianling emperors during their Southern Tours, the Qing-era Yangzhou has been the focus of intensive research by historians.
caption: A late Qing artist conception of the Yangzhou massacre.
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