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8-692: The massacre is described in a contemporary account, A Record of Ten Days in Yangzhou, by Wang Xiuchu . Due to the title of the account, the events are often referred to as a ten-day massacre, but the diary shows that the slaughter was over by the sixth day, when burial of bodies commenced. According to Wang, the number of victims exceeded 800,000, that number is now disproven and considered by modern historians and researchers to be an extreme exaggeration. The major defending commanders of Ming, such as Shi Kefa , were also executed by Qing forces after they refused to submit to Qing authority. The alleged reasons for

16-540: The anti-Qing Xinhai revolution to fuel massacres against Manchus . Wang Xiuchu Wang Xiuchu ( Chinese : 王秀楚 ) was a 17th-century Chinese middle-class scholar who lived through the conquest of the Ming dynasty by the Manchu -ruled Qing dynasty . Wang's most significant accomplishment is his writing of the "Yangzhou shiri ji" (扬州十日记, Account of Ten Days of Yangzhou ) an account that details his survival of

24-481: The ground. The organs of those trampled like turf under horses' hooves or people's feet were smeared in the dirt, and the crying of those still alive filled the whole outdoors. Every gutter or pond we passed was stacked with corpses, pillowing each others arms and legs. Their blood had flowed into the water, and the combination of green and red was producing a spectrum of colours. The canals, too, had been filled to level with dead bodies. Then fires started everywhere, and

32-508: The massacre were: Wang Xiuchu's account has appeared in a number of English translations, including by Backhouse and Bland, Lucien Mao, and Lynn A. Struve. Following are excerpts from the account in the translation by Struve. Several dozen people were herded like sheep or goats. Any who lagged were flogged or killed outright. The women were bound together at the necks with a heavy rope—strung one to another like pearls. Stumbling with each step, they were covered with mud. Babies lay everywhere on

40-468: The notorious massacre of Yangzhou that was perpetrated by the Manchu prince Dodo . In this account, five members of Wang's extended family are killed by Qing troops, and he witnesses the rapes and killings of many of his neighbors. In the end of the narrative, he is rescued by a sympathetic Manchu officer who orders his soldiers to spare the lives of Wang and his surviving family members. Wang's account

48-587: The pile of charred bones that remained afterwards. Books written about the massacres in Yangzhou , Jiading and Jiangyin were later republished by anti-Qing authors to win support in the lead up to the Taiping Rebellion and Xinhai Revolution . Qing soldiers ransomed women captured from Yangzhou back to their original husbands and fathers in Nanjing after Nanjing peacefully surrendered, corralling

56-417: The thatched houses...caught fire and were soon engulfed in flames...Those who had hidden themselves beneath the houses were forced to rush out from the heat of the fire, and as soon as they came out, in nine cases out of ten, they were put to death on the spot. On the other hand, those who had stayed in the houses—were burned to death within the closely shuttered doors and no one could tell how many had died from

64-509: The women into the city and whipping them hard, with their hair containing a tag showing the price of the ransom. There was a Hui Muslim community in Yangzhou during the Yuan, Ming and Qing dynasties with historic mosques like Crane Mosque and the tomb of Sayyid Puhaddin . Accounts of atrocities like the Yangzhou massacre during the transition from the Ming to Qing were used by revolutionaries in

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