Eighty-One Days

In the summer of 1645, the people of Jiangyin rebelled against the Qing Dynasty's "hair shaving order" and vowed that "the head may be cut off, but the hair must not be shaved" and they rebelled against the Qing Dynasty. Classical historians Chen Mingyu and Yan Yingyuan successively led the defense of the city. The whole city united and held on for 81 days. During this period, he cleverly used tactics such as "borrowing arrows from a straw man" and attacking enemy camps at night, which severely damaged the Qing army. In the end, they were outnumbered and fought to the death in the back streets after the city was broken. Yan Yingyuan's desperate couplet: "On the 80th, I will lead my troops to show my loyalty to Taizu in the 17th dynasty; one hundred thousand people will die together and leave three hundred miles of Ming Dynasty." In this battle, the Qing army suffered 75,000 casualties (including 3 princes and 18 generals), 172,000 people died in Jiangyin, and only 53 people survived. Jiangyin wrote the most tragic page of the Southern Ming Dynasty with the bloody battle of the isolated city, and was known as the "loyal and righteous state".