g-ho, which washed away the
defences of the city, drowned thousands of its people, and left it at
the mercy of the besieging troops.

Li's next effort was made against the city of Tunkwan, the most
formidable of Chinese fortresses. Situated in the mountains between the
provinces of Honan and Shensi, it was strong by position, while the
labor of centuries had added enormously to its strength. Here fortune
aided him, his army following into the city a fugitive force which had
been beaten outside. By this time the rebel chief had made himself so
dreadful a record by the massacres and outrages committed in conquered
cities that terror began to fill the minds of garrisons, and towns and
cities opened their gates to him without venturing resistance.

No longer a mere rebel chief, but master of more than a third of China,
and feared through all the rest, Li now assumed the title of emperor,
and, capturing every stronghold as he advanced, began his march upon
Peking, then a scene of unimaginable terror and confusion. The emperor,
who had hesitated to flee, found flight impossible when Li's great army
invested the capital. Defence was equally impossible, and the unhappy
weakling, after slaying all the women of the palace, ended the career of
the Ming dynasty by hanging himself. Li was quickly master of the city,
where the ancestral temple of the Mings was plundered and levelled with
the ground, and all the kinsmen of the royal family he could seize were
summarily put to death. Thus was completed the first phase of a
remarkable career, in which in a few years the member of a band of
robbers became master of the most populous empire of the earth. The
second phase was to be one of a decline in fortune still more rapid than
had been the growth of the first. And with it is connected the story of
the Manchu invasion and conquest of China.

We have seen in the preceding tale how the heroic Chungwan held the
fortress of Ningyuen against all the efforts of Noorhachu, the Manchu
chief. After his death Wou Sankwei, a man of equal valor and skill,
repelled Taitsong and his Manchus from its walls. This city, with the
surrounding territory, was all of Northern China that had not submitted
to Li, who now made earnest efforts by lavish promises to win Wou over
to his side. But in the latter he had to deal with a man who neither
feared nor trusted him, and to whose mind it seemed preferable that even
the Tartars should become lords of the empi