Amid the Terrors of War

When Li Zicheng passed through the gates of Beijing in 1644, the only Westerner in the capital was the Jesuit priest Johann Adam Schall von Bell (1592–1666). A few years earlier the Chongzhen emperor, the last of the Ming dynasty to rule in Beijing, ordered him to make cannons for the defense of the city. Having heard the news of the advance of Li’s forces, the emperor tried to flee, but the eunuchs thwarted his efforts and fired on him the same cannon he had ordered Schall to cast. Later that same day the emperor rode past the Jesuit residence on his way to Coal Hill (Meishan) and eventual suicide. Schall had served the Chongzhen emperor for nearly two decades and declared that as a ruler he was “almost the greatest in the world and second to none in the goodness of his character,” but “with no companion and abandoned by all, through his imprudence [he] perished by an unworthy death at the age of thirty-six.” The Ming Empire, which had lasted 276 years, was now extinct, but Schall added:

With such a noteworthy expression of sympathy for the last Ming monarch, Schall alluded to the uncertain fate of Christianity under a new regime.