Late September, the seventeenth year of Chongzhen, the first year of the Ming empress's reign.
Li, the Ming naval commander who held the titles of Great General of the Ming Empire, Commander of the Beijing Guards, Governor-General of the Five Armies' Commandery, and Admiral of the East Sea, led five thousand elite Li family musketeers armed with flintlock Minie rifles, more than a hundred naval cannons unloaded from warships, and over thirty thousand assorted support troops to battle the rebel army beneath Xi'an, the city where they had established their so-called Great Shun.
Now, the rebel army of the fake Great Shun had already suffered a crushing defeat along the Huaiqing–Pingyang line. They refused to come out of the city gates and had prepared in advance to strip the countryside bare, as if hoping to force the advancing Ming army to retreat that way.
"..."
At that moment, in the imperial palace of Xi'an, Li Zicheng, who called himself the emperor of Great Shun, sat high on his dragon throne in golden armor, looking at his assembled generals in silence.
Among the Great Shun generals standing on either side below his throne were Right Camp Commander Yuan Zongdi, Left Camp Commander Liu Fangliang, Liu Zongmin—the Marquis of Ru and Left Commander-in-Chief—as well as Li Laiheng, Tian Jianxiu, and his other trusted followers. Besides them, a host of other Great Shun generals were present.
They were gathered in the palace to discuss how best to repel the enemy!
But...
The Ming army's firearms were fearsome and deadly. Those muskets could kill a man from more than a thousand paces away. When thousands of them fired together, the spectacle was terrifying, and neither men nor horses could get close.
And besides those terrifying muskets, the Ming army's cannons were just as frightening!