May 27, 1644

Battle of Shanhai Pass

Dorgon and Wu Sangui defeat Li Zicheng at Shanhai Pass

Wu Sangui's men fought with scraps of white cloth sewn to their backs, so the Qing cavalry would know which Chinese soldiers not to kill.

27 May 1644: three armies where the Wall meets the sea

At Shanhai Pass, where the Great Wall reaches the sea about 150 miles east of Beijing, Wu Sangui's former Ming troops attacked Li Zicheng's Shun army on 27 May 1644 while Dorgon initially held the Qing force back.

Wu's soldiers wore white cloth patches on their backs so that Qing troops could distinguish them from Li's other Chinese troops.

Sand, then cavalry

The fighting ran for hours and weakened both Chinese armies. A fierce wind then filled the battlefield with sand, and Dorgon committed his cavalry against Li's flank.

The unexpected attack broke the Shun formation. Li's troops fled, leaving the battlefield and the strategic pass in Qing hands.

Whose victory this was

Wu had come to the pass unable to defeat Li on his own; he requested Qing aid and accepted Dorgon's demand for submission. This was no Ming restoration — the strategic beneficiary was Dorgon's Qing regime, which now controlled the passage into the North China Plain.

Li withdrew toward Beijing. Mark Elliott's account puts his army at about 60,000 against Wu's roughly 100,000; reported strengths vary substantially among historians, and no dependable casualty total survives.

Sources

Researched 23 Aug 2026 4 sources 2 audit passes

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet, rewritten from that sheet, then audited against it by a different model. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

Reported army strengths vary substantially among historians, and no dependable casualty total survives.
A few popular secondary accounts give May 28, but scholarly work by Mark Elliott and the Academia Sinica collection chronology support May 27.