Zheng Zhilong, born in Fujian, the son of a mid-level financial official for the Quanzhou government, had once, when he was a child, wanted to eat a longan fruit.

Finding a tree, he threw a small stone at the tree in the hope of knocking some fruit loose.

The mayor of Quanzhou, surnamed Tsai, was passing by, and his hat was knocked off by the stone Zheng had thrown.

Due to the child's age, the mayor forgave Zheng and released him, but Zheng's father never forgave him for embarrassing the family, and had forced him out of the family home at the age of seventeen.

Studying business under his uncle in Macau at the age of eighteen, he had been baptized as a Catholic in Macao, receiving the Christian name Nicholas Gaspard.

He later worked for Li Dan, a Chinese businessman in Nagasaki, Japan, where Zheng married Tagawa Matsu, a local woman.

When Dutch forces took over the Pescadores archipelago off the Taiwan Strait in 1622, Li Dan had sent Zheng to Pescadores to work with the Dutch as a translator.

The Dutch, wishing to control and monopolize commerce routes to Japan, collaborate with Chinese pirates; Zheng was one of the collaborators, engaging in robberies along coastal China.

After Lee died, Zheng acquired his fleet of ships in 1623.

Zheng's son, Zheng Chenggong, was born in Nagasaki in 1624.

Zheng relocated his enterprise to Taiwan in the same year, due to the feudal nature of Japan during the Edo period.

He had built ten outposts in the island's southwestern coastal region, between Tainan and Chiayi, but had been evicted shortly after when the Dutch arrived on the island.

Zheng had in 1625 founded Shibazhi, a pirate organization of eighteen well-known Chinese pirates.

Members include Shi Dashan, the father of Shi Lang, the future commander-in-chief of the Manchu fleets that will one day destroy the power of the Zheng family and conquer the short-lived Kingdom of Tungning (now Taiwan) founded by Zheng Chenggong, better known to history as Koxinga.

The Shibazhi have begun to challenge the Ming fleet and have won a series of victories.

The Ming Dynasty's southern fleet had surrendered to Shibazhi in 1628, and Zheng Zhilong receives the appointment of major general.

Tsai, the mayor who had forgiven Zheng for de-hatting him so many years ago, comes to Zheng and asks for a position in the Ming navy; Zheng grants this request.

After joining the Ming navy, Zheng and his wife had resettled on an island off the coast of Fujian, where he operates a large armed pirate fleet of over eight hundred ships along the coast from Japan to Vietnam.

Appointed by the Chinese Imperial family as "Admiral of the Coastal Seas", he defeats Dutch East India Company vessels in the Gulf of Kinmen on October 22, 1633.

Zheng will continue to serve the Ming dynasty after the fall of Beijing in June 1644.

Massive epidemics had broken out in northern and central China in 1640 and raced south down along the Grand Canal of China and the densely populated settlements there, from the northern terminus at Beijing, to the fertile Jiangnan region.

The epidemic wipes out ninety percent of the local populace in some areas and towns.

Jurchen leader Nurhaci had broken away from the power of the decaying Ming Dynasty in 1619 and established the Later Jin Dynasty, domestically called the State of Manchu from 1635, and unified Jurchen tribes, establishing (or at least expanding) the Banner system, a military structure which has made their forces quite resilient in the face of superior Ming Dynasty numbers in the field.

Nurhaci had eventually conquered Mukden (modern-day Shenyang) in northern China’s Liaoning region and built it into the new capital in 1621.

Nurhaci's eighth son, Huang Taiji, who had succeeded his father a decade earlier, in 1636 reorganizes the Jurchen, including those other groups (such as Hans and Mongols) who had joined them, changes the nation's name to the Qing (”Pure”) Dynasty, and formally changes the name of the ethnic designation to Manchu.

The early significance of Manchu has not been established satisfactorily.

It may have been an old term for the Jianzhou Jurchens.

One theory claims that the name came from the Bodhisattva Mañjuśrī (the Bodhisattva of Wisdom), of which Nurhaci claimed to be an incarnation.

Another theory is that the Manchus, like a number of other Tungusic peoples, take their name from the common Tungusic word for 'a great river'.

Huang Taji continues the expansion of the state in the region later known as Manchuria, pushing deeper into Mongolia and raiding Korea and Ming China.

Huang Taiji in 1636 invades the Joseon Dynasty, as the latter does not accept that Huang Taiji has become emperor.

Han Chinese had suffered heavy discrimination during Nurhaci's reign, but Huang Taiji has begun to employ officials of Han ethnicity.

He realizes that they will still be the majority and the Manchus always a minority, which means to control the Han people, the two ethnic groups will need to live together or else the Qing Dynasty will repeat the fate of the Yuan Dynasty.

Beginning in the late 1620s, Huang Taiji had begun to incorporate allied and conquered Mongol tribes into the Banner system.

The first Han Chinese additions had been merely sprinkled into existing banners as replacements.

Eventually, the sheer numbers of Han Chinese soldiers had caused Manchu leaders to form them into the "Old Han Army", mainly for infantry support.

A separate Chinese artillery corps had been formed in 1631.

At the time of Nurhaci's death in 1626, there had been four Banner Lords with Huang Taji as the lowest rank.

Huang Taiji is rumored to have been involved in the suicide of Prince Dorgon's mother, Lady Abahai, in order to block the succession of his younger brother.

At the same time, by forcing Abahai to follow her husband into death, he assured that there would be no one to support the fifteen-year-old Dorgon or fourteen-year-old Dodo.

At the end of Nurhaci's reign, Huang Taji had secured control of the two White Banners (Striped and Plain), but after Abahai's death, he switched his banners for the two elite Yellow Banners (Plain and Bordered) controlled by Dodo and Dorgon, bequeathed to them by Nurhaci, who had controlled them personally.

Having thus gained control over the two banners of the greatest strength and influence, Huang Taji gradually has stripped his competitors of their powers.

Eventually, he will also receive the Plain Blue Banner, the third strongest, from a son of Nurhaci's brother Surhaci, who had controlled the two Blue Banners.

These three banners will officially become the Upper Three Banners during the early part of the Qing Dynasty.

John Weddell, having served as a sea captain for both the Muscovy Company and the East India Company, had early in 1636 been given command of six ships sent by the interloper Sir William Courten, who had received a patent from the king in December 1635 to trade in the East Indies.

After failing to establish trade in Canton owing to Portuguese intrigues, he returns to India, where he succeeds in establishing a trade at Rajapur.

Song Yingxing publishes his Tiangong Kaiwu (Exploitation of the Works of Nature), considered one of the most valuable encyclopedias of classical China, in May 1637.

It covers a wide variety of technical subjects, including the use of gunpowder weapons.

Featuring detailed illustrations that are to prove valuable for historians in understanding many early Chinese production processes, the technical encyclopedia of the Tiangong Kaiwu is divided into separate chapters with broad overall themes, which include agriculture, irrigation, and hydraulic engineering; sericulture and textile technology; agriculture and milling processes; salt technology; sugar technology; ceramics industry; bronze metallurgy; transportation; ships and carts; iron metallurgy; coal, vitriol, sulfur, and arsenic; oil technology; papermaking; metallurgy of silver, lead, copper, tin, and zinc; military technology; mercury; ink; fermented beverages; and pearls and jade.

A devastating epidemic in 1640 affects most of China’s densely settled areas, sparing only the provinces of Guangdong and ...

...Sichuan.

Zhang Yan, a painter, is active in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries during the Ming Dynasty.

A peasant soldier named Li Zicheng had mutinied with his fellow soldiers in western Shaanxi early in the 1630s after the government had failed to ship much-needed supplies there.

Captured by a Ming general in 1634, he had been released only on the terms that he return to service.

The agreement had ended when a local magistrate had thirty-six of his fellow rebels executed; Li's troops had retaliated by killing the officials and since continue to lead a rebellion based in Rongyang, central Henan province.