The Guilty Scholar Tree

Three trees have stood on this exact spot, and none of them is the one everybody comes to see. On 25 April 1644, as the rebel general Li Zicheng's army broke into Beijing, the last Ming emperor, Chongzhen, climbed Jingshan hill and hanged himself from a scholar tree at its eastern foot rather than be captured. Qing soldiers are said to have punished the tree afterward, binding it in an iron chain and cangue, the same restraint used on a condemned criminal, and a couplet about it is still quoted today. The sovereign was guilty and nobody asked, it says, and the old scholar tree, guiltless, wears the lock. That original tree is long gone. It was felled in the early 1970s during the Cultural Revolution as one of the Four Olds, replaced with a sapling in 1981, then replaced again in 1996 with a mature Japanese pagoda tree, already about 150 years old, transplanted whole from a courtyard on Beishuncheng Street across the city. The tree standing on the spot today, marked by a stele reading roughly Site Where the Chongzhen Emperor Died for the Country, is that third tree: genuinely old in its own right, roughly 180 years now, but with no physical continuity to 1644. The legend belongs to the site and the story it tells, not to any single trunk.