If the Chinese were to tell the most well-known history, I think the Three Kingdoms would be one of them. This history has gone through **, TV series, and the interpretation of games. It can be said that it is a household name, and it has a lot of influence even in neighboring Japan and South Korea. This is a chaotic era, the era of heroes rising together, the era of war, Cao Cao, Zhuge Liang, Liu Bei, Guan Yu is no longer a simple historical figure, but an image recorded in people's hearts.
Nowadays, people often talk about the classic battles of winning more with less, such as the Battle of Chibi, the Battle of Yiling, and the Battle of Guandu. However, if you are an ordinary person in such an era, it will be a disaster, and you may encounter a military disaster, or a plague, or a natural disaster. It's an unfortunate thing.
China has historically been the most populous country and the largest country, a record that has been held for thousands of years, and it was only in these two years that it was surpassed by India.
If you make a line table of the Chinese population of the past generations.
It will be a process of continuous upward and downward exploration, and then upward momentum, and we can see from the table for more than 400 years, even if China has experienced such great turmoil as the Northern and Southern Dynasties, it cannot be compared with the population decline during the Three Kingdoms period.
According to the historical records, in 157 A.D., the Eastern Han Dynasty ** had checked the country's household registration, in this "census", China's population was more than 56 million, and in 263 A.D. when Shu fell, the population grew to 940,000, this year the Wei State of Wei and Shu who pacified Shu State "counted" the population of Wei and Shu, and added Sichuan to northern China, a total of 5.37 million people. According to the Book of Jin, the population of Wu at the time of the fall of Shu was 2.3 million. In this way, the total population of China does not exceed 8 million. And this is the result of decades of relatively peaceful development after the three-legged tripod, and if it were placed at the end of the Battle of Chibi in 221 AD, this figure would probably be even more shocking.
Cao Cao recorded in "Bitter Cold Xing" in 206 A.D. when he was campaigning **, "The white bones are exposed in the wilderness, and there is no rooster crowing for thousands of miles." The people are left behind, and the thought breaks people's intestines".
It can be seen that the tragic state of society at that time. There are many reasons for such a sharp population decline, and people always blame the war for the reasons in the past, so that when I read the history of the Three Kingdoms, I was shocked by the decline in population, so that I sighed that "the atomic bomb is not as good as Liu Guanzhang's big sword and spear".
But if you look at Chinese history, you will find that although there were frequent wars during the Three Kingdoms period at the end of the Han Dynasty, if you look at the intensity of the two Jin and Northern Dynasties and the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms periods in later generations, as well as the rise of the Mongol Empire, the conquest wars that occurred were not much less than those of the Three Kingdoms period, and some of them were even more tragic. But even so, there was no such serious population loss as during the Three Kingdoms period.
Therefore, in addition to the war, there is an important reason for this situation is the plague, about the plague of the Han Dynasty, ** there are many theories, one of which is from the Han Wu Emperor period of the war against the Xiongnu, when the battlefield can not bargain, they used the most extreme method, the livestock infected with the grassland plague, put the river water source, lure the expeditionary Han army to come to drink water, or send the sick livestock, to the border city of the Han Dynasty. The Han army drank this water, got sick, and then spread throughout the country.
After more than 200 years, there were always periodic outbreaks, and the Han Empire was stable in the past, and such plagues could still be stopped, but the later Eastern Han emperors who ascended the throne after the Han He Emperor generally died young. As a result, the power was held by eunuchs and foreign relatives.
Finally, in 166 A.D., the scourge of the party broke out, and two years later, a second disaster broke out, and this also created an opportunity for the later Yellow Turban Rebellion, and the interesting thing is that Zhang Jiao, the leader of the Yellow Turban Rebellion, was not a peasant, and the reason why he was able to rise was also due to the plague.
In 184 A.D. the end of the party, the plague came again, and Zhang Jiao created the Taiping Road to use the plague opportunity to provide people at that time with water to cure diseases, very people actually magical**, so far the people at that time believed in Zhang Jiao's words, and then followed more and more believers, even up to hundreds of thousands of people, throughout Qingzhou, Xuzhou, Youzhou, Jizhou, Jingzhou, Yangzhou, Yanzhou, Yuzhou and other eight states, all worship Zhang Jiao's name, accounting for almost two-thirds of the country at that time, believers are honored as "great sages and good teachers".
Therefore, the Yellow Turban Rebellion is different from the previous and later peasant uprisings, which detonated from a sparkling spark to a nationwide turmoil, it was a comprehensive outbreak from the beginning, igniting a fire all over the country, in the past, we often in the book out of ideological needs, always regarded the peasant uprisings regardless of left and right as just and progressive, but throughout history, we will find that the destructive nature of the popular uprisings in the imperial era was far greater than the progressive, and most of the leaders of those uprisings were butchers who did not do anything.
This is also why the change of dynasty in ancient China and the peasant uprising fired the first shot, but most of the peaches picked in the end were people from those big families, such as the pioneer of the Tang Dynasty, Gaozu Li Yuan, and even the Yang Emperor of the Sui Dynasty, Yang Guang is cousin.
And the Yellow Turban Rebellion also gave warlords like Yuan Shao, Cao Cao, Sun Jian, and Liu Bei a chance to develop. After Dong Zhuo entered Beijing, he basically did not do anything, and finally triggered various princes to crusade against Dong Zhuo, until the eve of the Battle of Chibi, the entire land of China has been in a state of large-scale war, natural disasters (plagues) and man-made disasters finally made the Chinese population in the Three Kingdoms era the largest trough in history. The next time China reverted to the 60 million people of the Eastern Han Dynasty was a few centuries later, during the Sui Dynasty.