The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom achieved successive victories in Hubei, Jiangxi, and Anhui, and defeated the Jiangbei and Jiangnan camps of the Qing army. At this time, morale was high, but a sudden upheaval occurred in Tianjing City, changing the fate of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.
In 1856, when the leaders of the Taiping Army rebelled in Jintian, they were in the same boat and had a close relationship, like brothers. They revolted together in the recklessness, inseparable, like flesh and blood; If something needs to be discussed, they get together and make a decision quickly.
However, since the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom established Tianjing as the capital, some leaders have become arrogant and lascivious, focusing only on power and profit, which has led to the intensification of internal contradictions.
Once, Hong Xiuquan founded the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, hoping to overthrow the rule of the Qing Dynasty and realize the ideal of universal harmony. However, after he entered the Heavenly King's Mansion, he became passive and lazy, indulged in collecting gold and silver treasures, and lived an unpretentious and boring imperial life.
He advocated that husbands and wives live separately and that men and women are equal, but he embraces left and right and enjoys dozens of concubines. His right-hand man, Yang Xiuqing, the king of the East, is keen on *** and even tries to monopolize power.
Wei Changhui, the king of the north, was respectful and polite to Yang Xiuqing on the surface, but behind the scenes, he coveted power, and finally led his soldiers to attack Yang Xiuqing's mansion, which led to the Tianjing rebellion.
After Shi Dakai heard about this, he immediately rushed back to Tianjing and helped Hong Xiuquan prevent the situation from getting out of control. However, because of his greed and suspicion, Hong Xiuquan regarded Shi Dakai as a thorn in his side.
In the end, Shi Dakai was forced to leave Tianjing, and Hong Xiuquan also fell into loneliness and predicament. This made the power game of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom shuffle again, and Li Xiucheng and Chen Yucheng became the real ones who turned the tide.
Despite this, Hong Xiuquan's passivity, laziness and suspicion still put the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom under internal and external pressure. In the end, under internal and external pressure, Hong Xiuquan chose to give up his ideals and the future of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.
1.In the map of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom** drawn by Westerners, Li Xiucheng and Chen Yucheng were important figures in the Taiping army, who fought on the front line and incorporated the Twist army. 2.Li Xiucheng led the troops on the front line and incorporated the Twist Army, which was quite prestigious; Chen Yucheng is young and experienced in battle, and has served as the commander of the Jiangbei battlefield.
3.Li Xiucheng and Chen Yucheng are fellow villagers in Tengxian County, Guangxi, and they are also fellow villagers and friends. In 1851, the Taiping army passed through Tengxian County and secretly summoned nearby people to participate in the uprising, and Li Xiucheng rebelled.
4.Chen Yu studied in the Mongolian Pavilion when he was young, but later dropped out of school due to his poor family and made a living by herding cattle for others. After the Taiping army entered the village, Chen Yucheng actively participated and became a fierce general in the Taiping army.
5.Li Xiucheng and Chen Yucheng were ordered to defeat the army, and they were in danger. They led the Battle of Sanhe in 1858, which finally broke the Jiangbei camp of the Hunan army and relieved the siege of Tianjing.
6.After the Battle of the Three Rivers, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom turned the danger into a disaster, and the Hunan army suffered a great defeat. This battle was a serious setback for the Hunan army, as Zeng Guofan described in a letter to a friend: "Since the defeat of Sanhe, the vitality has been greatly damaged, although it has been comforted in many ways, compared with the sharpness of the past, it is a diminishing color."
Chen Yucheng and Li Xiucheng, two fellow villagers in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, had a conflict after the victory of Sanhe, Chen Yucheng advocated **Hubei, and Li Xiucheng advocated steady and steady. Due to the discord between the commanders, the Taiping army rashly advanced westward, and as a result, they lost in the Battle of Erlang River, and the offensive was contained.
The arrival of Hong Xiuquan's brother Hong Renji and his advice made Chen Yucheng and Meng Deen kings, while Li Xiucheng was forgotten. At this time, Li Xiucheng was in an awkward position, his army was trapped in Pukou, and his old mother, wife and children were also taken hostage.
In the end, Hong Xiuquan sent someone to send a plaque of "Eternal Loyalty" written by himself, and named Li Xiu as the king of loyalty. However, with the development of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the phenomenon of feudal kings has become more and more serious, and even the ** of a county or township can have a king, and the whole situation is chaotic.
Li Xiucheng's portrait of Li Xiucheng After being crowned queen, he suddenly became energetic. In 1860, he and Chen Yucheng joined forces again, swept through Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and marched to Shanghai, conquering six prefectures and one state such as Su, Song, Chang, Jia, and Hu in one fell swoop.
At this point, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom got rid of the downwind since the Tianjing Incident, and made the most of the rich land in the south of the Yangtze River, and established Sufu Province and Zhejiang Tian Province. The conflict between Li Xiucheng and Chen Yucheng became white-hot in the victory of the Eastern Battlefield.
When Li Xiucheng conquered Suzhou, Chen Yucheng made a special trip to Suzhou to negotiate with him, saying that he had no place in Jiangnan and planned to lead troops into Zhejiang. Jiangnan is Li Xiucheng's territory, of course, he refuses to give in easily.
Chen Yucheng and Li Xiucheng had a quarrel, but fortunately, Hong Renji personally went to Suzhou to mediate, and the two did not fight each other, so Li Xiucheng made concessions and assigned Danyang to Chen Yucheng.
After that, Chen Yucheng Group guarded Anqing, and Li Xiucheng Group occupied Suzhou and Hangzhou. Some scholars believe that in the later period of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the relationship between Li Xiucheng, Chen Yucheng and Hong Xiuquan can be said to be "a typical representative of friction, struggle and cooperation with the local power system".
Especially when Chen and Li joined forces, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom turned to a climax, and once the two were not in harmony, they went to the trough again. The Qing army was also keenly aware of the inside story of the discord between the generals of the Taiping army, and Li Hongzhang said in a letter to Zeng Guofan: "The kings of loyalty, servant, zhang, and gan are all at odds with the dog (Chen Yucheng), and they are afraid of them and hate them in the middle. ”
05 When a fellow sees a fellow, he gets a shot in the back. Li Xiucheng not only reconciled with Chen Yucheng, but also put the other party together at a critical moment. In 1861, Anqing, an important military town that had fallen into the Taiping Army for seven years, fell into the encirclement of the Hunan army, and the situation was urgent.
Located on the north bank of the Yangtze River and under the jurisdiction of Chen Yucheng, Anqing City is both the capital of Anhui Province and a military fortress. Anqing overlooks the Yangtze River, guards the west gate of Tianjing, and can secure the main roads to Nanjing to the east, and can be used as a military base for the Taiping army to march to the two lakes to the west.
Chen Yu became the one to save Anqing, and thought of a plan to encircle Wei and save Zhao, and asked Li Xiucheng, Li Shixian and others to attack Hubei, take Wuhan in the west, and induce the Hunan army to return to the two lakes. Chen Yucheng's Northern Route Army marched quickly and smoothly, conquering the Huangzhou capital in March and approaching Wuchang.
If the Taiping army met according to the original plan, taking advantage of the city's air defense, Wuchang would be just around the corner, but Li Xiucheng's Southern Route Army did not arrive until June and released Chen Yucheng's pigeons.
On the other hand, Zeng Guofan knew that Anqing was "related to the safety of the world", so he did not return to the division to rescue Hubei, and continued to bite Anqing, and Chen Yucheng's plan to encircle Wei and save Zhao did not work.
Due to Li Xiucheng's failure and the precarious rear, Chen Yucheng left a part of the army to defend Huangzhou, and led a large army to attack the Hunan army besieging Anqing, and never returned.
By the time Li Xiucheng arrived outside Wuchang with his army, it was already two months later than scheduled. At that time, Chen Yucheng had already led a large army to attack eastward, and the British consul in Hankou, Jin Deacon, also came to persuade Li Xiucheng not to attack Wuchang.
As a result, Li Xiucheng led a large number of people to return to Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and he controlled millions of people, becoming the largest local powerful faction in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. However, he only focused on his own territory and ignored the siege of Anqing.
The Zhongwang Mansion he built in Suzhou was even more magnificent than the Tianwang Mansion. At the same time, Chen Yucheng, who withdrew troops from Hubei, also failed to keep Anqing. In June 1861, when Li Xiucheng first arrived outside Wuchang City, Anqing City suffered heavy rain for several days, and the ammunition and food were exhausted.
The camp in the north of the city is several feet deep, the defenders in the city are starving due to lack of food, and it is difficult for Chen Yucheng and other reinforcements outside the city to break through the besieging army, and the battlefield is full of corpses.
The Hunan army led by Zeng Guoquan took advantage of this opportunity to repeatedly storm and finally collapse the north gate wall with explosives, and occupied Anqing in September of that year. The defenders of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom seemed to have fled through the tunnels dug under the city walls on the last night, and they were long gone, leaving only the people of the city and some gunners tied to the artillery on the walls, all of whom were pale and weak.
After the Hunan army entered the city, they were shocked to find that the vegetables and weeds in the city, and even the rats and other animals had been eaten, and the ** of human flesh in the market even rose to half a tael per catty. As for what to do with the more than 10,000 people left in the city hungry, Zeng Guofan wrote to his younger brother Zeng Guoquan as early as when he was besieging the city, telling him: "It is appropriate to kill more people in Kecheng, and you should not be merciful and miss major events." ”
Anqing has fallen, there is no danger to defend in the lower reaches of the Yangtze River, and the overall situation of victory or defeat has been decided. Although Li Xiucheng succeeded in controlling the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom's greatest local power, he failed to save Anqing at a critical moment.
And Zeng Guofan's ruthlessness also makes people shudder. The cruelty of this war has made people have a deeper understanding of war and make people cherish peace even more.
The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was trapped in a lonely city, and Chen Yucheng received a letter of surrender to the Qing army, but he flatly refused and insisted on going to Shouzhou to meet with Miao Peilin, but was trapped. Chen Yucheng would rather die than give in, refused to kneel and beg for forgiveness, and bravely took justice.
Chen Yucheng's death was a huge blow to the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and the departure of the British king caused the military strength of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to plummet. When Li Xiucheng was ***, Hong Xiuquan asked him to save Tianjing, Li Xiucheng said that he would stick to it without fighting, and after he took Shanghai, he would bring the ** ammunition of foreigners to relieve the siege.
Hong Xiuquan made Li Xiu a protector, and Hong Xiuquan directly summoned the Taiping troops from all over the country to Tianjing. Li Xiucheng returned to rescue Tianjing, and although he pieced together an army of 150,000 people, he was finally defeated in the Battle of Yuhuatai.
Hong Xiuquan issued an edict to reproach Li Xiucheng for his failure to relieve the siege, and when Li Xiucheng returned to Beijing again, the Taiping army had already been defeated on all fronts. Li Xiucheng proposed to Hong Xiuquan to "let the city not leave", but Hong Xiuquan did not listen to persuasion and did not leave.
In the end, Tianjing City was breached, and Li Xiucheng **, heroically righteous. The defeat of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was decided, and Li Xiucheng's death marked the end of this civil war.
At the height of the Taiping Movement, there was a loyal king Li Xiucheng, who, in the last few days of his life, wrote a handwritten confession of 50,000 or 60,000 words and 36,100 words, recounting the past of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.
Li Xiucheng has repeatedly asked the Qing army to stop the ** in Tianjing, pardon the veterans of the Taiping Army of Liangguang nationality, and let them go home to earn a living. He also suggested to the generals of the Hunan army that "if you want to compete with foreign ghosts, you must first buy artillery and prepare it in advance", which coincided with the proposition of the Westernization Movement.
As for why he insisted on defending Tianjing and supporting the Heavenly King, Li Xiucheng left an intriguing answer: "I really don't know." Zeng Guofan personally deleted and revised Li Xiucheng's autobiography and kept his original manuscript secret, which seemed to hide a deeper secret.
After learning the news that he could not escape death, Li Xiucheng wrote ten desperate poems to express his loyalty, and then went to die. According to some scholars, these ten desperate poems are actually the "**Ten Mistakes" in Li Xiucheng's personal confession.