Shaanxi, and indeed the entire northwest, is in a state of anarchy. In this kind of chaotic situation in which the law of the jungle eats the strong, the barrel of the gun is the last word, bandits are like ants, warlords are everywhere, soldiers are big bandits, bandits are small soldiers, and soldiers and bandits are indistinguishable. Coupled with a big melee in Zhiwan, fighting for the sphere of influence, the winner is the king, and the loser is the villain. Many of the defeated Anhui troops became rogue bandits, separating one side and fishing in the township.

At this time, there were already bandits in Guanzhong, and the two largest bandits were Hang Guizi and Xu Laoqi, who respectively seized Xi'an's left Feng Yi and right Fufeng, and mixed Xi'an City into a single body, forming a confrontation with the mainstream forces such as the Anhui Army and the Shaanxi Yasukuo Army at that time. Hang Guizi's original name was Hang Zhenkun, and Xu Laoqi's original name was Xu Chuanwu, both of whom were from the Shaanxi Yasukuo Army.

At the beginning of the 20th century, a folk song circulated in the Baoji area of Shaanxi Province, which said: "Hang kidnapper, the emperor of the soil, sent out bandits to live the king of Yama; The living king of Hades commanded the poor to dig up the treasures, and raised his feet to kill them. Eight months of fighting cocks and digging treasures, it really hurt the people!"

The "Hang kidnapper" mentioned in this ballad is Hang Zhenkun, the mastermind and instigator of the Fighting Console treasure theft case. Hang Zhenkun is a native of Huaxian County, Shaanxi. Because he walks with a lame leg, he is called "Hangzhou Kidnapper" by the locals. Since he was a child, he did not learn or know how to read, he was tired of reading poetry and books, and he did not want to engage in housework and production labor, but mixed with a gang of ruffians and hooligans all day long, eating, drinking, prostituting and gambling, and doing all kinds of evil. He is cunning, treacherous, fickle, and especially fond of gambling in crowds. Hang Zhenkun is stubborn by nature, he fights with people at every turn, and killing people has become commonplace for him. His lame leg was injured by his opponent when he was fighting bravely, leaving the root of the disease.

It is said that Hang Zhenkun began to wander around when he was a teenager, and worked as an apprentice in antique shops in big cities such as Xi'an and Beijing. Over time, he became an expert in this. He is particularly adept at identifying bronze objects, and the real thing is clear at a glance.

Later, Hang Zhenkun, who had always been extremely restless, abandoned business and joined Rong, and first joined the New Army Training Office of the Shaanxi-Gansu Green Battalion at that time, and became a small leader under Guo Jian, successively serving as a platoon, company, battalion, and regiment commander. Because he is very proficient in the way of drilling camp and knows how to vote for the preferences of his boss, he is more appreciated by Guo Jian. Later, Guo Jian stepped down, and he took advantage of the situation to set up his own door and became the soil emperor of Baoji City.

At that time, there was a squire named Yang Wansheng in the place of Doujitai, who was rampant in the township on weekdays, full of evil, and the people were very angry. Later, because he privately increased the tax on cigarettes, it aroused the righteous indignation of local farmers. As a result, some peasants* united to denounce his crimes, and some threatened to assassinate him in order to eliminate harm to the people.

Yang Wansheng couldn't help but panic. He asked Ma Ben of the party and Zhang Zhixian, who was a fellow villager with him, to intercede with him and exonerate him. Later, Yang Wansheng, who was a thief, learned that Hang Zhenkun liked cultural relics and was looking for treasures everywhere, in order to find a backer, and in order to thank Zhang Zhixian, he revealed to Zhang: "In the big ditch behind Daijiawan Village, there are several holes in the cliff, and there are antiques in the holes, and people in the village often dig up and sell them for money. For example, if someone loses gambling and has no money to repay his debts, he digs up two pieces in the cave and goes to Xi'an to sell them for dozens of yuan. As long as you move your head in the cave, you will definitely be able to dig up some treasures, and it is common to sell them for dozens or hundreds of white oceans. If you send someone to dig it up, you will definitely make a fortune.

After listening to Yang Wansheng's strange talk, Zhang Zhixian felt that this was a good opportunity to please his master, so he provided a clue to Hang Zhenkun and said: "There are a large number of antiques buried in a cave in the north of Daijiawan Village. ”

Hang Zhenkun was extremely happy when he heard this report, and he had a premonition that the time had come for him to make a windfall. And He Yutang, who was appointed by Hang Zhenkun as the commander-in-chief of the treasure theft, is the "living king of Hades" mentioned in the aforementioned ballad. He was very cruel, and before he robbed the treasure, he nailed an innocent peasant to the city gate east of Baoji with a big iron nail, cut off his scalp, and blindfolded him, so that the peasant finally died of pain.

After He Yutang accepted the task of commanding the treasure theft, he who had always been tyrannical and brutal, did whatever he wanted under the connivance and protection of Hang Zhenkun. On the issue of work, he sent Fan Chunfang, Ma Chenglong and others to come forward and convene the gentry of more than 80 natural villages near Doujitai, such as Qiaozhen, Jiacun, Panlong, Chencang, Changshou, and Lingyuan, to study it, and decided to send 600 migrant workers to work, and stipulated that each village would take turns to work; If there is a loss of work or a vacancy, one dozen and two penalties will be imposed, and there will be no mercy.

There was also a person who was arrested to dig up treasures, and said a few grumbling words, and after the supervisor heard it, he reported it to the commander-in-chief, He Yutang. He immediately ordered the peasant to be arrested and skinned alive, and his condition was unbearable. After many years, some old people in Baoji still remember the atrocities of Hang Zhenkun and He Yutang, and cursed them one by one for their innocent deaths.

Originally, the king of Baoji who was his own did not have anything to do, but the coalition army led by the national defense army entered Xi'an City, and naturally restored the administrative rights of the Baoji area, and sent a local civilian official to lead a delegation to recruit an an, and the first salute and then the soldiers negotiated with the Hangzhou kidnappers, of course, the conditions are not so preferential as the party * state, after all, the national defense forces take the elite line, and fundamentally reject these military ruffians who are full of vices, so the idea of Hangzhou kidnappers planning to mix up a military position cannot be realized. As for the local administration, since Wu Chenxuan planned to recover Shaanxi, of course he couldn't let this bandit become the emperor of the soil again, so the conditions were extremely simple, put down his arms, accept screening and dismissal, and the property of the Hang kidnappers could be taken away except for cultural relics. Such conditions are a joke in the eyes of Hang Guizi, and it is reasonable that the two-sided negotiations will collapse. So the delegation returned in vain and returned from Baoji City to Xi'an.

But the living king of Yama under Hang Kidnapper is gone, and He Yutang has hundreds of lives under his hands, if the boss is allowed to surrender the gun, Hang Kidnapper will naturally be fine, but He Yutang can be regarded as an explanation. Not to mention settling accounts after the autumn, even without the protection of Hang's abductors, his enemies could skin him alive, so He Yutang took dozens of henchmen to set up an ambush on the loess slope outside Caijiapo, and only a delegation of five guards of thirteen people only had a clever attendant who took advantage of his light horse to make a quick detour to the north, and only then did he go to Fufeng County to report the local coalition army. When a company of the coalition army arrived, only the corpses could be seen under the loess slope, five guards were in a trench, two were seriously injured after being shot several times, and three had gunshot wounds and knife wounds on their bodies, and two soldiers had their arms removed, and their broken arms were still holding the six guns that had been emptied. The broken bayonets and severed sapper shovels next to them seemed to tell people that the soldiers had exhausted all their weapons. The seven delegates were all tied up in a pit on the side, with their heads in different places, and their heads lined up in the middle of the road, apparently beheaded collectively after being captured, while the heads of the five guards were missing.

The company commander and company deputy of the Fengjun who led the team stared at each other, no one thought that on this Shaanxi-Gansu road, someone would actually poison the government delegation and dare to behead the demonstration, this is also too arrogant, right?

"Are you serious? None of our soldiers survived, and even the few literati sent were cut off by the bandits, or were they cut people in a big way? Lan Jihao's voice trembled a little, after all, it was his idea to salute first and then soldier, and he also had the credit of opposing the Qing Dynasty in the past, and some of them were still party figures who were connected with the revolutionary party, and wanted to give them a way to live, but he didn't expect these guys to "There is a way in heaven if you don't go, and there is no way to throw in hell." Don't blame the Wehrmacht for being ruthless.

"Order all regiments, transfer the garrison task to the Feng army and the Hubei army, and we must start suppressing bandits. Starting from Baoji, the bandits were uneven for a day, and the 5th Division of our national defense force did not withdraw its troops for a day. ”

Lan Jihao's military order had just been issued, and the communications officer had already handed over the order he had just received from Chief Wu to him. Above is the eight big characters "blood debt and blood repayment, don't be in vain, don't indulge". The communications officer also brought a report from General Staff Officer Duan that the 9th Infantry Division and the 10th Mountain Division of the Seventh Army had already been dispatched from their garrisons and arrived in Xi'an, Shaanxi Province in three days, and that the Wehrmacht would command the coalition forces to control the entire Shaanxi, Gansu, and Inner Mongolia, and deploy troops in the Qinling Mountains to deter Sichuan and Hubei.

The predecessor of the Wehrmacht, the Wuyi New Army, used bandit suppression to train troops, so this kind of anti-bandit warfare was not difficult for them, but some recruits who had never seen blood were added to it, and if they did not see blood, there was no guarantee that they would be able to withstand a tough battle.

So the Shaanxi-Gansu bandits with the Baoji City of Hangzhou as the prelude began, and the three divisions took the regiment as a unit, from the He Plain in southern Shaanxi like an iron grate, across the thousand-year-old Qinchuan.

Hang Guizi didn't know about the evil deeds of his cronies, so he was not on guard at all, and when the 5th Division surrounded Baoji City, he was still swallowing clouds and spitting fog on the couch. Lan Jihao personally commanded the general attack, and with an order, the howitzer group was mighty, and with the loud sound of the landslide and the ground cracking, a large gap of twenty zhang wide appeared on the ancient Baoji city wall. Guns were fired in unison, and the sound of gunfire, horns, and shouts of killing was deafening. The Hangzhou kidnapper army in the city panicked and was completely paralyzed. The besieging troops poured into the city like a tidal wave through the gaps in the walls without hindrance. The sporadic street fighting ended in less than an hour.

Hang Guizi himself was killed in the rebellion, and about 2,000 defenders in the city were killed and wounded, and the remaining 5,000 were captured. More than 10,000 of the city's inhabitants were killed under artillery fire, corpses and bloodied wounded were everywhere, and most of the houses in the city were scorched and in ruins.

On the third day after conquering Baoji, Lan Jihao sent people to take the local people to screen, and all those who did not have a bloody case were singled out, admonished, and formed a road construction brigade to go to Tongguan to build the Qinhai Railway. As for the remaining more than 2,000 blood-stained bandits, what awaits them will be a massacre order, and in November of the second year of the Republic, all 2,153 bandits who were captured alive under the Hang Kidnapper will be executed.

It should be said that such mass executions, or the killing of prisoners, are extremely rare in recent history, and there is still much controversy caused by them. However, at that time, there was a lot of banditry, China had just come out of the era of imperial autocracy, it was still far away from modern society, the relationship between the army and the state was very vague, there was almost no difference between soldiers and bandits, and they all believed in the law of blood reward, and of course there was no sense of military tribunals and human rights. If the Hang's subordinates were treated as prisoners of war (soldiers), then the massacre was naturally reprehensible, and if they were treated as bandits, it would be a different matter. After all, this is an era of barbarism, and it is impossible to talk about civilization.

This time, the bloodshed of the bandits was considered by many historical researchers to be a historical stain on Lan Shuai, but Lan Tianwei himself never said a word about it, until after his death, sorting out his diary, he found that Lan Shuai once had such a sentence: "The justice does not rely on verbal criticism, only blood for blood, killing to stop killing, since the butcher knife can prevent the wicked from mutilating the people again, and can warn future generations not to do evil again, then even in the face of Yama, I can be ashamed to say that I am saving people, saving thousands of Li people." ”