“…… In Beijing in 1665, a far-reaching event took place, that is, Ao Baili, who held the power of the court, overrode public opinion, and at the same time trained four new armies in Kaifeng, Jinzhou, and Hanzhong to adapt to the increasingly rapidly changing battlefield situation. What is surprising is that among the generals who commanded these four new armies, two were Han generals, namely Daniel Zhang, the commander of the Kaifeng New Army, and Zhao Liangdong, the commander of the Hanzhong New Army. ”

The sky in the east was already white, and Guo Puxia, who had read the manuscript overnight and revised the manuscript overnight, rubbed his eyes a little sour, and put down the manuscript about the Qing Kingdom in his hand. These manuscripts, created by one of his senior intelligence officers, are in a slightly different style from the previous one. And because of the limited access to information about the Qing Dynasty, many parts of it are speculation, and some opinions have yet to be confirmed, so the content of the article may not be so convincing to some people.

The article draws from the reform of the military system with the most information on the east coast, and highlights the three sets of military systems that the Qing army is now running in parallel, namely the Eight Banner Army, the Green Camp Army, and the New Army.

“…… The Eight Banners Army consisted of 300 leaders per unit, all of whom were paid by the Qing Emperor and given land property. Officers of the Eight Banners Army above the rank of assistant commander were transferred between ministries every five years or so to prevent the nobles of the clan or the generals of the army from gaining self-respect. It was a mature military system that would allow the monarch to sleep in peace and not die in court intrigues. The empire as a whole currently has about 200,000-250,000 such troops, but we are highly skeptical of this number, because there is intelligence that the total number of adult men in the Qing Empire is only in their early 250,000s, which means that they have counted the vast majority of adult men in the army, or as they say, men over the age of 15 and under the age of 60 have to serve, at least on the surface. ”

“…… The size of the Green Battalion is huge, almost 500,000 people, maybe 600,000 people, we can't count it exactly. At its peak in 1645, the Green Battalion might have numbered 800,000 or 1,000,000 men, because the front-line generals had recruited too many troops. After this, as the situation changed, the Qing court carried out a large-scale disarmament, a very bold action that ensured the health of the empire's finances - the existing Green Battalion needed about 4 million taels of silver and an unknown amount of food, cloth, and salt per year to maintain it - and barely guarded the empire's security. However, it is worth noting that these green battalion soldiers are hereditary, and their treatment is very average, and in recent years, they have often been deducted by their superiors, and their morale has fallen quickly. If they could still be compared with our servant army in the early years, they are no longer worthy of comparison with the new army units that have been completely reorganized, and they are inferior in every way. ”

“…… The new army currently has about 100,000 men, which is the limit of what the Qing Empire can maintain under the current situation, unless they are willing to reduce the establishment of the green battalion, but this does not seem to save much financial resources. Among the 100,000 new troops, the Jinzhou New Army was divided into two divisions, one led by Tuhai, about 40,000 people, including many Manchu, Mongolian, and Han Eight Banner disciples, and the other led by Sun Sike, about 20,000 people; The Henan New Army was led by the veteran Daniel Zhang and had a scale of more than 20,000 men, while the Hanzhong New Army was led by Zhao Liangdong and had a scale of about 15,000 men; Counting the 5,000 soldiers who practiced firearms tactics in the Shenji Battalion in Beijing, the total size of the new army of the Qing Empire reached about 100,000, which is not small even in Europe. ”

“…… Of course, taking into account the ratio of muskets and artillery equipment, as well as differences in the treatment of soldiers, the Qing Empire's cost of maintaining this 100,000-strong new army was not necessarily much higher than the cost of the Austrians to maintain a standing army of 30,000 to 40,000. However, many of their own firearms are now of better and better quality, and the cost of maintaining an army will slowly fall in the foreseeable future, unless they are determined to further increase the proportion of artillery and other technical weapons. ”

“…… If treatment and equipment are only one aspect of the army's combat effectiveness, then a common disease among the Qing, Shun, and Ming armies seriously limited the combat effectiveness of their armies. According to the accounts of the German mercenary officers who trained the new armies of the Qing and Ming states, it was difficult for them to get mid-level and higher-ranking officers to participate in the training, whether it was for the Qing or Ming armies, because they thought it was undignified to participate in the training with ordinary soldiers on the playground. And to make matters worse, these mid- and high-ranking officers have the privilege of not participating in direct combat in the military, so it is difficult to say how well these people know about the new methods of warfare. Of course, they may also learn about and learn new tactics through their own channels in private, but this is not known. All in all, the combat effectiveness of the Qing New Army should not be overestimated, and its level may be comparable to that of the five whole divisions of the New Army that we have reorganized over the years. ”

It can be seen that due to the factor of intelligence sources, this report describing the situation of the Qing State gives a lot of space to the military aspect, but as far as the content itself is concerned, it is generally more in line with the facts, especially those descriptions of the size, equipment, expenditure, training, and combat effectiveness of the Qing army, which were learned through some European instructors who had participated in the modernization training of the Qing army, and it can also be said to be first-hand information.

With such an army, Guo Puxia believed that with the help of the terrain - such as the Jiaolai Xinhe defense line, Siming Mountain, Huiji Mountain, etc., it should not be a big problem to hold Ningbo and Denglai, unless the Qing side tried their best to attack, but this was obviously impossible. Of course, we should also note that the overall strength of the Qing army should still be respected, and there is no doubt that they have a great advantage over the Shun and Ming states.

“…… In contrast to the areas controlled by the Li Shun regime in the south, the vast Qing Empire had a much more agricultural component than theirs. More than half of the country's land is mainly wheat, similar to Europe and the east coast, of which Gansu and part of Qinghai in the northwest are dominated by spring wheat, Henan, Shanxi, and Shaanxi are dominated by winter wheat and millet, Hebei, Anhui, Jiangsu, and Shandong are dominated by winter wheat, sorghum and new crops imported from overseas, and some prefectures and counties on both sides of the Yangtze River also produce rice, tea, rapeseed and some other crops. Every year, the results of the summer and autumn harvests were presented to the imperial court in Beijing as soon as possible, and the emperor himself and officials at all levels assessed the quality of the grain harvest and formulated corresponding policies on this basis, which you can think of as a somewhat strange and archaic budget system. It is worth mentioning that due to the large size of the army and the pressure of war, the financial burden of local states and counties is not light, so many states and counties will report 'bad harvests' from time to time to resist the desire of the Beijing court to increase the amount of taxes, and the imperial government is often unable to make accurate judgments about this due to the system and the way it governs. ”

“…… Although the tax burden is not light, but because of the decline in the population caused by the war in the last years of the Ming Dynasty, although it has been greatly recovered, the per capita land is still very considerable, and the life of the peasants is not catastrophic, and it is generally easier than the peasants under the rule of the Ming Dynasty in Guangdong, Guangxi and the southwest - of course, the temporary increase in war, the greed of local officials and the possible appearance of bandits will lead to sharp changes in the living conditions of the peasants in the short term, but in general, more than 30 years after the establishment of the Qing Empire, The population and grain production of the north, which is the core of its rule, have increased dramatically, and water conservancy, irrigation, and storage facilities have been renewed and expanded, which is important for an agricultural society. ”

“…… In the past ten years, according to our observations, the proportion of crops such as mulberry, tea tree, cotton, sesame, soybean, corn, sweet potato, potato, sesame, peanut and other crops in the farmland of the Qing Dynasty has increased, especially the first three. This seems to confirm the increasing demand for such cash crops in the market. We have no way to confirm whether cotton textile mills, silk weaving factories or tea factories of sufficient scale and huge investment were opened in the territory of the Qing Dynasty, and the information in this regard is too lacking, but it is certain that the number of raw silk, silk, tea, and cotton cloth exported by the Qing Empire has increased greatly in the past ten years, which can be seen from the financial information published in the markets of London and Amsterdam, and the two East India Companies of England and the United Province purchased a huge amount of the above-mentioned goods in the Qing Empire every year. These even include an unknown amount of oak silk from the north (in parts of North China and Manchuria, the Qing people used oak leaves to raise silkworms). ”

“…… The spinning industry was the most important handicraft industry in the countryside of the Qing Dynasty, and so far more than 80% of the cotton cloth in the Qing Dynasty was 'domestic', and only a very small number were purchased from Shunguo, Ningbo and foreign merchants. There is no doubt that more than 95% of the industrial output value of the Qing Dynasty was handicrafts, and only a very small number of industries would use some primitive, rudimentary, and inefficient hydraulic or animal power machinery for production. At this point, they were left far behind by the Shun and Ming countries, which had frequent trade with our country. ”

“…… The vast majority of handicraft production is located in the cities, but there are also many in the countryside. Usually handicraft production is made up of a one-family model, which is especially common in the north, for example, farmers spin and weave at home with their own labor, and occasionally some wealthy farmers will buy a few additional spinning machines or looms after accumulating a certain amount of money, and then hire labor to operate them. The same is true of some self-employed artisans in the cities, who sometimes hire poor citizens to mill rice, extract oil, and gin cotton to make up for the lack of household labor. It cannot be said that there were no large-scale handicraft workshops with centralized production in the Qing Dynasty, but neither the number of employed workers nor the output were far from being comparable to the handicraft production of the one-household model, because many of the latter were sidelines of the huge peasant groups of the Qing Empire. ”

“…… It is surprising that we have not been able to gather much information about the modern industry in the Qing Kingdom, because it is impossible for us to know nothing about it, no matter how poor our intelligence skills are. Therefore, can we speculate that there was no modern industry of the kind that we aided in building under the Li Shun regime in the Qing Dynasty, which may be due to the political system, economic form, ideology and culture of this country? In contrast to the primitive mechanized production of state-run enterprises such as the Pingxiang Coal Mine in Shunguo, the Xiangtan Iron Works, the Changsha Gun and Artillery Bureau, the Hengyang Weaving Factory, and the Ganzhou Oil Mill, the Qing did not have a single mining or manufacturing enterprise that used machines to increase production efficiency, perhaps because they spent most of the imperial budget on maintaining the army, stabilizing the frontiers, distributing flags, and paying for the government, officials, and the imperial family. However, according to some unconfirmed information we have received from the British and Dutch East India Companies in recent years, it seems that the Qing State is trying to seek to purchase some hydraulic or manpower machine tools and other equipment for shipbuilding and weapons production. At the same time, they also seem to be spending a lot of money to hire artisans from Europe to help them design the processing of major export commodities such as tea, raw silk, cotton, etc., in order to improve production efficiency. This may be due to the oppression of the enormous financial burden imposed by the war, and there is no other explanation. ”

“…… Although the Qing Empire suffered various shocks from overseas over the years, with the exception of a few enlightened people in the big cities who were willing to learn about overseas dynamics or new ideas, the cornerstone of the empire living in the vast countryside—the landlords and gentry—still lived in their traditional spiritual world. Embracing the philosophy of Confucius and Mencius, they took the imperial examinations organized by the imperial government year after year and were based on traditional Confucianism, and were relatively indifferent to new knowledge from overseas. Except for some schools in Songjiang, Suzhou, Hangzhou and other places that impart modern knowledge, we have not found any traces of these schools in other places, perhaps not at all, or because we do not know enough about this empire. ”

Seeing this, although there are still doubts about some of the passages, and I always feel a little foggy about some of the content, but in terms of the overall feeling, Guo Puxia already feels very clear, that is, the Qing Empire is almost no different from those feudal empires in the history of the Central Empire. Even because of the obstruction of the southern expedition and the existence of people on the east coast for many years, it only stimulated the Qing Empire to increase investment in the military industry, and their absorption of modern production knowledge, scientific and technological knowledge, and management knowledge was still very slow.

Guo Puxia even had some expectations that when ten, twenty, or thirty years later, with the expansion of territory and social progress, the production of military supplies such as steel and munitions, as well as the production of cotton, salt, oilseeds, and other civilian materials in Shunguo increased to a point similar to that of the Qing State, whether the upper echelons of the Manchu Qing rule would have a little consciousness, and whether the Han officials and generals in the territory would still be able to maintain enough loyalty to the old empire - he hoped to see this day while he was still alive.