Starting from his own heart, Li Xiucheng really didn't want to fight another battle to defend Tianjing, but he didn't even want to choose to move the capital like last time. Pen "Fun" Pavilion www.biquge.info

All this is because of the change of time, and today's Taiping Heavenly Kingdom is no longer the Heavenly Kingdom of Balance in the past, and today's Li Xiucheng is not the Li Xiucheng of the past.

Since the last time he successfully broke Zeng Guoquan's siege of Tianjing with the help of the Ming army, the entire national policy of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was basically formulated by Li Xiucheng.

Although there are many internal constraints, in general, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom is operating according to Li Xiucheng's will, based on Li Xiucheng's Anqing restructuring under Shi Dakai, and later his own experience in opening up Sufu Province.

Li Xiucheng absorbed a large number of scholars, let them serve in the government, gave them high-ranking officials, and reconciled with local scholars. This is why Wang Tao, a scholar, would write advice to Li Xiucheng, because Li Xiucheng was the only powerful person in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom who did not oppose Confucianism.

Thanks to Li Xiucheng's efforts, the whole country has established local governments, and although they are not yet very efficient, they can be unified from the top down, at least to a certain extent.

So in fact, Li Xiucheng and they now have a country.

After owning the country, he is no longer a rogue, and he can't do the habit of mobile warfare back then. If he wants to break through, the first thing he thinks of is not where to start a new stove, but to consider where hundreds of thousands of people will set off, and where will the food and grass come from? How to get the support of local forces, etc.?

The more he thought about these issues, the more desperate Li Xiucheng felt about breaking through, because he found that the world was so big that there was no place for the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.

A few years ago, when Tianjing was besieged, Chen Decai, the king of Fuwang who was on an expedition to the northwest, returned to the army to rescue, but when he arrived in Henan and Anhui, he found that the locals were no longer as supportive of them as they were back then.

It's not good to say, when they raised their troops, almost half of the southern half of the world directly accepted surrender and rarely fought tough battles, which is also the biggest difference between the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and Zhu Yuanzhang's uprising, Zhu Yuanzhang tempered himself through bloody battles again and again, and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was too smooth and peaceful.

The reason for this is that the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom said that it was because they had the support of the common people, and the Manchus said that they were holding the people hostage. In both cases, at that time, the life of the common people in the whole world was extremely hard, and the country had been suffering under the weakness for decades, just waiting for a flame to ignite.

Therefore, the Taiping army smashed the landlord's compound everywhere, plundered the treasury of the government, and distributed it to the common people and the poor, which really catered to the voice of the people at that time. But they offended all the landlords, and smashed the Confucian Temple, even the lower-class scholars.

But now the landlords and scholars represented by Zeng Guofan have been tested, and they have all stood up, and the reason why Chen Decai was defeated on the border of Henan and Anhui and finally committed suicide was because he found that no matter where he went, there were landlords who were armed and pursued closely, and it was because the landlords and scholars themselves organized themselves, it can be said that Chen Decai did not die in the hands of the Qing army, but was stopped by this kind of armed and spontaneous armed forces in the countryside, which gave the Qing army the conditions to mobilize troops to pursue and kill. Otherwise, with their guerrilla warfare methods, they would really not be found in this era of poor communications.

Later, the famine in the north, the reason why there was no large-scale peasant uprising, and 20 million people starved to death, but the disaster area appeared extremely calm, and even had the ability to resist the foreigners' disaster relief, is because the rural society has been highly organized after the Taiping Army movement, and the constraints of this organization on individuals have reached the extent that no one can resist by starvation.

In addition, there is a group of princes surnamed Hong, they don't want to leave, they are living too well here, they don't want to change at all, plus the last time Li Xiucheng successfully repelled Zeng Guoquan's miracle after besieging Zeng Guoquan for two years, they were lucky, Hong Xiuquan continued to hide in the palace and pray, shouting every day that the heavenly soldiers went down to earth.

On the one hand, under the pressure of the army, Wang Haiyang and Yang Fuqing can no longer be the most right with Li Xiucheng, and they will begin to cooperate with Li Xiucheng with the remnants of the defeated army.

This also gave Li Xiucheng some illusions.

But this illusion was broken again and again by the steady Zeng Guofan, Li Xiucheng ambushed the troops and lured the enemy, and all of them were seen through by the Hunan army, or the conservative Hunan army did not give Li Xiucheng a chance at all.

The Hunan army was like a porcupine, armed to the point that its teeth arched forward little by little, building strong camps along the way, not in a hurry at all, and compressing the living space of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom little by little.

They finally reached Yuhuatai, and almost dug it here with a trench and built it with a barracks.

On land, the Hunan army was steadily fighting, and on the waterway, it was gradually encroaching, they built a strong water village in Wuhu, and then continued to attack, with the infantry along the river bank to continue to advance. The sailors of the Taiping Army attacked and blocked many times, but they all returned in vain.

The Ming army told Li Xiucheng that it was the British who helped the Hunan army fight.

Yes, now Li Xiucheng still has contact with the Ming army, because after he arrested the Ming merchants in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in a fit of rage, he quickly calmed down, and soon released a group of people, who had been doing business with the Taiping army, and they could bring the Taiping army food and munitions that were in short supply. Although the other merchants were not released, they were mainly worried that they would destroy the defense of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and the surrender of a large number of local officials in the Jiangnan area to the Ming army was an example, Li Xiucheng did not dare to let these people come to lobby the officials of Tianjing, otherwise who knows if the officials of Tianjing would collude with the Ming army.

Although these people were not released, Li Xiucheng did not kill them, which made him and the Ming army not tear their faces.

The Yangtze River underwater telegraph line built by the Ming Dynasty did not break the connection, and still allowed communication between Shanghai and Tianjing, and when Xiaguan was still under the control of the Taiping Army, Li Xiucheng resumed official contact with the Ming Dynasty.

In fact, Li Xiucheng himself knows that he still vaguely expects that Daming will be able to change his mind and join forces with the Taiping Army again, and now this is increasingly becoming his only hope.

As if God forbid, the situation really changed, and the Ming and the British suddenly became hostile because of trade issues, and the British intervened in the territorial exchange between the Manchus and the Ming, and the Ming informed Li Xiucheng that he would send a navy to Tianjing.

This seems to be another time, the story of Da Ming's rescue of Tianjing, but what the truth is, Li Xiucheng himself can't figure it out.

Li Xiucheng stood on the city wall and saw with his own eyes a huge Ming fleet sailing into Xiaguan, they lined up on the sea, the front had already entered the port, and the back did not even see the chimney. These warships are large and small, but the largest is no more than 1,000 tons, and it is the inland river fleet of the Ming Dynasty, which usually operates on the Pearl River and offshore waters, and now all of them have been transferred to the south of the Yangtze River.

In the end, his subordinates reported that there were a total of 58 Ming warships, the largest dozen were 1,000 tons, most were 500 to 800 tons, and the smallest were more than 300 tons.

The arrival of these more than 50 warships, if Li Xiucheng breathed a sigh of relief, after many battles with the Hunan Army Naval Division, or the British Navy, only three of the ten ironclad ships he was proud of were left, and there was no other auxiliary warship left, and the fight with the world's first navy made him truly experience what the world is first, the feeling of being completely powerless to fight against it makes people very desperate, whether it is when you have the advantage, or when you are passive, you will find that it is always you who loses, this feeling, It's easy for him to have a sense of mission that he can't fight.

Not to mention Li Xiucheng, this is the prestige accumulated by the British for hundreds of years, under this prestige, Napoleon formed a fleet far more than the British in that year, but was destroyed by Nelson in World War I, and then the Germans competed with the British Navy in a hurry, but when it was really time to start the war, the German dreadnoughts only dared to hide in the harbor under the protection of mines and rust, and did not have the slightest courage to fight with the British Navy.

The Ming Navy may not really dare to confront the British Navy, but in the face of twenty or thirty small ships under the flag of the Hunan Army, the Ming Army is still fearless.

The purpose of their entry into Xiaguan was not to confront the British navy, but to reopen the Tianjing waterway, in addition to being able to stage the old trick of monopolizing this waterway last time and allowing the Ming merchants to make a windfall, the most important thing was to make the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom desperate, and also to make the Manchus feel that they were in danger of falling short.

In fact, it is just a military deterrence with diplomatic negotiations, really rescue the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the Ming Dynasty can't do it now, even if they were saved once in Tianjing, Zhu Jinglun is also convinced that the current Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, there is no chance of resurrection again, God gave them a chance, but they themselves did not cherish it, they laid the richest Jiangnan, but they could not build a solid ruling institution, the internal power struggle, and even the military power struggle could not be quelled, and the local forces were divided into one side, Obviously, such a regime cannot last.

Even if this kind of regime does not last long, it is impossible for them to re-establish it if they are given a chance.

But because of the lessons of the last time, Li Xiucheng was still full of illusions, and the Manchus were full of worries.

When he learned that the Ming fleet appeared outside Tianjing City as in 1864, Zeng Guoquan smashed the cup angrily, Zeng Guofan almost vomited a mouthful of blood, and Li Hongzhang, who had just begun to be interested in British support, immediately closed his door and closed his door and no longer saw Li Tai, the unofficial representative of the British.

The magnates of the Eight Banners cursed the Ming Dynasty with all kinds of vicious voices, and the diehard officials clamored for war, but one was for the benefit of the tongue, and the other was for the sake of lust and inwardness, venting their emotions.

To really solve the problem, it is necessary to rely on negotiation, so the Empress Dowager Cixi soon secretly met with Li Hongzhang to listen to opinions.