The historical Zeng Guofan should have died a long time ago, but he has held on for so many years, but he can't let go of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the biggest rebellion in his eyes. Pen "Fun" Pavilion www.biquge.info

After attacking Tianjing and successfully quelling the Taiping Rebellion, the spirit that supported Zeng Guofan was dispersed.

According to the intelligence of the Ming Dynasty, Zeng Guofan was already in poor health during the final stage of suppressing the Taiping Army.

After persisting in suppressing the Taiping Army, Zeng Guofan began to stabilize the order in Jiangnan, and after clearing the remnants of the Taiping Army, Zeng Guofan began to dismiss his troops.

The reason for the dismantling of the Hunan army was mainly at the request of the Manchu court, according to intelligence, after Zeng Guofan suppressed the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, a controversy broke out in the Manchu court about the Xianghuai army.

However, at that time, Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang refuted this argument at the same time, believing that the Hunan army and the Huai army were not yet able to compete with the Ming army, and asked the imperial court not to talk about war lightly, but to put peace first.

At that time, the Xianghuai group had nearly 400,000 troops, and if they could go south to compete with the Ming army, the Manchu magnates would naturally have nothing to say, but if they could not go south, the Manchu magnates would have to worry about these two military forces that were not under their control, that is, since they could not be used, they could not stay.

So soon the Manchu magnates reached an agreement, on the grounds of saving military salaries, asked Zeng Guofan and Li Hongzhang to disarm, but because of the trouble of the Ming Dynasty, they did not dare to let the two most effective troops disband, but let them each keep 100,000 people, first, the strength is equal, can continue to check and balance each other, and second, can effectively protect the Yangtze River area, prevent the Ming army from crossing the Yangtze River.

Zeng Guofan has become more and more unable to suppress the internal forces of the Hunan army, in the past, because of the Taiping army, Zeng Guofan could tolerate the poor military discipline of the troops, and the occasional looting action was also tacit, but now that the Taiping army has been pacified, the soldiers are still used to looting everywhere, which is not what Zeng Guofan can tolerate.

So in the last years of his life, he was gradually disarmed. Disarmament is not a simple task, in China there has always been a saying that soldiers and bandits are a family, not only in behavior, they are all keen to oppress the common people, but most importantly, under certain conditions, soldiers and bandits can be transformed into each other, for example, during large-scale disarmament, almost all dynasties and dynasties have turned soldiers into bandits, and a large number of soldiers are not returning to their hometowns, but are left in the grass.

Historically, after the capture of Tianjing, Zeng Guofan disbanded the Hunan army almost overnight, although there were also quite a few soldiers who were displaced to occupy the mountains and become kings, but after all, it was only a small part. The reason why it is so easy is mainly that after the soldiers of the Hunan army conquered Tianjing, they made a windfall from officers to soldiers. At that time, the fleet of ships transported from Tianjing to Hunan disappeared after half a year, and these hundreds of ships were loaded with property looted by Hunan soldiers from various palaces and even ordinary people's homes.

Later, Hunan literati recorded that after the Taiping Rebellion, the Hunan army, from officers to soldiers, took silver to buy land and build mansions throughout Hunan, the most luxurious is the mansion built by Zeng Guoquan for the Zeng family, which is said to be comparable to the palace.

The historical Zeng Guofan could feed the 200,000 Hunan army with the wealth looted by the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom for more than ten years, but this time, due to the intervention of the Ming Dynasty, millions of Tianjing people and the rest of the Taiping Army were rescued, and the property of the princes was also transferred to the Ming Dynasty, so the Tianjing obtained by Zeng Guofan was an empty city. He didn't have the money to feed his soldiers, so he had to give the officers a high degree of honor, and slowly pay the soldiers severance pay to let them go home, so the disarmament process was extremely slow, and it took three years to do it.

The first to be cut was Zeng Guofan's younger brother Zeng Guoquan, who persuaded him to resign. With Zeng Guoquan taking the lead, he was able to persuade other officers to give up their military power and replace them with various official positions from the imperial court, and disperse them to various places to be installed.

In the end, Zeng Guoquan resigned, the officers were settled, the soldiers were dismissed, Zeng Guofan released his last residual heat, and his life finally came to an end, and he died in the post of governor of Liangjiang last winter.

If Zeng Guofan has fulfilled the greatest wish of exterminating the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, then Zuo Zongtang's death was with unfinished business, with strong unwillingness, and regret.

Zuo Zongtang spent the last few years of his life in Shaanxi and Gansu, far from his hometown, where he not only stabilized the locality, but also raised funds to open a number of Western-style factories, competing with Li Hongzhang thousands of miles away.

He was stationed in Lanzhou, and founded two large-scale enterprises, Lanzhou Manufacturing Bureau and Lanzhou Machine Weaving Bureau, but unfortunately, like the enterprises in the early days of the Westernization Movement, the benefits were not very good.

Needless to say, the Lanzhou Manufacturing Bureau is not yet able to raise a glass to the conditions for starting a machinery industry, as long as it is to repair weapons and equipment for Zuo Zongtang's army. Lanzhou machine weaving bureau is still reliable, at least considering the actual conditions in the northwest, and there is a sense of using local wool resources.

Theoretically speaking, it is profitable to set up this kind of enterprise in Lanzhou, but the biggest problem of the official standard is that one does not care about the gains and losses of interests, and the other is that the layman leads the insider.

This factory is completely government-run, with 200,000 taels allocated by the Gansu Aftermath Bureau, and the chief soldier Lai Chang ordered 400 boxes of complete sets of machinery and equipment from the German Tailai Foreign Company. 1,080 pieces of yarn, 20 woolen looms, a complete set of dyeing and finishing machines, and 1 24 horsepower and 32 horsepower steam engines. There are more than 230 workshops, covering an area of more than 20 acres. Thirteen German craftsmen were employed. The factory is quite large.

However, the problem in the Westernization movement is still committed, that is, the imported machine has not considered the characteristics of local raw materials at all, the purchased machine is a German machine, and the raw materials used are wool produced in Germany, which leads to the performance of the machine and the local raw materials in Lanzhou are not compatible, the product quality is poor, the cost is very high, and the sales are not smooth.

This kind of mistake was made again by Zhang Zhidong ten years later, that is, the purchased iron smelting furnace did not match Daye's iron ore, the product quality was very poor, the cost was very high, and there was no market.

However, Zuo Zongtang's westernization construction in Gansu is just a small episode, and his significance in Gansu lies in border defense. Although his desire to enter Xinjiang has never been realized, and the Qing government, which is seriously short of funds, does not have the realistic conditions to recover Xinjiang, he is preparing to enter Xinjiang in the Shaanxi and Gansu areas, which is a kind of deterrent to the separatist forces in Xinjiang, and he must always guard against Zuo Zongtang's entry into Xinjiang.

But at the beginning of this year, Zuo Zongtang died of illness, losing Zuo Zongtang's strong deterrence, whether the Agubai regime in Xinjiang can be honest, and now the Qing court is no longer thinking about the question of whether to enter Xinjiang, but to guard against Agubai's possible invasion of the Hexi Corridor.