Li Xiucheng stood on the north wall of the Shanghai city wall, and he Li Xiucheng finally entered the city, and a sense of pleasure arose spontaneously. Pen fun and pavilion www.biquge.info

On the right-hand side is the rolling Huangpu River, and the sky above the originally busy Shiliupu Wharf is empty, and a huge ironclad giant ship is surrounded by many small fishing boats, tied to ropes and dragged by thousands of people to the shore.

The attack began in more than April, and it took a month to basically clear the periphery of Shanghai, but the siege of the city took only a month, and the combat effectiveness of the foreigners was still not to be underestimated, but the more this happened, the more satisfied Li Xiucheng felt.

The month-long battle was not as light as it was said, and the foreigners built a large number of fortifications outside the city, dug many trenches, and built fortifications.

He also hired 8,000 people from Shanghai to form a foreign gun team, and transferred 4,000 foreign soldiers, but whether it was the Chinese and foreign gun team in Shanghai, or the British soldiers with red turbans, they were all defeated by the Taiping army.

The Manchus were afraid of foreigners, and that Ming seemed to be afraid of foreigners, but he Li Xiucheng was not afraid.

He always believed that the first two attacks on Shanghai, if there were no accidents, he would have occupied it a long time ago. The first time Shanghai was attacked, it was the foreign guns that invaded Qingpu, and the Taiping army guards were in a hurry. Li Xiucheng led his men from Suzhou to rescue Qingpu, defeated the foreign gun team, wounded Wall, and killed one-third of the foreign gun team.

That time he should have taken advantage of the situation to attack Shanghai, but he was deceived by the foreigners, Hong Renji told the foreigners that he did not take precautions, who would have thought that the British and French troops would be ambushed, bombarded the Taiping army with foreign guns and artillery, and the British warships on the Huangpu River fired artillery bombardment.

In the second year, Li Xiucheng attacked Shanghai again, and in January, he captured Jiading and Qingpu, and advanced to Taicang, with more than 100 camps from Songjiang, Sijing, Qingpu, Jiading, Baoshan, and Shanghai, and the cities were guarded by foreign troops. Li Xiucheng personally led elite troops from Suzhou to meet the enemy, fought in Taicang, and broke the enemy's formation. Killed French Admiral Brod in Fengxian. In Qingpu, the deputy commander of the Changsheng Army, Falsid, was captured. In Cixi, he killed Wall, the commander of the Changsheng army.

This is the third time that they have fought Shanghai, and they finally won the battle and won all the achievements.

But what to do next, Li Xiucheng didn't think about it before, he didn't really plan to start a war with the foreigners, but the foreigners helped the Qing demon to defend the city, not to mention, he also drove the ironclad ship to the sixteenth shop to threaten him, which can't blame him.

To the north of the city wall, the French occupied the lease, which stretched from the 16-shop wharf to the other city wall, covering half of the city of Shanghai. After the French Concession, it is the British Concession, the area is larger, from the French Concession to the north, has crossed the Wusong River.

The biggest purpose of attacking Shanghai is for Shanghai's wealth, so Li Xiucheng wants to keep the prosperity here, so he restrained the troops, strictly required them not to plunder, and immediately posted a notice to the people after entering the city. But the people in the city ran away and ran to the foreigners' concessions.

Fighting the concession was not in the plan, and the foreigners were gone, where is there any prosperity in Shanghai, and where is there no foreigner, where will he get the money. So he didn't want to fight, but the foreigners did it first, but he made a post with the foreigners, telling them that this is the kingdom of heaven and the Qing demon fighting for the world, and the foreigners have nothing to do.

Although the concession is also strictly guarded, since he can even enter Shanghai, does he still care about a small concession?

From the binoculars, we can see that the concession is also full of panic, a large number of people fleeing with their burdens, from the French concession to the north continuously, foreign soldiers dug trenches on the border of the concession, and also set up a lot of barriers in the concession, it seems that they are planning to resist stubbornly.

Li Xiucheng laughed at the foreigners, but he was not in a hurry to attack, he had to let his soldiers rest for three days. This month's battle has been too hard, but fortunately it is his most elite troops, and if they are replaced by other armies, they may not be able to survive.

First of all, there was an artillery battle with the foreigners outside the city, he was very satisfied with the cannons of the Ming Dynasty, but this time he compared, he found that the cannons of the foreigners were good, fortunately he had many cannons, the foreigners only had 100 cannons, but Li Xiucheng pulled more than 2,000 cannons, fought for more than ten days, lost thousands of gunners, and then bombarded the foreigners' artillery array, and then captured the foreigners' positions in one go.

However, the Ming Dynasty is really unambiguous, after the foreigners outside the city were captured, they retreated into Shanghai City, at this time this kind of cannon was powerful, only a few cannons collapsed the city wall, the foreigners were stupid, when his soldiers rushed into the city, many foreigners were stupid and did not know how to plug the gap.

Although he was happy to succeed in taking Shanghai, Li Xiucheng's losses were also huge, his men lost more than 8,000 good brothers, and foreigners died more than 1,000. Fighting Shanghai is already like this, I am afraid it will be more difficult to fight the concession, where is the nest of foreigners, they must fight desperately, although Li Xiucheng believes that he will definitely be able to win the concession, but he is distressed when his elite dies.

Thinking of this, he felt that it was better to give the foreigners a step and let them take the initiative to surrender.

"Come on, go and send a letter to the foreigners, let them surrender, this king will save their lives, and allow them to continue to do business here, but they will have to listen to us in the future."

In the past, when he thought that the foreigners gave all the tariffs in Shanghai to the Qing Demon, and the Qing Demon used it to buy guns and cannons to the Great Heavenly Soldiers, Li Xiucheng was extremely resentful, and today these are all his, and he will not hate it immediately.

A selected warrior rode a horse and rode alone to the foreigner's fortifications, shot a letter with an arrow from a distance, transferred the horse's head and left, the foreigner was nervous when he saw the arrow, but did not fight back, otherwise I am afraid there would be no room for turnaround.

The letter was of course received from the French Concession, which was the closest to Shanghai, and the French soldiers were very depressed. There was clear news from the country that no reinforcements would be sent to them in a short time, that the emperor was threatening Prussia, and that sending troops at this time would not be conducive to solving the affairs of Europe. But the country demanded that they keep the concession no matter what. The military department told them that in about a month or two they would be able to get reinforcements, and it depended mainly on the attitude of Prussia, who thought that if Prussia did not know each other, they would only need a week to get rid of the small country in the event of a war.

There were only 2,000 French soldiers in the concession, and this was because they had seen the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom attack the vicinity of Shanghai and transfer a wave of reinforcements from Vietnam.

For this reason, they had not participated in the British defense of Shanghai before, and had been mediating diplomatically, and had been negotiating with the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to express the friendship of the French Empire. But they did not see any friendly meaning in the letters, and the prince of the Taiping army seemed to have completely confused them with the British.

The French would like to explain that it was not our French army that fought with you in Shanghai, but the John Bull on the other side of the Channel.

Their envoys waved white flags, started out of the fortifications, and walked towards the city of Shanghai, and their envoys were not embarrassed, and they also met Li Xiucheng, and personally expressed the attitude of the French to Li Xiucheng.

But Li Xiucheng only had one sentence, either fight or surrender, and after three days, he listened to their reply, surrendering can avoid death, and stubborn resistance can only perish.

The French could only ask for help from John Bull in the British Concession, and the British army was more numerous, because in April, seeing that the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom intended to attack Shanghai, the British urgently transferred troops from India, and they now had more than 10,000 soldiers in Shanghai, all of whom were Indian soldiers under the command of British officers.

France also had such a colonial army in Vietnam, but the number was only 5,000, and it had to help defend South Vietnam, so it did not dare to draw it at will. Even if it is transferred, it will be too late, so the most realistic thing at the moment is to turn to the British for help.

I don't know if they were annoyed that the French refused to help defend Shanghai, or because they were busy stabilizing their own concession, the British refused to send troops to support the French, but reinforced various fortifications in the British concession with the American army, and their advice to the French was that the French concession was too close to Shanghai to defend at all, and invited the French army to enter the British and American public concession to defend together.

The French are different from the British, the British and the Americans are both commercial thinking, and the French value land more, so the British and American lease said that the merger would be merged together, and they did not send officials from the country, and directly set up a public board of directors to manage here, while the French were not, basically treated the French Concession as a colony, and they sent a governor to implement French management here.

Sadly, in terms of management level, the French Concession is not comparable with the British Concession at all, and the commercial scale is less than one-tenth of that of others, but the hooligans in Shanghai like the French Concession.

In the British and American concessions, not only a large number of European merchants came to operate here, but also a large number of Chinese poured in, resulting in the expansion of the concession again and again, and now it has expanded for the third time, crossing the Wusong River to the north.

The advantage of the small number of people is that the French Concession is often relatively quiet, and rich and wealthy merchants have built a large number of leisure villas here, and later generations will count the elegance of the architecture of the French Concession, which is not comparable to the lively and noisy Anglo-American Concession. Another advantage of having fewer people is that the place is more empty and easy to defend. The French only hoped that relying on this advantage, they would build more fortifications so that they could hold off the Taiping army before they could send reinforcements from home.

After a three-day rest, at the end of June, Li Xiucheng's army finally began to attack the French Concession.

The French resisted for just over a day and then gave up resistance, not because the French were not brave enough, but because the difference in forces was too great.

Although they were better trained, the problem was that the power balance was too great, the French had less than a hundred cannons, and the performance level was similar to that of the Ming cannons, all of which were breech-loading Napoleonic cannons, while Li Xiucheng not only had more than a thousand cannons, but also had two super cannons.

After a half-day artillery battle with the French army, the French artillery positions were basically destroyed, at this time Li Xiucheng suddenly gave up the attack, the original Taiping army's tactics were to bombard the artillery in unison, and then the infantry swarmed up, unable to rush up, so the next round of artillery bombardment, continued to rush forward.

But this time, Li Xiucheng suddenly came, he also wanted to see the power of the two cannons, so it took people half a day to drag the two cannons from Shanghai to the front of the French Concession, and the cannons only sounded early the next morning, completely destroying the will of the French army, hanging out the white flag, and choosing to surrender.

The Taiping army marched into the French Concession, and the next step was to go to war with the British.