The Tusi did not expect that the Taiping army was not busy dealing with the upcoming Qing soldiers, but came to dig up their walls.

A new list was posted, and on this new list, the Taiping army refused to attach themselves to the Tusi charges, saying that they did not produce, and only enslaved the clansmen for prestige and happiness, and killed people at every turn, which was actually a group of bandits and people who brought disaster to the country and the people. The Taiping army regarded the people everywhere, regardless of the Tuhan and Han as the people of the Ming Dynasty, and could not bear to see the people of the Ming Dynasty being oppressed by the Tusi, so they called on the local people to go down the mountain and join the Taiping army to control the towns.

The Taiping army will ensure the safety of the lives and property of the people who come to the annexed area, and if there is any grievance, the Taiping army will be the master of it, and will attack the most heinous Tusi with heavy troops. All those who come to the attached soil will be registered and granted households, given the treatment of new Han people, and the government will provide them with land and houses, and they will be exempted from paying taxes on money and grain for three years.

In addition, the Taiping army promised that the children of the native people who came to the annex had the same books, education, and work as the children of the Han people, and would never allow the large Han families to oppress and hate the local people. In short, to attach the local people, the government will act impartially and treat everyone equally. For those who do not understand the language, the government will send a special communication officer, allocate special funds to build schools, and invite Confucian students to teach. Children who excel in their studies will either get money or food.

He also informed the natives that those who provided the hiding places of the Tusi and the strongholds of the stockade would be given a generous reward. If there is a person who captures and kills the Tusi and the native soldiers, he will be rewarded with silver according to the rank. For Han people who have bandits or joined the Qing army, they encourage their families to persuade them to return, and as long as they lay down their arms and return, they will also be given land. If the killer returns, a generous reward will be given. For the bandit leaders, those who return voluntarily will be given a guarantee of life and safety depending on the situation, or for good citizens; or according to the soldiers of his subordinates, they shall be given official appointments.

For the Han people who were captured by Tusi, the Taiping army immediately sent troops to rescue those who had clues. Those who have absconded and returned will be properly arranged, and troops will be sent to suppress the Tusi of the department.

At the end of October, when Zhou Shixiang met with the special envoy of Kui Dongbing in Changde to discuss the joint management of the two lakes by the Taiping Army and the Kui Dongbing to prevent the blocking of the Yunnan-Guizhou Qing Army, he deliberately formulated the Xiangxi Jingkou Policy in his busy schedule.

This policy regards the refusal to belong to the Tusi and the natives as bandits, and is the same as the remnants of the green battalion of the Qing army and the bandits in the mountains and forests. This policy changed the policy of the previous Ming Dynasty, and no longer recognized the two specific government institutions of the Xuanwei Division and the Xuanfu Division, in other words, the Taiping Army no longer recognized all the official treatment given to the Tusi by the Ming Dynasty in the past. As long as the other party refuses to lead the people to return, they will be regarded as heinous bandits and exterminated. After finally sweeping away these anti-Ming forces that were combined by Tusi and Qing army stragglers and bandits, Zhou Shixiang intended to implement the reform of the land and return to the river in Xiangxi, re-planning the administrative area, and implementing it in other places in the future. At the same time, the military marshal's office will write to all the official offices, and in the future, they will no longer be called Turen (each minority tribe), and those who come to vote will be called the new Han people, and after a few years, they will no longer distinguish between the old and the new, and they will be regarded as Han people. Those who do not vote are called bandits, and they are no longer called local officials.

Zhou Shixiang also ordered all government affairs to regard Jingkou as the primary task of the current government, and to organize the people to support and cooperate with the Taiping army in various places. At the same time, it is necessary to count the number of acres of arable land within the jurisdiction, and to "seize land" or change land for large landlords who occupy too much land, and to make a clear record of ownerless land, so as to ensure that those who come to the land have land to settle and houses to live in.

Due to the temporary inability to carry out the construction of townships and villages in the territory of the two lakes, Zhou Shixiang could only mobilize to the maximum extent by forceful coercion, and the Han gentry who did not cooperate should also be forcefully suppressed. What Zhou Shixiang didn't expect was that he thought that these strong policies would be deliberately diluted or dragged down by the degraded officials, but he never thought that the degraded officials would show unprecedented motivation and complete the instructions issued by the military marshal's office ahead of schedule.

Afterwards, Zhou Shixiang learned that the reason why the demoted officials worked so hard for the Taiping Army was, on the one hand, that they had just surrendered anyway and needed to show a certain degree of loyalty; On the other hand, it is to be able to make a lot of money from it.

Destroy the county order and break the prefect's house.

With the strong support of the Taiping Army, there was a large-scale wave of bankruptcy and flight of landlords and gentry in the occupied areas. And a lot of their land and goods went to the hands of the demoted officials.

There are pros and cons to any policy, and those in higher positions decide only whether there are more pros or cons. The Taiping Army's primary enemy was and would remain the Manchu court and its countless lackeys, and the fight against corruption was not a top priority. Of course, he also ordered to take a few heads of those who aroused the anger of the people to vent the anger of the people, and the rest were still ordered to do their jobs.

Unlike the leniency of degraded officials, Zhou Shixiang strictly forbade the military to participate in local affairs, and executed officers and demoted officials together when they were found to be in collusion. Resolute and resolute, no one will be allowed to bend the law for personal gain, nor will anyone be allowed to intercede for it, even if the previous achievements are impressive, but if you touch this thunder line, you will not be spared.

The duties and powers of the military envoys were further amplified, and Zhou Shixiang planned to set up a military discipline enforcement team similar to a military police unit to ensure that the Taiping army would not be corrupted or degenerate from top to bottom.

At the same time, Zhou Shixiang urgently ordered Song Xianggong of Guangdong to order him to purge the Guangdong officials. At the same time, we should speed up the training of military and political personnel of the Taiping Army, so that after the situation is settled a little, there will be new-style administrative personnel loyal to the Taiping Army to take over the civil affairs of the newly occupied areas. The previous use of demotion, those who have no talent and no virtue will all go to real posts and entrust them with false posts. Those who are talented but not virtuous use it according to their feelings, and those who are talented and virtuous are reused.

In view of the fact that Xiangxi is mountainous and watery, and the bandits have always been stubborn and cunning, they are familiar with the terrain, and as soon as they encounter the powerful blows of the Taiping army, they will be reduced to pieces, burrow into caves, and scatter and escape. The Han people and natives in Xiangxi have been oppressed by bandits for a long time, and some Han people and natives have lingering fears, fearing that the bandits will be liquidated afterwards and dare not help the Taiping army, making it difficult for the results of the bandit suppression in Xiangxi to expand rapidly for a while.

Zhou Shixiang specially ordered the first brigade from the second town, two brigades from the ninth town, one brigade from the sixth town, and two brigades from the Qing army, and 12,000 new Han soldiers from the new army were reorganized from the local official armed forces to form the Taiping Army's Xiangxi Bandit Army, totaling about 40,000 people in six towns.

After the establishment of the Bandit Suppression Army, Zhou Shixiang set up the Xiangxi Bandit Suppression Command Yamen, with Zhao Sihai, an officer of the military department, as the strategy officer for suppressing bandits, and Su Rile, a Mongolian deputy general of the second town, as the deputy strategy. The Yamen of the Suppression of Bandits commanded the Suppression of the Bandit Army in the Six Towns, and Guo Kuoyu, the governor of Biyuan, was responsible for the logistics supply of the Suppression of the Bandit Army and the resettlement of the natives.

According to Zhou Shixiang's opinion, after Zhao Sihai rushed to the yamen of the anti-bandit area stationed in Baojing's southern prefecture, he promptly summed up the experience of various ministries in suppressing bandits in advance, and combined with the strategy of suppressing bandits proposed by the commander, he divided 16 prefectures and counties, including Dayong, Yongshun, Luxi, Fenghuang, and Chenxi, into central areas, and Longshan, Sangzhi, and other eight counties as marginal areas, and first concentrated forces on suppressing bandits in the central area.

At the same time, the Yamen of the Suppression of Bandits extensively organized more than 80,000 young and strong people from the Han Dynasty to lead the way, deliver letters, and send food to the troops, and cooperate with the search of the mountains. At the same time as the military attack, a political offensive was launched, explaining the Taiping Army's policy to the families of the bandits, mobilizing them to persuade their relatives to go down the mountain to hand over their weapons and turn themselves in, and to take the initiative to report the situation of the bandits. In the course of this process, extreme cases occurred in some areas, where the families of the bandits were blackmailed, and if they did not return, they would kill their families, resulting in the innocent killing of hundreds of family members of the bandits.

The most important point of the political offensive was the unity and reuse of the native soldiers who came to attach to it, that is, the new Han people, among which the native soldiers who had made meritorious contributions in the Ming Dynasty were valued by the Taiping army, providing them with money, food, clothing, armor and weapons to suppress them.

From the division of the Tuguan and Tusi classes to the division of the native slaves, the system of sub-districts was formulated, and under the military and political double blows of the Taiping Army, the central area was soon effective.

From October to December, the Taiping army conquered Yongshun Wuliandong and captured the bandit leader Tusi Mahai; In Baojingye Zhuping, more than 3,000 bandits led by Luo Guolong, the capital of the Qing Dynasty, were eliminated; encircled and annihilated more than 4,000 Tusi Peng Hemp bandits entrenched in the northeast corner of the Zhijiang River; He annihilated more than 2,000 bandits in the area of Fengming Mountain in Yuanling and captured the bandit leader Longling. In addition to these big bandits, more than a dozen small bandits were annihilated, and thousands of them were killed. By the end of December, the Taiping army had killed more than 24,000 bandits and rescued more than 6,000 Han men and more than 20,000 women. More than 37,000 natives were forcibly relocated, more than 40,000 natives were killed, and more than 70,000 natives took the initiative to attach to them.

According to the statistics of the Yamen of the Suppression of Bandits, since the Jingkou in Xiangxi, a total of 125 earthen villages have been burned down, and tens of thousands of houses have been burned. There were 36 beheading officials, 9 generals of the Green Battalion, and 25 absconding Qing officials. By the end of December, in the process of suppressing bandits, more than 3,900 Taiping troops and more than 5,000 New Han soldiers had been killed. In addition, 18 generals with less than 1,000 households were killed, and 4 local officials were killed.

The army marshal's office and the generals of the towns were quite puzzled by the fact that the marshal had allocated so many soldiers and horses to exterminate the Tusi army, and if the troops of the six towns were used in Guizhou or the rest of Hunan and Hubei, they would definitely be able to continue to expand the results of the war in a short period of time, and they were even expected to seize the territory of the two lakes. (To be continued.) )