As the time passed, more than 2,000 soldiers of the Taiping Army of the four battalions of Zhenyu, Xiongwei, Hujie and Guards, who served as the main force of the siege, quietly assembled in the night, waiting for the signal of the siege -- the huge explosion sound that was about to sound.

In order to prevent the Taiping army from climbing and capturing the city at night, there were fires on the city walls at intervals, and the Qing troops never stopped patrolling back and forth. From time to time, the Qing army threw torches from the top of the city downward, and used the light of the torches to check whether there were Taiping troops lurking below.

Night, for the attacker has a natural advantage, for the defender is a big disadvantage, throughout the ages, many siege battles have taken place at night, especially before dawn, because this time is the most tired and most relaxed time. It's just that the Qing army, which had been on guard for a night, was the same as yesterday, and did not wait for the night attack of the Taiping army as they thought.

There are four gates in Xinhui City, but the west gate was completely blocked by the Qing army with a boulder when Li Dingguo's army came to attack last year, and the west gate was not unsealed after Li Dingguo withdrew the army, so the main strength of the defenders was concentrated in the east, south and north three gates, and the west gate only had few Qing soldiers and some young and strong defenses.

From the captives of the surrendered Qing army, Zhou Shixiang learned that there were now only more than 1,000 defenders in the city, except for the more than 200 Qing troops with blue flags who controlled the artillery, the rest were green battalion soldiers. The origin of these green battalion soldiers is also very complicated, most of them are soldiers and horses transferred from Guangzhou, and there is only a team of 300 people from Chaozhou, which is under the command of Wu Liuqi, the chief soldier of Chaozhou.

Wu Liuqi, the chief soldier of Chaozhou, was a great righteous man who opposed the Qing Dynasty and restored the Ming Dynasty in the pen of a novelist in later generations, but it is a pity that this novelist's portrayal of him is completely fictional out of thin air, and the real Wu Liuqi is an out-and-out traitor, the executioner who slaughtered his compatriots.

When the Taiping army left the camp yesterday, Zhou Shixiang asked Lin Youxian about the situation of the defenders in the city, and when he heard that there were still green battalion soldiers from Chaozhou in the city. Zhou Shixiang asked about these Chaozhou soldiers. From Lin Youxian's mouth, he heard the name Wu Liuqi for the first time, and also learned about this person's life

Wu Liuqi is a Hakka of the Han nationality in eastern Guangdong. He read poetry and books at an early age, and was extensively involved in scripture and history. However, he is quite fond of drinking and gambling, once gambling all his family property by the government as a postman, and then he absconded to Fujian, and then has been wandering in Jiangsu and Zhejiang for several years, doing some green forest work. After the Jiashen national disaster, Wu Liuqi defected to the newly enthroned Yongli Emperor with his Lulin brothers, because the Yongli Emperor had just succeeded to the throne and was in internal conflict with the Shaowu regime in Guangzhou. There was a lack of civil and military generals under his command, Wu Liuqi led the crowd to vote, and Emperor Yongli, who was suffering from no one under him, immediately appointed him as the chief military officer, so that he could entrench Nanao Island, an island in eastern Guangdong in the name of the chief military officer of the Ming Dynasty.

In the tenth year of Yongli (the seventh year of Shunzhi), the king of the south of Qingping Shang Kexi went down to Shaozhou from Nanxiong, and Wu Liuqi heard that the soldiers of the Qing army did not dare to resist, and the Jieshi general soldier Su Li surrendered. After the Qing Dynasty, Wu Liuqi thought that he had been entrenched in Nanao for many years and was familiar with the terrain of eastern Guangdong, so he invited himself to be the guide of the Qing army. In order to help the Qing soldiers capture the Chaozhou city that Hao Shangjiu was distracted from.

In the battle of the Qing army to capture Chaozhou, Wu Liuqi and Kong Guozhi from Jiangxi attacked the city one after another. The difference is that Kong Guozhi was then transferred out of the city by the Qing Jingnan general Hahamu. However, Wu Liuqi was left in the city to directly participate in the massacre of the ordinary people of Chaozhou.

Afterwards, Shang Kexi and Geng Jimao jointly made a speech to the Qing court, saying that Rao was flat to receive Zhang, Chao, Haikou haunted, Liuqi led the boat division to surrender, and there was a way to appease him. Since Hao rebelled and advocated rebellion, Liuqi personally went to the army to kill the thief. Please give me a title as an incentive.

After the Qing court received the letter from the two kings of Guangdong, it awarded Wu Liuqi to cooperate with the general army of Chaozhou. Commanded 1,000 troops to garrison Raoping to resist the Zheng Haikou in Fujian. When Hao Shangjiu was defeated. Zheng Chenggong was negotiating peace with the Qing court, seeing that he would not be saved, and then seeing that Hao Shangjiu was defeated, the Qing army occupied Chaozhou and was strong, and Li Dingguo was defeated and retreated in Zhaoqing, so he ordered his subordinate troops to retreat from Chaozhou to Fujian, and took a defensive position instead of what was agreed with Li Dingguo in the past to echo the enterprising trend.

Last year, Li Dingguo attacked Guangdong again, due to the lack of troops of the Qing army in Guangzhou, Wang Shangke of Pingnan was pleased to see that the Zheng family did not take an offensive in the direction of Chaozhou, so he transferred 500 troops from Wu Liuqi's army to Xinhui to assist in the defense. After defending the city for several months, these 500 Chaozhou soldiers suffered heavy casualties, and now there are 300 people left. Because it was Shang Kexi, the king of Pingnan, who transferred troops, without his consent, Wu Liuqi did not dare to recall people back, so he stayed in Xinhui City.

"The Chaozhou soldiers have been entrenched on the island for several years under Wu Wei's hands, and they are good at boating, and most of the soldiers are proficient in water.

From pretending to be dead to surrendering to today, but it has only been two or three days, Lin Youxian can't change his former title for a while, and he stopped talking several times between words, and changed his words stiffly, that awkward look at Zhou Shixiang is quite interesting.

Wu Liuqi, the general soldier of Chaozhou, was still far away, and Zhou Shixiang didn't have the heart to think about him, but the 300 soldiers under him who were good at boating fell into Zhou Shixiang's eyes. At this time, Guangdong, especially Xiangshan County, which was a place of three cities and one special zone in later generations, was densely populated with rivers and was located along the coast, so having a sailor in hand would undoubtedly have a double effect on the Taiping army taking root in Xiangshan.

Northerners ride horses, southerners ride boats.

When there is not enough strength to build their own cavalry, and there is not enough capital to build an infantry that can restrain the cavalry, it is undoubtedly a wise choice to use the unique advantages of the southerners to form a naval division team belonging to the Taiping army. At least, with a naval division in hand, the Qing army wanted to exterminate the Taiping army in a region like Xiangshan, which was densely covered with water networks, and the difficulty was not ordinary

The apprentice left by Zhang Fulai in the tunnel brought out Tie Yi's message, he would light the fire after half a pillar of incense, and ask the Lord of Qianhu to prepare to take the city.

In this era, there were no watches, and the rich had a sand leak time for the concept of time, and the poor watched the time, listened to the watch, or judged according to the sound of animals (such as the crowing of a chicken), but in the tunnel, the estimation of time could only rely entirely on mental arithmetic.

The half-pillar incense time is about a quarter of an hour, and after a quarter of an hour, whether or not he can capture Xinhui City depends on whether Tie Yi succeeds in igniting the fire.

Except for the trapped camp, the officers of the other four battalions were all on standby in the battalion, which would be extremely tense from top to bottom, staring straight at Xinhui City in the potential night. Some recruits covered their ears early, lest their ears be blown up later.

When everything was ready, it was still dark, but a little fish belly white could be seen in the eastern sky. (To be continued)