There was a lot of food in Annam, so Zhou Shixiang decided to go to war. Pen? Interesting? Pavilion wWw. ｂiquge。 ｉｎfo

Waged war at all costs, and used troops against Annan under great pressure, just to have food for Annan.

Food, Zhou Shixiang needs it too much.

The war of the Ming and Qing dynasties was a war between two nationalities, rather a war of grain.

In this era, everything is false, only food is true.

If there is food, there will be soldiers, and there will be people who will work hard; Without food, as powerful as the Ming Dynasty, it also collapsed in an instant.

For the sake of food, Houjin, who was still outside the customs, entered the customs and robbed many times; For the sake of food, the Qing soldiers almost slaughtered every city, just to kill those extra mouths, so as to reduce the burden of the Qing Dynasty, so as to avoid the Ming Dynasty for the starvation of the homeless people.

For the sake of food, the Taiping army also suppressed the Han people in Hunan by extremely bloody means; For the sake of food, the eastward detachment of the Taiping Army bloodbathed the four prefectures of Baoqing, Yongzhou, Quanzhou, and Hengzhou, resulting in the misery of the people of the four prefectures. And all this is only to support the war against the Qing army in the southwest, just to eliminate those Qing soldiers who came to grab food.

The two sides of the war can no longer say who is on the side of good and who is on the side of evil. At least, in Hunan, the Taiping army played an extremely dishonorable role, and in some respects even worse than the Qing army.

The people of Hunan think far more than they think, and the people of Hunan are miserable!

The grain trucks transported by the eastward detachment to Xiangxi do not know how much blood and sweat of the Hunan people were sprinkled!

Zhou Shixiang knew the suffering of the people in Hunan, but there was no way to relieve their suffering, because he really had no food, and he really needed their food.

.......

Guangdong Province, which has preliminarily completed the establishment of villages and townships, has a population of only 1.52 million, of which only 400,000 are adult men, and most of the rest are old, weak, women and children. Before the Qing army moved south, there were more than 987,000 households in Guangdong Province, with a total population of more than 750 and more than 2.23 million adult males.

Twelve years of war have reduced the population of Guangdong by eighty percent, and the population of Guangxi, which is already poorer than Guangdong, has dropped sharply. In the sixth year of Wanli, there were more than 1,786,000 people in Guangxi Province, but the population of Wuzhou, Xunzhou, Liuzhou, Guilin, and Nanning was only about 120,000 according to the statistics of the Guangxi Governor Yamen a few days ago.

The Guangxi Governor's Yamen did not count the natives in southern Guangxi, because so far, the Guangxi Governor's Yamen has only established actual rule in a few important towns, and has not yet established effective rule over the line from southern Guangxi to Zhennanguan. However, the population of those areas controlled by local officials was not included in the Yellow Book of the Ming Dynasty, and the fact is that the population of Guangxi Province is negligible, and more than half of the 120,000 people are old and weak women and children, and only more than 30,000 people can be called Dingkou.

The territory of Liangguang seems to be large, but the population is too small, and the pressure on Guangdong can be imagined because Guangdong Province alone bears the needs of tens of thousands of Taiping troops. Song Xianggong wrote many times, bluntly saying that Guangdong's people's strength had been exhausted, and if it could not obtain great results, it would be difficult for Guangdong to bear the needs of this war. If the pressure continues, it will inevitably affect Guangdong's production and stability, and may even provoke a popular uprising. This great result obviously refers to the capture of one or even several provinces, and the area occupied is by no means a barren and sparsely populated area like Guangxi. The Lianghu region was mentioned several times in Song Xianggong's letter, and it was clear that Song was very anxious to occupy the Lianghu or to obtain a grain-producing area that could stably support the Taiping army.

The pressure on Guangdong is so great that Zhou Shixiang doesn't know how he doesn't want to control the two lakes area. "The lake is wide and ripe, and the world is full", no matter how lonely he is, he knows very well about these six words. However, now he has no way to establish actual rule in the Lianghu region, as in Guangdong, to carry out the construction of villages and townships, so that the "imperial power" can go to the countryside, first, the Kuidong soldiers need to recuperate, in order to reduce the pressure of the Qing army in the north for the Taiping army; Second, if the hundreds of thousands of Qing troops in the southwest are not resolved, it will be impossible for them to establish effective rule in the Lianghu region, which is on the way they must go north. Zhou Shixiangzhen devoted his energy to establishing Ming rule in Hunan, and it is likely that in the end, the wind blew the eggshell and ran empty.

What Zhou Shixiang is doing now is to take all the people's strength and money and grain in Hunan to deal with the Qing army, which can be harshly called disregarding the life and death of the people of Hunan. The food and salary of hundreds of thousands of Qing troops in the southwest came from the wealth of the southeast, that is to say, Zhou Shixiang used Hunan and Guangdong to raise the Taiping army, while the Manchu Qing Dynasty used the land of several southeastern provinces to raise the Qing army in the southwest.

The pressure on both sides was also greater, but the Manchu pressure was much greater than that of the Taiping army, and their wealth was in the southeast, while their army was in the southwest, and the Taiping army was in the middle. If the war continued for a long time, or the Qing army could not break through the blockade of the Taiping army and come out of the southwest, after a long time, the Manchu rule over China would be in crisis, even if their biggest opponent, the Yongli regime, abandoned the country and fled, or was captured and killed, the situation caused by the Taiping army still hung over the Manchus.

Variables have emerged.

Years later, the Qing court had ordered Prince An Yue Le to go south. Yue Le had been ordered by Shunzhi before leaving, the young son of heaven could not hold back the anxiety and urgency in his heart, and had high hopes for Prince An who went south, and Zhang Changgeng, the governor of Huguang, also received an urgent order from the Qing court, ordering him to hold on to Wuchang, and at the same time rectify the Dongting Lake Naval Division to ensure that the line from Wuchang to Changsha was controlled by the Qing army.

When the Qing court responded to the changes in the two lakes, Zhou Shixiang was also responding. At the time of the Guangxi Taiping Army and the line of national security, he had already made a preliminary deployment for the campaign against Luo Keduo, the king of Qingping County. Zhou Shixiang planned to use the second town, the sixth town and the two towns of Xiangxi to suppress the bandit army to encircle and annihilate the Wang Luo Keduo Department of Qingping County. If Luo Keduo can be defeated in one fell swoop, the towns and soldiers of the Xiangxi Bandit Army will continue to carry out the important task of blocking the border between Hunan and Guizhou, and Zhou Shixiang will lead the second town, the sixth town, the ninth town and the eastward detachment to seize Changsha and go east along the river, directly take the rich land in the southeast, and take the southern capital in one fell swoop. The land of wealth in the south of the Yangtze River was used to alleviate the current shortage of money and food for the Taiping army, and took advantage of the situation to seize Zhejiang, Fujian, and Jiangxi, so as to unite the areas controlled by the Taiping Army in Liangguang and Hunan, forming a de facto half of the regime.

This plan is very ambitious, but there are also certain risks, the biggest risk is the southwest Qing army. Whether or not we can surround these hundreds of thousands of Qing troops in the southwest and prevent them from going north is the key to whether or not this strategy can be implemented. As for the Qing army in the southeast, Zhou Shixiang did not pay attention to it, because he believed that the national surname would clear these obstacles for him. What he has to do is to wait in Hunan, wait for the moment when the melons are ripe and fall, and wait for the Qing army in Jiangnan to celebrate the defeat of the country.

Along with the risk of the Qing army in the southwest is the growing food problem. (To be continued.) )