Accompanied by Li Zhicui and others, Ding Zhixiang specially met with the survivors of the Jihai tragedy and their descendants. Pen & Fun & Pavilion www.biquge.info

This is also the first important minister of the imperial court to come forward to meet and express condolences to the victims of the massacre of the Qing army that year, which set a precedent.

Before, there had never been.

Li Zhicui didn't know much about these survivors and the descendants of the victims, so Wang Ting introduced a few people standing in front of Scholar Ding.

Wang Ting pointed to a young man in his twenties, with a sad and angry face and a little nervousness, and said to Ding Zhixiang: "His name is Li Zemao, and when the Qing soldiers broke through the city, his parents hid him in the cellar. Later, the Qing soldiers arrested his parents and tortured them to hide the silver, because they were afraid that the Qing soldiers would find their son hiding in the cellar, his parents refused to let go, and finally were disemboweled by the Qing soldiers and died. He hid in the cellar for nine days, and survived by the rain and the two bags of dried noodles and pumpkins hidden in the cellar. ”

"My lord, the Tartars killed my father and mother, and killed the whole street, please avenge me!"

Seeing that Lord Buzheng was so respectful to the official in front of him, Li Zemao knew that the other party must be a big official in the imperial court, so he knelt in front of Ding Zhixiang and asked the other party to avenge him.

"You get up."

Ding Zhixiang helped Li Zemao up, shook his head at him, and said: "You are wrong, you should not ask me to avenge you, nor should you put the hope of revenge on others, you should take revenge yourself... The Tartar killed your father and mother, and also killed many people's fathers and mothers, if they are all like you, and only want to beg others to avenge him, then in the end everyone will not be able to take revenge. So if you really want revenge, do it yourself. Kill your father and mother as you do, and you kill them. The murderers of the past may be gone, but their descendants are, and those people are the objects of your revenge. ”

Li Zemao understood: "That... So how do I go about revenge? ”

"Be a soldier, kill the enemy."

Ding Zhixiang patted Li Zemao's shoulder, walked past the other party with a slight nod, and his eyes fell on a girl who looked only seventeen or eighteen years old.

The girl was only three years old, her father and brother were killed by the Qing army, and her mother was unwilling to be humiliated and committed suicide by biting her tongue. She also had two older sisters, one committed suicide by jumping into a well, and the other was taken captive by the Qing army. ”

Speaking of this, Wang Ting paused, "This girl was taken by her sister, and later her sister and she were sold to Anqing by the Qing army. For so many years, her sister had raised her, but by the time we found them, her sister had already died. ”

Ding Zhixiang sighed secretly, walked up to the girl, and asked her in harmony, "What's your surname?" ”

The girl raised her head a little and said in a low voice: "Back to adults, my surname is Wang." ”

Ding Zhixiang nodded silently and didn't ask again, because he knew what this girl had experienced, and every question he asked her was a hurt.

More than 200 survivors and descendants of the victims stood solemnly in white clothes. The crowd was silent, and not far away, the square in front of the memorial hall was paved with bluestone, but there was nothing.

When I got closer, I found that the bluestones on the ground were densely engraved with countless names. Only the middle column of the whole square is blank for people to pass, and the rest are names, bloody names - each name represents the life of the former Nanchang City.

When the "central officials" from Nandu walked in front of the survivors, some were sad, some were sympathetic, and some were angry, but there was no wave in the hearts of others. It's as if what happened in the city in the past is all the more normal.

Zheng Zhonglei was a rare calm person in the crowd, and when he passed in front of the survivors, he deliberately looked at their appearances, and in the end, he was attracted by a young man who looked like a fool.

The young man was indeed a fool, and he opened his mouth and looked stupidly at the people next to him, watching the group of officials pass in front of him. From time to time, there was a foolish laugh, which was incompatible with this solemn environment.

However, no one drove the fool out of the ranks, because this fool had witnessed his father being stripped of his entire skin with a long knife by the Qing army, his mother being pressed in front of him by the Qing army and having his neck cut off with a long knife, and his younger brother being picked up by the Qing army with a spear and carried away like a burden.

............

After entering the memorial hall, the central officials visited each other.

The memorial hall has only two main buildings, one is a calligraphy and painting hall that records the atrocities of the Qing army, and the other is a skeleton exhibition hall excavated from outside the city.

The entrance to the Hall of Calligraphy and Painting and the Hall of Bones is located in the hall of the memorial hall. There are three statues carved out of stone in the hall.

The first statue shows a middle-aged man sitting there, his long hair untied on his head, and a soldier holding a razor shaving his long hair. On the side was a group of kneeling people, and several Qing soldiers pointed their swords and guns at them.

The second statue is of a thin old man holding a child of two or three years old, and next to him lies a woman, who has slept quietly. Next to the woman, there was a headless male corpse. And in front of them were two Manchurians on horseback and laughing wildly with knives. No one needs to explain it, and those who visit it know that the male corpse is the woman's husband, the child's father, and the old man's son.

The third statue is a group of Han women strung with long ropes by the Qing soldiers, with dull eyes forward. Behind them, on the ground, were several dead babies. The front hooves of a Qing war horse are stepping on the corpse of a baby.

The footsteps of many officials stopped here, and they looked at the statues with complicated eyes.

On the main wall of the hall, four sentences are engraved.

History is not used to forget, nor to commemorate, nor to mourn self-pity.

History is used to wake up and remind us not to forget the sufferings we have suffered;

History is used to spur and spur us to revenge.

If we can't do that, what else do we need history to do?

----- Zhou Shixiang.

.........

The "central officials" entered the calligraphy and painting hall and the skeleton hall respectively. Ding Zhixiang didn't go with them anymore, and it was rare that the pro-army who had been "escorting" them didn't follow them in, which gave the "central officials" great freedom, although everything they saw in front of them was so depressing, but they still felt a kind of relief that they had never felt before.

The "free" visit is an hour in which no one bothers the central officials.

Many central officials chose to stay in the Calligraphy and Painting Museum, because the atmosphere here was not so eerie compared to the Skeleton Museum. After all, the blood evidence of the slaughter recorded literally and visually is more acceptable to people's psychology than the real white bones.

In this world, not everyone is very bold.

Only about 30 or so central officials were in the ossuary hall, and some of them stood there fixedly looking at the mountains of bones in front of them. Others sit there, close their eyes, and silently think about something. Others were inexplicably sad and indignant, cursing loudly those damned Manchurian tartars.

At present, there are only more than 30,000 bones in the bone hall, and there are as many as one million people killed inside and outside the city of Nanchang City, and many bones are either sunk under the East Lake, or buried in the wilderness outside the city. According to a preliminary estimate by the Jiangxi Provincial Political Envoy Department, it will take at least 30 years to completely clean up the bones of the victims of the Jihai massacre.

The area of the bone hall is very large, so big that you can't see the end at a glance. Rows of lanterns make this hellish scene unfold before the eyes of the world.

It was not that the officials had never seen dead people, but the shock of seeing so many white bones at once was far more amazing than they could have imagined before.

Manchurian Tartars should die, it is the unanimous voice of all the central officials in the ossuary hall at this moment.

"Everyone has seen it, everyone has seen it, this is the fate of our Han people being treated as pigs and sheep!"

Wan Dajun was inexplicably sad and indignant, and the blue tendons on his forehead burst out. How could he not be angry, the area where he stood in front of him was impressively placed with the bones of nearly a thousand young children. Looking at the bones of those severed children, he could clearly feel what these children had suffered before they died!

"King Qi is right, let's take revenge! What the Tartars have done to us, we should do the same to them! ”

Song Ren, a member of the Taifu Temple, also had a pale face, he hated those beasts and tartars, and he couldn't imagine how those beasts could do such a thing that people and gods were angry about.

"Not only do we want revenge, but we also want to know, why is this happening, why is this happening? What is the reason for this scene in front of us? ”

Wan Dajun's fists clenched tightly.

"Yes, we need to find out who is causing our country to be like this!"

More than 30 central officials gathered around Wan Dajun, and they began to search for the root of all this.

...............

There is also a fierce debate in the painting and calligraphy museum, but the debate is a different matter, and the theme around the word "objective" is the word.

Zheng Zhonglei was dissatisfied with the fact that his colleagues were blinded by hatred and could not see the truth.

"It is true that hundreds of thousands of people were killed in Nanchang, and it is also true that tens of millions of people died in the entire land south of the Yangtze River, but when we look at history, we must be objective and fair! Let me ask you, were all these people really killed by the Manchurians?

... I don't think so, since Jiashen, the number of full troops crossing the river is very small, and each time the troops are sent is not more than 10,000, but tens of millions of people have died south of the Yangtze River, how did these people die, and who killed them? It's those green battalion soldiers, such as Li Chengdong and the like. Is it those Han military banners, such as Geng, Shang, Kong Zhi, etc., what does it have to do with the Manchu soldiers?

So everyone should be calm, we are all scholars, knowing books and reasoning is the way of self-cultivation, there is something to say, there is reason, the Manchus did not kill so many Han people, we can't blame all this on the Manchurians with a clear conscience, right? ”

"Brother Zheng's words are reasonable, I agree with what Brother Zheng said, you are extreme. Since Jiashen, the people who have harmed our people the most are those who have surrendered to the Qing Dynasty, not the Manchu soldiers, so what everyone just said about exterminating the Manchurian clan is really unjust. An imperial historian of the Metropolitan Procuratorate stood up to support Zheng Zhonglei's opinion, believing that it is necessary to objectively look at the culprits of massacres in various places.