Towards the end of the meeting, Prince Jing said that these several submissions on trade affairs along the Yangtze River would be presented to the emperor's palace in the Rehe Palace by the Prime Minister's Yamen, and he believed that there would be good news soon. The pen "Fun" Pavilion www.biquge.info he bowed to the air, as if the emperor was in front of him, "The ministers respectfully ask for the holy judgment." At the end of the meeting, Prince Jing again brought up the purchase of gunboats from the British, and asked Hurd who was up to the task. A flash of inspiration flashed in his mind, and a sentence rushed to his lips: Mr. Li Taitai, the chief tax officer, was recuperating in London, and he was the most suitable person to handle the matter. Wen Bochuan, the prime minister's yamen minister who was present at the meeting, seemed to have something to say, and seeing that Prince Jing immediately agreed to this suggestion, he swallowed his words back.

In the last days of his stay in Beijing, Hurd had developed a close relationship with Prince Jing and the ministers of the Prime Minister's Yamen. He often rushed to the prime minister's yamen in Dongtangzi Hutong early in the morning, and after having breakfast with Wen Bochuan, the two began to talk from sunrise to sunset. He was 14 years old, passed the Shuntianfu Township Examination in 9040 and became a juren, and five years later, Zhongjin Shi was assigned to various jobs in various ministries of the imperial court, and at the age of 40, he was officially appointed as the Minister of Military Aircraft. It was he who participated in negotiations with the coalition forces as an assistant to Prince Jing after the fall of Beijing, and subsequently worked with Prince Jing and Guiliang to petition for the establishment of the Prime Minister's Yamen. He also had a bold idea of forming an eight-part elite unit called the "Shenji Battalion" trained entirely by the West to serve as the garrison of the city of Beijing. My father felt that this authoritative figure in Beijing politics was both a traditional scholar and an ardent advocate of modernization, and that he was the most enlightened and amicable of all the ministers of the Prime Minister's Yamen.

Prince Jing sometimes invited him and several members of the Prime Minister's Yamen to drink tea on the platform outside the "Green Sky Xiaoyin". It was a place where Prince Jing entertained relatives and friends, and inviting him, a foreigner, was an unusually courtesy. This is part of the West Garden, and its Cuijin Garden is a paradise for cranes, parrots and falcons. Sit under the shade of a tree and drink tea, watch the golden and black carp fly through the pond and under the miniature waterfall that flows down from the rockery, talk about politics and foreign news. From time to time, a wave of pride crossed Hurd's mind.

In addition to official business, the prince would also talk to him about some light topics. For example, they talked about a common preference for meat. The prince likes to drink liquor. He likes to drink a little bit of Shaoxing rice wine, which he learned in Ningbo. They also mentioned a tall Yanma with a very strong temperament, and unlike the sensitive Qianguo pony, this kind of horse always has its head and tail held high, but does not look at the direction, so it always runs and gets lost. When talking about this handsome Yanma getting lost, the prince, who has always been calm, couldn't help but laugh out loud.

This time together was short, and he was deeply impressed by the Prince's curiosity, great understanding, and courage to accept new things. From Minister Bruce and Counsellor Wittoma, he also heard Prince Jing's evaluation of him, saying that he had the "best impression" of him. Wen Bochuan said that he was "very reasonable" and "elegant and tame", saying that the prime minister's yamen regarded him as "his own person". It seems that they did not have a bad impression of him, and they all regarded him as an Englishman of great ability and courtesy for the sake of the Empire. One day, Bruce himself told him that Prince Jing actually called him "our Hurd"!

The day before he left for Tianjin, Hurd received a letter from Prince Jing asking him to act as the chief tax secretary with the other two tax secretaries of the Jiang Customs, Fei Zilai and Dedude, during Li Taitai's absence. At that time, he had a vague premonition that his life's work had begun.

What he didn't know was that while he was talking and laughing with them, Prince Jing was caught in the whirlpool of power struggles within the court. Many of Prince Jing's measures were opposed by some xenophobic officials. These favored ministers who stayed with the emperor in Rehe were headed by the auxiliary minister, Prince Duan Chengwei, who saw that Prince Jing was so keen on Western affairs that they secretly gave him the nickname "Devil Six". They slandered the sick emperor that the sixth child saw that the emperor would die soon, and joined forces with foreigners to plot a rebellion and replace him. The emperor and his sixth brother originally had a deep disagreement, so Prince Jing's situation could be called dangerous. Prince Jing wanted to go to Rehe to visit the sick emperor, but he was never approved.

At the beginning of September of this year, my father returned to Beijing after taking care of the affairs of the new port of Tianjin, and found that the entire capital was enveloped in an atmosphere of sadness. At the beginning of autumn, it was still a bright season, but the streets and alleys of the city were filled with a sense of slaughter. The shops were deserted, the pedestrians looked wooden and frightened, and all entertainment was banned. Only then did he know that just a week before arriving in Beijing, the emperor, who had been tormented by fear and worry, had died in the Rehe Palace.

Hurd went to the Prime Minister's Yamen, and Prince Jing was sometimes absent, and sometimes he was there with his brows locked to review the official documents, and he seemed to be preoccupied, and he didn't talk much when he saw him. He later learned that this was the time when the power struggle between Beijing and Rehe was heating up. After the emperor's death, one of the sons of a scheming concubine who won the emperor's favor by singing southern opera and wearing southern costumes became the new emperor, and she herself became the young imperial empress dowager.

The emperor's coffin was about to return to Beijing, and Prince Jing seized the opportunity to successfully join forces with her. The Empress Dowager of the Two Palaces galloped to Beijing, and the regents and auxiliary ministers were forced to follow the emperor's coffin into Beijing in accordance with the ancestral teachings of the dynasty. The young empress dowager who rushed to Beijing and Prince Jing took the opportunity to announce the guilt of these ministers and completely eliminated the political enemies led by Chengwei. Prince Jing finally became the Parliamentary King and Chief Minister of Military Aircraft to assist the little emperor.

After this palace coup, he admired the young prince's courage, audacity and political wisdom even more, and he was glad that he had met such a powerful man, and it seemed that he had really found the legendary philosopher's stone.

After receiving the authorization of Prince Jing, his father wrote a letter to Li Taitai, who was on vacation in London, entrusting him to purchase eight warships and a batch of munitions on behalf of the Daqian Empire.

During his talks with Prince Jing, his father had promised that he would have absolute leadership over the fleet, but Li Tai's loyalty to Her Majesty made him forget all these words. The commander of the fleet privately identified by Lee Thai was Mr. Asburn, Captain of the British Royal Navy. The leadership model he envisioned for the fleet was one similar to that of General Gordon's "Victorious Army," which was fighting the rebels in the southern part of the Empire, with a dry crew and commanded by British officers.

Lee told his father that the Lee-Ah fleet was on its way to Qianguo, and that in addition to Colonel Aspen, he had recruited 600 sailors in England.

"Wait and see, what I brought to the Great Qing Kingdom is an overseas fleet of the Royal Navy!"

His father's heart sank when he heard this, and he told Li Tai that he was very worried about the future of the fleet, which was still on its way.

Lee Tai's confirmation that his father is alarmist.

A few days later, what my father had feared finally happened.

When Li Shaoquan reported to the Prime Minister Yamen what Li Tai had revealed to him about the regulations of the fleet, the ministers firmly disagreed with the idea that a British officer should take command of the fleet. Li Taitai threatened to hand over the fleet to Japan or sell it to the Shengping Army in the south if he did not agree with his plan.

Li Taitai has always been very proud, and he relies on the power to oppress people at every turn. He didn't trust the other party at all, but he wanted the other party to trust him unconditionally. And he always gives orders without consulting with others, always dictates and sets conditions, and always quarrels with others. In the final analysis, it was he who thought that the Great Qian Empire could not live without him. But Prince Jing's hard-line attitude dealt him a fatal blow: things were not what he wishful thinking had been, and his calculations were wrong. At the appointment of Prime Minister Yamen, Prince Jing personally nominated Hurd to serve as the head of the Yangtze River ports and the Ningbo Taxation Department, including the Jiangxi Customs.

Early in the morning of his arrival in Shanghai, Hurd saw two ships in Aspen's fleet, the "Beijing" and the "Qianguo". The ships anchored in the harbor, and the early morning light cast their behemoth-like shadows. They suddenly emitted black smoke, blackening the sky that had just begun to show a glimmer of dawn. It seems that Aspen is preparing to lead his fleet north.

Aspen took these eight warships to the mouth of the Yangtze River as early as early August. Lee has been instructing Aspen to wait for news from Beijing. After going to Beijing, Li Taitai immediately ordered Aspen to sail the fleet to Yantai, and the colonel himself traveled from Zhifu to Beijing to join him. When the Shengping Army heard the news, they sent people to contact them several times, hoping that this fleet from the Atlantic Ocean could serve the Heavenly King, and even some sailors had been bought by them. It turned out that Li Taitai's words threatening Prime Minister Yamen to sell the fleet to the Shengping Army were not groundless.

There was no suspense about what happened next, and Li Shaoquan rushed to Tianjin to officially return the warship waiting for handover at Dagukou. Li Taitai was so angry that his face was crooked, but there was nothing he could do. Little did he know that an even bigger blow was yet to come. As Li Tai needed to return to the UK to deal with the disbandment of the fleet, Prime Minister Yamen had officially announced that Hurd would take over as the chief tax department.

On the night of his appointment, Hurd wrote in his diary: "I am very happy that I have finally reached the top. ”

After that, his work and life in Qianguo can be said to be smooth sailing, and as a result, Hurd actually dreamed of being the commander of the Qianguo Navy like Li Taitai at the beginning. Modeled after the customs under his rule, he designed a framework for the "General Administration of Coastal Defense", which was directly under the jurisdiction of the Prime Minister Yamen, and Hurd himself was also the General Department of Coastal Defense. However, this plan was opposed by almost all forces: the major European shipyards did not want to give Hurd a monopoly on the arms broker business, so they sent representatives directly to Qianguo to liaise with local governors, and the Japanese and Italian companies, who had been working under them, solicited business for the French shipyards in their home country, and the prices were more favorable. What is even worse is that Li Shaoquan, the minister of Beiyang, and Ding Yusheng, the minister of Nanyang, were most worried that Hurd's "zealous" would damage their dominance of the coastal defense cause of Qianguo, so Li Shaoquan instructed his aide Xue Shuyun to send a letter to the prime minister's yamen in 9081, criticizing Hurd for "being a man of yin and dictatorship, being sloppy and self-respecting, and although he is rich in food and in a high position, his intention is still that of the Westerners and the outer middle earth." Ding Yusheng directly went to the imperial court, saying that "Hurd should not concurrently serve as the chief coastal defense department", otherwise "the military power and salary power will be in the hands of one person", and suggested that if Hurd wants to serve as the chief coastal defense department, he must give up the post of the general taxation department and go to the seaside to train troops in person, and of course Hurd will not give up the post of the general taxation department, and the dream of the "general coastal defense department" will eventually be stillborn.

But now, all of a sudden, the dream is close again.

As a result of Japan's rapid invasion of Korea, people's illusions about the superiority of the Qianguo army and navy were immediately shattered. From the outset, the war was dominated by a series of Japanese offensives aimed at the determination to capture Beijing. The situation of the war clearly and dramatically exposed the failure of the military preparations of the Qianguo and the effectiveness of the Japanese military preparations. Since 9068, Japan's army and navy have benefited from the modernization of other branches of society, and it has also promoted these innovations, allowing for a guaranteed close cooperation between the Japanese army and navy. In bringing the Japanese armed forces to a high level of efficiency, foreign advisers and instructors, including the Englishman John Brown. Ingalls and the German Jacob. McKel, including McKel, has made a lot of efforts. McCale helped reorganize Japan's War Ministry, elevate the status of the General Staff Headquarters, improve military education, and enrich its logistical and medical work. He also helped to reorganize the Japanese army into divisions, and told the Japanese "the requirements for a national mobilization, which included a strategic railway network, a new conscription order, and an improved set of staff operations." As a result, his achievements in Japan were much greater than those of his counterparts in the Qianguo. Ingalls was also able to do more than his peers.

After the declaration of war between the two sides, the Japanese military operations in Korea had shown that its "generals knew how to command the battle, and the organization of the army functioned smoothly even in a country without good roads." American, British, and other foreign observers have repeatedly praised the Japanese for their strategic and tactical mastery, for their effective training, discipline, bravery, and collectivism, as well as for their outstanding performance in transportation, military supplies, and medical facilities.

After the war began, the Japanese offensive in Korea progressed rapidly. The Japanese fleet raided the coastal ports and military bases of the Qianguo Kingdom to cover the transportation of troops; The Navy failed to respond to the challenge. In just over a month, the Japanese army occupied the southern town of Busan, and it took only a few days to take this heavily defended fortress of the Qianguo country, and the tens of thousands of troops who regarded Prince Jing as the elite were crushed in one fell swoop. Then the Japanese army quickly captured Seoul, the capital of Korea. This victory, the result of the excellent command of the Japanese army generals, was extremely brilliant, and these victories allowed the Japanese to send further troops to land in Korea and devise even more daring battle plans.

Except for the defenders of the Qianguo in Pyongyang and Kaesong, which withstood the Japanese attack, almost three-quarters of the territory of Korea fell into the hands of the Japanese, and the successive defeats on the Korean battlefield seriously disintegrated the morale of the Qianguo army and plunged Beijing into a panic.

The commander in chief of the Qianguo army, who was directly responsible for operational command, was Hurd's "old friend" Li Shaoquan, the governor of Zhili and the minister of Beiyang.

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