One of the two who escaped, Rong Lu, knew that he was the second son of Jing Shan, who had been a bachelor of Hanlin and Minister of Internal Affairs, named Enming. The other is Wang Chonglie, the son of Wang Yirong, who is the son of Wang Yirong, who is the son of the country, does not know, but Wang Yirong, who is the prince of the country, knows him, and Yang Chongyin, the imperial historian who worked closely with him in the Wuxu Change, is the same Jinshi, and Wang Yirong's sister is married to Zhang Zhidong, the governor of Huguang, who is now famous all over the world.

Under Rong Lu's persuasion, Enming finally stopped his grief and said that they originally had a companion, Xu Chengyu, who served as the squire of the Criminal Department, but Xu Chengyu was captured by the coalition forces at the gate of the city, and now only the two of them are left who have escaped from the tiger's mouth.

From Enming's mouth, Rong Lu finally got the recent situation of Jingshi, which made him heartbroken, and he was extremely glad that he was "rescued" from Beijing by Long Qian.

Enming began to cry again, first talking about the tragedy of his family: his father Jingshan, who was seventy-seven years old at the time, was accustomed to keeping a diary, and that night, under the guidance of the traitors, the coalition army searched for the ministers of the palace, and his father had expected the disaster, and he was still hungry to write the last diary of his life, and the coalition army had arrived outside his door, and Enming's brother, a typical gentleman and fanatical member of the Boxer Rebellion, Enzhu, actually stuffed his father into a well. The coalition forces that broke into the house and killed people on sight, and Eunzhu, who was about to escape, was captured by the coalition forces, and the Boxer belongings were found on his body, and he was beheaded on the spot. Enming hid in the haystack of the livestock shed, and escaped a catastrophe.

Wang Chonglie's family was miserable enough, his parents were unwilling to be humiliated, and they jumped into the well hand in hand to die, and his widowed sister-in-law Zhang went to the disaster together.

Besides, Xu Chengyu, who had supervised the beheading of Yuan Chang, was actually mentally deranged when he was captured by the Japanese army. The story of the Xu family. It was Xu Chengyu who said it to Enming personally. At that time, he met Enming and Wang Feng, who were walking with their companions on the street, who were about to go out of the city.

Xu Chengyu's father is Xu Tong, who fanatically advocates the magic of the Boxers, and is over eighty years old this year. He no longer had the strength to flee with the Queen Mother, so the old man was ready to die. He said to his eldest son Xu Chengneng, as the first assistant, the country has suffered this great disaster, and I must die of martyrdom. Your third brother is a minister, and he should know what to do. After I died, I was buried in my hometown of Yizhou, the descendants of my Xu family. Ploughing and reading heirlooms. You are not allowed to be an official anymore. The third son Xu Tong mentioned was the squire of the Criminal Department, who killed Xu Chengyu, who resolutely opposed Yuan Chang, who was against the war with all nations. Before he died, Lao Xu Tong finally understood how ridiculous his self-esteem was.

But Xu Chengyu, who was once high-spirited, was not ready to die. Even Song Ru didn't have the courage to "usually talk about his heart and heart, and repay the king when he died". He was confronted with two life-threatening ropes hanging from the beams of the room. Crying and saying to my father. If the son dies first. Unable to do his filial piety for his father. Please ask the father to go first, and after the father is buried, the son will surely die. So Xu Tong committed suicide by hanging the beam. But Xu Chengyu took advantage of his family's inattention and escaped. He didn't want to die at all. There are always such people in history, who are impassioned and look down on the world on weekdays, but when real danger comes, their bones are softer than anyone else, let alone being a traitor, even if they are kings and slaves, as long as they live.

Xu Chengyu did not survive. The intelligence work of the coalition forces is still good, and every meeting of the imperial court, including its pure internal affairs research, cannot be hidden from the eyes of foreigners. The Empire's secrecy of state secrets is truly inferior to the point of suffocation. For Xu Chengyu, who is a fanatical main battle faction, he has long been on the "blacklist" of the coalition army. Xu Chengyu was captured by the coalition forces before he could escape from Beijing - he did not have the confidence to "look at the door and think about Zhang Jian". It must be noted that Xu Chengyu secretly returned to his second home after escaping, and found that the whole family, including men, women, children, and servants, a total of 16 people, were hanging from the beams in the hall, and the miserable scene almost made him insane. Xu Chengyu was captured by the Japanese army and died, which should be a relief for him.

Rong Lu's heart was shattered when he listened. Now it's certain. After entering the city under the pretext of protecting the embassy, the allied forces first pounced on the palaces and ministers' residences. Not only did they believe that the princes and ministers of the empire were to be punished mercilessly, but that their palaces were huge warehouses full of gold and silver treasures.

If you don't leave, will you also suffer a second-class tragedy? Rong Lu's attitude in this war is unpredictable, and it is difficult to list him as the main battle faction, but it is not the main peace faction like Yuan Chang. In these two days of extreme chaos and terror, there is a great possibility that staying in Beijing will be poisoned.

Enming affirmed that many families, meaning nobles who were different from the common people, committed suicide by the whole family.

This Rong Lu believes. The princes and ministers of the empire had the fullest estimation of the impending catastrophe. They are not all like Rong Lu who can escape, and they are not all qualified to follow the Queen Mother and the Emperor to "hunt in the west". These people, who usually live a pampered life, have a good voice, and have a sober judgment of the coming danger. This judgment is innately flowing in the blood of the aristocracy.

As a result, they either chose to flee or commit suicide en masse.

History has such an experience: when the Yuan army invaded the capital of the Great Song Dynasty, when the Qing army entered Beijing and crossed the Yangtze River, there were already countless "predecessors" who made a tragic example for them. Reading history books, they used to appreciate history written in blood, but now it is their turn to practice it themselves.

Rong Lu wiped the cold sweat on his forehead - not beads of sweat from the heat, but cold sweat from being scared, and looked at Long Qian with sincere gratitude.

In fact, this is just what happened to the three families, and Rong Lu will get detailed information in the future:

On the day of the destruction of Beijing, there were many aristocrats who committed collective suicide:

The clan served Chongshou, and after killing the whole family, he died with a steel knife through his chest, and he really went to the hand.

Bao Feng, the attendant of the clan, first chased the two palaces out of Beijing, but did not catch up, and after returning home, the whole family swallowed gold and died.

The general of the clan Bong-eun, Zalonga, hanged himself with his son, daughter-in-law, daughter, and grandson.

At the critical moment when the coalition army rushed to the front of the house, he plugged in the gate, led the whole family of ten people to run to the backyard, piled up firewood and grass, and set himself on fire.

Yan Mao, a Jilin general who had commanded the battle in the Andingmen Tower, returned home alone after the city was broken, and set himself on fire with his mother, brother and sister-in-law, brother-in-law and children, a total of 12 people.

Chen Luan, a third-rank lieutenant and a cavalry commander, committed collective suicide with a family of 31 people. This is the highest number on this bloodstained list.

According to incomplete statistics, within two days of the destruction of Beijing, there were more than 30 imperial relatives and more than 2,000 relatives who committed collective suicide. The aristocracy is always well populated, so this number is particularly staggering.

The fate of the princes and ministers who did not choose to commit suicide made those who "raced against time" to commit suicide with their families feeling lucky.

Hubu Shangshu Chongqi, the word Wenshan, surnamed Alut, is the son of Saishan, a bachelor of the Daoguang and Xianfeng dynasties. This is a very unusual Manchu aristocracy, and the biggest unusualness is that Chongqi was a minor official in the Yamen, the commander of the infantry army. There is no such grace as the children of other Manchu nobles. Fighting cocks and lackeys, but reading at night with lights and nights. Finally, in the 1864 scientific examination, he was named on the gold list, and the ranking turned out to be the first first, that is, the champion Lang who people were happy to praise. The result immediately caused a stir. It also made the court urgently discuss what to do.

It's kind of interesting to say. In the midst of the narration of the tragic story that took place on this tragic day. Insert this somewhat legendary story. Maybe it can relax the reader's nerves for a moment. Chongqi, as the son of a Manchurian eunuch, was supposed to be a good thing for the ruler to celebrate, so why should he urgently discuss it? That was because of the special policy adopted by Manchuria when he came to control the Central Plains. The supreme ruler of Manchuria was based on the mindset of "establishing the country by force". They did not want their own children to indulge in the Han classics and abandon their martial arts traditions, so it was stipulated that the Manchu children would receive money and food allocated by the state when they were born. Manchurian children were not encouraged to compete with the Han Chinese for the already tense quota for the imperial examination. In addition to the privilege of the Manchu children to receive living expenses, this regulation seems to have a little intention of taking care of the Han people, but in fact, the Manchurian rulers knew that it was better not to let their children who could not even speak Chinese go to the imperial examination to be embarrassed. In fact, during the 200 years that the Manchus entered the Central Plains, there were occasional Manchu and Mongolian children who participated in the imperial examinations, and there was never a grand event of winning the top prize. But there is a Chongqi, no wonder the imperial court has to study it carefully. As a result, in the call of "only reading the article, regardless of the Manchu and Han dynasties", it was awarded to the editor of the Chongqi Hanlin Academy. Since then, Chongqi's good fortune has followed, and her daughter has been elected as the empress of the Tongzhi Emperor. As a result, this Manchurian champion was also the national abbot, so Chongqi was promoted to the general of Shengjing all the way, and the head of the household was still the secretary.

In the year of Gengzi, Chongqi was already more than seventy years old. Moreover, he had little to do with the Boxers, and only appealed for the establishment of the crown prince of Duanjun for the sake of political speculation. But he was a little weak-hearted, and when he learned that Cixi and Guangxu had escaped, he also ran to Baoding. The family members who did not have time to flee with him fell into the hands of the coalition forces, and Chongqi's wife, concubine, daughter, and daughter-in-law were all imprisoned in the Temple of Heaven and arbitrarily gang raped. After being released home, Chongqi's son Chongbao was so angry that he dug a large pit, buried the children alive, and then hanged himself by the pit. Chongqi's wife led the rest of the family to commit suicide, and Chongqi, who was in Baoding, was ashamed and angry, cried a lot, and committed suicide.

It wasn't just the princes and ministers who were the victims of this catastrophe.

The rationale for the coalition attack on Beijing was to destroy the Boxers. Indeed, in the summer of 1900, the Boxers in the vicinity of Beijing and Tianjin numbered hundreds of thousands. But this huge peasant army mysteriously disappeared after the coalition broke through Beijing, and no one can say where they went. In fact, most of the Boxers fled Beijing before the city was broken, and those who stayed in the capital and did not have time to escape would not wear the clothes of the Boxers, and would have "roared around" with their rudimentary weapons or magic weapons.

The coalition forces first besieged the Boxers' headquarters in Beijing: the residence of Prince Zhuang Zaixun. Jae-hoon was accidentally killed, and he escaped the poisonous hands of the coalition forces. The regiments that had followed him had already scattered and scattered, and the coalition army burned down Prince Zhuang's mansion.

The massacre of the Boxers was carried out everywhere, and in an alley near the imperial city, the Boxers and ordinary people who escaped from the burning of houses by the coalition forces were blocked by the coalition forces to the end of the alley, all of them were shot, and the corpses were piled up, which was unbearable.

The vicinity of the Xishiku Church, which had been attacked, was the focus of the encirclement and suppression of the coalition forces, and the coalition forces on both sides drove thousands of people, most of them unarmed people, who had lived at the feet of the so-called Son of Heaven for generations, and lived a peaceful life, and were all driven to the city wall and shot under the walls of the extreme barbarism and shamelessness displayed by the Boxer Rebellion, the imperial court, and the civilized nation.

The massacre was accompanied by brutal looting. In fact. Robbery is what the coalition wants to do the most. As a result, shops, pawnshops, jewelry stores, and money shops were all "spontaneously" robbed by the officers and soldiers of the coalition forces, who, in the name of searching the Boxers, gathered in groups of three or five, armed with foreign guns and sharp knives, and broke in to find all the goods they thought were valuable. Who dares to resist. Immediately killed. The reason is simple. The other party is the Boxers.

At first, of course, it was aimed at gold, silver and jade, and there was a problem with the identification of jade, and the officers and soldiers of the coalition were of course the first choice for gold and silver. As gold and silver are hard to find, the targets of robbery are even more miscellaneous. Mink and other leather goods have also been looted. It is not uncommon to see coalition soldiers hurrying on the streets with guns and bandaged bags. For them. Beijing is such a wonderful place.

Of course, the coalition forces after entering Beijing were not without fierce resistance. The Japanese army paid a huge price on the night of the 19th.

Needless to say, the palace of the prince and minister was sacked after the coalition forces entered Beijing. Get rid of the private shops and money houses, and even openly start the idea of the household treasury. It was the Japanese who did this, after all, they were the only Asians in the coalition army, and the intelligence work of the Japanese army was obviously more careful than that of the invading armies of other countries, and they immediately sent a force of more than 100 people after entering the city, escorting more than ten carts ready to go straight to the household department, which belonged to the occupied area of the Russian army, but the Japanese did not care about this, they knew that despite the defeat of the First Sino-Japanese War, the most concentrated place of the Manchu Qing court silver should still be the household department. This specialized robbery squad was unexpectedly attacked by unknown armed forces who arrived first, apparently with the same purpose, and the Japanese were caught off guard and suffered heavy casualties - the robbers' intelligence was clearly flawed, and they believed that the organized resistance in the city of Beijing was over, and that Beijing was already a stripped-down and humiliated by others. Unexpectedly, there were still resistors here, the Japanese army was shot and killed about 40 people in front of the Tobe bankhouse, the narrow alley could not be effectively avoided, and the rest were immediately subjected to a severe and decisive white-edged impact, the Japanese army suddenly collapsed, and the living desperately fled, but the other end of the alley was blocked, and there was a fierce and accurate volley of guns head-on. About eighty Japanese officers and soldiers were "killed", and the rest were killed after surrendering.

This was the largest casualty suffered by the coalition forces after entering Beijing. When the coalition troops heard the news and rushed to reinforcements - the first to arrive were the Russian troops, who grabbed a guide and hurried to the ground with corpses all over the ground, even their clothes were stripped off.

It was not without resistance, in front of the "Shunyuan Dart Bureau" opened by him, Wang Wu, who was quite famous in Sijiu City, brandished the Qinglong Yanyue Knife that was said to be more than 100 catties and rushed towards the foreign soldiers, but after a row of guns, Wang Wu, who was armed with martial arts, fell in a pool of blood, once again proving that the myth of the invulnerability of the Boxers was nothing but nonsense.

Wang Wu's real name is Wang Zhengyi, the word Zibin, a native of Cangzhou, Hebei. Worship Li Fenggang as a teacher, ranked fifth, known as the fifth king of the big sword. In 1898, he planned to rescue Tan Sitong, who was imprisoned in the Wuxu Reform.

These tragedies are not clear to Enming and Wang Chonglie. But the news they brought angered the commanders of the Mengshan Army, "Commander, foreign devils and beasts are not as good, it is in vain to waste our energy, it is better to slaughter these dogs and avenge the people of Jingshi!" Feng Lun was furious when he heard this.

"Never." Rong Lu shouted.

"Don't be impulsive. Our captives did not participate in the atrocities of the Kyoshi. Secondly, the honor of the military must be maintained at all times. We want revenge, but not to kill the defenseless captives, and when we are strong, defeat them on the battlefield, and let them taste the pain of the country! Long Qian stood up and stopped a group of angry subordinates, "Lu Shan, you are responsible for taking care of the prisoners, don't do anything I don't want to see!" ”

"Yes." Lu Shan agreed with a gloomy face.

Long Qian turned to Rong Lu and said, "My lord, we can't take care of the affairs of Jingshi for the time being. Revenge is also a matter for the future. Since foreigners are so inferior to beasts, they are really worried about the safety of the holy driver. The humble position thought that it would not be fast to go with the wounded number and prisoners, so it was better for us to go in batches, and first lead the cavalry under the command of the humble position, and rush to the queen mother's side as soon as possible. ”

"That's what you're talking about. The holy car drove out of Desheng Gate to the north, let's rush to the direction of Juyong Pass, and we should be able to catch up. Rong Lu looked at Long Qian's eyes full of appreciation, "You set off, and the old man rushed over." Rong Lu thought to himself that he didn't have the ability to gallop wildly. (To be continued......)

PS: Don't think that Aaron is cheating on the word count. Bloody Beijing is in this chapter. Moreover, there is foreshadowing in it. After this chapter, it's time for a new chapter.