Chapter 133: Rebellion

Many people in later generations believed that the greatest feature of the Ming Dynasty was the dictatorship of eunuchs. In particular, the Manchu Qing Dynasty, in order to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, specially formulated very strict regulations for the eunuchs in the palace to prevent trouble. The effect is good, and there are indeed many famous eunuchs in the history of the Qing Dynasty, such as An Dehai, Li Lianying, Cui Yugui, etc. But everyone also admits that no matter how unbearable these fathers-in-law are, they haven't made any waves - however, this does not prevent them from carrying the black pot in the slightest. In fact, many people in this group are actually severely stigmatized. Let's take Li Lianying as an example.

One. The Beiyang Navy Division formed an army, Li Hongzhang asked the imperial court to review, and Cixi ordered Li Lianying to go with Prince Yiyun (pronounced "Xuan", the biological father of Emperor Guangxu). During the whole trip, Li Lianying bowed down to serve Yiyun, handed him dry tobacco to wash his feet, and returned to his room to rest after falling asleep every day, so that those who did not know it saw him as the internal supervisor of Prince Alcohol's Mansion. After the review, Prince Alcohol ordered the photographer to take a photo for "going up to the town and the provincial government, and going down to the captain of the guard", but Li Lianying refused politely.

Second.

Gengzi Incident, Cixi and Guangxu fled west in a hurry, and stayed overnight in a broken temple. Li Lianying went to Guangxu to say goodbye to Cixi after saying goodnight, and found that Guangxu was sitting under the lonely lamp and did not sleep, so she persuaded him: "The emperor should rest early, and he will have to hurry tomorrow morning." Guangxu said gloomily: "I can't sleep." I came out in a hurry, without a cover. ”

Li Lianying cried!

While weeping, he prostrated and said, "The slave deserves to die." If the emperor is not dirty, the servant will bring his bed to you, and you will be left for one night. ”

Then, I sat under the porch of the door and kept watch all night!

After Guangxu returned to Beijing, he personally said: "If it weren't for Li Lianying, I wouldn't be alive today." ”

Third. When Cixi died, Li Lianying resigned to Longyu after 100 days of filial piety in the palace, and handed over all the rewards she had received over the years, saying: "These are all royal things, and they can't be lost to the people." The minions were carefully kept for decades, and all of them were returned to their masters. "Then his grave was dug up and left empty!

In the final analysis, eunuchs are the emperor's personal slaves, and with some extremely rare exceptions, their special status determines the natural attribute of absolute loyalty to the Son of Heaven: once they break away from the imperial power, they completely lose the meaning of their existence - in the imperial era, who would dare to use eunuchs as servants? So we see that those who are described as powerful eunuchs, such as Liu Jin and Wei Zhongxian, the emperor bowed down and killed with a word, not to mention stubborn resistance, and there was not even a symbolic distinction.

The eunuch dictatorship of the Ming Dynasty was true, but it was not the core of the problem - the prevailing hypocrite culture was! The so-called hypocrite culture is the practice of selling fame and reputation as the representative of the civil official group. "I usually talk about my heart and surname, and report to the king when I die", well, I usually don't do anything serious, and I end up with a bad life, which is good! The most terrible thing is to fight for "fame" for the sake of grandstanding, blatantly using "righteousness" as a fig leaf and tossing to death. For example, to recognize the emperor's father.

After the middle of the Ming Dynasty, the atmosphere of the entire civil official group had completely deviated from the normal track, and the emperor had to rely on his own domestic slaves and eunuch groups in order to resist the cardinal's restriction on imperial power (many of which were deliberately added to the chaos in order to show his "offence". Of course, history is written by civil officials, so when the world is overturned, women and eunuchs become the rightful backstabbers - if the weight is not enough, one or two traitors will be introduced, and everything will be done.

The ministers of the Jingshi received heavy gifts from Huguang, so they turned their attention to picking quarrels and provoking troubles elsewhere, especially in Sichuan, where another war was going on, and it was very chaotic. In other words, as long as you want to find faults, grab a handful of ready-made pigtails.

Sun Jie, the beloved general of the Son of Heaven, has been having a very hard time these days, although he has occasionally won small victories, but he has been pressed and beaten by Zhang Hu. There is no way, Sun Jie's subordinates are indeed the elite left by Old Man Sun, and their combat power is second to none in the official army sequence of the Ming Dynasty. But there were only four battalions in total, with a number of more than two thousand, and only five or six thousand auxiliaries; And Zhang Hu has a rabble of more than 100,000 people, and he doesn't care about human life at all. Sun Jie was reluctant to completely bury his family in the flesh mill in northern Sichuan.

In fact, Zhang Hu's chaos should not have happened.

Zhu Ningxiao, the king of Anhua, was the Zhu shovel, and when he tossed out the rebellion farce, almost all the border towns did not take it seriously after receiving his "raise volunteers together, fight against Liu Jin together, and take the Qing monarch's side", except for Yansui Town, which sealed the document to the imperial court, most of them neither reported nor took any countermeasures.

The first to raise troops to quell the rebellion was Cao Xiong, the chief soldier of Shaanxi, and Zhang Hu was the general of the horse soldiers under Cao Xiong. During the battle, hearing the news that Zhu Shosho had been captured by Qiu Yuesheng, He Jin, Ding Guang and others, who led the rebels to intercept Cao Xiong at the crossing of the Yellow River, saw that the general trend had gone, abandoned the army and fled, and the rebels were defeated. Zhang Hu led ten cavalry men to chase all the way out of Helan Mountain, and finally killed several people's personal guards outside the border wall (now the boundary of Alxa Left Banner), and captured He Jin, Ding Guang and other leaders!

However!

The Daming civil official group, which is always wrong with people, collectively turns a blind eye to this - because Cao Xiong is Liu Jin's in-law!

Not only that, Cao Xiong's fate was miserable: exile to the border! The commander of the dignified military region, who was the first to raise troops and broke the rebels, was assigned to be the lowest level of the flower soldiers!

The commander-in-chief is still like this, and Zhang Hu's situation is not much better - the great merit of capturing He Jin, Ding Guang and others must fall on the heads of Lord Yang's cronies hundreds of miles away from the battlefield. In order to prevent the incident, some people want Zhang Hu to shut up forever. Originally, it was a very easy thing to enter the camp with a knife and "invite" Zhang Hu to kneel down and listen to the "reward": reporting "dying in the chaos" is not a matter of words? It is impossible for the imperial court to care about which cannon fodder is killed!

It's a pity that the few people who entered the camp found Zhang Hu and just said half a sentence, and their heads flew into the sky one after another - Zhang Hu and his ten brothers didn't say a word of nonsense, and directly drew their knives!

Because they got the news beforehand.

The one who delivered the news to them was the first hero of this battle, Qiu Yue.

Qiu Yue's original surname is Wang, his real name is no longer available, it is nothing more than a cat and a dog, and he was born in an ordinary military family in Pingliangfu Town. Once I went to Chimukou (now Sanguankou) with 100 households to patrol the border, but I unexpectedly had a chance encounter with the Mongolian compatriots who came to threshk grass. In the hand-to-hand battle of the enemy, the patrol team was completely annihilated, and Xiao Wang was hit in the back by a hammer and fainted. When he woke up, he fled to Pinji Fort...... Then, I met three "nobles" - three Mongolian compatriots who were not very neat on their legs and feet behind the large army!

Don't look at the age, the legs and feet are not good to keep up with the large army, but the Mongolian compatriots each have two treasures: the Mongolian horse under the crotch and the head on the neck! Xiao Wang, who was a very chicken thief, knew that no matter how young and strong he was, he couldn't outrun the Mongolian horse, so he pretended to be dying, struggled into a small forest with half-truths, and tricked the three of them into dismounting and following up...... Finally won the grand prize of the game of hide and seek: the third-class real "captive" and three Mongolian horses!

With such military exploits, Xiao Wang's classmate became an officer of 100 households, and was appreciated by the commander of Ningxia - recognized as a righteous son! Xiao Wang's surname has since changed to Qiu, since he is an officer, he can no longer be called a cat and a dog, and when he re-named it, he pondered that he was more powerful and domineering, so he called Yue! Later, "the enemy is a pawn, and there is no heir, so he ordered Yue to take his secular position"! In the second year of Zhengde, he was promoted to a guerrilla general in Ningxia.

A guerrilla warrior in the bitter cold border with yellow sand, those civil officials didn't look at him at all, and no one paid attention to him. However, when Qiu Yue, who was trapped in the tiger's den, led a hundred and ten family members to make a great contribution to capture the king of Anhua, it was different: how could this work? You have to participate, otherwise how can you reflect the value of the existence of our group!

"The minister heard that Yue was at both ends of the first rat, and saw that the first rebellion against the general trend had gone, so he took advantage of his unpreparedness and sent it."

The minister seconded. After being visited by the minister, his person is really a disciple who has betrayed his ancestors for Tengda! ”

"Shameless villain!"

"Capricious, (Han) Xin (Lu) Bu's genus!"

The handful of old Qiu Yue (then fifty-two years old) knew that he couldn't argue with those guys no matter what, and he endured it, and his old superior Cao Xiong was confiscated and he was really powerless, so he endured it, but when he heard that someone was going to give Zhang Hu and others a "reward", General Qiu, who had been in the military for more than 30 years, couldn't suppress the sympathy in his heart, so Zhang Hu got an early warning in advance.

Zhang Hu took the lead in the uprising, Cao Xiong's thousands of soldiers were leaderless, the small half fled on the spot, the small half honestly stayed in the camp and waited for the imperial court hanging by the mirror to do justice, and the small half of the heart followed Zhang Hu horizontally. Zhang Hu, who was familiar with the reality of the border army's camps and forts, led everyone to avoid the Yuquan Battalion (Qiu Yue's defensive ground) with heavy troops and went straight to Xi'an (now Haiyuan, Ningxia), and then went south to Gongchang Mansion along the border between Jingyuwei and Pingliang Mansion, and arrived at Baoning Mansion in Sichuan along Jiamengshui (now Bailongjiang) at Yulei Pass, which is known as the "throat of Longshu" (now Yulei Township, Wenxian County, Gansu), and captured Guangyuan, an important town in northern Sichuan! As for those who stayed in the camp and did not follow Zhang Huyu to break the net and sacrifice their lives, most of them begged for benevolence - Zhang Hu's rebellion against officials has been ironcladly proven, which further confirms that the adults are as wise as electricity and things are like gods. Now that Cao Bu has become a rebel, it has to be encircled and annihilated! It doesn't matter if you can't catch up with Zhang Hu, you may not be able to beat if you catch up anyway, isn't this a few hundred people who are obediently tied up?

Hundreds of heads are handed in, and it's another big victory!

If Zhang Hu's rebellion was actually forced, if no one made trouble, it would be impossible for the routs who were less than a thousand and everyone was panicked to become bigger. Zhang Hu led the crowd from Xi'an all the way south, and after arriving at Tongwei in Gongchang Mansion, he faced a catastrophe: there were chasing soldiers in the north, only a few small villages in the east were two or three hundred miles away from supply, and the west was Gongchang Mansion with high walls and deep moats - the east and west directions were all land, and the traffic was extremely inconvenient, and the rabble would collapse on their own after not going far. To the south, Xue Chengye, the prefect of Gongchang, had mobilized heavy troops from Zhangxian, Ningyuan (now Wushan), Qinzhou (today's Shui) and other places and Ding Zhuang to block the battle in Fuqiang (now Gangu) and wait! Zhang Hu, who was completely ignorant of all this, grabbed dozens of large and small fishing boats in Tongwei and went down the Huachuan River. Huachuan flows into the eastward Weishui in an inverted "T" shape in Fuqiang - that is, if there is no accident, the end of the road is Fuqiang: the end of Huachuan, and the end of Zhang Hu's life. Both.

However, if no one makes trouble at the critical moment, it is not a big deal. Yu Chaozhi (the word Liren), the imperial historian of Shaanxi Province, angrily participated in Xue Chengye's departure from the city! Yu Yushi is not uncommon to go to the field to personally inspect the environment, and after looking at the map like a landscape painting, he came to the conclusion: Gongchang Mansion is so close to Tongwei and so far away from Fuqiang (the map is seriously out of proportion, in fact, the distance is about the same, like an isosceles triangle), you don't meet the head-on, you are obviously afraid of the enemy like a tiger! Besides, the city extends in all directions, in case of loss, it is difficult to escape the crime of death!

In order to show his awe-inspiring righteousness, Yu Xun, who did not do secret things, directly threw a copy of the participation to Xue Zhifu. Xue Chengye's face turned green with fright after reading it: Don't look at the supervision of the imperial history is a seven-rank official, but it is "patrolling on behalf of the Son of Heaven, and the prefect and below are all under his orders"! Without saying a word, he immediately led all the people to run back to Gongchang Mansion.

On the third day of Xue Chengye's departure, Zhang Hu drove directly into Fuqiang City, which was almost undefended and already in chaos.

Soon, the Son of Heaven saw Yu Xun frequently bowing his head according to the recital of "The thief is very arrogant, but the ministers are taking precautions, and the soldiers are in Gongchang, fortunately not lost". It's a pity that the palace wall is too high, the Son of Heaven didn't see the fire in Fuqiang City, the Jingshi was too far away, and the Son of Heaven didn't hear the cry of the old and weak women and children dying.

Zhang Hu's third life and death test was at Yulei Pass. Yulei Pass, known as the "throat of Longshu", during the Three Kingdoms period, Wei general Guo Huai led a large army to build a city here to attack Shu general Liao Hua (that is, "there is no general in Shu, Liao Hua is the vanguard" of Liaohua). Later, Deng Aiva Shu defeated Jiang Wei at the bridgehead of Yulei Pass, Jiang Wei abandoned the pass, and retired to the Sword Pavilion. Zhang Qiguang once wrote the poem "Yulei Pass", in which he used "the sky opens a trench to lock the throat and control the 200 states in the southwest" to describe the danger and military significance of Xiongguan.

Yulei Pass is under the rule of Gongchang Mansion, not far from Hanzhong Mansion in southern Shaanxi to the east, Minzhou Wei is also very close to Minzhou Wei in the west, and Long'an Mansion and Baoning Mansion in Sichuan are to the south. If the two governments and one guard of Shaanxi Province cooperate with the two provinces of Sichuan to attack from the north and south, Zhang Hu will have no way out even if he has three heads and six arms. However, Xue Zhifu no longer dared to step out of Longxi (Gongchang Mansion City) half a step, Minzhou Wei and Hanzhong Mansion sent troops, but they were all Chen Bingfu boundaries: Minzhou Wei's soldiers and horses were stationed at Lianghekou and Hanzhong Mansion in Yangping Pass, never half a step forward, and made it clear: "As long as you don't come over brother, I will never stand in the way". The most terrible thing - the Sichuan Third Division, which is close at hand, did not get any warning! Well, several of the guards originally sent messengers, but some injured their feet, some got lost, and one team capsized in the Qiang water...... By the time the Third Division of Sichuan received the "precautionary" warning from the neighboring provinces, Zhang Hu had grown to a team of more than 20,000 people who had already captured Guangyuan and taken Jianzhou (now Jiange. The Jianmen Pass of the Ming Dynasty is also known as the Sword Pavilion, north of Jianzhou)!

The rich land of abundance has opened up in the hinterland!

* After all, he had the great merit of capturing the first rebel, and Qiu Yue was still named Xianningbo by the imperial court while being scolded bloody. In general, counterinsurgency is a very good excuse to go on a rampage. However, Qiu Yue did not do that, and the people of Ningxia felt his virtue of "not disturbing the soldiers" and built a shrine for General Qiu.

[Welcome to forward.] 】