Dong Zhuo, the famous villain in the historical Chapter Hui novel "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", is a lustful and brutal and arbitrary demon who seizes power, and the image of being confused by the mink cicada and monopolizing the government in the novel is even more deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, so he has been crowned by posterity as a notorious name of lust and inhumanity.
Most of our understanding of Dong Zhuo comes from the story after he seized power - supporting the army, deposing the emperor to dominate the dynasty, and finally dying under the sword; however, few people know that when he was young, Dong Zhuo was heroic and righteous, wise and courageous, and was respected by many people, which was far from his later image. How did Dong Zhuo, who was once a hero and a good man, emerge from the crowd and even become a big devil in the last years of the Eastern Han Dynasty? This article will give you a glimpse of Dong Zhuo's rise.
Dong Zhuo, also spelled Zhongying, was born in Lintao, Longxi, Liangzhou (present-day Min County, Gansu), where the shangwu customs were prevalent, and although the Dong family was a family of officials and eunuchs, they were not famous and prestigious, and most of them still had to rely on themselves if he wanted to get out of the first day. Dong Zhuo has been physically strong since childhood, proficient in horseback riding archery, and can also open bows left and right, while the young man not only understands martial arts, but also has first-class public relations and communication methods, and even the fierce Western Qiang people have become his good friends.
How did Dong Zhuo's good friendship with the Qianghu people begin? Dong Zhuo liked to travel to the western regions when he was young, and he traveled in the Qiang tribe for a long time and made many Hu friends. According to the "Chronicle of the Three Kingdoms and the Book of Wei", once, the leader of the Qiang tribe came as a guest, Dong Zhuo was very generous to kill his own cultivating cattle to entertain the other party, in ancient times, cultivating cattle was a very important asset for farmers, but also a tool of production, so the "killing of cultivating cattle" made the Qiang leader very moved, thinking in his heart: "Dong Zhuo is worthy of my good buddy", and turned around and offered a thousand heads of livestock as a gift. Since then, Dong Zhuo's reputation for serving righteousness and being bold and heroic has gradually spread, and many Qiang tribes have also admired him and exchanged courtesies with each other.
Subsequently, Dong Zhuo successively worked under The Taishou of Longxi and the Assassins of Liangzhou, responsible for patrolling the Xiaxia and leading the troops to pursue the Hu people who did not coexist peacefully with the Han Dynasty. Dong Zhuo's military ability and excellent achievements were soon seen, he was recruited by the imperial court as the emperor's guard, and then promoted to the general of the Xiongnu General Zhang Zhang, Dong Zhuo was brave and brave during the crusade against the Hu people, and he not only killed many enemies on the battlefield, but also killed the leaders of the Qiang tribe. As a "public relations master", Dong Zhuo did not have the shelf of a high official, and after making a miraculous achievement, he was rewarded by the imperial court, and immediately distributed the reward to his colleagues who lived and died together on the battlefield, and ate meat and drank wine with everyone, as if he became the ideal leader in the hearts of the brothers.
Later, although Dong Zhuo's official road was not very smooth, and even suffered defeats in the crusade against the Yellow Turban Thief, the imperial court still praised his military and public relations ability to resist foreign enemies. Once with the army to fight the Qiang, the Han army was besieged by tens of thousands of Qiang troops, just when the crisis of survival, Dong Zhuo thought of a clever way to escape, he first asked his men to go to the river to disguise themselves as ordinary people fishing, but secretly blocked the upper flow of the river, taking advantage of the water full of tens of miles, immediately broke the embankment so that the Qiang army was caught off guard and could not continue to pursue, at that time Dong Zhuo's army also became one of the few troops who returned to the camp.
As Dong Zhuo gradually took control of the Western Liang Army, he became one of the world's top military forces, and the disputes in the imperial court allowed him to go to a higher level. At the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, when the struggle between foreign relatives and eunuchs was at its worst, He Jin, a great general who was a foreign relative, summoned Dong Zhuo to Beijing in order to kill the eunuchs, but before Dong Zhuo could lead the army, He Jin was murdered by the eunuchs because of his deeds. The situation in the capital was suddenly chaotic and leaderless, and Dong Zhuo, who arrived late, seized the opportunity to absorb a lot of the capital army.
Dong Zhuo, who once practiced heroism and righteousness, wisdom and courage, should have been a hero to stabilize the country, but after leading the army into Beijing, he stepped into the power game step by step. Supporting the self-esteem of the army, he first instigated He Jin's old department to kill his superiors, and then induced Lü Bu, the god of war, to kill his lord Ding Yuan, and then he "threatened the son of heaven to establish a will" to depose the Han Shao Emperor Liu Xie and support the Han Emperor Liu Xie, and no one in the capital could shake Dong Zhuo's position.
Dong Zhuo has since turned his power to the world and controlled the imperial court, and some people think that the matter of "abolishing the Young Emperor and establishing the Emperor Xian" is because Liu Xie, the Emperor of Han Xian, is young and better controlled by him, but there is also a saying that Dong Zhuoli's clever Liu Xie became the new emperor in order to support the Xianwang and Kuangfu Han Dynasty, not to seek power and usurp the throne. However, no matter what the reason, in the eyes of the central and local important ministers, the abolition of the emperor was a big taboo, so Dong Zhuo became a rebellious minister in the eyes of people, and many princes such as Yuan Shao, Sun Jian, Cao Cao and others thought that his name was not justified, and even launched the "War against Dong Zhuo".
When there was a wave of anti-Dong rebellion in various places, Lü Bu, who was not accustomed to Dong Zhuo's monopoly on the government, joined forces with Wang Yun to design a plan to kill him. After Dong Zhuo's death, the capital was in chaos, the emperor was displaced, and the local forces gradually broke away from central control, which also officially opened the chaotic era of the Three Kingdoms era.
Throughout Dong Zhuo's life, from the good reputation of acting heroic and righteous, to the reputation of his later years, most people used words such as "power pouring into the opposition", "arbitrariness", "fierce and cruel" and other words to describe him, and even Chen Shou, the author of "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", gave him a full negative evaluation: "Dong Zhuo is a wolf and a thief, tyrannical and unkind, and has come since the book deed, and there is no such thing." "However, some people in later generations rehabilitated him, believing that Dong Zhuo was because he had the great dream of establishing a stable state, but his ideals were too naïve and too arbitrary, and he would be regarded as a great traitor who would cause trouble to the imperial court...
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