When it comes to China's modern history, I believe that everyone will not feel strange. For our ancient country, this is an extremely humiliating history, which can be described as a fierce sea, internal and external troubles. Externally, we were invaded and divided by the great powers, and even the Eight-Power Alliance hit our capital; internally, the Qing government squeezed the people, suppressed the resistance, and became an accomplice of the great powers in invading China, which made the people hate it to the bone.
The decline of the late Qing Dynasty
Everything is in flux, and a dynasty is no exception. As the last feudal dynasty in Chinese history, the Qing Dynasty also had a strong history, successively pacifying and stabilizing the vast border areas, so that China's territory reached its peak after the Yuan Dynasty.
However, such a prosperous world eventually ended with the closure of the country and the slow backwardness in the industrial age, and the Qing Dynasty in the middle and late period has gradually become an "empty shell" of external strength and middle power. Although the aggression of the great powers was the direct cause of the decline of the Qing Dynasty, the most fundamental reason was the backwardness of the productive forces and the decay of the Qing Dynasty itself.
Zeng Guofan's "salary"
Perhaps just by saying this, everyone still has no specific concept of corruption in the late Qing Dynasty, and we will start with the official Feng Lu in the late Qing Dynasty. From the beginning of the establishment of a unified dynasty in China, the income of officials mainly came from the fenglu issued by the imperial court, which was generally divided into two types: coins and grain. With the gradual development of social productive forces, the official's salary has also changed from mainly grain to mainly coins.
At the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, silver gradually became one of the common currencies in society, so the Qing Dynasty officials' Feng Lu was mainly silver. Zeng Guofan was a heavy minister in the late Qing Dynasty, and one of the most prestigious figures in the imperial court at that time.
When Zeng Guofan had just become a Shu Jishi of the Hanlin Academy, every six months of Feng Lu was about 31 two 5 yuan of silver, 31 yuan of Lu rice and 5 buckets, according to one or two silver equal to about 175 yuan, Zeng Guofan's salary for half a year was 16585 yuan, that is, only more than two thousand yuan per month. Of course, after Zeng Guofan gradually emerged in the official arena and eventually became a member of the Yipin Dynasty, his Feng Lu also rose to a hundred times that of the past, and the annual Feng Lu could reach more than two million yuan. But even so, Zeng Guofan still lived a rather simple life, and even rarely ate meat.
In addition to the grain and money needed to support the family, there was also an extremely important expenditure in the late Qing officialdom, that is, "human affection and sophistication". In the official arena at that time, almost any kind of social networking had to be linked to money, and the Qing government even issued "raising incorruptible silver" for social networking in order to prevent officials from excessive corruption, but officials like Zeng Guofan still did not get much extra income from it, because the larger the officials did, the more "sophisticated" expenses were needed. Therefore, there is a saying that "three years of Qing prefects, 100,000 snowflakes of silver", these incomes need to be exploited by the people, which really makes insiders feel that the fall of the Qing Dynasty is a foregone conclusion, and it is strange that the country is not destroyed.
No matter how powerful a feudal dynasty was in a period of time, it could not change the fact that it was essentially behind the times. Therefore, the overthrow of feudal rule became the trend of the times, and our people also woke up in time, did not let the mistakes continue, and finally completed the revolution.