We have said in previous texts that the historical event of rushing to the camp existed during the Ming Dynasty, but in the late Qing Dynasty, the Yangliuqing people of Tianjin called it out, so that it still has an echo in the depths of history.
What was the earliest camp like? Let's start with one person.
This person's name, Wang Xiangqing, a native of Taigu County, Shanxi, because of his tall stature and superior arm strength, he was called "Wang Er Scar", and was the founder of the famous Mongolian merchant "Dashengkui" in the Jin merchants of the Qing Dynasty. The "big camp" he first discovered was the military camp, the military camp of the Qing Dynasty.
The historical background is as follows: Wang Xiangqing was first stationed as a brother-in-law in the Qing army around The Tiger's Mouth, serving miscellaneous services, and may not have had the formal establishment of the army. He was very clever, and when he saw that the soldiers were in great need of some daily necessities, he began to use the small amount of silver in his hand to buy some daily necessities and sell them to the Qing army. In the process, he must have made some, but not a lot. History gave him this opportunity: in the thirty-fifth year of the Qing Kangxi Dynasty (1696), the Kangxi Emperor wanted to drive the western conquest of Gardan, and the killing of tigers in Youyu County, Shanxi was the only way for the army to lead from the interior to the Mongolian steppe, and the number of Qing troops stationed here increased involuntarily. He felt that his business opportunity was coming, so he left military service and realized his dream of getting rich.
At first, the situation was very bad, Wang Xiangqing's line was very simple, one flat burden, one end bundle of simple luggage and food, the other head tied up with goods to be sold to the soldiers, wherever the army went, he followed, in exchange for the money is only enough for his own livelihood. Later, the situation changed, Kaldan was conquered, the Qing army went out to control the grassland, and he thought of doing business with people. This has the historical "Taoyuan Three Knots" about him - he found two people with the surname Shi and Zhang, and the three of them became brothers and started a joint business.
Today's historical data say that Wang, Zhang, and Shi were not afraid of risks and hardships, and finally stepped out of an international trade route with Shanxi and Hebei as the hub, the Great Wall of North Vietnam to Russian Siberia, the east to Fusang, and the south to Southeast Asia. In fact, it is not entirely like this, in front of Wang, Zhang, and Shi are the qing dynasty's troops, these three people initially have some of the role of "cargo", and later, with the Taiping of the grassland, they also have the experience of changing from merchants to sitting merchants, and founded the "Great Shengkui" that has dominated the Mongolian steppe for more than 200 years, and only then did they have their business routes with Shanxi and Hebei as the hub.
In order to commemorate and inherit the entrepreneurial spirit of Wang, Zhang and Shi, people today enshrined four heirlooms in the ancestral hall of "Dashengkui" and in front of the God of Wealth Seat: a flat burden, two cargo boxes, a stone, and a bowl of porridge. The flat burden is the founder to shoulder the trade started; the cargo box is the founder used a large wooden box containing belongings; the stone is used as a scale to weigh silver when starting a business; porridge is the most difficult period of entrepreneurship in that year, on the night of the Chinese New Year's Eve of the year, Wang, Zhang, and Shi, because of extreme poverty, have no money to eat Chinese New Year's Eve rice, so they have to cook a pot of millet porridge to fill their hunger to pass the New Year's Pass. These objects all powerfully illustrate the experience of Wang, Zhang, and Shi in the first place to follow the army or "catch the camp".
The same is true of the Tianjin people's "big camp", which initially followed the army of Xijing, Shaanxi and Gansu, and experienced a rough route: that is, from Shaanxi to Pingliang and Qingyang in Gansu, and then to Wuzhongjinjibao in Ningxia, to Hezhou in Gansu and Xining in Qinghai, and then all the way west to Suzhou (Jiuquan) in Gansu. On this line, the Tianjin people, mainly Yang Liuqing, saw where the army went, and they followed where they went, basically like Wang Xiangqing's, picking two ends of a flat shoulder, allowing themselves to survive at the same time, and also selling the goods they were carrying to the soldiers of the Qing army, more or less earning some silver.
Like Wang Xiangqing, among the Tianjin people who "drove the big camp" there was also a representative who had made a fortune -- An Wenzhong. An Wenzhong was first a shipwright recruited by Zuo Zongtang's army, because the Qing army was short of all kinds of daily necessities everywhere he went, which made him gradually realize that if he followed the troops to do business, he would definitely make a lot of money. So he bought a pair of baskets, bought small daily necessities, and started a business with the troops.
An Wenzhong's experience was, of course, as arduous as Wang Xiangqing's—at that time, the war was fierce, the business was very risky, and hunger and cold and illness were commonplace. Sometimes walking through twenty villages without seeing a single person. It is said that once, An Wenzhong and two companions rushed to the road with goods, and there were corpses all over the way. At night, everyone really couldn't walk, so they had to find a place to rest in the cold wind. Extremely thirsty, they saw a bright place not far away, thought it was water, and they all went over and drank a few sips. At first, none of them found anything wrong with this "water", but when they woke up, when the sky was dark, they found that the "water" they had drunk earlier was actually a puddle of blood!
Like Wang Xiangqing's brother in the "Taoyuan Three Knots of Righteousness", seeing that the environment was very difficult, Zhang and Shi were discouraged, so they returned to their hometown to make another living, and An Wenzhong earned some silver, so he went home and did other business. However, their experience invisibly formed the power of example in their hometown, that is, Zhang and Shi made the people of their hometown feel that they could make money by walking to the west entrance, and they also joined the team of going to the west mouth; after An Wenzhong returned to his hometown of Yang Liuqing, he also made Yang Liuqing feel that catching up with the big camp could make money, so they joined the team of catching up with the big camp.
Here, we take a detour to say one thing, which is also the difference between rushing to the camp and taking the west entrance. People who are familiar with history know that the "mouth" of the west entrance in that year refers to the pass of the Great Wall. The West Exit is relative to the East Exit. The East Exit is a pass east of Zhangjiakou in Hebei Province. The West Exit is a pass represented by the Tiger Killing Pass. Out of the East Exit and The West Exit, both are in the Inner Mongolia region, but one is in the eastern part of Inner Mongolia and the other is in the western part of Inner Mongolia.
In China's Ming Dynasty, because of military needs, a Ming Great Wall was built. The specific route is: from Ningxia Huamachi, through the three sides of northern Shaanxi, Yulin, Fugu, to the northwest of Jin, close to the Yellow River, the bend, the pass, through the Yanbei region, connecting With Zhangjiakou in Hebei, and finally up the Yanshan Mountains. Therefore, there are many passes in and around the Great Wall west of Zhangjiakou, and people in the mouth need to pass through these passes to get outside the mouth.
Different from the people who drove the camp, the groups that took the West Exit were mainly concentrated at the junction of Shanxi, Shaanxi and Inner Mongolia, where there were land species, that is, the "isolation belt" we mentioned before, and the main group of people who took the West Exit were rushing to the land outside the Sai to plant, not just to do business, which led to its huge number. The campers had no land outside Cyprus for them to plant, and were limited to doing business, so the population was limited.
Having land to plant can have more hope of survival, and the hope of planting without land will of course be reduced. Therefore, to some extent, it is more difficult to drive the camp than to go to the west entrance, and the risk is very large. This kind of high-risk pure business work made the camp without women and became a uniform man, and the initial lack of women in the West Exit group was because the princes in the Mongolian region were afraid of going to the West Mouth group to drag their families with their mouths, and it was not easy to settle down in the Mongolian area and become Mongols. Later, with the large-scale increase in the number of people who went to the west entrance, this rule was broken, and there were always no women in the group that drove the camp, and the women were weak and could not bear the burden of life.
Today, people study the route to catch up with the big camp, but in fact, at first, it was a military erratic line, which was really fixed, accompanied by the rest of Zuo Zongtang's army in Suzhou and the preparation for the recovery of Xinjiang. The historical chronology is as follows: In November 1873, Ma Wenlu, the leader of the Suzhou Huimin Army, was forced to surrender, and with the revival of Suzhou, the Shaanxi-Gansu hui came to an end, but the Qing army battalion was still stationed there, preparing for the recovery of Xinjiang, until April 1876, When Zuo Zongtang raised the flag in Suzhou and officially sent troops. The more than two years in between have also allowed people to rush to the camp to take a fixed route to catch the camp.
This road starts from Tianjin, passes through the east entrance of the Great Wall, then enters the Hetao area, then enters the Alxa area from the Hetao area, and then reaches the Jiuquan area. This is also a route of the Silk Road, during the Song Dynasty, people in the Central Plains and the south went to Xinjiang, generally chose this route. Because of the harsh natural environment in the Alxa area, there is a famous Silk Road - Camel Road - a road formed by camel walking, and like other Silk Road branches, it connects the frontiers of the motherland and the interior, and is also a historical road that relies on camel material trade and military supply. The arrival of the camp group has once again brought this ancient road to life, connecting the large and small towns and commercial port docks along the way, from east to west, expanding the footprints of the campers, and has also become a historical memory left by them to future generations.
An Wenzhong, who had earned money to go home as mentioned above, joined the group of people who rushed to the camp at this time--originally, he had already found another way to make a living, but because he was cooperating with others to sell grain, he encountered the wind and waves ship overturning and damaged the goods at sea, and lost the silver he had earned earlier. In desperation, he had to carry the small basket to Jiuquan again and follow Zuo Zongtang's army into Xinjiang. Behind him, Yang Liuqing officially opened the prelude to the camp. They bought tea, tobacco, peppers, candy, needle and thread, hand towels, cloth socks, etc. with the silver in their hands and went out of the Yumen Pass with the troops, and were registered by the Qing army, and became merchants accompanying the army in the regulations such as "no military information after entering Xinjiang, no opium trafficking, no gambling nest prostitutes", and so on.
Later, the route of the camp was the same as that of Zuo Zongtang's army to retake Xinjiang, and they first entered Hami, the gateway to Xinjiang, and then from north to south, throughout the towns of Xinjiang. Next, some of them returned to their hometowns, and the other part of them changed from merchants to merchants in the local area, making indelible contributions to the development of Xinjiang's commerce and economy.
An Wenzhong's situation is probably like this: he first built a simple house with several fellow villagers in Dihua (Urumqi), which is sparsely populated, and set up stalls on the southeast side of the big cross road in the city. In 1883, after the Qing court recovered Ili from the Tsarist Russia, he entered Suiding in Ili with General Jin Shun from Dihua, set up a store department in the city, hung up the sign of "Wenfeng Taijing Goods Store", and soon entered Huiyuan (now Part of Huocheng County), Ningyuan (present-day Yining), and set up a main store in Ningyuan.
During this period, he returned to his hometown about once, not only got married in Tianjin, but also bought many commodities with two thousand taels of silver and shipped them to Xinjiang for sale. For a time, people rushed to tell each other that Xinjiang was a good place to earn money, even a lot of money, and more and more people joined the ranks of catching up with the camp.
Now, people don't know how many people went to Xinjiang in those days, but the people who rushed to the camp in Tianjin have left such a sentence in the history of Xinjiang - three thousand goods are full of Tianshan Mountain. When we wrote this history some time ago, there are still many old Tianjin people in Urumqi, but these people only speak Tianjin dialect when they are at home, because it is somewhat inconvenient to speak Tianjin dialect in the outside world. These people may not be the descendants of the big camp, because after the founding of New China, there are also many Tianjin people who have formed a system to aid Xinjiang, such as the second construction of the autonomous region, the Xinjiang Plastic Products Factory, etc., but they are all witnesses of Tianjin people in Xinjiang, so that Tianjin and Urumqi, two Chinese cities that are more than 2,000 kilometers apart, have a closer "blood kinship".
What we did not expect is that the An Wenzhong family still has descendants in Urumqi - his name is An Qihu, and he has also been interviewed by reporters to tell the story of the Tianjin people driving the camp. A few years ago, after CCTV broadcast the documentary "Catching the Big Camp", it caused a lot of sensations, and many people who rushed to the big camp not only took the initiative to contact the media and tell people the story of that year, but also reporters went deep into Xinjiang to interview, and found a cemetery of the people who rushed the big camp in Hami. History cannot forget, and who can say that xinjiang's prosperity and stability today have not had the contributions made by people who rushed to the camp in Tianjin?
The pictures in this article are from the network, thanks to the original author!