After capturing the high-ranking generals of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the Qing Dynasty would always brutally torture and execute them. Shi Dakai, Chen Yucheng, Li Xiucheng, Hong Renjie, Lai Wenguang, Lin Fengxiang, Li Kaifang, and even the young heavenly king Hong Tianguifu were all executed by Ling Chi.
This is the so-called "system" of the Manchu Qing Dynasty. According to the Great Qing Law, those who rebel and revolt must not only be executed, but also have to be cut off all over the door.
Compared with the Qing Dynasty, how did the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom execute captured Qing officials and generals?
It should be said that the captured Qing officials and generals ended up much better.
Since the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom ultimately failed, they captured fewer senior Qing officials and generals. However, there were still some captured senior Manchu officials and generals.
So, what means did the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom use to execute these Qing officials? Judging from the current records, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom has never deliberately executed high-ranking prisoners of war by torture like the Qing court, and there is no case of solemnly executing Qing court prisoners.
Let's look at a few examples.
Inspector Li Mengqun of Anhui.
Li Mengqun was a nineteen-year-old middle-aged soldier, and at the age of twenty, he was a county magistrate, and he was also considered a young and promising young man. After the Taiping Rebellion broke out, he soon joined the Xiang Army and became a member of the Xiang Army. Li Mengqun fought fiercely with the Taiping Army for many years and caused great losses to the Taiping Army. In 1859, his location in Lu'an, Anhui, was attacked by Chen Yucheng, and he himself was captured by the Taiping Army.
After Li Mengqun was captured, Chen Yucheng treated him quite favorably and repeatedly advised him to surrender, but Li Mengqun refused to live or die. In the end, Chen Yucheng finally executed him, and the way to execute him was to behead him, which was witnessed by Li Mengqun's staff at the scene and left a written record.
According to records, Before his death, Li Mengqun, who was only thirty-one years old, also smoked opium smoke and wrote a desperate poem, which was beheaded and executed. After the beheading, the Taiping Army took the initiative to sew his head on the corpse, buried it in a coffin, and ordered his entourage to be transported back to the Qing army barracks.
Zhao Jingxian, the envoy of Zhejiang Province.
Zhao Jingxian is a Zeng Guofan-style figure. He is a native of Huzhou, Zhejiang. In 1860, the Taiping Army broke through the Jiangnan camp and immediately swept through Jiangnan. Important cities such as Suzhou and Hangzhou fell into the hands of the Taiping Army. Zhao Jingxian organized regimental training in his hometown of Huzhou, and he withstood the attack of the Taiping Army, and the isolated city persisted for two years, causing great trouble to the Taiping Army. As a result, the Qing court granted him the title of envoy.
At the beginning of 1862, the weather in Jiangsu and Zhejiang was severe, the snow was flying, and Taihu Lake was actually frozen. The Taiping Army took the opportunity to pass through the ice of Taihu Lake and surrounded Huzhou City. After several months of fierce fighting, Zhao Jingxian saw that the people of the city were going to starve to death, so he decided to surrender. He himself put on his official clothes and went to see Tan Shaoguang, the king of Mu, only to die quickly.
Tan Shaoguang sent Zhao Jingxian to Suzhou. Li Xiucheng personally received him and advised him to surrender. But Zhao Jingxian refused. Li Xiucheng wanted to impress him with favorable conditions and imprisoned him for half a year, giving him preferential treatment every day. However, Zhao Jingxian was resolute not to surrender, and he also planned to find an opportunity to assassinate Li Xiucheng.
Later, Zhao Jingxian really couldn't find the opportunity to get close to Li Xiucheng, so he wanted to assassinate Tan Shaoguang instead. Once, Tan Shaoguang met with him, and he suddenly went to grab the foreign gun of Tan Shaoguang's guards. Tan Shaoguang was finally enraged and ordered someone to shoot Zhao Jingxian on the spot.
Fujian envoy Zhang Yunlan
Zhang Yunlan is a native of Xiangxiang, Hunan, a fellow of Zeng Guofan, and he is also an old man of the Xiang Army. He followed Zeng Guofan in the southern expedition to the north very early, and although his achievements were not as brilliant as those of Zeng Guoquan and Bao Chao, he also had a lot of merit. If you calculate according to the "level", he is the same height as Zeng Guoquan and Bao Chao.
By 1864, Tianjing had fallen, but there were still many remnants of the Taiping Army in Zhejiang and Fujian who continued to fight against the Qing army.
In October, the unfortunate Zhang Yunlan was ordered to Fujian to participate in the battle to suppress Wang Haiyang, the King of Kang of the Taiping Army, and because he was too light on the enemy, he took only 500 people and rushed to Wuping, Fujian. As a result, Wang Haiyang was ambushed, the entire army was destroyed, and he himself was captured by the Taiping Army. Historical records record that after Zhang Yunlan was captured, he scolded the Taiping Army, and the Taiping Army dismembered him and died.
It can be seen from this that Zhang Yunlan can be regarded as the most tragic death among the high-ranking civil and military officials of the Qing Dynasty. However, it cannot be said that the Taiping Army deliberately tortured him to death. At that time, the situation on the battlefield changed rapidly, and although Zhang Yunlan was captured, the Qing army's large contingent of men and horses quickly arrived at the battlefield, and the Taiping Army was forced to retreat quickly. Therefore, the Taiping Army could not solemnly execute Zhang Yunlan. At the same time, because Nanjing had fallen at this time, the taiping army generals hated the Xiang army to the bone, and the situation on the battlefield was urgent, so the possibility of Zhang Yunlan being hacked to death was the greatest.
Qing army spy Zhang Jigeng
Zhang Jigeng's status is not high, just an alternate Zhi County. After the Taiping Army captured Nanjing, he became a spy for the Qing army and provided intelligence for the Qing army.
Later, Zhang Jigeng was captured by the Taiping Army. Before his death, he indiscriminately bitten and framed many Taiping Army generals as internal responders of the Qing army, and yang Xiuqing, the eastern king, caught his plan, resulting in more than thirty people being implicated and losing their lives.
When Yang Xiuqing realized that he had been deceived, he could not help but be furious and ordered Zhang Jigeng's execution. According to historical records, Zhang Jigeng was sentenced to "car cracking". The car split is the corpse of five horses, and there was torture in the Spring and Autumn Period. However, compared with Ling Chi's torture, prisoners died relatively quickly.
Zhang Jigeng killed so many Taiping Army generals, and then caused Yang Xiuqing, the Eastern King, to be ugly in public, and only then did he get a car crack. It can be seen that the Taiping Army was really much more moderate than the Qing Dynasty.
There are also some records of captured Qing officials being executed, such as Zou Minghe, the former governor of Guangxi. When he was an inspector in Guangxi, he was just in time for the Taiping Army uprising, so he did not fight with the Taiping Army, and of course, there were not a few Taiping Troops killed. Zou Minghe is a native of Wuxi, Jiangsu Province, and returned to his hometown after leaving office. However, the Taiping Army came to Jiangsu, and Zou Minghe received the Holy Order to go to Nanjing to assist in the defense of the Taiping Army. As a result, when the city of Nanjing was destroyed, Zou Minghe was captured by the Taiping Army, and according to records, he was also scolded, and as a result, he was dismembered by the Taiping Army. Obviously, Zou Minghe was also hacked to death by the Taiping Army on the gas head.
From the above examples, we can see that the Taiping Army's methods in executing high-ranking enemy civil and military officials were far less brutal than those of the Qing Dynasty. The Taiping Army had actually been trying to win the surrender of captured Qing officials, but there were very few who surrendered. Despite this, the Taiping Army also treated those high-ranking prisoners of war with relatively lenient measures, which was in stark contrast to the vicious methods of the Manchu Qing Dynasty.
In addition, there is another phenomenon that deserves our attention. In the taiping heavenly kingdom and later the battle between the twist army and the Qing army, the qing dynasty governors, inspectors, generals, and admirals, who were high-ranking civil and military officials, died in battle, but according to historical records, very few were captured by the Taiping army. According to the records, these high-ranking officials who died in battle either committed suicide when they saw that the general situation was gone, or they preferred to die unyieldingly and fought hard. In terms of historical data, there were many people who surrendered and were captured by the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. If you only look at these historical materials, it is easy to conclude that most of the qing dynasty's civilian and military generals were loyal and indomitable, while the generals of the Taiping Army were generally greedy and afraid of death.
However, this is clearly not the case. There are actually many ghosts of death among Qing Dynasty officials, and this is well documented. Logically, they should not have so many heroes and tough men who are not afraid of death, otherwise, why is the war to the outside world so ugly?
Therefore, the actual situation should be like this: because there are very few historical materials left by the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the historical materials we can see are basically recorded by the Qing Dynasty. Of course, the Qing Dynasty inevitably wanted to beautify its own high-ranking officials, so many officials who died in the war were smeared with a halo, and one by one they died "heroically", but this was not the case.
There must have been many Qing officials who were captured by the Taiping Army and then executed. However, in the relevant documents of the Qing Dynasty, they were written as either suicide or death in battle, so that the death was more beautiful and conducive to the grace given by the Qing Emperor.
Such is the case with the famous Mongol county king Monk Greenqin, who was killed in battle according to the canonical history, but there are also some private records that say that he was actually captured and executed by the Twister army. Even if the monk Greenqin himself really died in battle, in the battle of Gaolouzhai that killed him, according to the records of the Qing Dynasty, many of the civil and military officials under the monk Greenqin were all "killed in battle", which is unbelievable. The fact that the Twister Army was not able to capture any of the high-ranking officials of the Qing Dynasty was obviously contrary to common sense.
Therefore, there should be many high-ranking Qing officials who were actually captured by the Taiping Army and the Twist army, but it should also be an obvious fact that the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom did not have the brutality of the Qing court when executing these officials. If the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom had also used all kinds of cruel means to kill people, then the Qing court would certainly not have no relevant records, and they would not have spared these black materials.