Nowadays, qing palace dramas on TV are quite popular, and almost all of them show the taiping prosperity of junxian chenming, political communication and people. But in fact, in the 268 years that the Qing Dynasty ruled China, there were four or five disasters almost every year, especially after the Qing Dynasty entered the last year, and various disasters and famines were more frequent.
At the end of the Qing Dynasty, the Yellow River breach, the Qinyu drought, the southeast drought, the Yongding River breach, the Ding Pengqi famine, and the Gansu earthquake, it can be said that every time it was a tragic death, and the victims were everywhere. It only took the occurrence of Shanxi and Henan from 1877 to 1878 as the center, and affected Zhili and Shaanxi. Gansu, Shandong, Jiangsu, Anhui. The "Ding Pengqi Famine" in Xichuan and other provinces, for example, has been regarded by the West as the first major disaster in ancient and modern China.
Shanxi Province alone is a province of thousands of miles, with more than five million starving people, of whom as many as 50% or 60% are starving, and many places and even entire villages are dead. Henan and Hebei also have millions of hungry people each, and there are hungry people who die on the side of the road everywhere.
In the last years of the Qing Dynasty, disasters and famines were frequent, and the main reason why the people were not happy was political corruption and years of war, and the Qing Dynasty was unable to organize an effective ability to resist disasters. In the face of natural disasters falling from the sky, if the people do not want to sit still, they can only go into exile, and even in some places, the whole village has gone out to escape en masse, looking for a way out of the place where they think that there may be food to survive.
When the people could no longer survive and were extremely poor, the Qing Dynasty government and local gentry were still frantically amassing wealth and ignoring the lives and deaths of the people, which eventually led to the disaster victims having to fight for survival, and the people revolted.
Although the Qing government had a system of grain reserves, due to political corruption at the end of the Qing Dynasty, the phenomenon of barn deficit was serious. After receiving grain and silver, the officials in charge did not buy grain, but only cared about filling their own pockets, selling, misappropriating, and encroaching on it, making profits from it, facing the inspection of forged grain books, and passing through the customs in a confused manner. By the end of the Qing Dynasty, grain reserves were essentially extinct.
There are even some officials who, in order to increase their ranks and become knights, face the famine and conceal the lack of reporting or the small posters of the catastrophe, so that many of the affected people are called victims of their red tops. I couldn't help but make the officials at that time also sigh: "Apologizing for abundance is a sick national plan; apologizing for profit is harmful to the people's livelihood, and ultimately harming the national plan." ”
Because of the corruption of the Qing Dynasty, the devastation of the famine was even more severe, and a large number of the people who were affected by the disaster not only did not receive any assistance, but also suffered from the blank eyes of the officials, but at this time they also had to be blackmailed by the officials, and their lives were even more miserable.
In the end, the people who were desperate and struggling on the brink of life and death had to take the risk, and with their instinct to survive, they rebelled against and sought the hope of their own life, and finally buried the Qing Dynasty.