What do you think of when you think of Zhejiang people? In the brains of today's Chinese, the first thing that emerges is probably the image of Wenzhou businessmen. If you turn back the time back to the Republic of China, then it is the image of the Ningbo Gang struggling on the beach. It seems that all Zhejiang people have been labeled as "shrewd, competent, and able to do business", but there is no martial courage and good war. But it was such a group of people who proved with their own actions five hundred years ago that they could still be the pillars of a country.
The general environment of the Ming Dynasty
In previous articles we learned that whether a place can fight depends on its community. In particular, small communities that are more flexible and adapt to the local environment (such as tribes, villages, dock forts, etc.) are strong. Unfortunately, with Zhu Yuanzhang's policy of compiling households and uniting the people, the natural small communities in various parts of the Ming Dynasty that relied on clan blood ties shrank to varying degrees. This is reflected in the combat effectiveness that the combat effectiveness of the Han people in various regions has invariably deteriorated. Taking the Yanyun region as an example, during the Three Kingdoms period, Gongsun Zhan could rely on a place to resist Yuan Shao from within and resist Xianbei externally; during the Song-Jin War, the Yanyun Han people also had a pivotal position, and the Jurchens evaluated the Song Dynasty before going south to make the Jurchens jealous of two troops, one was the Western Army in Shaanxi, and the other was the Changsheng Army of Yanyun.
[Yue Fei was born as a daring warrior, and his growth also marked the erosion of the original system]
[Holding a bow and arrow on the city wall and shooting at the Hu people was the daily life of the Han people in the border areas during the Han and Tang Dynasties]
The establishment of the capital meant that it had to be transformed from a frontier to a "foot of the Son of Heaven", and the situation changed suddenly. The security of the capital was the responsibility of the Janissaries, and the general public did not dare to form a society to learn martial arts at the feet of Tianzi, after all, "chivalry violates the prohibition with force". As a collective, the village community can be a hero who defends the country and the country, or it may be a bandit who robs the family and robs the house during the agricultural leisure period. This is undoubtedly intolerable to the Sons of Heaven in the Center. Therefore, several dynasties with their capitals here devoted themselves to attacking the small communities in the Yanyun region and turning them into basic social units such as natural families. By the time Qi Jiguang ascended to the throne, Shiren's evaluation of the Hebei people was already "a wooden frontier" and had to mobilize troops from Zhejiang to defend the capital.
[Yanyun Haojie, who confronted Xianbei and Goguryeo head-on in the classical period, no longer existed in the Ming Dynasty]
The Zhejiang people as a supplement are the catchy Qi Jiajun that many fans have today.
A community of Zhejiang people
As an area far from the capital, Zhejiang's small communities are better preserved than in the north. However, in the two hundred years of the policy of weaving households and uniting the people, the original natural small community in the local area, like the central power concentration areas in the north, continued to scatter and desertification, especially in northern Zhejiang, and inevitably fell. Qi Jiguang divided the Zhejiang soldiers into five grades in the New Book of Ji Xiao, the best of which were soldiers from Chuzhou (present-day Lishui), again the well-known Yiwu miners, then the soldiers of the Wentai area, the worst of which was the Shaoxing soldiers, and the Hangjiahu Lake in northern Zhejiang was not qualified to serve as soldiers at all.
[Qi Jiguang is definitely a "map cannon" master]
Even people in these areas are not all available, because small communities only exist in the countryside, so Qi Jiguang ordered not to completely disperse the urban people. Out of the requirements of discipline, those who are too tough to see that the government is not afraid should not be, and those who are too clever and do not obey orders should not be desired.
These seemingly "territorial" orders are precisely the key to the fame of the Qi family army. With strong soldiers, they also need to be equipped with sophisticated weapons, qi Jiguang knows that similar "spiritual atomic bombs" are only used to fool children; the real battlefield is not to see whether you have the courage to hold explosives and die with the enemy, but the discipline of the army, the quality of the officers and the equipment of the troops. To this end, Qi Jiguang aimed at two places, hoping to make up for the backwardness of the Ming Dynasty's own equipment by importing weapons
To find firearms rely on the West
Qi Jiajun was born in the south, naturally not good at cavalry, which may have been an insurmountable problem in the past, but in the 16th century this problem has been well solved. At the same time, europeans came up with a very effective method of dealing with cavalry. To put it bluntly, it is to use the advantage of infantry firepower to offset the Ottoman cavalry superiority, in order to prevent the cavalry charge from directly scattering its own musket array, it is necessary to surround it with a long gun array.
[The Turks had the strongest cavalry legion in the world at the time, but they were taught by Europe in terms of firepower.
Coincidentally, the Ming Dynasty also liked to use similar tactics, but after the beginning of the Ming Dynasty, the Ming army's hand-to-hand combat ability became lower and lower, and it could only use the substitute of the spear array - the car camp. Unlike the spear array, the car battalion must be fixed to the ground before the battle, which means that it cannot move once the battle begins. Therefore, it cannot be compared with the spear array in mobility, and can only be said to be the product of helplessness in special circumstances.
Of course, the tribal cavalry in the Far East could not be compared with the Ottoman Empire, and even the Houjin had only 120,000 field troops before entering the pass. Naturally, the Ming army did not need such a good configuration as Europe, only needed to be equipped with similar firearms.
Before the introduction of European firearms, the Ming army's firearms were extremely bad. The northern frontiers mainly used fast guns (a type of musket) to defend against the Mongol cavalry. As a type of fire gun, the fast gun cannot be fired with a trigger, and can only be ignited by a fire fold. This leads to its inability to do a long time, a little bit of military common sense knows that the longer the barrel of the gun, the farther its range, the short barrel of the gun is only a quarter of the range of the arquebus gun. Worse still, the firing was placed under the armpits, which not only made maneuvering very inconvenient, but also made it impossible for soldiers to aim. Therefore, during the period of Zhu Yuanzhang, when the Ming army was still relatively strong, the firearms soldiers only occupied one-tenth of the troops.
[Compared with arquebusiers, the musket is to listen to a sound]
And these shortcomings, in the face of european imported arquebusiers, are solved. At this time, the arquebusier was almost the same as the rifle we see today, that is to say, it had basic elements such as "sight" and "trigger". In Qi Jiguang's school drill, the arquebus gun was "ten times faster than the fast gun and five times the bow and arrow", which was called a four-seat skill. Because the arquebusier was able to accurately shoot down birds in the air, it was called "bird reaming" by the Ming people.
However, it is also not the privilege of today's people not to admit defeat. When Qi Jiguang rushed to take up the bird's rifle and went to the north to take up his post, he was resisted by the Northern Army, even if the shooting performance in the school field was "ten times that of the fast gun and five times that of the bow and arrow", the Northern Army "finally refused to obey". Their resistance also had a great negative impact on the Ming army. In order to prevent indiscriminate shooting, Qi Jiguang stipulated that the che battalion troops must use salvo tactics, the reason for which was to prevent the Ming army from being unable to restrain the fear in their hearts, shooting when the enemy was still hundreds of meters away, and could only choose an effective distance at which all firearms could kill and injure the enemy for a wave of blows. To choose a "one-wave" salvo, it is necessary to choose an appropriate firing range. Qi Jiguang stipulated that the firing range of the Ming army was fifty steps. However, the range of the bird's rifle is four times that of this, and it is obvious that the radius of fire is not planned according to the range of the bird's rifle. Therefore, there is no doubt that the factor of the fast gun causes the radius of fire to be so short. Unfortunately, according to the barrel theory, it is your shortest plank that determines your endurance, so the existence of the fast gun directly led to the Ming army vehicle battalion facing the impact, that is, fifty steps away from a salvo and then you can short-term contact. This also makes Qi Jiguang's record in the north very ugly, such as the battle of Xifengkou, the leader of the Raw Duoyan Clan, who was bald, in fact, only two were beheaded.
[How to aim in such a posture, and how accurate is it to not aim?] 】
In addition to the arquebusier, Qi Jiguang also equipped his car camp with Flang machine guns. This kind of artillery belonged to the Guards cannon in Europe, and its efficacy could not match that of real field guns (that is, the Hongyi cannons in the Ming population), but it was also properly enough for the Ming army, which had no enemy at this time. Qi Jiguang praised the falconet, claiming that "this instrument is the most advantageous and extremely fast." Each Flang machine can carry nine bullets, and when facing the surging enemy army, as long as it can quickly replace the sub-guns, it can achieve a dense barrage. This can give major damage to the opponent who does not have enough artillery cover on the other side, and at this time, the Ming army's opponent in the north is still mainly cold weapons, which can be seen that Qi Jiguang's evaluation of "this weapon is the most advantageous and the speed is incomparable" is just right.
epilogue
The Zhejiang people of the Ming Dynasty were undoubtedly very unfortunate, living in an era when China's community was shrinking. However, they were also lucky, compared to Yanyun, which had been completely abolished, the Zhejiang army retained more martial virtues, and it was relatively primitive and fertile. The convenience of the Great Navigation Age brought advanced firearms from Europe to the Ming Army, making it easy for the Ming Army to destroy the Mongols whose organization collapsed. However, when a powerful opponent of the community reappeared in the north, the Ming army, whose own organization had almost disintegrated, was at the end of its life.