At the end of the Qing Dynasty, the government was corrupt and natural disasters continued. The people's lives are in dire straits, and the people are not happy. And the life of a group of royal aristocrats led by charity is extremely luxurious, and the money is like dirt. In this way, the people who could not eat could only take up arms and choose to revolt and resist. Therefore, there were many uprisings in the late Qing Dynasty, the most representative of which was the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement launched by Hong Xiuquan in Jintian, Guangxi on January 11, 1895, in the name of missionary work. Since then, one of the largest peasant uprisings in Chinese history has begun.
Since they were all peasants and had extremely limited weapons in their hands, the main weapons of the Taiping Army were swords and spears and rural fire bolts. Moreover, the iron refrigeration weapons of the Taiping Army mainly include knives, spears, three-finger forks, four-finger forks, etc., because of the serious lack of iron weapons, the Taiping Army also uses a large number of bamboo spears, called "bamboo military uniforms", because it originated from Guangxi, so the Taiping Army is very good at using rattan cards, especially good at mixing rattan cards with guns. However, after that, with the growing momentum of the rebel army and the increasing number of people, the Qing army has also been routing under this power. As a result, the Taiping Army captured a large number of firearms. Because the Taiping Army was basically Han Chinese, unlike the Manchurian nobility, it had a very strong pragmatism, not limited to the concept of foreigners and feudal customs. As long as you can win the battle, you can use it like a foreign gun.
After that, the Pacific Ocean successively occupied Hubei, Anhui, Jiangsu and other places, and captured a large number of firearms, and also managed to make some homemade firearms, and the combat effectiveness was greatly improved. With the Taiping Army establishing the capital at Tianjing, the Western powers seemed to see business opportunities. In order to seek more benefits in China, they secretly sold a large number of advanced weapons to Hong Xiuquan in the name of helping Hong Xiuquan. Moreover, the Taiping Army also bought weapons from corrupt and courageous Qing officials.
At that time, every time the Taiping Army captured a city in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, half of the gold and silver captured was used to buy foreign guns and cannons. In order to keep the water flowing, the Taiping Army also established many foreign guns and artillery units, and also hired some foreigners to teach them the methods of using and manufacturing weapons. For example, a foreign company in Shanghai smuggled 3,000 foreign guns, 870 cannons and a large number of firearms and bullets to the Taiping Army. In one year, the Singaporean foreign firm transported about 3,500 cannons to the Taiping Army-occupied areas. Despite this, although the Taiping Army had many firearms, it was still much worse than that of the Qing army of the national army.
At that time, in addition to the Taiping Army's professional foreign guns and artillery units, only two of the 8 people in the ordinary army were equipped with muskets. The rest of the soldiers fought with cold weapons, so their firepower was relatively weak, and they were still not opponents of the Qing army. Although the xiang army with great wealth does not attach much importance to firearms, firearms and cold weapons can still reach one per person. Li Hongzhang's Huaijun treatment was even higher. In the later period, the Huai Army was rarely equipped with cold weapons, and the main force was mostly fighting with foreign guns and foreign artillery. However, the Taiping Army still lost, although it was a problem with Hong Xiuquan's style and thinking, but the external equipment problem also accounted for a large proportion.