In November 1851, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement, the highest tide of the ancient Chinese peasant movement, broke out, and they chanted slogans such as "cut off the evil and leave the righteous" and "rejuvenate the Han Dynasty and destroy the Manchus", which turned the Qing Dynasty upside down.
Relying on more than 10,000 soldiers who later became known as the old battalion of Guangxi to repeatedly defeat the Qing army's encirclement and suppression, they finally broke into Hunan in June of the following year, and from then on they were like a trapped dragon into the sea, and from then on they attacked Wuchang, and finally trapped Nanjing, which shocked the world and established a state. Qi Xianfeng issued a reward as long as he attacked Jinling to pacify the long hair, regardless of the Han Manchus were crowned kings. At the same time, it greatly encouraged the anti-Qing snobbery in the world, and under such prestige, the Twist Army, which was active in the north, also sent emissaries to Tianjing in the hope of accepting the title of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and becoming the nominal Taiping Army.
This movement also greatly changed the power structure of the Qing Dynasty, and the local power factions of the Han Nationality rose up in the political arena, relying on the merits of killing the Han people, such as Zeng Guofan.
Why can their old battalion in Guangxi have such strong combat effectiveness?
Mainly due to the local form of Guangxi, because the national population soared, the per capita cultivated land area of the whole country decreased sharply, and the form of Guangxi was particularly severe, and the per capita cultivated land in Guangxi was one point and two mu per person at that time.
Many people who have no concept of arable land may not know much, but we must remember that the subsistence line at that time was "four acres per person".
Not only that, but because of the overpopulation of the whole country, the phenomenon of the population of the interior flocking from the interior to the border in all good years and years of famine was a major factor in the combat effectiveness of the Taiping Army.
As long as these people are organized and trained intensively, they can burst out of their combat effectiveness.
Compared with the commanders who drink the blood of soldiers and eat empty salaries, who eat grain and become soldiers, and the soldiers of the green battalion of the officers who eat food, the difference in the quality of the soldiers is not a star and a half.
Moreover, the ancients mourned the victory of the soldiers, and for the Taiping Army, not rebelling was a death, and rebellion was not necessarily death. A normal person knows how to choose this option. And the officers and soldiers? For them, fighting hard, there is a high probability of death, and if they really want to be promoted and get rich, it is better to kill liang and risk merit. When soldiers are oily, they eat every day, and they are too lazy to fight. For the Qing army, it was common for the Qing army to win out of nothing, or even to hide defeat into victory. For example, on June 8, 1851, the Qing army encamped in Duao Mountain found that 600 to 700 Taiping troops were assembled in Zhongping Village. In this encounter, the two sides did not engage in close combat, but shelled each other from a distance.
However, the shelling was widely bragged about by zhou Tianjue, the leader of the Qing army. "About thousands" of Taiping troops "directly approached the Ulaante camp" and created a large-scale offensive launched by the Taiping Army out of nothing. The "result" is also obvious, Zhou Tianjue did not blush and said, "Bombardment in separate ways, killing many thieves, the thief was defeated."
A small encounter, which was boasted of inflicting heavy damage on the Taiping Army, naturally despised the Taiping Army under this paralysis, and the Taiping Army marched forward in this "failure". Qiu Ba, who was not willing to show weakness at the bottom, also gave the example of that battle, and it was reasonable to say that after the camp was completed, it was time to fortify, and what fences and trenches and camps were all in order, not to mention that it was still a great enemy at present.
Unfortunately, because the officers and soldiers were lazy, they only had open tents in the camp, and there was no digging trench to build a fortification. Anyway, if you really fight and grab people's heads with the wind, you can run faster than anyone else. As for taking the initiative? Unless Ulantai (the main officer of the Qing army in the campaign) "personally urged" us not to sell this life.
The next day, the Taiping Army attacked because the Qing army occupied a geographical advantage of being condescending to the lower half of the crossing. The offensive was repulsed, and the Qing army was overjoyed and rushed to pursue. However, in the process of pursuit, seven people were intercepted by the Qing army, and after stopping, they did not stop and launched a suicide attack on the Qing artillery position.
However, the facts are sometimes more wonderful than the novel, and these seven people actually forced more than a thousand Qing troops to "collapse from the top of the mountain" and flee to the camp of Ulantai at the bottom of the mountain. At this time, someone had to ask, although it was said that the artillery lacked melee weapons, but more than a thousand people could not all escape, after all, there were seven people opposite. It is natural, in addition to the one who flees from the wind, there are also "those who kneel and receive the blade of the thief".
After the Seven Warriors captured the Weining Barracks, more than twenty Taiping Soldiers dared to come to their aid, and they manipulated the fourteen cannons left by the Qing Army to bombard the Ulantai Camp Pan at the bottom of the mountain. All of this was witnessed by Ulantai, and we don't know what he thought at the time, but afterwards he wrote to Xianfeng. "The slaves saw very really at the bottom of the mountain, only seven thieves... It is beyond reason that a thousand officers and men will not be able to defeat the seven thieves."
The combat effectiveness of the veterans of the Taiping Army in Guangxi can be seen in this battle.