In Jiang Wen's movie "Evil Does Not Pressure righteousness", there is a very interesting line: Who writes a diary of a serious person, a slut. In modern history, there are many people who love to write diaries, Chang Kaishen, Hu Shi, Lu Xun, and a large number of other people, but if you want to say that you have achieved fame by writing diaries, no one can compare with Zeng Guofan. Chang Kaishen said that Zeng Gong was a model of the spirit of the Chinese people, and Zhao Erxun said that he was the first person since the Qing Dynasty's Zhongxing. There are many kinds of praise, but I think Zhang Taiyan said the best, he said: Zeng Guofan, the reputation is a sage, and the culprit is the culprit.
Zeng Guofan made meritorious contributions to the three immortals, cultivated the Qi family, ruled the country and the world, and everything in the world is a model of the world, but he also has some places that cannot be washed white, as the saying goes: the thief who steals the hook is cursed, and the thief who steals the country is Hou. The murderer is cursed, the slaughterer is Hou. Zeng Guofan pacified the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, killed all the way to Tianjing, and finally achieved his reputation as a minister of Zhongxing.
Zeng Guofan never hid his various killings, and there are many bloody records in the "Zeng Guofan Recital", rijin he wrote that he captured 221 "old thieves", and every time he caught one, he cut the intestines and hung trees, peeled the skin and stones, and saw that everything was frozen. He captured 134 "rebel bandits" alive, and he confessed that beheading was not enough to relieve his hatred, so he ordered his subordinates to cut them off.
After the attack on Tianjing City, Zeng Guofan's staff friend Zhao Wenlie recorded the scene in his diary, all those who did not have the strength to pick up burdens and dig caves were slaughtered, the dead on the street were all old people, those two or three-year-old children were not spared, after death creeping on the road, women under the age of 40 died, at least ten knives were slashed on their bodies, and the sound of crying was earth-shattering.
Corpses piled up on the banks of the Qinhuai River, houses were burned, everything was robbed, and a county chronicle recorded that "since five generations, no more lives have been destroyed than today." Tan Sitong also recorded the atrocities of the Xiang army of cutting people when they saw them, robbing things when they saw them, and burning houses when they saw them.
In Anqing, the smell of corpses was everywhere, and the ancestral graves of the people were dug up, just to collect some silver. In Jiujiang, the river is red and the corpses are piled up, in Xuancheng, in Anhui NingguoFu, all kinds of atrocities are frightening. However, Zeng Guofan wrote in blood that "it is appropriate to kill more, and it is not necessary to fake mercy and mistake big things."
In the former Tianjing, the population was more than 1 million, and in the early years of Guangxu, the statistics of the Household Department showed that there were only 500,000 left in Tianjing, where did the 500,000 that disappeared go? This is even worse than the Japanese!