The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom is the largest old-style civil unrest in the history of all mankind, and one of the obvious manifestations of this is that the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom established a peasant regime, which although it is not the same as the same, it still has the basic rules and regulations of a country, and since the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom regime wants to compete with the Manchu Qing for orthodoxy, it naturally has its own set, and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom even sets administrative divisions for the whole country in its own way.
This is what is relatively little known: the administrative division of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.
So what does this administrative division look like? Let's first talk about the Qing Dynasty, the administrative division of the Qing Dynasty is basically the three levels of "province -prefecture-county", of which the official name of the province is the Department of Political Envoys, and there is a "Dao" between the province and the government, which has a certain administrative division significance; but what about the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom? The prefectural system was abolished, the prefecture was changed to a county, and then "province" was defined as a formal administrative division, so the administrative division of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was a three-level system of "provinces, counties, and counties".
The sphere of influence of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom
So how does it divide the country?
According to the formal conception, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom divided the country into 21 provinces (one of the leaders of the late Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, Hong Rengui, claimed several times that the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom wanted to divide the world into twenty-one provinces), these 21 provinces were the traditional 18 provinces of Han China, and then the Manchu Qing set up three general jurisdictions in the northeast, Shengjing, Jilin and Heilongjiang, and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was also designated as provinces.
But we know that the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom did not actually control the whole country, so its division was completely on paper, and the various plans in the later period of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom were very chaotic, so the number of provinces it actually mentioned was far more than 21, and the provinces in the control area were divided, and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom did not follow tradition.
Administrative divisions of the Qing Dynasty
"King Yingjie Returns to Truth" records Hong Xiuquan
Language: "Brother born in Middle-earth. The size of the eighteen provinces is subject to the three provinces of Manchuria, and the 50,000 trillion Chinese are subject to millions of Tartar demons.
According to statistics, in the various literature of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the total number of provinces mentioned is 25, where are the more? It is Sufu Province, Tianpu Province, Guifu Province and Ili Province, what are these places? Sufu Province is the area actually controlled by the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and it is a province set up after advancing into Jiangnan in the later period (suzhou, with 4 counties and 26 counties, including Suzhou County, Changzhou County, Taixuan County, and Songjiang County); Tianpu Province is very strange, only one county, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom changed Wopu County to Tianpu County in 1853, and changed Tianpu County to Tianpu Province in the autumn of 1858, why set up such a small province? Because its jurisdiction was Tianjing (present-day Nanjing) and Jiangpu County (including Pukou) on the north bank of the river, it was the throat of Tianjing to Anhui, Jiangxi, and Hubei provinces, and the Kongdao that transported grain and food supplies from the north to Tianjing, which actually had the meaning of the capital directly under the jurisdiction; Ili Province was Xinjiang (at that time it was under the jurisdiction of General Ili, not yet known as Xinjiang); what about Guifu Province? No one knows where it is, the jurisdiction is unknown, and some scholars speculate that it is a change of name for Sue Fook Province, but the evidence is insufficient.
So are the other provinces similar to before? No, oh, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom has made a mess of the names of the provinces, such as the "Sufu Province" and "Guifu Province" just mentioned, this "Fu" word is very strange, and the "Show" word on the left side of the "Fu" word is changed to the word "Yi" next to it.
In addition, in order to avoid secrecy, a large number of provincial names were changed, such as "mountain" in Shandong and Shanxi, in order to avoid the name of Feng Yunshan, the southern king, was changed to "Shan", Yunnan was also renamed Yunnan, Guizhou was renamed Guizhou (to avoid the secret of Xiao Chaogui of the Western King), and the following counties and counties were the same, the following counties and counties were changed to "玱" (for example, the capital of Hubei was Wuxuan, that is, Wuchang), when "Gui" (Western King Xiao Chaogui) was changed to "Gui", and when the "Quan" character (Tianwang Hong xiuquan) was changed to "Tsuen"...
What about Zhejiang Province? The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was renamed Zhejiang Tianfu Province, and the reason for adding the word "Tian" was to indicate supremacy, and by the way, the reason for adding the word "Fu" to the lower provinces was that according to the religious sayings of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, "Sin can be blessed without it." Then Heilongjiang is called WulongJiang, Fengtian is called Fengtian (the word "tian" is also a word to avoid, can not be used indiscriminately, Zhejiang and other core areas of heaven can be used, you Manchuria old nest do not want to use. ）
The most unfortunate was the Manchu Qing ruling center, which was renamed "Sin Province" and was scheduled to be changed to "Qianshan Province" after the occupation.
Which provinces did the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom actually control? From December 1852 to August 1864, during this period, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom successively established 7 provinces, 47 counties (including 3 county-level prefectures), 236 counties (including 10 county-level prefectures), including Jiangnan Province (with 3 counties and 13 counties, near the capital Tianjing); Tianpu Province; Sufu Province; Zhejiang Tian province; Jiangxi Province; Hubei Province; and Anhui Province.
Here to talk about Jiangxi, the Jiangxi Province of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom is very interesting, the provincial capital is not Nanchang but Jiujiang! This is related to the important strategic position of Jiujiang in the military, and it is also because the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom never conquered Nanchang, even if it swept through Jiangxi in its heyday, it also besieged Nanchang and did not attack here.
For the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, which depends on the Yangtze River, the Jiujiang River is very important
And. The capital of Jiujiang Province has also changed, not in the old Dehua County, but in Hukou County on the other side of Poyang Lake, which is also because of the important military status of Hukou. And what is even more bizarre is that when Jiangxi Province was first established in 1854, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom only conquered the Jiujiang region.
Therefore, in 1854, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom changed Hukou County to Jiujiang County, and Jiujiang Province to Jiangxi Province. It is also strange to change a province to a county and a county to a county.
Even, Hong Renjie also announced that the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom would set up twelve counties in Jiangnan Province and eleven counties in each other provinces, but this concept was divorced from reality, and it was not and could not be implemented, in fact, the administrative divisions of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom did not well combine the history and current situation of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and there were also deficiencies in the consideration of the actual situation and operability. Is a comparison of failed planning.