"Busy is like a dog that has lost its family, anxious like a fish that slips through the net... Exactly: Rather a peaceful dog, not a chaotic person! --Ming Feng Menglong, "Awakening to the Everlasting Word"
In middle school, I read Tang poems and read Du Fu's sentence
"Zhumen wine smells of flesh, and the road has frozen bones"
When it is not particularly understood, after all, "teenagers do not know the taste of sorrow". It wasn't until I grew up that I was interested in reading more historical materials and seeing the photos of the people in the late Qing Dynasty that I really connected poetry with life.
How bitter were the people of the late Qing Dynasty? Look at these people who can't bear to look at them directly, in other words, you may not be able to hold on for a day.
In the late Qing Dynasty, the government did not need to say too much about how much I said that everyone is also clear, the people who are worried about internal and external troubles do not have a good life, and they have signed a bunch of treaties on the loss of power and humiliation of the country, and a large amount of silver has poured into the pockets of the great powers like flowing water.
The amount of indemnity required for the Treaty of Xinugu alone was as high as 980 million taels of silver.
The reparations to the great powers were part of it, and the expenses for the Qing royal family were another part.
To some extent, the clan system of the Qing Dynasty is really unbelievable, afraid of the clan relatives seizing power, so the clan children are basically rare to be able to participate in political affairs; do not let people work, but also let people take money, each clan children can regularly receive their own expenses; in addition, these high-ranking clan relatives are born more and more, and there are more and more clan children who are passed down from generation to generation, and more and more money needs to be given to them.
There is also a part from the luxury of the royal family. The royal family here does not refer to a general term, but a specific reference, and Empress Dowager Cixi alone is worthy of a group.
Kangxi and Qianlong, because of their own merits, held a banquet for a thousand sons in their later years, and Empress Dowager Cixi was not far behind, and she also wanted to do a big job on her birthday, and a sixty birthday snared most of China's good things, and embezzled naval military funds in order to repair the garden.
Such a huge expense is all silver with white flowers, where does the silver come from? Come to the people.
As the monarch who created the last prosperous era of China's feudal dynasty, Kangxi's merits are undeniable, and during his tenure of social development, the people's lives were relatively comfortable, and he issued it in order to ensure the interests of the people
"Breed people, never give more"
But in 1840, the British used artillery fire to forcibly detain the Chinese national gate, and the First Opium War broke out, and since then the Shenzhou mainland has been devastated and the road to indemnity has been opened.
In order to repay the high amount of money, but also in order to maintain the dignity of the qing dynasty's royal relatives and the unbridled pleasures of Empress Dowager Cixi, the people added taxes one after another, and the types of taxes paid were varied.
In such a period of considered the weakest, the fiscal revenue reached the highest in the entire Chinese feudal dynasty, ten times higher than the prosperous kangqian dynasty, and even the richest Song Dynasty in history was difficult to match.
Since the Opium War, the qing dynasty's taxes have increased year by year,
In 1899, it exceeded the mark of 100 million taels, and the signing of the Xinugi Treaty rose like crazy, breaking through 200 million taels in 1908, and the Qing government officially declared its dissolution in early 1912, and by the end of 1911, the qing dynasty's fiscal revenue had exceeded 300 million taels.
Look at the real life of the people in the late Qing Dynasty under the lens,
Each skinny man could not find a single one with a few pieces of flesh on his body; ragged clothes were the norm, and more than that, they didn't even have to wear clothes, let alone shoes.
Ironically,
Even if they could not afford to eat and wear clothes, the people of the late Qing Dynasty would have to smoke opium, and perhaps only in the smoke of opium could they briefly forget about this cannibalistic late Qing society.