The Qing Dynasty can be said to be the founder of China's modern history of humiliation, since the First Opium War ended with the defeat of the Qing government, China has been tied into a century-long history of humiliation, blood and tears. China signed the unequal Treaty of Nanking, and China, which has always claimed to be the kingdom of heaven and heaven, has learned the power of western ships and cannons, so many people have begun to reflect on how China should deal with this "unprecedented change in a thousand years."
During the Qianlong period, the British envoy Ma Garni came to China with advanced Western technology, wanting to break the Self-Sufficiency Economic Model of the Qing Dynasty and trade and exchange, but was sent back by Qianlong at will. Decades ago, the rulers of the Qing Dynasty did not care about the tricks, but Magalni brought China's backward state back to Britain. On October 1, 1839, the British government convened a cabinet meeting and narrowly passed a resolution, believing that British commerce was hindered and the lives of the people of the British Empire were at stake, and that it was planning to send an expeditionary force to China to give Chinese some color to see.
The Daoguang Emperor, who was far to the east, was not yet aware of the crisis, and while ordering Lin Zexu to vigorously ban smoking to attack British trade; On the one hand, he continued to dream of the foundation of the Qing Dynasty for ten thousand years, disdained yiyi, and seriously underestimated the difficulties. Lin Zexu also confidently said: In addition to some power of the artillery, the British army is not good at land combat, the legs are tied very tightly, the movement is inconvenient, and there is no need to be afraid. These absurd ideas were actually accepted by the Manchu Dynasty Wenwu, and they were also strongly praised by the Daoguang Emperor, which strengthened his determination to go to war with the world's first power at that time.
In June 1840, 16 British warships, 4 armed ships, 28 transport ships, and a total of more than 4,000 navy and army arrived at the surface of Guangdong. The Qing army claimed to have 800,000 people, and the British army that faced thousands of people from afar was not enough to plug the gaps. For more than a hundred years, the Qing army has been raising soldiers and eight banners, and it has long been without combat effectiveness, cold weapons to scare the people are OK, and it is completely ineffective against the British army, and it can only be defeated, and the British army has entered no man's land for thousands of miles of sea and land in the north to Tianjin and south to Guangzhou.
To know that in the later Sino-Japanese War, little Japan spent half a century making preparations before the war, studying all the information of China, so that it could win with one blow, and this time the Qing government had no concept of Britain, and defeat was inevitable.
During the battle with the British army, the Daoguang Emperor learned from the prisoner interrogation that the British Emperor was actually a young girl. The intense curiosity for strange women led him to ask a few explicit questions: Why did the Emperor of England be appointed by this 22-year-old woman? How can a young woman serve the public? The daoguang emperor's biggest concern was whether she was married or not, and who was her husband?
The emperor who could ask such a ridiculous question naturally could not win the war, and the Daoguang Emperor was famous for slamming the door, wearing a patched dragon robe, but he was received a patch of one thousand taels of silver by the Ministry of Internal Affairs. The Daoguang Emperor was more generous in his request for military expenses at first, but later he calculated the accounting, and the reparations were more "cost-effective" than those who fought, and his policy of using troops was that they would not be mobilized without mobilization, and they would withdraw earlier if they could withdraw their defenses earlier, and they had started a policy of non-resistance.
This was completely different from the hot-blooded youth of Daoguang when he was young, when the Tianli Sect launched a change in the capital in the eighteenth year of Jiaqing, invaded the Forbidden City's Donghua Gate and Xihua Gate, and went straight to the palace center. When 200 believers rushed to the Yangxin Hall, Daoguang was studying in the study, and when he heard the sound, he immediately "went into the bag, the bird's ream, and the waist knife", flew out the door, raised his gun and shot, killing two believers on the spot. But feudal society caused the limitations of his thinking, and in the end it could not save the general trend of the decline of the country's fortunes.