There was once such a movie, called "The Mystery of the Treasures of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom", the plot of the movie tells the story of an archaeologist during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression who accidentally discovered from an old book that under an abandoned house in Zhejiang Province was hidden the treasury treasure of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom half a century ago.
However, due to the chaos of the times, the news of the discovery of the treasure soon reached the ears of the Japanese, and in order to compete for this treasure, the commander of the national army, the Japanese secret agent, the gang boss and other forces launched a desperate fight in the cellar of the heavy organs.
With a loud noise, the cellar collapsed, everyone was buried here, and the legendary treasures were never found again.
Many of the plots in the film are obviously fictional, but the film's main theme, "Treasure", is indeed recorded in history, and on the contrary, various news and clues about it have never been broken for more than a hundred years.
After continuous investigation and research, later scholars believed that the treasure of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Treasury was not a figment, so where did the treasure of the Heavenly Kingdom that fascinated countless people go?
Treasure of the "Holy Treasury"
From the beginning of the Jintian Uprising in 1851, the Taiping Army went all the way north, and its influence spread to eighteen provinces, and in the movement of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom for more than ten years, it has always practiced a "holy treasury" system.
The so-called "Holy Treasury" system, that is, in the areas controlled by the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the people are not allowed to hide their property privately, whether it is their own private property or captured booty, they must be handed over to the "Heavenly Pilgrimage Sacred Treasury", which began with Hong Xiuquan's founding of the "Worship of God" and was not dismantled until the overthrow of the Heavenly Kingdom.
From this record, it can be inferred that the treasures of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom were concentrated in one piece, and it was very convenient to find them, and there was a saying circulating at that time: "The wealth of the Hong Rebellion, the gold and silver are like the sea."
When the Taiping Army entered the city of Nanjing in 1853, the amount of silver in its sacred treasury was as much as 18 million taels, and the scattered treasures of other subordinates should have exceeded 20 million taels. At that time, Xiang Rong, the commander of the Qingjiang South Battalion, issued a military order that after breaking through the Tianjing City, the first thing to take was the Shengku.
According to the calculation at that time, the total income of the Great Qing Dynasty in a year was about 70 million taels of silver, and the Taiping Army, which had just gained a firm foothold, took 20 million taels, which could match the income of the Great Qing for a quarter.
Coupled with Hong Xiuquan's own initiatives such as expanding the Heavenly King's Mansion after entering the Tianjing City, he personally hid an astonishing number of treasures. The crown he wears on his head is made of pure gold, the crown weighs eight pounds, and the dragon robe he wears is also woven of gold thread.
Not only that, Hong Tianwang's daily lunch, there are as many as sixty-four bowls for vegetables alone, and they are all made of valuable porcelain, and the chopsticks are made of one-foot-long gold nuggets.
Boom and bust
In 1856, the contradiction between The Heavenly King Hong Xiuquan and the Eastern King Yang Xiuqing had reached an irreconcilable point. Until the summer of that year, when the "Eastern King forced the Heavenly King's relatives to worship at the Eastern King's Mansion to seal his long life" broke out, Hong Xiuquan could no longer bear it. He issued a secret order to Wei Changhui, the king of the North, to quickly lead his troops back to Beijing to "mediate.".
However, Wei Changhui, the King of the North, had a grudge with the Eastern King, and after he led his army back to Tianjing, he directly closed the city gates and surrounded the Eastern King's Palace. In the early morning of September 4, 3,000 heavily armed Taiping troops rushed into the Eastern Palace, slashed at people when they saw them, and killed everyone. Overnight in the Eastern Palace, a river of blood flowed, and Yang Xiuqing was killed on the spot.
For a time, people in Tianjing City were panicked, and when Shi Dakai, the king of the wings, saw this scene, he hurriedly stopped the western expedition back to Beijing to calm down, but Wei Changhui, who killed the red-eyed, could not listen to it at all, and secretly executed Shi Dakai's entire family, Shi Dakai took advantage of the chaos to escape from Tianjing City, and entangled the 100,000 Tianjing Qinwang.
Seeing that the situation was about to get out of control, Hong Xiuquan was forced to personally order Wei Changhui to be killed, but the good times did not last long, and after the wing king Shi Da drove back to Beijing, he was still jealous of Hong Xiuquan and was constrained by Hong Xiuquan's brothers everywhere. The following year, Shi Dakai was forced to lead his headquarters of 100,000 troops and horses to flee, and from then on he broke with the grace of heaven.
Since then, the taiping heavenly kingdom has been scattered, the situation has been reversed, the control area has been shrinking, and the strategic situation has been at a disadvantage.
After Shi Da left, Hong Xiuquan completely entrusted the internal affairs of the Heavenly Kingdom to his brothers Hong Renfa and Hong Renjie, while he himself soaked in the Heavenly Palace all day and indulged in wine, so that the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, which had experienced political turmoil, began to show signs of difficulty in the economic field.
Sadly, the kingdom of heaven is no longer able to turn the tide.
In July 1864, the Tianjing City, which had been besieged by the Xiang army for a year, was finally breached, and the first thing zeng guofan and Zeng Guoquan brothers did after entering the city was to take people straight to the legendary "Holy Treasury". However, the historical records recorded that the holy treasury presented in front of the two of them was empty, and there were tens of millions of taels of silver, not even a piece of copper coin.
It is said that if it is a chopstick and a hat, it is normal to find it, but it is tens of millions of silver, not to say that it can be hidden where it is. Moreover, the city of Nanjing had been surrounded by Qing troops like iron barrels for more than a year, and they refused to be able to transport the silver out.
The more Zeng Guoquan wanted to get angrier, he directly dug hong Xiuquan, who had been dead for a long time, three feet into the ground, and burned the corpse out and burned it into ashes.
Treasure is a mystery
Zeng Guoquan was still not dead hearted, and he ordered the Xiang army to freely loot the city for three days. From this day on, there were four burning and killing in Nanjing, countless looters, all the valuables in the city were looted, the Qinhuai River was blocked on the third day of the slaughter of the city, and tens of thousands of floating corpses were floating, even so, no one still found the so-called "Holy Treasury Treasure".
Zeng Guofan began to do the work of Li Xiucheng, the general of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and repeatedly threatened and seduced him, and Li Xiucheng skillfully answered his question with "There has been no grain in Tianjing City for a long time".
In the end, The worthless Li Xiucheng was executed by Zeng Guofan Lingchi after writing his memoirs. Since then, these treasures have not appeared in the historical records.
Different people have come to different conclusions about the whereabouts of this treasure over the past hundred years. Some people say that after the city was destroyed, a large number of treasures of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom had already fallen into the hands of the Qing army, but some people saw that cai had deliberately embezzled some of them, and the most suspicious of them was Zeng Guoquan, the commander of the Xiang Army who attacked Tianjing.
After the fall of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, someone once visited Zeng Guoquan, and saw that there were many unique treasures in his home that had never appeared before, and there were hundreds of jewel bracelets on his wrists alone, and some of them were even larger than the gems that the Prince of the Qing Dynasty usually wore.
Some people recall that when Zeng Guoquan left Nanjing to return to his hometown by boat, the boats accompanying him on the river were densely packed, and even blocked the villages on the other side of the river. And the things carried on the ship are tightly wrapped. As a result, some curious people associated the treasure in the Heavenly Pilgrimage Vault with him.
But does this conclusion stand up to scrutiny? The Tongzhi Emperor had sent his ministers to inquire about the whereabouts of the treasure many times, but he had checked the treasures of hundreds of ships, not even a single silver ingot. In addition, during this period, the "Thorn Horse Case" occurred, and in order to calm the contradictions between the Xiang and Huai armies and the central government, the emperor was forced to stop the investigation.
There is also a saying that a coachman named "Jiang Donkey" in the Jiangnan region obtained a large amount of sacred treasure. It turned out that before the destruction of Tianjing City, in order to transport the capital of the future comeback out of the city, the Taiping Army found Jiang Donkey, who had a donkey cart in his hand.
The Taiping Army put boxes of treasures into the carriage procession of Jiang Donkey, and after the Taiping Army was completely destroyed, Jiang Donkey suddenly became rich by relying on this ownerless wealth. At the same time, he made a fortune at the same time as Wang Tofu and other low-level people. They all had one thing in common—their home was in the city of Nanjing and they had been in contact with the Taiping Army.
But this statement is too dramatic, coupled with modern historical considerations. The wealth of Jiang Donkey and Wang Tofu was completely accumulated little by little by their own business acumen, and the real estate was also bought from the Taiping Army at a low price during the war, and after the war, it was sold to the Qing court at a high price in exchange for the difference in price.
After all kinds of unreliable possibilities have been ruled out, one version that is now widely circulated is that the treasures in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Sacred Treasury were divided into several batches by Hong Xiu due to the chaos of the war, and the Tianjing City was lost to the people after the destruction of the Tianjing City.
According to the records, after the "Tianjing Incident", Hong Xiuquan spent all day drinking and building palaces, and the silver in the holy treasury was consumed year by year, plus the wing king Shi Dakai took a large amount of grain and grass, ordnance and treasures from the "holy treasury" when he left in 1857.
The Taiping army led by King Yi also gradually became difficult to support with the encirclement and suppression of the Qing army, and finally was completely annihilated in the Dadu River in Sichuan, and the treasures of the heavenly kingdom they carried were gradually exhausted in many years of conquest and scattered among the people.
By 1864, before Hong Xiuquan's death, not much gold, silver and jade had been left in the Heavenly Kingdom's "Holy Treasury", and he knew that the number of Heavenly Kingdom's destinies had been exhausted, so he distributed all the treasures in the Sacred Treasury to the generals.
After the destruction of Nanjing, many Taiping Army generals went into exile, and these treasures also followed them to foreign countries, and in the 20th century, British scholars found the sword that Hong Xiuquan had used in Cuba.
The true whereabouts of the treasures of the Kingdom of Heaven are still a mystery, and I believe that with the passage of time, the mystery of the treasures of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom will surely be solved, and the long-sealed history will eventually re-tell the world about the past.