The Book of the Later Han Dynasty reads: "He Tianqu was in a prosperous world, and he surpassed thousands of years and achieved great achievements. "China's five-thousand-year historical civilization, the era of being called "prosperous" is not uncommon, in the early days it was said that there was the rule of Chengkang, and later it was said that there was a Prosperous Era of Qianlong (or the Prosperous Age of Kangqian), but none of the prosperous times were as controversial as "Qianlong Prosperous World", and the positive view is that when Qianlong reigned, China's territory was vast, the population soared, and it exceeded 300 million, which showed prosperity.
The negative view is that during Qianlong's reign, people lived in poverty, were suppressed and exploited everywhere, and the territory and population size could not explain the problem. Let's not say which of these two views is correct, it is often said that "the authorities are obsessed with bystanders and the Qing", when the Qianlong Emperor thought that the heavenly kingdom did not need to communicate with the outside world, what was China like in the eyes of foreigners?
First of all, we can make it clear that in the late reign of the Qianlong Emperor, the signs of the decline of the Qing Dynasty have already appeared. Otherwise, after the Jiaqing Emperor ascended the throne, he would not face a crisis-ridden situation of chaotic discipline, rampant corruption of officials, and empty treasury. However, the Qianlong Emperor himself was quite confident, and he commented on himself: "The former generation of so subjugated people, known as qiang domains, known as external troubles, known as powerful ministers, known as foreign ministers, known as foreign powers, known as female advocates, known as eunuch temples, known as adulterous ministers, and known as Yu Xing, so that none of them seem to be likes." ”
This view is obviously suspected of self-intoxication, and the Qianlong Emperor summed up the "reasons for the subjugation of the country" in the past dynasties, but he only saw the height of the temple, but did not see the distance of the rivers and lakes. Throughout history, since Chen Sheng, Wu Guangzhen's arm, which dynasty's demise has not been accompanied by a vigorous peasant uprising? These Qianlong did not pay attention to it, and he never thought that the ants could shake the tree of feudal despotism.
Secondly, the praise of Later scholars for Qianlong's prosperous life also has the characteristics of focusing on "big" and ignoring "small" like Qianlong. Historian Xiao Yishan, who is known as the "first person to study Qing history", believes that the Qianlong Emperor reigned for sixty years and "martial arts and civil rule, which can be called extremely prosperous ... It belongs to a unique era, that is, in the history of our country, it can also be compared with the Han and Tang Dynasties, and the history of Guangyan", but this evaluation also does not mention how the people lived during the Qianlong period. To clarify this problem, we can refer to the observations of foreigners.
In 1793, the British Macartney mission was given the opportunity to meet the Qianlong Emperor, which was a collision of Chinese and Western cultures, in the process, the Qianlong Emperor asked the local general soldiers to set up a team to deter the emissary Yang Daqing Guowei but to no avail, asked the emissary to kneel and pray, resulting in a clash of etiquette, Macartney found that the Qing soldiers were still widely using backward swords, guns, bows and arrows, and Fukang An refused to watch the British practice new weapons.
All of the above can be seen that the Qing Dynasty at that time was not broad enough in the eyes of both monarchs and subjects, and it was difficult to wake up after being immersed in the dream of "Shangguo". After ma garni himself and the members of his mission returned, he wrote down many materials to record his experiences and feelings in China, including prejudice and objective descriptions, and Macartney ridiculed the Qing Dynasty's important minister Fu Kang'an for being stupid, commenting that China at that time was majestic on the outside and weak on the inside, and could easily defeat it.
The British scholar John Barrow recorded the living conditions of ordinary people he saw after coming to China, writing:
At any given time, I have not seen any proof of "abundant food and clothing, abundant prosperity" in the books. In the land of China, there are no gentlemen's mansions, comfortable farmhouses, they live in low-rise houses with thatched mud walls, there are very few single-family buildings, and their architecture is completely incomparable with our towns.
When the fleet of the mission temporarily anchored in Dinghai and asked the Qing general to find someone familiar with the sea route to lead them to Tianjin, Barrow also saw how the general soldiers completed the process of finding people. According to Barrow's vision, it should be enough to make people volunteer to apply for the job, but in fact, the general soldier called the soldiers to quickly arrest all the local people who had traveled to Tianjin by sea, and then selected.
Barrow was surprised: "I have never seen anyone as miserable as them... They knelt on the ground and listened to the arrogant inquiry, and although they said that traveling away from home would bring inconvenience to their family life, wives and children, and showed reluctance, the general soldiers did not listen at all, and only ordered them to prepare well, which showed that the empire did not give the people enough respect and protection, and its legal system was not at all wonderful. ”
In addition, Barrow also recorded that he saw Qing dynasty officers and soldiers forcing a large number of Gufra fibers, only a small amount of wages, but not the cost of the trip home, and many people fled for this reason. In order to renew their manpower, the officers and men went door to door in the villages in search of new men, who were "thin and weak and never seemed to have eaten enough", and when some of them tried to escape, or asked for exemption from military service on the grounds of old age and infirmity, "the supervising soldiers would whip them with whips, as if they were a herd of horses."
Barrow's "Qianlong Prosperous Age" is false and self-deceptive, and he deeply feels that he has been deceived, and the prosperity depicted in the book does not exist at all. There is no doubt that when Britain's strength grew rapidly through the industrial revolution, the Qing Dynasty was not yet aware of the changes that had taken place in the world, still maintained the feudal ruling mentality, and more firmly clamped down on people's thoughts, which made Barrow feel a kind of disillusionment, and at the same time, everything That Barrow saw could more or less prove that people's lives in the later years of the Qianlong Emperor's reign were already in deep trouble.
I have always believed that the history of man must be viewed from the perspective of "man". Objective evaluation shows that Qianlong was an emperor whose merits were also obvious and his deeds were also obvious, and he naturally had "ten perfect martial arts" on merit; he had expanded the feudal autocracy to the maximum, so that the thinking of his subjects was tightly bound by invisible pressure, and the literature was neither prosperous nor backward, and it was more boastful than the inside and insufficient than the outside.
Tang Zhen, a famous enlightenment thinker in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, once said that "the prosperous world is common and talented, and the decline of the world is often suffering from lack of talent", if you focus on the spiritual and material life of people in the Qianlong period, the situation of the Qianlong prosperous world is very much like the description in "Dream of the Red Chamber", the building will lean forward, the surface is infinitely beautiful, the inside is full of holes, it is the end of the road; the name of the prosperous world is inevitably untrue.