In China's successive foreign wars, the Qing army fought against the Eight-Power Alliance and was recognized as a disgrace. Fighting at the "home field" in Beijing and Tianjin, the Qing army, which had absolute superiority in strength and logistics, was actually beaten by tens of thousands of eight-nation coalition forces, and the capital of the country, Beijing, fell tragically, and was raped and plundered by the eight-nation alliance. The whole "Gengzi National Disaster" not only allowed "Chinese to enter the twentieth century with the shame of the capital being attacked". Even more, how many Chinese people are in pain when reading history, and they are eager to roll up their sleeves to help.
As a result, many friends also gave birth to a new conjecture: Since Daqing is not powerful, if there is a time machine, can you give Daqing a "cross-time and space rescue"? For example, the Great Qin army that swept through the Six Kingdoms two thousand years ago was "carried" to the battlefield of the "Gengzi National Disaster" and shouldered the heavy responsibility of opposing the Eight-Nation Alliance. Will this Qing Dynasty still fall to the point of "losing the capital and running away"?
Thanks to the special effects of various "costume dramas", the Qin Dynasty army under Qin Shi Huang has always given many historical fans the impression of "very cattle and very strong": the Qin army generals with bright armor shouted "wind!" The overwhelming momentum of the "gale", the steel infantry riding tiger division that rumbled on the battlefield, and the "Great Qin Arrow Rain" that roared like a fierce wind and rain all made the blood of many viewers in front of the screen boil. If such a large army descended on the battlefield of Beijing and Tianjin at the beginning of the last century, could it give the arrogant Eight-Nation Alliance a vivid and unforgettable lesson? This matter must be said: the Qin Army in the movie and the Qin Army in history are two different things.
A down-to-earth fact is that the real Qin army in history, the tiger and wolf division that completed the great cause of "sweeping the six combinations", let alone compared with the Eight-Nation Alliance army more than two thousand years later, even compared with the next Han Dynasty army, the gap is very obvious.
In this matter, first of all, you can first look at the class of soldiers. Although the Qin army is known for its neat military formation and tactical maturity, if we refer to the excavation evidence of the Terracotta Warriors and Horses of Qin Shi Huang, we can see a more real scene: the qin army's organization is still mainly infantry, and vehicles are mainly riding. According to the records of the "Records of History", in the million-strong army of Qin, the cavalry was only "ten thousand horses". The "cavalry maids" in the Qin figurines are also mostly equipped with weapons such as crossbows and bronze swords. Compared with the Han army that could cross the desert north with tens of thousands of cavalry and launch a vertical attack on the Xiongnu, the gap was actually obvious.
The more obvious gap is in the equipment. Just by looking at the Qin figurine pit, we can see that the Qin army that "swept the liuhe" is still dominated by bronze weapons. Although the "Qin Kings" and "Qin Emperors" in the "Qin Dynasty Theme" film and television dramas often boast of their "iron armor invincible". However, the Qin army in the Terracotta Warriors and Horses of Qin Shi Huang is still mainly based on leather armor, and "iron armor" is actually very rare. Like the 11 kilograms of Han Dynasty iron armor unearthed in Hohhot, Inner Mongolia, it is almost impossible to find in the Qin army. According to Yan Hanjian and other classics, the Han army unit wearing "iron armor" to guard the border pass was obviously a notch stronger than that of the "Great Qin Tiger Division".
As for conventional weapons, the gap is also visible to the naked eye: the weapons of the Qin Army, whether they are swords as short weapons or long weapons, are mostly made of copper. It was not until the Han Dynasty, with the leap of technology such as "blast furnace smelting" and "steel frying", that the Han army achieved "iron tools": the Han army weapons unearthed from the Chang'an arsenal of the Han Dynasty, in addition to a small number of copper arrow clusters, a large number of other armor, knives, axes, spears and other equipment, are all made of iron. In particular, the iron "ring head knife" that is more than one meter long and made of fried steel technology completely replaces the copper coins of the Qin Dynasty and becomes the individual equipment of the Han soldiers.
Such a Han army, which is almost wrapped in steel, if it comes to a "hard-hitting" contest with the Qin army wrapped in leather armor and holding bronze weapons, the consequences can also be imagined.
It is worth mentioning that there are also countless fans of the costume drama circle "Great Qin Great Killing Weapon" - Qin Crossbow. Compared with the "Qin Army Crossbow Arrow" in the film and television drama, the real Qin crossbow is also much more advanced than that of other warring powers: the Qin crossbow unearthed in the Qin Figurine Pit has a very complete bronze crossbow design, especially the Wangshan Mountain used for aiming is greatly elevated. The restored Qin crossbow arm is 70 cm long, the overall proportion structure is more reasonable, and the lethality is stronger. In addition, the Qin army also used a large number of large crossbows, and in the records of the "History", it even used crossbows to shoot giant fish, and the battlefield deterrent was full.
However, compared with the crossbow of the Han Dynasty, these advances of the Qin crossbow are a little worse: the crossbow machine of the Han Dynasty has added copper Guo, and the scale has been added to the Wangshan Mountain, and the shooting accuracy is higher. The lethality of the Han crossbow is also a large piece stronger than the Qin crossbow - in terms of strength, the Han crossbow is divided into various types, such as "one stone crossbow" to "twelve stone crossbow". One of the most common "six-stone crossbows" has a range of up to 260 meters. As for the "crossbow" used by the Qin army to shoot fish, it is also a battlefield artifact of the Han army - when the Han army went north to the Xiongnu, it was common to "shoot a single crossbow". The intensive shooting effect often made the Xiongnu lament that it was "really terrible". In the northern border defense troops of the Han Army, the proportion of crossbow equipment is also more than 60%.
It can be said that if the Han army and the Qin soldiers do not do anything else, they will shoot at each other. The outcome of the victory or defeat is also not to be guessed.
It is also this powerful level of equipment that chen tang, a Han general who wrote the feat of "although the criminals of the strong Han are far away", issued the bold words of "one Han is five Hu" - a single heavily armed Han soldier is enough to deal with three to five Xiongnu soldiers. This significance, of course, is not to "crush the Qin soldiers", but to prove a down-to-earth truth: the progress of China's dynasties is precisely the progress of core technology represented by this "iron knife", "iron armor" and "strong crossbow".
And in the hypothesis of "time-space rescue", the Qin army, which is much worse than the Han army, encountered the Eight-Nation Alliance Army armed to the teeth in the early 20th century? It is hard to say what the fiasco turned out to be, but the fiasco was a foregone conclusion.
However, back to this hypothesis, according to the view of some Western journalists in the early 20th century, if the Qin army really "crossed" over, the battle results might be really stronger than the Qing army. Because in a series of fiascoes represented by the "Gengzi National Disaster", the most important memory left by the Qing army to the great powers is not backward equipment, but poor combat effectiveness.
Taking the battle against the Eight-Nation Alliance as an example, the common manifestation of the Qing army is "so many false bullets", that is, when they see the enemy, they open fire indiscriminately, and they are often inaccurate. And when the Eight-Nation Alliance rushed to the front and revealed the shiny bayonets, these "elites of the Great Qing Dynasty" actually "left their weapons, birds and beasts scattered", and were almost chased by people with bayonets and beaten on the butt. In the previous Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese army vividly described the Qing army's appearance: "Whenever the white blade battle, they all discarded the rifle with bullets on the chest and scattered."
Such a group of "waste soldiers", let alone fighting modern wars, even if both sides throw away foreign guns and cannons, and directly take cold weapons to fight. This "national shame" is probably impossible to run.
More than ten years later, when the Beiyang warlords were in a scuffle, the Beiyang Army, which was born out of the Qing Army, even received a lei evaluation under the pen of foreign journalists: During the Zhiwan War, the two major warlords of the "direct lineage" and "Anhui lineage", who were known as the "elite of the Republic of China", hundreds of thousands of people on both sides swung to fight, but because the quality of the soldiers was too large, they could not shoot and fire accurately, and only 200 people were killed or injured in the tens of millions of rounds of ammunition. So much so that the British reporter Morris suggested that the two families should not waste ammunition, and they should be replaced by bows and arrows to win the battle, which is cheap and practical.
Looking at this scene, the matter of "Qin Army Saving the Field" is really not a joke when placed on such a unit.
Why is it so ridiculous? The reason is also very simple, the strength of an army is not only in advanced equipment, but also in strict discipline and training. Put it on the Qin and Han armies, look at the strict military training regulations in Qin Jianli, as well as the training subjects such as "Keju", "Stone Throwing", and "Over-range" in the Han Dynasty, as well as the strict "proofreading" system, we will know how the Qin and Han armies that swept the world were trained. In the years of the late Qing Dynasty and the Republic of China, the severely decayed military system, childlike management and training created a "new army" that was abolished generation after generation, and the national shame that was deeply painful.
The phrase "the Qin army resisted the Eight-Nation Alliance" is of course a joke, but behind the joke, how many lessons of rise and fall, compared with the various backward and beaten scenes in modern history, make people laugh, on the contrary, there is the meaning of the alarm bell ringing for a long time.
References: "The Battle of the Qing Army and the Eight-Nation Alliance", "The Production Technology and Combat Performance of The Bow and Crossbow Cannons in the Pre-Qin and Han Dynasties", "A General History of Ancient Chinese Handicraft Technology", "The History of the Sino-Japanese War", "Military Thought of Chinese Dynasties", "Military Equipment of Chinese Dynasties", "Historical Manuscripts: Alternative Observations of Late China"