In the late Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, there were too many kings, which seemed to cause the kings to be a bit insufficient. Thus, after a king reimburses or surrenders, his title is transferred to another person. For example, the title of King Kang was first given to Wang Anjun, but after Wang Anjun surrendered to Li Hongzhang in Suzhou and was killed, Hong Xiuquan transferred the title of King Kang to Wang Haiyang. There is also the King of Feng. In 1862, Gu Longxian was made king of Feng, but surrendered to the Qing army the following year, so Hong Xiuquan transferred the title of King of Feng to another general, who was a man named Huang Penghou who would be described below.
Huang Penghou was a nameless young man in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and he had no popularity. However, in recent years, through investigation, his life deeds have been fully excavated. Many people know that Huang Wenjin, the king of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, is known as the Yellow Tiger and is a fierce general, while Huang Penghou and Huang Wenjin are the same sect and his nephew, and they are all from Dongxiang, Bobai County, Guangxi.
Huang Penghou, also known as Huang Minghou, Huang Fourteenth, Fourteenth Lang, Little Tiger (Huang Wenjin is a big tiger), born in 1836, his seniority is very deep, together with Huang Wenjin, with thousands of people and villagers to participate in the Jintian Uprising, but he was only 15 years old at the time, so he only fought with Huang Wenjin, few people know about him. However, he fought bravely, and after hundreds of battles, he gradually grew into a general of the Taiping Army. Especially in the middle and late Period of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, there was a lack of talent in the army, so Chen Yucheng, Li Xiucheng and other young and strong factions were promoted and reused by the ranks, and Huang Penghou was also promoted at that time.
On October 22, 1860, Ji Gong ascended to the Heavenly Dynasty Nine Gates Yulin Kai Dynasty Wang Zong Yan Tian'an (Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in addition to wang jue, set up yi, an, Fu, Yan, Yu, Hou sixth and other titles), only two ranks away from the title of king, on September 28, 1863, Feng Wang Gu Longxian surrendered, Hong Xiuquan transferred the title of Feng Wang to Huang Penghou, and Huang Penghou was finally crowned king.
However, when Huang Penghou was crowned king, it was already the time of the defeat of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, nine months later, Tianjing was attacked by the Xiang army, the young heavenly king fled to Huzhou, and Huang Penghou and Huang Wenjin were in Huzhou, they collected all the remnants of the army, escorted the young heavenly king to flee to Jiangxi, along the way, this army collapsed, Huang Wenjin and many other generals died in battle, it was difficult to escape to Jiangxi, and was attacked by the Qing army, the young heavenly king and the dry king were captured, Huang Penghou and Ji Wang's golden love and other feet smeared with oil and ran fast, only to escape, after several tosses, Finally put into the Kang Wang Wang Ocean Camp. But what he did not expect was that Wang Haiyang had the desire for power and selfishness, excluded dissidents, and found an excuse to kill King Ji Jin Ai first, and then killed Li Shixian, the attendant king.
Everyone knows that the King of Shi and the King of Ji are both old Guangxi, who are of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom lineage, while King Kang Wang Haiyang is of the Anhui clan, who is not of high status, and has followed Shi Dakai, who has betrayed the Heavenly King, so it is difficult to convince the people, and King Kang has a heavy army at this time, and if he wants to control all of them, he must clear those old Guangxi and let his Anhui department occupy the pit. Therefore, after a clean-up, the high-ranking Guangxi generals all died, and the remaining Guangxi Yankees, who were less threatening like Huang Penghou, were also trembling, and those soldiers of the two Cantonese nationalities were also very aggrieved.
Under such circumstances, Huang Penghou was shaken, and at the end of the fourth year of Tongzhi (1865), he secretly sent people to the Qing army camp in Longnan, Jiangxi Province, to ask for surrender. The Qing general Liu Dian was overjoyed, accepted his surrender, and arranged for him to lurk in response. Soon after, in the Battle of Jiaying Prefecture (present-day Meixian County) in Guangdong Province, he conspired with Ding Sun, a general who had already joined the Qing army, and he secretly informed the Qing general Xiao Yasi of Wang Haiyang's operational secrets in advance, and Ding Sun told the Qing army about Wang Haiyang's position and personality characteristics on the battlefield, which led to this battle, Wang Haiyang was sifted into a sieve by the Qing army with guns, and the main force of the Taiping Army lost most of the way.
Tomb of Huang Penghou
After the fall of the Taiping Army in Jiaying Prefecture, Huang Penghou led his troops to surrender, shaved their hair, and officially joined the Qing army, ending their status as an "underground party". At that time, some Qing generals wanted to kill him, but Zuo Zongtang cherished talents and specially presented to the imperial court "Please give Huang Penghou of Guicheng's Exoneration to the Garrison Title", suggesting that "forgive the crime and reward the garrison title", the imperial court decreed, in this way, Huang Penghou changed from the king of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom to the Qing Dynasty's Zhengwupin Garrison.
After Huang Penghou surrendered to the Qing army, he seriously became an official. In the thirteenth year of Tongzhi (1874), Japan used troops against Taiwan to compete for sovereignty over the eastern part of Taiwan. Huang Penghou followed Luo Dachun into Taiwan to help the indigenous people in the eastern region to develop. That is, to build roads in the mountains and appease the residents. During this period, he was attacked by some natives who disobeyed the imperial court, and Huang Penghou "repeatedly fought bloody battles and was injured all over the body", which persisted for eight years. In 1882, he was dispatched to Taizhou, Zhejiang Province, to suppress the uprising, and was given the title of deputy general for his meritorious service in "suppressing bandits". Finally, he was killed in a battle against bandits in the eleventh year of Guangxu (1885), leaving behind "hatred that cannot annihilate bandits and eliminate harm for the people." The last words of the last words, all 50 years old. The Qing court presented the martial arts general from Erpin.
Before Huang Penghou's death, because of his disgraceful past and some political reasons, he hid his identity a lot. In his epitaph, he does not mention his experience in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, but takes joining Zuo Zongtang's army as the starting point of his life. After his death, he was buried in Cicada Mountain, Lengruichong, Chongling, Dongxiang, Xuancheng, Anhui, and the tombstone was inscribed "The Tomb of the Emperor Qing Xianxuan's Martial Arts General Zhen PengHou Huang Gong", through which others could not know the first half of his life, and only thought that he was a Qing Dynasty official.
It was not until the 1980s that scholars investigated the tomb and life deeds of Wei Jun, the general of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, in Xuancheng, Anhui, which triggered many people's exploration and research on other Taiping army generals and their descendants in the Xuancheng area of Anhui. In 2018, Mr. Wang Milin, the choreographer of the special project team of the CCTV Science and Education Channel, personally went to Xuancheng to inspect Huang Penghou's tomb and related deeds, which made Huang Penghou's Experience of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom not buried, but fully presented.
Like Wei Jun and other Taiping generals, Huang Penghou also left many descendants in Xuancheng, Anhui (more than eight generations have been bred), and their ancestors could not return to their hometown in Guangxi because of the taiping heavenly kingdom, so they had to settle down here, and their descendants also regarded the foreign country as their hometown, and the sound of the hometown faded, and gradually became Anhui people.
Yong Xuan sighed that Wei Jun and Huang Penghou's generation, who abandoned the darkness in their early years and rose up, sacrificed their lives to oppose the Qing, and were worthy of being heroic and heroic, but they failed to end up begging from one end to the other, although they had helpless feelings, but they were great, they were ashamed of the loyal people, and it was because there was a story of Huang Penghou's hidden kingdom of heaven on the tombstone, and the descendants regarded Xuancheng as their hometown. After a hundred years, how can the lessons of the predecessors be forgotten?
References: Luo Ergang's History of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, Wang Milin's Research on the History and Culture of Xuancheng