The Qing Dynasty was the last feudal dynasty in China's history. It was founded in 1636 by Nurhaci, a Jurchen chief who lived in the northeast. At the beginning of its establishment, the regime was Houjin. After Nurhaci's death, his son Emperor Taiji took over the Later Jin dynasty and changed the name of the country to "Great Qing" in 1636.
In 1644, with the surrender of Wu Sangui, the Ming general stationed at Shanhaiguan, the regent of the Qing Dynasty, Dolgun, took advantage of the situation to lead the Qing troops into the customs, and after more than 20 years, he successively pacified the regimes of Dashun, Daxi, and Nanming, and then the Kangxi Emperor suppressed the Rebellion of San Fan, unified Taiwan, and finally completed the national unification.
It can be said that the Qing Dynasty in its heyday laid the foundation for China's territory, and also laid the foundation for Chinese large country. But it is such a powerful dynasty, after passing on twelve emperors and ruling the land of China for 296 years, it will eventually collapse.
On February 12, 1912, puyi, the last emperor in the history of the Qing Dynasty and the last emperor since Qin Shi Huang founded the emperor system, issued an abdication edict in the Forbidden City, and the Qing Dynasty fell.
"Today, the psychology of the whole people is mostly inclined to the republican system, the people's hearts are desired, the mandate of heaven can be known, the whole people look forward to a peaceful solution, if they rebel against the hearts of the majority of the people, they will tolerate the honor of a nation, the likes and dislikes of the people, and use the appearance of the general trend, the internal examination of public opinion, and the special lead of the emperor to make the ruling power of the whole country public, to designate the republican constitutional state system, to comfort the heart of chaos and hope for governance in the sea, and to the righteousness of the ancient holy world..."
The Qing Dynasty collapsed, but when the Qing Dynasty fell, there were about a million Qing troops stationed in tens of millions of square kilometers of land, and where did these millions of Qing troops go? Among the millions of Qing troops, they can be roughly divided into three categories: eight banner soldiers, green battalion soldiers and recruits.
Let's start with the Eight Banners
The Eight Banner Soldiers were the ace army that swept through the Central Plains Dynasty in the early Qing Dynasty, and were an iron-blooded army built by the Qing Taizu Nurhaci on the Jurchen Niulu system. When the Qing Dynasty entered the Central Plains, the number of Eight Banner soldiers reached 200,000. They can fight well and dare to fight. It can be said that without the Eight Banner Soldiers, there would be no later qing dynasty to unify China.
However, with the unification of the Qing Dynasty, these Eight Banner Soldiers were treated generously, and they only knew how to eat, drink and have fun all day, and they had long lost their domineering spirit of swallowing mountains and rivers, and their combat effectiveness declined rapidly. Until the end of the Qing Dynasty, the Eight Banners had little combat effectiveness. After the fall of the Qing Dynasty, due to the loss of the original preferential treatment, most of the Eight Banner Soldiers were poor and eventually disappeared into the long river of history.
Let's talk about the Green Battalion
The Green Battalion was one of the standing soldiers of the Qing Dynasty. In the early years of Shunzhi, it was composed of the ming army and other Han soldiers, with the battalion as the basic unit, and the green flag as the symbol, so it was called the green flag soldier. In the early period of the Xianfeng Emperor's reign, there were about 600,000 green battalion soldiers.
In the late Qing Dynasty, the Green Battalion became increasingly corrupt and its combat effectiveness declined, and it was finally reorganized into a patrol battalion. After the establishment of the Qing Army at the end of the Qing Dynasty, the Green Battalion soldiers survived in name only. In the early years of the Republic of China, hundreds of thousands of Green Battalion soldiers were reorganized into local security forces of a police nature.
Finally, the Forces nouvelles
In the late Qing Dynasty, due to the inability of the Eight Banners and the Green Battalion, in order to cope with the increasingly severe situation, the Qing court ordered the governor of Huguang, Zhang Zhidong, the directly subordinate viceroy Nie Shicheng, and The Wen chu Dao Yuan Shikai to organize a new type of army. This newly recruited army, "learning foreign guns and learning Western law", completely uses the Western-style military system and equipment, and is called the new army in history, and the full name is "new army".
After more than ten years of development, before the outbreak of the Xinhai Revolution, the Qing Dynasty trained a total of sixteen towns and sixteen mixed associations of the New Army, with a total number of about 200,000 people.
After the outbreak of the Wuchang Uprising, new armies in Shaanxi, Hunan, Jiangxi, Anhui, Jiangsu and other provinces revolted one after another and broke away from the control of the Qing Dynasty. After the establishment of the National Government, these new armies were transformed into armies under the new government.
However, when consulting the historical data, it was found that there was another Qing army that did not disappear after the fall of the Qing Dynasty, but still held the camp, and this was a Qing army stationed in Kowloon, Hong Kong.
After the fall of the Qing Dynasty, the situation of this army can be described as very embarrassing. Some of the soldiers chose to return to their inland hometowns, while the rest remained in the Kowloon Walled City. According to the "Sino-British Exhibition and Expansion of Hong Kong Boundary Sites" agreement, Chinese officials and soldiers can be stationed in Kowloon City.
Seeing the collapse of the Qing Dynasty and the weakness of the Republic of China government, the British Empire wanted to annex this place, but it was met with stubborn resistance from the Qing army stationed here, and it did not succeed in the end. After defeating the British army, the Kowloon Walled City became an extra-legal place that was not controlled by all parties, and it also hid dirt and grime, and the crime rate was also high.
It was not until 1984 that China and the United Kingdom signed the Sino-British Joint Declaration to deal with the Hong Kong issue, and the two sides decided to jointly demolish the Kowloon Walled City. With the signing of the agreement, the last army of the Qing Dynasty, which originally lived here, was finally disbanded.
[Reference: Draft History of the Qing Dynasty]