At the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, it was a chaotic world without compromise. Famine, plague, heavy taxes, wars and massacres have brought deep suffering to the people. According to demographers, the total number of people who died in various natural and man-made disasters in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties was about 40 million. And the "Ten Days of Yangzhou" is a chaotic scene in that chaotic world.
First, the "Ten Days of Yangzhou" and the little doubts it raises
In 1644, the Qing Dynasty army broke through Shanhaiguan and officially launched the war to enter the Central Plains. The following year, the Qing army arrived in Yangzhou and attacked the city. Shi Kefa, a Ming general who guarded the city, led the army and people to stubbornly resist, causing the Qing army to suffer heavy losses, and after the city was destroyed, Shi Kefa preferred to die rather than surrender, angering the Qing general Duoduo. Duo Duo decided to slaughter the city to establish his power, and subsequently, the Qing dynasty army slaughtered civilians in Yangzhou for ten days, and countless civilians were brutally killed. This incident also became one of the stains that the Qing Dynasty could not erase, and later generations called it "Yangzhou Ten Days".
However, the book ban in the heyday of the Qing Dynasty was very strict, and almost all the books that recorded the atrocities of the early Qing Dynasty were listed as banned books, prohibiting private printing and dissemination. Therefore, in the first and middle periods of the Qing Dynasty, few people in China knew about the existence of the "Ten Days of Yangzhou". It was not until the end of the Qing Dynasty that a book called "Ten Diaries of Yangzhou" was discovered in Japan and brought back to China by revolutionaries to encourage the people to overthrow the Qing Dynasty, which made many people in China know the "Ten Days of Yangzhou".
The Ten Diaries of Yangzhou was written by Shi Kefa's generals and was secretly preserved by survivors of the massacre. At the height of the Qing Dynasty, such books that "slandered the imperial court" were strictly banned, and the book naturally could not be circulated in China, but it was brought to neighboring Japan by anti-Qing people, and eventually circulated in Japan. The book records many details of the Qing army burning and looting in yangzhou in that year, and also tells us that Yangzhou killed a total of 800,000 civilians.
But this figure is very suspicious: the population size of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties was very limited, when the entire Yangzhou capital was only about 800,000 people, and the massacres of the Qing army were limited to the city of Yangzhou (the relationship between Yangzhou City and Yangzhou Capital, similar to the relationship between today's "Zhengzhou City" and "Zhengzhou Area"), so how could the Qing army kill 800,000 people?
Second, at the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, only the Qing army was doing evil?
When facing the history of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, out of love for their own nationality (Han nationality), many people paid great attention to the crimes of the Qing army and reprimanded them bitterly, but paid little attention to whether the "anti-Qing armed forces" in the same period loved the people. Everyone praised Zheng Chenggong, saying that he was loyal to the Ming Dynasty and was an anti-Qing righteous soldier, but Zheng Chenggong's army slaughtered civilians, looted property, and razed many villages and towns to the ground in Fujian province, but few people paid attention to this, and this history is still preserved in European Catholic literature in black and white, which was recorded by Li Sheng, a missionary who had direct contact with Zheng's army. Not only that, the "Chaozhou Chronicle" also records that after Zheng Chenggong's army conquered Guangdong Outing Village, it killed more than 60,000 civilians...
Historians of the last century seem to be particularly fond of praising the peasant uprising, and naturally do not hesitate to praise peasant leaders such as Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. However, there is a historical document called "The Chronicle of Yu Change" that clearly records that Li Zicheng and Zhang Xianzhong's men killed and set fire to people in Henan, and did all kinds of evil: Li Zicheng's army wantonly killed the people in Chenzhou, Xuzhou, Guide, and other places, and Zhang Xianzhong's army indiscriminately killed innocents in Xinyang, Shangcheng, and other places, killing only one survivor left in Shangcheng...
Now back to the point, back to Yangzhou in the early years of the Qing Dynasty. Since it is unlikely that the Qing army will kill 800,000 people in a few days, and since those armed forces that are enemies of the Qing army are equally inferior, how did the figure of "800,000" come from? Could it be that during the same period, forces other than the Qing army killed the people in the Yangzhou area, and the number of people they killed and the people killed by the Qing army added up to 800,000?
Third, the information revealed by another banned book of the Qing Dynasty
In fact, for the above questions, the historical notes "Ming Ji Nanluo" have already told us the answer. Because there are many words in the "Ming Dynasty Nanluo" condemning the Qing Dynasty and recording how the Qing army harmed the people, this book could not be circulated in the heyday of the Qing Dynasty. It was not until the middle and late Qing Dynasty, when the literary prohibition was relatively relaxed, that the book was able to reappear in the sky. Such a book, which is very unfavorable to the Qing Dynasty, cannot be used to smear the Qing rulers, so its record is more credible.
There is such a record in the "Ming Ji Nanluo": "Yangzhou was slaughtered twice by Gao Jie at the beginning, and the killing was not counted. and the king of Yu, and the slaughter. In total, there were 800,000 people before and after killing. "Yes, before the Qing Dynasty army occupied Yangzhou, Gao Jie, a Ming general, had already killed many people on the outskirts of Yangzhou, resulting in the death of many people. The survivors under Gao Jie's sword took refuge in the city of Yangzhou, but were ordered to slaughter the city by the Qing general (Duo Duo, Prince of Yu). The civilians killed by Gao Jie and the civilians killed by the Qing army added up to 800,000, not the 800,000 people unilaterally killed by the Qing army, although the Qing army bore the greatest responsibility for the tragedy in Yangzhou.
Gao Jie, one of the four towns of the Southern Ming Dynasty, was originally a general of Li Zicheng, who later surrendered to the Ming Dynasty and became a general of the Ming Dynasty. After the Chongzhen Emperor hanged himself, he supported Zhu Yousong as Emperor of the Ming Dynasty. For such a person, the Ming Dynasty Nanluo records that his troops from Xuzhou, to Siyang, and then to Yangzhou, "killing people accumulate corpses, and fornication insults young girls." ”
epilogue:
At the end of the Ming Dynasty and the beginning of the Qing Dynasty, whether it was the Qing army, the Ming army, or the peasant rebel army, they all killed the people indiscriminately and brought deep suffering to the people. Bloodshed and brutality are not peculiar to the so-called "barbarians", but are the dark corners of the history of nations and peoples. Therefore, in the face of the history of the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, we should take out the spirit of Hugo to explore "humanitarianism" and pursue "humanitarianism".