The Qing Dynasty had a very serious crisis in 1875, and in the southeast coastal area, Japan, which had just undergone reform, could not wait to invade Taiwan. In the northwest, Agubai led an army to attack the north and south of the Tianshan Mountains, and most importantly, Russia and Britain supported them. At this time, Tsarist Russia also divided 440,000 square kilometers of Land in China through the "Sino-Russian Survey and Division of the Northwest Boundary", so the external crisis of the Qing Dynasty at that time was very serious.
In the history of our country, many people have struggled here for this part of Xinjiang. There are still many dynasties, because this land has been debated many times, and the imperial court of the Eastern Han Dynasty in China has proposed to throw away this land, and even some people let them throw away the liang land in Hexi. Those who agreed to give up, led by Li Hongzhang, believed that the distance from Xinjiang to the Central Plains was too far, and the land there was not very fertile, and it was really not worth paying so much to keep such a place, plus at that time, Xinjiang and Tsarist Russia and Britain belonged to places adjacent to India, which was difficult to defend.
If that's the case, it would be better to spend the money spent in Xinjiang to strengthen defenses along the Southeast Asian coast. And the person who supports the preservation of Xinjiang is Zuo Zongtang. Zuo Zongtang believes that holding the coastal areas is as important as defending Xinjiang, if it cannot defend Xinjiang, then Mongolia will have to give up, and Shaanxi, Shanxi and other places are the same, Zuo Zongtang also said that Xinjiang has a lot of products, not li Hongzhang thought, there is nothing.
As for Li Hongzhang's proposal to invest the money spent in Xinjiang in the coastal areas, Zuo Zongtang said that all kinds of military equipment in the coastal areas have been almost prepared, and now the main thing is military training, so the money needed is not much. Zuo Zongtang put forward a series of reasons similar to those put forward by the Eastern Han Dynasty a thousand years ago, when people who did not agree to abandon Xinjiang said that if Liangzhou was abandoned, then the guanzhong plain area in central Shaanxi and the western part of Shaanxi would become the front line of the war.
Later, the rulers of the Qing Dynasty also realized this problem, so they sent Zuo Zongtang as the minister of Chincha, gave him 50 million taels of silver, and asked him to keep Xinjiang, the Qing Dynasty from 1876 to 1880, every year need to spend about 15% of the finances on the recovery of Xinjiang, now here is China's cornucopia.