Yesterday, Zongheng also discussed a problem with a friend, that is, the police system was created by Yuan Shikai during the New Deal period at the end of the Qing Dynasty, that is to say, there was no police at all during the Qing Dynasty.
So the question arises, in ancient societies without police, how to maintain local law and order? The answer is catch fast!
The Qing Dynasty stationed troops such as the Eight Banners and the Green Camp in the localities, but the army did not care about local administration, so the local governors would recruit catchers to help them govern the localities.
The duties of catching fast are limited, mainly to maintain law and order, such as hunting down theft and other acts, but the arrest of fast is not a government organization, they are subordinate to the government that recruited them, and the government also said that the layoffs were made when they were not needed.
Usually, local officials are transferred in three years, and as a result, officials are transferred away, but the local teams do not move, and many catchers operate their own forces in the local areas, and over time they become land snakes.
What was the prevalence of prostitutes in the late Qing Dynasty?
Prostitution is a very old social phenomenon, in a long period of time is a difficult problem of governance, the early Qing Dynasty has always adopted the strategy of "heavy rules and regulations" to deal with the problem of prostitutes, one of the interesting phenomena is that officials are not allowed to prostitute, in the "Great Qing Laws" stipulate that if officials prostitute, they will be beaten with sixty sticks.
In the "Yongzheng Dynasty", when Li Wei was the inspector of Jiangsu, he raised a Qinglou woman, and Yongzheng almost gave him 80 large plates after he knew it, which scared Li Wei to the point of not guarding the house, which shows that the management of prostitutes in the early Qing Dynasty was still very strict, and brothels could be opened, but officials could not go.
However, with the spread of prostitution, by the middle and late Qing Dynasty, it had developed to the point of irreversible and uncontrollable, and in the late Qing Dynasty after the collapse of the traditional small-scale peasant economy, prostitution had reached its peak, and in some areas, "the only means for people to make a living is the money earned by women in this way." Some villages don't even have a clean woman."
Coupled with the seriousness of the feudal society's idea of son preference, the proportion of men and women is seriously imbalanced, taking the Zhejiang region as an example, the difficult ratio reaches 194:100, almost to the situation of two men and one woman, a large number of men can not find a spouse after adulthood, so in order to meet the physiological pursuit, it also objectively accelerates the development of the prostitution industry.
As the saying goes, it is better to block than to loosen, in such a situation, in the late Qing Dynasty, the government took measures to lift the ban on prostitutes and demarcated the location of business, such as the Bada Hutong in Beijing.
Of course, with the management ability of the late Qing Dynasty, it was absolutely impossible to control prostitutes, as people at that time said, "For two thousand years, prostitutes have been a door, and the lords and courtiers have been known for a long time, and they cannot be forbidden, and they are also monks and Taoist temples, and they are still all over Kyushu, and they have not tried to be a good way to resettle idle people."
Why did gambling prevail in the late Qing Dynasty?
To say that the most developed place for gambling in the late Qing Dynasty, when Guangdong and the Qing Dynasty implemented the policy of sea ban, only allowing Guangzhou to trade, which led to Guangdong's economy being more developed than other provinces.
At the same time, the economic development is also the common development of criminal and evil forces and gambling culture, Liang Qichao described Guangdong in the late Qing Dynasty as "the blazing wind of theft in Guangdong, its source is actually from the gambling wind", the two become complementary to each other.
When the Qing government was short of money, it opened gambling widely, and then extracted taxes from it, and when the Taiping Period began to strictly prohibit gambling, it is interesting to say that in 1875, Guangdong Inspector Zhang Zhaodong strictly banned Gambling in Guangdong, and as a result, gamblers ran to Macau, thus achieving Macau's gaming industry.
Eventually, it led to a serious outflow of gambling taxes in Guangdong, and later Zhang Zhidong and Li Hongzhang both served as governors of Liangguang, and the measures they took were basically the same, that is, to liberalize gambling and then collect taxes to legalize gambling.
One of the most popular gambling situations in Guangdong is the "Min surname", which is aimed at the surname of the scientific examiner, and the number of winners and loses is determined according to the number of guesses. It can be seen that in the late Qing Dynasty, Gamblers in Guangdong could play a lot.
The war over opium in the late Qing Dynasty
Opium drugs have always been a tumor in society, and the harm to society is particularly huge, and the Qing government has always adopted a zero-tolerance attitude towards opium in the early days, because the Qing Dynasty implemented a policy of sea ban, and the Western powers have always hoped to import their goods into China, and finally chose opium as a thing.
At the beginning, opium was popular among the dignitaries and nobles, and then gradually became popular, and the high cost caused the families of opium-addicted people to be destroyed, causing young and middle-aged people to lose their labor, and the impact was extremely bad.
However, the huge profits of the trade between the opium trade allowed all parties to profit from it, so the scale of opium smuggling became larger and larger, and the number of smuggled opium was tenfold from 1821 to 1838.
The influx of a large number of smuggled opium caused great harm to the society of the late Qing Dynasty, countless families went bankrupt due to opium consumption, after the Opium War, the opium trade trade was gradually legalized, in order to cope with this phenomenon, the ministers who advocated smoking ban later requested the Qing court to plant opium, from the Second Opium War, the country began to promote the cultivation of opium on a large scale, after more than twenty years of promotion, in 1882 China's opium was completely self-sufficient, and even exported to foreign countries.
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In the chaotic social order of the late Qing Dynasty, in the absence of a police system, the phenomenon of pornography, gambling and drugs repeatedly reached new historical heights, playing new tricks, and falling into length, just talk about so much!