The gap between the situation at the end of the Ming Dynasty and the last year of the Qing Dynasty is actually very large, from the perspective of the social environment factors faced by the two dynasties, the threat factors of the surrounding enemies, etc., the environment of the Qing Dynasty is actually more fortunate than the Ming Dynasty, so there will be a Ming Dynasty that cannot issue military salaries, the Chongzhen Emperor has worked hard for more than ten years, he has lived more miserable than the ordinary people, but he still has not been able to save the country, and the Qing Dynasty is different, on the one hand, the Manchurian nobles of the Qing Dynasty led by Cixi still live an extravagant and lavish life. On the one hand, there is still money to train a new type of army.
The decadence of the Ming army
We all just know that the Qing Dynasty army was mentally and physically weak because of its perennial opium consumption, but the mental state of the Ming Dynasty army at that time when facing the Post-Jin Eight Banner Army was actually worse than the state after opium smoking, and the Ming Dynasty was constantly facing the threat of ethnic minority armies from the north and northeast from the middle and late period.
The resurgence of the Mongols and the rise of the Jurchens in the northeast region have become the heart of the Ming Emperor, at that time the Ming Dynasty was relatively stable internally, so it can concentrate on dealing with foreign invasions, this war against the Mongols has not stopped since the change of Tumu Fort, the most outrageous thing is actually the Jiajing Emperor, the Mongol army actually attacked the surrounding suburbs of the capital, which is simply an insult to the Ming Dynasty's armed forces.
Therefore, since the Jiajing Emperor, the Ming Dynasty had to re-strengthen its armaments, because the Ming Government at that time has always pursued a policy of non-peace and intransigence, there is only one typing for foreign enemies and invasions, whose fist is hard is the true truth, even if it cannot win, it will not flinch, so in the border provinces of the Ming Dynasty, the emperor arranged many armies according to the willpower of the people and ministers, and this army from Gansu Province to today's Liaodong region is known as the "elite of the nine sides".
At the beginning of the establishment of the Nine-Sided Elite, the combat effectiveness was very strong, and it repelled the attacks from the steppe Mongols many times, so that the Mongols were defeated many times without results, and by the middle of the Ming Dynasty Wanli Emperor, the overall number of this Nine-Sided Elite soldier once reached the scale of 900,000 people, of which 300,000 were distributed in the Capital city area, and 200,000 people were garrisoned in the Liaodong region to control Korea and the Jurchens and the former Duoyan Sanwei. The rest were local soldiers in the northwest against Tubo and Uszang.
The Ming Dynasty's peculiar inland and frontier troops
The number of cities and troops in the border provinces of the Ming Dynasty was actually very large, and sometimes the main function of a city was military combat, such as "Xuanfu City" and "Datong City" in Shanxi; such as "Wuwei" and "Jiuquan" in Gansu; and "Lanzhou" and "Xingqingfu" in Ningxia Wei, which were military cities in border fortresses, and soldiers lived in these cities and pools to play a lot of roles, and almost half of the time spent in a month was used for military training.
The rest of the time will allow the soldiers to be freely distributed, these soldiers have basically settled here, and the women of the local people are married, their hearts are also more responsible, for the protection of this land will be treated as if to protect their own homeland, so when there is no need for military training, these soldiers are back to their homes to farm, cultivate the land, and then rely on their ancestral craftsmanship to do some small business, thus forming a strange "military city scenery" on the frontier of the Ming Dynasty.
In fact, there were very few garrisons in the interior of the Ming Dynasty, first of all, adhering to the tradition of "imperial power does not go to the countryside", the garrisons of the imperial court were mainly concentrated in the county seat, and the villages under the county town were basically managed through the negotiation of some retired old officials and landlords, collecting taxes on their behalf, which not only facilitated the imperial court, saved manpower, but also facilitated the low-level officials to get benefits from it. The army stationed in the county town is generally about a few hundred people, and in some slightly larger county towns, it will reach the size of a thousand people, and it is only a few thousand people in such an important town as the provincial capital.
The number of hundreds and thousands of garrisons and frontier provinces in this way is incomparable, because the internal provinces of the Ming Dynasty were relatively stable and peaceful from beginning to end, in fact, when the ming dynasty fell to the end of the country, the places in the jiangnan region that did not suffer from war were still a prosperous scene, and the situation in the north was in sharp contrast.
The last year of the Ming Dynasty, the most chaotic
In the chongzhen era of the last emperor of the Ming Dynasty, the Ming Dynasty had already entered the countdown to the demise of the country, and at that time, the Ming Dynasty troops at that time had a sharp reduction of more than 100,000 combatants after a fierce battle with Houjin, so the million elites from the former nine sides were only about 800,000, and they were also responsible for defending the defensive line from Houjin to the western mongolian region, which put a lot of pressure on the frontier soldiers. Moreover, at this time, the elite of the Nine Sides of the Ming Dynasty was not as good as before.
The contradiction between the Liaodong army and the Liaoxi army was very deep, and sometimes the Liaodong soldiers had already gone forward to fight desperately, but the soldiers in the western Liaoning were hiding behind under the leadership of their own generals to watch a good show, and when it came to the battle, the fastest to escape were often Zu Dashou and Wu Sangui, the warlords of western Liaoning. Such soldiers could not fight at all, and in the long run, the gap between the armies became deeper and deeper, so in the late Ming Dynasty, no soldier dared to fight with the Houjin soldiers, in fact, they were afraid of friendly troops watching the drama and suddenly fleeing.
The various natural disasters in the local areas were also continuous, the finances of the Ming Dynasty government had actually collapsed long ago, and the wealth of the entire society was concentrated in the hands of a small number of officials and landlords, these people did not have a little patriotic feeling in their hearts, and when the country was in crisis, they all had to make a lot of money, and the Chongzhen Emperor was so poor that he ran out of his treasury, so he almost sold the gold and silver utensils in the imperial palace, so when Li Zicheng entered the capital later, he sighed that "the king is not very dark."
In the dark, the Ming Dynasty's group of scholars and doctors, who had painstakingly accumulated tens of millions of family wealth, and finally became the wedding dress of Li Zicheng and the Manchurians, what could they get? Many times I can't figure out how the Ming Dynasty actually perished, and the reason why the dynasties perished was because the last few emperors were faint, but Chongzhen was trying to rule! It was not impossible to save Daming, but it was replaced by a small Jurchen country with a population of less than 100,000 outside Guanwai, becoming the tragedy of Han civilization.
The actual situation of the army at the end of the Qing Dynasty
The composition of the army at the end of the Qing Dynasty can be simply divided into the elite eight banners of Manchuria and the eight banners of the Han people organized by the eight flags system, and the Mongolian eight banners located in the middle of the two, the eight flags system was very strong in combat in the early days of the Qing Dynasty, basically able to crush the Ming Dynasty army with more than 10,000 people, and many local troops that suppressed the peasant rebel army were terrified and scattered after fighting with the eight flag army, thinking that there was no way to deal with the eight flag army.
However, the combat effectiveness of this unit had already declined a lot by the time of the Kangxi Emperor's old age, and when they came out of the old forest in the northeast, they were very powerful, but after the second and third generations of pampering and treating them well, they were not even as good as the Han army, from suppressing the invincible four parties to only bullying and bullying the common people, this was the common situation of the elite of the Eight Banners at that time, so when the Opium War broke out, the Daoguang Emperor ordered the local Sichuan soldiers and Guangxi wolf soldiers to rush, and the Eight Banners at that time were really abolished.
By the second Opium War, the composition and actual power of the Qing Army had been in the hands of the Han Dynasty, Zeng Guofan, a poor scholar, turned out to be a poor scholar, single-handedly founded the Xiang Army to quell the rebellion of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom in the south, and later began to form the Huai Army and various local troops again, although the financial system at the end of the Qing Dynasty was not good, but it had not yet reached the point of complete collapse at the end of the Ming Dynasty, and the training of the new army of the Qing Dynasty actually came from the uneasiness of the Manchurian nobles.
Because they saw the strength of the Xiang Army, the Chu Army, the Huai Army, and the Sichuan Army, and knew that the fall of the Qing Dynasty was nothing more than a show of hands, and the biggest enemy at that time was the Westerners, so Zeng Zuo Hu Li did not usurp the throne. However, Cixi and these people were still afraid in their hearts, so they needed to train a new type of army to ensure their own safety, hoping to collect military power into the hands of their own Eight Banners, this new type of army was much better than other armies, and the money was because the Qing Dynasty maintained its rule over most parts of the country, and the army equipment could be enhanced by increasing taxes.
summary
To sum up, the last years of the Ming Dynasty and the last years of the Qing Dynasty faced a situation of no hierarchy at all, zhang Juzheng's ten-year reform at the end of the Ming Dynasty had long been consumed by the Wanli Emperor's good and great achievements, and it was difficult for the Later Taichang, Tianqi and Chongzhen to make the Ming Dynasty rise again, without the determination and ability to reform, while the Qing Dynasty was different, at the time of the Second Opium War, it was awakened by the Westerners, and the timely implementation of the 30-year-long foreign affairs campaign and various innovations made the training army in the later period have sufficient financial support.