On July 19, 1864, outside Tianjing City, the capital of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, shouts of killing shook the sky. At noon, with Zeng Guoquan's siege order, the city wall at the Taiping Gate was blown open about 20 zhang. The red-eyed Hunan army finally saw the opportunity and swung into the city like a tidal wave with their weapons.
The Taiping army defending the city could no longer block the attack of the Hunan army, and the battle lasted until the evening, when the nine gates of Tianjing were broken and Tianjing fell. According to Zeng Guofan's aide Zhao Liewen in "The Diary of Being Able to Live Quietly", "Nine out of ten dead bodies along the street are old people. His young children under the age of two or three were also killed as a play, and crawled on the road. There is no one among women under the age of forty, and none of the old people are injured, or more than ten knives, dozens of knives ......"
In this massacre, the survivors said, "Last night, the princes and the people of Jinshu, and the people of Jiangning died." As soon as the city was broken, people were killed, and houses were burned, and the children's jade silk was swept into the Hunan army, and Jinling was forever poor. To this day, my father is still deeply resentful. ”
From then on, people still called Zeng Guofan with words such as "Zeng shaved his head" and "Zeng butcher", and insulted him for leading the Hunan army to attack Nanjing. The question is, why did the Hunan army slaughter the city? In addition to venting their hatred, they also had an important purpose, to find out Hong Xiuquan's whereabouts.
However, when the Hunan army occupied Nanjing for more than ten days, Zeng Guofan still failed to get Hong Xiuquan's whereabouts. It was not until July 30 that Xiong Dengwu, the commander-in-chief of the Hunan Army, received a whistleblower from a palace maid of the Heavenly King's Mansion that Hong Xiuquan had died more than ten days ago, and the cause of death was unknown.
Under the leadership of this palace maid, the Xiang army finally found Hong Xiuquan's body in an underground in the main hall of the Heavenly King's Mansion. Unlike the traditional use of coffins for burial, Hong Xiuquan was wrapped in more than a dozen layers of thick cloth after his death. The Hunan army tore off the thick cloth on Hong Xiuquan's body and moved it to Yuhuatai for Zeng Guofan to examine.
Zeng Guofan never dreamed that his biggest opponent would meet him in such a way, and he also recorded this scene in his diary, "The beard is slightly white, the head is bald and hairless, the left arm and left arm still have flesh, and the whole body is wrapped in a yellow satin embroidered dragon robe." ”
To crush Hong Xiuquan's bones and scatter ashes, this is Zeng Guofan's biggest idea. Zeng Guofan thought of a method, "Kill the corpse, raise the fire and burn it!" Hong Xiuquan was chopped into meat sauce, then mixed with gunpowder, loaded with cannonballs, and then fired.
This time, Hong Xiuquan is all "in heaven". It's just that the way of going to heaven is a little special, and it will be wiped out in ashes, and there will be no return.