Ai Xin Jue Luo Hongli (25 September 1711 – 7 February 1799), the sixth emperor of the Qing Dynasty and the fourth emperor after the capital of Beijing, the era name "Qianlong", means "Heavenly Dao Changlong".
He was solemn and elegant in his life, good at riding and shooting, his pen and ink handwriting has also been all over the country, there are many magical stories in his life, he inherited the throne when he was 25 years old, it was in his youth, Kangxi was eight years old, not only could not hold power at the beginning, but also the entire childhood was bound by those red tape, Yongzheng was in his 40s and took the throne.
The Qianlong Emperor's throne was also relatively straightforward, did not experience the bloody rain of the Nine Kings of Yongzheng, that is, after the throne, he and his brothers also got along more harmoniously, and the most enviable thing is probably his unparalleled health, he is one of the longest-lived emperors in Chinese history, living to the age of 88.
There are many different legends about Qianlong's life, and the history books have also vaguely mentioned that Qianlong is actually a child of the Han people, in fact, he is the son of a family surnamed Chen in Haining, Zhejiang, this surname Chen family in the early years many people in the imperial court are extremely popular subjects, there was a year when the Yongzheng family and the Chen family had children at about the same time, Yongzheng listened to it very happily, let the Chen family take the child to see, it took a long time to be sent back, the Chen family found that the child was dropped, not their own family, and it was a boy. Turned into a girl, the Chen family was of course shocked, but did not dare to speak up, saying that it was full of doors.
Later, when the Yongzheng Emperor took the throne, he immediately promoted the Chen family to an important official position, so there is a saying that qianlong always went down to Jiangnan after becoming emperor, and one of the purposes was to inquire about his own lineage.
Some people count that Qianlong reigned for 60 years or near or far or near out of the tour, there are about 150 times, the most well-known of which is six times down the Jiangnan, each time going out is time-consuming and labor-intensive, the last two times down the Jiangnan, the Qianlong Emperor has more than 70 years, so every time the year before the jiangnan must send officials to survey the route, build bridges and pave roads, and build the palace Emperor to take the road to be flat and straight, not to bend and bend.
These local officials took the opportunity to extort the people along the way, demolished houses and flattened ancestral graves if they disobeyed slightly, and also found excuses to arrest innocent people in prison.
There were more than 2,000 princes and ministers who followed the emperor, more than 2,000 concubines and officials, more than 1,000 large boats on the waterway, 6,000 horses requisitioned on land, 400 horse-drawn carriages, 800 camels, 3,600 conscripted porters, and other servants up to 10,000 people.
Within 30 miles of the road, local officials all put on official clothes to welcome the driver, all gentlemen, readers, and ordinary people were given to line up and kneel on the spot, and the Qianlong Emperor felt that only in this way could he show his grand style, and those local officials, rich businessmen, in order to pat the emperor's ass, were hollow minds.
Arrange dragon boat lighthouses in the river, build color tents on the shore, Yangzhou, Suzhou, Hangzhou and other local shops and houses that the emperor's team will pass through are all painted, officials in Zhenjiang outside the city with red and green silk forging decorated into a huge peach, more than ten miles away can be seen, the emperor's dragon boat arrived, suddenly fireworks burst, the giant peach cracked, there was a theater in the peach, there were hundreds of actors acting.
Once the Qianlong Emperor stopped at Dahongyuan in Yangzhou, he boasted, "Oh, this scenery is good, very similar to the Spring Yin of Qiongdao in the South China Sea of Beijing, there is only one trumpet tower, yangzhou officials listened to the secretly bought the eunuchs, got the drawings of the lama tower, immediately built construction, overnight, built a lama white pagoda.
Needless to say, these officials and rich merchants were all rewarded by the emperor, and the Qianlong Emperor always went to the south of the Jiangnan to inspect one of the purposes of the water conservancy project, and when he inspected the Huai River, he found that the original earth embankment was not safe, so he ordered the Tianzhu Yulin Stone Bank, and personally spent the drawings, and there was a place closed in the plan proposed in the song, which coincided with him, and the emperor was very happy and immediately promoted him to an official.
When touring the south, he had to pass through the three provinces of Shandong, Jiangsu, and Zhejiang, and the Qianlong Emperor repeatedly ordered the reduction of taxes in these three places, and he also visited farmland, weaving machine rooms, and encouraging nongsang, etc., all of which reflected the Qianlong Emperor's consistent policy of attaching importance to the development of agriculture.
The southern tour passed through the cemeteries and ancestral halls of some celebrities, such as Yue Fei, Han Shizhong, Fang Xiaoru, Yu Qian, etc. The Qianlong Emperor always had to send officials to sacrifice, and he himself also attended the sacrifice of the Zhou Gong Temple, the Confucius Temple and the Ming Taizu Mausoleum in Yuling.
There were many people studying in the Jiangnan region, and the Qianlong Emperor announced that the quota of officials and students in the localities would be increased, and more than 600 people would be added to the qualifications of the first rank, and for the retired old ministers who lived along the way, the Qianlong Emperor gave special preferential treatment and courtesy, and every time they came to greet them, these people had to be promoted to a first-level official, and the Qianlong Emperor used this method to win people's hearts and minds and win over Han scholars and officials.
Some historians believe that the Qianlong Emperor went to Jiangnan six times, the purpose was to travel south by xingxing, because Qianlong himself was a prince of taiping, accustomed to an arrogant life, at that time Jiangning, Yangzhou, Suzhou, Hangzhou, etc., the city was quite prosperous, the economy was also very developed, and the beautiful scenery of Jiangnan was in the world, beautiful, and the Qianlong Emperor was of course willing to go to this place to play.
Judging from the main activities of Qianlong's southern tour, his social positive significance is still very great, but as just said, the expenditure spent on each southern tour is too large, and the total expenditure of six times is more than 20 million taels, which is so expensive, so long that it uses manpower and material resources, and has created a new historical record.
Among them, it is inevitable that there will be a precursor to political corruption, and this kind of thing has been seen by some upright ministers, and there is a waiter who says that His Majesty is touring the south, and the people are suffering and complaining! When the Qianlong Emperor saw it, he was particularly angry and angrily asked, "When you say that the people are suffering, then what do you say that people are suffering, that is complaining, then you specifically point out who has complaints?" Of course, this waiter certainly did not dare to respond.
There was also a university scholar Chen Jinyi who opposed the Qianlong Emperor's tour of Huzhou, and the Qianlong Emperor said, "Go to Huzhou, not to play, but to go there to see the mulberry breeding silkworms, this Chen Scholar is very sad to say that the emperor goes back to Huzhou this time, the next time there will be no silkworm mulberry in Huzhou, the vitality of the common people cannot be restored for generations, ah, the words are said, but the emperor does not listen, no matter how much he says, it is nonsense, and these two officials have been punished, so that the atmosphere of extravagance and extravagance up and down the Qing Dynasty has become more and more intense.
During the reign of the Qianlong Emperor, the national strength of the Qing Dynasty reached its peak, when China's gross national product accounted for 1/3 of the world, and there were more than 70 million silver reserves in the national treasury, but in the last year of Qianlong, there were only two million taels left in the inventory, which was exactly the squandering of the Qianlong Emperor, waste was inseparable, the more the ruler was poor and extravagant, the more it caused the increasing corruption of the atmosphere, the burden of the common people became heavier and heavier, and the Qing Dynasty also embarked on the downward slope from prosperity to decline from this period of time.