Statue of Zeng Guofan
When it comes to a series of major events in China's modern history, such as the Foreign Affairs Movement and the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement, Zeng Guofan is an indispensable figure. In the Pacification of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement, the Xiang Army formed by Zeng Guofan made great contributions to the continuation of the Qing Dynasty.
The background of the formation of the Xiang Army had a great relationship with the decline in the combat effectiveness of the Eight Banner Army and the Han Green Battalion at that time. So the same Han military camp, compared with the Green Battalion, the advantages of the Xiang Army are reflected in what aspects?
Qing Dynasty Green Camp Army
The premise of Zeng Guofan's establishment of the Xiang Army was the decline in the combat effectiveness of the Green Camp Army, and in simple terms, zeng Guofan's bad habits of the Green Camp Army can be summarized in eight words: "Victory is jealous, and defeat does not save each other." "While this is human nature, it is a mortal threat to an army and a national defense force. Therefore, when the Xiang Army was established, it overcame this defect very well: that is, recruiting relatives, friends, and neighbors, so that the soldiers were more familiar with each other, and they could cooperate tacitly on the battlefield and take care of each other. Such an army is particularly emotionally good in peacetime, and can achieve the effect of concerted efforts in combat.
In the former residence of Zeng Guofan, a man dressed in xiangjun costumes
When Zeng Guofan formed the Xiang Army's water division, he once said to his subordinate Zhu Xiaotian: "Sailors must recruit up to 4,000 people, all of whom must be Xiangxiang people, and the people of Gaitong County are easy to agree with." According to Luo Ergang statistics, of the 182 Xiangjun figures mentioned in the "Biography of qing shilie" and "The biography of Zhongxing general Shuaibie", 156 are verifiable, and among these 156 Xiangjun figures, there are nearly 130 people from Hunan, accounting for more than 80%.
Xiang Jun in the movie "Letter of Submission"
The person who had the deepest influence on Zeng Guofan's formation of the Xiang Army was Qi Jiguang, a famous general in the Ming Dynasty. Mr. Luo Ergang, a famous historian, has compared the military systems of the Qi family army and the Xiang army in detail and found many similarities, such as recruiting hard laborers in the countryside who can bear hardships, and appointing more talented and leadership talents.
Qi Jiguang
The Green Camp of the Qing Court was based on the principle of the world's work, with a fixed military household, or "soldier family". There are regular soldiers in the soldier household, and the rest of the male dings are called "Yu Ding", and when the regular soldiers are vacant, they are selected from the Yu Ding. Soldiers are from the military household and are passed down from generation to generation. The xiang army's soldiers came from different sources from the Green Battalion, and adopted a recruitment system. The recruitment of soldiers in the Xiang Army draws on Qi Jiguang's training method, and there are several strict regulations:
The first unusable person is the slippery and opportunistic person in the city. And the first available people are honest people in the countryside and people who are suitable for manual work.
Moreover, the bravery of soldiers must be guaranteed, and those who are not insured will not be collected, and they are not allowed to fill the number with rootless guerrillas and camp sticks. Simple and honest mountain farmers, hard-working and hard-working, and all have guarantees and military registration to check, which is convenient for training and discipline.
In order to strictly control the number of green battalions composed of Han Chinese, the Qing government stipulated that most of the soldiers in various places were selected and transferred from various places. In this way, it is possible to prevent large-scale assemblage of soldiers in various places, and it is also possible to prevent private battalions, and at the same time, most of the commanders will be recruits from different places, so that it is impossible to grasp absolute military power, and most of the military power is in the hands of the state, such an army model is very similar to the military construction of the Song Dynasty and the Ming Dynasty. This inevitably led to the embarrassment that the soldiers of the Green Battalion did not know the general and would not know the soldiers.
Although such a model has played a role in preventing the dictatorship of military generals, the combat effectiveness of the army has also greatly declined, and the cohesion of operations will naturally not work. In contrast, one of the most important characteristics of the Xiang military camp system is that soldiers will return to the generals, recruit troops because of the generals, and scatter the troops.
The commander-in-chief selects the commander- and commander-in-chief, the battalion officer selects the sentry chief, the sentry commander selects the shi chief, the shi commander selects the brave ding, and the layers are selected to form an army, which is the structural mechanism of the Xiang Army. Once a general is killed or transferred, his troops must be dismantled and not used directly by other generals.
Luo Ergang likened it to a big tree, "a big handsome like a root, from the root to the stem, branches, leaves, all in one breath." The Xiang Army's system of returning soldiers to generals gives the troops a clear advantage in combat effectiveness: the generals who choose their subordinates are all familiar and trusted; the subordinates are appreciated by their superiors and must fight to the death to repay them.
Xiangjun organizational model
It is also true that the "Thunder Battalion" commanded by Bao Chao, a famous general of the Xiang Army, once made outstanding achievements in battle. In the sixth year of Tongzhi (1867), Bao Chao returned to his hometown due to illness, and the thunder camp had no commander for a while. Zeng Guofan was reluctant to dismiss this powerful team and hoped that Bao Chao's ministry would take over in the future. His subordinates Song Guoyong and Lou Yunqing were outstanding, the former had been in the thunder camp and had a deep relationship with the generals, while the latter had left the thunder camp for a period of time, and the personal relationship was shallow. Zeng Guofan wanted to choose lou Yunqing, whom he liked, but all the generals jointly expressed their disobedience and "refused to support Song", which surprised Zeng Guofan greatly, and Lou Yunqing did not dare to go to take over the unification. In desperation, Zeng Guofan had to do things according to the rules - ordered the dismissal of the Thunder Camp and asked Lou Yunqing to re-recruit the dismissed Old Yong.
Luo Ergang commented: "Only because after such a formality of withdrawing this move, although the courage recruited by the new battalion is still recruited from the people who have been withdrawn from the old camp, and because they are personally recruited by the commander, the results are completely different in the transfer. ”
Here is an interesting contrast, that is, the salaries of the soldiers of the Green Battalion Army and the Xiang Army. The monthly salary of the Green Battalion army is: 2 horses, 1 soldier, and 1.2 guards. Such a salary level, if in the early Qing Dynasty can still maintain a basic livelihood, but in the late Qing Dynasty, especially during the Xianfeng period, it is difficult to meet the daily expenses of a family, so some soldiers can only go out of the camp to make a living as peddlers, resulting in the serious consequences of bing yong having little time to train.
On the other hand, on the side of the Xiang Army, the average monthly salary of soldiers was 6 taels, which was 3 times that of the horsemen of the Green Battalion. There was also a higher salary treatment - "two hundred and two battalion officers", and the system created by Zeng Guofan made Jiang Baili, a military expert during the Republic of China period, worship and praise. He said in the "Theory of National Defense": Zeng Guofan's intention of giving high treatment to battalion officers is very deep, and the battalion officers are personally present at the front line and have a heavy responsibility, so only by raising his salary and treatment can we give full play to his sense of responsibility.
Jiang Baili
Most of our understanding of the Xiang Army comes from the Xiang Army's operations against the Taiping Army, but few people know that one of the reasons why the Xiang Army had such outstanding performance in the face of the Taiping Army that shook the Qing Dynasty is that its recruitment conditions, formation methods, and internal mechanisms are very conducive to condensing the morale of the soldiers, mobilizing the ability to coordinate operations, and enabling each soldier to exert the greatest combat effectiveness on the battlefield.
Luo Ergang: History of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, Hunan People's Publishing House, 1994.
Zou Yilin: Chinese Historical human geography, Shanghai People's Publishing House, 2001.
Han Maoli, Sixteen Lectures on China's Historical Geography, Peking University Press, 2015.
Editorial Board of Chinese Heritage: Chinese Heritage (Hunan Special Issue), No. 7, 2013.
Lucic, Spatial Structure in Chinese History, Huazhong University Press, December 2015.
(Author: Haoran Wenshi Yugong Walker)
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