Many people know that Shi Yousan once burned the Shaolin Temple, and also know that the Shaolin Temple participated in the warlord melee, resulting in the burning.
What is the ins and outs of this matter, and what roles did Feng Yuxiang and Zhang Zuolin play in it?
Involved here is a lesser-known person, Fan Zhongxiu, a small warlord in Henan.
Fan Zhongxiu was born in 1888 and is a native of Baofeng County, Henan Province, not too far from the Shaolin Temple. When he was 14 years old, he went to the Shaolin Temple to study art for three years, became a disciple of the Shaolin layman, and learned a good martial art. Later, Fan Zhongxiu met huang xing, the leader of the revolutionary party, and fought under huang xing. Because he was wanted by Yuan Shikai and harassed by bandits, he had to move to Luochuan, Shaanxi Province.
Unexpectedly, in Shaanxi, he was repeatedly bullied by local bandits. Therefore, The intolerable Fan Zhongxiu gathered six or seven people from the old department, plus his brothers, and more than a dozen people took advantage of the night to touch the bandit camp and kill the bandit leader.
Fan Zhongxiu's reputation in the local area was great, and many haojie and bandits came to vote, and soon more than 200 people gathered guns. Fan Zhongxiu led the team to start fighting the local tycoons and attacking the county seat. Surrounded and suppressed by the officers and soldiers, Fan Zhongxiu successively defected to Lu Jianzhang, Chen Shufan, and Wu Peifu. With the continuous job hopping, Fan Zhongxiu's team has also grown stronger and stronger. Fan Zhongxiu also took more than 8,000 people to Guangdong, listened to Sun Yat-sen's dispatches, fought Chen Jiongming, and made military achievements.
In 1925, Fan Zhongxiu returned to Henan to develop and was appointed by Sun Yat-sen as the commander-in-chief of the Yu Army. At this time, the north was just the Feng clan entering the customs, and the war continued, and Fan Zhongxiu collected a lot of scattered soldiers and bandits.
In 1926, the Northern Expedition began. Fan Zhongxiu's team was assigned to Feng Yuxiang's Second Army and fought many battles with Feng Yuxiang.
In 1927, there was serious infighting within the Northern Expeditionary Army, and the Northern Expedition was forced to stop.
In 1928, the infighting was initially resolved and the Northern Expedition continued. At this time, the targets of the Northern Expedition were mainly Zhang Zuolin of the Feng clan and Sun Chuanfang and Zhang Zongchang, who were dependent on the Feng clan.
At that time, Feng Yuxiang already had 400,000 soldiers and horses, of which nearly 200,000 were from the Yan clan, attacking eastward from Shaanxi, Shanxi, and Henan, and more than 200,000 people of Lao Jiang attacked north. The resistance of Feng Shi, Zhang Zongchang, and Sun Chuanfang was also resolute.
In March 1928, the Northern Expedition was mainly in Shandong and the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei area, and the battle situation was so fierce that Feng Yuxiang had to pull all the troops that could be mobilized to the front. Henan was empty, and many cities were defended with only a few hundred men.
It was under these circumstances that Fan Zhongxiu accepted the bribes and rebellion of the Feng clan, and gathered 50,000 troops in Henan to rebel. Soon, Fan Zhongxiu's army captured more than a dozen county seats and besieged Luoyang, Yuzhou, Dengfeng, and Xiaoyi Arsenal.
After Feng Yuxiang won the battle at the front, he mobilized two armies, Shi Yousan and Song Zheyuan, to suppress Fan Zhongxiu's rebels. Song Zheyuan and Shi Yousan were both among the best generals under Feng Yuxiang, and it was still very easy to fight Fan Zhongxiu, and soon the siege of Luoyang and Dengfeng was soon lifted.
In the process of Fan Zhongxiu's rebellion, the Shaolin Temple Baosi Regiment also participated, and Fan Zhongxiu's headquarters was located in the Shaolin Temple. As a disciple of the Shaolin layman, Fan Zhongxiu has been in contact with the Shaolin Temple since his inception, and should have given a lot of donations to the Shaolin Temple.
By the time Shi Yousan's troops broke into Fan Zhongxiu's headquarters at the Shaolin Temple, Fan Zhongxiu's headquarters had already withdrawn, and the monks in the temple had run out. Shi Yousan was furious and burned the Fa Tang.
Su Mingqi, the commander of Shi You's three brigades stationed in Dengfeng, ordered the soldiers to carry kerosene to the temple, and the soldiers and some tenant farmers who held a grudge against the Shaolin Temple together burned the Shaolin Temple. At that time, the Shaolin Temple had a total of about 200 monks, and it is said that there were more than 1,300 acres of land.
The fire destroyed most of the buildings of the Shaolin Temple, burning 296 rooms, burning more than 1,000 scriptures, and burning 105 sets of boxing scores. Many cultural relics that are more than a thousand years old have disappeared since then.
This is a catastrophe for the Shaolin Temple, but also a cultural loss in China.
The culprits are, of course, Shi Yousan and Su Mingqi.
The Shaolin Temple monks and Fan Zhongxiu also have great responsibilities.
Shi Yousan was more unusual in the Northwest Army, and although he was very good at fighting, he briefly defected to Yan Xishan after his defeat in the Battle of Nankou in 1926, so he was punished by Feng Yuxiang and ostracized by other generals of the Northwest Army. In the Battle of the Central Plains, Shi Yousan betrayed Feng Yuxiang again, and successively defected to five or six forces, and also to the Japanese, which is a typical scum. It is not surprising that you can do such a thing as burning the Shaolin Temple.
Of course, when Shaolin was burned, Shi Yousan was still a general of the Northern Expeditionary Army, belonging to the righteous side, but it was too criminal. Fan Zhongxiu belonged to the rebel army, the Shaolin Temple monks were not good at chanting the sutra and worshiping the Buddha, and the desire to smoke their hearts followed Fan Zhongxiu to rebel, and it was even more wrong to oppose the Northern Expeditionary Army. The Shaolin monk once followed Li Shimin to fight the world, but this time he followed the wrong person.
Feng Yuxiang, as Shi Yousan's direct superior, of course, is also responsible, and the supervision is not strict. Zhang Zuolin's side plotted against Fan Zhongxiu, and he also had a certain responsibility.
Was this incident directed by Feng Yuxiang?
Definitely not. Feng Yuxiang had no grievances against the Shaolin Temple, and at that time the front-line war was fierce, Feng Yuxiang had to command more than 400,000 troops, distributed in six or seven provinces and multiple battlefields, and there were more than 30 telephones ringing in the headquarters, and there was no time to eat and sleep. Where is the time to take care of such small things? Moreover, Feng Yuxiang loved the people's livelihood, spent his whole life abstaining from food and clothing, planting trees, building roads, pacifying the people, and banning opium in every place, which was inconsistent with Feng Yuxiang's consistent style.
You can also say your own opinion.