In Lu Xun's memory, the most terrible thing when he was a child was to "make a long hair". In Lu Xun's collection of essays, Chao Hua Xi Shi, Lu Xun tells through the mouth of his nanny Chang Mao's mother about the atrocities of Chang Mao in Jiangsu and Zhejiang. In the original text, Lu Xun borrowed the mouth of the long mother to describe the terrible act of burning and plundering when the long hair entered Zhejiang, which left a very deep impression on the young Lu Xun's heart.
Lu Xun
The elder mother told Lu Xun that when ChangMao entered the city, Lu Xun's grandfather ran to the house in the countryside by the sea with his family to hide, leaving only a concierge and an old mother who cooked rice to watch the door at home. After Long Mao entered the city, the old mother knelt on the ground and called them "Great King" and told them about their hunger. So LongHai smiled and handed over an object to tell the old mother: "So, this thing is for you to eat?" ”
The long hair handed over was a bloody human head, and this human head was the head of the concierge. Since then, the old mother has been frightened and left a psychological shadow, and she has not stepped out of this shadow until she died. Long hair not only plunders young women, but also children to make small hair, and for those who are not good-looking like long mothers, they are also taken captive, and they take off their pants and line up at the city gate. Once the enemy came to attack, and saw the ugly woman on the wall who had taken off her pants, the enemy's cannon could not penetrate.
The long mother told Lu Xun the story of long hair
Lu Xun borrowed the mouth of Chang's mother in "A Chang and the Classic of Mountains and Seas" to describe the atrocities when Chang Mao entered the Jiangsu and Zhejiang areas, and Lu Xun was deeply impressed by The cruelty of Long Mao, which once became a nightmare in Lu Xun's childhood. When Lu Xun disobeyed, the eldest mother used long hair to scare Lu Xun. After growing up, with the richness of experience and the accumulation of knowledge, Lu Xun found that the long hair that the long mother said at that time, in addition to the Taiping Army, there were actually "short hairs" (bandits) and "flower green heads" (officers and soldiers), due to the low level of knowledge and culture, the long mother unified them as "long hair".
In fact, the long mother's understanding of long hair represents the most direct and terrifying understanding of the Taiping Army by the people of Jiangsu and Zhejiang in that era. This sense of panic continued for decades, until Lu Xun was still immersed in this sense of terror when he was young. Why did the people of Jiangsu and Zhejiang have such a deep sense of terror against the Taiping Army? Flipping through the thick archives of history, we found some answers.
Li Xiucheng was on the battlefield in Jiangsu and Zhejiang
Around 1860, the political and military center of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom gradually shifted to the Jiangnan Battlefield, and two control areas were opened up successively, Sufu Province and Zhejiang Tian province. At that time, the Taiping Army, the Qing Army and foreign armies fought in the Jiangsu and Zhejiang areas, and the war caused the people in the vast areas of Jiangsu and Zhejiang to be bored. In the wealthy Jiangnan market town, the Taiping army burned and killed when it came, and the Qing army burned and killed again when it came, and after the officials and the Taiping army left, the bandits took advantage of the fire to rob and burn again. In the face of war, residents absconded into the mountains and helped the elderly and their children to take refuge first.
After the outbreak of war, Yu Zhi, a gentleman in Wuxi, was forced to flee with his family and relatives and suffered from displacement. He painted what he saw along the way as "Hard Tears" and called on everyone to raise money and materials to support each other. Zhang Erjia of Hangzhou had no way to survive on the way to escape, and issued a "rare moon star, scratch your head and ask the sky, and the sky does not answer." "The tragic situation. Changshu gentleman Ke Wuchi encountered the Taiping Army on the way to escape, was cut by the Taiping Army more than 10 knives, almost killed on the road, and finally was rescued before he recovered a life.
Map of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom
The Taiping Army's entry into Jiangsu and Zhejiang caused great psychological panic among the people of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and many people committed suicide because of panic. For example, the Qing Dynasty document "Avoidance of Soldiers" records: "Those who do not follow the thief are first humiliated and then killed." "Therefore, before the thief arrives, he hangs the beam, throws water, and commits suicide with the whole section." After the Taiping Army entered Jiangsu and Zhejiang, panic spread like a plague, and many people chose to commit suicide because they were not willing to be humiliated. After the Taiping Army broke through Jinling, "the soldiers and people committed suicide, or the whole family or several mouths, no less than 100,000 people." ”
Under the shroud of the normalization of panic awareness, women in Jiangsu and Zhejiang have chosen to commit suicide for fear of losing their virginity. In the "Taizhou Xiantong Kou Nan Jiluo" written by the Qing dynasty Chen Maosen alone, 123 women committed suicide in order to preserve their virginity, some of whom threw themselves into wells, some of whom took poison, some of whom hanged themselves, some of whom even had husbands who led their wives and children to commit suicide by throwing themselves into the lake, and some of whom committed suicide by taking poison at the same time, which was quite tragic.
Taiping Army
In the eleventh year of Xianfeng (1861), the Taiping Army attacked Hangzhou, and a large number of people committed suicide in hangzhou. According to the "Chronicle poem of Hangcheng Xin You" written by the Qing Dynasty, "When the city fell, there were martyrs who closed the door, there were martyrs who threw themselves into wells and swallowed gold and opium, there were martyrs who were martyred in the grains, there were those who cursed thieves and were killed, and tens of thousands of martyrs were martyred. At that time, the Taiping Army did not have a large-scale massacre or persecution of the people in Hangzhou, and some people even recorded the Taiping Army's rescue of women who fell into the water. The breath of panic was like a plague, which quickly spread to every corner, and the suicide of a certain number of people gave rise to this layer of fear, and more and more people committed suicide.
When the Taiping Army entered Jiangsu and Zhejiang, the people's psychology was overshadowed, and the image of the Taiping Army, which became more and more terrifying, gradually destroyed the psychological defense line of the people in Jiangsu and Zhejiang. So in addition to suicide, many people formed vigilante groups and took up arms to resist the invasion of the Taiping Army. In December of the Xianfeng Decade (1860), the villagers of Northwest Township in Changshu, Jiangsu Province, fearful of the Taiping Army, called on the whole village to rise up against the Taiping Army in the form of a noodle rally at the Guandi Society. As a result, the Taiping Army made difficult progress on the ground and was constrained at every turn.
Qing army
After the Taiping Army entered Jiangsu and Zhejiang, there were various floods, droughts, rains and snow disasters in the Jiangnan area for several days and months, coupled with successive military disasters, and a major plague broke out in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, causing three million deaths. The Great Plague was followed by the Great Famine, and according to the literature of the time, the Great Plague led to "Hangzhou, half of the starving dead", and "the inhabitants of the bark and grass roots fought to fill the hunger, and there were still those who suffered from it". The most cruel thing is that "every time the hungry man dies on the sidewalk, the breath is not exhausted, and the two strands of flesh have been cut off." (Qing Shenzi's "Diary of Avoiding Kou")
At the end of 1860, cannibalism caused by the Great Famine occurred frequently. According to the "Zeng Guofan Song Shu" record: "Everywhere people eat people, human flesh began to sell 30 yuan a catty, recent news increased to 120 wen a catty, Jurong, Er li eighty wen a catty." In Nanjing and other places, there are also a large number of horror records about "eating the flesh of his relatives". The phenomenon of "cannibalism", this kind of horror situation sounds scary, but can you imagine how much panic was caused to the people under the social environment at that time? And people are accustomed to blaming natural disasters on man-made disasters, and the Taiping Army, as an outsider, naturally has to carry this pot.
The Taiping Army defeated the Yankees
The great famine also brought about soaring prices, the Taiping Army and the Qing Army fought frequently in the Jiangsu and Zhejiang areas, and coupled with the great plague, the economic balance in the Jiangsu and Zhejiang areas was broken. According to relevant information, in August of the first year of Tongzhi, pork rose from 123 yuan per kilogram to 200 yuan per kilogram. In the second year of Tongzhi, the price of pork rose to 400 yuan a catty, which is roughly equivalent to today's 80 yuan a catty. In addition to pork, oil, rice, tea, salt and other things also rose, and the literature at that time was mostly recorded as: "Prices have risen more, never seen before." ”
War, plague, famine, cannibalism, soaring prices, the people of Jiangsu and Zhejiang living in this vicious circle are full of fear and panic about the outside world from the environment and in their hearts. Without knowing where they would die in the next second and whose flesh would be devoured by whom, the people naturally hated the foreign invaders, the Taiping Army, so much so that they eventually led to irreconcilable contradictions and hatred between the people of Jiangsu and Zhejiang and the Taiping Army.
The Diary of a Koukou
The panic caused by the Taiping Army to the people of Jiangsu and Zhejiang was bad, and this panic not only led to the Taiping Army's inability to gain a long-term foothold in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, but also led to the final collapse of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom's forces in Jiangsu and Zhejiang. There are four main reasons for this panic:
First, the Taiping Army attacked Jiangsu and Zhejiang, breaking the calm in jiangsu and Zhejiang. The common people only want to live a peaceful birthday, and whoever becomes emperor has nothing to do with them. When the Taiping Army came to jiangsu and Zhejiang, the protracted fighting led to the disintegration of the economy and ecology of Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and a large number of people's homes were destroyed, and the dead and injured were displaced. The people of Jiangsu and Zhejiang attributed the culprit to the Taiping Army, which is psychologically justified.
"Pacifying the Cantonese Bandit Chronicle"
Second, natural disasters were attributed to man-made disasters, and it is true that the Taiping Army entered Jiangsu and Zhejiang to break the balance around Jiangsu and Zhejiang, but the frequent natural disasters were not controlled by manpower. After the emergence of the great plague, the people naturally blamed all these disasters on the Taiping Army. The Taiping Army's policy of "pulling out people" (beating up rich households) also led to the collective resistance of the rich people in Jiangsu and Zhejiang, and the rich households were generally squires who could write books, and these people could not fight wars, but it was first-class to write articles and curse people. The Taiping Army moved these people's cheese, and naturally there would be no good reputation.
Third, the evil deeds of bandits and soldiers made the Taiping Army carry the black cauldron. Although the Taiping Army acted extremely, it targeted a small number of rich people. Most of the women and the people committed suicide by throwing themselves into the lake, stemming from many bandits and soldiers who took advantage of the fire to rob, and the people could not distinguish who was the Taiping Army, so naturally they all held the black pot on the Taiping Army. In fact, after the Taiping Army conquered Hangzhou, many women who committed suicide by throwing themselves into the lake were saved, and people were forbidden to commit suicide by throwing themselves into the lake, and food was raised to relieve the victims.
Fourth, the counter-propaganda of the Qing court smeared the image of the Taiping Army. During the war, both the Taiping Army and the Qing Army smeared each other's images, and the Taiping Army called the Qing court "Yan Luo Demon" and the Qing Court called the Taiping Army a "long-haired thief". Under the counter-propaganda of the Qing court, the people's fear of the Taiping Army in Jiangsu and Zhejiang reached the extreme, and the Taiping Army did not arrive and the people committed suicide by throwing themselves into the water, which is the best proof.
The panic caused by the Taiping Army in Jiangsu and Zhejiang was extremely bad and far-reaching. To this day, there are still many long-haired pasts in Jiangsu and Zhejiang. Lu Xun's childhood was only about 30 years after the fall of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and the story of this long-haired atrocity was naturally deeply rooted in the hearts of the people, and even a nanny who did not know a single character in Lu Xun's family could tell a large section of long-haired stories, which showed how deep the panic caused by the Taiping Army was.
bibliography:
"Hangcheng Xin You's Chronicle Poem"
The Complete Works of Zeng Guofan