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Before the Spring and Autumn Period in China, it was the charioteers who played a decisive role in the war, and the role of the infantry began to rise during the Spring and Autumn Period, and by the Warring States Period, the infantry became the main branch of the army, and its dominance continued until modern times.
However, cavalry has always been the decisive and most important assault force in battle, although it is not overwhelmingly superior in numbers.
Although naval warfare has increased in modern times, on the whole, it is still dominated by cavalry-dominated land warfare, with cavalry still an important force in the army, and naval divisions (later called navy) are temporary troops drawn from infantry and cavalry.
1. The composition of the Qing Dynasty's military forces
In the early Qing Dynasty, the army was divided into two parts: the Eight Banners and the Green Battalion.
As far as the structure of the services is concerned, there is a difference between the army and the navy, with the army being the mainstay, and the army has infantry, cavalry, and artillery.
Among them, the Eight Banners are mainly cavalry, with infantry; The Green Battalion is dominated by infantry and also cavalry. In the Qing Dynasty, it was customary to call the regular army a soldier and the irregular army a brave one.
Westerners commented on the number and composition of the Qing army:
"Two major uprisings in China, the Taiping Rebellion in South China and the Twist Army Rebellion in Central and East China, brought the entire Qing court to the brink of collapse. The vast majority of the Qing army's troops under the command of the commander of Beijing and Tianjin, Seng Lingqin, were green battalion soldiers, supplemented by infantry and cavalry of the Eight Banners. Unlike the infantry of the Eight Banners, the cavalry came from the corresponding provinces, and most of them were Mongols. The Chinese cavalry units were mainly armed with spears, but these units did not receive much adequate and effective battlefield training. The Mongol cavalry rode smaller, steppe ponies and used bows and spears. When the prince led his troops to retreat to the vicinity of the imperial capital, he was reinforced by the Imperial Forest Army (Jingying), who wore yellow coats with black trim and stood out on the battlefield. ”
Here, "there are about 30,000 people who belong to Sanglingqin, 10,000 people who belong to Shengbao, and thousands of people who belong to Ruilin, totaling about 50,000 people." The infantry weapons were mainly arrows, knives and spears, shotguns, and guns, and the number of guns was unknown. ”
The Eight Banners and the Green Battalion were both soldiers of the Qing Dynasty. The Eight Banners are the pro-army of the Manchus, and because they are not enough, they have recruited the Green Battalion soldiers, which is the product of the Manchu rulers' "Han to control Han".
The establishment of the Eight Banners is based on 300 Ding as a bull record, five Niu Records as a Jiala, and five Jiala as a solid mountain (flag).
The Eight Banners are subordinate to the Guard Office and the Eight Capital Command Yamen, which are the world's military system and completely obey the emperor's orders. Selected from among the male children of the Eight Banners who are over the age of 16, Yu Ding and young Ding under the age of 16 can be alternated as reserve soldiers.
Its armament is the best among all arms, and its mission is to defend the Beijing division and garrison other important cities and places in dangerous situations to defend the fruits of victory.
The Eight Banners had an establishment of a firearms battalion, while the Green Battalion did not have such an establishment.
Rewarding and promoting the archers of the Green Battalion and suppressing the guns and artillery, the purpose of these two strategies is to make the Eight Banners weapons level always surpass that of the Green Battalion.
Before and after the Qing Dynasty entered the customs, the total strength of the Eight Banners was 186,600, which was comparable to that of any power in the world, including 96,000 in the Eight Banners of Manchuria, 39,300 in the Eight Banners of Mongolia, and about 51,300 in the Han army (i.e., Wuzhen Chaoha), with high-quality Hongyi cannons.
Its combat effectiveness is very strong, from the unification of the Jurchen tribes and the conquest of Mongolia and Korea, to the overthrow of the Ming Dynasty regime in all wars, it can be said to be invincible.
It takes the flag as the number, and is divided into eight flags: red, yellow, blue, white, red, yellow, blue, and white.
Later, the Eight Banners of Mongolia and the Eight Banners of the Han Army were added. Each banner establishes official positions such as the commander, deputy commander, staff leader, and assistant leader, and is under the control of each level. After entering the customs, there were 890,000 regular troops in the country, divided into two parts: the Eight Banners and the Green Battalion of the Han Army.
The Eight Banners are divided into two parts: the Beijing camp and the garrison.
The Beijing battalion of about 127,400 people was stationed in the Beijing division and nearby areas according to the flag, and the central forbidden army was responsible for guarding the security of the capital and guarding the subordinates.
At the same time, it was also a strategic mobile force that the Qing court used to control the whole country and reflect the intention of focusing on the heavy and controlling the light.
About 107,760 people were stationed in the Eight Banners, and according to the principle of combining key garrisons with centralized mobility, some of them defended the land of Longxing in the three eastern provinces, and some of them were stationed in Hebei and Shanxi to monitor the Mongols. Some of them were guarding the northwest frontier, and the remaining 40,000 people were scattered all over the country.
2. The decay of the Eight Banners
However, soon after entering the customs, the Eight Banners began to show signs of declining combat effectiveness.
In the pacification of the rebellion of the three feudatories, its former main position was replaced by the Green Battalion. During the Yongzheng and Qianlong periods, the Eight Banners, known as the elite and whose strength had increased to more than 270,000, performed worse than the Green Battalion.
Therefore, from the Jiaqing Dynasty to the end of the Qing Dynasty, the Eight Banners gradually evolved into a social relief object that relied exclusively on the state to support them, lost their minimum combat ability, and finally disbanded as a citizen after the Qing Dynasty in the third year of Xuantong (1911).
In the middle of the 19th century, the Qing Dynasty garrisoned troops in the southeast coastal defense line, mainly concentrated in Guangdong, Fujian and Zhejiang provinces, with about 116,090 people.
For example, the total number of Qing troops in Guangdong Province at that time was 73,600. Among them, there are 5,600 soldiers in the Eight Banners and 68,000 soldiers in the Green Battalion. There were about 13,000 Qing troops inside and outside the city.
In the 20 years since the Opium War between China and Britain, the situation in China has changed dramatically. For example, in 1851, the Taiping Rebellion broke out in Guangxi, and the Taiping army went all the way north, occupying Nanjing in 1853, and set the capital here, and sent troops to the north and west.
By 1856, when the Anglo-French Coalition Army broke out, Jiangning (Nanjing), Jingkou (Zhenjiang), and Cangzhou, which were garrisoned by the Eight Banners, were all conquered by the Taiping Army, and the three banner battalions were basically wiped out.
In order to suppress the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and the popular uprisings in various places affected by it, the Qing court mobilized the Eight Banners in most areas, and even the Sauron Iron Cavalry in Jilin and Heilongjiang, to jointly suppress them.
However, it was repeatedly defeated, the banner soldiers were strong and lost more and more people, and the combat effectiveness continued to decline; The heavy military affairs and errand duties in the garrison also restrict the mobility of the garrison of the Eight Banners.
Therefore, against this background, when the Anglo-French battle broke out, the Eight Banners were in further decline.
At this time, the troops, scale and strength invested by the coalition forces were stronger than those of the Sino-British Opium War; The number of countries participating in the war increased from Britain during the Sino-British Opium War to Britain and France, with the help of the United States and Russia. The gap between the two sides in weapons and equipment is even greater.
At the same time, the theater was no longer confined to the coast and along the river, and the Gyeonggi region, the heart of the Qing court, became the focus of the invading army's offensive. All this has made the task of the anti-aggression war facing the soldiers of the Eight Banners even more arduous.
In 1856, the 3,902 officers and soldiers of the Eight Banners stationed in Guangzhou showed a heroic and tenacious fighting spirit.
In May of the eighth year of Xianfeng (1858), the invading army attacked the Beijing-Tianjin area. Jingshi is the residence of the emperor of the Qing Dynasty and the center of power of the country, which should be guarded by heavy troops, so the Qing court placed 127,400 soldiers of the Eight Banners stationed (including more than 10,000 people in the Green Battalion), of which the Xishan Jianrui Battalion and the internal and external firearms battalion are known as the "forbidden brigades", which are the essence of the Eight Banners.
In addition, the Huanjing Division set up three lines of defense against the Eight Banners. The innermost line, Shunyi, Changping, Sanhe, Liangxiang, Baodi, Gu'an, Caiyu, Dong'an eight places, each stationed in a flag; the second line of defense, Baxian, Yutian, Luanzhou, Xiongxian four places, each with two flags; Baoding, Cangzhou, Taiyuan, Dezhou, and Shanhaiguan, which are farther away from the Beijing Division, each set up heavy troops, which are the inside and outside of each other, constituting the outermost circle of the Beijing Division's garrison system.
Of the three lines of defense, the more the inner line, the fewer troops are garrisoned; The closer they got to the Jingshi, the weaker the Eight Banners' armament became.
The Qing court also realized that the allied forces might advance into the Beijing-Tianjin area, so for safety reasons, they transferred the Beijing Eight Banner Forbidden Brigade, the flag soldiers stationed in various parts of the north, as well as the Green Battalion soldiers and Mongolian soldiers, to the line from Haikou in Tianjin to Shanhaiguan to form a line of defense in depth along the coast.
This kind of transfer of troops with multiple systems and unaccustomed generals has caused various armies to be uncomfortable with each other, and their command has been confused, thus laying the hidden danger of failure.
The Battle of Beijing and Tianjin began in 1858, and the Eight Banners participated mainly in the battles of Zhangjiawan in Tongzhou (25,000~30,000 cavalry of the Qing army) and Baliqiao (more than 30,000 cavalry of the Qing army) in 1860.
There is no doubt that in this war, except for the second Battle of Dagukou in 1859, the Eight Banners were defeated. However, it must be noted that the Eight Banners used medieval weapons to resist the European invading armies with modern equipment, and they used a phalanx of both hot and cold weapons to compete with the invading armies using new firearms, line or column tactics.
If we do not judge heroes by victory or defeat, we must admit that, as the aggressors said, in the battle of Beijing and Tianjin, the Eight Banners soldiers have indeed shown their irrefutable courage.
Their failure was not due to a lack of heroism, but to the era of asymmetrical development between China and the West, the decay of the dynasty, the disorder of the command system on the battlefield, the mistakes in the decision-making of the Qing generals and officials, and the low quality of the soldiers.
3. Why are the Green Battalions scattered?
The tasks of national defense, coastal defense, river defense, and border defense in the Qing Dynasty were mainly undertaken by temporarily assembled land and water green battalions.
The Green Battalion and the Eight Banners are two armies with different organizations and systems:
The Eight Banners are the tribal armies before the Qing Dynasty entered the customs, but the green battalion is a local force composed of the surrendered Ming Dynasty officers and soldiers and the recruited Han Zhuang men in the process of unifying the whole country.
Referring to the old system of the Ming army's suppression and garrison system, the divisions were fixed and defended, the establishment was uneven, and the number of soldiers in the battalion was very different, with thousands of soldiers and only a few dozen.
Because after the Eight Banners entered the customs, they became increasingly corrupt and lost their combat effectiveness, and the status of the green battalion of 600,000~800,000 people became more important.
The Green Battalion is also a world military system, but it is not as strict as the Eight Banners. There is a quota throughout the country, and each soldier is recorded in the book, which is reported by the provinces according to the annual book, and stored in the military department, and the food and salary are in the household department. They are different from private households, the father is in service and the son is the surplus, and the father retires and the son makes up for the shortfall, and the fixed salary is to support his net worth.
Its structure is divided into three parts: the Beijing Division, the Provincial Division, and the Border Region, and the main force is located in the provinces and border regions. The Governor and Governor are the nominal commanders of the Green Battalion Military Region, and the Admirals and Commanders are the commanders who lead the troops.
In the event of an expedition, the emperor transferred it and appointed the Manchu ministers to lead the command.
Although the Qing court used the Green Camp as its main tool for rule, it was clearly different from the Eight Banners because of the prejudice of the Han people:
In terms of garrisons, the Eight Banners are concentrated in Tun to ensure that they are combined, and the Green Battalion is dispersed and stationed in Tun to ensure their share; In terms of weapons, the best weapons are used by the Eight Banners, and the Green Battalion uses only ordinary weapons; In the case of the Beijing Guards, the Eight Banners are the sole responsibility, and the Green Battalion is not allowed to participate; In terms of labor, the Eight Banners live up to the errands, and the Green Battalion serves as a hundred servants; In terms of treatment, if there are criminals in the Eight Banners, they will be ordered to issue the flag for the people, and the Eight Banners will be valued, and the soldiers of the Green Battalion will be regarded as subordinate soldiers; The Eight Banners have a lot of silver, while the Green Camp has a meager salary. All of this raised the status of the Eight Banners to suppress the Green Battalion.
The Green Battalion was mainly infantry, divided into two types: warriors and defenders, in addition to horsemen (cavalry) and sailors.
The battalion system is divided into four types: standard, association, battalion, and flood, the governor, governor, admiral, and general soldier belong to the standard, the deputy general belongs to the association, the general, the guerrilla, the capital division, and the garrison belong to the battalion, and the thousand generals, generals, and foreign commissions belong to the flood.
The standard and association govern 1~5 battalions, and the battalion is divided into a number of floods. According to the distance in the road, the water and land are slowed down, and the flood is deployed.
In 1850, there were about 585,412 soldiers, three or four times more than the Eight Banners, and then it hovered around 560,000-580,000. Guangdong, Fujian and Zhejiang provinces accounted for 26.1%, with a total of 152,900 people.
In terms of numbers, the Green Battalion is strong enough, but this is not the case, as it has to do with the duties of its class and its own corruption.
Its main tasks are:
"To protect the security of local authorities, the smooth flow of transportation, to guard warehouses and prisons, to patrol the main roads of the villages, to prevent all kinds of crimes, and to suppress rebellions and rebellions of all kinds." A striking feature of its nationwide deployment is that it is scattered, and it is rarely stationed in a centralized manner, and the number of people who are divided into defenses is roughly determined by the importance of the locality.
The number of people in each battalion ranged from two or three hundred to more than a thousand. However, the troops below the battalion level were not concentrated in one place, but scattered in various cities and towns, and soldiers often lived in the barracks with their families or rented houses nearby. The native soldiers usually commute to and from work on time, except when they go out to fight, the barracks do not open stoves, and they all go home to eat.
The battalion has set up interrogatories, with dozens or hundreds of people per interrogation, responsible for patrolling, anti-theft, relieving criminals, escorting, and courishing. This kind of arming is similar to the principle of stationing the national police in modern times, and can only be used to maintain public order. It lacks training and group combat capability, and its combat effectiveness is very low, and once it assembles for battle, it often collapses."
It can be seen from this that it was mainly deployed in towns and towns and on major transportation routes in various provinces under the supervision of the Eight Banners to assist the Eight Banners in maintaining social order and maintaining political order and stability.
During the Opium War, the heavy troops (army) stationed along the coast were dotted around, with a total of 293,136 people from north to south, accounting for almost half of the green battalion soldiers.
37,000 in Zhili, 20,000 in Shandong, 49,850 in Jiangnan (mainly under the jurisdiction of today's Jiangsu, Shanghai and Anhui), 43,450 in Zhejiang, 69,726 in Fujian, and 73,110 in Guangdong, it can be seen that the army forces used by the Qing court amounted to more than 230,000 in Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong alone.
By the time of the Anglo-French Coalition Army, there were a total of 16,870 troops stationed in the Eight Banners on the southeast coastal defense line, which was not too much. In the main army, there are about 300,000 coastal green battalion soldiers, and about 50,000 green battalion sailors, a total of about 350,000.
"Although the Qing army had an absolute advantage over the invading army in terms of total strength, it did not maintain this advantage in the various battles.
There are three reasons why the Qing army's military strength is difficult to exert itself:
The backward military system has made the army constrained everywhere; Outdated equipment and transportation conditions made it difficult for the army to reach the intended battlefield; The embarrassing financial crisis made it difficult to cope with the huge military expenditures. ”
Due to the extreme corruption and uselessness of the Eight Banners and the Green Battalion soldiers, after 1853, they were gradually replaced by the Yongying Xianghuai Army, and there was a situation in which the former Hunan Army was state-owned and the Hunan Army was the future soldier.
The Green Battalion was abolished in the 29th year of Guangxu (1903).
4. How weak were the Qing Dynasty sailors?
The Qing court's construction of coastal defense was a passive defense ideology in which defense was more important than offense, and shore defense was more important than water defense, and it did not have a clear understanding of the importance of naval divisions (which evolved into navies during the First Sino-Japanese War).
The "Qing Historical Manuscript" contains:
The Lvying Naval Division was divided into inland rivers and open seas, and the Outer Sea Divisions of Fengtian (present-day Liaoning), Zhili (present-day Hebei), Shandong, Jiangnan, Zhejiang, Fujian, Guangdong, and other coastal provinces stipulated that their tasks were only to "defend Haikou and arrest pirates.
Such a naval division is actually equivalent to the coast guard of European countries (note: in 1905, the Qing court established the "patrol force", ending the history of the separation of military and police), and it is not a formal navy, although its strength is far greater than that of the Eight Banners.
From the 20th year of Kangxi (1681) to the 3rd year of Xianfeng (1853), Zeng Guofan founded the Hunan Army and the Hunan Army Naval Division to settle the Taiping Army Rebellion, which lasted more than 170 years.
In the four provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong on the southeast coast alone, there were 100,000 troops, thousands of large and small warships, and thousands of cannons, which was the largest fleet not only in Asia, but also in the whole world at that time.
Since the formation of the army, it has played a role in a certain period of time (1651~1795), such as anti-smuggling, arresting thieves, quelling rebellions, eliminating rebellions, and shouldering the tasks of preventing rivers and seas and protecting national security.
However, due to the strict implementation of the maritime ban policy by the Qing court, it was willing to consider itself a land power country, and did not pay much attention to the green camp sailors.
Not only is the system of rules and regulations, organization, and training still the same as the old people, but even in terms of equipment, they are inferior to those of the previous dynasties. Therefore, compared with the Southern Song Dynasty, the Yuan Dynasty, and the Ming Dynasty, it should be the weakest naval army.
In the Guangxu period, the iron ships of the South and North Oceans were made, and special officials were set up to command them.
Specifically, at the beginning of the founding of the Manchu people, the original cavalry archery was the mainstay, and the sailors were not in the scope of consideration, after entering the customs, it began in the eighth year of Shunzhi (1651), in the coastal and riverside provinces, following the regulations of the Ming Dynasty, with the green battalion to make the sailor battalion, the establishment of the inland and outer sea division, and the establishment of the patrol and drill system.
In terms of the situation of river (river) defense and coastal defense, it can be divided into three categories:
One is the coastal provinces, to which the naval warships of Fengtian, Zhili and Shandong provinces belong; the second is the inland river province, to which the warships of Jiangxi and Huguang water divisions belong; The third is the inland river and open sea provinces, and the warships of the Jiangnan, Zhejiang, and Guangdong naval divisions belong to it.
During the Shunzhi and Kangxi periods, the military affairs were undecided, and there were strong generals, until the three feudatories were peaceful, and the various systems in the naval division were established. In the early years of Shunzhi, all provinces set up warship repair factories, stipulating the life limit of warship repair, three years for minor repairs, five years for major repairs, and ten years for dismantling.
During the period from Shunzhi to Qianlong, three naval commanders were set up in Fujian, Guangdong, and Jiangnan, and at the same time, naval divisions and forts were set up in Lushunkou, Dagukou, Wusongkou, Zhapu, Xiamen, Humen, Taiwan, and other important coastal defense areas, and shipyards were also set up in Zhangzhou, Quanzhou, and Taiwan in Fujian Province to specialize in building open sea and inland river warships.
It differs from the Land Soldier in that it only plays a different role in terms of mission.
Soon after its formation, the Qing court saw that it was difficult to form a naval army from the northern nomads, so in the early years of Qianlong, the focus of the naval division was shifted to the south, and it was composed of green battalions mainly composed of Han Chinese.
Eight inland river divisions, including Jiangnan (Yangtze River), Zhejiang (Qiantang River), Guangdong (Pearl River), Hunan, Hubei, Anhui, Jiangxi, and Guangxi, patrolled rivers and lakes, and seven inland water divisions in the three eastern provinces, Zhili, Shandong, Jiangnan, Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong defended Haikou and arrested pirates.
Because of the fact that there is no distinction between land and water, the sailors are often under the command of the land commander, and are called the water and land commanders.
Later, with its position is particularly important, there was a special naval commander, and the naval division from the land system separated, the naval commander is the highest officer in the naval battalion, the military rank from a product, the country has a total of Fujian (1728), Guangdong (stationed in Shunde in 1664, abolished in 1668, relocated in 1809, stationed in Humen), Jiangnan (1727) three full-time naval commanders.
In addition, Zhejiang, Hunan, and Jiangnan also have naval commanders with both water and land jurisdiction.
Its specific tasks are to patrol the oceans, arrest pirates, check the technology and performance of civilian vessels, and the number of people and goods carried.
These measures are of great significance for maintaining coastal law and order and traffic order, but their negative nature lies in the fact that they have seriously constrained the development of the navigation and shipbuilding industries and hindered the development and growth of coastal defense forces.
5. The military structure after the middle of the Qing Dynasty
The Qing court has always depreciated the Green Battalion and advocated the Eight Banners, and the weapons and equipment of each branch of the armed forces are configured in echelons, and the Green Battalion is the worst equipped, but it plays the most important role in the ruling machine:
The main task of the Eight Banners was to defend the Beijing Division, and the Green Battalion and the Green Battalion Water Division were the main forces to calm internal and external troubles.
The Green Battalion on the land route is not a pure national defense force, but has three functions at the same time: the police, the internal security force, and the national defense force, among which the color of the national defense force is the lightest, and the color of the police is the strongest.
The main task is to assist the Eighth Banner Army and play a role in maintaining public order and maintaining political order and stability. The Green Battalion Naval Division inherited the Ming system, defended the sea frontier and inland rivers in sections, and was an auxiliary branch of the armed forces that had no unified establishment and no unified national command structure, and was subordinate to the governors and governors of various regions, and its tasks were to defend the sea, arrest thieves, patrol the ocean, and defend the sea frontier, which was roughly equivalent to the coast guard.
Obviously, this is determined by the purpose of building the army, its tasks, the characteristics of its armament, and its weaponry.
During the Sino-British Opium War, the main battle against the British army invading China was the land and water green battalion.
In the battle of the Anglo-French coalition army, except for the Beijing division guarded by the Eight Banners, the force to resist the coalition army was actually mainly undertaken by the land and water green battalion, but in the end, the task of confronting the coalition army still fell on the shoulders of the Eight Banners.
This kind of troop setup goes against the trend of world history in which infantry dominates the battlefield. In the Anglo-French invasion of China, the Eight Banners cavalry repeatedly attacked the British and French troops who were waiting for them in the wilderness, and no matter how they outflanked them, they had to face the guns and artillery firepower arranged by the enemy.
Today's people believe that letting a scattered army, which lacks the training of ocean-going formations, mainly to investigate pirates, take on the task of resisting the invasion of the world's strongest European army and navy is tantamount to driving sheep into the mouth of a tiger.
In the middle of the 19th century, the Qing Dynasty's land and water green battalions had no strength to resist the invading army, and the defenders could only rely on simple coastal fortifications to resist slightly.
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