The person "butcher" - Jiangkou Shenyin (Zhang Xianzhong's secret) (1)
Nie Zuoping
The night sinks like water, and the cold winter wind in the western Sichuan Basin cuts his face, Guo Jianhua, who is over half a hundred years old, rides on a motorcycle and slowly moves along the riverside road. To keep out the cold, he dressed very thickly. Guo Jianhua's job is called patrolling the river, and every night, he has to patrol back and forth from the Minjiang Bridge to the confluence of the two rivers, which is a distance of about two kilometers.
Under the highway fort is the Minjiang River and its tributary Jinjiang River, which flows from the western Sichuan Plateau. The river is wide, but the water is not deep, and in recent years, dams have been built upstream to store water. At the confluence of the two rivers, a shoal is exposed to the water, and with the help of the lights that come from the Pengshan city area a few kilometers diagonally on the opposite bank, the weeds on the shallows are hazy at night, and there is not even a small boat fishing at night on the nearby river. What is Guo Jianhua going to inspect? In other words, what needs to be protected in such a lonely and lonely river?
It turned out that Guo Jianhua was protecting the wealth of the ancients from three centuries ago, which had sunk into the surging river 370 years ago. For a long time, the local history and folk word of mouth, as well as the occasional clues found in the river, have made this wealth of the ancients and the contemporary era inseparably linked.
The owner of the wealth is called Zhang Xianzhong, nicknamed Huang Hu, also known as the Eight Kings, a household name in Chinese history. More than 300 years ago, at the end of the Ming Dynasty, the world fell into a crisis in the 17th century: at the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, the global population grew rapidly, but after the 17th century, the Xiaoice period from the 13th century reached its peak, the global temperature plummeted, food production plummeted, the world had a terrible situation of not enough to eat, no food was unstable, in the West, the rise of the Fronde movement in France, the outbreak of the bourgeois revolution in Britain, Moscow fell into several major turmoil; In China, in addition to the natural disasters of the Xiaoice River period, there are also man-made disasters from Wanli neglect to apocalypse, and the Ming Dynasty is troubled and lifeless. Despite Chongzhen's best efforts, it was still difficult to recover the wheels of the empire that had slid into the abyss: on the one hand, the internal worries of the peasant uprising, and on the other hand, the external troubles of the Manchu invasion.
Mr. Zhang was always associated with another more famous man, Li Zicheng, who was once regarded as the greatest leader of the peasant uprising in Chinese history. In fact, Zhang Xianzhong's qualifications are older than Li Zicheng. At the end of the Ming Dynasty, the peasant army was divided into 13 families, Zhang Xianzhong was one of the 13 leaders on an equal footing with Gao Yingxiang, and Li Zicheng was only Gao Yingxiang's general. "History of the Ming Dynasty" said: "Xianzhong began to be a thief with Gao Yingxiang, and he became a partiality of Yingxiang, and he did not dare to merge with Xianzhong." ”
However, Li Zicheng was more able to judge the situation and conform to the will of the people, so he soon caught up and surpassed Zhang Xianzhong. In 1644, when Li Zicheng marched on Beijing and finally forced Chongzhen to hang himself, Zhang Xianzhong led his troops from Hubei to Sichuan. In August 1644, Zhang Xianzhong occupied Chengdu, and three months later, he proclaimed himself emperor in Chengdu and established the name Daxi.
However, Zhang Xianzhong's Onishi regime soon came to an end, and directly led to the sinking of that huge fortune into the rolling Minjiang River.
It turned out that Zhang Xianzhong was brutal and easy to kill. For example, after he entered Sichuan from Hubei and occupied Yuzhou, in order to deter the Sichuan army and civilians, he ordered 300,000 people to have their ears, noses or hands cut off and driven to various parts of Sichuan, so as to warn the soldiers and civilians everywhere: Anyone who dares to resist will be dealt with in this way. Whoever automatically killed the royal gentry and waited, Qiu did not commit it.
Zhang Xianzhong's move shocked the Sichuan people, and everyone was in danger, but the result was counterproductive: "Therefore, the people are not convinced, and all the prefectures and counties near and far have rebelled to kill thieves." The resistance of the military and civilians in various places in turn deepened Zhang Xianzhong's anger and hatred, and the next massacre will become more intense, and the intensified massacre will inevitably stimulate stronger resistance from the military and the people. Zhang Xianzhong, who has advocated the law of the jungle all his life, fell into the vicious circle of this vicious circle and could not extricate himself.
After Zhang Xianzhong became emperor in Chengdu, some of the officials he sent to various places were killed within two or three days of taking office, and some counties even killed more than a dozen county officials within three or four months. In addition, Li Zicheng became the emperor, the Manchu Qing Dynasty entered the customs, and the Fu King built the Nanming, and the power of the three families was far above Zhang Xianzhong, and they all regarded Zhang as an enemy. Zhang Xianzhong knew very well that he did not have the strength to compete with the three strong enemies, even if it was a small Sichuan, it would eventually be lost, just as he had lost countless states and counties when he was a rogue. As a result, Zhang Xianzhong broke the jar and carried out a larger-scale plunder and massacre of Sichuan. Mr. Lu Xun once analyzed:
He didn't want to kill people at the beginning, he didn't want to be an emperor. Later, he knew that Li Zicheng had entered Beijing, and then the Qing soldiers had entered the customs, and he had only one way left, so he started to kill, kill.