In 1860, Li Xiucheng, the loyal king of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, and other generals adopted the strategy of "diverting the tiger from the mountain" to attack the Jiangnan camp of the Qing army to besiege the capital Tianjing. Subsequently, Li Xiucheng personally led an army of more than 200,000 troops to march eastward, and in two months, he connected Danyang, Changzhou, Wuxi, Suzhou, Jiangyin, Yixing, Changxing, Wujiang, Jiaxing, Kunshan, Taicang, Jiading, Qingpu, Songjiang and other places, and the troops were directly aimed at Shanghai, the important place of wealth of the Qing court.
Li Xiucheng has been like a bamboo
Zeng Guofan and the Hunan army
Li Hongzhang was ordered to reinforce Shanghai
At that time, because of the Taiping Rebellion, the rich gentry in Jiangsu and Zhejiang all took refuge in Shanghai, and this time even Shanghai could not be saved, and the gentry no longer dared to be "misers", so they decided to recruit reinforcements to come to Shanghai. At that time, the only one who could compete with the Taiping army was Zeng Guofan's Hunan army, and at this time, as the governor of Liangjiang, controlled the military affairs of the four provinces of Suzhou, Anhui, Zhejiang, and Jiangxi, and the defense of Shanghai was also within its scope of responsibility.
However, at this time, the main force of the Hunan army had just conquered Anqing City, the western gateway of Tianjing and the capital of Anhui, and was about to go down the river to attack Tianjing, so all the generals were unwilling to give up this low-hanging fruit, and ran all the way to Shanghai. In the end, Zeng Guofan handed over the task of rescuing Shanghai to his student and the first strategist by his side - Li Hongzhang. Although Li had no soldiers in his hands at this time, he had held a regimental training in Anhui for four consecutive years eight years ago, and he had connections and experience.
Huai army in training
The local regimental training was upgraded to the Huai Army
With the strong support of Zeng Guofan, Li Hongzhang began to actively organize and train his own private armed force, the Huai Army. At that time, not only did the Taiping Army have frequent activities in various parts of Anhui, but the Twist Army and even the Green Forest bandits were also very restless, so various localities organized regimental exercises to protect themselves, and the leaders of these regimental exercises were inextricably linked with Li Hongzhang. Soon, Li Hongzhang used his father's relationship to summon Zhang Shusheng and Liu Mingchuan, and wrote a letter to recruit his former protégé Pan Dingxin, and recruited the fierce general Wu Changqing's department through another protégé, and quickly formed the core of the Huai Army.
As his henchman who was about to "marry" Shanghai, Zeng Guofan also allocated considerable "marrying funds", not only reluctantly allocating two battalions of personal soldiers, but also transferring 6 battalions of elite battalions such as "Linzi Battalion" and "Kaizi Battalion" to join. Among them, the "Kaizi Battalion" is the Taiping Army that has just been recruited when conquering Anqing, and the leader Cheng Xueqi is the leading brave general in the Taiping Army. Zeng Guofan finally directly detained Cheng's adoptive mother before forcing Cheng Xueqi to surrender. The "Kaizi Battalion" is not only brave and brave, but also the sergeants of the battalion are not idle people, including the later Beiyang Navy Admiral Ding Ruchang.
The Huai army was stationed in Shanghai
On March 31, 1862, when Li Hongzhang officially led his troops to set off, he had already recruited 13 battalions of men, a total of 6,500 soldiers, plus 2,340 long-term husbands, etc., with a total strength of more than 9,000 people.
In his later years, Li Hongzhang was a very popular minister