On July 14, 1841, Lin Zexu bid farewell to his wife and children in Xi'an and embarked on a journey of exile.
Exile on the frontier is an extremely painful thing for many officials. For he will face both mental and physical torture. As a result, many officials prefer to commit suicide after being punished by exile.
However, on the way to exile, Lin Zexu was still worried about the country and the people, and he was not worried about his personal fate and future, and he also wrote down such an ancient famous sentence as "Profiting the life and death of the country, it is better to avoid it because of misfortune", which has been sung to this day.
At the same time, Lin Zexu was always concerned about the progress of the First Opium War and inquired about relevant information. On September 3, 1842, after Lin Zexu arrived in Lanzhou, he learned the news from his old friends Yao Chun and Wang Baixin from Tang Shuyi, a Lanzhou Taoist, and was overjoyed and immediately wrote them a letter with a pen.
In this letter, Lin Zexu painfully expressed his feelings: "Thinking of misfortune and happiness in death and life, I have already left it out, but the reverse flame has been like a fire, although the body is relaxed, can An be entrusted not to hear it?" ...... The farther and farther away, the futile feeling of worry is like burning ears. The farther away he was from the battlefield, the more anxious he felt. As for the misfortune of death and life, it has long been ignored.
Next, Lin Zexu reviewed the causes and consequences of Humen's cigarette sales: "Xu Zihai went to Guangdong in the new year, and he knew that he was in crisis. And to the city of Yangcheng, with a piece of paper, he announced that Dewei would receive his tobacco in a few days. After the seizure, no one was guilty. All the other countries have obeyed it, but the law of righteousness and the accumulation of more than ten smoke sellers have been repeated repeatedly, causing them to engage the boat master. The Arrival of the Yingyi Warship was in mind. Lin Zexu believes that Humen sold cigarettes, and he did his best to be kind and righteous, and did not question the British traders. It was only the law of righteousness and others who betrayed their faith, which led to war.
Along the way, Lin Zexu reviewed the First Opium War in his mind and sought a solution to deal with it. He proposed that the strategy for dealing with the British army was nothing more than two. The first is to plan the construction of ships and cannons, build a strong marine division unit, strive to take the initiative on the water, and change the previous way of fighting land battles. The second is to base ourselves on the locality, recruit local heroes, and form an elite armed force as the main force for defending the enemy, and do not mobilize troops from afar.
There is no doubt that Lin Zexu's two strategies are extremely forward-looking. Years later, Li Hongzhang and Zeng Guofan implemented these two strategies separately —Li Hongzhang established a Beiyang Marine Division, and Zeng Guofan built a Xiang army in Hunan.
Lin Zexu condensed his suggestions into eight words: "Skilled in the instrument, courageous and strong in heart" He emphasized the improvement of weapons and technology, and more importantly, the morale of the army.
At the end of this letter, Lin Zexu also boldly imagined that if the southeast coast was occupied by the British army, "the strategy for restoration should be first in Jing and Xiang, and it must be linked to Qin and Shu." That is to say, we must take Hubei, Hunan, Shaanxi, and Sichuan as the rear, and carry out a protracted war of resistance until the enemy is driven out of the country, and we must not compromise and yield to the enemy.
Unfortunately, Lin Zexu was already a sinner at that time. Although these strategies proposed by him were very targeted, they could only communicate among friends and could not be transmitted to the supreme ruler, the Daoguang Emperor, and transformed into a magic weapon to defeat the enemy.
The American scholar Zhang Xinbao admired Lin Zexu's tactics, pointing out in his article "Lin Chincha and the Opium War": "Many historians accuse Lin Chincha's general policy of being the product of backwardness, which is unfair. He believes that Lin Zexu's concept of "protracted war" is "very similar to the strategy implemented in the war between the Kuomintang and communist forces against the Japanese in the 1930s and 1940s." He asserted: "As more and more documents are discovered and studied, Western historians will have to re-evaluate Lin Zexu's role in China's modern history." ”
Lin Zexu has knowledge underground, and he will definitely feel relieved to have a confidant like Zhang Xinbao.
[References: Draft History of the Qing Dynasty, The Complete Works of Lin Zexu, Lin Qincha and the Opium War, etc.]