Chapter 85, Emperor Chongzhen’s despair (Part 1)
In August of the fifth year of Chongzhen, the capital
In the summer of this year, the street scene in the capital was extremely bleak. Due to the martial law in the city, there are far fewer street vendors. In addition to the dust and the smell of urine, the remaining feeling on the streets is depression. Every street and alley has the same sparse pedestrians, and most shops are deserted. Many shops simply closed their doors. It's hard to say whether it's because there are no customers or because there are no goods.
——Because the Wenxiang Cult monster bandits raised troops in Lunan and cut off the water transportation to Beijing; Chen Xin in Dengzhou Town rebelled again, repeatedly defeated the imperial navy and blocked Tianjin's shipping, so everything from the south to the capital was imported Food supplies are almost cut off. Unexpectedly, the previous combat operations of the Tartar Abatai who broke through the border and went south to fight with the imperial army consumed most of the capital's originally small grain reserves. The original plan was to replenish them as soon as possible. Unexpectedly, this year's new grain has not yet arrived in Beijing, and sea and water transportation will be difficult. have been cut off together. What's even worse is that the wealthy businessmen in Beijing are still hoarding food and speculating on grain prices. As a result, the price of rice in Beijing has skyrocketed to ten taels of silver per stone, and the price of wheat is eight taels of silver and one stone. Many poor people have starved to death, and all industries in the city have withered. , the market is extremely depressed.
As the world becomes more and more difficult, the public security in the capital market is also deteriorating, and various rice-grabbing trends emerge one after another. Driven by hunger, those usually honest and humble people have turned into fierce thugs, and they have spontaneously gathered Get up, grab sticks and kitchen knives, and rush to the grain store in groups to burn, kill and loot. The green-skinned idlers in the city even appeared one after another, acting as the vanguard of the rioters. The Shuntian Mansion in the capital had no choice but to make up its mind. In troubled times, they used heavy rituals to chop off hundreds of heads at once and hang them outside the government office for public display. Relying on the bloody and terrifying butcher knife, the most basic order was barely maintained.
As for the countryside of Shuntian Prefecture on the outskirts of the capital, it was even more miserable - first there were severe droughts for years, and then they were tortured to death by the Tartar invaders. There were also the various Qinwang officers and soldiers who came to the capital, and they also caused harm to the place along the way. , and eventually the roads were full of beggars, people died of hunger everywhere, and corpses were floating in the canals. The refugees peeled off the bark of elm trees to make cakes, the bran bark to make porridge, and the rotten residue of bad grains as a delicacy. Extremely hungry, people gathered to besiege official warehouses and intercept grain supplies one after another. There was another rebellion, and all the manors in the countryside of Shuntian Prefecture were plundered, even the imperial manor was not spared.
In the Forbidden City, it was also a gloomy scene. The palace maids, guards and eunuchs were all trembling with fear. Even the concubines had temporarily given up their thoughts of competing for favor. In the past few days, several unlucky ones had been angered by minor mistakes. The emperor was dragged down and beaten to death!
"...Kill, kill, I'm going to kill Chen Xin, Huang Shi, Zu Dashou... and those bastards..."
The Forbidden City and the Hall of Cultivation of the Heart were covered with broken porcelain pieces. Emperor Chongzhen's pale face had a sickly flush, and he kept roaring madly.
——The Battle of Dalinghe, fought from last summer to early spring of this year, cost the imperial court millions of taels of pay every year, and even almost emptied the emperor's private treasury. However, on the battlefield, they only gave Emperor Chongzhen was disappointed again and again, and in the end, it simply turned into despair: a full 150,000 elite soldiers supported by the court with heavy money were wiped out on the battlefield of Daling River, and countless gunners, artillerymen, horses and vehicles were lost in desperation. The officials in the mainland used strict performance appraisals time and time again and did not hesitate to force civil unrest to raise the Liao salary, but they quickly disappeared in these defeats.
After the defeat in the Battle of Dalinghe, the former chief minister Zhou Yanru and the emperor's master Sun Chengzong took the blame and resigned, and Wen Tiren succeeded him as the chief minister. Emperor Chongzhen originally thought that as long as there were new people in the cabinet, there would be some new atmosphere, but who knew that what was waiting for him was one after another more terrifying and shocking news!
Chen Xin, the commander-in-chief of Dengzhou in Shandong who had been personally praised by him, suddenly rebelled. He first raised his troops and attacked Dengzhou City, forcing Sun Yuanhua, the governor of Denglai, to flee to the sea in a boat, where he ended up unknown. Afterwards, the Dengzhou Navy bombarded Dagukou, causing shock in the capital.
And the Fujian general Huang Shi, who once swept through Liaodong alone and killed Nurhachi, has now turned against him. In view of the corruption of the Liao Dynasty, someone in the DPRK proposed to use this person to go north to Ping Liao... Unexpectedly, Emperor Chongzhen had not yet considered in his mind whether to adopt this proposal, but the explosive bad news came from Nanjing that Huangshi colluded with overseas gangsters to rebel, conquer the provincial capital of Fuzhou, and kill Fujian Governor Zou Weilian!
These two pieces of bad news were delivered to Emperor Chongzhen one after another, who was still struggling with the defeat of Dalinghe. His Majesty was immediately so angry that he fell down. At the subsequent court meeting, the ministers and officials shirked each other's responsibilities and blamed their opponents, which made Emperor Chongzhen even more dissatisfied. Finally, after a quarrel, he decided to appoint Zhu Dadian as the governor of Shandong, responsible for supervising the division. Put down the rebellion in Dengzhou. As for the chaos in Fujian, the Nanjing Ministry of War tried to mobilize troops to put it down. At the same time, an order was sent to the Yamen of the Governor of Guangdong and Guangxi to immediately expel the merchant ships of the Kun thieves and to prohibit private trade with the Kun thieves.
Unexpectedly, it rained all night long, and before Zhu Dadian could arrive in Jinan to take office, the Wenxiang Cult demons once again rebelled in Lunan, attacked Jining, cut off water transportation, and killed the people who transported grain and rice from Jiangnan to Beijing. lifeline! As a result, before the rebel army scheduled to enter Dengzhou was assembled, they had to turn around and deal with the Wenxiang Cult rebellion first. Moreover, because they underestimated the power of the religious bandits, they lost several battles in a row.
Next, several groups of Shaanxi bandits also began to break into Henan, and they seemed to have a tendency to join forces with the Wenxiang Sect bandits. After repeated discussions, the imperial court decided to dispatch Trilateral Governor Hong Chengchou to lead the Qin army out of Tongguan and take charge in view of the increasingly stable ground in Shaanxi. Put down the chaos of bandits and religious bandits in the Central Plains.
At the same time, Nanjing, the remaining capital, and Fengyang, the central capital, also managed to organize all their forces and march north to the Huaihe River to block the southward route of the Wenxiang Sect rebels. As for the rebel general Huang Shi who was far away in Fujian, he couldn't care less about it for the time being - it was more important to save the lifeline of the canal and the colorful world of Jiangnan first!
After holding on until July, the Wenxiang Rebellion has still not been put down, the canal has not been opened, not a single grain of grain from the south has been delivered to the capital, and the price of grain in North Zhili has skyrocketed. How is the war situation in Fujian? Even more ignorant. Although Hong Chengchou won a victory at Luoyang City and severely damaged a group of rogue bandits, hundreds of thousands of rogue soldiers had poured into Henan at this time, enslaving the local hungry people. Coupled with the Wenxiang Sect's uprisings everywhere, there was almost no one in Henan Province. Is there any government that is in peace? There is no way to deal with it for a while... But at this juncture, the border troops of Xuanfu and Datong actually broke out in internal strife because of the competition for two silver mines, and defeated them all in one fell swoop. Thousands of troops! You really don’t take the court’s laws and regulations seriously!
Next, before the cause of the civil strife in Xuanfu and Datong towns was clearly investigated, another even more terrible news came from Shanxi - another group of Shaanxi bandits did not go to Henan to wreak havoc, but went straight to Taiyuan and wiped them out in one fell swoop. He captured the Shanxi Provincial Government and slaughtered the whole family of the King of Jin!
After learning about this incident, Emperor Chongzhen's eyes darkened again, and he almost vomited blood on the spot - such a disaster of losing a vassal and killing a vassal king had never happened in the Ming Dynasty for a hundred years, but now it happened under his own rule. In the future, How can I still have the dignity to meet my ancestors? !
Just when Emperor Chongzhen was furious, even more terrifying bad news came from the Liaodong front line that broke his heart: the insidious and cunning slave leader Huang Taiji, known as the reincarnation of the Nine-tailed Fox, passed through Daling Many Ming Dynasty generals who surrendered in the Battle of the River began to lobby the remnants of the Guanning Army in western Liaoning to surrender, causing rumors and confusion in Jiliao border towns for a while. In addition, due to the cutoff of sea and water transportation, the money and food allocated by the imperial court to Guan Ning's army was suspended for two months. The governor of Liaodong, Qiu Jiahe, and the eunuchs in charge of the army repeatedly reported secretly, saying that the morale of the army was unstable and there was fear of unforeseen disasters. In order to prevent Guan Ning's army from defecting to the enemy, which will lead to the wide opening of the country, I hope that the emperor will quickly allocate money and food, reward the sergeants heavily, so as to reassure him...
In response to this, Emperor Chongzhen, in addition to angrily scolding Guan Ningjun for being disloyal and unjust, could only smile helplessly: Give a heavy reward to the sergeant? That's easy to say! The treasury in Taicang has been extremely poor since the end of Wanli, and the emperor's inner treasury has no more than a few taels of silver left. Now that water transportation has been cut off, taxes from various provinces cannot be sent to the capital, so where is there any money left? Besides, Guan Ningjun, a bunch of bastards who only take money and don’t work, can they be appeased by just a few rewards?
In short, seeing so much bad news coming one after another, and the situation that was deteriorating rapidly day by day, Emperor Chongzhen couldn't help but feel weak. He felt that although he was a great man who kept his promise on the surface, in fact he seemed to have become The trapped animal in the cage, no matter how hard he struggled, could not escape his tragic fate... But he still couldn't do anything except sit behind the desk and throw the tea bowl and lose his temper.
At this time, seeing the emperor being furious again, all the maids and eunuchs hid far away. Only Cao Huachun knelt on the ground and cried bitterly with tears streaming down his face: "...Your Majesty, please calm down and take care of yourself. If it is because of Those vulgar warriors have injured their bodies, and the slave’s sin is even greater.”
Looking at the sad expression on the eunuch's face, Emperor Chongzhen stayed for a moment, and finally sat down slumped. He picked up the newspaper forwarded by the Ministry of War. Each one was either about an emergency or the fall of a certain county, which made his mood even worse. . The only thing that can be regarded as good news is probably the "good news" that Hong Chengchou, the governor of the three sides, recently led his troops to drive out the bandits and regain Taiyuan - but even with Emperor Chongzhen's purely layman's military knowledge, he knew that this was just a case of the bandits trying to seize the official position. military Before arriving in Taiyuan, they voluntarily abandoned the city and evacuated... because these bandits soon appeared on the North Zhili Plain on the other side of the Taihang Mountains, causing those prefectures and counties that had just been ravaged by the Jiannu Tatars this spring to once again Suffered a disaster.
——Dengzhou, Lunan, Liaodong, Xuanfu, and along the Taihang Mountains in Beizhili... The surrounding areas of the capital seemed to have been completely eroded by endless wars. On the southern side of Zhili, the demon thieves of the Wenxiang Sect were also arrogant. They not only captured Xuzhou, which produced fine iron, but also marched all the way along the Huaihe River. They had the momentum to attack the south of the Yangtze River, killing the officers and soldiers mobilized in Fengyang and Nanjing. He was beaten to a pulp. As for Lingnan and Fujian, which are further away, due to the news barrier, it is still unclear how far Huangshi and those overseas thieves have gotten into recently.
Emperor Chongzhen had no idea how to deal with such a rotten situation that was so corrupted that he no longer knew how to deal with it - it was impossible to count on the corpses and trash in the court. Five years after he ascended the throne, the young Emperor Chongzhen had already initially seen through it. , those so-called "gentlemen" can talk eloquently on weekdays, but on paper, "everything goes up in smoke while talking and laughing." If they were really faced with such a situation, they would all be dumbfounded. They would be unable to do anything but engage in internal fighting, talk nonsense and shirk responsibility: in their view, the decline and collapse of the country is The emperor is immoral, the eunuchs are meddling in politics, and the generals are incompetent. They will never reflect on their own lives, but will only mess around with you based on the words of saints.
Of course, there are only a few ministers who are really willing to do things, but only God knows whether they can get the things done.
"...Hey, the country's affairs are really difficult! I have obviously tried my best, why does God still want to punish me?" Emperor Chongzhen put down the newspaper from the Ministry of War and looked at Cao Huachun who was still kneeling on the ground, feeling extremely depressed. The feeling suddenly came to his heart - he couldn't help but start to miss the time when he was still King Xin. At that time, all the important national responsibilities were shouldered by the emperor's brother, and he only needed to read and play every day. But now, the seemingly revered emperor's life has left him in endless panic every day. A piece of bad news like thunder always comes from time to time, but he has no way to deal with it... Emperor Chongzhen really I feel very tired, so tired that I almost collapse.