Great time travel

Chapter 85. The Despair of Emperor Chongzhen

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.Because of the martial law throughout the city, there are a lot fewer street vendors.In addition to the smell of dust and defecation on the street, the rest is a feeling of depression.Every street and alley is the same with few pedestrians, and most of the shops are empty in front of them.Many shops simply closed down.As for whether it was because there were no guests or because there were no goods, it was hard to say.

——Because of Wenxiangjiao’s demon bandits attacking Lunan, they 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 he imported everything from the south to the capital. Food supplies are almost cut off.However, the former Tartar Abatai broke through the pass and went south to fight with the imperial army, and consumed more than half of the capital's small stockpile of grain and fodder. It was originally planned to replenish it as soon as possible. have been cut off.What's more terrible is that those wealthy businessmen in central Beijing are still hoarding and frying food prices, causing the price of rice in Beijing to skyrocket to ten taels of silver a stone, and the price of wheat to eight taels of silver a stone. Many poor people starved to death, and all industries in the city withered , The market is extremely depressed.

As the world becomes more and more difficult, the law and order in the capital market is also deteriorating day by day, and all kinds of rice grabbing trends come and go. Driven by hunger, those usually honest people have also become vicious thugs. They spontaneously gathered They got up, took sticks and kitchen knives, and rushed to the grain store in groups to burn, kill and loot.The green-skinned wanderers in the city even appeared one after another, acting as the vanguard of the rioters.The Shuntian Mansion of the capital had no choice but to make up their minds. In troubled times, they used heavy codes to chop off hundreds of heads in one go and hang them outside the yamen for public display.Relying on the bloody and terrifying butcher knife, the most basic order was barely maintained.

As for the counties and villages of Shuntian Prefecture on the outskirts of the capital, it was even more horrible-first, there were years of severe drought, and then they were tossed to death by the Tartar invaders, and all the soldiers who came to the capital also went all the way to harm the place. , In the end, beggars are everywhere, starvation is everywhere, and corpses are rolling in the canal.The refugees peeled the elm bark to make cakes, the chaff to make porridge, and the bad food and rotten residue as a delicacy.Under the extreme hunger, people gathered to besiege the official warehouse and intercept grain grains one after another.There were also routs and rebellions, and all the manors in the countryside of Shuntian Mansion were looted, even Huangzhuang was not spared.

In the Forbidden City, it was also gloomy. The maids, guards, and eunuchs were all trembling, and even the concubines temporarily put aside their desire to compete for favor. In recent days, there have been several unlucky people who have been angered by minor mistakes. The emperor was actually dragged down and beaten to death!

"...Kill, kill, I'm going to kill Chen Xin, Huangshi, Zu Dashou...and that bunch of savages..."

In the Forbidden City, the Hall of Mental Cultivation, there are broken tiles all over the floor, and Emperor Chongzhen's pale face was flushed with sickness, and he kept roaring madly.

——From last summer to early spring of this year, the Battle of Daling River cost the imperial court millions of taels a year, and even almost emptied the emperor's private treasury. Emperor Chongzhen was disappointed again and again, and in the end it turned into despair: a total of 15 elite soldiers supported by the imperial court were wiped out on the Dalinghe battlefield, and countless losses of guns, artillery, food, horses and vehicles were lost.The Liao pay that officials in the mainland used to use strict performance appraisals again and again, and did not hesitate to force the civil upheavals to collect them, quickly disappeared in these defeats.

After the defeat in the Battle of Dalinghe, the former chief assistant Zhou Yanru and the emperor Sun Chengzong took the blame and went to the field, and Wen Tiren succeeded him as the chief assistant.Emperor Chongzhen originally thought that as long as the cabinet was replaced with a new person, there would be some new things anyway, but what was waiting for him was one after another even more terrifying shocking news!
Chen Xin, the general soldier of Dengzhou who had been praised by him in Shandong, suddenly pulled up his banner and rebelled. First, he raised his troops to break through the city of Dengzhou, forcing Sun Yuanhua, the governor of Denglai, to go boating and flee to the sea, where he disappeared.Afterwards, the Dengzhou navy even bombarded Dagukou, shaking Gyeonggi.

And Huangshi, the No. 1 general in Fujian who once swept Liaodong alone and killed Nurhachi, is now reversed. In view of the corruption of the Liao incident, some people in the court proposed to use this person to go north to Pingliao... I don’t want Emperor Chongzhen Before deciding whether to adopt this proposal or not, the explosive bad news came from Nanjing that Huangshi had colluded with overseas gangsters to rebel, broke through the provincial capital Fuzhou, and killed Fujian governor Zou Weilian!

These two pieces of bad news were delivered one after the other to the Emperor Chongzhen who was still struggling with the defeat of the Daling River, and His Majesty the Emperor was so angry that he fell on his back immediately.And then at the court meeting, the behavior of officials and officials shirking each other's responsibilities and putting hats on their opponents made Emperor Chongzhen even more unappetizing. Finally, after some quarrels, he decided to appoint Zhu Dadian as the governor of Shandong, in charge of supervising teachers. Put down the Dengzhou rebellion.As for the chaos in Fujian, the Nanjing Ministry of War tried to mobilize troops to quell it.At the same time, an order was sent to the Yamen of the governor of Guangdong and Guangxi to demand that the merchant ships of the Kun bandits be expelled immediately and the trade between the people and the bandits be prohibited.

Unexpectedly, it was raining all night, and Zhu Dadian had not had time to rush to Jinan to take office. The demons of Wenxiangjiao raised the flag to rebel in the south of Shandong again, and attacked Jining to cut off the water transportation, and cut off the supply of grain and rice from the south of the Yangtze River to Beijing. lifeline!As a result, the rebellious army that was scheduled to attack Dengzhou had not yet assembled, so they had to turn around and deal with the Wenxiangjiao Rebellion first, and because they underestimated the power of the religious bandits, they lost several battles in a row.

Next, a number of bandits from Shaanxi also began to break into Henan, and it seemed that there was a tendency to merge with the bandits of Wenxiangjiao. Put down the rebellion of bandits and bandits in the Central Plains.

At the same time, Nanjing, the capital of Liuzhou, and Fengyang, the central capital, also managed to organize all their troops to go north to the Huaihe River to block the southward route of the Wenxiangjiao thieves.As for Huangshi, the rebel general who is far away in Fujian, I can't take care of it for the time being-it's important to keep the lifeline of the canal and the world of flowers in the south of the Yangtze River first!
After struggling until July, the Wenxiangjiao rebellion still hasn't been quelled, the canal has not been opened, and no grain from the south has been delivered to the capital. The price of grain in northern Zhili has skyrocketed. What is the situation in Fujian? I don't even know anything.Although Hong Chengchou won a battle under the city of Luoyang and severely damaged a group of bandits, at this time 10,000+ refugee troops had poured into Henan, engulfing the local hungry people and blooming everywhere. In addition, Wenxiangjiao's riots everywhere, there is almost no one in Henan Province. The mansion is peaceful, and there is no way to clean it up for a while... But at this juncture, the frontier troops of Xuan Mansion and Datong actually broke out due to the competition for two silver mines, and wiped out tens of thousands of soldiers in one go horse!You really don't take the court's laws seriously!
Next, the cause of the civil strife in Xuanfu and Datong towns has not been investigated clearly, and another more terrible news came from Shanxi-another group of Shaanxi rogues did not go to Henan to wreak havoc, but went straight to Taiyuan and killed them in one fell swoop. Invaded the Shanxi provincial capital, and slaughtered Jin Wangman's family!
After learning about this, Emperor Chongzhen's eyes darkened again, and he almost vomited blood on the spot—such a disaster of falling into a vassal and killing a vassal king has never happened in the Ming Dynasty for a hundred years, but now it happened under his own rule. How can I still have the face to meet my ancestors? !
Just when Emperor Chongzhen was in a state of desperation, even more terrifying bad news came from the front line of Liaodong, which broke his heart: the insidious and cunning slave leader Huang Taiji, known as the reincarnation of the Nine-Tailed Fox, passed Daling Many generals of the Ming Dynasty who surrendered in the Battle of the River lobbied the remnants of the Guanning Army in western Liaoning to persuade them to surrender, which caused rumors to spread in Jiliao Border Town and people were confused.In addition, due to the severance of sea and water transportation, the money and food allocated by the imperial court to the Guanning army were interrupted for two months. The governor of Liaodong Qiu Jiahe and the eunuch of the army made repeated secret reports, saying that the army's morale was unstable and that there might be unexpected disasters. To prevent the Guan Ning army from defecting to the enemy, which led to the opening of the country, I hope the emperor will quickly allocate money and food, reward and reward the sergeants, so that he can feel at ease...

In this regard, Emperor Chongzhen had no choice but to smile helplessly besides angrily scolding Guan Ning's army for being unfaithful and unrighteous: Reward the sergeants heavily?That's easy to say!Taicang, the state treasury, has been running poorly since the end of the Wanli period, and the emperor's internal treasury has not had a few taels of silver left. Now that the water transportation has been cut off, the taxes and taxes from all provinces cannot be sent to Beijing. Where is there any money left?Besides, Guan Ningjun and the gang of bastards who only take money and don't work, how can they be appeased with a few rewards?

In short, seeing so many bad news coming one after another, and the current situation getting worse day by day, Emperor Chongzhen couldn't help but feel powerless. No matter how hard the beast in the cage struggles, it cannot escape its tragic fate...but there is nothing he can do except sitting behind the table and throwing tea bowls to lose his temper.

At this time, seeing the emperor was furious again, the court ladies and eunuchs hid far away, only Cao Huachun knelt on the ground, crying bitterly with tears streaming down his face: "...My lord, please calm down and take care of yourself. If those vulgar warriors injure their bodies, the crime of the slaves will be serious."

Seeing the sad face of this great eunuch, Emperor Chongzhen was stunned for a moment, and finally sat down slumped, and picked up the Tang newspaper sent by the Ministry of War, a copy of which was either 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 the army to drive out the bandits and regain Taiyuan-but even with the military knowledge of Emperor Chongzhen who is purely layman, he knows that this is just the bandits grabbing the official position. Before the army arrived in Taiyuan, they voluntarily abandoned the city and withdrew... Because these rogues soon appeared on the other side of the Taihang Mountains on the North Zhili Plain, making those prefectures and counties that had just been ravaged by Jiannu Tartars this spring, Once again suffered a back disaster.

——Dengzhou, Lunan, Liaodong, Xuanfu, along the Taihang Mountains in Beizhili... The surrounding areas of the capital seem to have been completely eroded by endless wars.On the southern Zhili side, the demons of the Wenxiang Sect were also arrogant. They not only captured Xuzhou, which produces fine iron, but also went all the way along the Huaihe River, with the momentum to go straight to the south of the Yangtze River. The fight was overwhelmed.As for Lingnan and Fujian, which are farther away, due to news blocking, they still don't know how far Huangshi and those overseas thieves have gotten into recently.

With such a corrupt situation beyond control, with the limited intelligence of Emperor Chongzhen, he no longer knows how to deal with it—it is impossible to count on the waste of corpses and vegetarian meals in the court hall. After five years of enthronement, the young Emperor Chongzhen has initially seen through it. However, those so-called "gentlemen" can talk about it on weekdays, and "the masts and sculls disappear in smoke while talking and laughing" on paper.If they were to face such a situation, they would all be dumbfounded, and would be unable to do anything except engage in infighting, speak out, and shirk their responsibilities: the decline and collapse of a country, in their view, is Because of the emperor's immorality, the eunuch's meddling in politics, and the incompetence of the generals, he never reviewed his own death, and would only mess around with you with the words of a saint.

Of course, there are only a few courtiers who are really willing to do things, but only God knows whether they can handle the errands well.

"...Hey, the state affairs are really difficult! I have clearly tried my best, why does the heaven still want to punish the widow?"

Emperor Chongzhen put down the pond newspaper of the Ministry of War and looked at Cao Huachun who was still kneeling on the ground. A feeling of incomparable depression suddenly came to his heart - he couldn't help but began to miss the time when he was still the king of Xin in the past. At that time, everything The important tasks of the country are undertaken by the emperor's elder brother, and he only needs to read and play every day.However, the life of the emperor who seems to be respected now makes him feel endless panic every day, and there is always a thunderous bad news coming from every now and then, but he has no way to deal with it... Emperor Chongzhen is really... I feel so tired that I'm about to collapse.