Outside Datong City, on the south bank of the Shili River, the dark land is covered with shacks of all sizes. A low earth wall and a trench that is neither wide nor deep circle these shacks together. .
Within the earthen walls, there is a miserable world.
Those trapped here are the "good people of the Ming Dynasty" as Luo Yangxing called them. They are all survivors captured from the castles in Datong Prefecture that were broken down by the Qing army!
The soldiers of the Qing Dynasty are still as ferocious as before they entered the pass. Any castle that refuses to surrender will be massacred after they break it! Instead of killing them all, they killed half and captured the other half - those who resisted with weapons were killed, the men who could not do manual labor were killed, and the older women were also killed. The rest were all captured and used as serfs for the nobles of the Eight Banners, called Baoyi!
Except for a few such as Fan Wencheng and Ning Wanwo, most of the slaves under the Eight Banners were forced to surrender to the flag in order to climb up. Either they had their land enclosed and had to work as serfs for the Eight Banners to farm the land, or they were slaves captured from the wild or broken cities by the Eight Banners soldiers!
And these Bao Yi captured by the Eight Banners soldiers from the enemy's territory are the lowest and least trusted among all Bao Yi's slaves.
Because they have a bloody feud with the Qing Dynasty!
If you capture them, they will be used as slaves to order them to death. If they die from exhaustion and illness, just capture another batch.
In the past ten years, soldiers from the Eight Banners entered the country six times and looted countless Han people. And how many coated slaves have entered the pass from the dragon now? The quantity is certainly not large. If it were more, what kind of "investment and recharging method" would be used? So one can only imagine the fate of those Han people who were plundered...
Similar to these people, there are also the Han people who have disappeared from around Beijing because of "land enclosure" and "house occupation". In the 16th year of Chongzhen's reign in the Ming Dynasty, there was not a single bannerman in Beijing. Now, in the second year of Shunzhi's reign in the Qing Dynasty, there are not many Han people (excluding coated slaves) in Beijing.
How is population replacement achieved? How are the hundreds of thousands of Han residents in Beijing relocated?
Many of these Han people who disappeared in the long river of history were still alive in 1645 AD!
Bai Siwen, a military scholar who was a member of the Zhenlu Guards, was such a living person who was about to be submerged in the long river of history.
He is twenty-five years old this year, and he is also a well-known figure in Zhenluwei in his family. It is not the family of the commander, but the family of Qianhu. The powerful Hulu Bai Qianhu is his... ancestor! His ancestors were very powerful. Miao Zhenggen was a member of the Red Scarf Army, a veteran who followed Liu Futong in the uprising. Later, he followed Mr. Guan, the general of the Red Scarf Army, in his campaign to the north, breaking the Yuan Dynasty's upper capital on the grassland, and killing the Tatars until they were mountains of corpses and seas of blood.
Later, the Red Scarf Army failed, and Bai Qianhu defected to Zhu Yuanzhang again. Because he defected too late to defeat Chen Youliang and Zhang Shicheng, he continued to kill the Tatars, and later followed Xu Da deep into Mobei to kill... A hereditary Qianhu official was born.
It's a pity that the art of killing Tatars has not been passed down. By Bai Siwen's generation, they have all become scholars!
But the ancestral blood is still there! When the Qing soldiers came, all the children of the Bai family went to the head of the Zhenlu Guard City and fought with the traitors who raised the red flag for ten days and ten nights! Of the eleven brothers from the same clan, only Bai Siwen was left.
Because of their resolute resistance, the Qing army who broke through the Zhenlu Guards went on a killing spree. The soldiers and civilians in the city were closed, and only less than a thousand people were killed. Bai Siwen was one of them... However, the Qing soldiers did not let go. Instead, he shaved his ugly braided head and classified it as a soldier of the Zhenghong Banner - the kind of soldier who collapsed from exhaustion and was forced by the Zhenghong Banner Han Army to dig trenches outside the city of Datong. Besieging the city, working day and night, and there was nothing to eat. There are now less than a hundred people from the Zhenlu Guards who were captured together!
However, the number of prisoners in this camp by the Shili River has not decreased, because there are always a steady stream of Han slaves, escorted by the Eight Banners soldiers from all over Datong Prefecture!
It seems that after this war is over, Datong Mansion, which used to be prosperous in the past, will turn into a white field...
At dawn, Bai Siwen, who had long been tortured to the point of numbness by suffering, dragged his tired steps out of the smelly shack where he slept, weakly walked to an empty flat ground and stood up. He was not the first to arrive. Before him, many Han slaves like him, wearing rags, thin bodies, and numb eyes, had already arrived and were looking around with confused eyes.
Where is Zhang Jing’s master, Cao Heitan, who is holding the red flag? Why didn’t this living king of hell come today? Could it be that he was killed by the Ming army in Datong City when he went out on patrol last night?
In addition, if Cao Heitan didn't come, why didn't the other Tatar traitors come? Could it be that they were all beaten to death by the Ming army?
impossible? Is General Jiang in Datong City so powerful? The defenders of Datong have not even gone out of the city gate in the past few months. It is impossible for them to become rich overnight, right?
Just when Bai Siwen and others were feeling strange about the disappearance of the Eight Banners master, they suddenly heard someone shouting: "The Tatars are defeated! The Tatars are defeated... The army is coming! The army is coming to save us. La!"
"The Tatars are defeated! The army is coming..."
"Master, your eyes are open! The army is here to save us!"
"The Ming Dynasty will be victorious!"
...
"Hehehehe, Tatars are nothing more than that!"
I saw a large group of soldiers wearing war hats and jackets marching into a camp surrounded by tens of thousands of Han Chinese slaves. General Zhenshuo, the commander-in-chief of Datong in the Ming Dynasty, Jiang Quan, laughed proudly. He glanced at Wang Yongji beside him and said with a smile: "Zhijun, next we should send envoys to report the victory to the court, right? How much is appropriate?"
"How much?" Wang Yongji didn't react for a moment.
"Behead!" Jiang Quan smiled, "How about 8,818 real Tatars? Not much, right?"
More than 8,000 is not much? Wang Yongji frowned: "Why do you still bring a small change?"
"It looks real. I have to give a round number, just because I'm afraid the higher-ups won't believe it."
"Can you believe it if you quote more than 8,000?" Wang Yongji shook his head, "If you quote a little less, fold it in half and reduce it by half."
"Oh, let me do the math... I can't get rid of it! Can I report it as 2205?"
"Report 2505!" Wang Yongji thought for a while, "I will write the memorial... How about writing a night attack on the enemy camp?"
"It all depends on military control."
Wang Yongji asked again: "But is there a way to send the memorial to Nanjing? The road from Datong to Nanjing is blocked!"
"There is a way," Jiang Quan said with a smile, "There is a big gap between Shuozhou, Jingpingsuo, Naihe Fort, and Jiangjunhui Fort! As long as you sneak to Luliang Mountain, you can take the road to Shaanxi. I'll ask Luo Yangxing. After that, Shaanxi Province and Nanyang Prefecture in Henan Province are still in the hands of rogue bandits!"
"Traveling to the territory of rogue bandits?" Wang Yongji frowned, "Can Li Zicheng agree?"
Jiang Quan snorted: "How could he refuse? The Tatars were defeated... Isn't this the good thing he thinks about day and night?"
