Aixinjueluo Xuanye ascended the throne at the age of eight, took charge at the age of fourteen, and excepted Obai at the age of sixteen. Now the three vassal kings in the south have become a serious problem for the imperial court.
Among all the emperors of the Qing Dynasty, he was the most capable and best one (the other controversial one is Emperor Yongzheng). His good qualities will be introduced separately later. As for his ability, judging from his pacification of Wu Sangui It's very clear.
It is said that since Wu Sangui entered Yunnan and solved the Yongli King Zhu Youlang, he relied on Hong Chengchou and Obai to support him in the court. In fact, he became the native emperor of Yunnan, and he also owned the land of Guizhou. All officials in Yunnan and Guizhou are appointed and dismissed by him, and all taxes are managed by him. He can even recommend officials from other provinces and mint Yunnan's copper coins and silver coins. Because he had so many soldiers, the court needed to pay him more than 20 million taels every year, and the court's annual fiscal revenue was only about 3,600 taels. "The three vassals use half the world" has become a real The indisputable fact is.
Such a San Francisco, which concentrated the power of appointing and removing officials, taxing power, minting power, and even required the court to support them, had to be abolished at that time.
Wu Sangui's title was also promoted from King Pingxi to "Prince of Founding Heshuo". His son Wu Yingxiong still stayed in Beijing, became the "consort" (consort), and married the emperor's fifteenth daughter (Princess Jianning).
He lived in the Wuhuashan Palace left over from Yongli's time in Kunming, and occupied the 70,000 acres of land left over from before. It can be said that he spent a lot of money, and he also bought a lot of beauties. Legend has it that there is also a "Four-sided Avalokitesvara" and "Eight-Sided Guanyin." (Chen Yuanyuan became very negative because of this and became a nun, with the Buddhist name "Silent").
Although Hong Chengchou, who surrendered to the Qing Dynasty a few years earlier than him, was considered a "very human minister", he was still inferior to him.
To put it rationally, if Kangxi had not attacked him in order to seek the unification and centralization of the Qing Empire, Wu Sangui, who had lived to the age of 62, would have hoped to be content with the status quo and did not want to take risks and rebel against the Qing Dynasty. But we cannot expect a young emperor to be so rational when doing anything. It is not surprising that he is a bit impatient.
But rationality is rationality. The emperors of ancient China must tend to centralize imperial power whenever possible; and soldiers, the army, and the military itself are the cradle of the birth of ancient Chinese emperors. Kangxi will not be any lax on these two points. of ideas.
In February of the twelfth year of Kangxi's reign, Shang Kexi, the king of Pingnan who was guarding Guangdong, felt that he was already seventy years old. He wrote to Kangxi and asked to return to his hometown in Liaodong to take care of his old age, so that his son Shang Zhixin could succeed him as king of Pingnan and stay in Guangzhou. . Kangxi saw this and thought it was an opportunity to withdraw from the vassal. He ordered Shang Kexi to bring all the soldiers and family members to the north and move to Haicheng District in Liaoning Province, and revoke his vassal in Guangzhou.
This order shocked Wu Sangui and Geng Jingzhong (the grandson of Geng Zhongming), the king of Jingnan who founded Fuzhou. In order to test whether Kangxi had the will to withdraw from the vassal state, Wu and Geng went to court and said: They would rather "withdraw the vassal state". When Kangxi saw it, he said "Okay!" and immediately arranged for imperial envoys to come to Kunming to urge Wu Sangui to set off as soon as possible.
After thinking about it, Wu Sangui decided to kill Zhu Guozhi, the governor of Yunnan, and detain the imperial envoys Zheerken and Fu Dali on November 21 of this year, officially falling out with Kangxi.
In order to have the legitimacy of his own troops, on the day of the attack, he wore the clothes of the Ming Dynasty and led several generals to worship Yongli's grave and cried. It was as if he had forgotten that it was he who had killed King Yongli. Zhu Youlang captured and killed him. But this cry did work and aroused the loyalty and indignation of many soldiers.
Later, he published the slogan "Xing Ming and Pursuing the Captives". This slogan cannot be found in China, but Japan has left a copy for us.
In the memorial, Wu Sangui claimed that he was "the former chief military officer guarding Shanhaiguan, and now he is serving as the prime minister of the land and water marshal of the world, and the general of Xingming's war against captives." As for what order he was following? He said it was the order of the third prince of Emperor Chongzhen.
He said that he deeply regretted borrowing "one hundred thousand barbarian soldiers" when Li Zicheng occupied Beijing. He did not expect that the cunning barbarian soldiers "betrayed the alliance against heaven, took advantage of my domestic needs, dominated the Yan capital, stole my artifacts from the first dynasty, and transformed me." Chinese Crown Shang".
He also said that when he was preparing to "rebellion against the North", he encountered "the third prince of the former emperor, who was just three years old", so he could only hide and hide, select generals, recruit soldiers, and restore the secret plan. Now the time has come, and it is planned to be scheduled on the New Year's Day of the first month of the Jiayin year (the thirteenth year of Kangxi) to honor the prince, offer sacrifices to heaven and earth, enshrine the great treasure, and establish the Zhou Dynasty.
In order to slander him everywhere, historians of the Qing Dynasty said that his country's name was "Da Zhou" and the year of Jiayin as "Yuan Year of Zhou", deliberately deleting the word "consultation".
In fact, there are many rumors about Emperor Chongzhen’s third prince. According to Ming history records, his name was Zhu Cijiong and he was named Prince Ding. When Emperor Chongzhen hanged himself, he should have been thirteen years old instead of three. If Wu Sangui’s memorial It's not that he copied it wrong or missed the word "十", it's probably that he gave it to someone else, a fake.
At the beginning of Wu Sangui's uprising, the momentum was huge, but Kangxi also responded quickly. He first followed Suo'etu's suggestion, dispatched troops, and stationed in several dangerous places to respond step by step.
First of all, Kangxi's first beautiful deployment was in Zhejiang. As soon as the war began, he sent Li Zhifang, the Minister of War, to Hangzhou to "governor Zhejiang Military Affairs" to block Geng Jingzhong's military power. Li Zhifang was very dedicated to the Qing Dynasty. Instead of settling in Hangzhou, he went directly to Quzhou to fight to the death with Geng's army. In October of the 15th year of Kangxi, Geng Jingzhong surrendered, and the Geng army in Zhejiang was slowly defused by Li Zhifang.
Kangxi's second coup was in Jiangxi. In the 13th year of Kangxi's reign, he sent Prince An Yue Le (son of Abatai) as the general of Dingyuan to suppress the invaders and stationed in Nanchang. Originally, many chassis were occupied by Wu Jun and Geng Jun. Yue Le was worthy of being from a famous family and took over many cities in a short period of time.
Kangxi's third winning move was in the northwest. In the fifteenth year of Kangxi's reign, Tuhai, who opposed the withdrawal of the vassal state, was appointed "General Fuyuan" and led the elites of the Eight Banners of Manchuria to attack Wang Fuchen in Pingliang, Gansu Province to relieve his worries. After Tuhai went there, he immediately captured Hushan Dun in the north of Pingliang City, and Wang Fuchen surrendered.
The hardest thing to fight was actually Pingxiang, which Wu Jun and the Xia Kingdom held fast. Kangxi was not as rigid as the subsequent emperors. He knew the importance of new weapons, so he commissioned the Westerner Nan Huairen to build new cannons (Red Cannon, Hongyi Cannon). Cannon), the new cannon is much more powerful than Wu Sangui's cannon. Kangxi gave twenty gates to Yue Le, and Yue Le captured Pingxiang in February of the 15th year of Kangxi's reign. When the Qing army captured Shaoguan, Shang Zhixin also surrendered.
Subsequently, the cities occupied by Wu were taken over one after another, and Wu Sangui also died in August of the 17th year of Kangxi. Wu Shifan (Wu Sangui's grandson) who succeeded Wu Sangui as the leader was not outstanding in ability. By February of the 20th year of Kangxi, the remaining strength of the Wu army was Kunming was besieged until the city was broken in October, and Wu Shifan committed suicide.
In fact, the reason why Kangxi was able to destroy Wu Sangui was more because Wu Sangui's dream was not to destroy the Qing court and unify the world, but to rule across the river with the Qing court. He forgot that "Han and traitors are not at odds with each other. The king's business is not partial to peace." As for Kangxi, he took the initiative at every turn and made decisions every time. In the end, a young man in his twenties who had grown up in the palace and had never been on the battlefield defeated a sixty-year-old veteran who had experienced hundreds of battles.
