Chapter 175 Conferred God
Chapter 175 Conferred God
On the tenth day of July in the third year of the Tongzhi reign, 16,000 Huai troops set out from Fengyang and embarked on the journey of the West.
Grant was appointed Chief of Staff and was in charge of the overall troop movement.
Wu Ziyi was left in Fengyang to continue recruiting soldiers. Twenty-four thousand new recruits had to be gathered in Fengyang from all over the three provinces. It would take a while to recruit them all, and even if they were all recruited, they would have no guns.
Shao Quanzhong left two hundred veteran soldiers to Wu Ziyi, and asked him to train new recruits in Fengyang. When new guns arrived, he would gradually equip the troops and then send them to Shaanxi in batches.
"report!"
The person who came to report the situation was Le Sen, who had only ten days of wedding leave.
"The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was destroyed, and the Ever-Victorious Army reorganized from the Foreign Rifle Corps has been disbanded by Li Hongzhang, and the elite troops and artillery have been incorporated into the Shanghai Army. Our mortal enemy, the Foreign Rifle Corps, no longer exists."
Shao Quanzhong was relieved. Frederick Wall had been killed in Ningbo, and Wu Xu and Yang Fang were punished by Li Hongzhang for colluding with foreigners to embezzle and sell opium for profit. Shao Quanzhong's enemies in the officialdom basically disappeared.
Wu Xu and Yang Fang were fined 310,000 taels of silver and 63,000 British pound to make up for the losses caused to the government by corruption.
Wu Xu was dismissed from his post, but only retained his qualification as a prefect, becoming a candidate for prefecture, which saved some face. Yang Fang was demoted to the lowest position and became an ordinary citizen.
It is certainly not unfair for these two brothers to be punished for corruption.
But the real reason for being dismissed is that Li Hongzhang is not Xue Huan, he has soldiers under him. As the powerful governor of Jiangsu, he cannot tolerate local tyrants in Shanghai who do not obey his command...
"Hahaha, every evildoer will be punished by his own evil. Li Jianfu has eliminated the trouble for me. I can now march west without any worries."
Teams of elite Huai Army veterans lined up to board the ship.
Zhang Zhiwan is one of them. After taking over the position of Governor of the Grand Canal, Wen's grand canal fleet will still retain its original business.
In the future, new soldiers and arms were continuously transported from the Fengyang base to the front line, which still required the transportation capacity of the grain transport fleet.
Shao Quanzhong looked far to the southwest, where Zuo Zongtang, who was granted the title of first-class Kejing Earl, had pacified Zhejiang and was leading the Chu army into Jiangxi and Fujian to pursue and destroy the remaining Taiping Army. The battle was in full swing.
"Zuo Gong, you are someone I admire. As long as I, Shao Quanzhong, am here, you are too old to carry a coffin to fight in the future. You should take good care of yourself and enjoy yourself for a few more years. The northwest cannot withstand the ten-year harassment of Bai Yanhu and Yakub Beg. I will complete your achievements in advance. I promise that I will do better than you and will not bring shame to China."
No one knew what Shao Quanzhong muttered in a low voice with a serious face.
Looking back at Fengyang where he had fought for several years, Shao Quanzhong stepped onto the canal boat without any reluctance.
"Yuting, everyone thought that after the destruction of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, our Huai Army had reached its peak, and that future development would be slow. Who knew that we could expand the army right away? The morale of the soldiers is very high."
Shao Quanzhong patted Liu Niang on the back and said, "The Huai Army was born in Hailing and grew stronger in Fengyang. Now that it has advanced into the northwest, it is strong enough to rise up against the wind. What's the point of fighting a civil war? Destroying the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom is just the beginning for us."
"Oh, right, now that Zhang Zhidong is gone, isn't that a big loss to us? How could that foreigner, Old Ge, have the ability to become a top scholar?"
Shao Quanzhong shook his head, "No. Zhang Zhidong and Lao Ge are different types of people. When it comes to leading troops to fight, deploying troops and logistics, Lao Ge is better than Zhang Zhidong. Zhang Zhidong is good at conspiracy and trickery. Conspiracy and trickery are useful in dealing with the complicated relationship between us and the Taiping Army, the Nian Army, and the court. When we go to the northwest, our opponents are basically irreconcilable mortal enemies, and we can only fight head-on. Lao Ge is more suitable for fighting in this situation."
"So, Zhang Zhidong left at the perfect time?"
"The Zhang family has its own power. Sooner or later, Zhang Zhidong will go solo when his wings grow strong enough. In the future, under the new situation led by me, he will definitely have an important position."
"Will you use him as prime minister in the future?"
"We'll talk about it when the time comes." Ten days later, the Huai Army arrived at Tongbai. After resting for another twenty days, the army set out westwards after nearly 30,000 horses arrived by land, finally leaving the place where they had been stationed for a long time.
The army traveled fifty miles a day. Half a month later, they passed through Nanyang, entered Shaanxi at Shangnan, and arrived at Longjuzhai in Shangzhou.
The army stopped here again, waiting for supplies to be transported by the Dan River.
Supplies determine how far an army can go. Without food, Li Xiucheng would be helpless. The former Governor of Gansu and Shaanxi, Yang Yuebin, was also a capable fighter, but he left his post in disgrace because he could not handle logistics and could only sit back and watch banditry spread everywhere.
Since the army left Tongbai, there was no support for wired telegraph and information suddenly became blocked.
I don’t know how long it will take for the food and fodder that Lord Qiao mobilized by water to arrive, so we can only wait.
Now Ren’s Telecommunications Engineering Company is urgently pulling telegraph lines into Shaanxi.
The British and American capitalists have plenty of money. Even if Shao Quanzhong occupied all the territory of the Qing Dynasty, they could immediately lay down telegraph lines.
The problem was that the leaders of other provinces did not accept this foreign thing, and were extremely wary of foreign ownership, fearing that they would be branded as traitors. This also resulted in Shao Quanzhong firmly sitting on the position of British and American agent, and was very popular with foreigners.
As for reputation - as long as you keep winning, that's not a big deal.
Fortunately, Henan is now Zhang Zhidong's territory. Although Shao Quanzhong is embarrassed to set up an insurance team in Henan where he passes through, there is no problem in pulling the wired telegraph over.
Zhang Zhidong was determined to follow in Shao Quanzhong's footsteps, and in the future the entire province of Henan would definitely have railways and telegraphs.
The army was stationed in Longju Village, and Le Sen immediately began the skilled process of building a security team in Shangzhou.
Shao Quanzhong had nothing to do, so he took a few old brothers to the village to see the effect of the insurance team established in Shaanxi.
As soon as I entered the town, I didn’t see the insurance team, but I saw a small temple with a lot of incense.
Shao Quanzhong was quite a believer in God. He took Liu Niang and his brothers into the temple, burned incense, and then he remembered to see what kind of god they were worshipping.
Like most Chinese people, Shao Quanzhong worships all kinds of gods. Believe in them or not is another matter. Basically, the Chinese people’s belief is actually their ancestors.
Shao Quanzhong looked up and saw that the statue looked so familiar.
No one recognized him, but he was wearing an official robe and riding a fine horse, and he turned out to be a military general of the Qing Dynasty.
After a closer look, it was "the throne of the Grand Tutor of the Crown Prince and the First-Class Light Cavalry Commander Duolong'a."
Damn, Duolonga has become a god.
The people of Longju Village are all Han people, yet they are so pious to a bannerman general. Tian Xing was very unhappy at the time.
He grabbed a person who was worshipping the gods and asked, "Aren't you a Han Chinese? Why are you worshipping the Tartars so enthusiastically?"
The old man glared at Tian Xing and said, "You, a military officer, know nothing! Without the protection of General Duolong'a, we would have been killed by those damn bastards in the Eighteenth Battalion."
(End of this chapter)