What was the level of firearms in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom at that time?

The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was a very large-scale peasant uprising in the Qing Dynasty, which lasted 14 years, and at its peak occupied half of the Qing Dynasty, posing a very big threat to the rule of the late Qing Dynasty, but it still ended in failure. At that time, the level of firearms in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was not bad, and the size of the troops equipped with firearms would not be less than **. To put it mildly, the firearms of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom** were mainly seized on the battlefield, purchased from foreign merchants, and self-cast firearms.

At the beginning of the Jintian Uprising, the Taiping Army's equipment was mainly broadsword and spear, supplemented by firearms. It's not that the leaders don't pay attention to firearms, it's that there are no **, so there are not many of them.

At the time of the Jintian uprising, Shi Dakai had opened a furnace to cast cannons in Baisha Market in Guixian County, and the "Guiping County Chronicles" also had a record of Shi Dakai's rate of "more than 1,000 party members, stationed in Baisha, opening furnaces and casting cannons, and going to the rest of the month", which was also the first batch of "heavy **" in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. It can be seen that Shi Dakai is also a very far-sighted military strategist.

Later, the Taiping Army also cast a new style in Kunshan, which was presided over by two Britons. Now, in Jiangxi, Anhui, Hubei, Zhejiang, Jiangsu and other places, there are found artillery made by the Taiping Army, the heaviest of which is 1,000 catties.

Of course, the artillery made by the Taiping Army was a traditional Chinese style of front-loading guns, which was difficult to compare with modern Western-style artillery.

In addition to self-minting, buying is also a way to go.

In June 1860, after the Taiping army captured Suzhou, they sent people to sneak into Shanghai with money to buy foreign guns and gunpowder. Not only that, but the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom also allowed foreigners who served them to buy arms.

After the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom occupied Ningbo, foreign merchants and the British and French navies vied with each other to sell arms and food.

The last way is to seize it.

Since the Jintian Uprising, the Taiping Army has expanded its territory all the way, and wars have been frequent, although the Qing army at that time was only partially equipped with firearms, but this has been a treasure for the Taiping Army. Especially later in the battles with the Hunan Army and other new armies, more firearms were captured, and the quality was much better than that of the Eight Banners and the Green Battalion.

But it is undeniable that the ** of firearms is too complicated, and there are even private collections, It is said that the Taiping Army has obtained a batch of firearms set up by Wu Sangui that year, whether it is true or false, it can be said that the Taiping Army's firearms specifications are varied, and the effect will not be so good that the ** goes, and even many firearms will do more harm to themselves.

Moreover, although firearms determine the outcome of the war to a certain extent, the key lies in people, which is why the Qing Dynasty frequently purchased advanced firearms and cast them themselves, but the outcome of the war with foreigners still ended in failure. So although the Taiping army attached great importance to firearms, it did not save itself from defeat.

The firearms of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom were still relatively advanced at that time, and many of them were even funded by the French.

At that time, the Taiping army used a large number of artillery **, including privately built, purchased and smuggled, and looted, and the number was similar to that of cold weapons, which was a very high level at that time.

In the Qing Dynasty, the ** troops were still backward, and even some still used bows and arrows and broadswords. So in contrast, the ** of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom at that time was relatively advanced in the Qing Dynasty.

Worship God. Taiping heavenly kingdom. The ideology of the peasant uprising is the religion of worshipping God, and it is Hong Xiuquan.

Founded under the influence of the West. Hong Xiuquan was originally a rural scholar who tried to follow the path of the imperial examination to become a wise scholar, and in 1836 he obtained from missionaries on the streets of Guangzhou the sermon book "Advice to the World" written by Liang Fa, China's first pastor

Began to come into contact with Western denominations.

Characteristics of the Thoughts:When Hong Xiuquan entered Guangxi to plot revolution, according to the spirit of the doctrine of "Advice to the World", "persuade the world to worship God, persuade the former posture to eliminate people and cultivate goodness, and if the people of the world are willing to worship God, there is no difficulty, those who do not worship God will hurt people, and those who worship God shall not worship other gods, and those who worship other gods will be guilty." Therefore, after the people of the world have worshiped God, they dare not worship God.

Those who are the people of the world are afraid of death, and those who are not afraid of snakes and tigers bite people? Therefore from it. "Lee so-sung.

The words directly stated the fact that Hong Xiuquan used the God Worship Sect to win over and organize the masses.

Very good, in the firearms found in Guangxi, there were 500 catties of iron cannons and 600 catties of copper cannons engraved with the words "Taiping Left and Right Army", and relatively small sub-cannons and small cannons of five sub-cannons were also found.

The firearms of the army of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom have been equipped with many soldiers, and one-third of the soldiers are equipped with firearms and muskets, which is already very large-scale and very good.

Very strong. If it weren't for the high level of corruption within the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, it could have been said that it would have been able to defeat the Qing Dynasty's army.

Their firearms are very good, and they have their own military production system.

The firearms of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom were very powerful, and their firearms were made with the most advanced technology, and their lethality was very large.

The level of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom's army was very powerful, and their army had already reached a relatively advanced level at that time.

The ** level of the army of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was actually higher than that of the Qing Dynasty at that time, but it was still too far behind to resist foreign enemies.

I think that the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom could not win the Hunan army mainly because of the following three points:1. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom lost its cohesion due to open and secret internal struggles; Second, the Hunan army has a unique and strong team cohesion and combat effectiveness; Third, the first-class configuration of the Hunan army is more reasonable.

In the early days, the Hunan army could not defeat the Taiping army, and at that time, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom team was on the rise, and the army was all veterans of the battlefield, led by generals with rich experience in leading troops. On the other hand, the Hunan Army, at that time, was still a local armed force with the nature of a militia group, and it was newly formed, and it had no actual combat experience in the team, and it was often beaten all over the ground looking for teeth. The first time the general Zeng Guofan led his troops to fight, there was a misjudgment, and the team was defeated in Jinggang, and Zeng Guofan almost committed suicide by throwing himself into the water.

Late stageThe Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was in internal chaos, and the internal struggles at the top led to instability in the morale of the military. Therefore, the occupied areas were slowly recovered by the Qing army, and it was difficult to guarantee food and clothing for the troops who had lost their logistical support. Such an army, of course, cannot win the war.

The reason why the Hunan army was named the Hunan army is because the officers and soldiers of the Hunan army are all Hunanese, and most of the generals of the Hunan army are scholars with a high level of education, strong learning ability, and fast learning of the art of war, so the command quality of the generals of the Hunan army is higher than that of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom. The soldiers of the Hunan army were recruited by the generals themselves, and many of them were relatives, friends and hometown fathers and villagers, these people lived together before, and later became soldiers and were still togetherThe cohesion of the Hunan army is very strong, so the combat effectiveness increases very quickly.

Compared with the Taiping Army, the Hunan Army's ** configuration is more reasonable, the Hunan Army is not a single soldier, its combat unit is a team, the team is divided into the following two types: one is a sword and gun team, using cold weapons; There is also a musket corps, which uses firearms. Cold weapons are combined with hot weapons, hot weapons are responsible for long-range attacks, cold weapons are responsible for close combat, both offensive and defensive, andThe logistics support of the Hunan army is good, the food and supplies were sufficient and timely, and compared with the Taiping army, which had already reached the land of decline, it had obvious advantages.

I think the most fundamental reason for this problem is that the leaders of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom have made mistakes, and this is the root cause of the problemSo if something goes wrong here, then all the orders they give will also lay the groundwork for future military operationsAlthough the army of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom has a lot of **, and the number of their troops is increasing year by year, they lost a mess when they faced off with the Hunan army.

We cannot deny that the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom did have a very glorious time, but as time went by, Hong Xiuquan became more and more mediocre, because he was only a peasant at the beginning, and he did not have much eloquence, despite leading such a large teamHis thinking was still stuck in the past, although after the establishment of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, they also made a series of measures to improve the current social environment.

However, because the program ideas put forward were very different from the social development situation at that time, they could not be coordinated at all, so none of them could be truly implemented. Another important reason why the Taiping army lost this war was that they were not organized, and their strength was actually inferior to the well-trained Hunan army, because they were all peasants before.

This is a very typical peasant uprising, and these peasants had been farming at home before the uprising, with little military talent and not necessarily how strong their bodies were, so their opponents were differentThe Hunan army is a well-trained army, and since they have been given this name, they have assumed the responsibilities assigned to them by this nameAnd there is also the support of **, which is even more powerful, this is my point of view.

Most of the soldiers in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom were peasants, because of the wars at the time. So I had to recruit civilian troops. Therefore, the army of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was sloppy and could not fight against the Hunan army led by Zeng Guofan.

In the Ming Dynasty, firearms were already widely used in warfare, and of course muskets were used during the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.

As early as the Jintian uprising, there were a lot of guns in the Taiping army, on June 27 of the first year of Xianfeng (1851), the Qing general Ulantai attacked Xinxu, and captured 13 Taiping artillery guns at one time, all of which were cast with the words "Taiping Left and Right Army", obviously, these cannons were cast by themselves after the uprising, and there was also a record of Wei Changhui's "opening the gate to make cannons" in Guiping.

In addition to cannons, the early Taiping army also had many other firearms, according to the captured Li Jinfu, the Taiping soldiers in Bauhinia Mountain, each had to carry a cloth bag containing gunpowder, which shows that the amount used is quite a lot.

The "General Essentials of the March", published around 1855, stipulated that the most basic combat unit of the Taiping Army, the "Liang" (with 25 men), was equipped with two guns and five shotguns, and the guns were operated by two people. The Hunan army against the enemy of the Taiping Army, a battalion is divided into four sentry posts, each sentry has eight teams, of which four teams are swords and spears, two teams carry guns, two teams of small guns (bird guns), and six teams of pro-soldiers, of which three teams are swords and spears, two teams of mountain artillery, and one team of small guns, and the ratio of hot and cold weapons is 1 1, and the two are relatively compared, although there is a gap, but it is not big. Cannons are very precious to the Taiping army, and in 1852, the Taiping army accidentally obtained the iron cannon left by Wu Sangui in Yuezhou, Hunan, which was like a treasure; After entering Nanjing, most of the heavy artillery was centrally deployed, such as the Jiangbei fortress Guazhou, which was assigned to be equipped with a copper cannon weighing 2,000 catties.

Comparatively speaking, carrying guns, shotguns, and small cannons are much more popular.

For the use of foreign guns, the Taiping army is not lagging behind, in 1855 during the Battle of Hukou, Wang Haiyang and other Taiping Army "vanguard" on the use of foreign guns assault, in 1858 in the Battle of Fanchang, the Taiping Army Liu Guanfang has used a large number of foreign guns. In the later period, the Taiping Army was equipped with a large number of foreign guns and foreign cannons, such as the guards of thousands of people in King Zhong, and the soldiers equipped with foreign guns in Suzhou City reached more than 20,000 people.

Yes, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom had frequent contacts with foreigners, and they were able to get a lot of firearms, and there was once a situation where foreigners joined the army to fight for them, but firearms were not popularized, and later Zeng Guofan also developed firearms, so the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom's advantages in this regard were not obvious.

In some cases, the Taiping army once purchased advanced firearms from Westerners on a large scale, and used this to defeat the Qing army. This was also one of the inducements that prompted the Qing court to reflect on and carry out the Westernization Movement.

Yes, Zeng Guofan has such a team.

Because the later period of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was very corrupt, the army had little combat effectiveness, and it was basically a plate of scattered sand. So the resulting failure.

Although there were many firearms, mainly the economic base under the rule, it was not enough to complete the war of attrition with the Hunan army.

After all, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was not a regular army, and the army was disheartened and orderly, and it was relatively corrupt in the later period. will be defeated by the Hunan army.

Because of political corruption in the later period of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the management of the army was relatively loose. In addition, because the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom buried the corpses on the spot, there was an outbreak of plague, which led to the death of a large number of army members.

The fire is relatively backward, and then the whole team is not standardized and unified enough, and the economic foundation is not enough, so it is impossible to fight at all.

The long-term attrition is often accompanied by the plague, because the corpses in the army at that time adopted the policy of burying them on the spot, rather than burning them intensively, especially the Taiping army trapped in the lonely city, and there was often a large-scale plague in the city, which spread from the army to the people, causing a large number of deaths.

It is said that there are many firearms, but as far as I know, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom does not use foreigners' things, and once it is captured, it will be wiped out, and besides, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom is a team formed by peasants after all, and it is still not good for real troops.

After all, the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom was a contingent established by peasant organizations, and there was still a certain gap between the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom and the Hunan army, which was born in regular troops, in marching and fighting.