Hello everyone, today we will continue to chat The History of the Three Kingdoms .
Earlier, we talked about the historical logic of the inevitable division of the Eastern Han Dynasty empire. In today's issue, we have to continue to talk about the historical background of the first issue. When the background is explained clearly, we can better enter the main story.
You may have heard a sentence called "I would rather be a Taiping dog than a chaotic person". Now it is usually said by many people, "I would rather be a Taiping dog than a chaotic person", which is less charming, but more Easy to understand.
The Three Kingdoms at the end of the Han Dynasty is the best annotation for this sentence.
At that time, most ordinary people had only one fate: death.
The word "most of" is not an exaggeration at all - "Three Kingdoms: Zhang Xiu Biography" records, "It is time to reduce the consumption of household registration in the world, ten cuts and one in", which means nine-tenths of the population All died in chaos.
Then how many people died? According to the data of the historian He Ziquan, the total population of the Eastern Han Dynasty exceeded 50 million at the time of Emperor Huan, while the population during the heyday of the Three Kingdoms was only 7.67 million. The death toll during the period exceeded 40 million.
I checked other information, there is no dispute that the population of the Eastern Han Dynasty exceeded 50 million at the peak, but some people think that the population of the Three Kingdoms was more than 10 million in the heyday. According to this data, the death toll is still above 30 million, possibly closer to 40 million.
What is the concept of the death number? ww1 ,The total number of casualties was only more than 30 million. Note, I'm not just talking about the number of deaths but the total number of casualties. In fact, the death toll in World War I was 10 million, only 1/3 or 1/4 of the Three Kingdoms at the end of the Han Dynasty.
Why do so many people die?
Some people may say that it is because of the war. You see the records in " Three Kingdoms ", a battle kills tens of thousands of people at every turn.
But the truth is not like this.
Why do you say that? There are two reasons.
First, there was a tradition of falsely reporting military exploits during the Three Kingdoms period at the end of the Han Dynasty. This kind of data falsification was officially recognized and even encouraged, and its purpose was to publicize the strength of imperial force.
How false is the data? If you kill 1 enemy, you need to report 10, which is 10 times the data fraud.
This is not my nonsense, it is recorded in "Romance of the Three Kingdoms: Guoyuan Biography", the original text is "Broken thief documents, old one is ten".
The second reason is related to the combat form.
In ancient China, most of the battles after Warring States were defeat battles. When the battle occurs, the goal of both sides is to find the other's command system, "catch the thief first to capture the king", and once the command system of either side is defeated or chaos occurs, the soldiers will run for their lives and will not stay on the battlefield to continue. Fight, so in fact, not many people can be killed.
In ancient China, there were often battles where the less was the better, and there were even stories of dozens of people chasing tens of thousands of people, all of which were related to this type of battle.
When will such a rout not happen, when the soldiers truly have faith and can fight for their faith. The classic battle example is the Hu family's shack battle that occurred during the Liberation War. The Hu family's shack battle will not be discussed here. Students who like it can check the information by themselves, which is very, very exciting.
That's the problem. If it wasn't for war, then who was the murderer who killed tens of millions of people in the Three Kingdoms at the end of the Han Dynasty?
The answer is plague.
Disasters are "natural disasters", and epidemics are "plagues"—the plagues were the real killers of the Three Kingdoms period at the end of the Han Dynasty, and profoundly affected the historical process of the Three Kingdoms at the end of the Han Dynasty.
Let's talk about natural disasters first.
This topic starts with the climate of the Eastern Han Dynasty.
The climate of the Eastern Han Dynasty highlights one word: cold. For example, there was a year when Emperor Heng of the Han Dynasty, and frost in summer; Emperor Xian of the Han Dynasty There was a year when the wind in summer was as cold as winter. There are many written records such as
, the time span from the founding of the Eastern Han Dynasty to the unification of and the Western Jin Dynasty , I will not list them one by one, it is rather boring.
But the ancients did not understand climate science,It can only be based on the popular theory of "harmony between man and nature" at the time - the cold weather was a warning from God to the emperor, and it was a criticism of him for not managing the country well.
What can the emperor do? You can't quit your job, you can only slightly change your policy or find one or two ministers as scapegoats to kill them, and this is over.
But the common people are not finished here. Every process of agricultural production has a fixed time. When the weather is cold, the farming season is disrupted. At that time, there was no greenhouse technology. Know.
Later scholars verified that the Three Kingdoms period at the end of the Han Dynasty was one of the two " Little Ice Ages " in Chinese history, so the weather was particularly cold.
When is another "Little Ice Age"?
Late Ming and early Qing.
Anyone who is a little familiar with Chinese history will know that large-scale peasant uprisings also broke out during this period.
So you see sometimes, the fall of a dynasty can not be entirely blamed on the ruler
also have to look at the destiny. Of course, we still have to focus on the main reason. The main reason is that the rulers do not handle personnel affairs.
At the same time as the climate became colder, various disasters were very frequent in the late Eastern Han Dynasty.
From Han Andi to Han Xiandi, the recorded disasters include: 34 floods, 35 droughts, locust plagues 19 times,There were several earthquakes. On average, disasters occur almost every year.
The main reason for the frequent occurrence of disasters in the late Han Dynasty was the irregular monsoon climate.
The characteristics of China's monsoon climate are: if the summer monsoon is weak or it retreats early to the south, there will be less precipitation and droughts; ; Only if the summer wind is neither strong nor weak, neither early nor late, can the year be smooth and rainy, and the common people can live relatively easily.
During the late Eastern Han Dynasty, the monsoon was very unstable, and there were many floods and droughts.
With the cold climate and frequent disasters, it is too difficult for ordinary people to rely on the sky for food. The production of fields is reduced or even no harvest. They can only wait for the government's relief to open warehouses or set up porridge farms.
However, at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, the political corruption, the fighting in the imperial court became a pot of porridge, and individual responsible scholars and officials were suppressed because of the calamity of the party.
So these ordinary people have only two choices: either flee to become refugees, or enter the landlord's estate and become tenant farmers.
No matter which one you choose, it will become a destabilizing factor in society - when the refugees, many people rebelled along with the Yellow Turbans ; those who entered the landlord's manor became the private armed forces of the separatist forces.
The famous ministers of the late Qing Dynasty Zeng Guofan There is a saying,It is called "the people have no food, they must follow the thieves; the thieves have no food, they must change their ways." This is a very important summary of the ancient Chinese state governance method.
In ancient Chinese dynasties, there was an important ruling strategy, that is, to fix the peasants on the land, and guard your one-third of an acre of land, so as to manage and stabilize the society. The government of the Eastern Han Dynasty cannot let the common people stay on the land, can the society not be in turmoil? Can the country be in chaos?
In order not to starve to death, the common people staged many human tragedies. You go to the biography of Han Lingdi in " Later Han Dynasty ", there are many related records, the husband eats the wife, the wife eats the husband, very miserable.
Natural disasters can also affect the course of history, such as a flood in AD 219.
At that time, Guan Yu and Yujin fought fiercely in Fancheng area.
In " Romance of the Three Kingdoms ", in order to beautify Guan Yu, Luo Guanzhong said that Guan Yu first stored water and then burst the embankment, using a water meter.
But in fact it was a natural disaster, when it rained for days, Han River overflowed, and Cao Jun was flooded, resulting in a fiasco.
In addition to the cold climate and frequent disasters, there were frequent plagues during the Three Kingdoms period at the end of the Han Dynasty.
The specific cause of the plague is unknown.It is speculated that it may be related to the death of a large number of people.
During the Eastern Han Dynasty, a total of 38 large-scale plagues occurred, with an average of one plague recorded every 5 years. At the end of the Han Dynasty, the plague became more and more serious—from 169 to 182 AD, in just 13 years, there were 5 large-scale plagues across the country, an average of once every two and a half years.
When we talked about Zhang Jiao in the previous article, we said that when Zhang Jiao rose, he took advantage of the panic caused by the plague, explained the plague as a tool for God to rebuild the world order, and believed in Taiping Road In order to survive the plague, he relies on this to fool the believers and expand his influence.
At the end of the Han Dynasty and the Three Kingdoms, many famous people died of the plague. The Xu Gan , Chen Lin , Ying Yue (Yang), and Liu Zhen in " Jian'an Seven " all died in the plague that occurred in 217 AD. In the same year, another person in the "Seven Sons of Jian'an" Wang Can died of illness, which was also suspected to be related to the plague.
There are also studies that say that the death of the famous Soochow general Zhou Yu was also caused by infection with the plague.
During the Three Kingdoms period at the end of the Han Dynasty, a plague that had the greatest impact on historical development occurred in 208 AD.
If you are familiar with history, you may have guessed that, yes, the plague during Chibi Battle .
During the Battle of Chibi, a plague broke out among Cao's army, and historical records recorded "a great epidemic, many officials and soldiers died", which is one of the reasons for Cao Cao's defeat in Chibi.
Having said this, we can answer the previous question more accurately: Tens of millions of people died in the Three Kingdoms at the end of the Han Dynasty. Of course, war did exacerbate the effects of natural disasters and plagues.
After a lifetime of sighs, our article is coming to an end. Why do I want to talk about the disaster and epidemic of the Three Kingdoms at the end of the Han Dynasty? In addition to many factors affecting the historical process, there is another important reason, that is, I want to tell you: the Three Kingdoms at the end of the Han Dynasty is different from what many people imagined. Yes, it was a heroic era, but by no means a romantic one. On the contrary, for the people at the bottom, this is an era of pain and despair.
Finally, we use a few poems by the Jian'an poet Wang Can who died in 217 to experience the suffering of the troubled times again:
Go out and see nothing, white bones cover the plain
There are hungry women on the road, Abandoned in the grass.
Gu heard the sound of sobbing, but did not return the tears.
"I don't know where I'm going to die, how can I end up in two?"
.References:
Chen Shou "Three Kingdoms"
Liu Ye "The Book of the Later Han Dynasty"
Sima Guang_span " General Mirror of Zizhi"
He Ziquan "The History of the Three Kingdoms"
Lu Bi "Annotation of the Three Kingdoms"
Lv Simian: "The History of the Three Kingdoms"
Liu Chunyu: Epidemic of the Eastern Han Dynasty A Preliminary Study
Prince Jin: A Historical Investigation of Climate Changes in Qin and Han Dynasties
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