Looking for the tree hanged by Chongzhen
The sun shines in Beijing in early April, warm and lazy. This is Beijing at the beginning of the century-the beginning of April in 200 1 year. It was this morning that I came to Jingshan Park behind the Forbidden City again.
It's not because I haven't seen enough of the scenery here. On the contrary, there are not many scenic spots to see here, especially the Forbidden City in the south and Beihai in the west, but it is just a dirt mountain and several pavilions, and she has nothing to boast about at all. I came here again because there was one thing. I passed by in a hurry last time and didn't savor it.
This thing is a tree, a tree hanged by Chongzhen.
In fact, that tree is just a symbol-in the southeast of the hill-like Jingshan, there stands a pagoda tree with a crooked neck and a sign hanging on it-Chongzhen Hangs Jingshan Park. Naturally, few people will believe that this is a tree hanged by Chongzhen, because this crooked-necked tree with a thick bowl mouth is only thirty or forty years old at most, and since Emperor Chongzhen hanged himself in 1644, it is still three years away from Shen Jia's sixth reincarnation. If that tree is still growing, how touching it would be. Facing it, people will feel the ruthlessness and aging of the years!
I lingered in front of the tree for a long time, then climbed the stairs and sat down at Wanshou Pavilion at the top of Jingshan Mountain. The Forbidden City is just in front, and the strong sunshine makes me squint ―― it is directly in front of the central axis from Tiananmen aisle to the exit of the Palace Museum, so it looks like an open history book.
It was a stormy year and the building was about to collapse. On March 18, Li Zicheng's peasant army, which was totally annihilated, breached the last fortress of Chongzhen-the Imperial City of Beijing. Zhu Youjian, the Emperor Chongzhen of the Ming Dynasty, stumbled out of the Forbidden City after forcing his concubines to death and slashing princess royal to death with his sword, and ran to Jingshan Park behind him, watching the smoke everywhere and drinking a pot of wine until the sun set and the stars filled the sky. Then he tied a knot with a ribbon between the branches and told the eunuchs around him that he had lost his country and was ashamed to see his ancestors, so he would cover his face with his hair after his death. Then he hanged himself.
The death of Chongzhen is of great significance. His death lies not only in the irreversible demise of a dynasty, but also in a fact that may be ignored: with the Qing Dynasty entering the Central Plains, a civilized and mature country was taken over by a savage and backward Confucius, the factors of science and technology and culture were seriously suffocated, and the germination of humanistic spirit was destroyed in every way. Chinese civilization, which was two or three thousand years ahead of the world, almost stagnated and began to lag behind the West.
Countries and nations are always linked.
In the west, five years after Emperor Chongzhen hanged himself, Charles I of Stuart Dynasty in England also came to the end of the road. 1The 1940s can be said to be an extremely important era for the east and the west ―― in the previous centuries, after the great awakening of humanism and the great progress of science and technology, the east and the west basically formed a balance that was not very biased. With the demise of the Ming Dynasty and the entry of the Qing Dynasty, the balance of the world was out of balance.
National subjugation first.
Many people, including many historians, have sympathy for the death of Chongzhen. Compassion for what? Sympathize with his origin and his ending. Despite all my efforts, I still can't go back to heaven. The national movement has obviously failed, but I still can't support it. As he said, I am not the king of a country, but everything is like the death of a country. Naturally, behind the sympathy for Chongzhen is a lament for the decline of a country and a nation.
Emperor Chongzhen reigned for seventeen years, but he was different from all the emperors in China. From the first day of his accession to the throne, the collapse and disintegration of the national building has been tormenting him. According to historians, he made great efforts for seventeen years, trying to revive the country, but he failed to reverse Gan Kun. China people have the impression that Shang Zhouwang, Qin Ershi, Chen Houzhu, Yang Di and Song Huizong are all dissidents. These people are either cruel or shameless, or ignorant and incompetent, and there is no point in surviving. To say the least, if he dies in Zhu Yijun, his ancestor Emperor Wanli, a man who has been lazy for more than 20 years and doesn't care about state affairs, will also die. If he dies in his brother Zhu Youxiao, the Apocalypse Emperor, a man who uses eunuchs to engage in spy politics but likes to dance with his civil skills in the palace, he will die. The name of the king of national subjugation finally fell on Emperor Chongzhen, which was really "unfair". So the historian's point of view is that Chongzhen is acting as a scapegoat for Emperor Wanli and Emperor Apocalypse.
There are countless decadent and dark times in the history of China, and I think the most decadent and dark time should be the apocalypse years before Chongzhen. Why? It is a bit out of line to make a shrine to a living person, not to mention that this living person is a eunuch from a rogue background; It doesn't matter, the level of building a shrine is even comparable to that of Confucius, a "model for all generations"! The location of the shrine is more prominent. On the beautiful Xizi Lake in Hangzhou, a eunuch shrine was built between Yuefei Tomb and Guan Gong Temple, which made the passing literati sigh! But the price of this sigh is being beaten and beheaded. A huge "climax" of building shrines for them has been set off all over the country. For example, Kaifeng even stripped 2,000 houses to build magnificent shrines, and many places also demolished schools and other temples for shrines. What is the greatest achievement of this eunuch Wei Zhongxian? That is to serve the emperor well, he is the emperor's best servant! What is even more tragic is a country and a nation. After Shang Yong's ignorant Lindong party member was defeated one by one, people familiar with sage books began to choose silence, and quite a few people chose flattery. Imagine that there are so many officials and politicians, eagle dogs who are willing to be eunuchs, and even grandchildren of adopted sons. The ruling and opposition parties are full of five tigers, five tigers, ten dogs and adopted sons. How shameless is the state atmosphere? After reading this page of history, more than 300 years later, we are ashamed of the ugliness, hypocrisy, fierceness, arrogance and weakness of such a group of people in the nation, and these things are really strange things in the history of world civilization!
Chongzhen took over such a mess, but at the age of seventeen, he expelled the guest Wei, cut off the eunuchs and purged the bureaucracy, but he looked neat and sophisticated and won the expectation of a country. At that time, many scholars and people felt that the Ming Dynasty had turned the corner and would start a new Renaissance.
However, the chaos is a mess after all, and this mess has reached the point of rot-more than 20 years of drought and abnormal drawbacks, especially the corruption and darkness during the apocalypse, and the Ming Dynasty is actually sliding into an endless abyss, so that from the day Zhu Youjian took over the throne, he felt that it was not a comfortable dragon chair, but a crater of anger and hatred. In the first year of Chongzhen, Shaanxi, where people were starving everywhere, has ignited a single spark of hunger uprising, and a bigger peasant storm is brewing. In the northeast outside the Great Wall, the aristocrats of the late Jin Dynasty have already risen, and the descendants of Nurhachi are eyeing the Ming Dynasty in the pass ―― in their eyes, there is no doubt that the Ming Dynasty is waiting for them to slaughter and share a piece of the countless fat cows and sheep in captivity. Domestic troubles and foreign invasion, on the one hand, are like a spreading fire, on the other hand, like a roaring tide. This is the embarrassing situation after Emperor Zhu Youjian of Chongzhen took over, and as time goes by, the situation becomes more and more serious. Zhu Youjian can't help but feel confused first, then panic, and then uneasy. It can be said that the mentality of worrying about the country and the people runs through the seventeen years of Emperor Chongzhen's reign.
When people comment on Emperor Chongzhen, most people think that one of the fatal things of his loss lies in two words: paranoia. Suspicion makes it difficult for him to be consistent in employing people. Doubt made it difficult for him to tolerate failure. Suspicion made him particularly harsh and made him self-destruct the Great Wall. People have seen that both the generals who guarded the frontier fortress after the Jin Dynasty and the generals who suppressed the peasant rebels changed like a lantern. People see that an excellent general like Yuan Chonghuan died not on the battlefield, but on his own execution ground in the Ming Dynasty. People also saw that after Emperor Chongzhen purged the eunuch group in Wei Zhongxian, many people he finally started were eunuchs, but only those eunuchs who were his cronies.
Why is Emperor Chongzhen suspicious? I think this is something that should be fully considered.