Yixing In The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement

The regional researches of the period of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement are numerous,but in the previous research results,quite a few scholars focus on the county town and rarely on the rural area's conditions.This paper treats Yixing during this period as the object of study,takes the urban and rural areas as the one to carry on an overall study,analyzing the circumstances of the the urban areas,at the same time,taking advantage of the materials of the genealogies,exploring the situation of the rural areas.As a whole,with the Taiping Army's activities in Yixing as a template,this paper investigates the wars,the destruction brought by the wars and the post-war recovery that occur in Yixing's urban and rural areas during the period of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom Movement.Specifically,first of all,this article utilizes materials such as local chronicles,collected works and atlas,explores the resistance of the urban and rural areas in Yixing in details.Although the Green Camp armed forces were stationed on the urban areas,they could only competent at the duty of ordinary suppression,but couldn't protect the county town against the attack of the Taiping Army.The defend war of the county town achieved some success at the beginning,but soon failed and the the urban areas was lost.However,in the rural areas,there were hardly any troops,the resistance was surging and living.The main force was the village military power.The clan system in Yixing played a key role in organizing the village military power to resist the Taiping army.During the several years when the Taiping Army were stationed at the county and battled with the village military power in rural areas,Yixing had suffered a great loss and the destruction was 'especially miserable'.The war made the masses die or went into exile,brought Yixing with hundreds of thousands of population into a loss.The clan system took a heavy toll.Simultaneously,the public services and facilities were destroyed,the masses'private property was robbed of,the agriculture,the handcraft industry and the business were suffering a setback,and eventually rendered the economical development of Yinxing into collapse.With regard to the culture,plenty of schools fell in ruins and the imperial examinations was once interrupted because of the warfare.Until the third year of Tongzhi,the Qing Government reoccupied Yixing,those refugees who escaped from the county town returned home one after another.In face of the situation of the scattered population,the farmland which went out of cultivation and the exhausted economics,the government,the gentry and the clans set out to the post-war recovery together.The county magistrate leaded the gentry to recovery the county town,so the public services and facilities such as the ancestral temples,the charitable institutions,the fortress,the government offices,the storehouses and the bridges were restored.And with policies such as the exemption of rent for land,making a survey of the land and so on,all carried into operation,making the recovery of the agriculture speed up developing,on this basis,the handcraft industry and the business gradually revived as well.Schools and the imperial examinations were also got back on track.Although the government and the gentry played an important role in the post-war recovery,it was not enough to explain the fact that the rapid recovery of the large rural areas.The rebuilding in the rural areas was different from that in the urban areas.The clans,as one of the rural areas' main cohesive force,took an important part in rebuilding.The clan elites,who recovered the patriarchal-lineage through building the clan ancestral temples and the genealogies,improved the clansman's life condition by the mutual assistance of the clan members,and further,expanded the functions of the clan to the rural areas which it was within via holding a concurrent post as Tudong or Xiangyue,made the post-war recovery of the rural areas come true rapidly.In conclusion,this paper attempts to contrast the urban areas with the rural areas,to pay attention to the role which the clans played in organizing the village military power to resist the Taiping Army and in the post-war recovery,in order to represent Yixing in the Tai Ping Heavenly Kingdom Movement from a more comprehensive perspective.