In 1793, the summer of the fifty-eighth year of Qianlong, the first British mission to China arrived in China. The British are full of curiosity about this mysterious country.They believe that China is like Marco Polo's travel notes, where gold is everywhere and everyone wears silk and satin. However, as soon as they landed on the land of China, they immediately discovered shocking poverty.The Qing Dynasty hired many ordinary people to come to the ships of the British missions to serve tea, pour water, sweep the floor and cook for the British.The British noticed that these people were "all so thin." "Among ordinary Chinese, it's hard to find something similar to the beer belly of a British citizen or the beaming face of a British farmer."These ordinary Chinese "every time they receive our leftovers, they are very grateful. For our used tea, they always greedily scramble for it, and then boil it and drink it."

John Barrow, a member of the mission, said in "My View of the Prosperity of Qianlong": "Whether it was in Zhoushan or in the three days of going up the Baihe River to the capital, I did not see any evidence that the people had enough food and clothing, and the countryside was prosperous... except for the villages. There are few trees around, and they are ugly. The houses are usually mud-walled bungalows with thatched roofs. Occasionally there is a small independent building, but there is never a gentleman's mansion, or a comfortable farmhouse... Neither the houses nor the waterways can be compared with those on the banks of Reddrif and Wapping (two towns on the Thames in England). In fact, there is nothing but poverty and backwardness everywhere."

There is no doubt that Emperor Qianlong is one of the greatest emperors in Chinese history.Some commentators even dropped the word "one". Indeed, China under Qianlong's rule was the most populous and most powerful period in China's thousands of years of history.Horizontally, it was the most powerful and richest country in the world at that time.Why is the sumptuous prosperity of our 5,000-year culture so bleak in the eyes of the British? The reason is that the gap between the living standards of Chinese and Europeans during the Qianlong era was too great. In the 14th century, Europeans were not much richer than Chinese.The proportion of meat in their food is not high. A large piece of bread and a bowl of thick soup have already satisfied the British farmers who have worked hard all day.However, with the development of society, the living standards of Europeans have been continuously improved.

In the early days of the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, an ordinary hired worker on a Hampshire farm in England had the following recipe for three meals a day: breakfast was milk, bread, and bacon left over from the previous day; lunch was bread, cheese, a small amount of beer, and bacon , potatoes, cabbage or radishes; supper is bread and cheese.On Sunday, you can eat fresh pork.After the industrial revolution, the life of the British people is even more prosperous. In 1808, the consumption list of the average British peasant family added 2.3 gallons of skimmed milk, 1 pound of cheese, 17 pints of light beer, half a pound each of butter and sugar, and a ounce of tea.

And what did the Chinese eat during the Qianlong period? For thousands of years, the main food of Chinese farmers has been coarse grains and green vegetables, with very little meat, eggs, and milk. Usually, during the spring famine, they have to pick wild vegetables to survive.In the Qianlong era, there are many records of people eating bran-swallowed vegetables.According to "China and the World in the 18th Century: Farmers Volume", after a year of consumption, ordinary British farmers can have 11 pounds left, which is about 33 to 44 taels of silver.However, the total annual income of a medium-sized Chinese farmer is only 32 taels, while the annual expenditure is 35 taels.Therefore, once there is a famine, ordinary families will go bankrupt immediately, and selling children and daughters is very common.

The poverty in Qianlong's heyday was not only reflected in material, but more importantly, in spirit. After arriving on the coast of Zhejiang, the British asked the local general to help them find a navigator because they were not familiar with the Chinese route.The commander-in-chief readily agreed. The British saw an unexpected scene.The general soldier's method is to send soldiers to find all the people who have been to Tianjin by sea.Baro, a member of the mission, said: "The soldiers they sent quickly brought back a group of people. They were the most miserable-looking guys I have ever seen in my life. One by one, they knelt on their knees and were questioned... They cried in vain. , Traveling far away from home will ruin their business and bring pain to their wives, children and families, the commander-in-chief was unmoved and ordered them to be ready in an hour."

This scene is unimaginable in Europe.The British said: "The arbitrariness of the general army reflects that the legal system of the court or the protection given to the people is not very good. Forcing an honest and hardworking citizen, a successful businessman to abandon his family and engage in labor that is harmful to himself, It's an act of injustice and atrocity." This is only the beginning of a series of surprises for the British, and things that shocked them more than this are yet to come. When the boats were sailing on the inland river, the British noticed that the officials forcibly recruited a large number of people to pull the fiber, pulling "about six pence wages" a day, but did not pay the travel expenses home.This is obviously uneconomical, and many people don't want this salary and keep fleeing. "To find replacements, the officials sent their soldiers to nearby villages and unexpectedly pulled some villagers out of their beds to join the militiamen. Soldiers flogged militiamen who tried to escape or demanded immunity on the grounds of old age and infirmity. Hardly ever a night does not happen. It is painful to see the miserable condition of some of them. They are visibly starved and emaciated... They are always supervised by soldiers or some entourage of minor officials, whose long The whip will be drawn on them without hesitation, as if they were a team of horses."

The order of Qianlong's prosperous age was originally established in this way. In Europe at the same time, the concept of human rights has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people.No matter how high a person's status is, he cannot arbitrarily put another person under his feet. In 1747, the twelfth year of Qianlong, King Friedrich II of Prussia built a summer palace called Sanssouci Palace.Unexpectedly, this Sanssouci Palace brought him trouble.It turned out that his palace was chosen on the edge of a common people's wind mill.During the construction period, the mill owner sued the king in court, saying that the newly built palace blocked the wind, which was not conducive to the rotation of the wind mill.In the end the king had to bow his knees and agree to compensate the miller.

This story helps us understand why the British were so surprised by the human rights situation of the Chinese during the Qianlong period. The emergence of Qianlong's prosperous age depends on the fact that Emperor Qianlong mobilized all the technical resources of the traditional man to rule Mingjun to the greatest extent.If this prosperous age appeared in the Han Dynasty or the Tang Dynasty, it would certainly be worthy of the word great. Unfortunately, in 1522, about 200 years before Qianlong was born, Magellan had already completed his voyage around the world.Then, Portugal, Spain, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom successively came to the waters south of China, and the process of globalization began.It is no longer possible for any country to close itself to the outside world forever.

The 18th century in which Qianlong lived was a great turning point in human history.Until then, the pace of human progress has been slow.And from this century onwards, history began to run forward. "Qianlong reigned for sixty years, just when Britain experienced the whole process of the industrial revolution." "Prior to this...the bottom of the earth contains huge resources and energy, and people have been exploring but harvesting little. In the 18th century, all of a sudden After obtaining the key to open the treasure house, new productive forces suddenly spewed out like springs dormant in the ground. The output value of industry and agriculture increased hundreds or thousands of times, and material wealth flowed in endlessly.”

And the progress of political civilization in this century is not slower than that of material civilization.In the thirteenth year of Qianlong (1748), Montesquieu published the famous book "The Spirit of Law".In the forty-first year of Qianlong (1776), the United States declared independence.In the fifty-fourth year of Qianlong (1789), the bourgeois revolution broke out in France, and the "principle of sovereignty rests with the people" was put forward.In the second year after Emperor Qianlong abdicated (1795), Washington announced his refusal to serve as the third president, perfecting the American democracy. In the 18th century, the mainstream of the tide of world civilization was to "domesticate the rulers and lock them into legal cages" through constitutional and representative systems. On the other side of the world, Emperor Qianlong was doing the opposite.Although Qianlong's grandfather, Emperor Kangxi, already knew that the earth is round, that there are five continents in the world, and that there are people who have sailed around the entire earth.Although Western missionaries had introduced the heliocentric theory to him during the Qianlong period, although the British mission brought him astronomical instruments, globes, Herschel telescopes, Parker lenses, a model of the giant warship "King Wang", and even hot air balloons He performed with the pulley again, but he was not at all sensitive to changes in the general trend of the world.He regards the vitality and spontaneity of civil society as the greatest enemy of the Qing Dynasty forever. With more than 60 years of hard work, he has completed the most meticulous, perfect and firmest autocratic rule in Chinese history, and locked the people in stricter cage of tyranny. All levels of Qing society were under his strong control: He used carrots and sticks to eliminate the possibility of the royal family and foreign relatives interfering in politics, so that they can only enjoy their salaries honestly and dare not talk nonsense.He firmly controlled the ministers in his hands with his clever tactics and extraordinary political terror, so as to ensure that the will of the monarch was unimpeded at any time and in any field. His attitude towards the "troublemakers" who dared to resist was to suppress them blindly.In his eyes, the relationship between the emperor, officials and common people is that of father, son and grandson.No matter how the father abuses the son, the son is not allowed to resist in the slightest.Therefore, no matter how oppressed and exploited by corrupt officials, the common people can only resign themselves to their fate, and are not allowed to "leapfrog petitions".When the masses gather to protest and defend their rights, he always regards them as a big enemy, and repeatedly emphasizes the need to "severely deal with it", and even "regardless of who leads and who follows, and implements the law." For intellectuals, he is even more like an enemy.He uses super terror as a means to sweep away all the germs of thought that may endanger the rule.During the Qianlong period, there were 130 large literary inquisitions alone.The literary inquisition campaign of more than 30 years is like putting the whole society into a pressure cooker for sterilization, completing a comprehensive cleaning from the outside to the inside, eliminating all germs of heresy, and creating an iron forge that he believes will be safe for generations to come. country. Therefore, the prosperity of Qianlong was the product of going against the mainstream of human civilization. The merits of Qianlong's heyday were to create unprecedented political stability, feed an unprecedented number of people, and establish today's territory. However, the permanent spiritual trauma caused by the Qianlong era to the Chinese nation is far greater than the achievements of this period. Comparing the development of world civilization in the 18th century horizontally, the Qianlong era was a prosperous age with only the right to survive but not the right to development.A vertical comparison of Chinese history shows that the Qianlong era was also the era in which people’s rights were deprived the most and their will was suppressed the weakest.The prosperous age of Qianlong was a prosperous age of hunger, horror, and rigidity, which was designed based on the maximization of the interests of a few rulers.The Chinese in the Qianlong era were "steady slaves" who were only allowed to have stomachs and intestines, but not brains.Only in this way can the great Qing Dynasty last for hundreds of millions of years. The people carefully shaped by Qianlong's prosperous prison are tame, obedient, and extremely tolerant, but they can't straighten their backs, keep their eyes open, and welcome the coming world tide. Brits have also come into contact with Chinese in other parts of the world.In the Philippine Islands, Batavia (present-day Jakarta), Penang, "and other possessions of our East India Company," the Chinese immigrants' "honesty was as good as their meekness and industry...where their invention and ingenuity It also seems to be as good as learning imitative precision."However, when they came to China, they found that the Chinese living in their own country were far less lively and natural than the overseas Chinese, and they lacked creativity.They are more timid than the rest of the world, and generally lack self-esteem, selfishness, apathy, and indifference to public affairs. When the mission's boat was passing through the canal, a group of onlookers overturned a small boat in the river, and many people fell into the river.Barrow said: "Although there are many boats in this area, there is no boat to rescue the people who are struggling in the river... There is no response from the people on our boat to go to the rescue. Seven miles an hour, that's why they won't stop. I'm sure some of these unfortunates must have lost their lives." The British analyzed that this deformed national character was the result of careful shaping by the Chinese rulers: "As far as the current regime (Qing court) is concerned, there is sufficient evidence that its high-handed methods have completely tamed this nation, The pattern shaped the character of the people. Their moral values ​​and behavior were completely shaped by the ideology of the imperial court and were almost completely under the control of the imperial court." Macartney's conclusion about the Chinese regime is better known: "This government, as it currently exists, is strictly speaking the despotism of a handful of Tartars over hundreds of millions of Chinese." This despotism had disastrous effects . "There has been no improvement, no advance, or rather regress, for at least the past hundred years since the Tatar conquest of the North or Manchuria; and while we advance every day in the arts and sciences, they are in fact becoming Semi-savage." Although at its peak, Qianlong's rule was nothing new.The prosperity of Qianlong is nothing but a great summary and repetition of the rule of Wenjing, the rule of Zhenguan and the prosperity of Kaiyuan.Unfortunately, this flourishing age happened when it shouldn't be, so if the candlelight meets the sun, its achievements will be dimmed all of a sudden. In the face of major changes in the world that have not been seen in thousands of years, if the autocratic rule is not so airtight and the Chinese society is not so monolithic, the new wave of civilization from the West may naturally infiltrate this ancient land.It is a pity that China coincides with a "prosperous age" in which the ability to govern has never been improved.The spiritual weakness, conservatism, and rigidity of the Chinese nation caused by the autocratic spirit represented by Qianlong were not only the reason for China’s failure in the Opium War, but also one of the reasons why China’s stumbling, difficult and tortuous road to modernization since the Opium War .However, more than two hundred years after Qianlong's death, there are still many people who firmly believe that only Qianlong's style and methods are suitable for this unique land. Only when we have a thorough understanding of the other side of the Qianlong era and make a comprehensive and accurate assessment of the gains and losses of this era, can our nation not experience the "Qianlong prosperity" in vain.