Chapter 5 Maqiao bow

The full name of Maqiao is "Maqiao Bow".The bow refers to the village, but the land including the village is obviously a traditional unit of area.A bow is a square and a arrow.There are about forty families in Maqiaogong, as well as a dozen cows, pigs, dogs, chickens and ducks, nestling in the paddy fields with two long and narrow ditches.The four most important points of this village are: the field of Shuanglonggong is connected to the east, and the Luojiang River can be seen in the distance.The undulating mountains facing Tianziling in the north, and Chazigou are divided by Qiling according to the flow of water on Tianziling.It is adjacent to Zhangjiafang in the west.Nantong Longjiatan, and there is a small road connected to the Chang (Sha) Yue (Yang) Highway built in the 1960s. If you go to the county by car, you have to take this route.It takes more than an hour to walk from the bow of Maqiao to the end of the bow, which cannot but surprise people: how great and mighty were the ancients, who could shoot such a large area with one arrow?From generation to generation, does it mean that people grow smaller and smaller?

It is said that Maqiao Bow was also called Maqiao Bow in the past, but there is no more evidence except that it was written in this way on an old deed.It is also possible to regard it as the result of a temporary false writing by the predecessors.After entering the modern era, the history of the establishment system with relatively clear records is roughly as follows: before 1956, it was called Maqiao Village, which belonged to Tianzi Township; from 1956 to 1958, it was called Maqiao Group, which belonged to Dongfeng Cooperative; People's commune (big commune); from 1959 to 1979, it was called Maqiao production team, which belonged to Tianzi people's commune (small commune); after 1979, the people's commune was abolished, and Maqiao village was incorporated into Shuanglong township along with a part of Tianzi township.

Most people in Maqiao have the surname Ma, and they are roughly divided into two villages, Shangxia and Gong.Before Shanggong, there were more rich people and more people with the surname Ma.Such cases are not very common.On the contrary, the surname of people in Zhangjiafang nearby is Li, and the surname of people in Longjiatan is Peng. The village name and surname are not unified, which once surprised me.According to my rough statistics, this kind of situation accounts for more than half of the total number in this county. According to the records of "Pingsui Hall", Maqiao Gong was once prosperous in the early Qianlong period of the Qing Dynasty. At that time, it was known as Maqiao Mansion, with a population of more than a thousand people. breach.In the fifty-eighth year of Qianlong's reign, a man named Ma Sanbao from Maqiao Mansion suddenly lost his mind while having a banquet at a relative's house. Establish the Lotus Kingdom.At that moment, his three relatives, Ma Youli, Ma Laoyan, and Ma Laogua also went mad, disheveled their hair, and shouted loudly. A niece and another woman surnamed Li are concubines.They spread posters everywhere, raised troops and rebelled, and unexpectedly entangled unscrupulous people from far and near Shibagong, robbed merchants of goods, attacked government grain ships, and killed countless people.On the eighteenth day of the first lunar month in the fifty-ninth year, Ming Antu (a Mongol), the commander-in-chief of the town, and his deputy, Isana (a bannerman), led 800 troops in two ways to suppress them.Attack the Qingyu pond from the left, rush to the village head-on, fire guns and guns, throw fire bombs and burn the bandit village, forcing the bandit to rush to the river and countless dead.After copying the bandits on the right, they felled wood and built a bridge in Hengzipu, crossed the river with the wood, and attacked Maqiao Mansion, the bandit's nest, at night.At dawn, more than 200 thieves broke out of the stronghold and fled to the east. Just in time, the officers and soldiers from the left arrived. They surrounded and killed none of them.All the bandit strongholds around Maqiao were burned down.Only some of the common people who have made great contributions to helping the officers and soldiers put down the chaos will be distributed by the officers and soldiers with red flags, with the word "good people" written on them, and inserted in the door, so as to avoid the harassment of the officers and soldiers.

This "Pingsui Hall Chronicle" makes me a little regretful.Ma Sanbao, who was once included in the list of "Peasant Uprising Leaders" by the Xin County Chronicle, and Ma Sanbao, who was once rumored by Maqiao people as the real dragon emperor, has a very bad image in this chronicle compiled by the Manchu Qing authorities.In just three months of rebellion, he didn't think about making contributions to fight against the enemy and save the world, but he took the lead in conferring five concubines.Judging from historical data, he has no talent for rebellion. He heard that when the officers and soldiers arrived, he would only invite Wu Gong to set up an altar to pray for gods, cut paper and scatter beans, and turned paper into soldiers to resist the steel guns and artillery of the officers and soldiers; The virtue of rebellion, once captured, there is no sense of generosity to sacrifice, just wrote more than forty copies of the confession, the paper is full of words of begging for mercy and self-deprecation like "little" and "little" Said, wholeheartedly to get the mercy of the victor.He wrote monolingual and incoherent confession, and his madness appeared vividly on the paper.During the rise and fall of the "Lotus Kingdom", according to official statistics alone, more than 700 farmers died in Maqiao and its surrounding areas. .They went through fire and water and fought bloody battles, but they just put their fate in the hands of such a lunatic.

Is the statement false?I sincerely hope that these confessions are just part of the fake history of the Qing rulers.I sincerely hope that Ma Sanbao, who was finally doused in kerosene and tied to a big tree to light the "sky lantern" by the officers and soldiers, is not the one described in the "Pingsui Hall Chronicle", but the seven who followed him Hundreds of undead have never been mocked by such a madman. Perhaps there is another history? The "Lotus Bandits" rebellion was the biggest event in Maqiao's history, and it was also a major reason for Maqiao's decline.After that, more and more people from Maqiao migrated to other places, but fewer and fewer people stayed.The whole village was dilapidated and desolate when it entered this century.When the higher-ups arranged for educated youths to settle down, they usually focused on poorer villages with fewer people. Maqiao was one of the villages selected by the higher-ups.