Huaxi immigrants

First of all, Shanghai, a trading port, replaced Hangzhou as a new central city in the south of the Yangtze River. Before the arrival of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, Hangzhou was the most beautiful, affluent and prosperous place in China, with prosperous economy, rich people and prosperous imperial examinations. The cottage industry and urban handicraft industry in Zhejiang have been greatly destroyed, and the place that was originally the dream of literati has become a refugee area.

Second, population is a great loss. Hangzhou City is the center of contention between Qing soldiers and Taiping Army, with a large number of deaths. For example, in Hangzhou, there was a record of140,000 people being slaughtered, and its war trauma was almost comparable to that of Nanjing.

"Huaxi Diary" records that "seven out of ten houses were burned, and there were several miles along the township. More than 1000 people were captured and more than 10000 people were killed. There are bodies everywhere in the fish pond, the banks are flat, and the front and rear towns are trapped, but this is the worst. "

Third, the impact on traditional culture. Wherever the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom went, all kinds of Buddha statues were destroyed, and all the five statues of Buddhist Temple, Taoist Temple and Huangcheng Temple were not urged. For example, there are only two temples left in the famous Ling Ying in Zhejiang. The disaster brought by Taiping Army to Huizhou, the cultural center of Anhui Province, is even more surprising.

Hu Shi recorded in "Forty Readings": "At that time, my family used to make a donation to build a ancestral temple. At that time, there were about 6 thousand men, women and children in the country. The year after the collapse of Taiping Army, our family conducted the second population survey. After the chaos, there were only 1200 people left, and the population decreased by 80%. " Fourth, the destruction of the clan. In Qing Dynasty, Anhui, especially Huizhou, paid special attention to the development of clans. Huizhou has clan fields. After the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, a large number of clan fields were lost, especially the genealogy and memorial tablets of some clans were greatly destroyed. The ancestral temple is usually the most exquisite and magnificent landmark building in Huizhou. After the impact of the Taiping Army, it even disappeared.

In a word, under the impact of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom War, there was a "vacuum" and "semi-vacuum" state of population in southern Anhui. As a result, the local government had to attract immigrants to resume production after the war, which triggered a large-scale immigration tide. During the half-century migration movement, more than one million immigrants and their descendants settled here, accounting for 74% of the total population, so that the original Wu dialect area in southern Anhui was separated and eroded by Jianghuai Mandarin, Henan dialect and Hubei dialect.