How much harm did the Taiping Army do to the local counties and cities when they fought in Zhejiang and Anhui?

First, Shanghai, the treaty port, replaced Hangzhou and became the new central city in Jiangnan. Before the arrival of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, Hangzhou had a prosperous economy, a prosperous people, and prosperous imperial examinations. It could be the most beautiful, wealthy, and prosperous place in China. Zhejiang's cottage industry and urban handicraft industry were greatly damaged, and what was originally a dreamland for literati became a refugee area.

Second, the population loss is huge. The city of Hangzhou was the center of contention between the Qing soldiers and the Taiping army, and a large number of people died. For example, in the city of Hangzhou, there is a record of a massacre of 140,000 people, and its war trauma is almost comparable to that of Nanjing. "Huaxi Diary" records: "Seven out of ten houses were burned, and all of them were disabled for several miles along the countryside. More than a thousand were taken captive, and more than 10,000 were killed. There were corpses in the fish pond, both sides of the bank were flat, and the towns before and after were trapped, but this was the most Tragic.”

Third, the impact on traditional culture. The Taiping Heavenly Kingdom destroyed all kinds of Buddhist statues wherever they went, including all Buddhist temples, Taoist temples, and City God Temples. For example, the famous Lingying Temple in Zhejiang only has two halls left. The disaster brought by the Taiping Army to Huizhou, the cultural center of Anhui, is even more surprising. Hu Shi recorded in "Autobiography of the Forty Years": "At that time, my clan once made a Dingkou general in order to distribute donations according to mouth and build an ancestral hall. At that time, there were about 6,000 men, women, old and children in the clan. After the fall of the Taiping Army, the first In the second year, our clan conducted a second population survey. After the chaos, the remaining population was only about 1,200, and the population decreased by 80%."

Fourth, the investigation of the clan. destroy. In the Qing Dynasty, local society in Anhui, especially Huizhou, paid special attention to the development of clans. There are generally clan fields in Huizhou. After the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, a large number of clan fields were lost. In particular, some genealogies and tablets of the clan were greatly damaged. The ancestral hall is usually the most exquisite and magnificent landmark building in Huizhou. After the attack of the Taiping Army, it even disappeared.

In short, under the impact of the Taiping Rebellion War, a "vacuum" or "semi-vacuum" state of population appeared in southern Anhui. As a result, after the war, the local government had to vigorously recruit immigrants to restore production, which triggered a large-scale immigration wave.

During the immigration movement that lasted for half a century, more than one million immigrants and their descendants settled in this area, accounting for 74% of the total population of the area. As a result, the original Wu-speaking area in southern Anhui was fragmented and was divided between Jianghuai Mandarin, Henan dialect and Hubei dialect. Words are completely eroded