Chapter 100: They Deserved It

In the Jiashen year the dynasty changed its surname; seven years of punitive war followed. What crime had the living people committed, to suffer the six extremes of calamity once more?

Blood splashed the imperial streets, where ants and mole crickets gathered to feed. Starving birds pecked at entrails, then flew to the north of the city.

The north wind carried the stench of ox urine; skulls piled up in heaps. Some rose like jeweled pagodas, some like hills.

The five elements were all exhausted; no wise man, no fool, no noble, no base — all shared one plot of ground. — "Sacrificial Ode at the Common Grave"

The Qing army had a custom of massacring and plundering newly occupied or "recovered" regions. When Zhou Shixiang was still a xiucai in Xinhui, he had heard of it more than once.

What left the deepest impression was the great massacre of Guangzhou carried out by Shang Kexi and Geng Jimao in the fourth year of Yongli (the seventh year of Shunzhi).

At the time, people said that after the Qing army entered the city, they slaughtered everyone within forty li on all sides of the city, killing more than six hundred thousand.

It was said that about six or seven thousand people in the city hid in the Six Channels Canal, but it happened to rain, and nearly all of them drowned in the filth; only two survived.

By the time the Qing army sheathed their blades, only seven people had escaped slaughter by hiding inside the belly of the statue of Guan Di in the temple at the great south gate barbican of Guangzhou; all the rest died.

The few Guangzhou residents who managed to flee the city were driven into the water by the Qing troops outside and drowned alive! Amid the dreadful, heaven-grieving atmosphere of terror, many Guangzhou residents, especially women, saw no way out and took their own lives.

Afterwards, the charred remains of the victims were heaped up outside Guangzhou like hills, and in the end they formed one great tomb that looked from a distance like a small mountain. People of the time called it the "Common Grave."

Outside Guangzhou, as long as a city offered even slight resistance, none escaped the doom of massacre, and it was even worse in towns and villages.

The Qing army proclaimed that if a single person in a village dared resist the Great Qing troops, the whole village would be slaughtered.

Even if no one dared resist the Great Qing troops, if a village merely allowed the Ming army to station itself there, even for only a day or two, the Qing troops who came after would likewise slaughter the people without distinguishing black from white, euphemistically calling it "teaching the people."

What did "teaching the people" mean? What was it for?

It was to teach the people to become obedient subjects of his Great Qing, to teach the people not to dare go near the Ming army, to teach the people to become slaves! And if the people would not heed the teaching, what then?

One word: kill. Ten words: kill as well!

Under the butcher's blade, five or six out of every ten people of Guangdong were slaughtered. The backbone of Han resistance was brutally shattered.

All the survivors asked for each day was that the Qing troops would soon pacify the Southern Ming. Apart from those few Han sons in whom hot blood still burned, who dared hope for the Ming army to come!

No wonder, no wonder Song Yi and Zhou Tai were like that! If blame there must be, blame only the Qing army's blades for being too cruel; blame only the Southern Ming army for failing to give the people safety, for failing to protect the people's lives.

Most news of the Qing army's city massacres circulated quietly in the streets and markets only months after the events. At first, when Zhou Shixiang heard these appalling tragedies, his heart ached, but after hearing them many times, he grew numb.

The dead were dead; the living had to go on living. Since the realm had truly fallen to the Great Qing, then he would just be an obedient subject and live his life in peace.

What did calamities elsewhere, dead people elsewhere, have to do with him? As long as the Great Qing's soldiers did not come to his house, then even if the sky rained and his mother remarried, he would let it be.

Only a few times in the deep of night, when his son cried and his wife, Lady Zhao, rose to nurse him, as Shixiang gazed at the figures of his wife and child, he could not help recalling something he had heard that day: after the Panyu clerk Ding Youyi and his wife were killed, the next day their abandoned infant crawled beside the corpses and, driven by hunger and instinct, suckled at its mother's breast, until everyone who passed could not hold back tears.

Thinking of that scene, then looking at the wife and child before him, even the most numb man could not help burning with indignation. Yet after the indignation, he could only heave a long sigh.

Hot blood could not keep a man alive; hot blood could not serve as food; could hot blood keep his whole family safe?

It was only lamentable that such a scholar, utterly devoid of hot blood, steel-hearted in his resolve to be an obedient subject of the Great Qing, should still have met with such tragedy — his parents, wife, and children not only cruelly killed but dismembered and eaten.

Who could have imagined such a thing, and who could endure it!

Sometimes in the deep of night, lying alone in bed, Zhou Shixiang would occasionally wonder: if not for this man from a later age possessing the body, what would that xiucai Zhou Shixiang have done? Would he have sought revenge? Would he have died like a man, or lived like a dog?

No one knows the answer, because that xiucai is no longer in this world.

The people of Xinxing Town's fear of the Ming army left Zhou Shixiang with nothing to say, because their worries truly existed.

After the Qing army entered the pass, they carried out inhuman massacres of the Han people, reducing the Han population by two hundred million. In the two capitals and eighteen provinces, where was there not a hundred li of depopulated land?

Where was there not one nameless grave mound after another that made people weep to look upon? Massacre after massacre — looking through the history books, even the Mongol Yuan did not match it!

In his previous life, Zhou Shixiang was not a historian, nor a researcher of this period. He was just an ordinary soldier, and the history education he received glossed over the massacres of the Han after the Manchu Qing entered the pass, while lavishing praise on Qing rule.

Television, the internet, and newspapers were full of the Great Qing's golden age.

One after another, Han traitors in human skin who had forgotten their ancestors, or Manchu scholars and experts summoning the spirits of their forebears, shamelessly praised the Qing's glorious rule, extolling that Kangxi-Qianlong golden age in which most common people did not even own a padded coat in winter.

Every time he thought of this, Zhou Shixiang could not help his fury. It was understandable for Manchu descendants to whitewash their ancestors, but why must we Han also sing hymns to the executioners?

You Han actors who nauseatingly cry "Age" and "Gege" on television — do you know the suffering of your ancestors? Do you know that everything you perform is built upon countless tens of thousands of Han heads? Do you know that perhaps among those countless heads was your own ancestor?

Perhaps these actors, scholars, experts, and Qing fanboys are not to blame, because the fault lies with us Han ourselves. At the root of it, we Han never carried out a reckoning with the Manchu invaders.

That gunshot at Wuchang did not let this nation — which should have been buried in a grave mound and cursed for ten thousand generations — perish utterly from the land of China.

Thus, under the influence of mistaken ethnic policies and a mistaken view of history, there appeared in later China that heart-wrenching, utterly absurd scene.

Being invaded and colonized is not shameful. What is shameful is that we refuse to face it squarely, and instead shamelessly treat the executioners as one of us, as our ancestors, as our pride!

The Yuan and Qing were absolutely not China. The Yuan and Qing absolutely left us Han no political legacy, nor did they bring us any territorial benefit, because without those bastards, the land we Han possess would be greater and larger than what they brought.

Without personally experiencing the bitter history of the Ming-Qing transition, without personally suffering the tragedy of his wife, children, and family dying cruelly, Zhou Shixiang would not have harbored such hatred for the Manchu Qing.

Nor would he have known that so many massacres existed, nor how brutal the Manchu Qing were to us Han.

The Guangzhou Massacre was the first atrocity that the original owner of this body's memories told Zhou Shixiang about.

Before that, he knew of Shang Kexi, knew of this prince called a founding hero of the Great Qing, and knew that his descendants gathered every year in Haicheng, Liaoning, wearing Qing official robes, to worship this traitorous executioner ancestor who slaughtered his own countrymen.

At that time, when Zhou Shixiang saw this shameful conduct in the newspaper, he felt little indignation. Now, however, he wanted to see the Shang line ended — he was determined to see the Shang line ended!

Those who forget history deserve to be made slaves. Those who forget hatred deserve to be slaughtered again. They deserve it — all of it, they deserve!

His previous-life countrymen deserved it. But in this life, he absolutely could not allow that ugly farce to happen again.

If one opposed the Qing, one must oppose it thoroughly; if one carried out a reckoning, one must carry it out cleanly and completely. China could have only one people, one civilization.

That people could only be us Han, and that civilization could only be our Han civilization, because we are the finest of peoples, and our civilization is the most advanced of civilizations.