Luang Prabang, also known as "Luang Phra Bang", is the ancient capital and Buddhist center of Nam Chang Kingdom, and an important town of Nam Chang Lao. It is located at the confluence of Nam Khan River and Mekong River, and it is shaped like an "L" shaped peninsula.
The city extends along the left bank of the Mekong River, surrounded by mountains and rivers, has a cool climate, and is a gentle valley bottom surrounded by mountains.
At the beginning of the 18th century, Nanzhang split, and the Kingdom of Luang Prabang was established in its north, which the Qing Dynasty still called "Nanzhang". In 1727 (the seventh year of Yongzheng's reign), the Kingdom of Luang Prabang began to pay tribute to the Qing Dynasty.
In 1791, the Kingdom of Luang Prabang was intervened by King Chaonan of Vientiane, and King Anuru of Luang Prabang was forced to flee to Bangkok.
Soon, with the help of the Qing Dynasty, Anuru returned to Luang Prabang to rule. Until the reign of his son Mantatura, he still had close contacts with the Qing court, and the Qing court also issued imperial seals and edicts to him.
However, as a small force, Luang Prabang can only survive in the cracks.
Not only did they pay tribute and trade to the Qing Dynasty, they were also protectors of Vietnam and Siam, and were controlled by the two countries in turn.
King Mantatura had been on the throne for many years at this time. Although he was always bullied, because of the mutual restraint between Siam and Vietnam, Mantatura's throne was still there.
Luang Prabang believes in Buddhism from top to bottom. The abbot of the temple has strong Chinese rights in Luang Prabang.
As he got older, Mantatura devoted most of his time to worshiping Buddha. There were Buddhist temples everywhere in Luang Prabang, the capital.
In addition to the magnificent Buddhist temples here, most ordinary people live in simple bamboo buildings.
The climate here is very good, and along the river, the people can easily have enough to eat by growing food, fruit trees and fishing.
Therefore, in Luang Prabang, people are generally lazy, and they can only cheer up when worshiping Buddha.
Because they can fill their stomachs without paying too much.
It is said that the people of China are hardworking, but the people of China are not born hardworking.
They are born to struggle for survival. If they are not hardworking, they will starve to death. Therefore, those who survive are hardworking.
This is also a natural selection.
In such an environment, Luang Prabang's army had little combat effectiveness. They were still using outdated bows and arrows, spears, and guns.
Moreover, their body protection was very weak. Most of the soldiers were even bare-chested, and only some generals had armor made of cowhide or even rhinoceros skin.
Nobles would put exquisite gold foil on their armor to dress themselves up in a golden light.
However, because Luang Prabang was double suppressed by Siam and Vietnam, it had no conditions to strengthen its army.
Originally, this small country could continue to live like this.
But in early 1855, a group of guest troops came over from northern Vietnam in the east.
These guest troops were well-equipped, at least in the eyes of the people in Luang Prabang.
They were dressed in messy military uniforms, but all had yellow turbans.
In the past, there would be guest armies from the north that flowed to Nanzhang, but the number of these people was not very large. They were either wiped out by the Luang Pra Kingdom's army, or they were bribed with heavy sums of money.
The people of Nanzhang have already mastered a method to deal with these fierce guest troops who escaped from the north.
But this time it was different. This time hundreds of thousands of people came all at once. The entire Luang Pra Kingdom could only govern hundreds of thousands of subjects.
Moreover, these people came from the east of Vietnam to pray, not from the north.
Let’s first take a look at how Shi Dakai got here.
Since Shi Dakai left Guangxi, he feels like he has become younger again.
He feels that he should always be on the journey.
When we first entered northern Vietnam, we encountered a little resistance. But these Vietnamese troops were not even as good as the Green Camp of the Qing Army.
Of course, this refers to the kind of green soldiers that the Taiping Army encountered when they first started to rebel.
As the forward commander, Chen Yucheng commanded the most elite force in the Taiping Army. Most of the artillery and rifled guns were equipped in the hands of this 20,000-strong forward force.
After entering Vietnam from Zhennanguan, the prefectures and towns encountered along the way were like chopping melons and vegetables in Chen Yucheng's hands.
At this time, Vietnam implemented a system similar to that of the Manchu Qing Dynasty. They also implemented a feudal model of civilian government.
The country was also like the Manchu Qing Dynasty, with corrupt officials, constant peasant uprisings, and domestic conflicts on the verge of breaking out.
Therefore, when the Taiping Army entered the northern part of the Kingdom of Vietnam, instead of helping the government to defend their homeland, ordinary local people rose up one after another to respond to the Taiping Army.
They even caused chaos in the city when the Taiping Army was attacking the city, and cooperated with the Taiping Army inside and outside.
The Taiping Army also used the same tactics in northern Vietnam. Every time they captured a place, they killed and arrested all the officials and local gentry who had committed heinous crimes.
Then the property of these people was confiscated for military use. Shi Dakai had hundreds of thousands of people in his hands, and the daily consumption of the army was huge. Without such a method that is similar to robbery, it would be impossible to collect enough military resources.
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However, the Taiping Army did not allow soldiers to rob or harm ordinary people in Vietnam. This made the people of Beiqi support the Taiping Army even more.
There are many Han people living in Northern Vietnam, and they have played a huge role in the development of Northern Vietnam.
However, they are the targets of oppression and exploitation by the local Vietnamese government. The living conditions of the Han people living here are extremely poor.
After the Taiping Army arrived, the local Han people rushed to join the Taiping Army with their families.
The Taiping Army also restored some of its original systems.
They organized the families of soldiers into women's camps and Boy Scout troops.
But now the Taiping Army has become much more humane. When the army is resting, their families are allowed to meet.
Chen Yucheng led the vanguard all the way to the Hanoi area. At this time, all the dignitaries in northern Vietnam who could escape ran to Hanoi City.
The entire city of Hanoi is now a big cake.
Chen Yucheng saw that Hanoi City was high and deep, with a moat. He knew that the city was not easy to attack. And this city was also the center of the Vietnamese Kingdom of Beiqi. It had also served as the royal capital of Vietnam in the past.
They were now foreign troops and could not afford the huge casualties. Therefore, Chen Yucheng adopted tactics commonly used by the Taiping Army.
He recruited a large number of Vietnamese rebels as civilians. He asked these people to dig trenches outside the city, set up obstacles, and surrounded the entire Hanoi city.
Then Chen Yucheng left the general army and a part of the Vietnamese rebels to build the city.
The soldiers who besieged the city also had to dig out the moat and divert the water from the moat. But they only needed to besiege the city, not attack it.
Then Chen Yucheng led his men and continued southward, quickly occupying Thanh Hoa, a strategic area between Beiqi and Nanqi. This blocked the way for Vietnamese reinforcements to go north.
Zhang Denggui, Duke of Sui Thanh County, a bachelor and auxiliary minister of Qinzheng Palace in Vietnam, controlled the affairs of the Nguyen Dynasty at this time.
The Nguyen Dynasty at this time was somewhat similar to the Ming Dynasty, with civil servants and eunuchs being very active in the court.
Because Beiqi has been in turmoil for the past two years, when the guest troops entered Beiqi at first, they did not send troops to support them immediately.
Regarding Beiqi, Ruan Chao has always had a headache, because of the continuous natural disasters in the past two years, and the war broke out in Beiqi.
In the past, when guest armies went south, they would cause conflicts with local forces.
Zhang Denggui felt that he could use the guest army to kill some of the Beiqi people, and then the imperial army would take advantage of the situation to kill and save the people from the fire and water, reaping the benefits.
But they were all wrong about this.
The number of guest troops coming this time is probably too large. They are said to be hundreds of thousands of troops, although most of them are definitely ordinary people.
But there must be tens of thousands of elites among them.
As soon as this group of men entered Beiqi, they attacked the city and captured the territory with overwhelming force.
This suddenly made the entire Ruan Dynasty look dumbfounded.
Although the Kingdom of Vietnam basically shares the same culture with China, they are still very afraid of the Chinese suzerainty in the north.
Since the Qin Dynasty, northern Vietnam has been under the rule of China. It was only separated later, and it was divided and combined at times.
Therefore, these Vietnamese scholar-officials who were also influenced by Chinese Confucianism felt guilty.
Seeing that the guest troops from the north had occupied most of the land in Beiqi in a blink of an eye, Zhang Denggui and his group finally reacted.
It turned out that the guest troops coming this time were different from the bandits who escaped across the border in the past.
The Taiping Army has its own organizational system, and they know how to win over civilians.
In this way, the originally turbulent environment in Beiqi was taken advantage of by the Taiping Army. However, the Taiping Army's tactics were easily accepted by the local people.
After reacting, Truong Deng Qui quickly suggested to King Nguyen Phuc Thi to send troops to collect the goods.
So 20,000 Vietnamese vanguard troops were sent out.
These 20,000 people are considered the elite of Vietnam. They are all standing troops in Hue, the royal capital.
When these 20,000 people arrived at Qinghua, they happened to encounter Chen Yucheng's forward army.
Chen Yucheng's number is smaller. Now he refuses to defend the city and uses the muskets and artillery in his hands to consume the enemy.
Chen Yucheng had more than a hundred artillery pieces in his hands, while the reinforcements from the Ruan Dynasty only had more than fifty artillery pieces.
The two sides first engaged in a round of artillery battle.
The artillery they use are all old-fashioned muzzle-loading guns, with similar range and firepower.
But Chen Yucheng's side is defending the city. It is also protected by the city wall.
The artillery was installed on the city wall by Chen Yucheng, and the black muzzles protruded from the openings on the city wall.
There was an artillery battle between the two sides. The number of artillery pieces of the Kingdom of Vietnam and the location were inferior to those of the Taiping Army. Naturally, they were defeated and suffered heavy losses.
If the artillery battle fails, the infantry charge is used. This is roughly how the old army fought in this era.
The Royal Vietnamese Army also had muskets, but they were all muzzle-loading muskets purchased from foreigners.
When the Vietnamese sent their most elite musketeers up.
Not only did they have to be constantly bombarded by artillery on the city wall, but when they reached a distance of four hundred yards, they began to be shot by the Taiping Army on top of the city.
The Vietnamese army's musketeers also lined up in a line formation.
The current relationship between the Kingdom of Vietnam and France is tense because Vietnam tore up the "Vietnam-France Treaty of Versailles" signed with the French more than ten years ago.
In addition, Vietnam has been preventing foreigners from proselytizing in the country and persecuting its own Catholics for many years.
But before that, there was a honeymoon period between the Kingdom of Vietnam and the French. At that time, the French helped the Nguyen Dynasty complete the unification and win the Tay Son War.
So it’s not surprising that the Vietnamese know how to use foreign tactics.
As these Vietnamese musketeers approached the city wall, they fell faster.
Using the front-loading rifled gun produced by Fuxing Military, the Taiping Army clearly had the upper hand.
In the end, these Vietnamese musketeers collapsed before they even entered the shooting range.
The Vietnamese army has already begun to decline, and its morale is not as good as before.
The musketeers were not good enough, so the Vietnamese generals resorted to the ant attack method.
But this is exactly what the Taiping Army wanted.
Chen Yucheng only placed a few thousand soldiers on the city wall. He asked the soldiers to take turns to defend the city wall.
This gave the Vietnamese people the illusion that there were only a few thousand Taiping soldiers in the city.
If they had known that the main force of the Taiping Army in the city was more than 10,000 people, the Vietnamese generals would not have sent all their troops to attack the city.
The strangest scene in this battle was that the Vietnamese people in the city actually helped the Taiping Army defend the city, which shows how unpopular the Nguyen Dynasty regime was in the north.
The Nguyen Dynasty army attacked the city and finally reached the city. However, they were immediately knocked upside down by the landmines planted by the Taiping Army.
At this time, the bows and arrows of Minzhuang who were on the city's defense also joined the attack. For a while, people were coming and going up and down the city, and the battle became a little fierce for a while.
However, it is obvious that the side defending the city took advantage.
Although there were many casualties on the top of the city, most of them were civilians. The casualties of the Taiping Army were minimal.
However, the Nguyen Dynasty army under the city suffered heavy casualties.
At this moment, Chen Yucheng moved the other half of the soldiers who were resting inside the city wall to the top of the city. Suddenly, the firepower output on the top of the city greatly increased.
The Taiping Army has basically realized the use of firearms. Although they generally like to bring a cold weapon, basically everyone has a musket.
Chen Yucheng had seen the Huaihai Navy and the New Army of East Guangdong.
His tactical thinking is relatively advanced, and he is a young man with a quick mind, which is why Chen Yucheng has been able to progress to where he is today.
He has now vaguely become the number two figure in the Taiping Holy Army and the number one general under Shi Dakai.
When the Taiping Army's reserve force climbed up the city wall, the Vietnamese general saw that his own soldiers had already climbed up the ladder, so he pushed the entire army up, trying to break through the city wall controlled by the Taiping Army in one fell swoop.
At this moment, a large number of thunderbolts were thrown from the city wall, which were the grenades of the Taiping Army.
Naturally, the Renaissance Army's grenades would not be sold to the Taiping Army. But weapons like Zhentian Lei had been commonly used during the Ming Dynasty.
It's not difficult to make, but the Thunderbolt is big, so it can't be thrown as far as a grenade.
But this kind of bulky guy can still be used to defend the city, at least it is better than throwing stones at the city.
At this time, the army of the Kingdom of Vietnam had gathered beside the ladder below the city.
A black thunderbolt was thrown down from the city wall with sparks, and first hit the head of a Vietnamese soldier.
The Vietnamese soldier, who didn't even have a helmet, was knocked unconscious on the spot.
At the same time, a large number of black thunderbolts were thrown down from different places on the city wall.
Immediately afterwards, there were one after another explosions under the city. Some Vietnamese troops were thrown out, some siege ladders were blown apart, and the Vietnamese troops above fell from the ladders to the ground.
Screams and explosions became the main theme on the battlefield for a while. The power of this thunder was no less powerful than the hand grenades of the Renaissance Army.
The offensive under the city wall relaxed again. In addition, the firepower output on the city wall was doubled. This caused heavy casualties to the Vietnamese army.
Seeing that the Taiping Army on the city had increased its troops, the Vietnamese general had no choice but to withdraw his troops. At this time, as soon as the Vietnamese army was counted, a day-long attack had already caused the loss of one-third of the Nguyen Dynasty's army.
If it weren't for the intermittent casualties, the Vietnamese army would have collapsed at this time.