Ceng Wenzheng was born in an ordinary family and was admitted to a scholar in the seventh year. Then it got out of hand, and at the age of 27, he won the Jinshi. After that, Daoguang was awarded the second place in imperial academy, Jishi Shu. At that age, Ceng Wenzheng was not a serious person, but a young man who liked traveling, chatting and joking. The first problem in his character is that he can't calm down; The second problem is arrogance and poor cultivation; The third problem is hypocrisy, and I am used to saying good things in social situations; The fourth problem is lust. When I entered imperial academy, I found that I had studied since I was a child, and my vision was not as good as that of my peers. So I went to visit Tang Jian, a great scholar, and asked him how to study. From the complete works of Zhu Xi, he worked hard step by step. At the age of 30, he decided to reinvent himself and determined to learn to be a "saint".
Where to learn to be a saint? He started by keeping a diary. Ceng Wenzheng's diary is different from our usual diary. It has several characteristics:
On the 2nd1day after starting to keep a diary, Ceng Wenzheng vowed to quit smoking. The day after quitting smoking, he began to lose his mind and couldn't sleep. But he wouldn't budge a step. A month later, he wrote in his diary: "I quit smoking, and I will be fine in January." It's bad now! "
The success of quitting smoking gave Ceng Wenzheng great confidence and strengthened his efforts to polish himself through his diary and learn to be a "saint". He kept a diary every day until he died at the age of sixty-one.
Ceng Wenzheng entered Beijing at the age of 29 and left Beijing at the age of 4 1. He has always been a civil servant. I never thought that at the age of 42, I would start to be Yong Yong and become a military attache who led troops to fight. His whole military career revolved around how to destroy the Taiping Army. Never having any military experience, Ceng Wenzheng spent twelve years destroying Taiping Army. In these twelve years, militarily, he mainly did two things:
It is not easy to stick to this strategy. At the beginning, the emperor only asked him to train small-scale local armed forces. At that time, the emperor appointed more than 40 retired or worried former officials. Other officials are perfunctory and even take the opportunity to collect money. Only Ceng Wenzheng is serious. It is not only located in the local area, but has "established a big group". After half a year of group training, the emperor was anxious to let him go north to reinforce Hubei. He knew that if he didn't practice well, he would throw an egg at a stone, so he resisted the pressure and put it off again and again. During the Second Opium War, when the British and French allied forces approached Beijing, Emperor Xianfeng fled Chengde in a hurry and ordered Zeng Guofan to send people to Beijing to be diligent. Ceng Wenzheng thought it was useless to go to Beijing, but at this time it was more urgent to attack Anqing strategically, so he just used the tactic of "dragging".
What supports this strategy is Ceng Wenzheng's stupid method of "building a hard camp and fighting a protracted war". His personality is characterized by "static braking and self-consolidation", so when attacking the Taiping Army, what he thought was how to turn the enemy into the main force. The conclusion is to harden the village and dig trenches to repair the wall. Xiang army marched for four hours and walked three miles every day. Then I stopped, and spent four hours digging ditches and repairing walls. Trenches are not dug casually, and the width and depth of trenches and the height and thickness of camp walls have clear requirements. A ditch outside is two meters wide and nearly three meters deep. The size of a ditch inside is halved. The camp wall is also two stories, and the building outside is more than two meters high and two meters wide. One of them is halved. At night, the army is divided into three classes, two sleeping and one standing guard. Many people despise this stupid method. For example, when Li Hongzhang first arrived at Ceng Wenzheng Camp, he said disapprovingly, "I thought that the Xiang army had different skills from ordinary people. Now I know that its skills are nothing else, but when I heard about it, I stood on the wall." However, Ceng Wenzheng fought all his life, but slowly but firmly, and began to manage Yingyong as a civilian. Twelve years later, Nanjing was captured and the Taiping Army was basically defeated.
Twelve? I don't think it will be long, especially for a former civil servant who is worried at home. He built an army from scratch and finally won the Taiping Army, which the regular army of the country could not do. If the strategy is correct, we will unswervingly focus on the strategy, even if we are stupid and slow in tactics, we will eventually achieve our goal. And it may not take as long as you think.