Where is Wei Yuan from? What did he write? What ideas have been put forward? What army did he build to become the main force to suppress the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom?

The failure of the Opium War gave great shock and stimulation to the intellectuals in China at that time. During this period, the patriotic resistance of the imperial court was rejected and hit. After the Opium War, faced with the painful situation of territorial decline, reparations, port opening and invasion by foreign forces, some people in the resistance group began to tend to innovate and opposed the old system that had long been conservative and isolated. These people became pioneers of modern reform ideas. Wei Yuan is one of the representatives. Wei Yuan (1794 ~ 1857) is famous for his profound writing. Shaoyang, Hunan, was born in a landlord and bureaucratic family. At the age of ten, my hometown was devastated and my family was ruined. Because of his poor family, Wei Yuan couldn't afford to read, so he had to borrow books from a private school and study hard in front of his mother's loom. Because of his diligence, he was admitted to the scholar at the age of fifteen and won the prize at the age of twenty-nine. Wei Yuan is keen on studying the realistic problems in China and likes to talk about current politics. In his youth, he participated in the compilation of the Imperial Classics edited by He Changling. During the Opium War, under the recommendation of Lin Zexu, he helped resist the British army in the shogunate of Yu Qian, the governor of Liangjiang, and witnessed the occlusion, ignorance and ignorance of the rulers of the Qing Dynasty, as well as the cruelty and shamelessness of the British invaders. He once lamented that' I heard that soldiers fought for peace, but saw that peace fought for war', and he also wrote bitterly,' The flag on the city is under the alliance, and the surging tide is the sound of low tide! In order to better serve the motherland and resist foreign aggression, from the day the Opium War broke out, Wei Yuan began to pay attention to understanding and studying the world. 1one day in September, 840, the British troops occupying Dinghai sent people to spy on the military situation in order to plan an attack on China. An artillery officer named Antude secretly went to the Qingshan depression in Dinghai for surveying and mapping, and was captured by the local people and handed over to the Ningbo magistrate. Wei Yuan heard the news and immediately rushed to Ningbo to personally interrogate Antoinette. Antoinette gave Wei Yuan a detailed introduction to Britain's history, geography, economy, politics and other natural conditions, and also explained the British military's operational intentions and weapons. Later, according to Antoinette's account, Wei Yuan wrote this English story to introduce the history and geography of Britain to China people for reference. 184 1 one evening in, Wei Yuan met Lin zexu who was dismissed by Daoguang because of the Sino-British war and was about to be sent to Xinjiang. When two patriots who care about the country and the people and advocate resistance to Britain meet, they can't help but feel mixed feelings and sigh. In Wei Yuan's residence, Lin Zexu carefully opened a cloth bag and pointed to a large bundle of books and newspapers in the bag and said,' This is the translation material that I organized an interpreter to translate from books and newspapers in Hong Kong and Macao when I was in Guangdong. Now I'm sent to Yili, Xinjiang, and it's a long way. I don't know when I can come back. I want to give you these things. If you can write a book about overseas countries based on these materials and change Chinese people's ignorance of the world, this will realize my long-cherished wish. "Wei Yuan took these precious materials from Lin Zexu, deeply responsible. He is determined to collect the geographical and historical information about countries around the world and write a comprehensive world history book on the basis of Lin Zexu's existing information. After treaty of nanking was signed, Wei Yuan was very angry and accelerated his writing. On the basis of Lin Zexu's Chronicles of Four Continents, he worked day and night according to historical records of past dynasties and newly collected foreign graphic materials. 1852, Wei Yuan finally finished writing the last page. In this way, after the defeat of the Opium War, the first encyclopedic and precious ancient book that China's advanced intellectuals understood and understood the West was born, and this book was named "The Chart". The first draft of the National Records Chart is fifty volumes. In the preface of the book, Wei Yuan put forward two anti-aggression programs, namely, "controlling foreigners with foreign materials" and "learning from foreigners to control foreigners". "Controlling foreign countries with foreign countries" means: uniting with other countries to fight foreign invaders; "Learning from foreigners to control foreigners" means learning advanced science and technology and training methods from western countries in order to defeat foreign invaders. Through the personal experience of participating in the anti-British struggle during the First Opium War, Wei Yuan believed that these western invaders had three advantages over China: first, flying warships; Second, artillery with long range and strong lethality; Third, strict training methods. Combining these three advantages, the British army can easily defeat China. Therefore, if China wants to avoid the recurrence of the Opium War, it must set up a Firearms Bureau to manufacture weapons, invite French and American technicians to teach technology, and send craftsmen from China to learn how to manufacture, so as to strengthen national defense. From the standpoint of anti-aggression, Wei Yuan advocated learning from the enemy's strengths and complementing his own weaknesses in military technology, and took the first step to learn from the West by means of "learning from foreigners" and "controlling foreigners". In addition to learning from the west militarily, Wei Yuan also advocated learning from the modern machinery industry of western countries economically, including the arms industry and the civil industry, and put forward the suggestion that "coastal businessmen voluntarily set up factories and bureaus to build shipbuilding machinery, or those who use them for their own use or sell them themselves will listen to them". Politically, he envies the democracy of western capitalist countries. For example, the federal system in the United States, Switzerland, where there is no throne and only officials and nobles handle state affairs, is known as the Peach Blossom Garden in the West. National Nautical Atlas is also an unprecedented detailed and accurate work of world geography by China. The book introduces the history and geography of various countries in great detail, including 77 maps, which are divided into the whole map of the earth, the maps of continents and the maps of various countries. The whole map of the earth, the latitude and longitude, the five continents and the four oceans are all introduced in detail. The History of Charts is a masterpiece about the geographical, historical and social conditions around the world. It broadened the horizons of China people and took the first step to learn from the West, which had a great influence on the Westernization Movement and the Reform Movement of 1898. The national records of nautical charts also crossed the ocean and spread to Japan, China's east neighbor, and were translated into various versions by the Japanese reformists, which had a considerable impact on the Meiji Restoration in Japan. Wei Yuan also revealed the cruel fact that Russia invaded the northern bank of Heilongjiang Province outside Xing 'an Mountains in the middle of 1842 and annexed a large area of land in China, implying that "Beiyang Russia" was the future frontier of the Qing Dynasty. Shows the courage and insight of an intellectual. After the Opium War, under the decadent rule of the Qing Dynasty, the whole society was on the verge of "a rotten fish, a ruined river, and hopeless", while the capitulators insisted on the rumor that "the laws of their ancestors cannot be changed". In this regard, Wei Yuan proposed that "there will be no disadvantages in the world for a hundred years, and there will be no way to be infinite, and there will be no way to eliminate disadvantages and benefit." He believes that "the older it is, the more convenient it is." Only by eliminating bad politics can we resist foreign invasion. In Wei Yuan's reform thought, although there is a faint voice of developing capitalist economy and some words praising bourgeois regime, it is a pity that his footsteps have never crossed the threshold of feudalism. He fantasized that the Qing Dynasty could change its course and learn from Qiang Bing, a rich western country, in order to revive its national prestige. It was this political stance that prompted Wei Yuan to organize landlords to practice armed forces to fight against the peasant uprising in the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom when he was the prefect of Gaoyou, Jiangsu Province in 1853.