Chapter 5 father was a magistrate

Li Hongzhang's father, Li Wen'an, was a kind-hearted judicial officer and a very good poet. The Li family in Li Wen'an's time was still in a poor family and half-farming and half-studying.Li Wen'an used to be a school teacher, making a living while preparing to take the imperial examination and seek an official career.In the fourteenth year of Daoguang, he was ranked 96th in the Jiangnan provincial examination, and then went to Beijing to participate in the general examination four years later, and won the 112th Jinshi.When the reporter came home to announce the good news, her wife didn't believe it at all, and continued to plow the field.Jinshi in Wen'an High School transformed his family from practicing martial arts in Litian to a local prominent family.When Li Wen'an became the head of the household department, he has become like a high-ranking member of the imperial court, and he became the first official to become an official after Xu's surname was changed to Li.

Li Wen'an has been an official in the Ministry of Criminal Justice for many years, devoted himself to his duties, and is very serious.It is said that whenever a case is settled, he will work day and night, and will never stop until the truth of the case is found out.For this reason, he often had to confront people in court, and he was called the reincarnation of Baogong, but he also often offended his superiors because of his resolute temper.Later, when he managed the prison, he also strictly abided by the rules, prohibited the jailers from abusing the prisoners, prepared clothes, quilts, and bait for the prisoners, gave them porridge in winter and banquets in summer, and personally inspected and supervised them from time to time.

If it weren't for the rise of the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom, the father and son had to put down their official documents and go to war, and he might have been able to sit in this position forever.It is not easy to get this position, it is entirely the result of his 20 years of hard work and studying hard. Li Wen'an's father, Li Dianhua (that is, Li Hongzhang's grandfather), was a scholar in the countryside who hadn't moved to the city for fifty years. His family owned dozens of acres of land.He never went to the city, but he always wanted to get out of the yellow land, so he was very concerned about the kung fu in the examination room.But he always failed in the exams, and he was frustrated repeatedly in the examination room. Later, he set up a library at home to teach students and children to read, pinning his hopes on his sons.

Li Dianhua's family conditions are not very good. His family is a small tile-roofed courtyard with three entrances, and he is at most a middle peasant.His grandson Li Hongzhang once exposed the old background of the family. He once wrote a letter of nostalgia with his younger brother Hezhang: my grandfather was poor and destitute.Grandfather can't repay, only hesitating.Hesitation is always not a long-term solution, even if you borrow from relatives and friends, and there is no repayment period, your relatives and friends will gradually hate you.At that time, I was lucky to have my great-uncle Zhou Juchu, who had a little savings, and used it as a charity. He advised my grandfather to be diligent and thrifty, and urged his children and grandchildren to go to school. My grandfather followed his words, and today we can see that the life of the Li family was not easy in the early years.However, Li Dianhua was very ambitious and determined to make his four sons able to study and become officials, so that they could become prosperous and honor their ancestors. For this reason, he spared no effort to invite experts from the examination field to be tutors to help his sons study and prepare for the exam.

Among the four sons, the youngest son, Li Wen'an, finally realized his father's ideal. He passed the Jiangnan provincial examination, and four years later, he was admitted as a Jinshi. The farmer's family rose up overnight with Kejia, and became a prominent family in Lujun.Li Wen'an was the first member of this family to go out of Anhui, go to officialdom, go to the capital, and go to the coast. He was the only Jinshi among the first seven generations of Li's family that had genealogy records. Smart children from other people's families started enlightenment at the age of four, but Li Wen'an didn't study until he was eight.He studied hard in his early years.He is the youngest among his brothers and has been physically weak since childhood.By the age of thirteen, everyone else had passed the examination as a scholar, but he had only finished reading the Four Books and Mao's Poems.Li Wen'an's behaviors seemed to his father Li Dianhua to be playful and not hardworking, and he didn't see that he was a late-blooming talent. Later, Li Dianhua asked his eldest son Li Wenyu to supervise the formation and specifically supervise his studies.

Li Wenyu's examinations were not going well, and after passing the examination as a scholar, he did not make any progress. He also followed his father's example and opened a school at home to accept apprentices to teach.This big brother is also really good at dealing with the younger ones. Every year, school starts on the third day of the first lunar month, and he has to study until the new year, and he will not relax.After all, a strict teacher produces high-level apprentices, and the blue is better than the blue. As a result, Li Wen'an won the exam but his elder brother failed. A few years later, Li Wen'an won the Jinshi again, and his brothers all lost their names.

However, Li Wen'an also spent a lot of effort. He studied hard until he was thirty-five years old (1834) before he passed the Jiangnan provincial examination.Prior to this, he had experienced more than ten years of torment in the cold light. During this period, he also worked as a teacher, took in apprentices, or stayed with others, but he never let go of his homework.Four years later, he finally passed the Jinshi examination.At this time, he was almost forty years old and had spent most of his life. But the most important thing is his life.He was neither too early nor too late as a Jinshi, and he happened to pass the exam in the same year as Zeng Guofan, who became popular a few years later. This relationship used to be called the same year.In that era, this is an extremely delicate and extremely important relationship.In the sense of benefits, it far exceeds the relationship between fellow countrymen, classmates, clansmen, and even compatriots, because being a Jinshi at the same time means being an official at the same time, with a common connection and reference.They are a whole body when they are new officials in the capital. Except for their examiners, they are often closer to each other than other people in the officialdom, and they can help and use each other as a matter of course.

Although Li Wen'an's personality is relatively introverted and his qualifications are middle and low, he knows everything by heart and his eyesight is not bad. In the same year, Zeng Guofan was the one who had the closest relationship with him.At that time, Zeng Guofan was not well-developed, and he was just an ordinary Beijing official. At first, he served as a bachelor of the Imperial Academy and a bachelor of the cabinet. He was just an idle official who compiled history books. Deputy Minister).Although Li Wen'an didn't pass the Jinshi examination until middle age and entered the official career, he had a sense of advance in the arrangements for his son. Perhaps this was one of the reasons why Li Hongzhang was able to make a career in the future.After Li Wen'an's relationship with Zeng Guofan was confirmed, he arranged for his two sons, Li Hanzhang and Li Hongzhang, to visit Zeng as his teacher early on, and learn from him the knowledge of the world. up.This is probably the highest wisdom that Li Wen'an contributed to his family.

As a judicial officer, Li Wen'an is honest and upright. He insists on judging the case according to the law. When the final case is decided in the autumn trial, he reads the case file until late at night, and strives to give an accurate sentence. He does not wrong a good person. The purpose of rebirth.But because of his stubbornness and disobedience, he was not accepted by Shangguan.In fact, this has always been the case in official circles, one must be serious in doing things, but not too serious, it depends on what the matter is.You are too serious about everything. It is not flattering to be an official.The problem is that Li Wen'an is too serious about everything, so he must not be liked by his boss, so he has never been able to become a ministerial cadre.In the same year, everyone else was promoted very fast, and he was still watching the prison after messing around.

Nevertheless, some upright colleagues saw clearly and wrote down his good deeds in the form of poems, especially his kind treatment of prisoners, which was extremely rare in that dark age.In those days, no one cared about innocent people, so who cared about those prisoners? There are several poems "Ode to Mr. Li Yuquan for the Jail" as evidence.One said: One soup and one meal are shallow and deep, and you can taste whether it is worthy of the meal. Hard work can push an army of 100,000, and the name will be fragrant in prison. After the dinner was over, my eyes were piercing with sorrow.

Fortunately, there is Tuenmi in prison, Mr. Zi came here for an example. The thorn wall is deeply closed and the sky is far away, and the fumigation of the hot summer is not easy to disappear. Depending on your benevolence, the wind blows across the seat, and 50,000 palmflowers are ostentatious. Beg for alms along the door to pay money, autumn and deep check points to replenish yellow cotton. The husband was even given a quilt for the sick, so cold that he didn't shrug his shoulders. It means that when he was in charge of the prison hall, he had two prisons under him, and he had to inspect it every day.After all, it is the big prison of the Ministry of Criminal Justice, and there are 50,000 prisoners in it!Each prison has a five-mile round trip from south to north, and it takes more than ten miles to walk between the two prisons every day. He always insists on visiting the site in person every day, and this alone is not easy. He strictly forbade prison guards from ill-treating prisoners, and stipulated that each prisoner should be given a full spoonful of rice. In order to prevent prison guards from skimping on two pounds, he would personally inspect and taste raw and cooked meals when they were served.Expenditures in the prison are limited, and the kitchen is closed after dinner. When encountering those prisoners who were escorted to prison after dinner, he couldn't bear the hunger, so he paid out of his own pocket to donate rice to cook porridge for comfort.In spring and summer, infectious diseases are prone to occur in prison, so he sent people to prepare the medicine early in preparation.He even bought fans and mats in summer, donated cotton clothes in winter, and prepared twelve quilts in each cell for the sick prisoners to sweat and recuperate. It can be seen that besides being kind-hearted, he is also a very careful person.Therefore, during his tenure, there was no accidental death in prison.He is also quite satisfied with his work, and repeatedly expressed his complacency in his poems: Every time I think about thousands of buildings in the Ministry of Industry, I love Xiangshan Wanliqiu even more. I will give the prisoner a big quilt, spread sticky grass and mow (yi) the wild pond in autumn. Running north and south for ten miles, walking on the sand with clean clothes. Divide the meals for the chips, it's like waiting to be fed. Clean up your clothes and wait for the Yamen to attend, and you will know the daily safety bamboo report. I often wish that the two prisons have no sick posts, and I will never tire of Ji Chuangnan when discussing merits. His "Two Kinds of Fools and Brooms" was published in the Tongzhi period (1866), ten years after his death.At that time, his two sons, Li Hanzhang and Li Hongzhang, had long been officials of the Qing government. One was the governor of Liangjiang, and the other was the governor of Hunan. It can be an official of the current dynasty, or a relative of the emperor, but otherwise, the person who wrote the preface is either a relative or a colleague. People still praise him for his kindness and integrity.