Is the prosperous time of Kanggan, which the Qing Dynasty was proud of, a prosperous time or a joke?

John Barrow, a member of the British Mission, visited the Qing Dynasty and wrote in "I See the Prosperity of Kanggan": In Zhejiang and Beijing, it has not been proved that the people are well-fed and the countryside is prosperous. The main food of farmers in China is coarse grains and green vegetables, with little meat, eggs and milk. During the spring drought, they had to pick wild vegetables to make a living. During the Qianlong period, there were records of people eating bran swallow vegetables. Trees are rarely ugly except around the village. Houses are usually mud-walled bungalows with thatched roofs. Occasionally, there are independent small buildings, but there is no so-called gentleman's mansion and no comfortable farmhouse. Neither houses nor rivers can compare with Radcliffe and Waping (two towns on the Thames in England). In fact, all we can see is poverty and backwardness. "Kanggan Shengshi" is a product boasted under the slave culture of Qing Dynasty, and its competitiveness is not as good as that of the late Ming Dynasty. During this period, China's economy, science, politics and culture are all going backwards! Influenced by Kyle Poirot, Europeans always think that China is a country where everyone wears silks and satins in arachis duranensis. But Macartney himself came to China and found that it was not the case at all. At that time, after the British industrial revolution, social wealth soared and ordinary people could eat meat every day. And China people didn't even have enough food and clothing, and there were malnourished people everywhere, even far worse than in the late Ming Dynasty. What shocked Macartney most was that they often saw dead babies and abandoned babies on their way from Tianjin to Beijing. Magalny found that the houses on both sides were adobe houses with thatched roofs. He didn't see a place that felt like a clean and solid English town. Magalny said: "The lives of ordinary people in China are still relatively poor, and everyone is very thin. We rarely see the beer bellies of British citizens or the beaming faces of British farmers in China. " A foreigner, who has only been to China once, has seen the Qing Dynasty so thoroughly, and the truth of the prosperous time of Kanggan has been mercilessly poked by a foreigner. I don't know how many ignorant scholars have studied the history of most of their lives today, but they are not as clear as a foreigner 200 years ago.