Chapter 1121: The Lei-Wang Struggle, the Current State of the Northwest

In the past two years, there had been no major changes in the court of the Great Han. Political stability was often reflected in the stability of personnel. The three chancellors, Wei Renpu, Dou Yi, and Wang Qiwu, had formed a stable leadership collective. Wei Renpu was magnanimous and measured, mindful of the overall picture; Dou Yi was upright and incorruptible, strictly adhering to ritual and law; Wang Qiwu was in the prime of life, diligent in study without cease, and was praised by others as having the bearing of a chancellor.

The official system of the Great Han was also reorganized once more, further distinguishing and clarifying scattered military honors from substantive court appointments. This was not difficult—it merely required blending the Tang system with the current conditions of the Great Han. In the process, another batch of redundant officials was eliminated.

The greatest change in official titles belonged to the State Finance Commission. In order to distinguish it from the Three Bureaus of the imperial army, the Three Judicial Courts, and the local Three Offices, the Finance Bureau was formally established, governing three departments: Expenditure, Revenue, and Salt and Iron. The head of the Finance Bureau was called the Finance Minister, and this was written into the *Han Compendium of Statutes*. Thus, the authority and status of the Finance Bureau were further elevated, making it second only to the Director of the Secretariat.

During the process of establishing and rectifying the financial system, the first relatively intense political conflict and struggle of the Kaibao era erupted—the confrontation between Lei Dexiang, the former State Finance Commissioner, and Wang Qiwu, the Minister of Revenue.

Ever since Wang Qiwu returned to court and was assigned to the State Finance Commission, Lei Dexiang, as the original head of the Commission, had remained under a shadow. In Lei Dexiang's view, Wang Qiwu had come to seize power and usurp his position. Relying on the Emperor's favor, Wang Qiwu threw his weight around in the Commission, and even managed to push Lei Dexiang—a dignified Finance Minister—out of the core leadership collective of the Kaibao New Policies.

In terms of ability, Lei Dexiang considered himself no weaker than Wang Qiwu. However, in terms of personal rapport, everyone praised Wang Qiwu for his handsome bearing and elegance, while Lei Dexiang was too rigid, hot-tempered, and often disrespectful to superiors and harsh to subordinates, so his reputation was more than a notch worse. As for closeness to the Emperor and the degree of imperial trust—there was simply no comparison.

Personality sometimes truly determines fate. After enduring for more than two years, Lei Dexiang chose to fight back, directly targeting Wang Qiwu—nitpicking his words and deeds, obstructing his work. This caused the State Finance Commission to be in constant turmoil for a period of time, even delaying the work of the Expenditure Department.

In the end, this angered the Emperor. As emperor, Liu Chengyou naturally welcomed competition and confrontation among his ministers, but there had to be a limit, a bottom line—one could not harm the laws of the state or delay public affairs.

When Lei Dexiang set aside state affairs for personal grievances, Emperor Liu could not tolerate it. In the end, Lei Dexiang was stripped of his post as Finance Minister and sent out to Longyou to serve as Prefect of Lanzhou. Such an arrangement followed an unspoken rule: Lei Dexiang was after all a senior minister of the court. Though he could not be accommodated at court, being sent to the provinces still allowed him to hold an important post.

Of course, it was also because in Emperor Liu's view, Lei Dexiang's shortcomings as a chancellor were obvious, but he was more than adequate for a regional post. Moreover, the northwest region was precisely a place in need of capable men.

As a result, the court struggles of the Great Han began to enter a relatively rational state, no longer inevitably bloody and stormy. This was also a convention that Emperor Liu had gradually cultivated over more than ten years in power—from Bian Guidang to Li Tao, and from Fan Zhi to Lei Dexiang, every time a high official or senior minister was expelled from the capital, they never lost an important post or heavy responsibility.

The Lei-Wang struggle ended in Wang Qiwu's complete victory, and on the strength of it, Wang Qiwu was appointed Finance Minister. From beginning to end, in the face of Lei Dexiang's provocations, his response strategy consisted of three points: first retreat, second endure, third yield. He yielded until the very end, the Emperor intervened, Lei Dexiang was sent away, and Wang Qiwu leaped into place, becoming the de facto number two figure in the Hall of State Affairs.

When Lei Dexiang departed westward to take up his post, Wang Qiwu personally saw him off. A smile to erase old grudges was hardly so simple, but Wang Qiwu's prestige among the scholar-officials grew day by day, and his tolerance became his political trademark. Moreover, after returning to court, Wang Qiwu had recommended many talents, further solidifying his position at court.

In the Kaibao era of the Great Han, on this dazzling stage, Wang Qiwu was destined to be a political star, radiating brilliant light.

Speaking of the northwest, it must be said that it was not exactly stable. Especially the Hexi region—although the court had made a series of arrangements, especially strong military garrisons, the aftereffects of the excessive slaughter of earlier years had now surfaced. The people there still wavered between submission and rebellion. Though every uprising was brutally suppressed by the Han army, there were always those who rose up against the rule of the Great Han.

Over the past two years, the population originally under the jurisdiction of the Ganzhou Uyghurs had sharply decreased by half—all either dead or fled during the turmoil. Though somewhat hard to accept, the fact was that under the rule of the Great Han, the Gansu region was actually less peaceful than it had been under Uyghur rule.

Several groups of Uyghurs who had escaped from Gansu were also restless, especially one branch that migrated west to the southwest of Shazhou. Within two years, they had gathered forces to raid Guazhou, Shazhou, and Gansu five times. Their population was small and their military strength weak, but they were deeply versed in guerrilla tactics. Like flies and bedbugs, they could not knock you down or bite you painfully, but they made you endlessly annoyed.

In the largest raid, they allied with some Tibetans to cross the border, killing and plundering over three hundred people from Shazhou. For this reason, the Hexi garrison troops had already prepared to launch a surprise attack to completely eliminate this troublesome remnant of Uyghurs, and incidentally strike at those restless Tibetans.

The Guiyi Army had completely withdrawn from the stage of history, enjoying the court's heavy ranks and generous emoluments. Cao Yuanzhong, Duke of Xiping, and Cao Yuangong, Earl of Guang'an, made a high-profile return east to enjoy their fortunes in the capital, while the local powerful clans gradually moved inland, scattered and resettled throughout the Guanzhong and Longyou regions.

The Hexi Corridor could be said to be completely in the court's hands, but the Silk Road remained severed, and trade and travel could hardly flourish. Besides the unstable situation, the main reason lay in the state of affairs in the Western Regions.

Nearly five years had passed since the Liao army's western expedition, and in those five years, Liao had reaped great war dividends. According to intelligence gathered from within Khitan territory, through their conquest of the Western Regions, the Liao army had plundered over 1.3 million head of cattle, horses, camels, and sheep, with gold, silver, and valuables beyond count. More than 150,000 able-bodied young men and women of various Western Regions peoples had been sent back to Khitan as slaves...

And the price paid was only less than twenty thousand casualties. After seeing the benefits of conquering the Western Regions, the Liao sovereign Yelu Jing had sent reinforcements to Yelu Xiezhen—a total of more than twenty thousand tribal troops. Of course, besides supporting the western expeditionary army, it was also because the Han army's seizure of Hexi forced them to strengthen the Liao forces in the Western Regions, lest the Great Han stab them in the back.

In the winter of the second year of Kaibao, after Yelu Xiezhen gradually pacified the main Uyghur forces in the Luntai region, he again concentrated his forces to advance west and attack Kucha. This time, the Uyghurs could not hold out. By the second month of spring in the third year of Kaibao, the city of Kucha, which had held out for a year and a half, was breached, and the Western Prefecture Uyghurs were thus consigned to the dust of history.

Though it was impossible to accurately tally how much destruction the Liao army's western expedition had brought to the Western Prefecture region, a rough estimate could be made. Before the war, the Western Prefecture Uyghurs had a population of one million. Excluding those who died, fled, or were captured, by the fourth year of Kaibao, the remaining population of the Western Prefecture was only around four hundred thousand—and this was with Yelu Xiezhen consciously controlling the slaughter in the later stages of the campaign.

It could be said that the history of the Western Regions had entered a period of decline, and it was unknown how long it would take to recover.

The destruction of the Qocho Uyghurs did not mean the end of warfare in the Western Regions. After the pacification of Kucha, because Khotan had sent troops to rescue the Uyghurs and made an enemy of the Liao army, Yelu Xiezhen dispatched forces southward, intending to destroy them as well.

The result was a heavy setback. At this time, Khotan's formal state title was the "Great Treasure Khotan Kingdom," and its king was Li Shengtian, who had ruled Khotan for half a century. Under the leadership of the old king, Khotan actually defeated the Liao army, killing or capturing over two thousand.

Yelu Xiezhen flew into a rage and was about to personally lead troops to attack when an even bigger problem arrived: the Kara-Khanid Khanate, whose expansionist appetite was burning and had nowhere to vent, formally entered the war, advancing eastward in force under the banner of holy war and proselytization.

The Kara-Khanid army was not weak in organization, their equipment was fairly fine, and they had the halo of holy war to boot. But the Liao army underestimated them—because they did not understand them—and thus suffered a great loss.

The first battle between the two sides was fought in the third month of the third year of Kaibao, at Badaling. The Liao army had twenty thousand men, the Kara-Khanids thirty thousand. The result was a great defeat for the Liao. Under the impact of the Kara-Khanid heavy cavalry and those fanatical holy warriors, the Liao army, which had been complacent and contemptuous of the enemy, could not hold at all, losing over four thousand men.

That battle was the greatest setback the Liao army had suffered since the western expedition began—the first time they had been beaten into utter submission, even though nearly half of the Liao troops involved were Uyghur auxiliary forces.

One defeat led to a second, then a third. The Kara-Khanid army broke through the Tianshan and advanced eastward, defeating the Liao army successively at Wochi, Moman, and Gumo. Only when they retreated all the way to Kucha did the Liao army, under Yelu Xiezhen's leadership, manage to steady themselves.

The Liao army had lost over ten thousand men in total, including troops from the Khitan homeland. The situation ahead was not optimistic for the Liao army—indeed, it could be described as dire—because they could not afford to fail in the Western Regions. If they failed, the Uyghurs, who had been temporarily subdued by force, would surely become restless.

And the backlash came quickly. When news of the Liao army's defeat spread, the old Uyghur populace of Qochao immediately began to stir, even erupting into revolt.

At this critical moment, it was Yelu Xiezhen who displayed his military talent. Exploiting the Kara-Khanids' arrogance, impetuous advance, and contemptuous negligence after their string of victories, he secretly gathered elite troops and set an ambush before the walls of Kucha. Using tactics of heavy clubs, maces, and cutting horse legs, he broke the Kara-Khanid heavy cavalry and pursued the fleeing enemy for over twenty li, killing or capturing more than five thousand.

Thus, the crisis for the Liao army was temporarily resolved. However, in the following year, the two sides—Kara-Khanid and Liao—continued to fight fiercely in the Tarim River basin west of Kucha.

Perhaps unexpectedly, even with a commander of Yelu Xiezhen's caliber, the Liao army found it difficult to gain the upper hand. The most important reason was that the Liao army had too many problems: because of their excessive slaughter, the Western Prefecture had been too devastated to provide adequate support, and the Khitan homeland behind them was too far away—distant water could not quench a nearby thirst.

In comparison, the Kara-Khanids had waited until Qochao's blood had been drained and the Liao army was weary from prolonged campaigning before seizing their opportunity, naturally holding the advantage. Under such circumstances, the Khitan position in the Western Regions grew increasingly precarious.

This, in turn, allowed the Kingdom of Khotan to breathe a great sigh of relief, watching the show from the south...

As for the impact of the Western Regions' warfare on the Great Han, it was largely manifested in the severance of the overland Silk Road. Watching the Liao army run into the hard bone of the Kara-Khanids, there was even a certain schadenfreude.