Chapter 1694: The Spice Road: The Prince of Wei's Memorial

The Chongzheng Hall was extremely quiet. Exquisite palace lanterns were arranged throughout, releasing a soft glow, and the air was filled with a hint of refreshing incense, whose main ingredients came from the South Seas, expertly blended by the palace's master incense makers.

The Great Han's incense culture had a long and storied history, and by the present era it had entered a mature stage, embodying the essence of a land of rites and propriety, with a remarkably thriving market.

Apart from musk, which was produced domestically, the Great Han's spices basically all came from beyond its borders. In the past, they were primarily imported through the Silk Road trade routes of the Western Regions. During the ten years of Han–Kara-Khanid peace, a large quantity of spices flooded in, and for those who dealt in this trade, that was a golden period.

Spices were also one of the few goods that the Great Han needed to obtain from outside. Due to their scarcity, the profits involved were naturally considerable. Incense products made from spices were necessities for the court, nobility, officials, religion, and sacrificial rites, and they had always remained luxury items.

At the same time, some spices also had medicinal and culinary value, which complemented the Great Han's food culture as well. With such a wide range of uses, the market naturally expanded, and at one point demand outstripped supply, with prices remaining quite high.

The most prominent hallmark of the great flourishing of the Great Han's spice market was the development of the South Seas. Large quantities of various spices produced in the South Seas region were discovered by colonists and merchants who had gone south, then imported into the country.

This greatly enriched the variety and quantity of spices in the Great Han, and the market was able to experience an explosive boom. Back then, Tao Gu compiled a book called *Qing Yi Lu* (Records of Pure and Strange Things), an encyclopedia of the Great Han. In subsequent supplements, fifty-six kinds of spices were added, and by the twenty-first year of Kaibao, the number had reached seventy-two.

Cloves, nutmeg, pepper, and other South Seas specialties also began to integrate into the Great Han's spice and culinary culture, and some rare spices were especially sought after by the upper echelons of mainstream society.

With the influx of large quantities of South Seas spices, the Great Han's former thirst for spices was alleviated, but at the same time it thoroughly stimulated the entire market, igniting the consumption of spices among the Great Han's gentry and commoners. Subsequent developments caused demand and supply to enter a state of spiraling upward growth.

In recent years, there had even been instances where spice prices rose instead of falling. Various incense products began to enter countless households across the Great Han, so that their use was no longer limited to nobles, officials, and wealthy merchants. Even an ordinary commoner, tightening their purse strings, could enjoy what the high and mighty enjoyed, albeit with some difference in quality.

In the flourishing overseas trade, spices were one of the most important commodities. It would not be much of an exaggeration to call the South Seas route the Spice Road, for even the sea breeze could not blow away the fragrance wafting across the ocean.

Every year, over a hundred spice ships traveled between the Great Han and the South Seas, yet even so, the Great Han's annual demand for spices continued to grow.

The majority of spice users were concentrated in towns and cities, and over the past thirty years, the Great Han's urbanization had progressed extremely rapidly. To fully fill this market would clearly still take time.

Around spices, an entire industrial chain had also formed and was gradually expanding. A large number of merchants and traders participated in the spice trade, and spice workshops sprang up like bamboo shoots after rain. Within the last decade, a group of highly skilled master incense makers had even emerged across various regions, with some gaining fame that reached the capital, where they were courted by high society.

The court had always been a major consumer of spices, with quite stringent requirements on specifications and quality. Every year, a large portion of the court's expenditures went to this matter.

Because Emperor Liu favored light and subtle fragrances, the palace's incense making also tended toward Emperor Liu's preferences, which in turn sparked a trend of fresh and refined elegance.

At this moment, the fragrance lingering around his nose stood out for its freshness and elegance, refreshing the mind and spirit while also having an invigorating effect.

Inside the hall, Emperor Liu sat calmly at the imperial desk, holding a memorial in his hand, reading it with his head lowered. He had been at it for a while, while Crown Prince Liu Yang, as was his usual custom, stood respectfully in attendance below.

After another moment, Emperor Liu set down the memorial, raised his head, and with a thoughtful expression on his face, said, "What is your view on Liu Min's memorial?"

The war in the Western Regions had basically entered a period of truce after Yang Yanzhao advanced on Shule and easily captured it. Liu Min had taken the initiative to halt the pace of the western expedition and suppressed the voices calling for continued attack.

By now, nearly three months had passed. Although there had been some incidents of Kara-Khanid raiders coming south to harass, they were all of little consequence. Under Liu Min's defensive arrangements, the Kara-Khanid harassments had all been repelled.

Moreover, after being ravaged by the great war, the region east of Kucha lay in desolation. Even if the Kara-Khanids wanted to raid, there were not many valuable targets to attack, and if they ventured deeper, they might well end up in a situation of going in but never coming back.

During this period, Liu Min's main energy was devoted to calming the morale of the troops and the people, and to organizing the resumption of production. Building fortresses, repairing city walls, reclaiming farmland, and demarcating pastures—the Uyghur and other tribal populations were all forcibly incorporated into the Han army's governing order. On the basis of limited manpower, Liu Min had achieved no small results.

However, after a few months, he had also reached a bottleneck: the territory was too large, the population too small, the means of production insufficient, and organizational capacity inadequate—especially the shortage of officials.

Regarding the long-term strategy for the western expedition, Liu Min had already submitted a memorial on this previously. After discussion at court, approval was given. Slowing down was fine, and especially for those ministers who did not endorse the campaign against the Kara-Khanid state, if the war could end here and make the Kara-Khanids acknowledge the current situation and results, that would be even better.

And the fact that Liu Min could proactively consider the nation's expenditures and the court's difficulties made him all the more worthy of approval. Many ministers were praising him, saying that the Prince of Wei had the nation in his heart and took the overall situation into account.

As for Liu Min's present memorial, aside from systematically and thoroughly explaining the situation in the Western Regions and his strategy for consolidating the borders, his purpose was simple: to request aid from the court.

However, it was no longer about military supplies for the army. With several months of full-scale supply transport and battlefield captures, plus the grain that Yang Yanzhao had extorted from the Kingdom of Khotan, the western expedition army's reserves were already enough to see them through the entire year.

Looking only at the basic need for grain, the current field headquarters of the western expedition was not under much pressure. But when considering the entire Anxi region, completing all those operational preparations was inevitably difficult, and the newly reclaimed and developed areas would also need time before they could yield harvests.

What Liu Min was requesting from the court this time was mainly three things: first, various means of production, primarily farm tools, ironware, and seeds. Livestock and such were of secondary importance—the Western Regions lacked many things, but animal power was still well developed.

Second, grassroots officials. Attached to the memorial was Liu Min's proposed administrative division of the newly occupied lands, which would require a considerable number of officials to fill in, in order to perfect the court's governing system over the region.

Third was population—the most scarce resource in the Western Regions. Across the several thousand li of land from Yizhou to Shule, the population was under one million. Even with vast expanses of desert and shifting sands, the fertile core areas were still sparsely populated. Liu Min urgently needed population to fill the land, as this was the most effective way to digest and absorb these territories.

Regarding Liu Min's requests, Emperor Liu's attitude was unclear at this moment, and he instead asked Liu Yang. Liu Yang, clearly well prepared, answered almost without hesitation upon being asked:

"Your son believes that although the strategy devised by the sixth brother is aimed at conquering the Kara-Khanids, it can serve as a way of long-term stability and good governance. If consolidation cannot be carried out, then even expanding territory by a thousand li would be like a castle in the air—at the slightest disturbance, it could collapse, and what was gained would be lost again.

The sixth brother's ability to view the Han–Kara-Khanid war calmly, to reduce the burden on the court, and to protect the territory and consolidate the borders—all of this is worthy of approval. Therefore, your son believes that the sixth brother's memorial can be approved and supported!"

Hearing Liu Yang take such a stance, a slight smile appeared on Emperor Liu's face, and he said, "My son has indeed been tempered by experience!"

These words praised both Liu Min and Liu Yang. As for the governance strategy for the Western Regions proposed by Liu Min, Emperor Liu naturally approved of it. Perhaps in his view, the fact that Liu Min could combine the actual conditions of the Western Regions and the court, calmly make judgments and decisions, and put them into action was even more gratifying than his expansion of two thousand li of territory.

In fact, Liu Min was not the only one who had calmed down. After all this time, Emperor Liu's fevered mind had finally sobered up somewhat, and rationality had once again taken the high ground in decision-making.

Under the current conditions, launching a war to destroy a state several thousand li away hardly seemed like a rational act. Moreover, the Western Regions of today was not like the fragmented state of small kingdoms standing side by side a thousand years ago. The slogan of recovering ancestral lands was ultimately not very persuasive.

For the vast majority of the Great Han's gentry and commoners, they simply did not care about the Western Regions, and the progress of the western expedition since its start, along with the rivers of blood beneath the walls of Kucha, had forced Emperor Liu to change course.

Judging from the current results, the western expedition was clearly a losing venture, and a costly one at that. Cutting losses in time was also an acceptable outcome.

It was just that his earlier words had been too grand and his stance too resolute, making it hard for him to eat his own words without losing face. Thus, he had never issued an edict to withdraw the troops.

Therefore, when Liu Min began to slow the pace of war in the Western Regions, Emperor Liu did not engage in micromanagement from several thousand li away, sending urgent battle orders or anything of the sort.

Even more so, when some courtiers proposed stopping here, Emperor Liu neither approved nor objected. After Liu Min's political and military strategy for the Western Regions arrived, it actually already conformed to Emperor Liu's wishes.

At the very least, this western expedition had expanded territory by two thousand li, and everything south of the Tianshan Mountains had been brought under the Great Han. That was enough to look good on the surface and be satisfying.

"Fighting a war while building at the same time—there seems to be nothing wrong with that," Emperor Liu said.