Chapter 1925: The Great Merchant

Helping the army transport military supplies was not a profitable business, especially for the early Han army's campaigns—it was nothing but a money-losing proposition, and even carried enormous risk. If losses exceeded the stipulated amount, or if one was delayed without cause, or even lost baggage trains, one would be dealt with under military law and could lose one's head. It could be said that in the early days, Kang Ning was completely driven by "loyalty" to the court, supporting the front lines.

At that time, the court was utterly impoverished and could not produce much extra funding for material transport. The army's logistical support was mostly handled through uncompensated corvée and conscript labor, as well as auxiliary soldiers cut from the army's reorganization.

Someone like Kang Ning, who voluntarily stepped forward, was a rarity at the time. Many even treated it as a joke, thinking the man had lost his mind. But Kang Ning paid no attention to such talk. Like a gambler, he staked his wealth and his fate on the Great Han court, which was then beset by troubles within and without, buffeted by wind and rain.

Not just the Battle of Pingdu—later, the pacification of Hezhong, the two counter-offensives against Shu, and even the support to Youzhou—Kang Ning and his retainers participated in all of them, shuttling between the front lines and the rear. Though his overall share was not large, he still played a supplementary role in the court's baggage transport, actively supporting the officers and soldiers as they campaigned east and west.

He lost money, truly lost money. The transport funds allocated by the Ministry of War (originally the State Finance Commissioner) were nowhere near sufficient, and a portion of them was even intercepted along the way.

But when one side fails, the other succeeds. Through the opportunity of transporting baggage, Kang Ning could openly travel along the Han army's communication lines. Holding the court-issued permits, he passed through every region without obstruction. Most of the troubles that ordinary merchants encountered when moving goods were avoided, for behind him stood the court under its wartime system, and his backing was the army. In an era that had not yet emerged from the age of warriors, there was no more solid backing than cold steel.

In this process, after completing military transport tasks, smuggling some private goods on the side was perfectly normal—even taken for granted. This portion of goods, first, paid no taxes, and second, avoided the extortion of checkpoints everywhere. No matter how bold the local officials, no matter how overbearing the military governors, none dared to bleed the "military supplies" of the imperial army...

As for Kang Ning's private activities, there were indeed reports against him, but they were all suppressed. Such "loyal and upright men" naturally deserved the court's protection.

Of course, Kang Ning's enterprise saw its great development and his wealth explosive growth only after the court pacified internal rebellions and repelled external threats—expanding along with the court's own expansion.

The Huainan campaign could be seen as a beginning. Transporting grain and baggage for the main army remained his primary business, but the various "sidelines" that accompanied it clearly multiplied, for the previous wars had basically been fought on home soil, and many methods could not be employed.

Huainan was different. At that time, it was "Tang territory"—enemy state, enemy people. Although Emperor Liu had regarded it as his own domain from the very start, the soldiers below, especially the lower-ranking officers and men with "simple" mindsets, did not have such lofty awareness.

At that time, the Great Han—from the high officials and nobles down to the peddlers and porters—was all starving and thirsty. The Han army marching out, called the royal host, was said to be executing the imperial decree to suppress rebels, but in truth they were a pack of wolves with green light gleaming in their eyes, and Huainan was one great slab of fat meat.

Though there had been conscious efforts to restrain the Han army, that only covered the broad strokes. "Not taking a single needle from the people" was impossible. Even Zhao Kuangyin's army, which was the first to storm Yangzhou, did not engage in wholesale looting under Zhao Kuangyin's strict discipline, but in reality there were still "grass-cutting" actions—a practice learned from the Khitan. Some rules of war could not be lightly challenged, or chaos would easily ensue.

The common folk had no money, but merchants and wealthy farmers could always "lend" some, couldn't they? The gentry and worthies of the commanderies could not be lightly touched, but those stubborn elements who refused the king's civilizing influence always had to have their households confiscated and clans exterminated. The goods in official granaries and treasuries could not be touched, but the soldiers always had to get their share of "battlefield spoils."

Therefore, everything the Han army seized in the Huainan war could basically be divided into three parts: the court took the lion's share, the army took a smaller portion, and the remainder was left for Huainan Circuit, newly become territory of the Great Han.

People like Kang Ning, in the midst of it all, followed the court and the army to eat the leftover scraps and drink the leftover dregs. But even so, that was enough to fill his belly to bursting—even to the point of splitting his stomach.

Look at what Kang Ning did during the more than half a year of the Huainan campaign: besides transporting baggage, he "organized" local laborers and able-bodied men on the spot to support the army, raised military supplies, and even killed defeated Tang army stragglers, guarded prisoners, and maintained order in the cities...

War, on one hand, is enormously destructive, but from certain angles, it is also a business of outrageous profit. As the victorious side, everyone up and down, in every aspect, who participated feasted their fill, while the ones who suffered loss and harm were the pitiful Jiangnan court and the hundreds of thousands of common people north of the Yangtze in Huainan.

And Kang Ning merely collected various "spoils of war" from the hands of the officers and soldiers. After all, even setting aside the portion handed over, the sheer quantity of goods in the hands of the lower-ranking officers and men was enormous. When the Han army was in Huainan, if not scraping the earth three feet deep, they had certainly taken half of everything.

For the soldiers, compared to floating wealth like gold, silver, and cash, many things were inconvenient to carry and were nothing but burdens on the march. The best thing was to convert them into cash, and Kang Ning happened to satisfy the needs of some officers and men...

In this process, his earning some profit was entirely reasonable, and the common soldiers did not care about the twists and turns behind the transactions—they only cared about the money in their hands.

When the Huainan campaign ended and the army returned in triumph, every officer and soldier who made it back to the capital alive had a bulging purse. Likewise, quite a few merchants of the capital coveted those "spoils of war," and even the State Finance Commissioner had to sell off a portion of the spoils to make up the fiscal shortfall and prepare for pensions and rewards.

And such business—clever men like Kang Ning had already done it back in Huainan.

With the experience of the Huainan campaign, doing these things subsequently came even more naturally. Taking Jingxiang, absorbing Hunan, destroying the Meng Shu—all followed the same pattern. Even Hunan, which was already utterly desolate by then, yielded Kang Ning quite a few "specialty products." And behind the rebellion that followed the pacification of Shu lay a gluttonous feast of carnage—the Han army entering Shu suppressed the revolt and earned merit, while "official merchants" like Kang Ning, like vultures, gnawed at the rotting flesh and carrion left behind after the great army had plowed through.

By the time of the First Northern Expedition, the Great Han's finances had already become considerably more comfortable, and they had begun fighting "affluent wars." At that time, to meet the transport needs of the northern expeditionary army's baggage, civilian carts, boats, and merchant caravans were used to share the burden on a larger scale, and the prices offered were also more generous.

But by then, one could no longer participate casually. Those qualified were, besides early boarders like Kang Ning, merchant caravans formed either by those with connections to the powerful or simply by retired soldiers. The scattered boats and scattered carts merely took work through these people.

Of course, this was still only a supplement to transport capacity—they were more efficient and had lower losses. But the court could not entrust critical materials and the army's logistics to such merchants and caravans. The mainstay remained the baggage corps and the millions of local conscripted laborers. These were corvée obligations—in the early phase, the court basically only bore the losses along the transport route, and only after the war would it issue certain pensions according to circumstances.

What distinguished this from past war profiteering was that in the First Northern Expedition, Kang Ning was very restrained, thereby avoiding the fate that befell some unscrupulous merchants who were branded as hoarders or even traitors colluding with the enemy—their property confiscated, their families destroyed, sunk into ruin forever.

Kang Ning's real push came after the war, helping to clean up the battlefields, especially the great battlefields like Nankou and Jinzhou. Among the remnants and overlooked items there were quite a few good things. He dared not touch sensitive items, but things usable by both military and civilian could be sorted out with bold confidence.

After many Han army campaigns, ordinary leftover supplies were directly distributed to the accompanying laborers and local people, not to mention damaged grain, timber, clothing, iron, and the horses and livestock that had died or been wounded.

Through thirty years of wind and rain like this, by the time the Great Han had unified north and south, driven the Khitan north, and the realm gradually settled into peace, the wealth Kang Ning had accumulated was already quite considerable.

So Kang Ning began to attempt a transformation. The "fur goods seller" that Wang Yansheng remembered was what Kang Ning later built up—specially collecting all kinds of fine hides and furs, making them into various leather goods, and for this purpose he even established several large handicraft processing workshops.

Most of the leather goods produced were sold to the Ministry of War's subordinate weapons workshops and to the army—these were the biggest consumers of leather goods. For civilian use, he targeted the high-end market. Over more than a decade, he had become the leader in the Great Han's urban high-end leather goods market...