Chapter 2145: Shizong Chronicles 13: Storm Clouds over Central Asia (Part 2)

While the Islamic world was forming a coalition army, preparing to march east for revenge, to expel the Han and retake the Hezhong region, unexpectedly, within the three kingdoms of Anxi, a hard-to-suppress voice advocating continued westward expansion was rising.

A large number of commanders, camp marshals, and captains under the Anxi system continuously petitioned the King of Anxi, hoping to reorganize the great army and continue campaigning west and south, advancing into Persia, watering their horses in the Two Rivers, and going to the heart of the Islamic world to destroy and conquer those unsubmissive rebels and heretics.

Clearly, once the pace of expansion begins, it is very difficult to stop. Throughout Anxi, from top to bottom, there was an eagerness for battle, an eagerness for expansion, an arrogant and impatient mentality that nearly made everyone's head feverish.

And to be honest, when the Hezhong region had not yet been consolidated, when public security was unstable and disturbances were constant, when governance was still at a primary stage, a low level, to restart war was truly not a wise choice.

Such behavior had long been described by a phrase in Han culture: "waging war relentlessly and exhausting the nation's resources." And in the Anxi royal court, there were many civil officials and talented scholars from the mother country, steeped in Han civilization, who, even after conquering all of Hezhong and developing and managing territories ten thousand li away, instinctively chose to adopt traditional Han methods and rules to govern.

And unceasing war, war at all costs, was clearly contrary to this philosophy. Of course, in the distant Hezhong or even farther Persia, which were long beyond the traditional sphere of Han influence, persisting in applying traditional Han methods would also be difficult to sustain in the long run.

And on this point, Liu Min, the King of Anxi, had understood as early as the late Kaibao era that some appropriate changes had to be made. This was also the fundamental reason he had chosen to implement the "camp system" reform in the Anxi Protectorate. Traditional Han governance could firmly rule the Nine Provinces of China and radiate influence to the periphery, but it absolutely could not establish an unbreakable rule over the vast regions west of the Western Regions.

However, many of the Han's excellent governing policies and ideas for managing the people were still worth learning from and promoting, and some unassailable principles of statecraft were applicable in any country.

Therefore, no matter how loud the war cries below grew, in the upper echelons of the state of Anxi, there was also a powerful voice strongly insisting on recuperation, restoring production, promoting Han institutions, consolidating rule, and only then seeking further advances.

For the upper-class elites, they also needed broader sources of resources, through the exploitation and plunder of wealth, to trade eastward with the mother country of the Great Han for enough resources to supply their enjoyment and experience, such as silk, porcelain, tea, polished rice, fine salt, and various military resources. These things, as early as the Yongxi era, had to be paid for in full.

It can be said with certainty that fools were few, because truly stupid people could not survive long in the Hezhong region, which was filled with turmoil and violence, bloodshed and death. This point had nothing to do with birth.

Everyone came to the northwestern foreign lands, certainly with some desire to render meritorious service and establish careers, but the innermost driving force lay in promotion and wealth. Here, one could obtain power, status, prestige, and wealth that could not be enjoyed at home. If life were no better than in the homeland, then why bother coming at all?

And the upper-class elites also wanted greater power, more social resources, including territory, wealth, population, slaves, and so on, to satisfy the rich and comfortable lives of themselves, their clans, and their subordinates.

Under the "camp" system of the three kingdoms of Anxi, especially the camps as the basic constituent units—these farming, herding, and fighting units organized by military methods—their leaders all thought about how to increase wealth, expand land, and boost population.

But even within this group, those who supported continuing the war were not a minority. In this vast region beyond the empire's directly governed territory, there seemed to be a kind of magic that injected a brutal and wild nature into the gentle and moderate Han civilization. All Han who set foot in this territory seemed to evolve from docile sheep into fierce lions, and the ferocity and greed that had been restrained in their hearts by Han moral culture were greatly unleashed.

The core ruling elites of the three kingdoms, even under the moral constraints of "loyalty, filial piety, integrity, faithfulness, propriety, righteousness, honor, and shame" at home, still committed many evils of the exploiting class—how much more so in foreign lands where restrictions were lifted?

The ruling classes of many dynasties in Chinese history had already proven how brutal and cold-hearted they could be when they exploited and extorted without regard for bottom lines. When their instinctive evil was completely unleashed, the degree of savagery and madness was not necessarily lighter than that of the fanatical Muslim believers they had encountered on their westward march.

And the core ruling elites of the three kingdoms either came from the soldiers of the original westward expedition army, or were royal relatives by marriage, or were meritorious nobles who had migrated west, or were the official systems that the imperial court had supported in the early years.

These goals could, in fact, also be achieved through restoring production and continuing to exploit the original inhabitants of Hezhong under their rule, but where was the pleasure compared to plundering outward? Where were the most essential and wealthiest parts of the Arab states? In Persia! In Baghdad!

On the other hand, in the several years of the great "de-Islamization" transformation of the Hezhong region, the destruction of the local area had been too severe. Population casualties and losses were heavy, land lay barren, production stagnated, the economy regressed. To slowly restore and develop would require a long time, and for the many impatient military leaders of all sizes, they could not afford to wait.

Problems within the ruling system were internal causes, but the "expansionist faction" insisting on continuing the war also had extremely important external factors. That was the "international environment" in which the three kingdoms of Anxi found themselves. The core ruling classes of the three kingdoms were all Han and deeply Sinicized affiliated tribes; in Hezhong or even the former Kara-Khanid territory, they were all outsiders.

The upper-class elites of the three kingdoms, aside from a small number who were original Great Han soldiers who had stayed after participating in the westward expedition, were mostly losers in the imperial power struggles, even the disheartened. Some simply could not make it at home anymore and followed the tide abroad to seek their fortunes—which happened to fit the three kingdoms' policy of opening wide their gates and vigorously recruiting talent.

These groups were the executors, maintainers, and beneficiaries of the "camp system," the core ruling institution of the three kingdoms of Anxi. Among them, even those criminal officials and corrupt clerks who had been exiled for crimes committed in the Great Han were all "elites" in Anxi, and among these people there was absolutely no shortage of those with outstanding insight and exceptional ability.

To be sure, within the core ruling groups of the three kingdoms of Anxi, there was an abundance of low-level petty officials and base commoners from the original mother country of the Great Han. Those of clean family backgrounds were a rare class; more were merchants, criminals, convicts, minorities, barbarians, and even rebels.

The population of the Great Han numbered in the tens of millions, mostly concerned with their own family interests. Those with lofty ideals were truly few, and even if there were any, the probability of them appearing in a barbaric place like the three kingdoms of Anxi was very small.

This voice mainly came from the upper ruling class of Anxi, to a certain extent representing the will of the state, and it had the support of Liu Min, the King of Anxi. Having been a true king for twenty years, Liu Min had also come to deeply understand one point: beyond military conquest, political conquest, cultural assimilation, and economic control were the more difficult and complex tasks.

They were utterly incompatible with local forces in politics, economics, culture, language, and history, with intense conflicts—especially religious conflicts, which were irreconcilable.

And the Arab states, even with their numerous contradictions and constant wars among themselves, at least possessed a powerful unity in faith. But the core ruling groups of the three kingdoms were very limited in number.

Counting from when Liu Min destroyed the Kara-Khanid state, over the course of more than twenty years, through imperial military deployments, local policy immigration, and other means, the westward-migrating Han immigrants numbered only about five hundred thousand. Around the eleventh year of Yongxi, the core ruling groups of the three kingdoms of Anxi, even adding the newly assimilated old nobles of Central Asia and the lower-class barbarians from the conquered regions, numbered less than seven hundred thousand.

These seven hundred thousand people had to rule a vast territory of over a million square kilometers, as well as an indigenous population and tribes several times, even ten times, their number, amid constant warfare. Even at the present moment in the first year of Jianlong, those who could be counted as the ruling foundation numbered only around one million.

And what enemies did the three kingdoms face? In the vast Arab region, those large and small dynasties, states, warlords, and tribes governed populations numbering in the tens of millions. They might have had numerous contradictions among themselves, rising and falling in turn, and in the absence of external pressure, fighting each other was the norm. But the existence of the Islamic faith allowed them to at least achieve a basic unity against outsiders when facing external threats.

To the Arab states and the Islamic world, the three kingdoms of Anxi were precisely three evil dragons that destroyed states and nations, slaughtered gods and extinguished religions—great enemies worth setting aside differences to join forces against.

By the time the Yongxi era began, the central mother country's support for the vassal states had been reduced to mere "moral kinship." For the three kingdoms of Anxi, this meant losing their most important "external" source of expansionary power, gradually transforming from a carefree "rich second generation" into a hard-striving "self-made first generation."

Thus, the situation of the three kingdoms of Anxi in the Hezhong region became one of "fighting alone." Even though they could still obtain some support from the mother country of the Great Han through trade and requests for aid, it was ultimately not what it had been. And what the three kingdoms faced was the entire Islamic world—a region with an ancient civilizational heritage and a population of over thirty million.

To be honest, without the blood-transfusion-style support of the Great Han Empire, the three kingdoms of Anxi, in terms of overall strength when facing the Islamic world, were completely at a disadvantage.

In terms of war machinery, although the armies of the three kingdoms had already extensively employed gunpowder, and even the king of battle—the cannon—had mature methods of use and application scenarios, its power was far from the point of sweeping everything before it. And the Arabs were not entirely inflexible barbarians; while contemplating defensive measures, they were also learning and imitating.

And in the long years of war, as time passed, that early westward expedition iron cavalry that had swept the Western Regions, annihilated the Kara-Khanids, and displayed the might of the Great Han—the old had aged, the dead had died, the departed had left—had long since exited the stage of history.

In their place were several armies that remained elite but whose combat training and fighting capability had undeniably declined. Although they were still formidable and had jointly destroyed the Samanid dynasty, the former hegemon of Hezhong, the degenerative changes occurring within them were also real.

Using the small to overcome the large, the few to fight the many—this was the long-term situation the three kingdoms of Anxi had to face. Under such circumstances, relying solely on production and development could never conquer the Islamic world. On the contrary, they would instead be counter-consumed and counter-assimilated by the enemy's vast population and material advantages.

Recuperation certainly had its rationale, but it was only to alleviate the fatigue of soldiers and civilians and to reorganize the forces of war. Only by continuously expanding outward and plundering, while increasing their own wealth, could they also weaken the hostile Islamic world's strength—killing their believers, destroying their production, and assimilating their population.

If one followed the traditional Han method of governance and development, it would be absolutely impossible to gain a firm foothold surrounded by a completely different, conflicting civilization. Looking far back at the Kara-Khanids, and close at hand at Hezhong, what the three kingdoms of Anxi implemented was this same set of "expansion and plunder" national policy—this was the foundation of statehood and the way of survival.

And to achieve long-lasting rule like that in the Han lands, the first step was to thoroughly sow the glory of Han civilization upon this land. At the very least, the population of "assimilated" people had to reach a sufficient scale.

This point was equally operable. At least the experience of the first thirty years had fully demonstrated that those Muslim believers were not made of steel and iron—arrowheads could pierce their bodies, and steel blades could cut off their heads.

There were always those who, under the threat of force and the terror of death, were willing to become obedient subjects and slaves of the Han lords. If given a bit of welfare and treatment, they could even transform into supporters of a new state and a new sovereign.

While the three kingdoms of Anxi were locked in internal struggle over whether to expand and conquer, Baghdad's piercing declaration of eastward expedition, the Islamic world's clamorous cries for revenge, and the visible large-scale troop movements of the rising Ghaznavid dynasty from the southwest—layer upon layer of voices, all manner of actions, came pouring in and spread throughout the three kingdoms of Anxi, and the three kingdoms boiled over as well.

In the more than thirty years since the westward expedition, Anxi's understanding of the Islamic world was no longer as vague as in the early years. They had placed many spies along the Caspian coast, on the Persian plateau, in Baghdad, and even farther afield. Intelligence was not exactly sophisticated, but at least it had basic functionality. Small movements could not be grasped, but major storms could always be detected.

Thus, the Arabs once again conscripting believers and uniting to march east, offending the majesty of our Han—such a great commotion naturally could not be hidden. Upon learning of this, the upper echelons of the three kingdoms were naturally enraged. They were still arguing over "whether to fight or not," yet the enemy was taking the initiative to provoke, to stroke the tiger's whiskers—how could this be tolerated?

All disputes could cease. Internal contradictions and developmental issues could be discussed later. Conscripting troops, organizing armed forces, and making military preparations to counter those unsubmissive western barbarians became the first priority for the three kingdoms of Anxi to resolve.

Even entering the Yongxi era, although there were certain differences of interest within the three kingdoms, they remained united on the issue of dealing with the Muslims.

Therefore, in the eleventh year of Yongxi, as the military orders of the three kings of Anxi were issued level by level, the war machines of the three great vassal states that had dominated Hezhong once again revved into high gear. Compared to when they had destroyed the Samanid dynasty, this time the three kingdoms assembled 130,000 troops, of which 60,000 were elite Han armed forces of the kingdoms.

And the enemy they faced was a coalition of over 200,000 Islamic troops personally commanded by Sultan Mahmud of the Ghaznavid dynasty, who gathered his forces at the city of Amol in the autumn of the eleventh year of Yongxi. A battle of this scale was rare in all of Persian history, and a bloody collision like thunder striking fire unfolded across the vast region south of the Caspian Sea...