Chapter 294: Barbaric Civilization, Civilized Barbarism

When the Jurchen had just unified Jianzhou, their military strength and able-bodied population were, frankly, merely average.

In the "Comprehensive Investigation Report on the Jurchen Rise" that Zhu Youjian ordered the Hanlin Academy to compile,

there was a crucial piece of intelligence provided by an envoy from Joseon:

In the twenty-third year of Wanli, Joseon and Jianzhou fell into hostilities over the matter of crossing the border to harvest ginseng.

While Joseon requested Ming to mediate, they also sent an interpreter to Jianzhou to negotiate peace.

At that time, Nurhaci paraded out all his troops and horses as a show of intimidation.

They counted 3,000 cavalry and 6,000 infantry, a total force of around ten thousand.

This was likely a one-man-one-horse turnout, a display that even dragged out the Jusen who normally did not go to war, just to make up the numbers.

Starting from this military strength, the Later Jin successively annexed Hada, Hoifa, and Ula among the four tribes of the Haixi Jurchen.

These four tribes bordered the Mongols and were close to the Great Ming, so their cavalry resources and armor had always been abundant.

The conquest of the Ula tribe alone provided the Later Jin with 3,000 sets of armor and 5,000 warhorses.

Through a series of campaigns, the Later Jin rapidly transformed from a force strong in infantry to one that placed equal emphasis on both infantry and cavalry.

By the thirty-sixth year of Wanli, synthesizing various sources—Xiong Tingbi's memorials, the recollections of Joseon envoys, and veteran soldiers from the Liaodong front—

the Later Jin's total military strength had already reached 30,000 men, including 7,000 cavalry and 4,000 elite mountain long-spear infantry.

After this, the Later Jin recuperated and built up strength for ten years, then formally rose in arms against Ming in the forty-sixth year of Wanli.

By this time, their total strength had reached 40,000 men, having essentially finished absorbing all the able-bodied populations of the Haixi, Jianzhou, and Donghai Jurchen tribes annexed over the years.

And at the very beginning of the Liaodong affair, before the Battle of Sarhu, one battle overlooked by many civil officials became the key turning point jointly identified by the Great Ming's present "Jurchen Investigation."

It was precisely this battle that precipitated the Battle of Sarhu and, to a certain extent, contributed to the defeat at Sarhu.

—It was precisely the Battle of Shelidian.

In this battle, the Later Jin first attacked and captured Fushun.

The Regional Commander of Guangning was ordered to lead ten thousand troops to rush to the rescue.

According to the recollections of veterans who survived this battle, their original intention was to emulate the precedent of expelling Mongol incursions: form up a defensive line, wait for the Jurchen to retreat, then pursue and kill, capturing some heads to consider the job done.

They never expected that the Jurchen, having already withdrawn, would for some unknown reason turn back and return.

(Note: It was not until Liu Xingzuo, the "Fish-Skin Dumpling," defected back to the Ming side that the sovereign and ministers of the Great Ming learned that Nurhaci had originally seen through the Ming army's intentions and intended to retreat, but was vehemently urged to fight by Hong Taiji and Daishan.)

After the battle began, the Jurchen first swarmed forward with unarmored infantry, then fought with double-armored infantry, while light-armored infantry formed up behind them and fired volleys.

Then, firearms within the Ming camp exploded, throwing their formation into chaos, and the Jurchen cavalry instantly swarmed in. In barely a single two-hour watch, the army's formation collapsed with a thunderous rout. Of over ten thousand soldiers, in the end no more than three hundred escaped.

It was fortunate that these three hundred escaped, for only then was the Hanlin Academy able to reconstruct the full picture of this battle from the accounts of these very front-line veterans.

In this battle, the Ming army was inferior in every aspect—equipment, training, morale, troop strength—so defeat was not surprising.

But... what Zhu Youjian could not understand was: where did they get the nerve to use ten thousand men to pursue forty thousand?

In Wenhua Hall at the time, the assembled officials looked at one another. Finally, a bold Bureau Secretary from the Ministry of War answered.

"Your Majesty, before the Liaodong affair began, the saying 'one Han is worth five barbarians' was, in truth, no exaggeration."

"Regional Commander Zhang took 7,000 cavalry and a 3,000-man wagon corps over there, set up his formations, and could hold off fifty thousand Mongols without defeat." "For him to go on the offensive was no strange thing; not going on the offensive would have been the strange thing."

Zhu Youjian let out a long sigh, instantly reading a deeper implication from these words.

The Jurchen's military edge was formidable—even if that Regional Commander understood it, did the Governor understand it?

Even if the Governor understood it, did the civil officials at the central government, or the slacking-off Wanli Emperor, understand it?

With Fushun fallen, no matter how poor the military strength, did that Regional Commander, or the Governor at the time, dare to not send a single soldier?

This was also the reason he had initiated this "Jurchen Investigation." Some perceptions, if not mutually synchronized, would cause the execution actions taken by superiors and subordinates to undergo terrifying distortions.

At that time, although Liaodong had a paper strength of eighty thousand troops, the truly elite forces capable of field battles numbered no more than twenty thousand.

Ten thousand of these were the regular troops garrisoning Ningyuan and Jinzhou—the Main Battalion, the Left Wing, and the Right Wing, three battalions totaling over ten thousand men.

The other ten thousand were the personal household retainers attached to officers of various ranks, dispersed under the command of two Vice Regional Commanders, seven Assistant Regional Commanders, twelve Mobile Corps Commanders, and twenty-five Defense Officers and Garrison Commanders.

The force that went to reinforce Fushun was precisely the Main Battalion and the Left Wing Battalion, cobbled together with the personal household retainers of various officers picked up along the way.

Therefore, the Battle of Shelidian, though appearing to lose only ten thousand men, was in fact nothing less than the loss of over half of Liaodong's entire field combat strength.

It was for this reason that Wanli was jolted awake from his slacking off, and thereby pushed forward with the Battle of Sarhu the following year.

However, after this Battle of Shelidian, the Later Jin had already traded their bird guns for cannon.

In the Battle of Shelidian, the Later Jin captured 9,000 army horses and 7,000 sets of armor.

This directly doubled their cavalry numbers to over fifteen thousand, and their armored soldiers surged to thirty thousand.

It was precisely because of these spoils that Nurhaci could pull off the tactical maneuver of "no matter how many routes you come by, I go by just one."

Otherwise... relying only on infantry charges, without large-scale cavalry to screen the battlefield, disrupt enemy positions, and charge in pursuit, what would they rely on to gain battlefield information superiority? What would they rely on to freely choose the point and target of attack?

In the forty-seventh year of Wanli, the Battle of Sarhu began.

On the first day of the third month, Nurhaci arrived at Jiefan with six banners and forty-five thousand troops and engaged the Western Route army under Du Song.

At this time, Du Song had detached ten thousand men to hold Sarhu and personally led over ten thousand elite troops to attack Jiefan.

Once the two sides engaged, the fighting continued until noon. Du Song was ultimately outmatched, his troops routed, and he himself perished.

On the second day of the third month, Nurhaci turned his forces to attack the Northern Route army under Ma Lin.

At this time, the six thousand Yehe cavalry assigned to Ma Lin had failed to arrive on schedule; his own command numbered only fifteen thousand men.

Even after gathering up Assistant Regional Commander Gong Niansui and the routed troops fleeing from Du Song's command, he still had fewer than twenty thousand.

He originally intended to withdraw, but was blocked by the army supervisor Pan Zongyan. He could only set up camp, dig trenches, and place the routed troops under Pan Zongyan several li away to establish a stockade. When the Later Jin troops arrived, Pan Zongyan's camp, as expected, was the first to panic and collapse.

Ma Lin, caught in a pincer attack by the Later Jin from left and right, could ultimately only flee to Kaiyuan.

On the third day of the third month, Nurhaci had men disguise themselves as Ming soldiers and deliver a forged order from Du Song, instructing Liu Ting's division to advance rapidly. Liu Ting believed it to be true and immediately ordered his troops to shed heavy gear and push forward at speed. On the fourth day of the third month, Nurhaci's ambushing troops sprang from all sides, first routing the vanguard, then sweeping in for the kill. Liu Ting's main force of over ten thousand troops could not withstand them, and the fifteen thousand Joseon soldiers were even more fragile than paper; he could only meet defeat and death.

On the fifth day of the third month, the slow-moving Southern Route army under Li Rubai received Yang Hao's order to retreat and thereupon withdrew.

In five days, Nurhaci, with sixty thousand troops, fought across a hundred li and shattered three armies in succession.

The Ming's nominal force of four hundred seventy thousand troops, an offensive that actually saw just over eighty thousand men pass beyond the passes, collapsed utterly in that moment.

Thereafter Yehe was extinguished, Joseon fell silent, and the strategic balance between Ming and Jin in Liaodong reversed from that point on.

A genius?

Zhu Youjian did not think such tactical decisions were particularly brilliant.

Though he himself had never led troops, he had seen works of true genius in later ages, so it was naturally difficult for him to feel much reverence for a campaign that amounted to "strike here first, then strike there."

He did not even think there was anything wrong with Yang Hao's dispositions.

For this battle, he had already ordered the Ministry of War to reconstruct a rough version of the contour map of the area around Helamutu.

Though not detailed enough, it was basically sufficient to see that the terrain here simply could not accommodate a hundred thousand or two hundred thousand troops advancing together.

Had they actually done that, once the vanguard collapsed, it would have been a repeat second only to Liu Bei's disaster at Yiling.

So dividing the forces was correct. The plan to assemble at Helamutu on the second day of the third month, apart from Li Rusong's contingent, was not excessively behind schedule either. Even the strength of each column was sufficient — even if a single column could not win, it should not have been routed in every single engagement.

Nurhaci's victory was certainly aided by the battlefield superiority conferred by his cavalry's scale, but it was even more the advantage conferred by the Later Jin's sheer military strength. And that strength triumphed as much because of the Later Jin's own power as because of the Ming's weakness.

Troops gathered from all quarters, commanders newly recalled to office — like loose sand, hurried and prodded forward — thrown against a Later Jin integrated into a single cohesive whole. How did this campaign differ in any way from the one the Tumed and other tribes fought against Ligdan Khan?

In both Du Song's and Ma Lin's engagements, the Later Jin fought with hard, direct force, combining infantry and cavalry to smash through Ming positions that had been properly fortified with wagon camps and trenches. That alone speaks volumes about the true cause of the defeat. And with this battle won, the Later Jin captured twenty-eight thousand six hundred horses and mules from the Ming army, to say nothing of the countless suits of armor and firearms.

Their subsequent exploitation — striking Kaiyuan and Tieling, crushing the Khalkha Jaisai tribe that came to Tieling's relief, and coercing them into an alliance — was all the result of their military power swelling further.

Yet if that were all, it would not have filled Zhu Youjian with such deep anxiety.

Merely by the second year after the Battle of Sarhu, the Later Jin had already absorbed their experience facing firearm units.

When they confronted strongholds like Shenyang and Liaoyang, cities Xiong Tingbi had spent years fortifying, their tactics shifted abruptly once again.

Facing the light fire net woven by Ming matchlock muskets, Barbarian-Destroyer cannons, and Hundred-Bullet cannons, cavalry found it hard to advance.

They immediately switched to charging with shielded carts, with horse and foot following behind.

Infantry clad in cotton armor, sheltering behind the shielded carts, advanced under Ming fire and once again became the masters of the battlefield.

Even…

At the east gate of Liaoyang, when facing the reinforcing Sichuan troops, the Later Jin even used firearms themselves!

"The bandits fired two volleys of blanks; our troops did not lose a single man, and so we pressed forward to fight hand-to-hand. When we closed to twenty or thirty paces, they fired a true volley all at once, and of our troops, only seven survived." When the briefing reached this point, Zhu Youjian could not help breaking out in a cold sweat.

Cavalry warfare and archery warfare he did not understand.

But how could he possibly not understand the trick of holding fire until twenty paces!

What shocked him was not merely the tactic itself, nor merely the troop quality required to execute it, but the timeline…

Barely two years from the seizure of Fushun, and from Sarhu, a single year.

The Later Jin had already put captured firearms to use, and to such a brilliant degree…

Who, in the end, was the barbarian, and who the civilized?

This series of evolutions was breathtakingly swift.

By the third year of Tianqi, Nurhaci had finally digested the gains of his successive campaigns and ordered a reform of the military system.

Each niru was fixed at one hundred fifty armored soldiers: one hundred for campaigning, fifty to remain and rotate.

Of the one hundred campaigning armored soldiers, ten were White Bayara, forty were Red Bayara, and the remaining fifty armored men were formed into a "Black Camp," to which firearms were assigned. Yes — firearms assigned to the Jurchen!

There was no such dogshit rule that Han troops used firearms while Jurchen used mounted archery.

For a military organism so bursting with vitality,

whatever tool could secure victory faster, that was the tool they used.

So long as it brought victory, they would stop at nothing!

At present, because of the appearance of the red barbarian cannon, the Later Jin's shielded-cart tactics had been frustrated in siege warfare.

Thus, after their two defeats at Ningyuan and Ning-Jin, while they turned their attention toward the Mongols, against the Ming they reverted to cavalry-dominant operations, raiding within the passes from time to time but rarely committing to frontal assaults on fortified positions.

And Zhu Youjian knew even more: in the original course of history, by the time of the Song-Jin campaign that decided the dynasty's fate, the red barbarian cannons in Hong Taiji's hands, whether in number or quality, had actually surpassed the Ming's!

Was mounted archery stronger, or infantry?

Were firearms stronger, or bows?

Was shock cavalry stronger, or horse archers?

To this military organism that had fought its way out of the white mountains and black waters, such endlessly debated armchair theorizing was utterly laughable.

They were like a cold, pitiless war machine, utterly indifferent to tradition or ancestral institutions.

They knew only one thing — whatever won wars was the strongest.

From top to bottom, they would push through any military innovation that could confer an advantage, at the most efficient speed possible.

So long as it brought victory, so long as the conditions were met, they might even complete a line-infantry reorganization faster than the Ming, while sustaining higher morale. After all, the greatest advantage of a slave-military organism was the absence of human rights. This was a disadvantage the Ming could never overcome.

Only after hearing the entire briefing did Zhu Youjian understand why, in the end, it was the Later Jin who won the realm. It was not something that could be dismissed with a casual word like "luck."

This organism had many military shortcomings, but its single longest plank was simply too outstanding, and it was growing longer at terrifying speed. In the end — heavy infantry, heavy cavalry, line musketry, massed cannon… it had practically become the very image of the Ming's future that Zhu Youjian idealized. Against such a military organism, Zhu Youjian absolutely dared not pin his hopes on training some hollow-square formation or line infantry and then throwing them to the front to gamble the dynasty's fate.

He could only squeeze them through diplomacy, defend through strategy, reorganize from the level of soldier organization, and overhaul from the level of armaments.

He would strive to advance on all four fronts simultaneously, doing his utmost to tune the Ming war machine until it could roughly approach the Later Jin's.

But fortunately, this was precisely where his own advantage lay.

Warfare Zhu Youjian did not understand, nor would he dare claim otherwise.

But when it came to using every method to forge a team that had fighting strength, that willingly worked 996 and even took pride in it — in this time and space, he stood peerless and without rival!

After the briefing on the Jin Section's plans was finished, what greeted him was the Emperor's prolonged silence, and Mao Yuanyi grew visibly uneasy.

He was inwardly guessing which item he had spoken of incorrectly when he heard the Emperor's gentle voice.

"Minister Mao, just remember the core principle we discussed."

"All armament reform must proceed from operational requirements."

"We do not need ten-thousand-catty red barbarian cannons, nor do we need divine engines that lay waste to scores of li."

"Everything must be done based on facts, done based on need."

"If the front line needs a cannon that can smash shield-carts and still be towed by a single horse, then make it."

"If the front line needs a cannon that can fire grapeshot within a hundred paces to kill cavalry horses, then make it."

Zhu Youjian paused here and added:

"We do not understand war, so We shall not blunder on with further talk, but veterans who live by the blade cannot fail to understand."

"Go ask, go see, go think — find the weapons they truly need, and manufacture them with earnest care."

"As We said at the very end of that 'Report on the Jurchen'..."

"What the barbarians can accomplish, why can we not?"

He gave Mao Yuanyi a deep look.

"Minister Mao, in this matter of civilization surpassing savagery — can We trust you?"

Mao Yuanyi drew a deep breath, feeling an unprecedented pressure bearing down on him.

"This subject accepts the charge! This reform shall not be confined merely to improvements in individual weapons."

"The integration of equipment with the front line, the training manuals matching equipment to officers and men — all shall be updated as one."

"Every reform shall take the front line as its standard, take need as its standard."

"Every instruction shall use plain speech alone — absolutely no obscure, abstruse phrasing, no feigned profundity!"

"What this subject shall develop are shield-cart-smashing cannons, cavalry-killing cannons — and absolutely not red barbarian cannon, Folangji cannon, or Great General cannon!"

Faced with Mao Yuanyi's pledge, Zhu Youjian still felt some doubt in his heart.

But he let none of it show on his face, merely handing over a bowl of chicken soup with the utmost ease:

"Apply yourself earnestly. In Minister Mao's work, We have always been at ease."

— This was a lie.

Ever since reading that "military encyclopedia," Mao Yuanyi's weight in Zhu Youjian's mind had lessened somewhat.

But one can only pick a general from among the dwarfs.

In this age, finding a man to reform military equipment who was not too deeply marked by the literati temperament and yet had front-line experience was truly not so easy. Fortunately, as the various new policies were gradually sorted out and the departments had even begun to show some spontaneous competitive drive, Zhu Youjian could at last release a little more of his energy.

And thus he could once again direct his energy toward certain domains he had been unable to cover in the past.

The reform of military equipment was but one move in this whole series.

Zhu Youjian turned his gaze toward Xiong Mingyu, signaling him to continue calling the roll.

(Attached chart: a brief summary of the Later Jin's wars and changes in troop strength from their rise to the seventh year of Tianqi.)

(These figures can only serve as reference, because mobilized versus non-mobilized troop strength are two entirely different orders of magnitude. Moreover, cavalry and mounted infantry are not strictly distinguished among the Later Jin — their cavalry, and even the Mongol cavalry, frequently "dismount to fight on foot.")