Chapter 1094: The Scourge, the Dzungars! (Please Subscribe)

Zhu Cilang left Nanjing, that "furnace," for Wuhan, another metropolis famed as a "furnace," in the hottest days of the twelfth year of Hongxing. He did not stay in Wuchang or Hankou, however, but took up residence in the East Lake Palace just outside Wuchang, where it was slightly cooler.

The East Lake of today was a scaled-down version of Laoshan, laid out in much the same way, with a garden-style East Lake Palace and a matching East Lake town. The town also had government offices for the Grand Secretariat and the Marshal's Office, a great many official residences, and an East Lake encampment.

Because the court did not ordinarily reside there, the area around East Lake had always been rather quiet. Only after the Zhu Emperor moved west did the merchants of Hankou begin bringing their trade over. Still, it could not compare with the Laoshan–Pukou area.

Even with the court's westward move, the population of the entire East Lake area did not exceed fifty thousand, while the Laoshan–Pukou area had long since passed two hundred thousand.

Because of the heat, the Zhu Emperor had been staying these days in the Cool Breeze Pavilion, which was comparatively cool and surrounded by water on three sides. It was a building blending Chinese and Western styles, of brick-and-timber construction, four stories high, with a great hip-and-gable roof overhead that effectively shut out the heat of the sun. The walls were very thick and covered in ivy, which also kept out the heat.

This time the Zhu Emperor had left Wu Sanmei to hold Laoshan and had brought Zheng Chagu, Xu Erlin, Ajige, Tokugawa Taka, and the little foreign filly Marie Mancini with him to East Lake. The whole family lodged together in the tall, spacious Cool Breeze Pavilion.

Because the ground floor of the Cool Breeze Pavilion was rather damp, it became the place where Zhu Cilang held meetings and discussed affairs with his ministers. The second floor was the residence of Zhu Cilang and Zheng Chagu. The third floor was shared by the Emperor's two new favorites, Mancini and Tokugawa Taka, while Ajige and Xu Erlin lived on the fourth floor.

On the fifteenth day of the fourth month of the twelfth year of Hongxing, near noon, the routine joint meeting of the two offices had just ended. Zhu Cilang was in a map room on the ground floor of the Cool Breeze Pavilion, gathered around the map table with the senior staff of the Marshal's Office, discussing how to deal with the seemingly endless wars before them.

The map room had a very high ceiling, over ten feet, and was extremely spacious, occupying a large section at the east end of the ground floor. It had doors and windows on the east, south, and north sides, so the light was excellent, and on breezy summer days it was very cool once the doors and windows were opened.

Today, however, it was a bit stuffy, so instead of opening the windows, ice had been brought from the ice cellar and placed around the room to lower the temperature.

"Your Majesty, a military report from Jingzhou: the roving bandits' false emperor Li Guo has arrived at Yong'an and encamped there, and has imposed heavy corvée levies on the people of Yong'an Prefecture, stirring up seething popular resentment."

"What is 'corvée levies'?" Zhu Cilang interrupted the military advisor Li Yan, who was reporting the military situation.

After serving several years as Governor of Henan, Li Yan, who was thoroughly familiar with the roving bandits' situation, had returned to court to serve again as military advisor, while Wu Sanfu had become Minister of War, replacing Li Ruolian, who had been transferred to serve as Governor of Jiangbei.

"Your Majesty," Li Yan said, "the roving bandits' institutions are all copied from the Sui and Tang dynasties. Militarily they use the fubing system, and for state revenue they use the zu-yong-diao system. The yong is corvée labor, and 'corvée levies' means imposing an additional corvée obligation for building fortifications on top of the existing labor duties."

"Additional levies? That sounds familiar!" Zhu Cilang laughed. "They learned this from us, didn't they? If they keep this up, people will soon be rebelling, won't they?"

Li Yan smiled. "Your Majesty, additional levies and additional taxes have existed in every dynasty, and in fact there is nothing remarkable about them. As long as they are reasonable and the people can bear them, it is fine. The additional grain levies, corvée levies, and Burma levies the roving bandits are now imposing are not light burdens on the people, but they are not unbearable either. That is because men like Sun Kewang, Niu Jinxing, and Gu Junen are quite diligent in their work, and they also understand the people's hardships. They can apportion the burdens reasonably, so that the people suffer but are not driven to the point where they cannot survive.

Moreover, on the roving bandits' side, half the land is still owned by commoners. Though the commoners suffer, they can still scrape by, and their lot is somewhat better than it was during the Tianqi and Chongzhen years of our dynasty."

"Is that so?" Zhu Cilang could hear the hidden meaning in Li Yan's words. The man had himself once been a "great roving bandit," and had only defected to the Ming because he could not stomach Li Zicheng's flight-and-plunder strategy and roving-bandit doctrine. But Li Yan in fact thoroughly approved of the route Li Guo had taken after entering Sichuan: enclosing land to grant military fields and allotting civilian fields by headcount. What he could not understand was Zhu Cilang's "commerce and industry as the foundation" policy after he had secured the throne.

Of course, the Zhu Emperor's commerce-and-industry-first policy did not mean abandoning agriculture; rather, it treated agriculture as one form of commercial activity. Thus there was no talk of agriculture as the foundation and commerce as the periphery, no suppression of land consolidation, and naturally no more binding of peasants to the land.

The Zhu Emperor smiled and said, "How much longer does the military advisor think that Shun regime of the roving bandits can keep going with the times?"

"Ten years at the least, twenty or thirty at the most." Li Yan said. "The roving bandits now rule the people of Sichuan with the fubing system, suppressing all around them, strictly controlling land consolidation, emphasizing agriculture and restraining commerce, forbidding the people from engaging in two occupations, and channeling all profit through a single outlet. With thirty or forty million Sichuanese all under their control and all at their disposal, how can our dynasty's several hundred thousand combat-ready troops possibly subdue them? The only course is to use defense as offense, block their avenues of expansion, wear them down, wait for internal change, and only then can we achieve a swift, irresistible victory."

"The military advisor's view matches Ours," Zhu Cilang said with a smile. "The roving bandits' state policy imitates the Sui and Tang. But how much land was there in the early Tang? How many people? How much land per capita? Now how much land is there in Sichuan? How many people? Can the per capita land be even two mu? With two mu per person under the equal-field system, how can it last? If the peasants cannot sustain themselves, how can the fubing households balance their income and expenditure? If the fubing households run deficits, what will they use to perform their service? Emphasizing agriculture and restraining commerce does not mean one can ignore profit and loss! Farming is a business, a transaction. The fubing system, with agriculture as its foundation, is likewise a transaction. And a transaction cannot be allowed to lose money. As long as we keep making the roving bandits lose money, sooner or later they will be pacified by us. And Sichuan, which the roving bandits hold, is hard to enter and hard to leave. Surround it and slowly wear it down. Didn't Li Guo expand his army by 150,000? Good! Very good! More wolves and fewer sheep — the more he expands, the faster he exhausts himself!

So We are not worried about the roving bandits anymore. If there is one thing that gives Us the greatest headache, it is none other than the Dzungars!"

At the mention of the Dzungars, everyone in the map room could not help but frown.

The Mongols were a difficult problem! If you did not smash them, they would keep making trouble for you endlessly. If you did smash them, they would scatter and migrate everywhere. Across the vast steppe, the four great leagues would break up into hundreds of small tribes — where would you go to catch them? The Zhu Emperor had only a little over eighty thousand cavalry in all. Even if he sent them all to the steppe, they could not catch them all! Could he really split them into hundreds of detachments? Even if the cavalry could be split into hundreds of parts, it still would not work. The Zhu Emperor's cavalry could certainly fight, but they did not know how to herd sheep!

Fighting year after year on the great steppe, without the skill of herding, what would you eat? Rely on logistics? That was utterly impossible.

So winning a battle on the northern steppe was easy; completely pacifying it was hard.

Otherwise, with so many powerful periods among China's successive feudal dynasties, why could they never finish off those people?

And the Zhu Emperor was just as unable to finish them off now. Once the four great leagues collapsed, the population on the Dzungar side exceeded a million! Fortunately, this was an age when firearms ruled the field; otherwise, with a million nomadic people supporting two hundred thousand mounted archers sweeping down, the northern steppe would soon fall under Dzungar control, and the Mongols would be unified by Sengge Khagan.

"Your Majesty," Wu Sanfu, the Minister of War, now said to Zhu Cilang, "this subject has a proposal that might keep the Dzungars quiet for a while."

"What proposal?" the Zhu Emperor asked.

"Didn't the Emir of India say some time ago that he wanted to join us in attacking Bukhara?" Wu Sanfu said. "Why not go along with it and order the Dzungars to campaign against Bukhara? This Bukhara is also a remnant of the Mongols, descended from the Golden Horde, but they have converted to Islam and become mortal enemies of the Mongols who follow the Yellow Faith. The Yarkent Khanate and the Kazakh Khanate, which the Dzungars destroyed, were both allies of the Bukhara Khanate. Why not let Sengge play the villain to the end and destroy the Bukhara Khanate as well?"

"But wouldn't the Dzungars then unify everything west of the Tianshan?" said Chief Grand Secretary Wei Zaode. "When that happens, I fear we will have another Timurid Empire on our hands."

Zhu Cilang waved his hand. "Let's deal with the present first. Later We will ask that Galdan fellow and then decide."

(End of Chapter)