Chapter 1257: Poison

Li Guo had finally made it to becoming the late emperor!

And a late emperor who died midway before his enterprise was half complete, a bit like Liu Bei. Though he fell short in one respect, because the realm today was long past being divided into three; the Shun was holding out with just the corner of Sichuan and Yunnan against the whole country, and had already worn itself down to the point of national exhaustion — one could truly say it had reached the critical moment of survival or ruin.

Li Dingguo, who within the Shun realm bore the name of "a second Zhuge Liang," felt this exhaustion of the Shun's national strength most keenly, because for most of these years he had been stationed on the Shaanxi front, matching wits and courage with the Great Ming's Sima Yi, Wu Sangui (Wu Sangui himself insisted he was the Great Ming's Cao Zhen).

To be honest, Li Dingguo's craft in war and his opponent Wu Sangui's were truly six of one and half a dozen of the other. Li Dingguo excelled at fighting clever battles, while Wu Sangui could fight hard ones. The two had clashed several times, and each time Li Dingguo opened with ingenious maneuvering, making a fool of Wu Sangui, only for Wu Sangui in the end to strike back on the battlefield with a smaller force against a larger one, driving Li Dingguo back step by step until he had no choice but to swallow his resentment and withdraw.

But Li Dingguo had also absorbed the lesson from Romance of the Three Kingdoms, where Zhuge Liang always had to retreat when his grain ran out, and from the very start he had made plans for military farming and a protracted struggle. He had also used the strategy of first marching out from Qishan and then raiding Guanzhong, seizing many of the loess tablelands on the northern slopes of the Zhongnan Mountains, and using the commanding terrain there to lay out defenses, firmly pinning the main battlefield between the Ming and Shun armies to the junction of the Guanzhong Plain and the Qinling Mountains. One could say he had seized every advantage.

But before long, Li Dingguo discovered that the advantage he had worked so hard to seize had turned into a chicken rib — tasteless to eat, yet a pity to throw away.

It turned out that after Wu Sangui led his great army to Guanzhong, Li Dingguo found that his own troops were incapable of defeating Wu Sangui's Ming army on the flat ground below the tablelands. The latter's ability to fight in formation was simply too strong; they fought with coordinated tactics of infantry, artillery, cavalry, and engineers. Moreover, beneath the Ming army's four great branches of infantry, artillery, cavalry, and engineers there were even more finely divided sub-branches, capable of all sorts of coordination and cooperation on the battlefield — extremely formidable.

With no way to win in open-field battle on the plains, Li Dingguo was unwilling to abandon the great stretch of tablelands on the northern slopes of the Qinling. The tablelands he occupied north of the Qinling stretched roughly fifty li east to west and about eight li north to south, roughly four hundred square li in all. Because there were many gullies, the land that could actually be cultivated was not that much, but it still came to over a hundred thousand mu. And it was all already-cultivated land, which looked fairly prosperous — at least far more prosperous than the Shaanxi Li Dingguo remembered.

To abandon such a stretch of rich land that could be farmed and tilled for nothing — Li Dingguo and the Shun army's generals truly could not bear it.

So Li Dingguo arranged for the various armies to build fortresses on this stretch of loess tableland, open up fields and farm them, as a plan for a protracted stand.

He had thought it through quite nicely: a hundred thousand mu of land, even if each mu produced sixty or seventy jin of flour, would still come to six or seven million jin a year — enough to feed an army of twenty thousand.

In addition, on the Qinling slopes right next to these tablelands, a great deal more land could be opened up to plant sweet potatoes and potatoes — these foreign crops had already made their way into the Shun realm! In a year there could always be several million jin of them to mix with flour for food, enough to support an army of forty thousand.

With a bit more grain shipped up from Hanzhong, the Guanzhong front could sustain fifty to sixty thousand troops — enough to stand off against Wu Sangui for a long time.

The thinking was fine, but in actual execution a very big problem arose!

Li Dingguo was no Zhuge Liang after all. Zhuge Liang excelled at civil administration and was a famed minister of his age, able to govern the Shu Han, with its few people and little land, in perfect order. Li Dingguo was only a military man; they called it a peasant uprising, but in truth he had no idea how to farm — he had been a small child when Zhang Xianzhong took him as an adopted son, and he understood nothing of agriculture.

He was in fact a warrior who had grown up in Zhang Xianzhong's army, much like the second-generation fubing soldiers in his own ranks — none of them knew how to farm.

A Li Dingguo who could not farm, leading tens of thousands of second-generation fubing who could not farm, going to open up fields on the loess tablelands at the foot of the Zhongnan Mountains — what they would manage to farm is easy to imagine. Those tablelands might look prosperous, but they were very difficult to work, and moreover their prosperity had mostly come from smuggling toward Hanzhong.

So Li Dingguo's military farming ran at a loss from the very start. In the first year they harvested less than a million jin of wheat, and after removing the husks only a little over six hundred thousand jin remained. That could not supply much of an army at all, so the tens of thousands of troops in Guanzhong could only be sustained by shipments from Hanzhong and by what they had seized in Guanzhong.

In the second year, Li Dingguo learned his lesson and conscripted old farmers from Sichuan to come to Shaanxi. But these old farmers all grew rice and had no idea how to grow wheat on the tablelands!

So they farmed at a loss again and had to continue shipping grain from Hanzhong, and the volume transported was several times that of the year before — because previously there had been captured supplies to consume, and now there were none.

In the third year, Li Dingguo finally found the right people, bringing in farmers from the Gongchang area who could work the northwestern terraces, and used the correct methods to farm — and the result was a total crop failure!

Found the right people, used the right methods — how could there still be a total crop failure?

That's right — this is agriculture!

Li Dingguo and his men had run into a drought!

The tablelands and gullies of Shaanxi fear drought most of all, and drought is unavoidable — a small drought every three years, a great one every five; there is no escaping it.

Moreover, this great drought of the fifteenth year of Joint Governance not only parched Guanzhong but also severely affected agriculture in Hanzhong, Gongchang, Baoning, Songpan, Long'an, and other places under Shun rule. Even Chengdu Prefecture, which was so rich it oozed wealth, saw its harvest fall by more than thirty percent.

Under such circumstances, Li Dingguo seemingly ought to have withdrawn his troops, but he could not do so!

Because the more than a hundred thousand fubing who had followed him on the northern expedition mostly came from regions stricken by the drought — which meant they were all suffering severe losses! Their capacity to serve had already fallen sharply, and if they were sent home empty-handed, whether so many men could be summoned again next time was hard to say.

And Wu Sangui also knew about the drought afflicting the Shun. In fact, Shaanxi, Henan, and Shanxi under Ming rule had all been stricken as well.

But the Great Ming now did not fear drought. After years of war, the populations of these northwestern and central provinces had plummeted, and with the great development of America Bay and Liaoyang Province, the people of the disaster areas had excellent places to go.

So in disaster years, the Ming court did not even distribute relief to the three provinces of Shaanxi, Henan, and Shanxi, nor did it remit the land tax!

Of course, for peasants willing to leave their homes in a disaster year and go to Liaoyang Province or America Bay, the court would issue subsidies — that was the real way to buy peace with money!

The Shun had no money to hand out, so they could only launch wars to seize it!

In the two years of the fifteenth and sixteenth years of Joint Governance, this "Zhuge Liang" Li Dingguo launched a series of offensives across the Shaanxi countryside, keeping Wu Sangui scrambling and indeed seizing a bit of wealth, but still not enough to cover the expenses of the fubing under him.

Just as Li Dingguo was planning to launch another large-scale offensive after the autumn harvest of the seventeenth year of Joint Governance, the situation within the Shun realm underwent a drastic change!

Li Guo had passed away, Li Laiheng had ascended the throne, and the Shun had suddenly come into money!

The bitter, hard-up Shun dynasty suddenly began handing out red envelopes!

The "red envelopes" were escorted to the Dingjun Mountain camp, draped all in white mourning, by Li Dingguo's youngest son Li Runxing — a total of 880,000 taels of silver and 480,000 strings of copper cash!

"Why so much money?" Li Dingguo's Vice Regional Commander Luo Hu stared at the baskets of silver and copper cash, greatly astonished. "How much of a reserve does the court even have? Handing out money like this — how are we supposed to live in the days to come?"

Li Dingguo also frowned. "The late emperor was always careful with his spending. A bit tight-fisted, perhaps, but it made the money last! How can His Majesty go on like this?"

Li Runxing smiled and said to his father and Luo Hu, "Ada, Marquis Luo, you two can set your minds at ease. The court has money now! The Grandson, no — the Army-Soothing Crown Prince went to India and carried out a great plunder, seizing more than eight million taels. That is why His Majesty can hand out rewards to his old brothers — everyone high and low has received generous rewards, and everyone is delighted!"

"Eight million isn't all that much!" Li Dingguo shook his head.

"Ada, don't you worry about that. Next time the Army-Soothing Crown Prince goes and seizes a bit more, we'll have everything!"

"There's a next time?" Luo Hu knew a thing or two about the fine deeds Li Jicheng had done — his own son was one of Li Jicheng's men!

"That's right!" Li Runxing laughed. "I'm going along too — I've got to grab a bit more for myself!"

(End of Chapter)