Chapter 1289: Young Master Li's Surname Is Niu (Happy New Year)

An urgent memorial from Sichuan and Shaanxi?

How urgent?

Zhu Cilang tensed up at once. A great battle was raging in southern Shaanxi right now — nothing must go wrong!

On paper, the Great Ming held an enormous advantage in national strength, military power, and finances, but that advantage could not produce a crushing effect. Because neither the Great Ming nor the Shun was the sort of early-modern state with strong mobilization capacity.

The Great Ming was a semi-feudal, semi-capitalist state, while the Shun was a feudal military state. Do not assume that the extra "semi-capitalist" meant the Ming could thrash the Shun. This is the seventeenth century, not the nineteenth — capitalism's advantage was not yet that great. Historically, the Ottoman Empire could still reach the walls of Vienna as late as 1683! Had a host of European states not joined forces to send troops, Vienna might well have been put to the sword by the Ottoman army.

If one carefully analyzes the real strength of the Ming and the Shun, one finds the gap between them is not actually so large.

The Ming's real strength was fiscal revenue of over a hundred million taels (not all in silver — a great deal was in goods), several tens of thousands of "new aristocrat" households clustered in Yingtian Prefecture and its surroundings, five handicraft centers — Wuhan, Yingtian, Shanghai, Quanzhou, and Guangzhou — capable of producing advanced firearms, over a hundred thousand guardsmen raised from childhood, and thirty to forty thousand army officers produced through years of training, education, professional instruction, and practical military experience.

Right — and a navy that could hold its own against the Dutch and English navies!

The Shun Empire's real strength, by contrast, was six hundred thousand second-generation fubing households — second-generation military aristocrats raised in a wartime environment are extremely hard to deal with!

The Manchu nobles who overthrew the Ming in history were just such a second generation, and they were far harder to deal with than Nurhaci's generation — they were bandits with learning! A host of high-quality bandits — one can imagine they were not to be trifled with.

And the Shun Empire had produced as many as six hundred thousand such households — the Shun state was in truth the state of these six hundred thousand military households; the other thirty or forty million people were not "citizens" at all.

Of course, six hundred thousand fubing households did not mean six hundred thousand fighting second-generation men. That figure included large numbers of first-generation veterans still in service, roughly fifty thousand fubing households serving as civil officials and clerks, and some fubing households too impoverished to bear military service.

But those able to fight still numbered half the total — nearly three hundred thousand — and among them at least twenty or thirty thousand could serve as the core, high-grade fubing.

In terms of troop quality alone, the Shun was not one bit weaker than the Ming.

In war industry and finance, however, the Shun lagged far behind the Ming. On the Ming side, flintlocks were already becoming widespread, while on the Shun side matchlocks were still somewhat scarce. Only the Shun army in Shaanxi and Li Jicheng's Long March fubing had sufficient matchlocks.

But with six hundred thousand fubing households and twenty or thirty thousand high-grade fubing, the Shun still had the strength to put up a fight.

The Zhu Emperor tensely took the urgent memorial Huang Xiaobao handed over, opened it, skimmed it once at ten lines a glance, then read it again word by word, and finally his brow knotted into a ball.

The battle in southern Shaanxi was not going well!

In resourcefulness and cunning generalship, Wu Sangui was far inferior to Li Dingguo. With victory clearly in hand, he had nonetheless, out of greed for glory and rash advance, suffered two defeats on the Hanzhong plain, losing nearly thirty thousand men and two great generals, Shang Kexi and Shang Zhixin.

Still, Wu Sangui had not abandoned the strategic point of Lüeyang. Instead he gathered loyal militia, expanded his army, and actively defended. Given Wu Sangui's outstanding ability in defending cities and Li Dingguo's poor ability in assaulting them, Lüeyang should hold for some time.

And so long as Lüeyang did not fall, Feng County town should be in no great danger — Wu Guogui had gathered the routed troops and fallen back to defend Feng County, and should be able to hold it. If Feng County held, reinforcements from Guanzhong could continue advancing to the front along the Sanguan road to rescue the trapped Wu Sangui.

Moreover, the three Guards divisions entering Hanzhong via the Baoxie, Ziwu, and Tangluo roads would absolutely not be defeated by Li Dingguo the way Shang Kexi and Wu Guogui had been. Because the Guards' field-fighting and night-fighting abilities were far superior to those of the garrison armies!

And they would choose night battle over daytime combat wherever possible, to maximize their advantage.

The Shun army's several forts in the Hanzhong basin probably could not withstand the Guards' attacks either — the Guards officers and men had all mastered the method of digging parallel trenches and zigzag approach trenches. Even without artillery, they could breach those rather carelessly built bastion forts. If the Shun forts were sturdier, no matter — they would build simple bastion forts of their own as a basis for a protracted campaign in Hanzhong.

So the southern Shaanxi campaign could only be said to be going poorly, not lost. So long as Lüeyang held, victory was still in hand!

The Zhu Emperor drew a breath, closed the memorial, then waved his hand, signaling Huang Xiaobao to withdraw.

"The southern Shaanxi campaign has reached a critical moment, and the front has done all it can," Zhu Cilang said. "If something can be stirred up on the eastern front, it would of course be greatly to our advantage. You must strive for it. If army troops need to be moved, go discuss it with Li Yan of the Ministry of War and Military Advisor Feng Sizhong!"

"We subjects receive the decree!"

While the Ming's secret service was plotting to use the "Huguang heroes" gathered around Huya Mountain to land a big fish, the legendary Young Master Li had already slipped quietly into Jiangling, the seat of Jingzhou Prefecture.

"Slipped quietly in" did not mean scaling the walls in night clothes. This Young Master Li had no such ability, nor any need of it. The Great Ming's border control was very lax, and it did not restrict the movement of people. Although the eastern and northern borders between the Shun and the Ming were perpetually tense and difficult to cross, that truly did not stump the Shun's spies and agents.

They generally entered the Ming by way of Annam or Siam. If they came through Annam, they passed customs at the Lihua River port, spent a little money to obtain an Annamese identity, and then entered the Ming under the pretext of trade. Once inside the Ming, within the directly administered provinces they could basically wander at will; only a few restricted zones were off-limits.

Going by way of Siam was even safer: sail from Burma out to Phuket, then enter the territory of the Western Army. Claim to have drifted over from Guangdong or Fujian or somewhere, and one could register a household (basically no one investigated), and then with the Western Army's household register one could "return to one's native place and travel about." Once inside the Ming, one could likewise wander freely throughout all the directly administered provinces.

This Young Master Li, who had come to do great things, had entered the Ming from Guangdong with a Western Army household register. At the time he had happened upon the visit of the Indian Princess Nisha and had watched the excitement for a while. After the excitement, he headed north into Huguang. For safety's sake he did not enter the Ming's western capital of Wuhan Prefecture, but went through Hunan into Jingzhou.

All along the way he had been examining the Ming's countryside and agriculture — this Young Master Li was no ordinary roving bandit, but a roving bandit deeply learned in finance and farming. This Young Master Li's surname was Niu. That sounds odd, but his surname really was Niu. He was the youngest son of Niu Jinxing, and his given name was a single character, Jie — his name was Niu Jie.

Their old Niu family counted as cultured people among the Shun. His father Niu Jinxing was the Shun's Left Assistant Grand Secretary — that is, the chancellor — and his elder brother Niu Quan was Minister of the Revenue Government. Niu Jie, however, was a "second generation" who had grown up only after the Shun entered Sichuan (Niu Quan did not count as second generation). He was accomplished in both letters and arms: as a boy he had studied letters under many renowned Sichuan Confucian scholars, and later he entered the Kunming Military Academy to study the martial arts. After graduating from the academy he first served in the army, then entered the Revenue Government to handle trade — trade with the Ming, that is. This was both to exchange goods and to gather intelligence! He was therefore extremely clear about the Ming's economy, and especially the prosperity of its industry and commerce.

And this trip through the Hunan countryside had given him a wholly new understanding of Ming agriculture and rural life — Ming farming was strong, but uneven. Its strength lay in the many great farming estates with the capital to invest in agriculture, so that farm tools, plow oxen, plow horses, mills, irrigation works, and the like were all far better than on the Shun side.

But too many and too strong great estates had also caused the mass bankruptcy of smallholders, the increasing concentration of land, and hardship in food and clothing for landless peasants. This was the Shun dynasty's opportunity!

(End of Chapter)