Chapter 1478: The Great Ming Cowboy King (Seeking Subscriptions)

Over in Europe, as those enormous "butterfly wings" beat with all their might, the people of the Great Ming Empire ten thousand li away still had no idea that King Louis XIV of France had already resolved on war... such was the inefficiency of information transmission in this age — a sailing ship needed at least five or six months to travel from Europe to the Ming homeland!

Fortunately, the military and diplomatic leaders of the Great Ming Empire in this era were still fairly sharp. Not only could they stare wide-eyed at the world, they could also click away at their abacus beads to scheme about the world's peoples. They were not the sort to wait until an N-nation coalition army was at the gates before scrambling to prepare for war.

In fact, these men had long since sensed that war was about to break out — even if the French had not taken the initiative to start one, they themselves would have thrown open the curtain of war. And so, from the end of the twenty-fifth year of Hongxing, the Great Ming Empire had begun preparing for a world war.

Moreover, the Zhu Emperor of the Great Ming Empire had, with great "wisdom," directed his main attention from the very start toward the New Continent across the Pacific. Although he had no intention of giving up the Indian Ocean and Central Asia either, those two regions did not require the Great Ming Empire itself to expend too much effort — the Timurid Empire, the Dzungars, the Khoshuts, and the Dai state were holding the line there! However, he had not anticipated that the French would launch an offensive along the eastern Pacific coast.

In his view, it would be very difficult for the French and the New Spaniards to transfer a fleet of any considerable size from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Besides, the pickings in the Americas were not all that rich — surely less attractive than India.

Therefore, Zhu Cilang and his Grand Marshal's Office had not, from the outset, concentrated the navy's main combat vessels in the Eastern Ocean Fleet and dispatched them all to the United States of New Continent.

Instead, they had concentrated most of the main combat vessels at the home port of Guangzhou Bay in the Southern Ocean, on standby, and had greatly strengthened the Malacca Fleet guarding the Strait of Malacca.

At the same time, the Ming navy had also begun forming a Western Ocean Fleet, preparing to fight it out with the French and the Dutch in the Lesser Western Ocean (the Indian Ocean).

However, compared with the two nomadic Chiliarchies that the Great Ming was preparing to commit to the North American continent, these naval preparations were truly not worth mentioning.

The two nomadic Chiliarchies were the Zhu Emperor's trump cards for contending for world hegemony — twenty or thirty years earlier, the Zhu Emperor himself would never have imagined that so grand an enterprise as contending for world hegemony would actually have to be accomplished by nomads. And Zhu Hekun and Zhu Hezhen, whom Zhu Cilang had swindled into becoming the Great Ming's cowherd boys — no, the Great Ming's Cowherd Kings — were even more dejected. They had thought they would be "little local tyrant kings," but in the blink of an eye their own father had swindled them into becoming Mongols who herded cattle and sheep.

And not even herding on the grasslands of the Ming homeland or Chahar and Tumed, but sailing across the ocean to herd on the grasslands of the New Continent.

Inside the civil-military Guard Commander's office of the Jining Guard bastion, under the jurisdiction of the Anbei Military Commissioner's office — a building outwardly magnificent but inwardly quite crude — a group of Chiliarchs and Centurions from the Jining Guard, dressed in somewhat grimy leather robes with their topknots gleaming with oil, sat on camp stools, curiously sizing up the distinguished guests who had arrived today.

Nowadays, most of the Ming's dozen or two dozen military garrisons had restored the system of guards, chiliarchies, and centuriate stations. But these guards, chiliarchies, and centuriate stations were not quite the same as those of the early Ming. What they administered was not population (households), but military-service land (pastureland) — this was not the early Ming, when people were few and land was plentiful, so controlling the people meant controlling the land. Today's Great Ming had two hundred million people; though nothing compared to the billion-plus of later ages, relative to good farmland and pastureland, people were still too many.

Once there were too many people, they became hard to manage, because managing people meant feeding them! In theory, guard land was meant to support soldiers, but in practice, supporting people always mattered more than supporting soldiers. Whether ordinary military households raising children or high-ranking military households raising sons and daughters, the urgency always exceeded that of supporting soldiers. If land were sufficient, none of this would be a problem — the more people the better. But if land were relatively insufficient, the trouble would be great. The cost of supporting people would inevitably encroach on the cost of supporting soldiers, and when the time came to use troops, there would be nothing left.

Therefore, those highly autonomous military garrisons began implementing the "military-service land" system, no longer administering how many households, only how much land. Land (pastureland) was either distributed (to meritorious subjects) or contracted out (ordinary soldiers and civilians alike could bid for it), and then those who received the land had to supply able-bodied men for military service or pay taxes in money. This made management far more convenient — the garrison only had to follow the land registers and demand men or money from below.

Implementing the "military-service land" system had another advantage: it allowed, to a certain extent, the governance of rotating officials and performance-based assessment. If one administered households, it was easy to form layer upon layer of personal dependency — pull one hair and the whole body moves — making rectification far too difficult.

However, this method of administering land rather than people also had its drawbacks: there were too many surplus able-bodied men with no way out — because under land administration, those who could not fulfill military service and could not pay up would have their land confiscated. Under such circumstances, the military and civilian households contracting land below were most unwilling to keep idle mouths, nor could they afford to!

And so surplus able-bodied men with no prospects and no property multiplied, becoming a headache for the northern military garrisons.

Fortunately, the Great Ming had been expanding in all directions these years, and the court was also recruiting boy soldiers from the military garrisons, so the surplus men of the northern garrisons always had somewhere to go — not only somewhere to go, but they could even pick and choose.

The first and best destination was, of course, becoming a boy soldier — this was practically the road to heaven for youths of the northern border garrisons! In recent years, at least one-third of the newly appointed officers in the Ming army had come from the boy soldiers.

In addition, many boy soldiers, after retiring from service, had passed the civil examinations and become officials with secure livelihoods. And these boy-soldier officials who soared to success could often marry wives from the Yingtian nobility and Southeastern capitalist families — women who brought large sums of money with them into the marriage. These men, to put it plainly, had risen from the bottom and entered the ruling class of the Great Ming dynasty, playing a role similar to the imported "little Grand Secretaries" of the Arabian faith.

The second good destination was going abroad in groups under the Ming princes or the young masters of the military garrisons. That was to serve as running dogs and claws — the Ming's "soft-rice kings" could not rely solely on their fathers-in-law; they needed their own men too. Though this pack of running dogs and claws might not necessarily become officials, they were certain to be allotted a large stretch of land, and their opportunities for advancement were many — far better than grinding away miserably in their home garrison.

Leaving one's home garrison to enlist as a soldier was the third destination — not exactly a good one, but still a way out. The Ming's new armies now used a recruitment system, and they recruited mostly from harsh, cold, and barren lands — this was the Zhu Emperor's little scheme: not only did poor and remote regions produce elite soldiers, but harsh, cold, and barren lands also tended to breed rebels! If the able-bodied men there could be recruited as soldiers, then wouldn't the rebels have no one left to recruit?

And today, the Chiliarchs and Centurions here in Anbei Garrison had heard of a fourth good destination — going to the New Continent to become cowboys!

Was that a good destination? Herding cattle and sheep could be done right here in Anbei — why go to the New Continent for it?

Seeing the Chiliarchs and Centurions below just sitting there speechless, the Anbei Military Commissioner Zhu Hebao exchanged a glance with the thoroughly dejected "Grand Cowherd King" Zhu Hekun (his younger brother Hezhen was the Little Cowherd King, and was right now at Daning Garrison sweet-talking people), and both were at a loss whether to laugh or cry.

But laugh or cry as they might, the task assigned by His Imperial Majesty still had to be carried out.

Zhu Hebao, son of Prince Dai Zhu Cijiong, cleared his throat and nodded to the men below: "The quota for going to the New Continent to join the nomadic Chiliarchies is limited — each Centuriate has only seven men and seven women, that is, seven couples. Neither spouse may be over twenty-five years of age; bringing children or not is up to you. It doesn't matter whether they are Mongols or Han, but they must be able to speak Chinese.

Each couple will receive one hundred taels of silver as a resettlement allowance, and then they need only set out empty-handed with His Highness Prince Huai (Zhu Hekun). His Highness Prince Huai will not mistreat them!

Furthermore, any Centurion who can fulfill the recruitment quota of seven households will have this year's boy-soldier recruitment quota increased by one; if he can exceed it and reach ten households, the quota will be increased by two. Well, can you do it? Speak up, all of you!"

(End of Chapter)