Chapter 1566: Emigrate to India and Become Emperor

Kunming Prefecture, Wuhua Mountain.

The Sun-and-Moon-Together banner symbolizing the Great Ming Celestial Dynasty and the twelve yellow dragon banners symbolizing the Ming Crown Prince have already flown over Wuhua Mountain for six full months!

Yet the final victory of the Yunnan campaign still had not come!

Zhu Hexing had only marched his army into Yunnan Province in the winter of the twenty-eighth year of Hongxing, that is, 1675 by the Western calendar. For the certain victory of this final battle of the Great Ming's mid-dynasty decline and chaos, the Crown Prince Zhu Hexing, going out from the capital to command the army for the second time, dared not be the least bit careless.

Yunnan was nothing like the New Continent or the Western Regions. The wars fought there were all "Hundred Years' Wars" — there was no such thing as winning everything in a single campaign. Even if the warring parties signed a peace treaty, that was merely resting after growing tired of fighting. It was a truce, not peace!

And Yunnan Province was one of the Two Capitals and Thirteen Provinces from before the Great Ming's mid-dynasty chaos — it was ancestral land the Ming dynasty could not abandon. As long as Yunnan Province remained unrecovered, this Great Ming restoration led by Zhu Cilang could not be counted a success. Therefore the Yunnan campaign commanded by Zhu Hexing could only succeed, never fail.

If it failed, the Great Ming would probably have to change its Crown Prince!

Zhu Hexing, who had long since been tempered in the posts of County Magistrate, Prefect, Governor-General of Military Affairs, and in the Grand Marshal's Office, could not now be said to have grown into any kind of military expert, but his conduct had become relatively steady and thorough.

Therefore, after entering Sichuan to command the army, Zhu Hexing did not rush to assemble troops and launch a large-scale offensive. Instead, he memorialized his Imperial Father Zhu Cilang requesting the merger of the two Sichuan military governorships into the Sichuan Military Commissioner's Office, and he himself requested to concurrently serve as Sichuan Military Commissioner. His purpose in doing this, of course, was to turn Sichuan from two garrisons back into one province, and then concentrate the manpower and resources of Sichuan Province to meet this pacification of Yunnan that had to be won.

Zhu Hexing, who had served as a County Magistrate in Sichuan in his early years, knew well that the roads of Shu were hard, and the roads into Yunnan were harder still!

If it truly came to fighting, the difficulty lay not on the battlefield, but in logistics!

Because Zhu Cilang had brought out his "final golden finger," the difficulties on the battlefield were not great — with twenty thousand Hongxing Year 20 long rifles and one million wooden-plug rifled cartridges, it was impossible to lose a frontal engagement.

But to guarantee that a large army could advance deep into rugged mountain forests and maintain supplies for several months or even a year, Sichuan, the great rear base, had to be properly integrated first.

Moreover, he also knew that the terrain of the Yunnan-Guizhou-Sichuan region was very "fragmented" — the only large plain relatively easy to control was the Sichuan Basin.

Elsewhere, there were distributed countless valleys and cultivable slopes. In addition, the climate of Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan was relatively humid, favorable to crop growth, and thus able to support a relatively large population. So it was very easy for self-sufficient separatist regimes to emerge on this territory. For the Ming court, defeating the small number of garrison troops Li Jicheng had left in Yunnan was not difficult.

But to eliminate the countless local strongmen across Yunnan, the Sichuan borderlands, and southern Sichuan — that was far too difficult. The slightest misstep could turn into a war with no end in sight!

Yet Zhu Hexing could not simply co-opt this whole crowd of local strongmen unchanged, making them Chiliarchs and Centurions of the Great Ming — these were all rebels!

Even those native chieftains who had originally been on the Great Ming's side had now betrayed the court for so many years.

If without paying any price, they could swap the Roving King's banner for the Sun-and-Moon banner and go on being local emperors, where would the majesty of the Great Ming Celestial Dynasty be? Would the southwestern native chieftains still take the Great Ming seriously in the future?

Besides, on the Ming side there was still a large crowd of old native chieftains and old military households — high-ranking military households — from Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan, all waiting to carve up Yunnan's territory!

Zhu Hexing, this Crown Prince, could not fail to satisfy their demands at all!

Otherwise, if this bunch of local strongmen all threw down their tools, how was the Yunnan pacification campaign supposed to be fought?

But to fully satisfy their conditions — wouldn't the local strongmen over in Yunnan fight to the death? Part of this group were old native chieftains who had gone over to the Shun, and part were Shun garrison military households who had been rooted in Yunnan for over twenty years. They had long since become deeply entrenched, and could not easily be uprooted.

So the second difficulty of the Yunnan pacification campaign was this: how to reconcile the interests of the old and new groups of local strongmen?

For this matter, the second urgent task Zhu Hexing undertook after entering Sichuan was to go with Ding Yuying on a "three invitations to Li Dingguo" — inviting out Li Dingguo, the Military Commissioner of Eastern Sichuan who held office but ignored governance, to serve as "Grand Strategist for the Pacification of Yunnan." Together with the Crown Prince's Attendant Ma Wanchun, Qin Liangyu's grandson, and the Duke of Qian, Mu Tianbo, it could be said that the great figures of every side had been invited into place.

Then Zhu Hexing, together with Ding Yuying, Li Dingguo, Ma Wanchun, Mu Tianbo, and the others, worked out a set of Yunnan pacification strategies: "transfer of fiefs, relocation of garrisons, entry into court service, bestowal of marriages, and extermination."

The so-called transfer of fiefs meant moving native chieftains out of their hereditary lands and enfeoffing them elsewhere. This policy was for the time being implemented only within the three provinces of Yunnan, Guizhou, and Sichuan. All former roving-bandit native chieftains who surrendered to the court were without exception to be enfeoffed elsewhere, and their original territories were all to be taken over by the old native chieftains who had followed Zhu Hexing into Yunnan.

The so-called relocation of garrisons meant moving surplus native chieftain feudal lords who had no land to be enfeoffed with to the Southern Seas, the Southern Continent, or the New Continent. This expense was enormous! Travel costs plus resettlement fees came to at least two or three hundred taels per person!

The so-called entry into court service meant entering the court as officials — the whole family, old and young, would be settled in Wuchang Prefecture or Yingtian Prefecture, given idle posts and nominal offices, and allowed to get by as best they could.

The so-called bestowal of marriages was for the military guard and Chiliarch-level native chieftains being transferred — one daughter of the old Zhu family for each household, and from then on they would all be imperial relatives by marriage!

In addition, they also had to contribute a few daughters of their own, all to be married to the dragon sons and dragon grandsons of the old Zhu family.

As for the strategy of extermination, that too was of course indispensable!

Suppressing bandits and quelling rebellion was no dinner party — one always had to exterminate a few stubborn, unrepentant bandits. Without the means to kill a chicken, the monkeys would not be afraid.

Without knowing fear, all the conciliatory measures — transfer of fiefs, relocation of garrisons, entry into court service, bestowal of marriages — were hollow, were empty!

Therefore, after completing a series of political, military, and economic preparations and mobilizations, in the winter of the twenty-eighth year of Hongxing, a hundred thousand troops of the Yunnan pacification army swore an oath at Chengdu and marched south!

The southern campaign to pacify Yunnan went very smoothly at the start. Several Shun prefectures and counties originally belonging to the Sichuan Regional Military Commission had long known that the imperial army was irresistible, so when Zhu Hexing was preparing for the southern campaign, they had already made contact through various channels to submit!

And the Shun court seemed to have no intention of placing its defensive line in southern Sichuan or the Sichuan borderlands, so in the southern Sichuan and borderland areas, the Shun army's defenses were practically nonexistent.

Zhu Hexing's great army left Chengdu on the eighteenth day of the eleventh month of the twenty-eighth year, and by the eighth day of the twelfth month — a mere twenty days — had taken the "Shun-controlled zone" of southern Sichuan and the borderlands. The vanguard crossed the Wumeng Mountains in one stroke, occupied Wuding Prefecture, which belonged to Yunnan, and closed in on the Shun's northern capital, Kunming Prefecture!

And starting in the spring of the twenty-ninth year of Hongxing, the Ming army, having already cleared southern Sichuan and the borderlands, launched a second wave of offensives, aimed directly at Kunming.

And this wave of offensives once again came up empty!

Eighty thousand Ming troops entered the utterly deserted city of Kunming almost without shedding a drop of blood. Zhu Hexing, who "victoriously entered" Kunming, felt not the slightest joy.

Because he knew very well that his enemy had not collapsed. Although the roving bandits had lost nearly all their territory within Ming borders, they had opened up territory in Burma, and had also seized territory in India.

So Li Jicheng had the strength to sustain the war in Yunnan, and he also had to sustain the Yunnan theater.

Because no one had guaranteed him that the Ming army would stop at Yunnan and not press the victory and strike into Burma. Without Burma, Li Jicheng's base for his western expedition into India would be gone!

Then he would be the last Roving King of the Shun!

So Li Jicheng's abandonment of the Sichuan borderlands, southern Sichuan, and Kunming was in fact a feint to lure the enemy deep. But Zhu Hexing was no fool either — the other side wanted to lure him deep, so he simply stayed put on Wuhua Mountain in Kunming for six months, refusing to go deep.

And the eighty thousand troops he had brought to Yunnan were also carefully deployed around Kunming Prefecture, meticulously clearing the five prefectures of Wuding, Qujing, Xundian, Chuxiong, and Chengjiang.

From the look of it, he was utterly determined to fight a protracted war, in no hurry at all to unify the realm!