Chapter 565: What Are You All Conspiring About?

In the nineteenth year of Chongzhen of the Great Ming, at the end of the tenth month, in Qufu, Shandong Province.

The hometown of the Sage Confucius was far more desolate now than when Dodo had come to attack it. The nine round forts outside the great bastion of Qufu now stood empty, with hardly any residents left. Only a few militia troops in red jackets, under the direction of their officers, were listlessly dismantling the fortifications.

These forts were being torn down so they could not be used by the enemy in the next siege — there were no longer enough men for Shi Kefa, Kong Yinzhi, and the rest to make use of them in another battle. For the famine sweeping the southeast had not spared Shandong either.

Shandong had many refugees, and it also stood on the front line of the struggle against the Qing army. Large stretches of good farmland had been seized by the Qing forces and turned into manors of the Great Qing's Plain Green Banner.

Although Shi Kefa, Gao Hongtu, and Zuo Maodi had worked hard to introduce sweet potatoes, they still could not solve the ever-worsening grain shortage.

So from the summer of this year onward, the refugees gathered around Qufu began flooding like a tide into Huaibei, Xuzhou, and Haizhou, and then surged on south of the Huai River.

Yet even as the militia's numbers dwindled, their equipment markedly improved. Not only did they receive many matchlock muskets from Japan, they also cast a good number of "one-catty" and "three-catty" great general cannons themselves.

Their Japanese matchlocks had all been purchased by Zheng Sen's mission. In Nagasaki, Zheng Sen had seemed to scorn the underpowered Japanese guns, but once he reached Edo and was grandly received by Tokugawa Iemitsu, out of consideration for balancing Sino-Japanese trade and promoting Sino-Japanese friendship, he reluctantly purchased ten thousand Japanese matchlocks.

Zheng Sen had not yet returned, but the ten thousand Japanese matchlocks he had ordered had been hurriedly shipped back.

At the same time, the Grand Marshal's Office had received Spanish light matchlocks delivered by the Dutch. A comparison between the two made the difference obvious at once — the Spanish light matchlocks were not light at all, and their power was great; at thirty paces they could punch through shield carts without trouble. They could even replace the turtle-dove-foot guns, thereby easing the New Army's logistical burden.

So the Grand Marshal's Office looked down on this batch of Japanese matchlocks and refused delivery (funds were tight too!). The Zheng family resold them to Shen Tingyang, and Shen Tingyang in turn sold part of them to the comparatively wealthy Shi Kefa — Shi Kefa had seized the treasury of the Kong family of Qufu, so of course he had money to buy arms.

Having obtained three or four thousand Japanese firearms, the Qufu militia began copying the tactics of the Model Army's infantry regiments, forming square infantry with pikes and matchlocks. They also purchased from Shen Tingyang's Dengzhou cannon foundry a batch of great general cannons with improved carriages, both "one-catty" and "three-catty" types, and cast a batch of crouching-tiger cannons themselves.

While acquiring so many firearms and cannons, Shi Kefa did not forget to strengthen the training of his troops. But he disdained Zhu Cilang's route of copying the West, and instead sought out the New Book of Effective Discipline, the Practical Record of Troop Training, and the Miscellaneous Notes on Troop Training, studying them carefully and using Qi Jiguang's methods to form chariot-infantry-cavalry battalions.

Relying on these ten thousand-odd trained troops equipped with firearms and cannons, and on his office of "Governor-General of Seven Provinces," Shi Kefa transformed himself into the head of the "Six Garrison Commands" — Shi Kefa, Gao Hongtu, Zuo Maodi, Gao Jie, Huang Degong, and Zhu Yihai.

But unlike the Qufu trained troops, who had taken the elite-force route, the armies of Gao Hongtu, Zuo Maodi, Zhu Yihai, Gao Jie, and Huang Degong had not been reduced because of the famine. For the armies of these five warlords were all tied to land — Gao Hongtu, Zuo Maodi, and Zhu Yihai were all local powerholders of Shandong, holding large territories, and beneath them were hosts of large and small landlords, every one of whom opposed the Qing's land enclosures and per-capita land equalization. Naturally they threw all their strength into maintaining the size of the militia!

Even if grain ran short, they would drive out some refugees to go begging, but they had to feed the militia to defend their own land!

However, the armies of Gao Hongtu, Zuo Maodi, and Zhu Yihai had all been established to protect the land of the landlord class, so naturally they had no way to satisfy the land demands of the ordinary militiamen. Thus, under the double pressure of the Qing's land enclosures and per-capita land grants on one side, and the land grants carried out by the Gao and Huang armies on the other, the morale of their troops was somewhat unsettled.

It should also be mentioned that although the equipment of the armies of Gao Hongtu, Zuo Maodi, and Zhu Yihai could not compare with Shi Kefa's (Zhu Yihai's army was somewhat better equipped), the training and organization methods they adopted all followed Qi Jiguang, taking the mixed route of chariots, cannons, infantry, and cavalry.

As for the two warlords Gao Jie and Huang Degong, Zhu Cilang had reformed them halfway — from mercenary armies into feudal land armies — but their warlord nature had not fundamentally changed.

After the reform, the on-paper troop counts of the two warlords had shrunk considerably (they had never really existed anyway), but they could still maintain a fighting force of ten to twenty thousand men (households), all granted manors, and reorganized according to the Model Army's structure into a number of regiments. Their tactics were of course "Maurician" in style, only the numbers of firearms and cannons were insufficient.

Land soldiers with manors would naturally not be starved to death by famine, so the grain shortage sweeping Huaibei and Xuzhou-Haizhou did not hit them hard. In a certain sense it even strengthened these land soldiers — many northern refugees who had drifted south became tenant farmers of the landlord-soldiers of the Gao and Huang armies.

But the Gao and Huang armies each had their own difficult scripture to chant.

The Gao family army's difficulty was that they had a bit too much money! Gao Jie and Lady Xing had thrown in with Zhu Cilang relatively early, and the couple were also big figures of the roving-bandit faction within the Northern Bureau group. The Crown Prince had deliberately cultivated them to balance the Liao garrison faction (that is, Wu Xiang, Wu Sanfu, Wu Guoyong, and that lot), so he gave them a fine territory: Haizhou — a newly established directly administered department encompassing the old Haizhou (a subordinate department), Suqian, Pizhou, and Shuyang. It lay along the coast and the Grand Canal, crisscrossed by waterways, with fertile land. It could well be called "the Jiangnan of Huaibei."

After gaining this territory, Gao Jie and Lady Xing spent considerable effort managing it well. They did not bother with official fields or military colonies; they simply sorted out the land carefully and then collected grain by the mu — one dou per mu for dry fields, two dou per mu for paddy fields, with no tax exemptions. One should not underestimate Haizhou: a careful survey showed no less than seven million mu, and at an average of one and a half dou, the land tax alone came to no less than one million shi.

And in the process of Zhu Cilang's "reform" of the Gao family army, Haizhou Prefecture's governing authority was not stripped away, nor were Haizhou's taxes and land touched. Instead, land in Xuzhou was taken (Xuzhou's population had plummeted after being stormed and occupied by the Qing army, leaving much wasteland) and distributed to the officers and men of the Gao family army.

So the roughly twenty thousand men of the Gao family army had both land in Xuzhou and taxes from Haizhou, and all became well-off. Well-off they were, but unfortunately their courage shrank too, and they were no longer very willing to fight the Qing army to the death.

They had everything except fighting strength — where would they find the courage to fight a decisive battle against the mighty Qing army?

And the Huang family army's difficulty was that they had a bit too little money!

Because Huang Degong had thrown in with Zhu Cilang somewhat late, and moreover came from the Chongzhen Emperor's own Valiant Guard Camp, he had never been favored by Zhu Cilang, nor did he have a good territory to profit from. The Huaibei assigned to him was poor to begin with, and had been ravaged by the Qing army once over, so he could only distribute land and had nowhere to collect taxes.

Moreover, the land assigned to Huang Degong's troops came late, missing last year's farming season and causing widespread crop failure in Huaibei. This year Huaibei suffered drought again, and the spring planting area was small (the land had just been distributed), so famine struck before the autumn harvest arrived.

Huang Degong had no choice but to borrow grain from the wealthy Gao Jie. Gao Jie refused, and so the two fell out.

Huang Degong then made an issue of Suining and Taoyuan (both counties west of the south-flowing Yellow River), which the two sides disputed, and directly sent troops to occupy them.

Gao Jie, having somehow gotten wind that Huang Degong was sheltering Zhu Cihuan, sent up a secret memorial denouncing him!

Shi Kefa, unaware of this matter (the matter of Zhu Cihuan seeking refuge with Gao Jie), and considering himself the leader of the various armies, summoned Gao Jie, Huang Degong, Gao Hongtu, Zuo Maodi, and others to Qufu — just as the great secret agent Ji Kun was coming north — under the pretext of welcoming Zhu Yihai back from his audience, intending to unify positions on the two questions of Zhu Cilang's progress and the Great Ming's heavenly troops' northern expedition.

But now Huang Degong, Gao Hongtu, Zuo Maodi, and Zhu Yihai had all arrived in Qufu, yet there was no sign of Gao Jie. And a whole crowd of warlords holding this sort of gathering before the court's imperial envoy arrived — no matter how one looked at it, they were conspiring!

(End of Chapter)