Chapter 937: So Poor, Truly Poor! (Please Subscribe)

The day Shen Tingyang, the second richest man in the Ming, arrived in Nanjing happened to be the first day of the fourth month of the ninth year of Hongxing, the day of the great victory parade.

When the private pleasure barge he was traveling on reached Longjiang Wharf, the nearby Yifeng Gate Avenue was already packed with commoners waiting to watch the triumphant army, every face alight with barely concealed excitement. Most of these people were northerners stranded in Nanjing—some were military dependents, some were loyalist refugees, some had once been lofty scholar-officials, and still others were nothing at all, just ordinary folk who had fled the ravages of war to Jiangnan in search of a place to shelter.

Among these people stranded far from home, some had found opportunities to rise high, some lived modestly and had settled down in the prosperous land of Nanjing, but the great majority were struggling desperately on the edge of poverty!

How could life as a refugee in a strange land ever be easy?

No matter how well or poorly these northerners were living in Jiangnan, the vast majority of them missed their homeland every waking moment!

For many, the moment they closed their eyes, the mountains and rivers of home, the towns and villages, and the elders and kinsfolk they had not seen for years would appear in their dreams.

As time passed, the longing of those wandering far from home for their native land only grew deeper and stronger!

And now, news of the Northern Expedition's victory had arrived!

Henan was recovered! Hebei was recovered! Shanxi was recovered too!

In the end, even Beijing was recovered! The ever-victorious Northern Expedition army had even fought its way onto the steppes south of the Gobi, and the Chahar Mongols, who claimed to be the legitimate heirs of the Great Yuan, and the Tumed Mongols, who claimed the title of Lesser Khan of the Northern Yuan, had both bowed their heads and submitted to the Celestial Court of the Great Ming!

The Northern Expedition had triumphed!

The northern lands had been recovered!

The sons and daughters of the north, wandering in the southeast, had at last seen the homeland of their dreams beckoning to them!

The time to go home had come!

And before they packed their belongings and set out to return to their native land, to see the loved ones, the mountains and rivers, the villages and towns of their dreams, they still had to welcome with the greatest enthusiasm the army returning in triumph and the sovereign who had restored the Ming.

"The great army returns in triumph! The great army returns in triumph!"

As forty ironclad cavalrymen riding tall foreign horses drove their mounts forward in perfect order, shouting "Triumph!" at the top of their lungs, the great victory parade of the ninth year of Hongxing began!

Not many troops took part in the victory parade, because although the Northern Expedition had won a complete victory, the northern lands, which had been in chaos for twenty or thirty years, had not yet fully quieted down. The authority of the Ming court still needed the iron army of the Northern Expedition to defend it, and beyond the frontier and beyond the passes there were still enemies unwilling to accept defeat who needed the Ming's mighty soldiers to overawe them.

So the troops that could temporarily end their campaigns and return to Nanjing to take part in this victory parade amounted to only five regiments, nearly ten thousand men, including one Imperial Guard cavalry regiment, two flintlock regiments, and two ordinary infantry regiments.

At the head was an Imperial Guard cuirassier regiment, uniformly equipped with foreign horses and plate armor, already drawn up in neat ranks on the wharf. When the shouting reached them from afar, the war drums began to beat.

An entire regiment of ironclad cavalry, formed into squares of forty riders each, drew up in perfect order and advanced, company after company, in a vast and mighty column along Yifeng Gate Avenue into the city of Nanjing.

On both sides of Yifeng Gate Avenue, bursts of cheering erupted at once!

"Ten thousand victories for the Great Ming! Ten thousand victories for the Great Ming!"

Those who had rushed to the best positions along the avenue outside Yifeng Gate to welcome the triumphant army were mostly northern military dependents, and some were veterans discharged from the New Army of Endurance.

Seeing these two thousand ironclad cavalrymen, they were too moved to contain themselves!

They all knew something of military affairs, and of course they understood what these two thousand armored lancers on tall horses meant.

If the Ming had possessed cavalry like this twenty or thirty years earlier, the Manchus could never have gotten through the Great Wall. Their arrows could not pierce plate armor, their short horses could not outrun these tall foreign mounts, and faced with a charge by foreign-horse cavalry, they would not even have had a chance to flee.

Next to appear were row after row of infantry in red coats and black armor, shouldering flintlock muskets with fixed bayonets—two full regiments of flintlock troops! Uniformly equipped with flintlocks, with no pikes and no sword-and-buckler men. Such an army might not be very useful on the battlefields of Europe, where shock cavalry was strong, but in the East, where there was no powerful shock cavalry, it was almost invincible.

Anyone who has truly set foot on a seventeenth-century land battlefield knows that using cold-steel melee or mounted archery to defeat an equal number of flintlock infantry drawn up in tight ranks is very, very difficult! Using foot bows at long range to trade shots with flintlock infantry is an even more laughable fantasy. Sending a whole company of baturu to grind down line infantry who only put down their hoes a few months ago in a war of attrition? And the winner of such a war of attrition would not necessarily be the baturu—just give the line infantry plate armor, and it would be enough to stop the baturu's "hundred-pace piercing shots"!

By now the great ironworks of Shanghai, Nanjing, Quanzhou, and Guangzhou were almost all equipped with water-powered hammers, so the cost of producing plate armor had fallen below that of lamellar armor, making it entirely possible to equip the troops with it in large quantities.

Outside Yifeng Gate, the loudest cheering of all suddenly erupted—it was the Ming Emperor Zhu Cilang, clad in golden plate armor and riding a magnificent Arabian horse, appearing on Yifeng Gate Avenue. The people on both sides of the avenue knelt and prostrated themselves before him, crying "Long live His Majesty!" and the whole street was instantly thrown into a frenzy.

Around Zhu Cilang thronged a great crowd of meritorious officers in plate armor on warhorses—officers who had won great distinction in the Northern Expedition and had now been granted the signal honor of escorting the Emperor in the victory parade.

Among them, riding closest to Zhu Cilang, was the Prince of Condé, clad all in black plate armor!

This French prince now wore a look of immense satisfaction. In truth, he had been the true "master planner" of this Northern Expedition into the Central Plains—the plan for the expedition and the decisive Battle of Deshengdian had both been his handiwork.

And in these years in the East, he had gained no small measure of skill! First, he had obtained practical experience in commanding large formations. Commanding an army of tens of thousands in Europe and commanding a war involving hundreds of thousands of men in China were two entirely different things!

Second, he had learned real skill during the siege of Beijing! The parallel-trench siege method "invented" by the Ming Emperor himself had opened his eyes, and had made him realize the truth that as long as one's mathematics was good, any bastion fort could be taken at will!

What delighted him even more were the explosive shells, wooden base fins, and wooden-tube fuses "invented" by Emperor Zhu. With these two innovations, the reliability of explosive shells had shot up several notches.

With reliable explosive shells and the parallel siege method, the age of the bastion fort was about to pass. For Europe, where bastion forts covered the land, a new age was on the verge of breaking forth!

Zhu Cilang, too, could hardly suppress his joy at this moment—not because the cavalry and flintlock infantry before him looked so formidable, but because on his way over from the opposite bank of the Yangtze he had seen with his own eyes the "war boom" in Nanjing, the foremost capital of the Ming. Around Pukou, a very busy handicraft center dominated by shipyards had sprung up, and near the Yangtze shore dozens of slipways had been laid out, all frantically busy building ships. On the opposite bank of the Yangtze, both banks of the Qinhuai and Jinchuan rivers were lined with cargo wharves, densely packed with riverboats waiting to load and unload.

Zhu Cilang, who had lived in Nanjing for more than ten years, could feel that the Nanjing of today was more prosperous than at any time in the past decade!

Since fighting wars could promote economic development, perhaps they should fight a few more in the future!

Who should be next?

As Emperor Zhu was pondering whom to fight in the next war, his warhorse had already reached the open ground outside the barbican of Yifeng Gate. This area was especially broad and open, so an especially large crowd of commoners had gathered there—all refugees from Shuntian Prefecture, many of them loyalist refugees who had followed Emperor Zhu in his flight. Now, seeing their emperor riding toward them in awesome majesty, they were stirred to the utmost. No one knew who started it, but suddenly someone shouted: "Your Majesty, take us home!"

At once, more and more people took up the cry!

"Your Majesty, take us home!"

"Your Majesty, let us go home!"