Chapter 246: Holding the Soil

In his memorial audience with Hong Chengchou, Zhu Youjian had pointed out clearly: the great army at Ningyuan and Jinzhou was not guarding Liaodong, but the Liaoxi Corridor; and the few footholds Mao Wenlong had established on the Liaodong Peninsula were merely a rear-area battlefield for harassing and pinning down the Qing army, not a line of defense against the Jianzhou barbarians' incursions — their effect was negligible.

In the Battle of Liaoshen in the first year of Tianqi, the Jianzhou barbarians took Shenyang and Liaoyang in succession, and the only fortress the Great Ming still held north of western Liaoxi was Guangning.

In the Battle of Guangning in the second year of Tianqi, the sixty thousand new troops that Liaodong Governor Wang Huazhen had raised at enormous cost in pay and provisions collapsed at the first brush with the Jianzhou barbarians, while his successor Xiong Tingbi took an even cruder approach — he simply led several hundred thousand Liaodong soldiers and civilians in a withdrawal through Shanhai Pass, abandoning every fort and stronghold built along the Liaoxi Corridor. On this point alone, Xiong Tingbi deserved death.

Fortunately, the Jianzhou Eight Banners were still in their founding stage at the time, and Jianzhou's overall strength was not very great. Nurhaci still had to lead his men in campaigns against the tribes neighboring Jianzhou, plundering people and goods to expand his power; he had neither the strength nor the inclination to occupy the entire Liaoxi Corridor, much less any ambition to fight through Shanhai Pass and contend with the Great Ming for supremacy. So after his string of victories over Ming forces, the Wild Boar Skin merely ordered the forts the Ming army had built along the Liaoxi Corridor demolished, shipping the bricks, stone, and timber back to Shenyang and elsewhere in batches. The common folk who had not managed to flee became booi bondservants of the Jianzhou barbarians, and the Liaoxi Corridor was temporarily left a vacuum.

After the Battle of Guangning, Mao Wenlong's forces carried out some small-scale harassment against the Jianzhou barbarians and established a few footholds at the southern tip of the Liaodong Peninsula, but such scratching-at-the-boot harassment was nowhere near enough to threaten Jianzhou's military operations against the Great Ming. Defense on the Liaoxi front remained the top priority.

As for the Ji Garrison direction, since Jianzhou still lacked the strength to launch a major invasion of the Khorchin, Chahar, and other Mongol tribes, these Mongols could for the time being serve as a buffer against Jianzhou incursions — there was no need yet to fear the Eight Banners cutting through the rugged mountains to reach the capital.

At the time, Sun Chengzong and Wang Zaijin, the two civil officials in court most familiar with Liaodong border affairs, had each proposed a different solution: Sun Chengzong advocated strengthening defense in depth and rebuilding the Liaoxi Corridor — building more defensive forts and stockades, stationing appropriate garrisons in them, defending when the enemy came, working the military farmland when they did not, with the forts supporting one another, pushing the line of defense ever farther out.

This was broadly the same strategy Fan Zhongyan of the Northern Song had employed against the Western Xia when he was Military Commissioner of the northwest — the aim being to bury the tiny state of Jianzhou under money, building forts step by step all the way into Jianzhou territory. The one difference was that the Song had been fabulously rich back then, whereas the Great Ming's finances were already drying up.

Although this plan won the support of most court officials, when the accounts were carefully reckoned the cost in money and grain was simply staggering — something the already dwindling Taicang treasury could hardly bear.

Wang Zaijin, by contrast, advocated contracting the defense — building a second wall outside Shanhai Pass to strengthen it; if the Jianzhou barbarians came and battle was joined, Shanhai Pass would not open its gates, and the troops outside the pass would have no choice but to fight to the death.

The great virtue of this plan was that it saved enormous expenditure and greatly lightened the court's burden, but its drawbacks were equally obvious: once Jianzhou grew strong and pushed its battle line up to Shanhai Pass, the capital could forget about peace and quiet — the soldiers guarding the pass would have to sleep on their weapons.

Moreover, the plan had an element of gilding the lily.

Shanhai Pass was already a formidable defile with ample troops to guard it — what use was there in gilding the lily by building another great wall-city outside the gates?

After deliberation between Tianqi and his ministers, Sun Chengzong's plan ultimately prevailed, while Wang Zaijin was packed off to Nanjing to live out his retirement.

The reasons Sun Chengzong's plan won the approval of most senior ministers and the Emperor were not hard to find. First, recovering lost territory carried the moral high ground — since there were no longer any civil or military officials winning new lands, surely recovering what had been lost should be no problem?

Second, the farther the battlefield with Jianzhou was pushed from the capital, the safer the Emperor and his ministers felt — out of sight, out of mind; and Wang Zaijin's plan could not give the Emperor enough of that sense of security.

Third, the Wild Boar Skin of Jianzhou had not pressed his advantage to occupy the Liaoxi Corridor, which bred a contemptuous mood throughout court and country — the belief that Jianzhou did not have the strength to wrestle with the Great Ming, and that with stronger defenses the Jianzhou barbarians could never fight their way to Beijing in a hundred years.

As for the enormous sums of money and grain required — well, then just levy more of the Liaodong surtax. And so the Liaodong levy of over six million taels a year was born, and the end result was that the Great Ming's finances went bankrupt and the dynasty perished.

Weighing everything, Sun Chengzong's plan better served the interests of all parties at court and in the country and was the more aggressive option, so its victory was inevitable. The consequence came in the Dingmao War of the seventh year of Tianqi, when the Khorchin, the Chahar, the Khalkha, Mao Wenlong's forces on the Liaodong Peninsula, and Joseon were each defeated in turn by Hong Taiji. The Jianzhou barbarians gained complete strategic initiative and could safely lay siege to the strongpoints along the Liaoxi Corridor and ambush their relief forces at leisure, without worrying about their rear — and those strongpoints became wounds on the Ming army that never stopped bleeding.

At the same time, because the Mongol buffer beyond the Ji Garrison had been swept away by the Jianzhou barbarians, Qing troops could pass freely through Mongol territory to raid through the passes, and the defense in depth beyond Shanhai Pass had lost its former strategic importance. Still, given the difficulty of the other two routes, the convenient Liaoxi Corridor remained quite significant.

As long as those strongpoints south of Jinzhou existed, the Emperor and his ministers would always feel somewhat safer psychologically — and the court had already poured so much manpower, resources, and money into the Liaoxi direction that abandoning it would mean losing everything invested. A decision to give it up was not easy to make, and if anything went wrong afterward, the decision-makers would bear enormous political risk.

Since last year, Zhu Youjian had issued decrees strengthening the defenses at Gubeikou and Xifengkou, making it quite difficult for the Jianzhou barbarians to break through either pass. He believed that after sending men to scout the situation, the Jianzhou barbarians would still make the Liaoxi Corridor their main point of breakthrough.

Even if the Qing army stormed those two passes regardless of casualties and forced its way into the capital region, with the several Ming armies of Xuan-Da, the Ji Garrison, the capital, and even Shanhai Pass closing in from all sides, and with its line of retreat very likely cut off, who knew how many of the Qing troops that entered the passes would ever make it back out?

And if they chose to go the long way around instead, then the Ming forces along the Liaoxi Corridor would pose an even greater threat — if the commander judged correctly and seized the moment to send a heavy force straight at their lair in Shengjing, the outcome would be hard to predict.

So going around through Mongol territory was good for raiding but not for staying. If Jianzhou truly meant to contend for the Central Plains, it would have to control the Liaoxi Corridor.

Historically, throughout the entire Ming dynasty, the Manchus never fully occupied the Liaoxi Corridor, let alone captured Shanhai Pass. Not until the seventeenth year of Chongzhen, when Li Zicheng led a great army to besiege the capital, did Wu Sangui — upon receiving the Chongzhen Emperor's summons to come to the rescue — have no choice but to voluntarily abandon the defensive line from Ningyuan to Shanhai Pass and lead his troops through the pass to relieve the capital. Before he even reached the capital, he received the grievous news that the Emperor had died for his country, whereupon Wu Sangui withdrew his forces to hold Shanhai Pass, and only after finally surrendering to the Qing did he open the gates and let the Qing army into the interior.

When Zhu Youjian was considering last year how to deal with the Guanning army, there had been moments when he thought of abandoning the territory beyond Shanhai Pass, voluntarily contracting the defensive line, and rebuilding the defenses of Shanhai Pass, the Ji Garrison, and the capital.

This was also because he held grave doubts about the fighting ability of the Ming army.

The Battle of Sarhu had already shown that the Ming army's fighting power was far inferior to the Qing army's, and the Guanning Iron Cavalry that later generations touted so extravagantly had only cowered behind city walls, never daring to meet the Qing troops in open battle.

The Eight Banner troops, born of a hunting-and-fishing people, together with the Mongol Banners later incorporated, were cavalry-based with extreme mobility — it was nearly impossible for the Ming army to win a head-on confrontation.

The Great Ming's advantage lay in controlling far more land and resources than Jianzhou, so Zhu Youjian wanted to implement a scorched-earth policy — abandon the northeast entirely, and while contracting the battle line, stretch the Jianzhou barbarians' own line until their supply lines became difficult. The Great Ming would use the capital as bait to lure the Qing army into breaching the passes, then concentrate troops from all directions to defend the capital region, fighting with superior numbers, waging Mobile Corps Commander war and wars of attrition — every battle annihilating small bands of Qing troops with overwhelming force, building small victories into great ones, gradually gnawing away at the Manchu main force. Even at the cost of having the capital region battered to pieces, he would grind down the Qing main force and utterly destroy the Jianzhou barbarians' vitality; then, once the Great Ming had recovered a few years later, he would muster a great army and recover the entire northeast in one stroke.

That idea had been somewhat extreme. As the Ming army gradually gained the upper hand in the bandit-suppression campaigns, Zhu Youjian developed a new appreciation for the regular troops' fighting ability, and in the end he cast the idea aside.