Chapter 529: A Fine Line

That night, the imperial carriage halted at the Hongmen traveling palace for rest — this was built back when Wang Mang was in power.

Though Diwu Lun was constantly on the move, important memorials had always chased his traveling residence. Even if he could enter Chang'an the day after tomorrow, some urgent submissions still had to be delivered to the Emperor at once.

This silk-bound letter came from Liang Province. With the destruction of the "Western Han," Diwu Lun had arranged a "troika" in Liang Province: General of the Guard Wan Xiu, stationed at Tianshui due to a back ailment, oversaw pacification in the Long region; General of the Rear Wu Han held Longxi, guarding against the Cheng family and the remnants of Wei Ao's forces lodged in Wudu Commandery while also restraining the Qiang tribes.

The true "Governor of Liang Province," Diba Jiao, remained in the four commanderies of Hexi.

Diwu Lun broke the seal by lamplight. Opening the memorial, he could not help but smile. "What a coincidence — it concerns the Western Regions."

Before this, the Central Plains and the Western Regions had been cut off from each other for a full ten years. Tracing the cause, one still had to blame Wang Mang's "Imperial Han" vanity: in an effort to align with ancient rites, he had demoted all the kings of the Western Regions states to marquises.

The Western Regions and the Central Plains differed in language. To the locals, their rulers were essentially city-state chieftains; the so-called kings and marquises were in truth Han bestowals. But the Western Regions had admired Han culture for over a century and had by now grasped the concept of noble titles. Wang Mang's abrupt change naturally stirred their discontent. It happened that the Western Regions Protector-General, who bitterly resented Wang Mang for usurping the Han, took several thousand men and defected to the Xiongnu — after all, the Xiongnu were marriage kin to the Han house.

The Western Regions instantly fell into chaos. Coupled with Xin Dynasty envoys extorting goods and wealth, the small states could not endure the exploitation, and those following suit in defecting to the Xiongnu were beyond counting.

Had the Xin Dynasty been brimming with martial might, none of this would have been a problem. But the great army Wang Mang dispatched to chastise the Western Regions, without the Xiongnu even lifting a finger, was defeated by states like Karasahr and annihilated to the last man. All that remained was the Xin Dynasty's Western Regions Protector-General, Li Chong, who gathered a thousand-odd remnant troops and fell back to hold the city of Kucha, nestled at the southern foot of the Tianshan Mountains. That was the third year of Tianfeng of the Xin (AD 16). Now it was the second year of Wei Wude (AD 26). The Western Regions had been cut off ever since.

But from the news Diba Jiao's envoys had gathered after reaching Loulan, the Xin army remnants at Kucha had actually held out for a full ten years! The men Li Chong sent out slipped through the Karasahr blockade and reached Loulan, where they met the Wei state's envoys. Only then did they learn that the Xin Dynasty had already fallen...

The next day, before setting out, Diwu Lun showed this memorial from Liang Province to Wang Mang.

"Old Wang, I spoke wrongly yesterday. The Xin's loyal ministers are not only Tian Kuang and Yan Erudite — there is also this Li Chong."

Wang Mang, too, read the words with astonishment. It turned out that a few years earlier, the Right Division of the Xiongnu had retaken the Tianshan range and sent men to press Kucha into submitting to the Xiongnu. Kucha thereupon surrendered, but Li Chong took his remnant force and fled to Luntai City east of Kucha, where he still doggedly held on. Yet they were nearing the point where arrows were spent and grain exhausted — they truly could not hold out any longer.

Diba Jiao, deeply moved by their plight, was at once seized by compassion. He had now sent a man to seek Diwu Lun's instructions, asking whether a detachment of troops should be dispatched west from Dunhuang to proclaim the Great Wei's prestige, to bring Loulan — which lay beyond the Xiongnu's easy reach — back into the fold of the court's vassal states, and incidentally lend a hand to that Western Regions Protector-General, Li Chong?

Wang Mang raised his head and looked at Diwu Lun, only to see the young man declare resolutely: "Of course we will not help."

"I shall also issue an edict severely reprimanding Diba Jiao. When I earlier had him send men into the Western Regions, it was to gather intelligence — to learn how far the Xiongnu had expanded westward and exactly how many small Western Regions polities had attached themselves to them — not to have him play the great philanthropist!"

"Hexi is now threatened by the various Qiang to the south and pressed by the Xiongnu Right Division to the north. It could be cut in two at the waist at any moment. It can barely look after itself — where would it find the spare strength to rescue Li Chong, stranded alone ten thousand li away?"

The Western Regions were too far. That was an arena only a strong, unified great dynasty could play in. Diwu Lun had not even fully unified the north yet — how could he possibly be worthy?

Diwu Lun said: "Li Chong's force numbers only a hundred-odd men. They pose no threat whatsoever to the Xiongnu and cannot even match the nearby Western Regions states. To me, he is utterly useless. To lose a thousand men, ten thousand men, for the sake of aiding a hundred — if they were meritorious officers and soldiers of this dynasty, that would be one thing; we would have to rescue them no matter what. But since they are leftover remnants of the former dynasty, it is quite possible that in the year or half-year it takes for envoys to travel back and forth, they will have already perished entirely. Dying cleanly would be for the best."

This utterly shameless speech greatly shocked Wang Mang, who cursed Diwu Lun: "You little brat — so cowardly, and you dare call yourself the lord of the Central States?"

If Wang Mang remembered correctly, Diwu Lun's grandfather had been an old soldier who campaigned in the Western Regions alongside Chen Tang. How could the grandson behave in such a manner?

Diwu Lun thought nothing of it. Diwu Ba had been fixated on the Western Regions on his deathbed, but Diwu Lun would not let that sway state policy. "Trembling and fearful, as though peering into a deep abyss, as though treading on thin ice — this, I believe, is the attitude the lord of a state ought to have when making decisions in a chaotic age."

He strongly agreed with one saying: weakness and ignorance are not obstacles to survival — arrogance is.

How arrogant Emperor Wu of Han was. Relying on the empire's zenith, he launched two distant expeditions against Dayuan ten thousand li away, exporting power madly. At the cost of fewer than one in ten of the expeditionary soldiers returning, he bought Dayuan's nominal submission — yet nearly dragged a mighty empire to ruin. The Han Dynasty's strategy in the Western Regions underwent a massive contraction, and forty years of war were nearly fought in vain.

And how arrogant Wang Mang was. He fancied himself the sage Son of Heaven who appears once every five hundred years, looked down on the surrounding barbarians, and with the attitude of a celestial court, cried out for attack and slaughter. The result was that he met rebuffs everywhere, successfully shattered the myth that "one Han can match five barbarians," and ended in an awkward debacle. Back when he usurped the Han, a hundred polities came to court. Now, among the vassal states Diwu Lun had inherited from the Xin and Wang Mang, there was not a single one left.

An empire appears mighty but is in truth incomparably fragile. Failing to grasp clearly just how much strength one actually possesses, pouring excessive energy into distant places — wanting to seize this, wanting to take that, a pit of desire impossible to fill — in the end, one merely exhausts one's energy and reaps no good result.

Diwu Lun continued: "Yesterday, Old Wang, you told me that the reason for opening the Western Sea Commandery and striking the Western Regions, apart from gathering the auspicious omens of the four seas, was to take their land to accommodate the surplus population of the Central Plains, to colonize and cultivate it, and ultimately to transform the barbarians through civilization. That idea is not bad..."

Though Wang Mang was a great Confucian scholar, his thinking was rather unconventional. Unlike the Han Confucians, who consistently disliked foreign expansion and the drain on national strength, Wang Mang believed that since the Han Dynasty had been able to turn New Qinzhong and Hexi from barren wastes into fertile land, then applying the same to the Western Sea and the Western Regions ought to work as well!

But to his surprise, Diwu Lun said: "Yet the lands of the four barbarians are several times, ten times the size of the Central States. If one cannot distinguish the right direction and campaigns recklessly, it is truly a case of driving south while intending to go north."

As he spoke, he had someone lay out a newly made map of the realm on the table. It included not only the provinces and commanderies under Wei control but also the Cheng family and Wu Han.

Diwu Lun picked up his brush and placed a dot north of Shanggu Commandery in You Province, at the Han Long Wall bordering the Wuhuan.

Then he placed another dot at Yongchang County in Yizhou Commandery (modern Baoshan), territory controlled by Gongsun Shu's Cheng regime.

As Diwu Lun connected the two dots into a line, the realm was thereby split in two. Most of the provinces and commanderies of the Han and Xin dynasties lay inside the line, but many border commanderies in Bing Province and Liang Province, along with the Western Regions and the Western Sea (Qinghai) that Wang Mang yearned for so obsessively, lay outside it.

Diwu Lun said: "Henceforth, even if I were to learn from Old Wang and colonize the four barbarians, transforming barbarians through civilization, it may only be applied southeast of this line. As for the lands northwest of this line — apart from Bing Province and Liang Province, which serve as shields for the border commanderies — the rest must not be greedily seized for the sake of temporary hollow fame. We must be exceedingly cautious."

"This is because southeast of this line, the annual rainfall is roughly two and a half chi, suitable for cultivating the five grains. Northwest of this line, without canals and irrigation works, the five grains can barely survive — let alone endure over the long term."

Wang Mang was instantly stunned. During his reign, he too had paid close attention to celestial phenomena, taking every slight change as Heaven's will. If this were truly so, how could he not have known? Who was Diwu Lun's astronomer, and how had he calculated the annual rainfall?

"How do you know this?" Wang Mang pressed Diwu Lun. Could it be that he had help from some extraordinary master?

Diwu Lun simply laughed heartily. "I just know!"

This line was, in fact, the 400-millimeter isohyet, which basically demarcates the boundary between agriculture and pastoralism. Over the millennia, it may shift somewhat according to large climatic cycles, but the variation is not great. Wang Mang's reign fell at a node of climate change. By now, this line had already slowly retreated southward from the Yinshan region of Qin Shi Huang's and Emperor Wu of Han's time. This was something human power absolutely could not stop. No matter how much your government invested, no matter how many settlers you moved, once you left the banks of the rivers, the crops would die when they were fated to die.

And this line was also a population divide. Diwu Lun had men calculate the figures from the last census conducted under Wang Mang's rule. He then discovered, with despair, that this line, like an iron curtain, confined the populations on either side of it. Southeast of the line was concentrated over ninety percent of the population. West of the line, Liang Province, Bing Province, plus the Western Regions and the various Qiang, all lumped together — despite their vast territory — were still utterly crushed by the east.

"This is the rule. Human strength can hardly alter it."

As if having opened Heaven's eye, Diwu Lun sighed and said to Wang Mang: "Old Wang, you did not understand this rule and expanded recklessly. Even if your original intent was good, in the end it was nothing but drawing water with a bamboo basket — all in vain."

In Diwu Lun's view, the northwestern lands must of course be considered "ours since antiquity." Their political and military significance to the Central Plains was very important. But for a fragile agricultural state before the threshold of modernity, purely in economic terms, the more provinces and commanderies lay northwest of this line, the more negative assets the court accumulated.

Even if settlers temporarily gained a foothold in the Western Sea or the Western Regions, the moment the court's endless investment was cut off, or the climatic cycle shifted, the settlers would either become Qiang-ified or barbarized, or flee until not a soul remained.

Therefore, Diwu Lun planned to keep Bing Province and Longyou to guard against the Qiang and barbarians, and to maintain the four commanderies of Hexi — that long umbilical cord — to preserve the barest minimum of exchange with the Western world. With him, this transmigrator, around, at least in his lifetime, that low-efficiency civilizational exchange along the Silk Road did not seem so terribly urgent after all.

Having finished criticizing Wang Mang's erroneous line, Diwu Lun rapped his knuckles on the southeastern side of that line and said: "If I were Old Wang, I would not have used troops in the northwest back then. I would have developed the south."

The south of the present day, especially Jiao Province and southern Jing, was as wild and barbarous as the northwest, unfit for human habitation. There were unruly, untamed barbarians there, a sweltering climate, snakes, insects, and fierce beasts running rampant in the jungles, miasmic pestilences that made men pale at the mere mention, and along the coast, unpredictable typhoons... To develop it until it was as rich and fertile as Wu Commandery and Kuaiji might take several centuries and cost hundreds of thousands, even millions of lives.

But unlike the northwest, Diwu Lun knew that investment in the south, after pioneering through hardship, could yield lasting returns.

Diwu Lun had been a southerner in his previous life. He harbored an infatuated obsession and an ineffable trust toward the south. If his dynasty could develop the south into a lesser Central Plains, doubling the size of the Chinese heartland, then even if it died a natural death, it would have fulfilled its historical mission!

Putting away the distant reveries in his heart, Diwu Lun said: "Thus, as for the Western Sea and the Western Regions that Old Wang finds so fascinating — never mind dispatching a great army to conquer them. Even if they came offering themselves on a platter, begging the court to station troops and establish commanderies and counties, for the next several decades I would accept only their submission. I would allow one or two envoys to travel back and forth, but I would absolutely not send a single soldier!"

"Likewise, Gongsun Shu and Liu Xiu hope that I will be content with the north and let them carve out separatist regimes in the south at their leisure? That is sheer delusion!"

This whole speech left Wang Mang wanting to mock Diwu Lun as shortsighted as those Confucian scholars at the Salt and Iron Debate, yet he could find no opening. Thinking carefully over all he had seen since entering the Pass, Diwu Lun's governance seemed in every case to share a similar original intent with his own reforms, yet the methods were vastly different. What pained him most was that Diwu Lun always succeeded.

And this choice of colonization direction was diametrically opposed to Wang Mang's own. Yet on this point, Wang Mang would probably never live to see the outcome...

"Arrogant."

"Conjecture!"

Diwu Lun's display of this omniscient, omnipotent manner made Wang Mang deeply uncomfortable — especially because it reminded him of the words Liu Xin had spoken on his deathbed.

"The sage, the true king who appears once every five hundred years, is not you, Wang Jujun."

"It is Diwu Lun!"

This was something Wang Mang would absolutely never concede. He merely thought Liu Xin had gone senile. But after spending many days together, Wang Mang seemed to truly glimpse, in Diwu Lun, the shadow of one ordained by Heaven...

But Wang Mang soon had no time to dwell on this matter. As the imperial carriage reached Ba Bridge, across that bridge — at once familiar and strange — what came to meet them was an enormous "petition delegation."

A dark mass of people knelt west of Ba Bridge. Among them were Erudites of the Six Classics in tall caps and Confucian robes, gallant knights in sword-sashes and martial caps, and even more Elders and local gentry from every county and commandery across Guanzhong. While fervently welcoming His Majesty the Wei Emperor back to the capital, the crowd also used their shouts to declare where they stood.

"Your Majesty the Wei Emperor, Wang Mang has committed great evils against the people of Jingzhao. Government decrees change daily, official titles are altered monthly, and the currency is reformed yearly — officials and commoners alike are thrown into chaos, merchants and travelers are reduced to destitution, weeping and wailing in the streets and markets. He instituted the Six Controls, increased taxes and levies, and exploited the people. Artisans starved to death, and all Chang'an stank. Those harmed by him number in the millions!"

"Though we have been blessed by the Wei Emperor raising troops to save us from fire and water, not a single day have we dared forget Wang Mang's evils. Now that news has come of the old traitor faking his death and being captured, every soul in Chang'an wishes they could eat his flesh raw."

"Today we gather the will of the people of the Three Adjuncts and present this petition of ten thousand names, hoping the Sage Son of Heaven will swiftly execute this traitor to the realm and vent the people's fury!"