Chapter 158: Where to Find Iron Armor

Zhang Zhao drank himself into a stupor. He had feasted every descendant of the Anxi Army that could be found in the city of Shule — in all, no more than one hundred and thirty-seven people.

Among these one hundred and thirty-seven were men and women, old and young. There were not many able-bodied men, and most had nearly gone native. Many merely remembered their ancestors and could no longer speak Chinese fluently.

But Zhang Zhao did not look down on them in the slightest. Surrounded by millions of Hu people, there was ordinarily no atmosphere for speaking Chinese at all. After more than a hundred years, that over a hundred of them still remained was already not bad.

Of course, this did not mean the descendants of the Anxi Army numbered only these hundred-odd people. Zheng Tong and Li Qilang had given Zhang Zhao a very important piece of information.

It was that, as Shule gradually became Islamicized, the Anxi Army descendants who had migrated there, fearing they would once again become the next target, had, for the safety of their people, moved out of Shule again within a few years.

The Anxi Army descendants who left Shule split into two groups. One, led by the Yang and Zheng families, migrated toward the kingdom of Ferghana — that is, the Fergana Basin.

Because after the king of Ferghana had his kingdom destroyed by the Arabs, he had once brought his people to Shule to seek the Anxi Army's protection. But at that time the Anxi Army was facing a massive threat from the Tibetan army and had no ability to advance west into the Fergana Basin to restore the Ferghana king's realm.

So over the decades, this branch of the Ferghana king's people, with no hope of restoring their kingdom, eventually merged into the Anxi Army as well.

Therefore, when they moved out of Shule, the Zheng and Yang families, together with the descendants of the Ferghana royal house, migrated back to Ferghana.

Not only because the Ferghana royal descendants were familiar with the region, but also because Fergana is a basin ringed by lofty mountains. With the land sparsely populated at the time, they had only to hide in the mountains to avoid most enemies. Life was hard, but they could survive.

The second group moved to the Geluo Ridge area south of Shule, because the descendants of the Luo family, the former Congling garrison commander, were still holding out there. It was likewise high mountains and steep ridges, good for hiding. This group was mainly the descendants of Lu Yang, the former Shule garrison commander, along with the Su, Bai, and other families.

Of these two groups, the one that migrated to Ferghana was the largest. People like Zheng Tong and Li Qilang, who stayed behind in Shule attached to the Great Cloud Temple, were in fact this group's eyes and ears left in Shule.

But for various reasons, there had been no word from them for seven or eight years. However, eight years earlier, this group had sent people to Shule. It was said they already numbered several thousand, had built a walled town, and established a school.

But the group that went to Geluo Ridge was in a worse situation. They had been attacked several times by the Kara-Khanid Khanate, and had produced a traitor like Lu Sanlang, who leaked the secret of the Loyalty Depot. It was entirely possible they had already been wiped out.

Besides these two groups, there was one more — the Guo family, who were suspected of being traitors, fell out with everyone, and chose to migrate east.

All that was known now was that about forty years ago they had moved to the vicinity of Kucha. There were also some who said they had gone in the direction of Suyab.

But this was only a rough account. Even Master Daozhen did not know exactly where they were.

The Guo family had been the largest clan in the Anxi Army. If they still existed, their numbers would be considerable. After forty years of multiplying, they would number at least ten thousand. They had to be found.

As for why these people did not go to Khotan, the reason was simple: Li Shengtian of Khotan was also a Hu man. Although Zhang Zhao knew from later history that Li Shengtian upheld Han culture and was a devoted admirer of the Tang, the Anxi Army did not know that!

Moreover, when the Tibetans had taken Khotan back then, Li Shengtian's ancestors had been traitors.

Otherwise, how was it that the royal houses of Shule's Pei clan and Kucha's Bai clan were both slaughtered to the last by the Tibetans, while Khotan's Yuchi clan alone survived and in the end even turned the tables? It was because they had chosen to surrender during the war in which the Tibetans took Khotan.

The ancestor of the monk Huixing, the Khotan garrison commander Yang Riyou, had been forced to retreat north precisely because the Yuchi clan went over to the Tibetans. So in their hearts, the descendants of the Anxi Army fundamentally did not trust the Yuchi clan of Khotan.

Moreover, the Anxi Army descendants had been ambushed by Hu people in Xizhou, and when they reached Shule they were treated as outsiders by the Kara-Khanids and struck again and again. They no longer trusted any Hu people of Anxi.

All they thought about was how to hide themselves away, and hide deep, because they felt that only by hiding like this could they wait for the Central Plains to revive and send troops eastward.

Having learned all this, Zhang Zhao knew what he had to do. The descendants of the Anxi Army probably did not number too many — at most he could find ten or twenty thousand. At the same time, the several thousand sons of Tang in Khotan were already fated not to go with him. So the number of people he could bring back would not be too large. He would still have to take the elite-troops route.

But Anxi's productivity at this time was very low. Iron armor and even iron weapons were extremely precious.

Yet to take the elite-troops route, he needed large quantities of iron armor and weapons. His current Hanshan Capital had only about a hundred sets of armor, which had already nearly emptied Zhang Zhao's coffers.

After that, although he had scavenged quite a bit from Satuq's treasury, it was only a hundred-odd sets. The armor he had gotten from Li Shengtian was only a few dozen sets. It was enough for the present stage, but to return to Gua-Sha and seize power, it was still far from sufficient.

So Zhang Zhao's greatest need right now was iron armor. But with Anxi's primitive iron-smelting industry, producing several hundred sets of iron armor in a short time was utterly unrealistic. If he had to find some, there was only one place that might possibly satisfy him.

That was the Loyalty Depot, the treasure buried by the Anxi Army descendants. According to Master Daozhen, the Loyalty Depot contained little gold or silver. This matched Zhang Zhao's guess. Back then the Anxi Army had been beaten down to just the single city of Kucha, unable even to supply food and clothing for twenty thousand men — how much gold and silver could they have buried in the ground?

But within this Loyalty Depot were two treasures that made Zhang Zhao's eyes burn with greed. First, according to the surviving account books, the Loyalty Depot contained at least five hundred sets of iron armor such as lamellar armor, tens of thousands of jin of raw iron, and countless other swords, spears, halberds, and the like.

Zhang Zhao believed this. The Great Tang's Anxi Army had been one of the best-equipped armies in the Tang military. At its height, the Anxi Army had fifty or sixty thousand soldiers. Storing away several hundred sets of lamellar armor and a large quantity of weapons was entirely possible.

Although the Loyalty Depot had now been buried underground for nearly fifty years, as long as it had been stored well and not soaked by water, the weapons might be damaged, but the armor would still have value.

Even if there was some damage, it was only a matter of removing rust, re-polishing, and re-lacing. Before he transmigrated, this was exactly what he did. Repairing armor should not be difficult.

The second treasure was that the Loyalty Depot held a large number of precious Buddhist sutras buried by the Great Cloud Temple. The most precious among them were the Buddha Shakyamuni's relics, once kept in the Great Cloud Temple, and the legendary birth-bed of the Buddha, said to have been used when Shakyamuni was born.

Nowadays the entire Hexi region was the most devout in Buddhism, especially the Wenmo people entrenched around Liangzhou, who were extremely pious.

The Wenmo were the ancestors of the Tibetans' Six Valleys tribes. Many of them were actually descendants of Tang subjects from Longxi. Esoteric Buddhism, after all — even in the later republic era, Tibetans still believed with great devotion.

If he had the Buddhist guardian deity Jialan and Shakyamuni's treasures as backing, plus the abbot of Liangzhou's Great Cloud Temple — a disciple of the Tripitaka Master Sangharama —

if Zhang Zhao could bring back over a thousand armored soldiers from Anxi, he might perhaps ride the momentum to become the second person after Gao Pian to win over the Wenmo tribes.

With their support, Zhang Zhao could then seize Liangzhou, stand against the Han family, Military Governor of Lingwu, and the Li family of the Dingnan Army, and then extend his reach toward the Central Plains.

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