Chapter 277: North of Liangzhou

When people in later generations mention Liangzhou, they generally assume by reflex that it was Lanzhou, the capital of Gansu province in later times.

But in fact it was not. Liangzhou was Wuwei in later-day Gansu.

It is a rather forlorn city in the Republic; if the name Wuwei did not sound so martial, many people would have no impression at all of this remote city.

In later times, the entire Wuwei municipality had a population of less than 1.5 million and a GDP of only a little over fifty billion.

The core Liangzhou District of Wuwei had a total population of only 880,000, and the urban population of Wuwei proper was even smaller.

Whether by GDP, population, or name recognition, it could be said to have almost no presence at all.

But at this moment, Liangzhou was the capital of northwestern China: politically the essence of the Five Liang, the great metropolis of Hexi; geographically it girded the western barbarians and held sway over the states west of the Pamirs; economically merchants and travelers came and went without cease; militarily it was the vital crossroads of the realm and the bulwark of the state.

Ever since Huo Qubing recovered the Hexi Corridor, Liangzhou had been the heart and logistical base from which the Central Plains regimes attacked and defended against the nomadic powers of the northwest.

By the Tang dynasty, faced with Tibetan military pressure, Liangzhou became all the more the key stronghold by which the Great Tang contained the Tibetans.

This was not only because of Liangzhou's important geographical position, but even more because the people of Liangzhou had a martial spirit.

The Book of the Later Han, in the biography of Zheng Tai, says: "The commanderies west of the Pass are well practiced in the arts of war. Of late they have fought the Qiang many times; even their women carry halberds and wield spears, clasp bows and bear arrows on their backs — how much more their strong and valiant men, when facing reckless foes in battle?"

The Western Liang army of the late Eastern Han was famed for its unmatched valor, and the Tang dynasty carried on this brave and martial tradition of the region west of the Pass producing great generals.

Zhang Zhao had once read a private opinion in later times which held that the true mark of the Great Tang's complete decline was not the An Lushan Rebellion.

For even though the An Lushan Rebellion inflicted grievous losses on the Great Tang's heartland, and every provincial Military Governor harbored thoughts of building up his own power, on the whole the Tang court had not yet lost its prestige.

The proliferation of military provinces did not mean they could ignore the court's summons, nor did it mean there were no loyal ministers and righteous men whose hearts inclined toward the court.

At that time the state could still broadly hold itself together; it needed only to avoid further blunders, and with one or two wise sovereigns the national power might even have recovered.

But then the Tibetans captured Liangzhou, and that completely buried any possibility of a Tang revival.

With Liangzhou lost, Hexi, Anxi, and Beiting were utterly cut off from the Great Tang; the Silk Road was severed by the Tibetans; Chang'an lost its greatest source of revenue; and militarily it became extremely passive.

With Liangzhou occupied, Tibetan cavalry could threaten Chang'an at any time. Bai Juyi once lamented: "Liangzhou has been lost these forty years; the Hexi and Longyou lands have been overrun for seven thousand li. In peacetime Anxi stretched ten thousand li; today the frontier defense is at Fengxiang."

Under the triple blow of the severed Silk Road, the military provinces' arrogance in cutting off tax revenues, and the Tibetans' constant incursions, the Tang court, which could firmly control only the Guanzhong region alone, finally and utterly walked toward its end.

And now, the Tibetans had declined off a cliff, and even for the next thousand years and more they would never recover their former might.

The Central Plains dynasties likewise never truly controlled this essence of the Five Liang and great metropolis of Hexi; historically it finally fell into the hands of the Western Xia.

Unfortunately, the Western Xia set out on a road of no return from the very start. After Li Yuanhao, the founding hero-king who styled himself the Son of Blue Heaven, grew old, he became so monstrously depraved that Zhang Zhao even suspected he was Gao Yang reborn.

And after Li Yuanhao went crooked in this way, Western Xia never again had the look of a normal state.

Otherwise, Western Xia would absolutely have become a dynasty that tormented the Northern Song to the extreme, and its threat might well have been greater than that of the Liao.

Therefore, given Liangzhou's uniquely superb natural advantages, Zhang Zhao was willing to painfully give up the temptation of first dealing with the Ganzhou Uyghurs, and instead seize this once-in-a-millennium opportunity to take Liangzhou first.

In the battle at Liaoquan Garrison, although Zhang Zhao felt quite frustrated because the Ganzhou Renyu Khagan, already a turtle in a jar, had completely slipped away,

the results were actually still quite good. Of the 18,000 riders the Ganzhou Uyghurs had levied from their entire nation, more than 400 were killed on the spot and over 3,000 were taken prisoner.

If one counted their losses in the battle at Suzhou, the Ganzhou Uyghurs as a whole had lost more than 8,000 able-bodied men.

For a tribe with a core population of 300,000 that could only field 30,000 to 40,000 at the extreme limit of conscription, this was an extremely heavy loss. Counting the loss of armor, weapons, and equipment, they had almost reached the brink of national ruin.

If the Guiyi Army's territory were not so small, and if Zhang Zhao could fully exploit the resources of the Gua and Sha regions, and if there were not the more enticing Liangzhou waiting for him to conquer, then in at most six to eight months Zhang Zhao was confident he could digest the Ganzhou Uyghurs completely.

The clatter of horse hooves sounded as over a hundred cavalry, bearing several bright banners, escorted over a woman dressed in men's clothing.

This place was neither Ganzhou city nor Liangzhou city, but the White Pavilion Sea north of Liangzhou, at a location north of later-day Minqin County in Gansu.

Zhang Zhao had not gone directly from Ganzhou to Liangzhou, but had first detoured to Juyan Lake north of Ganzhou — that is, later-day Ejina Banner — then traced an n-shape across the grasslands, and finally arrived at the White Pavilion Sea.

Liangzhou was not so easy to enter!

Pei Yuan had already gone ahead to report back to the Liangzhou Acting Military Governor Li Wenqian. At the same time, Zhang Zhao had dispatched Zhang Liecheng, leading the two hundred Sogdians who had followed him back from Ningyuan, to pose as traveling merchants from Anxi, while Luo Yu'er, with over a hundred armored soldiers of the Guiyi Army, entered Liangzhou city posing as a second batch of Guiyi Army horse-tribute envoys.

"Erlang, where is Xinchang? Have they not returned yet?"

Lady Cao Sanniang nimbly leaped down from her warhorse, and before she had even landed, she was already asking after her precious son.

"They should be back soon. Don't worry — the boy took five hundred elite cavalry and a thousand Ganzhou Uyghur prisoners just to sweep a few small Tatar camps. He'll be back quickly."

Zhang Zhao patted the back of Lady Cao Sanniang's hand, thinking to himself: your son often wears a white robe on the battlefield just to stand out, and he isn't afraid of that, so what danger could there be in fighting a few Tatar camps?

This was also the second reason Zhang Zhao had chosen to pass through the grasslands. From the prisoners captured in the battle with the Ganzhou Uyghurs, he had selected a thousand men,

and using these thousand as auxiliaries, he swept the grassland camps north of Juyan Lake and the White Pavilion Sea.

He was preparing to build a light cavalry force of about three thousand men, dedicated to doing the dirty and exhausting work.

"Has the old father-in-law finished concluding the alliance with Renyu? Has your twelfth aunt been rescued from Ganzhou city?" Zhang Zhao asked.

After the Renyu Khagan had successfully fled back to Ganzhou city, Zhang Zhao had lost interest in besieging Ganzhou.

Going there would just be a waste of time. If they really fought, the Ganzhou Uyghurs would fight to the death, and it could not be taken in less than two or three months. He did not have that much time.

Just at that moment, Cao Yuanzhong received word that Zhang Zhao had taken all of Suzhou and inflicted a great defeat on the Ganzhou Uyghurs. How could he sit still? Risking the impact on spring plowing, he levied two thousand men and personally hurried to Liaoquan Garrison.

After Cao Yuanzhong arrived, Zhang Zhao found that the brothers Cao Yuande and Cao Yuanshen were both in the party as well, and he immediately felt relieved.

His father-in-law still had a good enough head on his shoulders. No wonder that historically, after his father and two elder brothers died in succession, he had still been able to hold the reins of power in the Guiyi Army for thirty years under the pressure of the Ganzhou Uyghurs.

So Zhang Zhao left two thousand men to Cao Yuanzhong, and handed over to him the matter of holding a new alliance meeting with the Ganzhou Renyu Khagan.

He set only two conditions: first, the 300,000 strings of cash ransom that the Renyu Khagan had promised — not one single coin could be missing.

Second, Cao Yijin's twelfth daughter, who had been married to the Aduoyu Khagan, and her three grandsons, had to be handed over.

The former was to weaken the Renyu Khagan to the greatest possible degree, because these 300,000 strings of cash could not be produced by the Yageluo clan alone; they would inevitably have to be apportioned among the other tribes.

You, Renyu, have lost your army and your land, and now that you have returned you still want to squeeze your own people — your prestige is bound to plummet.

In that way, Yageluo Tongli, who was equally disgraced and had fled to who knows where, would not be left completely without the power to fight back, and the internal strife in Ganzhou would not cease.

Demanding the return of Cao Yijin's daughter and grandsons was to prepare for the complete subjugation of the Ganzhou Uyghurs later.

People are all like that: if they can have a self-deceiving way to climb down, many will choose to take the slope and dismount.

At the same time, the daughter's return could also greatly ease Cao Yijin's guilt.

After all, he had married his daughter off only a little over three years ago, and her husband Aduoyu had been murdered; the daughter's entire life had been almost completely ruined by this.

"The covenant is sealed!" Lady Cao Sanniang said with a grin. "You really called it, Erlang — that Khagan Renyu turned out to be a ruthless one after all.

He didn't even care about his own son, Prince Jingqiong. He shut all four gates of Ganzhou, and even wanted to send out roaming cavalry to cut our supply lines, hoping to wear down my six thousand troops until we left!"

"Of course he did. Three hundred thousand strings of cash! That boy Renyu doesn't have the reserves I do — three hundred thousand strings would be the death of him!

Not to mention letting Aduoyu's son go free — that would be endless trouble down the road. So how did he end up agreeing?" Zhang Zhao asked, puzzled.

"That was all thanks to your master craftsman Liu Di, Erlang. The man has real talent. He directed the craftsmen of the Thunderbolt Office, and together with Shisi, built four trebuchets in ten days. They bombarded the walls of Ganzhou for less than two watches, and Khagan Renyu meekly submitted!"

At the thought of it, Lady Cao Sanniang burst out laughing — but as she laughed, tears began to glimmer in her eyes.

Zhang Zhao sighed, took her hand, and squeezed it. Lady Cao Sanniang must have been remembering the devastation when the Ganzhou Uyghurs had fought their way to the walls of Dunhuang, and the death of her cousin Suo Sanlang.

"Rest assured! Once I have taken Liangzhou, I will strike Ganzhou again. For the insults they dealt us back then, I will make them repay tenfold!"

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