Chapter 582: The Heart Moves Before the Man Does

Just as Gao Conghui of Nanping resolved to curry favor with Zhang Zhao, the Meng Shu regime entrenched in the Ba-Shu region was also anxiously probing for the outcome of the war between Zhou and Tang.

However, for Meng Shu, tucked away in the southwest at this time, obtaining news from the southeast was simply too difficult.

They had originally received all their intelligence through Gao Conghui of Nanping, but once Gao Conghui decided to curry favor with Zhang Zhao, he stopped sharing information with Meng Shu.

So it was not until Zhang Zhao had withdrawn his troops and was almost back at the Eastern Capital, Kaifeng Prefecture, that Meng Shu finally learned the war had turned extremely unfavorable for Southern Tang.

But that was enough, because given the distances involved, Meng Shu could not possibly wait for fully confirmed news before making plans.

And judging by the current situation, it came down to just two possibilities: Southern Tang being outright destroyed, or submitting.

At the same time, Meng Shu's own situation was hardly encouraging. After the failed campaign to seize Guanzhong, Zhang Qianzhao had led out more than thirty thousand men, and only a few thousand had made it back.

An Siqian's force of over ten thousand had been completely annihilated, and even he himself had died in battle.

Only Sun Hanshao had managed to bring back the more than ten thousand elite Shu troops who had entered Fengxiang Prefecture. Afterward, Meng Chang urgently sealed off all the passes leading out of Sichuan, and only then did people's hearts gradually settle.

But this move was not entirely to Meng Shu's advantage. The reason is simple: if sealing off all approaches were wholly beneficial to Shu, then any regime in history that occupied Sichuan could simply have chosen to seal itself off completely.

Burn the plank roads, block the Sword Pavilion, and would that truly create a separate paradise?

In reality, no. Because ever since the Western Han, the most important economic activity in Shu had been silk brocade weaving, and the largest buyers of Shu brocade had always been Guanzhong and the Central Plains.

Now that Meng Chang had sealed the roads out of Shu for seven or eight months, the brocade stockpiled in the government warehouses had already piled up to a terrifying figure, and it was still growing.

This stuff was not something commoners could afford, nor was it suitable for them to wear.

Who would go work the fields dressed in brocade and silk? It would not take long before the clothes were torn to shreds.

And relying on Shu's officials and wealthy households alone clearly could not absorb so much Shu brocade — not to mention that they themselves were the biggest producers of the stuff.

Therefore, after seven or eight months of being sealed off, the price of Shu brocade had collapsed to a terrifying degree.

This had greatly reduced the income of the common people around the Chengdu Plain. If the roads were not reopened soon, the mulberry and silkworm farmers around Chengdu, the raw silk processors, and even the great numbers of weavers engaged in production would all lose their livelihoods.

This was an outcome the Meng Shu court simply could not bear.

And this had almost become an unsolvable problem for Meng Shu, and indeed for every regime that had ever held Shu — namely, that the population of the Chengdu Plain simply could not absorb all the brocade and silk produced by the whole of Shu.

For example, during the Shu Han regime of the Three Kingdoms period, although Zhuge Liang marched out from Qishan seven times, the Shu brocade trade with Cao Wei and Eastern Wu never stopped. He even opened up southwestern trade routes to sell Shu brocade as far as South Asia.

So in that era, although Shu was constantly at war, few people opposed it.

By the time of Jiang Wei, Jiang Boyue's abilities fell short of Zhuge Liang's. He could not use the proactive offensive posture of marching out from Qishan as a substitute for defense, so he could only adopt a mode of concentrated offensives, while elsewhere he had to rely on blocking the plank roads and other defensive measures.

At the same time, Cao Wei also caught on and restricted the sale of Shu brocade.

The result was that resentment boiled throughout Shu, and everyone from top to bottom was dissatisfied with Jiang Wei.

Because the brocade could not be sold, everyone suffered heavy losses. As soon as the remnants of the Wei army entered the western Sichuan basin, the powerful clans and great families surrendered one after another.

Moreover, before the Panzhihua iron deposits were discovered, the whole of Shu was desperately short of metals, to the point that there was not even enough copper to mint copper coins.

As for Shu's iron coins, those were an even bigger joke. They were heavy, and on top of that they were all cast from quite inferior iron. Apart from physical properties being roughly the same as later iron, they could hardly be called iron at all — and what's more, iron coins did not even exist yet at this time.

Under these circumstances, brocade and silk naturally became a currency with circulating value, and "cash" was merely a unit of account.

That is to say, what circulated was cloth, and it was simply converted into cash values.

And when this currency accumulated in vast quantities but could not be exported, could not truly be turned into "money," it would rapidly accelerate the depreciation of Shu's currency.

And once the currency began to depreciate, it would likewise dismantle Meng Shu's economic foundation at extreme speed.

Furthermore, Sichuan not only lacked precious metals, it also lacked porcelain and spices — especially spices. Sichuan's only native spice was Sichuan peppercorn.

Apart from Sichuan peppercorn, nearly all spices had to be imported. After just seven or eight months of being sealed off, bay leaves, cardamom, and the like in Shu were already worth their weight in gold. Given a bit more time, the price of pepper would probably go through the roof.

As a result, the mulberry and silkworm farmers and weavers of Shu toiled all day, and the brocade they wove immediately depreciated, until it was not even enough to buy food for a family of three.

And the more they wove, the faster it depreciated — yet they could not stop weaving. If they wove, at least there was a little money; if they did not weave, they could only drink the northwest wind.

Under this frantic "money printing," a huge population of artisans stood on the brink of bankruptcy.

The farming households suffered too. The little money their ancestors had saved over generations vanished in the blink of an eye amid the galloping inflation. Their own grain was only enough to feed themselves, while the prices of salt and sugar outside were rising like mad.

The powerful and wealthy families were equally dissatisfied. They needed to export Shu brocade in exchange for fine porcelain from the Central Plains, top-grade rock sugar and white sugar, fine spices of all kinds, as well as superior bronze mirrors, new-style furniture, and even more refined song and dance, music, and books.

At the same time, exotic glass cups, ivory goods, olive oil, and all kinds of gemstones coming in along the Silk Road were likewise indispensable.

It could be said that by now, the economy of Shu, from top to bottom, could no longer hold out.

In addition, more than ten thousand Shu soldiers and more than ten thousand civilian laborers were being held in Zhou's Guanzhong. Those ten thousand-plus Shu soldiers in particular were almost all Meng Shu's own palace guards and the Shannan West Circuit yabing guards from Xingyuan Prefecture.

If Meng Chang did not make some gesture, it was feared that mobilizing the palace guards would not go so smoothly in the future, and the morale of the troops in Xingyuan Prefecture (Hanzhong) in Shannan West Circuit could not be lost either.

Demanding them back — or at least making the gesture of demanding them back — was imperative.

Therefore, as soon as Meng Chang learned of Southern Tang's unfavorable war situation, he immediately summoned the Chancellor Mu Zhaoyi, the Chief Minister and Vice Director of the Chancellery Li Hao, and the Vice Commissioner of Military Affairs and Commissioner of the Northern Court of Palace Attendants Han Baozheng to discuss relations with Zhou.

In truth, however, there was not much room for discussion. It simply came down to whether to use brocade or to declare vassalage in exchange for the return of the soldiers in Zhou and the restoration of trade routes — or rather, both vassalage and reparations would likely be necessary.

In the end, after deliberation, they decided to send Li Xiaofeng, the eldest son of Vice Director of the Chancellery Li Hao and a Supervising Secretary, as envoy to Zhou, to probe the Zhou sovereign's attitude toward Shu.

Li Hao was originally a man of Qian County in Guanzhong. In the old days, when Li Maozhen captured Qian County and Guanzhong fell into chaos, Li Hao's family fled for their lives. His father, younger brother, and younger sister all died amid the marauding soldiers, and his mother was separated from him.

Li Hao was then noticed by Liu Zhijun, a fierce general of the Later Liang who had just submitted to Li Maozhen, and subsequently became Liu Zhijun's son-in-law. Later, when Liu Zhijun in turn submitted to Wang Shu, Li Hao followed him into Shu.

Afterward there was another episode. After Li Hao became wealthy and honored in Shu, he missed the mother he had been separated from in Guanzhong, so he sent trusted men to search for her. To his surprise, they actually found her.

Li Hao then personally went to the border between Shu and Guanzhong to receive his mother. Mother and son, separated for nineteen years, embraced and wept bitterly, and were finally reunited.

In the chaotic world of the Five Dynasties, this could truly be called a miracle.

When the deliberations were finished, Li Hao took his eldest son Li Xiaofeng home to discuss the matter. His mother, hearing of it, came out supported by her maidservants, took Li Hao's hand, and began to wail.

"I have enjoyed the blessings of my eldest son, wearing gold and silver, eating delicacies from land and sea. But alas, your father died early in the calamity of war, and was buried together with your younger brother and sister at Fengtian (Qian County), south of Mount Liang, outside a small village, where a great river winds around and many parasol trees grow.

If you go to Fengtian, you must find them. From then on, make offerings every year, and do not let them become lonely ghosts in untended graves!"

Although later literati mocked Li Hao as a hereditary writer of surrender memorials and a man of boundless extravagance, he was indeed a filial son. Hearing this, he too wept uncontrollably, and holding his mother's hand, he agreed to everything.

In truth, in Li Hao's heart, he had always bitterly regretted what had happened back then, because before Li Maozhen's troops took Qian County, Li Hao had had time to notify his family — he had simply forgotten entirely in his terror.

All these years, when Li Hao woke from midnight dreams, he always saw his father and younger brother and sister lying in pools of blood, and in his heart he believed he bore enormous responsibility for his family's deaths.

And as a man of Guanzhong, deeply guilty over his family's deaths, and influenced by his mother, Li Hao was in fact the one among Meng Shu's ministers who most ardently longed for the realm to be unified. That was why he made no secret of writing surrender memorials.

Whether it was Wang Shu or the present Meng Shu, Li Hao believed they were all nothing more than temporary separatist regimes. Once a sage ruler emerged in the Central Plains, the realm would sooner or later be unified.

Old Lady Li was getting on in years, and after weeping for a while she could no longer bear it. Li Hao and his son, afraid she would cry herself sick, hurriedly supported her and led her back inside the house.

But no sooner had they left than a small, slight maidservant, who looked thirteen or fourteen, slipped out through the back gate of the Li household.

Not far from the Li residence stood a large apothecary with a bustling clientele. Above its door hung a great plaque bearing three large characters: Youci Hall. Its owner was Han Baosheng, a famous physician of Shu and a Hanlin Academician.

Yet unlike the bustling scene outside, all was quiet within Youci Hall. Zhao Erlang was writing and sketching on a sheet of paper.

Before him stood four sturdy men. Only when he had finished four copies of the talisman-like scrawls did Zhao Erlang personally place them into the four men's hands.

"Grade A, third-level urgency. Deliver at once to Guanzhong, to Thousand-Household Xu of Guanzhong."

Had anyone from a later age come here, they would have discovered that Zhao Erlang's talisman-like scrawls were nothing other than Hanyu Pinyin. This was the greatest reliance of Zhang Zhou's Embroidered Uniform Guard.

Hanyu Pinyin, which no one else could understand, ensured that the information could not be deciphered. Even if someone cracked the rules of Hanyu Pinyin, it would do them no good, because the pronunciation followed the standard Mandarin of later generations.

And the information Zhao Erlang was sending back concerned the secret of the location of the graves of Li Hao's father and younger brother and sister.

Zhang Zhou's Embroidered Uniform Guard spy network in Shu rested on three lines.

One covert line was known only to Zhang Zhao and a very few others. One was an overt line, known to all in Meng Shu: merchants who doubled as secret agents.

And Zhao Erlang's line, the covert line relying on Han Baosheng, was the primary channel for conveying intelligence.

For the first line was activated only at the most critical moments, and the second was out in the open; it was this third line of theirs that truly did the work.

"Thousand-Household, the upper house says that tomorrow they wish to draw a hundred strings of cash from the apothecary's accounts, for an outing to enjoy the spring greenery."

Zhao Erlang had barely rested a moment before a subordinate came to report.

The upper house was Han Baosheng. Although this elder brother of Lady Han the Seventh was a physician of consummate skill and a trusted confidant of the Lord of Shu, he was simply too greedy.

A gleam of sharp light flashed through Zhao Erlang's eyes. "Every ten days he must go enjoy the spring greenery, and each outing costs a hundred strings. It seems the upper house reckons he can feed off us with impunity. Go and make preparations. It is time to fit a tightening band around our upper house's head."

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