Chapter 853

The night was deep and dark. Gao Fang and Dong Sankuo had argued all day without reaching any conclusion, and the matter was naturally shelved once again.

And the reason one of them supported defending while the other supported attacking was not without cause.

Moreover, this cause did not stem from the interests of the state, but from the interests of their families.

Now that the Gao clan had replaced the Dong clan in holding power over the Kingdom of Dali, they naturally hoped for a steady, cautious resistance.

For one thing, with the country at war, Gao Fang could legitimately take control of the army and, along the way, strike at his rivals.

For another, defending behind city walls was the safest approach. Even if the Zhou army broke through Changcheng Commandery, Shicheng Commandery, and Shengma, the three cities, there would still be Shanshan Prefecture and Yangjuomie City. They could fight while gradually putting forward conditions.

As for Dong Sankuo, although his official post was Grand Army General, in fact, as far back as the Nanzhao period, this office had already become detached from military duties and could only be counted as something like a deputy chief minister.

Now Gao Fang was a founding meritorious official, and by seniority he was still Dong Sankuo's elder. His clansmen numbered over a hundred thousand, and with him serving as Qingping Official, what power could Dong Sankuo, this Grand Army General, possibly still lay hold of? Being able to preserve his family was already not bad.

Therefore Dong Sankuo vigorously lobbied Duan Sicong to adopt the measure of taking the initiative and striking out.

Although Dong Sankuo understood very well in his heart that taking the initiative and striking out would make it very hard to defeat the Zhou army that had occupied Wumeng City.

But what did that have to do with him, Dong Sankuo? If the fighting reached a stalemate, he could instead attack Gao Fang from behind for errors in command.

For example, if the Gao clan sent out too few troops, one could say the Gao clan wanted the other tribes to go to their deaths.

If the sons and younger clansmen of the Gao clan suffered heavy losses, one could say that the Gao family, as a family that was the state's bulwark, had neglected military preparedness, so that it could not resist foreign enemies.

If they lost the war — well, if they lost, then of course there would be nothing more to say.

By then, the power Gao Fang held would be greatly weakened, and his prestige would plummet. What would become of the Kingdom of Dali was still unknown, but for the Dong clan, or rather for him, Dong Sankuo, it would certainly be a great good thing.

As for why Dong Sankuo, when faced with foreign invasion, seemed not to care whether the Kingdom of Dali existed or not, there was actually a reason for this.

First of all, after Gao Fang seized great power, the days of the Dong family became very hard.

The Gao and Dong surnames were both great clans of the Bai people, and there had always been strife between them. In the past, when Dong Jialuo was in power, he had never been sparing in putting the Gao family in order. Now that Gao Fang held power, did the Dong family still expect to have an easy time?

Although, in order to maintain the scene of Bai people holding the dominant position within the Kingdom of Dali, they would not go so far as to deliver a killing blow and overturn the Dong clan completely, overturning him, Dong Sankuo, was still possible.

Dong Sankuo had already felt this deeply. If the Gao family continued to hold power, the Dong clan might perhaps survive, but he, Dong Sankuo, and his descendants, even if they did not die, would have a layer of skin stripped off.

The second point must be explained from the origin of the Bai people as an ethnic group.

Although the conclusions reached by later generations were still that the Bai people were basically of the same origin as the Han and Tibetans, being a branch of the pre-Qin Di and Qiang peoples who moved south and formed the Erhai people and the Kunming Man, possibly with some admixture of ancient Shu people, Bo people, and Chu state bloodlines.

But at this time, the only ancestral origin the Bai people acknowledged was the nobility of the Chu state.

Almost to a person, they called themselves descendants of Zhuang Qiao, the Chu general and King of Dian, or descendants of the followers who entered Dian with Zhuang Qiao and established the Kingdom of Dian. There were even some bold and thick-skinned enough to dare claim descent from the Chu royal house.

At this time, if you told the Bai people they were Di and Qiang people, they would absolutely regard it as an insult and would fight you to the death without rest.

They spoke Han speech, read and wrote Han characters, used Han surnames, and studied Confucianism. Their appearance was similar to the Han people. All these characteristics made the Bai people believe in their hearts that they were not very different from the Han.

To tell the truth, among the various peoples of Yunnan at this time, apart from the Bai people, all the rest were somewhat dark-skinned.

Even the Dai people, of whom later generations have the impression of many fair-skinned, beautiful young women, were somewhat dark. Only the Bai people had fair skin and looked somewhat different from the surrounding natives.

This difference in appearance gave the Bai people a kind of self-confidence. They contemptuously called the other tribes, who liked to wear black clothes and had darker complexions, the Wu Man, the Black Cuan, and so on.

And the more contact they had with the Central Plains, the more they believed that Zhuang Qiao's kingship over Dian truly existed, that the ancestral legends were true, and that they were the descendants of the Chu royal house and Chu nobility who had migrated south, because the people of the Central Plains were as fair and tall as they were, and looked to be of one and the same ethnic group.

This was also an important reason why, in the Nanzhao state, Han people could rise to the high position of Qingping Official and their families could hold great power for generations, because the Bai people basically regarded the Han people as their own kin.

In the Dong clan's military camp, in a secret chamber, the Kingdom of Dali at this time was actually still in the stage of just transitioning from a slave society to a feudal society.

The forces within the state were somewhat similar to the Ji Zhou period. The king was only the common overlord, and below him, each great family had its own fief and private retainers.

And the military strength of the state was also composed of the imperial guard and the private troops of each family.

Although the Dong clan was being suppressed, its clansmen numbered nearly a hundred thousand, making it the third great family among the Bai people, second only to the royal Duan clan and the Gao clan, and naturally it also possessed its own territory and retainers.

But this was exactly what worried Dong Sankuo.

The existence of the Dong clan was an enormous threat to the Gao clan, which monopolized great power. The Gao clan would not permit the Dong clan to exist.

But they also could not swallow up the Dong clan, still less could they carry out a great slaughter against the Dong clan, because that would weaken the position of the Bai people, who stood above the various other peoples within the Kingdom of Dali.

Therefore the head of the Gao clan, Gao Fang, the Qingping Official of the Kingdom of Dali, had only one choice: to have Dong Sankuo killed, and then select a member of the Dong family willing to submit to the Gao clan to become the Dong clan head.

In the secret chamber, there were only Dong Sankuo and his nephew Dong Mohe. For Dong Sankuo, the only person he could trust at present was this nephew before his eyes.

Because his son Dong Kuomei was still young, the great power of the Dong clan was in fact shared between uncle and nephew.

This was also related to the structure of the Dong clan. Since the Nanzhao period, someone in the family had concurrently held the position of Azhali. This was a Sanskrit word that could be translated as "teacher" or "teacher of the Dharma," and so on.

Azhali was a Buddhist sect currently popular in the Kingdom of Dali, whose origin lay in the Han-transmitted esoteric school that had basically died out in the Central Plains.

Of course, after arriving in Dali, it had added many localizing modifications belonging to Dali itself, and could even be called Dian esotericism.

Later generations even directly called it the Azhali religion. The monks of this sect could eat meat, drink wine, marry, and have children. They venerated the Slender-Waisted Guanyin and the Great Black Heavenly King, Mahakala.

After this sect was transmitted in the fifth century, it flourished in the Yunnan region all the way until the Ming and Qing periods.

The emperors of the Ming and Qing dynasties held that this teaching was neither Buddhist nor Daoist, that its arts were sufficient to stir the masses, and its doctrines sufficient to delude people, and that these were assuredly troublemakers in a flourishing age, people whom the king's law must prohibit.

Thus it came about that Zhu Hongwu and Brother Ma, separated by several hundred years, acted several times in succession to prohibit and eradicate it, and after spending several hundred years, finally swept the Azhali religion into history.

Therefore, at this time, when the Azhali religion was still flourishing in Dali, the Dong clan had two extremely important positions: one was the clan head, and the other was their family's hereditary Azhali.

At this time, although Dong Sankuo was the Dong clan head, he was not the Azhali. The one recognized within the family as able to inherit the position of Azhali was Dong Mohe.

This had been established before his death by Dong Sankuo's father, Dong Mohe's grandfather, the great godlike figure of the Dong clan, Dong Jialuo.

It was only because Dong Mohe's experience and age had not yet reached the mark that he had not yet formally become the Azhali.

And for the Gao clan to suppress the Dong clan, besides installing an obedient clan head, another thing was to seize the Dong clan's Azhali position.

This was why Dong Sankuo could trust Dong Mohe without limit, because if the Gao clan succeeded, the two of them would absolutely have no good days ahead.

Historically, the Azhali position was indeed seized by the Gao clan, and it was not until the time of Dong Sankuo's grandson Dong Meiju that it was won back.

Dong Mohe paced back and forth in the room. By this point, he had already sensed that something was very wrong.

Because the Guo Rong and Zhang Fei they now faced were extremely cunning, and moreover had enormous patience in slowly laying their plans. The moment they made their move, they had thrown Dali into a situation where it could neither live nor die.

Could a monarch who could make such figures willingly stay in this remote borderland for several years at a time be a somewhat effeminate man, in not very good health, and outwardly fierce but inwardly weak?

"Something's wrong! Something's wrong!" Dong Mohe said "something's wrong" twice in a row. He went over and over again the experience of his trip to the Central Plains more than two years before, then suddenly raised his head.

"Uncle, when your nephew went to the Zhou state as an envoy last time, the whole way he was constantly hurried along by the Zhou people. He only caught a distant glimpse of Chengdu Prefecture, and then raced all the way to the Central Plains."

And after arriving in the Central Plains, he was not even allowed to go to the divine capital Luoyang or to Kaifeng Prefecture in the Eastern Capital, but was summoned to an audience at Xuchang Prefecture instead.

After barely a few words, the Lord of Zhou flew into a rage and had his nephew expelled on the spot. The whole way back he was escorted at a gallop and sent straight back to Dali, with no time at all to take a careful look at the state of Zhou. Tell me, does that not sound suspicious?"

Dong Sankuo also began to think hard. "You mean the Zhou people deliberately hid the real situation of their state from you, and the Lord of Zhou deliberately put on a muddled, weak appearance to lull you — then why would they do that?"

The more Dong Mohe thought about it, the more he felt he had been played for a fool. He slammed his fist down hard. "What other reason could there be? The state of Zhou is going to throw its full support behind Murong Baipao's eastern campaign against Goryeo and Wa."

And at the time Guo Rong had not yet gained control of twenty-one of the thirty-five Black Cuan tribes, so they deliberately showed us a false picture of internal chaos in Zhou, and fooled us all."

"What a grand scheme! From the Son of Heaven down to the supervisors below, they all joined together to make us take a great fall.

If the Lord of Zhou had not done this, we would never have been so completely unprepared for the situation in eastern Dian. If the twenty-one Black Cuan tribes had not fallen into Zhou hands, we could have blocked the Zhou men at Wumeng City."

Dong Sankuo also felt, the more he thought about it, that this was exactly the case. He cursed for a while in a fit of rage, then suddenly his face went startled, and he seemed to give a small shiver.

Dong Mohe had also caught on by now. He looked at his second uncle Dong Sankuo with some fear, and even his lips were trembling.

"Uncle, what do we do now? Gao Fang is old and cunning as a spirit — has he long since understood the reason behind all this, and is he just waiting for the moment to catch us all in one net?"

Dong Sankuo was the first to steady himself, and his face took on a look somewhere between tears and laughter. "This is still because the Zhou men on the other side did their work too well. If they had not seized the twenty-one Black Cuan tribes at the very first stroke, so that Gao Fang dared not stir up internal strife at this moment, you and I, uncle and nephew, would very likely have already lost our heads."

Dong Mohe nodded, still shaken. The Lord of Zhou was growing old, no longer aggressive, his state riddled with internal contradictions, and the troops stationed at Nanxi Prefecture were mostly there to prevent the oppressed Shu people from communicating with Dali — all these judgments were ones Dong Mohe had brought back.

And to show that he had exercised his wits and rendered great service in the state of Zhou, Dong Mohe had gone around proclaiming it everywhere.

So from another angle, he, Dong Mohe, was the chief culprit responsible for the present passive situation — that way of putting it also held up.

Seen this way, indeed, if the Zhou men had not seized Dali by the throat at the very first move, he, Dong Mohe, would long since have taken a turn on the execution ground.

Uncle and nephew exchanged a glance, and then Dong Mohe, feeling that his life could be forfeit at any moment, said cautiously and somewhat hoarsely:

"Uncle, if your nephew remembers correctly, Hei Ba of the Baoman tribe married the younger sister of the Wumeng tribe's headman. Should we not begin considering the future of the Dong clan?"

Two matters that seemed unrelated were in fact one and the same.

The headman of the Wumeng tribe had now gone over to the Zhou side and was said to be highly favored, while Hei Ba of the Baoman tribe had a mother who was a daughter of the Dong family and a devotee of Mahakala, the Great Black Deity.

By saying this now, Dong Mohe was almost openly asking his second uncle Dong Sankuo whether they should simply go over to the Zhou side.

Dong Sankuo thought for a long while, then slowly shook his head. The reason was simple: at the present rate of attrition, the state of Dali could still hold out for a year or so without any problem.

After all, it was a great state with a population of nearly a million and a core tribal population of over three hundred thousand, and it still had the financial resources to support sixty or seventy thousand fully detached troops for two or three years.

To place a bet now was too early for a great clan like the Dong. If anything went wrong, the entire family would suffer for it.

More importantly, the Dong clan controlled the Azhali sect, the most popular religion in the state of Dali, yet the Lord of Zhou also happened to hold the status of Wushangtian.

In Dong Sankuo's thinking, wherever the Zhou army went, the Six Dharma Sect was sure to follow — so what was the Dong clan to do?

Although the Azhali sect was now on the verge of being snatched away by the Gao clan, to demand that the Dong clan, believers of the Azhali sect for three hundred years, suddenly convert to the Six Dharma Sect was still very hard to accept! The clansmen would find it very hard to agree as well.

But just as Dong Mohe was growing somewhat disheartened, Dong Sankuo suddenly called him back and said in a low voice:

"Go find a few men you can trust, and have them go to Chongsheng Temple to pay their respects to the Fifth Grand-Uncle. Have the Fifth Grand-Uncle order the monks of Yuji City to make contact with the eminent monks of the Six Dharma Sect outside the city."

Dong Mohe was overjoyed and nodded hurriedly. Chongsheng Temple was known in later ages as Tianlong Temple — yes, the Tianlong Temple of the Duan clan of Dali and their Six Meridians Divine Sword in Demi-Gods and Semi-Devils.

From the time of its founding, this temple had been the foremost Buddhist temple in the land of Yunnan. For a temple of such standing, even if the Six Dharma Sect was restricted by Zhang Zhao from making contact, the Brocade Robe Personal Guard would surely not let it go either.

Therefore certain eminent monks of Chongsheng Temple had channels of communication with the Brocade Robe Personal Guard. Under the present circumstances, having them go ahead as an advance party was undoubtedly the most suitable course.

You could say that I, Sage Zhang, have come at just the right time. Had I come to attack Dali any earlier, when Dong Jialuo was still alive, the Dong clan's position would not yet have been threatened by the Gao clan.

With the Azhali sect in their hands, they would certainly not have tolerated the Six Dharma Sect reaching its tentacles in. A war of defending home and country combined with religious enmity would surely have been very hard to fight.

But at this moment, with the Dong clan's position in danger at any time, to ask them to convert from the Azhali sect to the Six Dharma Sect — as long as a title of Living Buddha could be offered, it no longer seemed so hard to accept.

However, just as this uncle and nephew were still thinking of taking things slowly, Guo Rong and Zhang Fei were already preparing to deal Dali a savage blow.

Of course, this savage blow was not something the two of them had thought up; they were merely to assist in carrying it out.

This savage blow was led by the Brocade Robe Personal Guard, with the Money House providing technical support, and the Brocade Robe Personal Guard sending men to carry out the main implementation.

In Guo Rong's hand was a kind of seashell, beautifully shaped, that even seemed to have a layer of glaze on it.

There is one fact beyond the understanding of later generations: the state of Dali, which at present lacked neither copper nor gold mines, used seashells as its circulating currency.

And this was not merely the present practice — from the ancient Dian kingdom of Zhuang Qiao before Nanzhao, all the way down to the final years of the Jiaqing reign of the later Qing dynasty, shell money made from these seashells remained in circulation.

At first, perhaps, large numbers of seashells were found by the shores of Dianchi, and as the people happened to lack the techniques for casting copper coins and gold ingots, they began using shell money.

Later, the people of Dian traded with India along the perilous Shu-Yuandu Road, and happened to discover that the Indian seacoast had many such shells. They regarded them as a treasure and began bringing these shells back to the kingdom of Dian.

Over several centuries, by way of the Shu-Yuandu Road, even the ancient states in what later became Assam, Manipur, and other regions of northeastern India began circulating this shell money.

Of course, at present Zhang Zhou still had no ability to go to India and ship shell money back in great vessels, so what was being used this time were shells collected from the coasts of Guangdong and Fujian.

These shells differed somewhat from the shells of the Indian Ocean — they were not as attractive and were slightly smaller in shape, but counterfeit money, after all, is all about being plausible at a glance.

This time the Brocade Robe Personal Guard directly spent thirty thousand strings of silver cash along the coasts of Fujian and Guangdong to purchase and prepare shell money that would require over a thousand mules to carry into Dali.

The exact number can no longer be calculated, but by rough estimate it was no fewer than fifty million pieces.

It must be understood that at this time, in the state of Dali, one piece of shell money was used at roughly the value of five wen of cash. That is to say, these relatively inferior shells collected by Zhang Zhou could be used at a value of at least two hundred and fifty thousand strings.

For Dali, whose economy was not very strong to begin with, the power of suddenly injecting shell money worth two hundred and fifty thousand strings into Yangjumei City (Dali) and Shanshan Prefecture (Kunming) in a short time was absolutely no less than dropping a nuclear bomb on Dali's economic market.

When that happened, the property of every Dali person would shrink at terrifying speed.

What was even more ruthless was that grain prices were already rising because most of the grain had been diverted to the front lines. With so much counterfeit money now flooding in, one could imagine how grain prices would begin to soar.

This inflation would not stop among the common people; it would rapidly strike the army, sharply cutting the soldiers' income and dealing a massive blow to morale.

At the same time, it would also transmit to the great clans of Dali, leaving them able only to watch helplessly as they bore unbearable asset depreciation.

And this was only one of the savage blows. The other was that Zhang Zhao personally gave the order to concentrate all the salt produced from the Ziliujing and Gongjing wells of Rongzhou (Yibin) into the hands of Guo Rong and Yin Yaozi.

At the same time, the refined salt produced at the Daning Salt Field in Kuizhou Prefecture, in the northeast of the Sichuan Province, was also transferred over in large quantities.

Counting only what had already arrived, there were ten thousand shi of refined salt and one hundred thousand shi of coarse salt. This was nearly the entire annual salt consumption of Dali. Although it would not all be dumped at once, even sending out half would be terrifying.

And this salt, like the shell money, was prepared to be dumped throughout the whole state of Dali.

It must be understood that the state of Dali had always been short of salt, and its few salt wells were an extremely important and precious source of tax revenue for Dali.

If it were suddenly hit by the dumping of one hundred and ten thousand shi of salt, then Dali's salt tax, which concerned its very lifeline, could no longer be collected.

Well, having come from a later age, he ought at least to employ some means of economic warfare. Zhang Zhao believed that with these two moves set in motion, the state of Dali would be about finished.

And the reason he was willing to pay such a heavy price to do this was to preserve these tens of thousands of elite mountain troops of the Dali Kingdom — in the future, when conquering Pagan and the Khmer, troops would still have to be dispatched from Dali.

As for the Pyu kingdom, they had long been a vassal of the Dali Kingdom, and the King of Dali had long since taken the title of King of the Pyu people into his own hands.

Therefore, in attacking Dali, winning hearts remained the highest priority, while military conquest was secondary — using the twin levers of force and wealth to handle these Bai people, who could be considered to share the same ancestral origin as the Han, and make them the vanguard in conquering Southeast Asia, just as the Dai people had been in history.

(End of Chapter)

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