Chapter 254: Nangqian

The arrival of Monk Gama at Haibei was an accident.

When he first set out, the Western Tibetan tribes in the Yushu region had no knowledge whatsoever of the Han army's advance into Qinghai.

Monk Gama, following the custom of second sons taking monastic vows since childhood, had traveled to Ü-Tsang as early as the Wanli era, where he was invested as the State Preceptor of the Nangqian Kingdom and thereafter resided at Genbang Monastery, knowing little of affairs in the Central Plains.

Barring the unforeseen, he should have spent his life as abbot of his family monastery, but his father and elder brother died one after another in the struggle against the King of Beri, forcing him to withdraw from the temple.

Had it been any other enemy, even without avenging his father and brother, Gama could have retreated into Central Ü-Tsang and preserved a lifetime of peace.

But the King of Beri was no ordinary foe. Since the forty-seventh year of Wanli, when the Bön-adherent King Donyo Dorje succeeded to the throne, he had steadily consolidated power and launched campaigns in all directions.

From an obscure petty chieftain, he became the King of Kham, whose domain stretched north to the Yellow River at Aba, east to the Dajian Road in Sichuan, west to Chamdo in Tibetan lands, and south to the border with Yunnan.

Kham and Ü-Tsang held different faiths. During the Tibetan Empire, with the support of the Tsenpo, Ü-Tsang converted wholesale to Buddhism, while Bön adherents unwilling to convert were exiled to peripheral regions like Ngari and Dokham.

Thereafter, Buddhism gradually localized, flourished, and even split into multiple schools in Ü-Tsang that fought among themselves, yet Bön persisted with tenacious vitality, rooted in this land.

Over centuries, Buddhism theoretically subdued demons and monsters, and Bön deities continued to be worshipped by Western Tibetan commoners under the guise of having been "tamed," the two growing ever more alike.

The greatest difference between them was that, as a primitive shamanism adapted to tribal society, Bön had no monasteries; its shamans or sorcerers were attached to tribal chieftains and, beyond conducting rituals, did not occupy additional land or wealth.

The monks adapted to the slave society of the Tibetan Empire, however, were precisely the opposite.

A secular ruler aspiring to strength, even if wholeheartedly intending to cooperate with religion, was bound to come into conflict with the monastic establishment that held power.

Gama was one of those power-holding monks.

Outside the troop-training horse camp at Haibei, Gama, who had come from the Nangqian region, had pitched a small camp, arrayed windhorse flags, and hung multicolored prayer streamers.

His attendant monks were carving scriptures onto stones. Gama sat in his tent, turning a prayer wheel, but his mind would not quiet.

The army of the Han commander Liu Chengzong was far stronger in soldiers and horses than he had imagined.

Gama's impression of Dai Daozi was extremely favorable.

On the mountain road south of Qinghai Lake, his herder-monks had lost two pack yaks.

Dai Daozi's outpost soldiers found the yaks; they neither embezzled the goods nor slaughtered the animals, but instead, upon meeting Gama on the road, returned the yaks to him.

For most Western Tibetan commoners or some Mongols, this was fairly normal. According to local custom, people not only dared not misappropriate a monk's property, but would even offer their own wealth as alms when a monk passed by, in exchange for karmic merit.

This held true even within the King of Beri's territory.

But for outpost riders from the Central Plains, no such custom existed.

They returned the yaks simply because they felt it was the right thing to do.

When the battle between Lhazun and Guru ended, those outpost riders had returned from the campaign with their pockets full; at the cost of one man with a crooked nose bridge, each man drove an average of six head of livestock back to Haibei.

These livestock firmly safeguarded their moral baseline.

To Gama, Dai Daozi was a good man.

The purpose of his journey was to cross the Qilian Mountains, go to the Oirats, and seek possible aid among the Mongols.

To achieve this goal, he carried two carefully chosen gifts tailored to their tastes: wealth and the Dharma.

Since his route would pass through Han territory, the warhorses and wealth were offered to the Han Emperor, but the ultimate solution to his problem still depended on delivering the Dharma to the Mongols.

The foundation of people's appeals to the divine is a harsh natural environment and problems they cannot solve themselves.

The Han lands, on the one hand, lacked this foundation; on the other, as a crossroads where multiple ancient civilizations blended, the people were worldly-wise and possessed a secular worldview that continually reformed itself.

This secular worldview was as deeply rooted as the Bön faith devoutly held by the commoners of Kham.

Their Dharma, an accepted orthodox path in Ü-Tsang and Kham, would become a heterodox teaching in the Han lands, unable to offer any help in guiding daily life.

But for the Oirat Mongols, both a harsh natural environment and problems they could not solve themselves were present there.

The person Gama truly sought was the Oirat leader renowned for mediating wars, the Güshi Khan of the Khoshut tribe.

As for Liu Chengzong's army, Gama actually did not wish to obtain its help.

During his brief stay at Haibei these past few days, Gama had gained some understanding of the Lion Army. They were not a local regime; from Dongke'er to their self-governed territory at Haibei, they were a group of exiled soldiers wielding extreme military force.

Without question, in terms of troop strength, this was a powerful potential ally.

But even the imperial court had been unable to extend its influence to Yushu and Chamdo. Liu Chengzong, as a Han man, would sooner or later have to return to the Han lands; even if he could dispatch troops once to aid him, he could not protect the Nangqian region in the long term.

Of course, that was a matter for the distant future, and from the present perspective, it was not important.

At present, the important thing was... Gama's purse was empty; he could not afford to hire an army so well-equipped.

Several sharp cracks of gunfire sounded outside the felt tent.

The horse troops from the Central Plains had begun drilling with their firearms again.

Gama had seen firelocks before.

Firelocks were rare weapons in the Snowy Mountains, but not entirely unheard of; they mainly came from the Ngari region, which bordered the Mughals who occupied India.

So while firelocks were extremely rare in the Snowy Mountains, they were not absolutely nonexistent. Gama had even heard that west of the Snowy Mountains, there were musketeers who fired their guns while riding on the backs of war elephants.

But Gama had never seen so many firelocks.

Hundreds of firelocks of varying patterns firing in volley, the heaven-shaking, earth-shattering, liver-trembling sound, constantly reminded him... yes, this was an army he could not afford to hire.

Suddenly, Dai Daozi entered the tent and said joyfully, "Gama, the Grand Commander will see you now!"

The chain of the prayer wheel slowly came to a halt. Gama took a deep breath, nodded, and walked out of the felt tent.

The cold wind of Haibei in the third month still cut against the face.

Liu Chengzong spurred his horse past the small military formation firing their weapons.

After this winter, the soldiers' robes and armor had all changed in appearance.

Their helmet neck-guards, armor, robe hems, and arrow sleeves had all been lined with a layer of fur; their clothing and armor were all fluffy, looking very warm.

These past two days he had been busy determining the combat capability of the troop-training horse camp.

Winter had gone and spring arrived. After several months of reorganization and integration, this army — built around seven thousand border troops from Yansui, Ningxia, and Guyuan as its backbone, supplemented by over ten thousand banner troops, peasant soldiers, and famine refugees — had basically recovered its fighting capacity.

Watching Gama and his party approach from afar, Liu Chengzong sat upright on his horse, impassively accepting their salute, and only then dismounted and invited them into his tent.

"Dai Daozi has told me of your matter. The conflict between the Nangqian tribe and the Beri tribe — how many troops do you have?"

Gama did not know how many troops he had. They were currently in exile, taking refuge; over a thousand monks and laypeople were hiding in the Jyekundo area of Yushu, where a headman of the local Zhawo tribe was temporarily protecting them.

Nangqian had no standing army; it relied entirely on tribal chieftains conscripting men in wartime. Genbeng Monastery had originally possessed over four hundred armed monks, but they had now been utterly terrified by successive crushing defeats.

Gama thought for a moment and said, "In the past, Nangqian could muster three thousand troops. As long as we return to Nangqian, those chieftains will still rally to us."

Liu Chengzong rephrased his question: "How many people are there in the entire Nangqian region?"

"Over four thousand households." Gama thought for a moment, then added uncertainly, "A little over twenty thousand people."

Liu Chengzong propped his chin on his hand, noncommittal, and continued asking, "And what about Beri? How many troops and how many people does he have?"

Strangely enough, while Gama had little grasp of Nangqian's population, he knew the population under the Beri King's rule extremely well. He answered without hesitation: "Sixteen thousand four hundred and some households, over ninety thousand people."

He had just pinpointed it to two digits of precision.

Liu Chengzong shot him a sidelong glance. "Great Monk, you're unclear about your own home's affairs, yet you're so certain about Beri's?"

A bitter smile crossed Gama's face as he explained, "In the lands ruled by the Beri King, every household must send one son to serve as his soldier. No one can escape this. He has sixteen thousand four hundred soldiers, so naturally there are sixteen thousand four hundred households."

The conscription ratio was extremely high.

"What does he use to support his troops?"

"Support his troops?"

Gama looked at Master Chen with great puzzlement. Only after Master Chen had explained the term two or three times did Gama suddenly understand. "So the Great Commander is asking what the soldiers eat. Their parents support them. They eat whatever is prepared for them."

Just as Master Chen finished relaying this, Gama added, "It is the same with weapons. Every household must prepare a weapon for the son serving as a soldier. He uses whatever is prepared. When the father dies, the son uses it again."

"The war between Beri and Nangqian is precisely because Donyo Dorje believes Nangqian should also be his territory, and that every household there should also provide him one soldier. My father and elder brothers were unwilling to provide him soldiers, so they have been at war ever since."

To be honest, upon hearing this answer, Liu Chengzong was completely dumbfounded.

It was as if they had been talking on entirely different planes.

Liu Chengzong had always thought he was the person with the lowest troop-support costs, but he had never imagined that in Kham, that Beri King Donyo Dorje had even lower troop-support costs than he did.

That man's troop-support cost was negative.

Because the families of the soldiers still had to pay grain and silver taxes, and he could even extract money back from them.

Inside the military tent, Yang Yao, Cao Yao, and the others were also dumbfounded. Old Bastard Cao was stunned for a moment before slapping the table and shouting, "Great Commander, isn't this damn well just the Founding Emperor's wei-suo system!"

Cao Yao's angle was so interesting that it made Lion Liu burst out laughing despite himself.

This Donyo Dorje was essentially the Great Ming Founding Emperor reborn, implementing total wei-suo-ization. I raise sixteen thousand troops without spending a single zanba of my own.

Liu Chengzong mused: if they were all conscripts, wouldn't an opponent like this be easy to deal with?

Gama watched the crowd roaring with laughter, utterly baffled.

What was so funny about this? It was terrifying! Every time a conflict arose, before any fighting even started, the minor native officers under their Nangqian side would be scared out of fighting first.

Liu Chengzong decided not to ask Gama any more military questions.

The armies they each envisioned were completely different things. Discussing these matters was useless. It would be better to wait until the army arrived and let the pond cavalry scouts investigate the real situation.

Beri's system of universal conscription did not necessarily mean that individual soldiers' combat capability was weak.

In fact, in the vicinity of the Beri native state, being able to enforce universal conscription was itself a sign of strong organizational capability among the native states.

But this was only suitable for border warfare in a small state with a sparse population. It lacked logistics and could not meet the needs of large-scale warfare.

So this kind of military strength was merely data on paper.

Under this system, how would a soldier from the far south ever march to the far north?

Therefore, at the individual soldier level they might be strong or weak, but at the broader tactical and strategic level, they were weak by far more than just a little.

Lion Liu and Cao Yao exchanged a glance, each seeing the mirth in the other's eyes.

They had just been looking for an opponent to drill their troops, and Gama had delivered exactly such an opponent. It was practically having a pillow handed to them just as they felt drowsy.

Liu Chengzong turned his head toward Gama and said with a solemn expression, "I can help you retake Nangqian and enfeoff you as the Nangqian Tusi. But what do I gain from this?"

Gama looked at Liu Chengzong and answered cautiously, "Great Commander, I know Nangqian cannot afford the wealth and goods to hire an army for an expedition. If the Great Commander helps me drive out Donyo Dorje, I am willing to submit to the Great Commander, pay annual tribute, and proclaim the Great Commander's benevolence and wisdom to the surrounding lands, so that more native kings will pledge allegiance."

Liu Chengzong felt that Gama was quite quick on the uptake.

Little did he know the bitterness in Gama's heart.

Submitting to a Han commander was no great matter. Even if they did not offer tribute to Liu Chengzong, they would inevitably have to offer tribute to someone else. It was all inconsequential.

The biggest problem was that he feared Liu Chengzong had no intention of ruling the south, of bringing Yushu and Chamdo into his grasp.

If all the surrounding tribes submitted to Liu Chengzong, then their own environment would naturally become stable.

But if this Han army remained squatting north of the sea, over a thousand li away, and he got beaten today and sent someone to seek help, by the time Liu Chengzong received the message, his own first-week death rites would already be over.

Yet at this moment, sitting right in Liu Chengzong's tent, he also could not refuse Liu Chengzong's help.

Otherwise, whether Lion Liu would have much inclination to help him fight for a price was debatable, but after gratuitously making an enemy, his inclination to chase him to the ends of the earth and beat him up would certainly be very great.

Now that Lion Liu was willing to help, he had no choice but to go along with it. Therefore, for his own safety... Gama had already decided that in the future, he absolutely must make all the native states around Nangqian swear loyalty to Lion Liu.

Liu Chengzong asked, "What can you offer as annual tribute?"

"Cattle, sheep, horses? It depends on what the Great Commander needs." Gama thought for a moment and said, "As long as I retake Nangqian, I can offer an annual tribute of twelve hundred horses, or twelve hundred head of cattle, or three thousand sheep?"

Unexpectedly, Liu Chengzong waved his hand. "No need for so many. You can keep raising these livestock... Master, show him that list."

Liu Chengzong had Master Chen prepare a list, written in three scripts—Han, Mongol, and Tibetan—on which were noted all sorts of raw materials he needed.

They were mainly animal hides and furs, horns, timber, and minerals.

Once this list was handed to Gama, Liu Chengzong added, "The prices are written on it. Gather what you can. An annual tribute worth five hundred knives will suffice. Apart from that..."

Liu Chengzong emphasized, "If during the war, my soldiers and the young women of your tribe fall in mutual love, permit them to go north of the sea to marry."

"And after the war ends, you must select six hundred clever children under the age of fourteen, and two hundred craftsmen of iron, wood, gold, silver, and stone, and have my soldiers bring them north of the sea."

"If you can do this, I will dispatch three thousand troops to help you reclaim Nangqian."

In that instant, Gama's expression became one of extreme terror.

This lion, this lion who looked so divinely handsome and radiant—he actually ate children!