Chapter 303: Pine Forest Fort

The wind along the Dadu River blew cold. The yamen runners laboring on the fort were miserable, but no matter how miserable, they dared not speak of it.

The spot Liu Chengzong chose for the fort lay across a great mountain from Dajianlu, a journey of some hundred forty or fifty li.

And from the official stockade of the Lengbian Tusi, counting the Dadu River, the straight-line distance was less than two li.

The location was excellent, with land fit for farming: over seven hundred mu of cultivated land to the north, over eight hundred mu to the south, and along the river flats stretching farther north and south, more ground that could still be opened up.

Moreover, in the mountains behind lay iron, coal, lead, limestone, and all manner of stone, with ample water sources.

Liu Chengzong sent no one to prospect for mines, because the mines were simply there — he only needed to send men following the native folk into the hills, searching out the places the tusi had once fenced off and barred people from, and they would find mineral deposits waiting to be worked.

Yet Liu the Lion's decision to build a fort here was not, in fact, to protect farmland and mines.

It was because from this very spot, one could see straight across to the vast stretches of fine fields on the opposite bank, and not far off lay the official stockade of the Lengbian Tusi.

Although Lengbian's territory was far smaller than West-of-the-River's, and the water and soil conditions on both banks were nearly identical, the far side far outstripped West-of-the-River in land reclamation, irrigation works, and population.

Such was the power of the market: wherever the market went, wealth flowed; wherever wealth went, people migrated.

In truth, the terrain along the Dadu River was ill-suited for building a fort. Every May the river swelled, its surface swallowing every inch of low-lying shore, yet in the dry season it laid bare vast rocky flats — poor ground for siting a fort to seal off passage.

If one tried to build a fort close enough for a jingal to reach the opposite bank, the fort's lower level would spend part of every year soaking in the river; and if one wanted to keep it out of the water, the mudflats on the far side could not be brought within range.

Liu Chengzong had not originally wanted to build a fort here. Whether at Xining or Kangning, he preferred to leave a small buffer zone with the imperial court — Lengbian and Shenbian were that buffer.

But the fact that a mere two porters could draw several hundred migrants to relocate both delighted and alarmed him. He was delighted that, under the bone-gnawing conditions of the interior, population was no longer Kangning Prefecture's bottleneck; he was alarmed that after this year's autumn harvest, the number of incoming migrants might multiply, and his grain shortfall would widen at a terrifying rate.

With that problem in mind, the terrain here became perfectly suited: it could serve as a storehouse, and also as a field-work strongpoint for defense and counterattack. Falling back, he could use military pressure to force the Shenbian Tusi to sell grain; advancing, he could force a crossing to seize it, and still block the pursuing troops of the grain's owner — he had to build a fort here.

Because a Pine Forest River ran nearby, he named the place Pine Forest Fort, called the adjacent farmland Pine Forest Township, temporarily garrisoned two hundred soldiers, and laid out a development plan for the Pine Forest region.

With mines present, there could be no idleness — this place would mine ore and smelt iron. He recalled that somewhere nearby there ought to be a very famous Luding Bridge; though he was already standing right here, he still could not fathom it: this river was called the Mo River, and there was nothing whatsoever around bearing the character "Lu" — so why call it Luding?

He too wanted to build an iron-chain bridge, only at present he lacked the capability to construct a bridge at all, so he had to begin by mining ore and smelting iron, and firing kilns to make bricks. The greatest difficulty in smelting iron lay in skilled men — he would have to transfer people from Xining before they could build the finest Dajian Furnaces.

He intended to transform a small hill into a timber-and-rammed-earth fort, and to raise two stone-footed blockhouses on the river flats, to protect his people and also to protect the future ironworks, and to lay the foundation for the iron-chain bridge. Once a bridge spanned the Dadu River in the future, transporting goods and supplies back and forth would become far easier.

Fortunately, on the matter of building the fort, Muya could offer help. West-of-the-River might lack every kind of tribesman, but it never lacked idlers loafing about Dajianlu.

Muya's armored cavalry rampaged in every direction; whenever they spotted a man in a kasaya on the street, they hauled him over. The idle monks from that side were all summoned, carting stone out of the mountains, until the frantic monks drove the price of clothing in Dajianlu up by twenty percent.

Driving it up did no good. The tailor shops in Dajianlu all used fine cloth imported from Chengdu Prefecture, and served no ordinary people at all — ordinary people, of course, included ordinary monks. They could not afford new clothes, the weather was still bitterly cold, and wearing a kasaya simply got them dragged off to labor.

It did, however, let the three detained yamen runners from Mingshan breathe a sigh of relief. When first captured and told they would be building a fort, they had been terrified, deathly afraid of being worked to death and dying far from home. Now, seeing several hundred foreign monks come to help, their hearts eased by half.

They still worried about being worked to death, but at least they figured that if they were, they would get free funerary rites, and somehow or other their souls might just fly back home.

When work truly began, Liu Chengzong met the three runners once and completely put their remaining fears to rest. He set them to no other task — just stay here as overseers, at six tsampa cakes and ten "folded-two" Marshal Tongbao coins a day.

The three runners mulled it over. Though they had never seen these "folded-two" coins with the Qinghai Marshal's Office yamen and a warhorse stamped on the back, a careful reckoning showed the pay was higher than serving at the county yamen, and all they had to do was watch other people work. They could do that.

Who knew — maybe when they were eventually released and sent back, the yamen would count this as official travel, and they could draw another wage besides.

What a master of knowing men and putting them to good use Master Liu the Second was — to take professional talents like yamen runners, experts at keeping the common folk down, and waste them hauling stones would have been far too great a squandering.

Without intending it, Liu Chengzong's act of paying the runners wages sent the thinking of the Shenbian Yu Tusi on the opposite bank veering completely off course.

Ever since Liu Chengzong's troops had entered West-of-the-River, the Shenbian Tusi had kept a constant watch on movements here. When a crowd of Han people came over to open up farmland, and moreover showed every sign of launching into large-scale construction, the Yu Tusi was thrown into utter panic, peering this way through his telescope from his official stockade day after day.

The more he looked, the stranger it seemed.

At the worksite were three men, dressed in dark narrow gowns, red sashes at the waist, black caps on their heads, with three peacock feathers stuck into the left side of each cap — a most conspicuous costume, recognizable at a glance as imperial yamen runners serving in the provinces.

And then, every day, the men hauling stone and timber out of the mountains were all monks draped in kasayas.

The Yu Tusi wondered what in the world was going on in West-of-the-River — were they collaborating with the imperial court to build a temple?

Though there were many soldiers about, they indeed did not seem overly aggressive, busy all day long erecting waterwheels, building watermills, digging channels and trenches, and leveling land. With so many trenches dug, even with his telescope, the Yu Tusi truly could not make out any sign of danger.

Liu Chengzong was indeed more focused on constructing waterworks. He treated this place as a testing ground, experimenting with the machinery he had learned from Wang Zheng's Illustrated Explanations of Marvelous Machines.

He had studied the contents of that set of books for a long time, but had never had a chance to apply them. From his experience, although it was an exceedingly advanced work blending Chinese and Western knowledge, many of the things in it likely still remained at the design and experimental stage in this world, put to use nowhere at all.

Because the machines in the book were, on the whole, rather complex.

Whether in East or West, those who studied such things lacked the authority to build them; and those who possessed the authority to build them plainly devoted their main energies to politics, military affairs, and economics.

This held equally true for Western nobles and Eastern officials.

A well employing dozens of large gears, connecting rods, and other mechanical devices could make drawing water a little easier for several dozen households — but those several dozen households, whether they lived in some desolate corner of Gansu or a remote rural hamlet in the Netherlands, were never so prosperous as to afford building such a well.

And those who possessed sufficient wealth and capability had no need to draw water themselves.

Without such demand, it was difficult to bring forth talented people who seriously studied these things, and even if a few existed, it was very hard for them to spread their knowledge.

In Liu Chengzong's understanding, this was why the book was called Marvelous Machines and not Divine Machines.

Only on his own turf could he build a few such things to amuse himself.

That set of books of his had been left behind in Xining as teaching material for the prefectural school. With no book at hand, relying entirely on memory, he had a well dug in Pine Forest Township. Two design errors occurred midway, and after corrections it was finally completed. He found the results quite good — it saved a great deal of effort — so he planned another one inside Pine Forest Fort.

The design of Pine Forest Fort came from the hand of Liu the Lion, and in this field, Liu Chengzong was an expert.

For a man to take part in building a single city or a single fort in a lifetime was already considered highly experienced.

Liu the Lion, however, had designed several forts, built several forts, seen a great many castles, stormed a large portion of them, and also encountered many forts whose construction left him helpless. What was more, he was adept at using his brain and had studied defensive concepts for fortifications extensively.

Building a fort or a city was all about adapting to local conditions; weapons and equipment were all about adapting to the enemy's conditions.

In all his fort designs, he had never once considered building a complete star fort of the sort in his memory.

The star fort in his memory was a fine thing: low, thick, heavy walls, great depth, many gun platforms, and together with the outer ditches and earthen slopes it formed a large defensive works complex, reducing the chance of being hit by cannon fire while maximizing the defenders' firepower advantage.

But Liu Chengzong believed he was not worthy of using such a fort.

Though the Lion Army was strong in firearms, that depended on whom they were compared to.

His opponents were Mongols and Western Tibetan tusi, who used fewer firearms than he did and fielded hardly any cannon at all — yet the number of firelocks and cannon in his own hands was, in truth, not that great either.

The garrison at Xining Prefecture might have somewhat more, but transporting such relatively heavy weapons and equipment to the Pine Forest region of West-of-the-River cost far more than manufacturing them on the spot.

And at the current level of firepower of the Kangning Prefecture garrison outside Nangqian, it simply could not reach the threshold needed to exploit a star fort's advantages. Using low walls would likely see them overwhelmed by large-scale enemy forces wielding cold steel, while raising the walls would make the construction effort far too great.

Most critically, if he poured a fortune into building a flawless star fort, only to discover afterward that his own cannon were not even enough to fill the gun platforms — that would be rather embarrassing.

So he borrowed only the concepts of the sharp-angled bastion and the ramped approach, using the mountain's contours to lay out a triangular fort, with sharp-angled bastions at the three corners, facing northeast, southeast, and due west, and the fort gate opening to the south.

Outside the fort, two lines of trenches were dug. The bridge over the inner trench lay to the east, sealed by fixed gun emplacements on two side-faces of the northeast and southeast bastions; the bridge over the outer trench was left to the south, likewise sealed by two side-face emplacements on the southeast and due-west bastions.

In terms of design, this fortress was to have eight heavy cannons, eight light cannons, twenty jingal wall guns, fifty firelocks, and a garrison of one hundred ninety men.

At the same time, two four-room beacon towers would be built to the east, identical to the beacon towers beyond the Great Wall — solid, high platforms with no doors — each manned by five soldiers and equipped with one falconet, five shields, and five firelocks.

The entire structure would use rammed-earth panel construction, to be faced with brick later if conditions permitted — or possibly never.

Beneath Pine Forest Fort, they also planned to build a large granary capable of storing over fifteen thousand shi of grain.

In fact, after his uncle Cai Zhongpan ran the calculations, he felt this fortress could easily accommodate a granary holding thirty thousand shi of grain, but Liu Chengzong said there was no need — the size of this granary was precisely his proudest touch.

Smiling, he said to his uncle, "This granary — building it bigger would be useless, and you'd still have to face it with stone, a waste of effort. Look around, where would all that grain even come from to store here?"

"Then fifteen thousand is unnecessary too," Cai Zhongpan said, gesturing from the hilltop. "I figure the grain this land yields this year — two thousand shi would count as favorable weather. Even if we open up some nearby wasteland, without enough hands to tend it, reaching three thousand shi would be doing well."

Cai Zhongpan spread his hands as he spoke. "Besides, go any farther north or south and the distance grows long. Beyond thirty li, you'd have to build another fort anyway. No point storing all the grain here."

Liu Chengzong wagged a finger. "No, no, Uncle. West of the river, the most we can produce this year is three thousand shi, true. But along the east bank, they can produce at least twenty thousand shi of grain. Twenty thousand shi — even if we don't bring it all over, we ought to get half, no?"

Cai Zhongpan blinked. So Liu the Lion had already counted the neighbors' grain reserves as his own. He asked, "Then are you planning to start a war with the Lengbian Tusi this autumn?"

"I'll try to avoid fighting. I plan to leave this matter to you, Uncle. Talk to Lengbian about buying grain. Nangqian has a batch of gold and silver from the earlier fighting — we can use it to buy grain and see if they're willing to sell."

Liu Chengzong gazed at the opposite bank and shook his head. "If they're not willing to sell, then we'll just have to take it. Anyway, once we build a few forts along this bank, it'll be hard for us to strike across, but they won't be able to come over either. So we'll just raid them once."

As for the agricultural prospects of Kangning Prefecture, Liu Chengzong held no high expectations.

Getting rich through farming here would be very difficult. If grain could raise the common people's standard of living above that of the slave era, keep rations at self-sufficiency, and draw immigrants to fill Kangning Prefecture, his wish would be fulfilled.

The tribal people were deeply resistant to mining, and the herders were deeply resistant to agricultural development — these endeavors could only be undertaken by immigrants.

And the prosperity of Kangning Prefecture would ultimately have to be achieved through the commercial flourishing brought by animal husbandry, mining and smelting, and handicrafts. Without agriculture and immigration as a foundation, these things had no possibility of achieving significant growth.

In Liu Chengzong's eyes, as long as enough immigrants came and Kangning Prefecture could guarantee their grain rations, after a few years of development, supplemented by infiltration and co-optation of Sichuan, it might well serve as a forward base for a flanking force entering Sichuan.

Just as the two were discussing future strategy toward the Leng-Shen Tusi, a mounted soldier came galloping from afar — a garrison trooper from Luhuo County, his warhorse ridden to the point of foaming at the mouth.

The cavalryman threw himself from the saddle and knelt, his legs so weak he nearly collapsed to the ground. Cupping his fists, he said, "Grand Marshal, urgent report from Xining Prefecture — war has broken out!"

"War in Xining?" Liu Chengzong exchanged a glance with Cai Zhongpan and asked, "Against whom? When did this happen?"

The cavalryman shook his head. "I don't know. The message was passed by word of mouth all the way from Xining — just those three words."

Liu Chengzong drew a deep breath, thinking, what the hell kind of report is this — would a few more words kill them?

He turned to Cai Zhongpan. "Uncle, the matters of the West River, the Songpan banner troops, and the western Sichuan immigrants — I leave them all to you. I'll return to Nangqian immediately. Send word for Li Laochai to hold the garrison, and order Zhang Tianlin's cavalry unit to accompany me back to Nangqian. Then we set out for Xining!"