Chapter 350: Smallpox

Liu Shizi endorsed Yang Yao's plan at Hezui Hamlet. When it came to success rates, having the government administer human-derived variolation was far superior to relying on folk pox doctors.

This was not to say that Yang Yao, a hardened killer, possessed variolation skills surpassing those of folk pox doctors.

It was because folk pox doctors lacked the manpower and resources for large-scale variolation, making the entire process inevitably uncontrollable.

Too few people and efficiency suffered; too many and skill levels became uneven. Using Yang Yao's method of blade-point supervision was, on one hand, a waste of talent, and on the other, it placed enormous mental pressure on the pox doctors.

It was far better to directly use a vertically managed military, employing martial law to regulate pox scab selection and the variolation process. They had the capacity to stockpile tens of thousands of pox scabs and the ability to variolate tens of thousands of people.

Just as Liu Shizi was intensively preparing to combat smallpox, Gansu Deputy Regional Commander Wang Xingshan found himself in an awkward predicament... he was quarantined.

Liu Chengzong, judging others by his own standards, believed that the Shaanxi authorities had received word of the smallpox outbreak earlier than he had, possessed more experience in epidemic prevention, and could deploy more personnel, so the trouble caused by smallpox should be resolved quickly.

In reality, however, Lanzhou had already descended into chaos.

Gansu had one Regional Commander bearing the seal of the General Who Pacifies the Qiang, one Deputy Regional Commander co-defending Ganzhou, and one Deputy Regional Commander separately defending Liangzhou. Wang Xingshan was the separately defending Deputy Regional Commander stationed in Liangzhou, a post also known as the Gansu Vice General.

Like Mo Yujing, Wang Xingshan had not long returned to his post after campaigning across Shaanxi, though relatively speaking, his soldiers' war-weariness was not as high.

On one hand, Gansu, like He-Huang, was barely affected by the drought. Gansu's biggest problem was the centuries-long desertification of the Hexi Corridor, an issue with far-reaching impact, but not as viscerally shocking as fertile fields turning to barren red earth in a short time.

On the other hand, even though Gansu was under Shaanxi's jurisdiction, Gansu troops were guest armies. It was normal for guest armies to suppress peasant revolts. No matter what natural or man-made disasters struck the area, guest armies found it hard to empathize with the locals; they simply saw a bunch of bandits. Soldiers killing bandits was a matter of natural justice.

However, Wang Xingshan's troops were indeed exhausted. His forces had crisscrossed Shaanxi, and no one knew where they had contracted smallpox.

When he led his army to Hekou in Lanzhou, soldiers had already been falling from their horses. Not only did the officers pay it no mind, but the soldiers themselves never considered they might be ill, merely attributing it to extreme fatigue.

No one took it seriously.

It was only upon reaching Hekou that they realized something was amiss. Over a hundred men simultaneously developed fevers, chills, weakness in the back and legs, and even coma. The army was completely incapacitated and unable to move.

Officers at all levels reported the situation to Wang Xingshan, and he too panicked. Anyone with eyes could see this was a plague outbreak!

Wang Xingshan, on one hand, requested medicine from Lanzhou, and on the other, investigated the type of plague within the army. He isolated the sick soldiers into a separate camp and formed a dare-to-die squad to examine their symptoms, finally discovering that some had broken out in pox.

Smallpox.

Such a major event had to be reported to his superiors. He urgently relayed the news to the Three Frontiers Supreme Commander Hong Chengchou, but Hong Chengchou... Hong Chengchou simply could not attend to him.

He had only just finished sweeping away the roving bandits in Shaanxi, a situation where suppressing one front only caused another to flare up, by year's end. Hong Chengchou hadn't rested for two days. After the New Year, he had finally freed his hands and planned to properly deal with the common folk of Yan'an Prefecture, who knew nothing of loyalty, filial piety, benevolence, or righteousness, when precisely this trouble broke out.

The previous year, there had been a minor figure who repeatedly crisscrossed between Shaanxi and Shanxi, and after that, repeatedly crisscrossed between Shanxi and Henan, an utter nuisance.

The imperial court launched an encirclement campaign against him in Shanxi, sealing off both banks of the Yellow River and driving him into the Taihang Mountains.

Just as Wang Xingshan and his men were plagued by smallpox, this minor figure emerged from the Taihang Mountains. This minor figure was named Li Zicheng.

There was, however, a slight directional deviation. Li Zicheng did not emerge from the western side of the Taihang Mountains; he came out from Jingxing on the eastern side, swept through Zhending Prefecture, and made a beeline for Beijing at a speed of four kilometers per hour, expected to impact Shunyang Gate in three days.

When Hong Chengchou received the news, he was scared out of his wits. Who had the time to care about smallpox in Lanzhou's Hekou? He now wished he could push every last unit into Shanxi.

In the end, this man made a feint, turned around, and dove back into the Taihang Mountains. He was cornered by government troops by the Qingzhang River in She County and beaten, then, after being routed, fled the mountains, reassembled his forces in Wu'an, turned around, and cornered the government troops in the mountains and beat them in return.

Old Master Hong told Wang Xingshan to handle it as he saw fit. So Wang Xingshan handled it as he saw fit, writing to Gansu Grand Commander Yang Jiamo to see if more troops could be transferred, and incidentally requesting aid from Shaanxi Grand Coordinator Lian Guoshi. But that was as far as it went.

The news that the Gansu frontier army on the north bank of the Yellow River was stricken with smallpox threw Lanzhou into utter chaos.

The grand commanders and vice commanders of the five garrisons had converged with their troops on Lanzhou. The Assistant Regional Commander garrisoning Lanzhou held a low rank and little authority, unable to control anyone.

In the end, it was Prince Su, Zhu Shihong, who stepped forward. He ordered the army to seal the riverbank and had all the civilians who had crossed from the north in recent days driven back to Hekou. Three hundred soldiers who had already survived smallpox were selected from the forces of the various garrison commanders to cross the river and find villages to settle them in.

He also selected six hundred banner troops who had survived smallpox from the Lanzhou Guard to man the boats at the Yellow River crossing, ferrying supplies to both banks.

Prince Su, Zhu Shihong, had no other intention. A hundred-day lockdown was necessary to prevent smallpox from spreading to the south bank of the Yellow River, where hundreds of thousands of people lived. Lanzhou's populace was too densely packed; once smallpox spread there, this major strategic city would fall without a fight.

Each princely fief had its own character. The Qing fief in Shanxi and the Zhou fief in Henan were prolific breeders, with descendants filling their halls; the Han fief in Pingliang had always been fond of shady, underhanded dealings.

The defining trait of the Su fief in Lanzhou, then, was a combination of valuing life and possessing talent.

Unlike their relatives, they did not care much for stirring up trouble, and the probability of producing a virtuous prince was exceptionally high, because the Su fief simply could not withstand turmoil—their numbers were too few.

For some unknown reason, this branch had been a single line of descent for three generations from the very start. The difficulty of smoothly inheriting the fiefdom was no less than winning the Bozhou Campaign.

The line was constantly dying out. When they finally found a commandery prince to become the vassal prince, the commandery principality would then have no one to inherit it, and the subordinate fiefs grew fewer and fewer.

Therefore, the Su fief was not as greedy for wealth as other imperial clans. Other fiefs had many people, and with stipend caps set, everyone was poor. But the Su fief had only a handful of members, with more than enough stipends to go around. Moreover, they had princely fields and lands accumulated over so many years, so they were not short of money.

Every generation of Prince Su was well-educated and maintained proper family standards; there were no particularly despicable ones.

The previous generation's Prince Su, in particular, was a hardcore virtuous prince for whom the Wanli Emperor had erected a memorial archway.

Zhu Shihong's idea was sound, but the execution capability of the Prince's Palace Guard and the Lanzhou banner troops was utterly pathetic. It was fundamentally impossible to find everyone and drive them north of the river.

Finding everyone was easy, but finding them did not mean they could be driven out.

Those who were prominent gentry figures in He-Huang remained prominent gentry figures in Lanzhou, whom the Palace Guard and banner troops dared not bully. Prince Su merely issued orders but could not back the banner troops everywhere.

In this day and age, the status of banner troops was beneath contempt, even lower than that of a yamen runner. Without a powerful backer, how could they possibly handle this matter well?

The great masters who came from He-Huang simply had their household servants drive them off with clubs, and no one dared utter a peep. The lesser masters who came from He-Huang casually slipped them a few taels of broken silver, and the banner troops left on their own.

They were happy to take the money upfront, but what if taking money meant they couldn't complete their assignment? Simple. Since people had to be driven across anyway, what did it matter who was driven?

Those who couldn't pay were driven to the north bank of the Yellow River. That was all.

Zhu Shihong could never have dreamed that the order he gave would result in not only the poor wretches of He-Huang being driven back, but also many poor wretches of Lanzhou being driven away.

The vast majority of the common people driven to the north bank of the Yellow River dared not go anywhere. They dared not stay in Hekou, dared not head north into Gansu, and even less dared to go west into the war zone.

All the deadly peril brought by the heavens was far less terrifying than the deadly peril brought by fellow humans.

But there was a voice among the crowd, constantly guiding people to flee west. The rumors from those Zhenhai Camp soldiers were too idyllic, so much so that people hardly dared believe them.

They said that if you went west, Grand Commander Liu was not afraid of smallpox, and that He-Huang would give them land to recuperate and rebuild. There would be no more endless levies and no more oppression from the masters. Grand Commander Liu would stand up for them.

People were skeptical. Some poor wretches who had absolutely nothing headed west. More people clustered together in mixed villages at Hekou, watching the situation, waiting on one hand for the war situation in the west to become clear, and on the other, hoping for word back from those commoners who had fled west.

Meanwhile, in Lanzhou, Prince Su, Zhu Shihong, submitted a memorial to the imperial court requesting an increase to the princely fief's guard force and the fortification of Lanzhou's city walls. At the same time, Shaanxi Grand Coordinator Lian Guoshi also hastily led his troops over and garrisoned Lanzhou, which finally steadied the people's hearts.

Upon garrisoning Lanzhou, Lian Guoshi immediately assigned personnel to reinforce the city's defenses. The very first thing he did was to delineate defense sectors along both banks of the Yellow River for the grand commanders and vice commanders of the five garrisons, while simultaneously sending a portion of the native troops back to their places of origin.

More soldiers were not necessarily better. Especially with smallpox blocking the way ahead, the five garrisons' frontier armies and his own standard camp already numbered thirty thousand. Adding Lanzhou's guard troops and garrison battalions, the military force was already more than sufficient.

Lanzhou's grain and fodder supplies were limited and still had to account for the Gansu garrison. Whether a mutiny broke out in Lanzhou or in Gansu, it would be a major problem.

Secondly, based on the Shaanxi roving bandits' combat habit of adeptly using heavy and light armored cavalry to charge formations and firing cannons and guns in volleys, he deployed iron caltrops along the Yellow River banks and dug earthen ramparts to position firearms and cannons. He also targeted their ant-like swarm siege tactics by rushing the production of 'Myriad Foe' bombs in Lanzhou city, preparing reed bundles and naphtha, readying for a city defense.

Finally, he ordered Gansu Deputy Regional Commander Wang Xingshan, who was stationed on the opposite riverbank, to select soldiers from his army who had already survived smallpox to form scouting patrols and probe westward for enemy intelligence.

But this operation went very poorly. Their scouts determined that the enemy had fortified the defenses and cleared the fields at Hezui, fifty li west of the river mouth, but blocked by the river they could advance no further. All they knew was that the enemy's defenses were tight and orderly; they were completely in the dark about the enemy's actual situation.

It was not until early in the third month that Wang Xingshan, whose defense sector lay on the opposite bank, sent word through three relays to Lanzhou, saying that a licentiate whose home was at Bapan Gorge by the river mouth had escaped over, bringing intelligence from the west, and asking whether the Grand Coordinator wished to see him.

Lian Guoshi was overjoyed at the news and had the licentiate sent over.

This man's name was Wei Yingshi. When he met Lian Guoshi, he wept bitterly and recounted that his home was at Shangzhuang in Bapan Gorge, south of the confluence of the Huang River and the Yellow River.

Some days earlier, several riders had suddenly come south down the Huang River and entered Bapan Gorge, installing puppet officials in the village and proclaiming that the war in the Hehuang Valley had already ended.

Wei Yingshi had the heart to kill the rebels, but feared bringing disaster upon the villagers, so he could only feign cooperation with the puppet officials, helping them take a census of the people and survey the fields in the village.

But when he saw the puppet officials completely destroy the local land registers, the tenant and master relationships, and the distinctions between noble and base, and then seize his own family's twelve hundred mu of land, utterly lawless, it set his heart ablaze with fury.

When he later heard that the puppet officials intended to drag all the commoners off to Hezui, Wei Yingshi used the pretext of recruiting more people for them and escaped.

Lian Guoshi sat in the main hall of the Lanzhou Assistant Regional Commander's official residence, listening to Wei Yingshi's report while inwardly analyzing Liu Chengzong's situation.

Although he and Liu Chengzong had never met, when Liu Chengzong entered Qinghai a few years earlier, Yang He had asked for his opinion.

At the time, Lian Guoshi had desperately wished he could simply disband Liu the Lion's entire army. He had known even then that moving Liu the Lion to Qinghai was nothing more than stalling for time while waiting for things to change.

The gamble was to place the fiercest rebel army in Shaanbei on the sea to rest and recuperate, and see whether he would first make thorough preparations in that land of hunger and cold, or whether the drought sweeping Shaanxi would pass first.

In truth, the strongest emotion in Lian Guoshi's heart as he led his troops to garrison Lanzhou was fury, because Shaanxi's intelligence on Xining had failed utterly, and they had not seen the slightest hint of this Hehuang war.

It was not only Liu Chengzu employing agents at the river mouth — the court's Shaanxi offices and the Lanzhou garrison had never stopped infiltrating Xining either. Though any official with a known name and surname who entered Xining vanished like a stone sinking into the sea, the Embroidered Uniform Guard disguised as common civilians could not be stopped.

But their spies could get no further than Xining Guard.

Ju'erwan had achieved nothing at all in sealing off spies, but its crackdown on smuggling was extremely fierce. Anyone who suddenly appeared would be treated as a smuggler, stopped, and seized, making it impossible to enter Ju'erwan at all.

And the intelligence from Xining Guard was almost entirely about Liu Chengzu and the chieftains scheming and struggling for power. Before this war began, the only hint of conflict was the chieftain Li Tianyu recruiting grain merchants to sell grain.

That was merely war preparation, and Lian Guoshi had thought the fighting would not begin until autumn at the earliest.

Who could have known that Liu Chengzong's puppet officials would already be installed as far as the Lanzhou river mouth!

Lian Guoshi analyzed the intelligence brought by the Hehuang licentiate Wei Yingshi, gave no indication of his thoughts, and only after the man had withdrawn did he summon He Huchen, Zhang Quanchang, Zhao Dayin, and the other commanders into his tent and inform them of all the intelligence.

When the commanders heard that Liu Chengzong was equalizing land distribution and giving out oxen and seed to the common people in the Hehuang Valley, they all frowned deeply. They detested it when the rebels did this sort of thing — it made it seem as if the rebels were the army of righteousness and they, the court's official troops, were the villains.

Then Lian Guoshi made his decision: "Even if smallpox is running rampant at the river mouth, we must advance the troops with all haste and strike straight at Hehuang. The rebel Liu is opening up farmland. The Hehuang Valley has ten thousand qing of fields, and if you add the mountain land, by next year his troops will be well-trained and his grain ample — then Lanzhou will be in grave peril!"

The commanders' expressions varied. He Huchen, the grand commander who had come from Ningxia, wished to urge the others not to engage Liu Chengzong in open battle, but the fact that he had been defeated head-on by Liu the Lion and had thrown away his elite troops made it too shameful for him to speak.

He Huchen had always brooded over his defeat by Liu the Lion. He believed his loss to Liu Chengzong had been a fluke — he blamed it entirely on that rain at Yellow Dragon Mountain.

And now there was this new fluke of smallpox. He Huchen desperately wanted to talk everyone out of it.

But before he could open his mouth, another grand commander who had come from Lintao, Wang Cheng'en, had already declared, "Right! Strike straight at Xining!"

Wang Cheng'en was the most impatient of all the grand commanders who had come to reinforce the five garrisons, because he was a Xining man himself. His home was at Wang Family Village, forty li east of Xining city. The moment Liu the Lion marched out of Xining, his home had fallen, and he was more anxious than anyone to send out the troops.

His old mother was still in Xining — who cared about smallpox?

"For now, I ask Commander Wang to shift his forces northward, scatter lime for ten li, and let the great army advance westward to suppress the rebels. Even if they contract the traveling pox, they can hold out for ten days. If he can attack us within ten days, can we five garrison border commanders not strike back within ten days as well?"

Just at that moment, an urgent dispatch arrived. The Minister of Rites, Yang He, was hurrying along the Great Wall toward Lanzhou. The court had sent him to inspect the defenses of Lanzhou under Prince Su's fief and to assess the situation in Qinghai.

Lian Guoshi, seated upright in the place of honor, frowned and shook his head: This old jinx has come again.