Chapter 411: Role Reversal

On the second day of the seventh month, in the sixth year of the Chongzhen reign.

By the banks of the Zhuanglang River northwest of Lanzhou, Bai Yiqing sat side by side with the cart driver on a donkey cart, gazing at Wild Fox Fort, which lay across the river valley not far away.

He wore no official robes, for that crimson color was far too conspicuous; he merely had on a square scholar's cap, a blue Daoist robe with a straight collar and wide lapels, and a pair of cloud-head shoes with shallow heels.

This ensemble, a youthful-leaning style popular in the late Ming, gave the middle-aged man a look of fluttering sleeves and dashing elegance.

The materials for these clothes and shoes were not expensive or fine — the shoes were cotton-faced, the garment single-layer fine hemp, and the styles were all common everyday wear for scholars and commoners among the populace, chosen purely for lightness and simplicity, to diminish the official air about him.

For Bai Yiqing was the Grand Coordinator of Gansu for the Great Ming.

Historically, candidates for Grand Coordinator of Gansu were mostly northerners, with few southerners, but Bai Yiqing was an exception — he hailed from Changzhou Prefecture in South Zhili, born of a prestigious family that, by his generation, had produced Presented Scholars for five generations straight.

More than half of Bai Yiqing's official career had been spent in Shaanxi, from Vice Surveillance Commissioner of Shaanxi and Military Defense Circuit Intendant of Xining, later in charge of the Guannei Circuit, to becoming Administration Commissioner of Shaanxi in the first year of Chongzhen, where his colleague was Hong Chengchou.

Because of his ample tenure in Shaanxi, his familiarity with the local customs and conditions of the northwest, and his fine administrative record, he was promoted to Grand Coordinator of Shaanxi.

He had come to this place because the impact of the Chahar tribe's westward migration was not something only Old Master Liu could see — in fact, serving officials in Shaanxi had access to even more firsthand information than Liu Xiangyu.

They needed no speculation to reach conclusions similar to Liu Xiangyu's, and even more comprehensive ones.

For Liu Xiangyu only knew that the righteous armies had turned to a disadvantage, but not when, nor where.

Bai Yiqing, however, knew that apart from the Eighth Great King and the Dashing King, thirty thousand government troops had already squeezed the main force of the roving bandits into the Shanxi region.

Regional Commander Ni Chong and Wang Pu led six thousand capital garrison troops stationed at Wu'an; Lu Xiangsheng was at Daming; Zuo Liangyu's reinforcement army was at Xinxiang; Deng Qi led Sichuan troops at Huixian; and Henan Assistant Regional Commander Chen Yongfu led native troops and local militia stationed at Henei on the north bank of the Yellow River.

From the strategic posture, it seemed the roving bandits would be annihilated any day now, yet precisely at this moment, Zuo Liangyu's army ceased its advance.

On one hand, the eunuch army supervisors whom the Chongzhen Emperor had dispatched to each army had arrived, leaving everyone somewhat disgruntled.

On the other hand, just this May, a hurricane struck the coast, and from June onward, while the Han River flooded, Henan was also battered by torrential rains, which finally brewed a flood disaster.

The forces of Zuo and Deng, operating in northeastern Henan, could only retreat into the mountains; they watched as the encirclement was about to form but could advance not an inch, forced to wait for the Shaanxi frontier troops to be transferred into Shanxi to deliver the fatal blow to the roving bandits.

Yet at this critical juncture, the Shaanxi frontier troops could not be moved on a whim — that depended on whether the officials and lords of Shaanxi would let them move.

And whether the officials and lords would let the frontier troops move depended on Liu Chengzong's mood.

Transferring Shaanxi's frontier troops into Shanxi was easy, but who would guard against Liu Chengzong?

Not to mention which was more harmful, Liu the bandit or the roving bandits; simply put, no matter how great the harm of the roving bandits, that harm was in Shanxi, whereas these Shaanxi officials were all in Shaanxi.

And Bai Yiqing, as Grand Coordinator of Gansu, had more worries than anyone else.

Over these past two years, he had watched with his own eyes as Liu Chengzong became the king of the northwest's rotten lands.

Apart from finding time amid his busy schedule to thrash the allied forces of the Three Frontiers and Five Garrisons, the rest of the time, the Marshal's Manor under Liu Chengzong's command had conquered every fightable piece of land around Xining and gathered every recruitable army under its own banner.

Within two thousand li around Xining, aside from the court's interior line from Lanzhou to Xi'an, the only geographical unit not in the hands of the Marshal's Manor was the Hexi Corridor.

In truth, Liu Chengzong's relentless territorial expansion was not the main reason Bai Yiqing felt such pressure.

Gansu was a military garrison through and through; compared to the interior, the region had a very strong martial tradition, and since the early Ming, it had been a primary theater of high-intensity warfare.

Since the Ming dynasty began, over two hundred and seventy wars had erupted in Gansu, averaging one major battle per year.

Precisely because of this, Gansu had never lacked battle-hardened generals or loyal and valiant soldiers willing to die — Liu Chengzong of the Marshal's Manor might be strong, but could the armies of Gansu really not handle him?

That was what Bai Yiqing thought at first, and he ordered the Gansu Garrison to reorganize its troops and repair its armaments, but sometimes these matters remained unknown until one looked — once he investigated, the Gansu Garrison was so rotten it was riddled with gaping holes, a shocking sight... they probably really couldn't handle the Marshal's Manor.

To put it plainly, in the entire Gansu Garrison, from top to bottom, there was not a single place that satisfied Bai Yiqing.

Armies need grain to eat, grain grows from the land, and the land in Gansu suffers from severe desertification — something no one could do anything about.

Bai Yiqing initially thought it was a natural disaster as well.

Later, he discovered a problem: in the Hexi region, the greatest problem they actually faced was man-made calamity.

The conflict between people and land in Hexi was not actually great; compared to other regions, its population was not large, at least not compared to ancient times.

The population here peaked in the middle of the Western Han, when there were seven hundred thousand households, and thereafter it cycled endlessly between decline, stagnation, and recovery.

In the Ming dynasty, however, population could not be measured by households, because the household-based conscription system and the corvée labor that enlarged households but conscripted single men led the common people to resist passively — their method of resistance was for several families of different surnames to merge into one household, resulting in the frequent phenomenon of dozens or even over a hundred people registered under a single household.

Although the authorities banned multiple surnames merging into one household, they could not ban a single surname from merging into one household; therefore, only the count of individuals was the accurate population figure for the Ming dynasty.

The population figure Bai Yiqing had was an extremely vague one million six hundred twenty thousand seven hundred forty-four individuals.

He knew this number was inaccurate, because it was the count obtained from the last population survey before Zhang Juzheng's death.

After that, the various guard and battalion offices and military forts across Gansu still nominally updated the Yellow Registers every ten years according to court law, but it was basically simple addition and subtraction to get the job done.

After ten years, add seven hundred twenty-four to the population, and submit it; another ten years later, subtract two hundred seventy-six from the previous decade's population, and submit it.

In any case, it was all done in a slapdash manner, just to get the job done.

Even though Bai Yiqing was the Grand Coordinator of Gansu, he still could not obtain an accurate population figure for Gansu, because if everyone used this addition-and-subtraction method to fob off the court, they would use the same method to fob him off.

He could only conclude that the population of Hexi had roughly recovered to Han dynasty levels, but the farmland... was nowhere near as extensive as in the Han dynasty. On the books, there were three million six hundred thousand mu of military farmlands, but in reality, less than half of the grain tax could be collected.

When Bai Yiqing wore his official robes and rode in a sedan chair to inspect, people took him only to wastelands, dry fields, and sandy lands; when he shed his official robes and searched on his own, he discovered that the military farmlands were all seized by officers and powerful families.

Those fields were not abandoned at all — they even used the sand-field method, and the harvests were excellent. In normal times, yields were fifty to eighty percent higher, and even when drought struck and other fields could only recover their seed, they could still harvest eighty or ninety jin of grain.

Moreover, they conscripted banner troops to farm, incurring almost no cost and paying no taxes, and arbitrarily altered irrigation channels, monopolizing water resources so that civilian fields went to waste.

The army had not even enough grain for a march; a campaign into Qinghai was utterly out of the question. Defending against Liu the bandit in Gansu by relying on terrain was something they could barely contemplate.

Because of the level at which Lord Bai Yiqing operated, it was difficult for him to even naturally encounter ordinary landlords, let alone members of the Three Tribulations Society at the very bottom of Gansu society — so much so that his perception of the lower-class commoners was locked away, and he had no idea what turbulent undercurrents were brewing beneath Gansu's stagnant surface.

His starting point for considering the problems of Gansu and the Marshal's Manor remained military.

The Marshal's Manor's intelligence on the Great Ming court's troop movements in the northwest had a certain lag, but it was hard to say they were completely ignorant.

The moment the court transferred Shaanxi troops into Shanxi, the Marshal's Manor would begin preparing for war the instant they received the intelligence, and a military clash between the two sides would be a foregone conclusion.

In that case, the Marshal's Manor had only three routes of attack.

The western route was to bypass the Qilian Mountains, pass through valleys or the great desert, and strike at Jiayu Pass; the central route was to cross the mountain ridges and passes of the Qilian Mountains, traversing the peaks to raid the interior; the eastern route was to pass through Hekou and advance northwest along the Zhuanglang River.

Without question, the western route was tantamount to wasting provisions and cutting off one's own retreat; the central route was tantamount to abandoning heavy equipment and courting death; only the eastern route was the path a normal person — or rather, a normal army — would take.

Bai Yiqing believed that this war was approaching step by step, and the fate of the dynasty and his own life and fortune all hung on a single point — Lanzhou.

With Lanzhou in the court's hands, even if the Marshal's Manor's army advanced north along the Zhuanglang River, its supply train would find it difficult to invade Gansu in force before besieging or even capturing Lanzhou.

But the current problem was that on the road section from Gansu to Lanzhou, the Hekou ferry where the Zhuanglang River merged into the Yellow River had been occupied by the Marshal's Manor after the great He-Huang War, cutting off the passage between Gansu and Lanzhou.

So Bai Yiqing wore plain clothes and appeared at Wild Fox Fort, sixty li northwest of the Lanzhou River Crossing Ferry — both to investigate military farms and troop conditions along the defense line deep among the people, and to request passage across the Yellow River into Lanzhou from the Marshal's Manor.

The journey had been safe enough. He brought only a single page boy and a driver who doubled as a guard, and nothing unexpected occurred. People took little interest in someone dressed like an old, perennial exam candidate.

But upon reaching this spot, a major problem loomed before him.

He had thought he would need to request passage from the Marshal's Manor sixty li further on at the river crossing. He never imagined that Wild Fox Fort, garrisoned by the Zhuanglang Garrison, had quietly changed its banners.

The red flags of the Marshal's Manor were actually flying above the fort.

Such a critical matter, and he, the Grand Coordinator of Gansu, knew absolutely nothing about it. If he had not come here in person, Bai Yiqing would still be kept completely in the dark!

Before his fury could erupt and he could order the donkey cart to turn back to the Zhuanglang Garrison to demand an accounting, the defending troops inside Wild Fox Fort had already come out. Several fast horses, trailing dust, bows drawn and arrows nocked. The leader, wearing a red-lacquered helmet with the character "Bravery" and a cloth-faced studded armor, shouted for them to halt.

In that moment, Bai Yiqing, his guard, and his page boy were all like startled little hares on the steppe, not daring to move a muscle.

This was not the guard's cowardice. The Grand Coordinator was pretending to be an ordinary scholar. For the driver to wear armor and carry bow, saber, and firelock would clearly defy all reason, and a driver in plain cloth armed only with a whip stood utterly helpless before several galloping cavalrymen — cavalrymen with bows, at that.

Fortunately, the driver, who had military experience, could still calmly apply his knowledge. He said to Bai Yiqing in a low voice, "My lord, aside from that leader, none of the others are veterans."

Bai Yiqing asked quietly, "Then, can we fight with all we have?"

The guard shook his head. This situation had nothing to do with courage or bravery. The disparity between the two sides was too great; there was simply no chance of success.

Bai Yiqing was not disheartened either. He merely nodded, signaling that he understood, then changed his expression entirely. Wearing an ingratiating look, he stepped down from the cart, cupped his hands, and asked, "Good sirs, brave warriors, may I ask why you have stopped this humble one?"

The soldier leading them looked down at him arrogantly from horseback and chuckled softly to those beside him: "Finally, one with guts dares to step forward."

With that, the soldier dismounted, stepped forward with a stern face and clasped fists, and asked him in a thick northern Shaanxi accent: "You look like a scholar. Coming from the north, did you encounter anyone claiming to be a Marshal's Manor soldier demanding taxes from you?"

Bai Yiqing first glanced back. To the north was the Zhuanglang Garrison's Red City Post, also called Red City Mound, where a hundred-household office was located. By all reason, this place should also be a hundred-household office, but now it had been seized.

He shook his head and said, "In answer to your question, sir, Red City Mound to the north is garrisoned by banner troops of the Zhuanglang Garrison. This humble one did not encounter any Marshal's Manor customs barrier. May I ask, sir, if this humble one wishes to pass through here and cross into Lanzhou, how much customs duty must be paid?"

The so-called customs duty referred to the paper-tax barriers, known among the common folk as excise barriers, primarily customs stations established along canals, the Yangtze River, and coastal regions, collecting passage fees.

Wild Fox Fort was no customs barrier, but Bai Yiqing reckoned that the Marshal's Manor, having risen from banditry, and now having their civilian levies stop him, most likely wanted to collect some travel fee.

The soldier wearing the "Bravery" helmet seemed thoroughly satisfied upon hearing this reply. He nodded and said, "At least they know their place. You may pass."

"Ah?"

Bai Yiqing was stunned. This was not what he had imagined at all.

The soldier had already pressed down on his saber, turned, and placed a hand on the saddle, preparing to head back into the fort. Hearing Bai Yiqing's stunned reaction, he could not help but mock him, asking, "Don't tell me you insist on giving us travel money? There are no tax posts all the way to Lanzhou, only a registration point at the ferry. The fare you must pay the boatman for the ride cannot be shorted."

"This humble one naturally knows that."

Bai Yiqing answered. By now, the unease and fear in his heart had vanished. Though these Marshal's Manor soldiers looked fierce, they harbored no intent to harm.

At this thought, his courage grew. He pressed further: "Sir, did something happen in the north for you to stop this humble one?"

The soldier turned around at this, shot him an impatient sidelong glare, and said irritably, "I told you to go, so go. Why so many questions?"

But then he seemed to think of something, and his expression softened slightly. He pointed to Wild Fox Fort behind him: "I am a hundred-household officer of the Marshal's Manor at the East Pass of the river mouth. The previous hundred-household here falsely claimed to be a Marshal's Manor officer, collecting taxes and extorting money from passing merchants and travelers, damaging the Great Marshal's reputation. I brought troops and wiped him out."

Having said this, he looked Bai Yiqing up and down and said, "By your appearance, you are a scholar. You likely have some friends in Lanzhou. When you pass through, tell them: Wild Fox Fort is the Marshal's Manor's northernmost fort on the Zhuanglang River. From here all the way to the river mouth, there are no tax posts."

"If you encounter anyone demanding taxes, they are certainly government troops impersonating us. Tell people not to refuse, lest they be murdered for their money. They may first give the man some coin, then come find me at Wild Fox Fort. I have my own methods to recover the money."

Bai Yiqing frowned upon hearing this and said, "Such a thing has happened?"

The soldier eyed him suspiciously, thinking to himself that when this old man frowned, he actually carried a bit of authority. He laughed and said, "Are you a village headman? You must not have been out much; your knowledge is far too limited."

"The He-Huang war has ended. Deserters and routed soldiers have fled all over the mountains and plains. In the hills around Bitter Water Post alone, there are seven men claiming to be chiliarchs of the Marshal's Manor, and one with just a few dozen men dares to call himself a commandant, plundering commoners and raiding merchant travelers. Even now they haven't all been wiped out. You knew none of this?"

Damn it all.

Bai Yiqing thought to himself, This is bad. The government troops have started pretending to be rebel soldiers, while the rebel soldiers are here upholding justice.

------ Off-topic ------

Good evening!