Chapter 422: The Best of Both Worlds

The realm had not yet fallen into chaos, but Shu was already in turmoil.

Chen Min filed his complaint at the yamen, Qin Keduo cursed and grumbled — Liu Chengzong believed every word both men spoke was true; they simply stood at different angles, and neither saw the full picture.

Nor did Liu Chengzong care about their personal feud. It was now the sixth year of Chongzhen; this great upheaval that began in Shaanxi and swept the realm had already lasted four years. Any grievance, any love or hatred, would be reduced to a muddled, unpayable debt in four years of chaos.

He only wanted to solve the problem.

First, he had to know where the problem lay. The teenage Qin Keduo could not give him an accurate answer to this question — only the licentiate Chen Min could help him.

But the Sichuan in Chen Min's account seemed worlds apart from the fertile land of heavenly abundance Liu the Lion remembered.

Chen Min used just four words: narrow land, crowded people.

Liu Chengzong, being an outsider, had a limited understanding of Sichuan's situation in recent years — at most, he knew of Yang Yinglong's rebellion decades ago, and She Chongming's uprising, which he had learned about from A Liu.

Beyond that, there were only minor, peripheral matters: the banner troops of Songpan Guard suffering humiliation at the hands of the Qiang, the lax combat readiness of the government forces at Yazhou.

People still believed Sichuan was different from Shaanxi — that without severe drought, its interior must be stable enough.

But in reality, after an all-night talk with Chen Min, a native scholar of Bazhou, and based on his recollections, Liu Chengzong had his attendants record a full seventeen pages on the situation in Sichuan.

That place truly was different from Shaanxi. In Shaanxi, many problems were born of poverty; in Sichuan, many problems were born of wealth.

The chaos in Sichuan could leave even a rebel king from Shaanxi like him utterly dumbfounded.

When Liu Chengzong analyzed matters, he liked to start from the contradiction between people and land. But in Sichuan, the people-land contradiction could not even be called land annexation — it should be called nationalization.

Take the land in Chengdu Prefecture: out of every ten mu, seven belonged to the Prince of Shu, and two belonged to the military.

As for that one remaining mu — surely it had to belong to the gentry, right? Everyone else became tenant farmers. But Sichuan's problem did not lie with the tenants.

As long as there were no natural disasters, the tenants actually had no great problem, because tenants were not the bottom of society — they were the mainstream.

Apart from a few small landlords who held one or two hundred mu but had no sons or relatives to work the land, the great landlords all set thresholds for taking on tenants — and the thresholds were very high.

Without an ox, farm tools, and family to help, renting thirty or fifty mu, even if a man were strong as an ox, he would work himself to death before he could plow it all.

Without the skill to farm, when the time came to deliver the grain and he could not pay up, the landlord took a loss. And if he was a local ruffian with no home or land, he could simply get up and run — and the landlord would swallow the loss in silence.

So to become a tenant, one first had to be a local whose background was thoroughly known; one also needed an ox, a full set of farm tools, the skill to work the land, and family at one's side. Not one of these could be missing.

Otherwise, only a fool would lease land to you.

Once a tenant, you created value: a small portion went to pay the emperor's taxes, a small half or even half went to the landlord, and the rest was your own.

And though a tenant might suffer oppression from the landlord, he could rely on the landlord's prestige to avoid certain informal local levies.

For example: if a local Gentleman Wang had friends visiting and lacked sedan-chair bearers, he might find two yamen runners to do the work. The runners, not wanting to do it themselves, would go to the countryside and find a village head: "Find me two bearers from your village — Gentleman Wang needs them."

The village head would approach a yeoman farmer. No threats, no cudgels — just a smiling "do me this favor." The yeoman, unable to think of a good excuse and too embarrassed to refuse, would go.

But if the village head approached a tenant, the tenant would also smile and say he could not help — if he went off to do other work, Goodman Li's fields would go to waste.

And the village head could do nothing about it.

Unless an economic crisis — a drought or flood — struck, they generally would not starve. At worst, they were the lower-middle stratum of society, better than some and worse than others, but absolutely not reduced to the bottom.

With so many people scraping by in all manner of trades — long-term laborers and day laborers, runners and peddlers, singers and matchmakers, pedicurists and barbers — no matter how you ranked the nine lowly orders, tenants never made the list.

But besides the land belonging to the princely estate, Sichuan had another social phenomenon unlike anywhere else: the local strongmen were extremely powerful.

People from other provinces entering Sichuan, and natives leaving it — in this relatively closed-off place, both were difficult to begin with. Before the Jiajing reign, if an official elsewhere heard he was being transferred to Sichuan and it was not a lucrative post, he would find ways to evade it.

If he absolutely could not evade it, he would delay his arrival as much as possible. Arriving sluggishly after a year or half a year was perfectly normal; nothing would come of it anyway.

It was not until the Jiajing reign, when the southern pirates and northern barbarians raged fiercely, that the atmosphere was renewed. Sichuan officials' time to assume office shrank from between half a year and two years down to within four months.

Throughout the Jiajing and Longqing reigns, when an old official was promoted or demoted, his successor would generally arrive that very month — a sign that the state machinery was running smoothly.

This state of affairs persisted into the Wanli reign; the deterrence of the Performance Evaluation Law still held, and officials could still assume office within the month. But... the Wanli Emperor simply gave up.

The promotion of state bureaucrats was a complex and precise matter. High-ranking posts were filled by recommendation; mid- and low-ranking posts relied on the unified grand selection.

So before each grand selection, the Ministry of Personnel would first send its recommendations for high officials to the emperor. Then mid-level officials would rotate, opening positions for lower officials — one link driving the next, setting the whole machine in motion before the grand selection was held.

With the very top giving up, the very bottom had no officials. The absence of chief governing officials in provinces, prefectures, subprefectures, and counties essentially plunged the Great Ming into anarchy.

But "anarchy" only meant the government was gone. Under these circumstances, the court still needed local support to wage war, and the authority the government was responsible for still remained.

Without a big government, Sichuan still ran smoothly as far as the court was concerned. The wars that needed fighting were fought without a problem — and won!

It was simply that power had changed hands, sinking down to the powerful clans or those who had held power all along.

But when a small government collided with the princely land-ownership system, the situation changed.

Without yeoman farmers, the tenants — the backbone of an agricultural society, these people who made an honest living — lost their chance to change their fate. The lack of local administrative control meant crooked paths grew wild and unchecked; powerful strongmen rapidly expanded their wealth by seizing public authority.

People vied in extravagance, simplicity abandoned. The rich held vast fields, the poor lacked even ground to stand on. In trade, they profited at others' expense; in business, they lent at crushing interest and called in debts ruthlessly. In society, honeyed words hid a heart of deceit; in disputes, tongues were swords. They gave free rein to greed, cruelty, and lechery; they schemed in the dark and struck when others were down. They burned with envy at another's success and gloated at another's misfortune.

In Chen Min's words, the harmony of village and hamlet gradually vanished; instead, morals decayed day by day and hearts grew daily more treacherous — to the point that fathers and sons turned on each other, brothers harmed one another, friends murdered friends, and husbands and wives wounded each other.

With hearts grown wicked, what the Sichuan people called the Four Scourges arose in response to the times.

These Four Scourges were: corrupt officials and venal clerks; scholarly bullies and powerful gentry; urban thugs and local tyrants; and yamen parasites and eunuch servants.

Cat and rat colluded, wallowing in the same mire. They seized local power and preyed upon the good. They ruined families and sold their children, swindled fortunes, destroyed scholarly prospects, took lives, violated women, and broke apart marriages. They themselves seized thousands of acres and thousands of halls, clad in brocade and fed on jade, while good and honest families wailed from cold and hunger.

Such was the scene. First came She Chongming sweeping through Jiangjin at Chongqing and Chengdu; then the White Lotus revolt in Guang'an in the seventh year of Tianqi; then the licentiates and scholars of Dazhou rising in uproar, beating dozens of yamen runners to death, cooking them alive over a fire, and swearing an oath to eliminate the Four Scourges.

Now there were five scourges — one more was the Yao-Huang Cudgel Bandits.

They were remnants of Wang Daliang of Hannan, who had risen in the first year of Chongzhen. After Wang Daliang was killed by Liu Yingyu, the Military Defense Circuit Intendant of Shangluo, in the second year of Chongzhen, the remnants fled into the mountains. At the time, they were just a gang of mountain bandits and robbers, using nothing but hewn wood for weapons and plundering traveling merchants — which is why the Sichuan people called them the Cudgel Bandits.

In the third month of the third year of Chongzhen, they passed from Long'an Prefecture through Jianzhou and were attacked by government troops. After that, the court established a garrison command at Guangyuan, with Vice Prefect Zhang Pengqi stationed to guard it.

In the fourth year of Chongzhen, the bandits' power swelled greatly, and they seized Kai County in Kuizhou. In the fifth year, they seized Xinning in Kuizhou.

They had barely struggled through to this year when the Yao-Huang Bandits took Daning County in Kuizhou. Then floods struck Hanzhong, making the mountains hard to survive in. They also encountered the great bandit Zhang Xianzhong, the Eighth Great King of the Western Camp, who rampaged with barely five hundred men. They heard that their old home of Shaanxi had seen no drought the previous year, and that the court's Supreme Commander was offering amnesty.

Yao Zhangru was tempted. Liu Chengzong was not the first person he contacted.

It was just that the amnesty offer was a farce.

They surrendered. The Shaanxi officials ordered them to gather firewood in the mountains for cooking on the road, and took away their bows and blades. They stayed in the mountains for a month. Then government troops from Sichuan and Shaanxi entered the mountains from north and south, preparing to slaughter them all there.

And here came the most absurd part: the Yao-Huang Bandits sensed something before the government troops closed the encirclement. They picked up their old pals — cudgels and stones — and routed the ambushing government forces.

The government troops were routed. The bandits seized their weapons, armor, and firearms. Only then did the survivors split into a loose alliance, headed by Yao Tiandong and Huang Long, with thirteen camp leaders as their support.

They had cut off their own road home. They could beat government troops once inside Sichuan, but they couldn't beat the common folk of northern Sichuan.

The common folk had firearms and armor, and they'd built forts, trapping them firmly in northern Sichuan. Tens of thousands of men could certainly take a fort, no problem — but when a few hundred went out to forage, they couldn't take the fort, and on top of that they'd eat plenty of bullets and cannonballs.

Precisely because of this, the moment village militia and armed peasants spotted the Shaking Yellow bandits, they killed them. And the moment the Shaking Yellow bandits spotted village militia and armed peasants, they killed on sight too, without asking where they came from.

When they finally managed to snatch back a little grain, their people got hit by Zhang Xianzhong.

Chen Min said Yao Zhangru had originally wanted to receive Zhang Xianzhong into Sichuan and join forces with them, but Zhang Xianzhong's troops ran into the great floods in Hanzhong and couldn't make it over to their side. The two sides only exchanged envoys, and it had originally seemed like negotiations were nearly settled.

No one expected that the moment the floodwaters receded, Zhang Xianzhong would turn on them without warning.

Liu Chengzong had always assumed Zhang Xianzhong's military discipline must be terrible, but in reality, according to Chen Min, the Eighth Great King kept especially tight control over his troops. His veteran soldiers numbered no more than five hundred, yet their combat strength was exceptionally fierce.

When they killed, they didn't blink at all. Several bands of the Shaking Yellow Thirteen Houses that had taken forts were wiped out without a sound. In a single day, within a hundred-li radius, they fought three battles in succession — bandit soldiers, their women, and their child conscripts were all beheaded.

It looked exactly like they'd been exterminated by government troops. At first, the many Shaking Yellow chieftains didn't even suspect that Zhang Xianzhong had struck first. They still wanted to send someone to warn Zhang Xianzhong that troops had entered the mountains, but when they sent men over, they discovered the place was empty — the men gone, the mountain deserted.

The Eighth Great King had already fled!

All that remained on the mountain was a heap of grain, fodder, and equipment that couldn't be taken away and had been burned or smashed.

Only afterward did the Shaking Yellow bandit horde belatedly get word: the court had transferred Qin Liangyu, the Shizhu Tusi from the Liaodong front, back to Sichuan. That was why Zhang Xianzhong wouldn't join forces with them — he'd slipped away toward Huguang, planning to detour into Henan to link up with the Sweeping King, the Dashing General, and the others.

The Shaking Yellow bandit horde was furious, but there was absolutely nothing they could do about it.

A man's name is like a tree's shadow — everyone who'd ever crossed blades with Qin Liangyu in this world was already buried beneath the yellow earth. The Shaking Yellow bandit horde had been forced into a dead end.

"Father, elder brother, please look."

Inside the Marshal's headquarters, Liu Chengzong spread out the map of northern Sichuan that Chen Min had drawn. Pointing to the Hannan mountain range that Yao Zhangru occupied, he said, "If Qin Liangyu leads her troops back, they'll be caught between a rock and a hard place."

In the hall, Liu Chengzu, who had just been summoned back from the river mouth, let out a laugh. "Their troops are poor, their grain is short, and their hearts aren't united — what do they have to fight the Shizhu troops in the mountains?"

"It's true the Shizhu Sichuan troops are expert at foot combat." Liu Chengzong said, "But if Qin Liangyu really is transferred back to Sichuan, there's no need to fight them in the mountains at all. They only need to station the White-Pole troops at Guangyuan and Bazhou, and have Shaanxi transfer another army to garrison Hanzhong."

As he spoke, Lion Liu spread his hand over the map, enclosing the mountain region the Shaking Yellow bandits occupied. "In half a year to a year, they'll have eaten every blade of grass in those mountains and suffocated to death in the great Hannan range."

Liu Laoye shook his head. "With so many mountains and rivers clustered together, it shouldn't be hard for them to flee toward Huguang."

"It's very hard, Father."

Liu Chengzong sighed. "They're not us. Wherever we go, the common folk who've benefited stay where they are — they all bring us word."

"They're bandits, pestilent thieves who harm the people. Wherever they go and run into common folk, those folk will report them to the government troops. Thirty thousand men snaking through the mountains — where can they run? Even if they break out under pursuit, I'm afraid only two or three thousand would be left."

Liu Chengzong let out a laugh. "And if they really dare run for Huguang, carrying their money and their pretty women — wouldn't Zhang Xianzhong just turn back around and slaughter them clean?"

Liu Laoye looked astonished. "They're all fellow provincials from Shaanxi — surely it wouldn't come to brothers fighting brothers?"

Liu Chengzong shook his head and said no more on that subject.

The Marshal's Manor might not have two hundred thousand troops, but just counting its thirty thousand combat soldiers — when Yao Zhangru sent a letter asking to have thirty thousand bandit troops submit to the Marshal's Manor, Lion Liu still had to weigh it carefully in his mind: could he really whip this bunch into shape?

Zhang Xianzhong's five hundred combat troops came and went like the wind; his entire force couldn't have exceeded three thousand. That was the most comfortable number for maneuvering troops — able to fight, able to run. Could he really keep Yao Zhangru's crew under his thumb?

Besides, when it came to pure plunder, three thousand elite, fierce soldiers were enough to rampage across the realm.

Whoever could beat them couldn't catch them; whoever could catch them couldn't beat them. A city that three thousand men couldn't take — adding thirty thousand bandit troops wouldn't take it either.

For the same plunder, why split it with thirty thousand men?

Not to mention a blood feud had already formed. In Lion Liu's thinking, either don't make a feud — and if you do make one, the moment you get the chance, you finish the enemy off.

Liu Chengzong simply said, "Their being driven into a dead end is a good thing. I plan to send Qin Keduo back and have him tell Yao Zhangru: if he's sincere about submitting, there's no need to send gold and silver. Let him come to me himself and meet face to face."

Liu Chengzu shook his head and frowned. "You really want to pacify and recruit these cudgel bandits? I think it'd be better to wait until next year or the year after. There's bound to be another great upheaval in Sichuan. When the time comes, we march the army in, wipe them out, and win the people's hearts completely — perfect."

"Win the people's hearts completely — I'm afraid that's not so certain. I thought the same at first, but right now Sichuan is too chaotic, and the temperament of the native Sichuan people is far too fierce and unyielding."

Liu Chengzong said, "By the time the various big and small chieftains in Sichuan have grown into a real force, they won't submit to us old Shaanxi hands either. I'm afraid that when we enter Sichuan then, it'll be even more chaotic than it is now."

"Besides, if we wait a few more years, the sons of Sichuan will suffer a great deal more. Whether or not we can enter Sichuan, my thinking is that next year we march the army east — take Lanzhou, Hanzhong, and Guyuan, then press on toward Ningxia, Guanzhong, and Sichuan. These men can help me take Hanzhong."

"Round up these cudgel bandits, select three or four thousand to form up into the army — the obedient ones get sent back to the old home to farm; the disobedient ones get sent to the underworld to reincarnate. The best of both worlds."

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Good evening!