Chapter 483: The Upper Strategy

No one ever complains about a free city.

Just as Zhou Riqiang was explaining the full story of Hami's surrender, staff adjutant He Huchen of the central army walked over and cut off their conversation. Cupping his fists, he said, "Marshal, the horses have been changed."

"War waits for no one — give the order to strike camp and march east." Liu Chengzong finished speaking, glanced up at the sun, then turned to Zhou Riqiang. "General Zhou, you haven't eaten on the road here either. Ride west with me for now, grab something to eat in the saddle — I still have a message for you to take back."

The troops assembled at once, leaving only a small detachment to pack up the camp. Soon the Tiger Guard Battalion had formed its marching column and set out across the endless yellow sands.

Zhou Riqiang followed Liu Chengzong for a long time. Although he was only twenty-some paces behind him, he never heard Liu Chengzong summon him. All he could see was the figure ahead, body rising and falling with the horse's motion, staring wordlessly at the three marching columns spread across the desert.

He had no idea how much time had passed — he guessed they had already covered four li — when he finally heard a bodyguard say, "General Zhou, the Marshal requests you come forward."

Once he spurred his horse ahead and the surrounding bodyguards bearing banners fanned out to the front, rear, left, and right, opening a ten-horse-length security cordon in the midst of the march, Liu Chengzong finally spoke. "Go back and tell my brother: if Babai has surrendered, so be it. No garrison, no taxes in Hami, but forcibly requisition the best weapons, soldiers, and horses, and head for the Tianshan Mountains as quickly as possible."

Zhou Riqiang still had not fully grasped it. He cupped his fists and answered, "Yes!" Then he asked, "Your servant has heard that Turpan is currently conscripting and building its army. Which general does the Marshal intend to transfer to garrison Hami?"

"No one," Liu Chengzong said, shaking his head expressionlessly. "I have no intention of starting a war with Turpan."

"This…"

Zhou Riqiang had never expected Liu Chengzong to take such an attitude toward Hami. He said urgently, "That is Hami! In a hundred years, Hami has never been as easy to take as it is today. I implore the Marshal to reconsider!"

This was the great cause that made his heart surge — the recovery of Hami. Just as with Hami's fate under the Great Ming in the past, Zhou Riqiang absolutely refused to let it become a flower in a mirror, a moon reflected in water.

In truth, in Zhou Riqiang's view, only the Marshal's Office had the ability to recover Hami now. He hoped to persuade Liu Chengzong to take Hami seriously.

Liu Chengzong, however, clearly did not take his persuasion very seriously. He merely smiled, fished a piece of dried meat from his saddlebag, and placed it in his mouth, chewing quietly.

The main force marched in silence. The warhorses' hooves struck the sand in rhythmic cadence, making the riders' armor and weapons clank against one another. Amid the rumble of supply carts and the neighing of horses, Zhou Riqiang burned with impatience.

Only after Liu Chengzong had swallowed the dried meat did he say, in an unhurried tone, "I recall General Zhou as a man of foresight and deep planning. This time you're letting emotion get the better of you — though that's not a bad thing."

In truth, deep down, Liu Chengzong was very pleased with Zhou Riqiang's attitude.

His own mind was filled entirely with army provisions, troop strength, tactics, and victory — precisely so that, under the conditions he created, others could think about things more important than just a mouthful of food.

Recovering lost territory was a more important thing. Completing the unfinished great cause of the previous dynasty was an even more important thing.

"Babai has surrendered, but a minor noble's word does not decide Hami's fate. Turpan will eventually take Hami back."

Having said that, Liu Chengzong shifted his tone, his face brimming with confidence. "Of course, however many times they take it, we can take Hami back just as many times. It's just that…"

Hope rekindled on Zhou Riqiang's face. "It's just that…?"

"It's just that that's not the crux of the Hami problem. The crux is a simple arithmetic problem."

Liu Chengzong looked at Zhou Riqiang and smiled. "General Zhou is not well-versed in military manuals, but your arithmetic is excellent. Let me put it this way: I've seen Yarkand's guns and armor on the Oirats. Their forged armor, bows, and blades are decent — their strength lies in close combat, their weakness in firearms and cannon."

Actually, the firearms were not necessarily short. He had seen both Yarkand's self-made muskets and purchased muskets in the hands of Baatur Khung Taiji — all quite long. It was just that the self-made ones had slightly inferior craftsmanship and used slightly inferior gunpowder.

Individual firearms were an advantage of the Central Plains dynasties, because firearms in this era had not yet developed to the point of rendering all other weapons and armor obsolete. Their one irreplaceable advantage was that they were simple to manufacture and use, making them the easiest way to rapidly form an army.

The bureaucratic centralization of the Central Plains dynasties, their enormous handicraft industry, and their vast population were the greatest advantages in using firearms. In the vast majority of the world — tribal noble or feudal noble societies that lacked a mature system for managing artisans and had not achieved centralized power — on what basis could one even speak of standardization?

Of course, this did not mean that non-standardized firearms were necessarily inferior. Firearms of all types were, broadly speaking, much of a muchness.

The human body is far too fragile in the face of gunpowder weapons. Even a two-kick firecracker, paired with a small stone and made with no lethal intent whatsoever, can blow a person to death.

Let alone one deliberately fitted with a tube and stuffed with an iron ball — long or short, far or near, they all kill.

The Marshal's Office's advantage lay in the fact that Liu Chengzong understood better than anyone that the development of firearms and the development of handicraft industry were inseparable. By using the craftsmen who had fled the Central Plains, he had rapidly established a relatively vast and complete gun-manufacturing system in Qinghai.

This determined that in the northwest, any khanate of roughly the same size as the Marshal's Office could not possibly have more guns than he did… not to mention that Yarkand's size was far smaller than the entire Marshal's Office, almost comparable to Xining Prefecture alone.

"Turpan can mobilize twenty to thirty thousand troops. Hami is a small city with poor terrain, though its saving grace is that it's easy to defend. It would require at least one battalion to garrison and defend, and you'd also need to guard against internal collusion and external attack — and what if the enemy simply doesn't come to attack you?"

Having said this, Liu Chengzong tossed the problem to Zhou Riqiang. "Where will the provisions for three thousand men come from? You do the math. If you can work it out, I'll allocate three thousand men for you to hold Hami. If you can't, then go and do as I said and tell my brother."

Zhou Riqiang had thought the matter far too simple.

In the heat of passion, people easily let their blood rush to their heads and perform extraordinary feats — just like Zhou Riqiang, the first Han general in a hundred years to set foot on the walls of Hami.

This general did not have many troops under his command. The eighteen Mongol Arhats of the Naval Office, over a hundred shipwrights, and three hundred Mongol sailors — every one of them, at his call, had donned armor and taken up weapons, ready to defend that small city to the death.

He had thought that with the Marshal's Office's formidable military strength, fighting at Hami, as long as they could hold out until the main army arrived with relief, they could easily sweep away the forces Turpan had assembled.

But war is not simple subtraction.

How many troops could hold Hami? How long would it take to transfer those troops into Hami? If the enemy did not come, how long would they have to garrison it? How many men would it take to transport the provisions to sustain the garrison, and where would the grain come from? All of this required precise calculation.

Transporting grain was Zhou Riqiang's core duty; calculating the wastage of army provisions along the supply route was also an essential skill for a local civil official.

He quickly ran the numbers in his head and soon arrived at an embarrassing figure.

Under the feudal fief system, Hami, with a population of less than ten thousand, had no capacity to support a standing army of three thousand. Under the guard-and-battalion system, Suzhou was already strained to its limit supplying the Suzhou Guard. It had the manpower and transport capacity to move grain, but no grain to move.

Meanwhile, the three places that lived by herding — Chijin Guard, Dunhuang, and Guazhou — together had fewer than ten thousand people. Feeding themselves was the best they could do; transporting grain was out of the question.

The only place the Marshal's Office controlled that had surplus grain was Hehuang. Although the distance was extreme, up to that point, transporting grain was still relatively easy.

Army provisions would have to rely on external transport. An ox cart carried five hundred jin of grain and traveled thirty li a day. The journey from New City to Hami would take three months. Even if the oxen grazed off the land every day, by the time they reached Hami, the oxherds, carters, and armed escort personnel would have eaten four hundred jin of the grain. At least one hundred jin would still arrive.

The real difficulty was exactly what Liu Chengzong had said: if the enemy did not come, how long would the troops have to garrison?

For every single day they were stationed there, three thousand troops would consume the food of fifteen thousand men.

There was no need to guard against thieves for a thousand days. Guard against thieves for three hundred days, and the Marshal's Office's grain reserves would be dragged down and ruined by Hami.

The fire in Zhou Riqiang's heart went out. Liu Chengzong smiled slyly. "Better to listen to me. Brother Zhou, there's no need to lose heart. I have three strategies — upper, middle, and lower. Garrisoning Hami and fighting Turpan is the lower strategy."

Zhou Riqiang's face lit up. "Then may I ask the Marshal, what is the middle strategy?"

He did not ask about the upper strategy, because these three strategies — upper, middle, and lower — usually followed a certain convention.

The lower strategy was foolish and naive, treating the symptoms but not the root cause. The upper strategy was excellent and perfect, but extremely difficult to execute. Therefore, when advisors presented plans, they usually hoped the ruler would choose the middle strategy.

His reaction, however, made Liu Chengzong pause for a moment — because he was the ruler and had no need for such games. He had hoped Zhou Riqiang would ask about the upper strategy.

So Liu Chengzong's response was very flat. "No garrison, no taxes. Hami remains as it is. Negotiate peace with Turpan, open markets, and in exchange obtain nominal rule."

Zhou Riqiang sighed. "And what if Turpan refuses to negotiate peace?"

Liu Chengzong was amused by this counter-question. He let go of the reins and spread his hands from horseback. "Then doesn't that just toss the problem to Turpan? They would have to garrison Hami, transport grain to Hami, and still guard against me leading an attack. By this time next year, they'd be dragged down and ruined."

Liu Chengzong spread his arms with an air of indifference. "The major cities and strongholds of the Yarkand region are all oases encircling a great desert, with poor east-west communication. Turpan, too, is just a few oases in the Gobi. Whether Yarkand dispatches a large army or Turpan mobilizes its forces, it's no easier than the Marshal's Office sending troops."

"On the Hami question, the circumstances both sides face are actually the same. One side always has to concede. The Great Ming conceded for a hundred years; now it's their turn to concede."

Liu the Lion spoke with ease, but his words left Zhou Riqiang deep in thought, inwardly marveling as if at a revelation from heaven.

He had known about Hami ever since his student days, but the Hami he understood back then was not this desolate, sparsely populated lonely city in the desert — it came from scholars' concrete laments over the nation's declining strength.

In truth, even the tutor who had given Zhou Riqiang his first lessons had never seen what Hami was actually like.

It was not until Ba Bai surrendered and Zhou Riqiang climbed onto the battlements of Hami, relying on the strong sailors from the Naval Command as interpreters to chat with the common folk of Hami, that he gained a rough understanding of the Western Regions in this era.

Even so, his knowledge of Yarkand remained limited, and he was even less able to put himself in their shoes to grasp the difficulties Yarkand faced in mobilizing troops.

Yet Liu Chengzong, who had clearly never been to the Western Regions, could rattle off the geographical environment of Yarkand as if he knew it by heart, and could even base the Marshal's Headquarters' strategic deployments on it — this clearly showed a deeply resolute mind... but where did that resolve come from?

This was not the first time Zhou Riqiang had questioned his own life. Over the years, from Liu Chengzong's mouth had come not only predictions of the Great Ming's decline and the rise of Jianzhou, but also accurate descriptions of the terrain and topography of Mobei, Liaodong, Qinghai, Ü-Tsang, Sichuan, and the Western Regions — he had even told Baatur Khong Tayiji that there was a Ural Mountains to the northwest.

At the same time, Zhou Riqiang felt relieved. Since Liu Chengzong had already grasped the geography of the Western Regions, he would absolutely not lack ambition for other people's lands.

So, cupping his hands atop his horse, he asked, "This subject dares to ask, Marshal, what is the best strategy?"

"Ha, I already told you the best strategy long ago."

Liu Chengzong let out a rather self-satisfied laugh and said, "Have my brother not garrison troops in Hami, not levy taxes in Hami, leave everything as it was, but also not negotiate peace with Turpan. He should simply forcibly conscript Hami's best weapons, soldiers, and horses, and head for the Tianshan Mountains as quickly as possible."

Zhou Riqiang's mind was still filled with the enormous grain wastage from long-distance transport, and his thoughts had not yet cleared. He asked, "The Marshal means to wear them down?"

"It wouldn't be wrong for you to understand it that way."

Liu Chengzong said, "Jiang Wei defended Hanzhong, yet Deng Ai crossed the Yinping Trail and destroyed Shu. Liu Shan opened the city gates of Chengdu and offered surrender, while the Jiange Pass in Hanzhong was never even taken by Wei. If Hami is not easy to resolve, then resolve the whole of Yarkand. Once Yarkand crumbles, Hami will naturally be solved with ease."

"But that is a matter for later. What matters most right now is the Tianshan Army. The man who truly decides Hami's fate is not Ba Bai, but Baatur Khong Tayiji and my brother. The key to changing the situation in Outer Northwest lies in their hands."

As Liu Chengzong spoke, the smile on his face gradually faded. In a solemn tone, he said to Zhou Riqiang, "The words that follow, you must convey to my brother when you return. The impact of the Qinghai campaign is fermenting. The balance of power among the Oirat will be reshuffled with the arrival of the Tianshan Army. Whether Baatur can use my elder brother's Tianshan Army to stabilize the situation — that is the true priority that will profoundly affect the structure of Outer Northwest."

"Hami is not important, nor is shipbuilding. These are matters for Baatur Khong Tayiji to worry about. You, my elder brother, and Brother Zhou need only exercise the power of the Great Khan among the Oirat."

"The Marshal's Headquarters is not an external ally for the Dzungars to annex the other tribes, but the master of the Four Oirat Tribes — supporting the weak against the strong. Do you understand?"

Zhou Riqiang's scholarly decorum vanished as a classic curse burst from his lips. He thought to himself, when Baatur Khong Tayiji was here, that was not how the matter was discussed!

"So surprised?"

Liu Chengzong asked expressionlessly, then said, "I have never heard that the Oirat would obey a Great Khan. You are to change the Tianshan from feudal to commandery-county administration. Take a line one thousand li northwest of Ili as the boundary — within those thousand li, establish prefectures and counties."

"Once you have stabilized the Oirat situation, issue a proclamation in my name to the Oirat. Regardless of great or minor nobles, jaisang and darkhan, herders and horse-slaves, even able-bodied women — the lands to the west shall belong to whoever conquers them. Beyond the thousand li northwest of Ili, let them race their horses and stake their claims."

"When commanders lead troops on western expeditions, the Marshal's Headquarters will, through trade, provide the necessary firearms and warships as support. When land is conquered, report it to the Tianshan Office, and the Tianshan Office will report back to me. Titles of nobility will be conferred and fiefs granted, using the wondrous craftsmanship of the Central Plains to aid them in holding those lands in perpetuity."

Liu Chengzong had taken a long, roundabout path with his words, only to return to Hami at the end. He said, "Hami lies precisely on the route these Oirat warriors must take to sell furs and buy firearms. Do you think we still need to worry about it? What you should be worrying about is the entire Western Regions!"