Chapter 491: The Surging Torrent

In the foothills along the Tao River, under the jurisdiction of the Taozhou Guard Military-Civilian Command, there stood a Zhuoni official stockade — and that was where Zhang Xianzhong was hiding right now.

The chieftain of the Zhuoni stockade was surnamed Yang, a family name bestowed by the Ming Dynasty's Martial Ancestor Emperor; originally merely one of the many tribal leaders in Taozhou, during the reign of the Divine Ancestor Emperor he received an oral decree to command the wild tribes of the forests, becoming the uncrowned king of all the tribes along both banks of the Tao River.

This generation's chieftain was called Yang Guolong, very young, having only inherited the position at the end of the Tianqi era; as far as the imperial court was concerned, Yang Guolong was an utterly unremarkable chieftain, so unremarkable as to be almost useless — but to the thirty thousand tribal subjects under his jurisdiction, Yang Guolong was a great chieftain worthy of comparison with his grandfather.

To live in this era was in itself a tremendous misfortune; Yang Guolong had inherited his father's rank and succeeded as chieftain only nine years ago, yet in those nine years he had encountered more problems than many of his ancestors had faced in a lifetime.

At the very start of his rule, the drought in Shaanxi brewed a massive uprising; after Wang Daliang's defeat, routed soldiers and bankrupt peasants flooded into the chieftain's domain, and hard on their heels Liu Chengzong seized control of He-Huang and fought the court year after year.

The influx of Han people onto both banks of the Tao River brought the chieftain intractable problems of governance on the one hand, but on the other hand it also brought the tribal people technology and ideas from beyond the mountains — an earth-shaking transformation that could easily bring revolution to the chieftain's domain.

When Yang Guolong's ancestor met a Sakya Geshe during the Yuan dynasty, he likened the situation he faced to "meeting a flood crest"; at this very moment, Yang Guolong too saw the flood crest come surging and crashing down from the high mountains.

No one could know the shifting course of the world's great currents in this chaotic age of armies clashing like raging torrents from every direction — Yang Guolong did not know either — but he did know that a chieftain who tried to block the torrent with his own strength would only be shattered to pieces; only a chieftain who threw himself into the current and followed its flow could flourish and prosper.

But everyone understands the grand principle — who can actually tell which is the true torrent and which is the countercurrent?

He therefore resolved to wait for the dust to settle, and while the Ming court was too consumed by internal chaos to attend to border affairs, he outwardly defended his territory in self-preservation with feigned compliance, while inwardly conquering rivals and annexing weaker neighbors — staging a fine drama on the stage of Taozhou.

Toward the bankrupt peasants and Han rebel soldiers who fled to Taozhou, Yang Guolong turned none away, allocating them wasteland to reclaim and cultivate; they paid no taxes or grain levies, but had to conduct trade for the chieftain's yamen, serve as teachers, and provide military service — so that within just a few short years, Han people in Taozhou came to occupy one-tenth of the Zhuoni chieftain domain's total population.

The year of the great He-Huang battle, the court's transfer order had barely reached Taozhou when Yang Guolong mobilized his troops with great fanfare — yet from the moment the Marshal's Command repelled the allied forces of the five garrisons and led troops to threaten Lanzhou and tear down Xigu City, he never once marched his soldiers out of Taozhou.

From that time on, relying on the geographical advantages of mountains high and emperor far away, Taozhou's poor infrastructure, and difficult roads, Yang Guolong never picked a side between the Marshal's Command and the Ming court; every time Shaanxi summoned him to mobilize his army, he used the court's conscription as a pretext to buy up troops and farmland from surrounding tribes and native officials on a grand scale — and mobilized his army.

But once mobilized, that army could never march beyond the Tao River.

At that time, the Zhuoni chieftain domain still had three types of land policy: military-service land, yamen land, and incense-offering land.

The subjects who farmed military-service land bore relatively low grain taxes; calculated per household, each household paid one dou of grain and one cartload of hay per year, and each village supplied one live pig — but every household had to bear military service.

Yamen land was divided into two kinds: one kind was allotted to subjects, who paid grain at the same rate and had to bear labor service and miscellaneous corvée for the chieftain's yamen, but did not bear military service. The other kind was granted to the chieftain's kinsmen or headmen, functioning as minor feudal lords who each collected their own taxes.

Incense-offering land was the private property of the monasteries.

By means of purchasing military-service land, marriage alliances, military expeditions, warfare, and other methods, the Zhuoni chieftain's territory grew ever larger and his tribal soldiers ever more numerous — yet they were either building roads or erecting bridges, and later they built water tunnels, city walls, passes, embankments, and renovated the Zhuoni walled city that Yang Guolong's grandfather Yang Zhen had constructed.

It was not until this year, when warfare erupted again and the tribal soldiers of Zhuoni Stockade truly had nothing left to build, that they built yet another King Gesar Hall, inside which the statue enshrined was Lord Guan — belonging to a new architectural school of the Zhuoni chieftain domain that blended Han and Tibetan elements.

His territory stretched westward, facing Chief Chen of the Marshal's Command at Octagonal City across the mountains; eastward it pressed all the way to Minzhou Guard; to the north it confronted the Marshal's Command's Lintao Brigade garrison across the mountains; to the southeast it directly bordered the native-official domains of Songpan.

But the expansion of territory also inevitably exposed Chief Yang's domain to even greater shocks.

First was religion: they had believed in the Sakya school for several hundred years, but the upheaval in Kangning Prefecture sent an intermittent stream of monks fleeing over snowy mountains and grasslands to seek refuge in Taozhou.

This should have been a good thing for Chief Yang in itself; although the spread of various sects brought enormous hidden dangers to chieftain rule, with the various headmen engaging in open strife and covert struggle due to their conversion to different sects, and vast amounts of land and wealth having to be shared with the monasteries... monks meant knowledge.

Monks did not mean merely scriptural learning — they also meant writing, woodblock printing, medicine, pharmacology, astronomy, and law.

For the entire chieftain domain, over the centuries, knowledge had been the most precious of things, and for it the whole chieftain domain had paid an unimaginable price.

It began with paper: for people to become literate, paper was needed; the Zhuoni domain suffered a severe shortage of paper, having long purchased it from places like Lintao, Longxi, and Qin'an — printing a single book required paying an enormous price.

And maintaining the temples required paying costs that were even harder to imagine; never mind the wealth the temples occupied — the golden roofs and Buddha statues needed for temple construction alone required vast amounts of copper, and the Zhuoni domain neither produced copper nor possessed smelting technology, while its western, southern, and eastern regions were all mountains without roads.

The copper roofs and Buddha statues of every single temple had to be purchased from the lama temples beyond Zhangjiakou, then transported all the way back.

For the sake of knowledge, no price was too great to bear — that was how it had been for centuries.

Yet by Yang Guolong's generation, a small problem had appeared in the Zhuoni domain: his territory contained several thousand Han people, all of Shaanxi rebel or Lanzhou refugee origin, who now had farmland on both banks of the Tao River and had formed four market towns and established fourteen villages.

In the past, there had always been Han people fleeing official taxes and corvée who ran into the mountains to become tribesmen, but those were solitary individuals; once in the mountains, they followed local customs and became tribesmen — at most a craftsman with a few extra skills, incapable of causing much impact.

But this time they came in groups, some even moving their entire clans into the mountains, and forming villages made all the difference.

Almost from the very first day the villages took shape, paper mills, brick kilns, coal kilns, woodworking shops, blacksmiths, medical clinics, and printing houses all sprang up at once; every household saw men tilling and women weaving, continuously producing copperware, ironware, woodenware, pottery, farming tools, paper, books, textiles, even clothing and weapons.

There was even a licentiate who persuaded him to fund the establishment of a chieftain official school.

The knowledge that monks could provide suddenly ceased to be precious — instead, the wealth, land, and population they occupied glared so piercingly!

At this point, Yang Guolong merely felt doubts about the meaning of the monasteries' existence, but at least supporting monks still carried some significance in terms of religious renown and enhancing reputation, and thereby expanding political influence — so he had not made up his mind; after all, it was a centuries-old tradition, and it did not necessarily have to end with him.

Just as one must wait for the torrents to surge and clash before recognizing who is the true Son of Heaven, Yang Guolong's view of the temples was the same — only by waiting could one discern in whose hands the true scriptures of genuine insight truly lay.

And then the external support for every sect vanished; the monks who had gone on pilgrimage to Ü-Tsang never returned, and those who wished to follow in their footsteps discovered that the road into Tibet had been cut off — cut off in every direction.

If they crossed snowy mountains and traversed grasslands, what awaited them were the Mongol-armed tribal soldiers of the Marshal's Command roaming at Octagonal City; if they struggled into Sichuan and headed straight for Yazhou, what awaited them were the Ming-armed tribal soldiers of the Marshal's Command at Dajianlu.

At that time, Yang Guolong had not yet realized the gravity of the problem; the chieftain's yamen, from top to bottom, merely felt that they had fallen behind the times — what kind of sect was this Marshal's Command, to be so popular?

After all, for chieftains and headmen in their sealed-off environment, this sense of being left behind was an inescapable part of life.

Waiting always yields brilliant blossoms; the various sects did not make Yang Guolong wait too long — the Güshi Khan of the Khoshut, who revered the Gelug school, led a great army into Qinghai; while the Khoshut and Dzungars besieged Octagonal City on the other side of the mountains, Yang Guolong on this side of the mountains announced on the spot the conversion of his entire domain, embracing the Gelug school.

Ü-Tsang was as far away as the edge of heaven, but the Güshi Khan's Mongol soldiers were right before his eyes.

Yet before the full-scale conversion was even complete, the Marshal's Command dispatched troops and, like snapping rotten wood, defeated and incorporated the Oirat alliance; it was only then that Yang Guolong realized — was there not a possibility that the very force cutting off the road into Tibet was this Marshal's Command?

The meaning of the temples' existence was utterly gone; the Zhuoni chieftain domain had been completely surrounded by these ancestor-worshipping Han people.

An unimaginable colossus revealed itself before Chieftain Yang Guolong with the emergence of Dunta Ulus, and he watched cautiously as the monster coiled at his side grew, prudently selecting from it wisdom beneficial to himself.

The Han people brought rapid prosperity and development to the chieftain domain, but they also subjected the feudal chieftain economy, long protected by the Ming dynasty, to the impact of the righteous army's ideology of equalizing land.

By the time the Marshal's Command began equalizing land and distributing fields, Yang Guolong already ruled all of Taozhou; from a tiny domain of eight stockades and thirty thousand people, rapid expansion had made him a great chieftain of twenty-eight stockades, three hundred seventy tribes, and one hundred twenty thousand tribal subjects — his registered tribal and Han soldiers guarding the passes in all directions alone numbered two thousand two hundred.

Although he had never from start to finish submitted a memorial or offered tribute to the Marshal's Command to express submission, he had specially dispatched a headman to Hezhou for the express purpose of spying on the Marshal's Command's cultural, economic, and land policies in He-Huang, and had even bought potatoes and corn grown in He-Huang from the common people.

Just last autumn, one month after the land distribution in He-Huang achieved an enormous harvest, the Zhuoni chieftain of Taozhou directly copied the Marshal's Command's land-equalization policy and administrative divisions wholesale; while tearing down the great temples, he simultaneously organized five towns, twenty townships, and two hundred bao, distributing land to the tribal people and carrying out collective farming organized by township and bao.

This was not because Yang Guolong could not withstand pressure from his subjects and muddle-headedly copied everything in its entirety.

Rather, he had taken the Marshal's Command's land policy and studied it for an entire month, and from the bottom of his heart he agreed with Liu Chengzong's policy, and moreover believed that this thing was more efficient at exploiting subjects than the feudal chieftain economy... it was a case of everyone being very happy.

A single household of his farmed a dozen or so mu of land, and he could only levy one dou of grain from them in a year — less than fifty jin.

Yet that Liu Chengzong, using just a little silver, could levy nearly fifty jin from a single mu; he gave you silver, but you then had to buy other things from the government, and the silver went right back — what the hell kind of exploitation efficiency was that?

No wonder he could support tens of thousands of standing troops with one hundred twenty thousand peasants, while he, with one hundred twenty thousand people, could only support a standing army of two thousand two hundred.

Yang Guolong was baffled for a long time; he felt it was impossible for everyone to be happy — otherwise the ancestors long ago would have done it this way — until he studied it meticulously for a very long time and finally realized that to exploit the common people like this required an extremely high threshold.

Iron farming tools alone were enough to dissuade ninety percent of chieftains; there was no need even to consider the subsequent technical thresholds of cultivation, mining, and manufacturing — only after crossing those thresholds did one still need the coordination of specialized talents such as improved seeds, community schools, veterinarians, physicians, and merchants.

Even for the currently highly prosperous Zhuoni chieftain domain, many areas could not keep up — but the temptation of all this was simply too great for Yang Guolong.

Most crucially, this method of collective labor and planned production organized by village according to terrain fit perfectly with the chieftain economy: farmland levied grain and pigs; pastoral areas levied butter, cattle, and sheep; forest land levied timber, charcoal, and local specialties; and a village that produced iron would deliver twenty jin of iron ingots a year, while a village that produced gold would deliver twenty taels of gold a year.

The headmen of the Chone domain are all experts at planning these things!

It was all an absolutely perfect match.

After all, Liu the Lion himself was a grand tusi; the entire He-Huang region was in fact the product of highly centralized power after he had fought a war to eliminate the landlords, monks, officials, and tusi.

Yang Guolong even wanted to follow the Marshal's headquarters' example in promoting smallpox inoculation, and hired a pox doctor at great expense from Qinzhou, but his luck was poor — the doctor had only inoculated three people when one died, and fled back to Qinzhou in fear of punishment, leaving Chieftain Yang howling with rage.

Be that as it may, this year the Chone Tusi had evenly redistributed all the land in Taozhou, and was sitting in his official stockade watching the spring plowing, smugly waiting for the autumn harvest so he could exploit his subjects — when a problem suddenly dawned on him: equalizing land and buying out the tax levy required silver.

Even if that silver could flow back into the tusi's hands through economic means, a huge amount of silver was still needed in the short term. The Chone Tusi family had some assets, but where was he supposed to get one or two hundred thousand taels of silver to buy grain?

Just as Yang Guolong was in a state of constant dread over the huge sum of silver, the war unfolding beyond the mountain pass caught his attention.

There were over a hundred thousand rebels there. On their western campaign, these men had stormed dozens of county seats and were carrying vast amounts of gold and silver with nowhere to spend it. Yang Guolong knew his chance had come.

The various leaders of the rebel forces generally had no intention of making enemies of the tusi. As long as the tusi did not send troops, they were happy to keep the well water from the river water and focus on dealing with the government forces. Among them, however, one leader was rather special: the Eight Great Kings of the Western Camp, Zhang Xianzhong.

Because everyone else brought their families and civilian laborers, but Zhang Xianzhong alone enforced a strict elite-troop policy. His civilian laborers were all forcibly conscripted on the spot; once the supplies were transported, he sent the men packing — he absolutely would not feed idle hands.

This method had worked in the past, but once he reached the western section of the Qinling Mountains, with no cities or villages to plunder and surrounded by allied troops who were not short of money, the situation grew awkward. He was short of everything — except gold and silver.

The tusi were all tucked away in godforsaken mountains he could not enter; otherwise, Zhang Xianzhong, nearly starving to death, would certainly have attacked.

Zhang Xianzhong and Yang Guolong thus took a liking to each other. As it happened, Yang Guolong had no grain on hand at the moment either, and he wanted to keep Zhang Xianzhong around until autumn. So he sent men to contact Zhang Xianzhong, allowing his two battalions to encamp outside the pass of the tusi domain, and invited him to enter the territory.

The two men talked it over and hit it off at once. Zhang Xianzhong immediately wrote to Liu Chengyun, requesting to rest at Hezhou Garrison and offering to help in battle — he needed to fight government troops to seize some grain anyway.

And the most important agreement in their discussion was this: after Zhang Xianzhong stationed his troops at Hezhou Garrison, when the autumn harvest came, he would use silver at fifty percent above the market price to purchase eighty thousand dan of grain, as well as medicinal herbs, paper, and implements. With this silver, the land equalization and tax buyout in Taozhou would be revitalized.

Good morning!