Chapter 535: Food and Drink Aplenty

The eighth month of the seventh year of the Chongzhen reign.

Liu Chengzong expanded his territory according to the maps, conferring offices and appointing generals in Lanzhou City.

The Marshal's Headquarters established the Monan Command, with its seat at Guihua City, appointing surrendered Ming general and former Guyuan Regional Commander Yang Qi as the Seal-holding Commander of the Monan Command, elevating him in one leap to one of the highest-ranking officials with real authority in the Marshal's Headquarters.

Subsequently, the Chahar County Count, Chaghan, was appointed Vice Commander of the Monan Command, while former Ming Lintao Regional Commander Wang Cheng'en and Ningxia Regional Commander He Huchen were appointed Assistant Commanders of Monan.

At the same time, four military garrisons were established in Monan: He Huchen as Regional Commander of Shuofang Garrison, Wang Cheng'en as Regional Commander of Wuyuan Garrison, Yang Qi as Regional Commander of Yunzhong Garrison, and the Chahar Count Chaghan as Regional Commander of Yanmen Garrison.

Everyone was very happy — except for Chaghan Taiji, who had just returned from Gansu.

To be honest, as a member of the Northern Yuan imperial clan, Chaghan Taiji had been perfectly happy right up until he received this appointment from Liu Chengzong.

Even during the Gansu campaign, when Zhang Tianlin commandeered his warhorses and caused a bit of unpleasantness, he actually harbored no deeper resentment beyond thinking that dog Zhang Tianlin was underhanded and didn't treat him as one of their own — money and horses were merely worldly possessions.

Besides, in the end Liu Chengzong had halved Zhang Tianlin's battle merits and given them to Chaghan Taiji. Whether or not the merits were shared actually mattered little to Chaghan; to put it in sentimental terms, what Chaghan Taiji wanted was precisely this attitude from Liu Chengzong.

What kind of person needs someone else's attitude? One who cannot, will not, or is incapable of realizing their own personal worth — their worth exists only in the attitudes of others.

Zhang Tianlin didn't need attitude; Zhang Tianlin wanted only worth. He wanted to realize his own worth, and doing whatever it took to acquire military equipment and beating people on the battlefield with invincible success was his way of realizing it.

Chaghan had no way of realizing any personal worth. As a member of the Northern Yuan imperial clan, his very origins did not support the realization of personal worth, and as a man of a fallen state, his spiritual world was a void — without respect, he had nothing at all.

But on the other hand, Chaghan Taiji was not particularly bothered by having nothing at all. He had long since come to terms with it. Places like the Mu Us Sea and the Uriankhai Sea had all once belonged to his elder brother. His elder brother had possessed the four seas, yet still vanished in the blink of an eye.

So in living, happiness mattered most.

Take happiness one day at a time.

He was not his elder brother Ligdan Khan, single-mindedly devoted to the great revival of the Great Yuan Empire. Drawing a salary from the Marshal's Headquarters, with the lands from the Dulan Mountains to Golmud all serving as pasture for the Chahar Camp, there was ample ground to raise horses and herd sheep.

He still had seven or eight hundred elite cavalry under his own command. If there was a campaign, he would follow the army; if not, he would return to Golmud, leading the old guard and surviving loyalists in venerating the ancestral White Banner, visiting kin and friends with a measure of pomp and circumstance. What was there left in such a life to be dissatisfied with?

Why the hell should he be some Yanmen Garrison Regional Commander?

Furthermore, even though his level of classical Chinese learning made him practically illiterate compared to men like Yang Qi and Wang Cheng'en, he could still see that this frontier garrison Regional Commander of the Marshal's Headquarters was far inferior to a Nine Borders Regional Commander of the Great Ming.

In practical comparison, only Yang Qi, as Commander of Monan, was roughly equivalent to a Nine Borders Regional Commander, while the remaining three of them were basically just overgrown Assistant Regional Commanders.

Because in the Great Ming, a seal-holding Regional Commander was not subject to the Supreme Commander's authority, whereas they were clearly subject to Yang Qi's authority.

Another point was that, while the garrison names Liu Chengzong had chosen all sounded quite pleasant, Chaghan Taiji was a living map of the Nine Borders. He had personally traveled from Shanhai Pass to Jiayu Pass and knew the terrain and landforms by heart. No matter how nice the names sounded, he knew exactly what kind of places they were.

Shuofang and Wuyuan were essentially the Ordos Tumen. He knew Ordos well — south of the Yellow River, north of the border wall.

Here the Great Wall formed a concave inverted triangle, with the two high points being the Helan Mountains of Ningxia Garrison and Hequ County in Yulin, separating the flat Ordos Plateau from the countless ravines and gullies of northern Shaanxi.

As the Grand Marshal sat here expanding territory on a map, Chaghan Taiji, who had roamed those lands, was filled with nothing but bitter laughter, because on one hand he knew perfectly well that this vast, mighty army Liu Chengzong had prepared, so long as it didn't start a war with Hong Taiji, could dominate Monan without the slightest problem.

These four garrisons could absolutely all be brought under actual control, because in Ordos, the only thing that could compete with them for territory was the desert.

The terrain of Ordos was shaped like an inverted character '合'. The bottom, inverted '人' shape was the Great Ming border wall. In this era, there was an enormous T-shaped desert there: the horizontal stroke lay along the southern bank of the Yellow River, while the vertical stroke cut straight through the entire Ordos Plateau.

On that land there was not a single forest, only a few seasonal streams suitable for nomadic herding. Compared to it, Golmud was a fine place for nomadism, with at least forests and rivers, while northern Shaanxi, threaded through by Yellow River tributaries, was paradise on earth.

The impoverished and tiny Yan'an Prefecture, even in the Chongzhen years, conservatively still held a population of six hundred thousand — and that was not counting the unproductive Yulin border troops — whereas the Ordos Tumen covered an area four to five times the size of Yan'an Prefecture.

Even in the best of times, during the period when Altan Khan developed Fengzhou Beach, the Ordos Plateau was never developed. A land as vast as northern Shaanxi plus the Guanzhong region combined supported only thirty thousand bowstrings.

Therefore, the greatest problem the three garrisons of Shuofang, Wuyuan, and Yunzhong had to solve in the past was not war, but survival.

Among them, Wuyuan Garrison faced the greatest pressure, because after looking at the map Liu Chengzong had drawn, Chaghan Taiji was absolutely certain that the Grand Marshal Liu had drawn the entirety of Wuyuan Garrison's territory inside the desert. You couldn't even hunt a rabbit there.

He Huchen's Shuofang Garrison had relatively better conditions — grazing was possible, there were rabbits to hunt, and being adjacent to Ningxia, finding solutions would be somewhat easier.

The best conditions belonged to Yunzhong Garrison, which was not in Ordos. Yang Qi's territory was in fact the core region of the Tumed tribe, also the front loop of the Hetao — a very fine place.

Taken together, short-term survival in these three places was no great problem in the eyes of the three brothers Yang Qi, He Huchen, and Wang Cheng'en, so they were very happy.

Chaghan Taiji was different. Yanmen Garrison was the largest garrison Liu Chengzong had delineated. A region as large as Ordos had been divided into two garrisons, while Yanmen Garrison alone was roughly the size of Ordos.

East of Guihua City, those lands had all formerly been Chahar territory, all excellent nomadic grounds — not only good for herding, but also for farming. It was splendid beyond compare; there was simply no need to worry about survival.

By all logic, Chaghan Taiji should have been delighted, but in reality, this was precisely what displeased him the most.

The various Mongol tribes now pasturing there — the Kharchin, Naiman, Aohan, and the like — were all his enemies. They had once all been vassals of the Chahar tribe.

When internal strife raged endlessly and foreign enemies seized the opening, the Mongol tribes, under the command of the Jurchen Hong Taiji, attacked their own Khan. The Battle of Zhaocheng presented the Later Jin with the grand gift of 'costing Ligdan Khan forty thousand troops.'

He deeply hated those Mongol nobles, not because they had surrendered or rebelled. Surrender was a helpless act to preserve life when the situation was hopeless; rebellion was a common occurrence throughout the unstable history of the Northern Yuan.

Such acts were not glorious, but neither could they be called shameful.

But reporting the Khan's court military intelligence to the Later Jin before they had surrendered, launching a sneak attack on the Khan's court while Ligdan Khan was at war with the Great Ming, and attacking their own Khan under Hong Taiji's command — that was deeply shameful.

National enmity and family hatred — this single letter of appointment as Yanmen Garrison Regional Commander from Liu Chengzong had unquestionably draped an artificially crafted sense of fatal destiny over Chaghan Taiji.

Under this sense of mission, even though in his heart Chaghan Taiji was a thousand times unwilling to return to Monan and turn his blade against his own kin, he found himself forced into an impatient eagerness to march.

Fang Zhenghua, temporarily residing in Lanzhou, was cautious and prudent, ordering the Embroidered-Uniform agents to observe the military movements unfolding in Lanzhou, and to report back everything, whether fact or rumor.

The agents, disguised and in altered appearances, scurried all over Lanzhou. Their mission was accomplished with great success: the personnel arrangements for the expedition, the specific timing, and where each route's troops and commanders would set out from — they gathered intelligence on all of it more clearly than some mid- and low-ranking officers in the Marshal's Headquarters.

Several times when the agents secretly gathered, they all complained to each other about the lax management of the Marshal's Headquarters. Apart from being unable to enter the military camps, the city of Lanzhou and its surroundings were like a sieve — there was no information they could not ferret out.

Correspondingly, what the Embroidered-Uniform agents chatted about, ate, and shat every day was also perfectly clear to Liu Chengzong's Feathered Forest Cavalry, because behind every agent was an anti-smuggling soldier assigned specifically to him.

A matter as large as mobilizing troops was never something Liu Chengzong intended to hide from Fang Zhenghua in the first place. Who would have thought that before he even sent someone to notify him, he would already hear from the Feathered Forest Cavalry that the Embroidered-Uniform agents were scurrying all over Lanzhou City. In that case, he simply wouldn't notify them — let them ferret it out themselves.

Liu Chengzong rather wanted to see just what these people could dig up, and what expressions they would wear when, after compiling their gathered intelligence, they realized that they themselves were also on the Marshal's Headquarters' expedition roster.

Privately peddling green salt is smuggling, and privately peddling intelligence is also smuggling. In our Marshal's Headquarters, anything tainted with the word 'private' is a serious crime, all under the jurisdiction of the Xining Prefecture anti-smuggling troops. Sentencing them to military exile would not be excessive.

In truth, as the most comfortable branch of the Marshal's Headquarters' forces, the anti-smuggling troops didn't have it easy either. Though they earned more for more work, combat troops could ride the winds and clouds of war and have a chance to become generals, whereas an anti-smuggling soldier becoming a squad leader of ten men was about as high as he could go.

It wasn't that they couldn't rise higher, but that they didn't want to rise higher — going any higher made it far too easy to end up dead.

The Marshal's Headquarters divided the penalties for smuggling into four grades: military exile, imprisonment, hard labor, and beheading.

Although the Marshal's Headquarters' laws stipulated that the four grades of punishment for smuggling progressed from light to heavy, sometimes the regulation was one thing and its enforcement another.

After all, they'd have to feed them.

Xining Prefecture was unwilling to let criminals sit in jail. Old Master Liu, having emerged from the great drought, was miserly to the extreme with the prefectural granaries' reserves. If the barns were even half a foot from full, it made his heart flutter with unease. Feed grain to criminals — and criminals who cut off people's livelihoods at that? Go eat shit!

The army was also unwilling to accept convicts for military exile. The region from Hehuang to Golmud, counting all the Han, Mongols, Tibetans, and various tribes, had a total population of three hundred thousand at the absolute maximum. Factoring in sex, age, physical condition, and intelligence, all those fit for military service numbered less than fifty thousand.

The law exiling smugglers to the army was something Liu Chengzong had created back then, and he had been too busy fighting wars ever since to get around to amending it.

But after the Ming finished sending them, Huoluo Chi sent them; after Huoluo Chi finished, the Oirats sent them; after the Oirats finished, the Chahar sent them. As a result, the Marshal Manor's problem of superfluous troops was far worse than the Great Song's. Counting men and women, young and old, from Hehuang to Golmud, two out of every three people came from a military family.

In the entire Marshal Manor, only Liu Chengyun wanted to establish a sound conscription mechanism in Hehuang. Everyone else, from top to bottom — including Liu Xiangyu, Liu Chengzong, Yang Dingrui, Cao Yao, and others — was thinking only about how to let the army kick out the less capable people.

Send them to the army?

Pure waste of grain!

And since none of those generals and officials wanted to play the villain, when an anti-smuggling squad captain brought a smuggler to court, the county magistrate would usually ask them for their sentencing recommendation.

What could a squad captain suggest? Suggest conscription, and you'd need a general willing to accept them; suggest jail, and you'd need the magistrate to nod.

So the first two punishments were basically always skipped. If someone deserved conscription, they'd suggest educating them and letting them go. If someone deserved jail, when there was really no alternative, they'd suggest sentencing them to a beating — thrash them and let them go. If they couldn't be beaten, lock them up a few days and release them fast.

Anyway, if beaten, not locked up; if locked up, not beaten.

For an anti-smuggling squad captain, on the one hand, they couldn't just not handle it — the offender really had smuggled, and besides, part of the seized goods was his men's wages. On the other hand, they didn't dare handle it harshly — that tested their work ability too much.

Given the Marshal Manor's current population distribution, smuggling wasn't something Mongols or Western Fan people could pull off. Unless they couldn't walk or were too feeble to move, all able-bodied men were soldiers in the Garrison Herding Camps, with their own grazing lands and no reason to wander — you'd catch them every single time.

And the Han people in the Marshal Manor were very few. Of the men running around outside, eight out of ten, if the slightest thing didn't go their way, could make their grievances heard all the way to the top.

Those who came from Shaanxi — who couldn't find Liu Chengzong? The natives of Hehuang — who didn't know Liu Chengyun?

Today, some fellow smuggled two bolts of cloth and broke the law. By law, he should be conscripted. You throw him into hard labor at the Gold Gully Silver Cave on Sun Moon Mountain. Tomorrow, Yang Dingrui gets word, convenes a summer assizes at the government office, and after the trial, the squad captain's head goes whoosh — hung up on the city gate tower.

Why bother?

This was the very foundation of why the Marshal Manor's anti-smuggling troops had stronger operational capability than even the Brocade Guard. Because toward smugglers under the Grand Marshal's rule, they were essentially in a state of "nurturing bandits to bolster their own importance." Catch them, confiscate the contraband, yell at them a bit, and let them go. They'd go back and offend again; next time, they'd catch them again. The main idea was a steady trickle, repeatedly farming GDP.

But toward outsiders — smugglers coming from east of Lanzhou — the anti-smuggling troops had no such qualms. Their investigative zeal was extremely high, and usually they'd nab them before they even crossed the Yellow River.

Once caught, they'd skip conscription and jail entirely. They'd arrange everyone's destination right on the road. Good people went to the Nanshan Fort salt-brick yard; normal people went to the Haibei quarry; especially bad ones were hauled off to the Gold Gully Silver Cave on Sun Moon Mountain. The county court trial was just a formality.

Toward work targets other than the Grand Marshal's own subjects, they always displayed extraordinary enthusiasm.

In the days that followed, Fang Zhenghua stayed in Lanzhou city in a constant state of delight. Every day he pored over the intelligence gathered by the Brocade Guard agents, now startled, now pleased. One moment he'd hear that a Mongol regiment was descending from the north; the next, that a Mongol regiment was coming from Qinghai Lake. Two days later, he'd get a corrected report: what came from Qinghai Lake was a unit of Mongol-equipped Fan troops.

At first, Fang Zhenghua was extremely alarmed by the massing of these armies. Later, when he learned that the four Chief Commanders appointed by the Marshal Manor were actually three former Ming Chief Commanders and a Mongol prince's younger brother, his heart surged with wild joy.

This intelligence was enough to turn the tide of war. Once they gained a firm foothold south of the Gobi, the court could prescribe the right remedy and win them over one by one. That would not only relieve the urgent border threat in the north, but also achieve the accomplishment of Recovering the Loop!

Bearing this enormous secret, the delight in Fang Zhenghua's eyes simply would not fade. By the fifteenth of the eighth month, all of Lanzhou was decked with lanterns and decorations. The Grand Marshal shared joy with soldiers and civilians alike, camping outside the city to admire the moon and eat cakes alongside the troops. He also distributed pigs, sheep, milk-wine, and extra pay to the entire army, along with two mace of silver per soldier as spending money.

Come the sixteenth of the eighth month, the jubilant atmosphere shattered in an instant. Amid the thunderous boom of war drums, the whole of Lanzhou bristled with murderous intent. The Grand Marshal held a military review at Lanzhou's western city wall and conferred the central army's grand banner upon Yang Qi, Commander-in-Chief of the Southern Gobi.

The grand banner stood one zhang and six chi tall. Its one-zhang-long flag was made of black-green satin with white silk borders, painted with the Taiji, the Eight Trigrams, and star constellations, adorned with beaded fringes and tassels, hung with five-colored streamers, and fitted with a leopard-tail pennant.

Beneath this great banner, the banner troops, rebel troops, and peasant troops — Han soldiers, Fan soldiers, Mongol soldiers — their camp flags stood like a forest, each symbolizing a different encampment.

Fang Zhenghua, attending atop the city wall, watched with great amusement. After all, in his eyes, the Marshal Manor's commanders were hoping to use this review to overawe the imperial court. But in his eyes, this review was also an advance inspection of the future Ming Southern Gobi Garrison Army... they'd all be won over sooner or later; he was just helping His Majesty check the quality ahead of time.

What he never expected was that just as the review was about to end, Liu Cheng called him over. Immediately, Feathered Forest cavalrymen stepped forward bearing armor, robes, and a headdress. A letter of appointment was slapped into his arms.

Fang Zhenghua didn't react at all. With a somewhat dazed expression, he read the appointment letter over and over. The name on it was his, no mistake, but the official post was not Eunuch of the Brush in the Directorate of Ceremonial, but Grain Supply Advisor of the Southern Gobi Commandery, Grand Marshal Manor.

"Grand Marshal, I was just about to request leave to return to the capital and report back. What is the meaning of this?"

"You already know this army well; I don't need to introduce much more. There's no rush to return to Beijing. Besides, it's on the way, isn't it? Going back via Zhangjiakou is much closer than going from Qinghai, and the road is safer — make the best use of things, and employ people to the fullest of their talents."

Liu the Lion thought to himself: at this critical juncture, he couldn't trust Hong Chengchou, who was squatting in Ningxia. If Yang Qi's army was to safely reach the Southern Gobi via the Helan Mountains, how could they go without an imperial envoy tucked in their pocket?

"Rest assured, I have nothing I need you to do. Just stay put in the army. Chief Commander Yang will escort you to Zhangjiakou... Chief Commander Yang, you won't let the Grain Supply Advisor go hungry, will you?"

Liu Chengzong's words had barely faded when Yang Qi, standing to the side, swiftly reached out and snatched Fang Zhenghua's official seal from the lacquer tray holding the robes and armor, tucked it into his own bosom, and then clasped his fists: "Grand Marshal, rest assured! This humble general guarantees that the border garrisons along the way will see to it that Eunuch Fang has food and drink for every single meal!"

Good evening!