Chapter 553: Adding a Cover

Yang Dingrui was basically the most knowledgeable civil official in the pre-war Marshal's Mansion.

His former official post had been fairly high in Yan'an Prefecture, and as a presented scholar, he had seen people from all directions in the capital.

So he understood very clearly why so many heroes and bold spirits ended up as separatist powers, unable to unify the realm — others couldn't understand what you were saying.

The realm shared a common script and standardized axle widths, but it did not share a common spoken language. Although there was a so-called "official speech," historical developments had split it into several branches.

The earliest official speech was the Elegant Speech of the Central Plains. After the elite fled south, it became the Jinling pronunciation. During the Southern and Northern Dynasties, the southern court's official speech became the Wu pronunciation of Jiangdong. With Sui-Tang unification, it returned to the Luoyang pronunciation. By the Yuan dynasty, the official national language became Mongolian, and besides the two branches of official speech — Jinling in the south and Luoyang in the north — there was now also the Beiping pronunciation of the Yuan capital.

By the Ming dynasty, the Hongwu Standard Rhymes were established in Nanjing, but the Hongwu Standard Rhymes were not the Nanjing pronunciation — on the contrary, they were meant to correct the Nanjing pronunciation, because Zhu Yuanzhang detested the Wu sounds of Jiangzuo most of all. He felt the southern courts that had migrated to Jiangnan were not legitimate, and with a circle of military nobles from northern Jiangsu, northern Anhui, and southern Shandong around him, the court naturally took their speech as the standard.

So by the mid-Ming, during the Zhengtong reign, Prince Ning, Zhu Quan, wrote a preface for the "Elegant Rhymes," pointing out that the region of the Central Plains Rhyme, the standard pronunciation honored by the Great Ming, extended north no farther than Pengcheng, south no farther than Dingyuan, east no farther than Jiangpu, and west no farther than Suiyang — anything outside this boundary was all local patois.

The "south no farther than Dingyuan" here refers to Dingyuan in Fengyang Prefecture.

It's like the words "俺" and "恁" — one meaning "I," the other meaning "you" — which frequently appear in the imperial edicts of Zhu Yuanzhang, Zhu Di, and others. But this is not them issuing edicts in colloquial dialect; quite the opposite, it is because these were precisely the elegant and standard pronunciation of the time.

Shaanxi, especially the western Shaanxi where they now found themselves, was poles apart from the east.

The roads were long and distant, and different ways of speaking naturally put people in a guarded frame of mind — yet the written script was the same. So when Yang Dingrui saw the picture books Liu Chengzong had produced, his eyes lit up at once, and he felt certain in his heart that this was an excellent tool for spreading the Marshal's Mansion's influence.

The Marshal's Mansion was stirring up a storm in the northwest, yet it was quite possible the common folk of the Yangtze-Huai region had no idea who he was.

Even if they did know, they only knew him as a rebel leader who stopped at no evil — a situation that was certainly disadvantageous to the Marshal's Mansion. Picture books, vernacular tales, and such were precisely what could solve this problem.

The southeast had the best papermaking, printing, and publishing industries in the realm, and this was an era when people held martial prowess in reverence and romantic fancy. It took only a little mental effort for Liu Xiangyu and Yang Dingrui to easily grasp what this meant.

Since the Jiajing reign, in the ever-intensifying military conflicts raging in every direction, people of every social stratum could gain opportunities for promotion by understanding military affairs.

Du Song was merely a banner soldier of a guard post, hacking wildly with his blade, and earned the title of Grand Master beyond the frontier. Liu Xian was a poor boy who survived by stealing offerings from a temple; in his first battle after enlisting, he charged the enemy lines wielding two fodder knives and killed over fifty men, rising from commoner status directly to Deputy Battalion Commander, a rank of the fifth grade, lower tier.

Scholars, even more so, could rely on their knowledge of military affairs to be sent to govern localities and win fame across the realm.

If the Marshal's Mansion's vernacular tales and illustrated portraits could cater to their tastes, they would surely win the common people's goodwill and attract talented individuals to come and serve — and the key point was that the Marshal's Mansion had far too many good stories. Pacifying Qinghai, advancing into Hami, striking the Choktu, smashing the Oirat coalition and expanding the territory by a thousand li — which of these was not the dream of every hero and bold spirit?

Liu Xiangyu and Yang Dingrui moved very quickly. Before the first lunar month was even over, the framework of the Marshal's Mansion's Office of Transmission had already been set up.

The Ming dynasty did not establish a chancellor, so naturally there was no Secretariat to serve as the central government office. The Secretariat's functions were therefore dismantled and divided into the Office of Transmission and the Six Offices of Scrutiny.

The Office of Transmission's primary authority was the circulation of official documents, and the distribution of court gazettes was also among its powers. Official documents were divided into memorials and personal memorials. Generally, documents sent in the name of a government office were called memorials, prepared in duplicate — one copy sent by the Office of Transmission to the imperial presence, the other sent to the Six Offices for copying; these were basically all public.

Personal memorials, on the other hand, were delivered directly by officials in their personal capacity to the gate officers and would not be made public before the emperor read them.

Every prefecture, guard, provincial administration commission, provincial surveillance commission, salt distribution commission, chief military commission, and pacification commission in the various regions had established a records office, which was the agency specifically responsible for sending and receiving official documents.

However, the Marshal's Mansion's framework had previously been too small, and official documents were all delivered directly to the desk. Even now, they only had five prefectures in total — Xining, Kangning, Lintao, Gansu, and Monan — so document delivery was not that complicated, and many departments that ought to have existed had simply not been established.

This was because their population was too small — so small that there was no need to set up administrative organs — while their officials were too numerous — so numerous that they could substitute for administrative functions.

A single county in Northern Zhili had two hundred thousand people and at most ten officials. Under Liu the Lion's rule, excluding Liangzhou, Gansu did not even have two hundred thousand people, yet its civil and military officials, high and low, numbered close to two thousand.

But what determined the number of officials was not population, but territory. The more vast the territory, the more people were needed to do the work.

The Chief Minister of the Office of Transmission chosen by Liu Xiangyu and Yang Dingrui was Lin Wei.

Lin Wei was another old hand who had followed Liu Chengzong since the Lion Camp days. He had originally been a licentiate of Ningxia Central Guard, good-looking, and was selected as the consort of a township princess in Prince Qing's estate. Then, because he cursed his father-in-law, he was sent to Prince Qing's manor to serve as the estate's head steward. He happened to be captured when Liu the Lion came raiding, and he was the sort who shamelessly rushed to join the rebels of his own accord.

Liu the Lion, acting on the principle of using every man to his full ability, handed the task of overseeing military agricultural colonies to him upon reaching Qinghai. So for these past few years, Lin Wei had never followed the army on its campaigns east and west, but had always remained west of the New City, cooperating with Liu Chengzu to open up wasteland for farming. His work had been done rather well, increasing the Marshal's Mansion's annual revenue by over seventy thousand dan of grain.

Now, with the establishment of the Office of Transmission, promoting him happened to suit Liu Chengzong's wishes perfectly.

Lin Wei had just arrived in Lanzhou, and the subordinate clerks of the Office of Transmission were not yet fully assigned, when work already arrived: Liu Chengzu's side had sent someone over from the Oirat to report on the winter campaign's battle situation and intelligence.

When Liu Chengzu had gone over, he and Zhou Riqiang had set up twelve relay stations along the route from Hami to Urumqi. From Hami to Lanzhou, there were another twenty-four stations under the Marshal's Mansion's jurisdiction, making thirty-six stations for the entire journey. At the fastest, a message could reach Lanzhou in nine days and nights.

But now that snow had fallen, the messenger had taken a full sixteen days just to reach Xining, and another day from Xining to Lanzhou. By the time Liu Chengzong saw this letter, it was already the eighteenth day since it had been dispatched from Urumqi.

Liu Chengzong calculated the time; Liu Chengzu had sent the letter right around the New Year.

However, this letter had been written by Liu Chengzu on the battlefield before the New Year. The Oirat campaign had not gone as smoothly as Baatur Khung Taiji had imagined.

Although Baatur Khung Taiji had returned to the northern foothills of the Tianshan Mountains and thrown himself into reorganizing his army and preparing for war, trying to show that the Four Oirat Tribes had not suffered too greatly in the southern expedition, no amount of bluffing could conceal the reality that their vitality had been severely damaged.

The Oirat's total mobilizable strength was only a few tens of thousands of veteran soldiers, half of whom had been lost at Liu Chengzong's hands. Even their former league leader, the Güshi Khan, had been detained. Consequently, as soon as autumn arrived, they suffered a fatal blow from the Kazakhs. As it happened, Baatur Khung Taiji had also been planning to attack Tyumen, and the Kazakhs caught him with his home undefended.

Had Liu Chengzu's main force not been garrisoned in the Ili River Valley, the Oirat might well have been wiped out in a single wave.

After this battle, Baatur Khung Taiji realized that attacking Tyumen, three thousand li away, was undoubtedly a fool's dream. He could only organize three thousand cavalry in winter to attack the northern salt lakes.

Liu Chengzu and Zhou Riqiang carefully analyzed the current predicament of the Four Oirat Tribes. To say they faced enemies on all sides was no exaggeration, so they strenuously urged Baatur Khung Taiji not to start a war before the firearms and cannons arrived in the Ili River Valley — but they could not dissuade him.

Baatur, for his part, believed that it was precisely at such a time that they had to go to war. Even if the cost was greater than avoiding battle, they had to strike at anyone who came. Even if they lost, as long as the invading enemy tasted the price, it would halt their incursions.

Otherwise, if the people's hearts scattered and the tribes dispersed, that would be worse than death.

When that happened, the east would go to Liu Chengzong, the west to the Kazakhs, the north to Russia, the south to Yarkent — and the thing called Oirat would cease to exist in the world.

Liu Chengzu thought it over and figured he had a point. After all, this was an Oirat that could not even unify its script or language; its inherent stability was very poor. So he did not press further, merely sending Dai Daozi with six hundred men to accompany the army, traveling north along the river to map the waterways and terrain.

Later, the Oirat did indeed pay a price.

In this battle at Lake Yamysh that took place at the end of the seventh year of the Chongzhen reign, three thousand Dzungar soldiers besieged the stronghold. After both sides suffered a combined total of over a hundred casualties, the Dzungar cavalry plundered the villages outside the stronghold and then withdrew from the salt lake.

Both sides fought very bravely, but as Liu Chengzong, in Lanzhou, leafed through the battle report, his features nearly scrunched together — it was practically unbearable to look at.

This was not a question of bravery. According to Liu Chengzu, the Russians had a wooden fortress by the lake, where over a hundred Russian soldiers lived year-round. At the start of the battle, they had also urgently conscripted over a thousand tribal natives from nearby villages.

Although Baatur Khung Taiji's mounted detachments had ranged far and wide, intercepting and killing or accepting the surrender of over three hundred men in the field, more than six hundred still managed to enter the wooden fort, giving the Russians a very ample defensive force at the salt lake wooden fort.

The Russians' wooden fort was very peculiar. Liu Chengzu could not say whether it was deliberate or just shoddily built, but in any case, those wooden walls had quite a few gaps between them, through which one could stick a musket. So when the fighting started, there were firing points everywhere, making the assault extremely difficult.

Baatur Khung Taiji directed his soldiers in four charges, and four times they were beaten back... What decent man storms a fort head-on? The fort indeed had large gaps — the Russian soldiers could even fit their old-model large-caliber muskets through them — but expecting the Dzungar soldiers to shoot arrows through those gaps in a world of ice and snow was very difficult.

Strictly speaking, the equipment the Russian soldiers used inside the fort was terribly poor.

Their large-caliber muskets were basically castoffs from European wars — that is, imitations made in places like Poland of the Spanish heavy muskets that had dominated battlefields a hundred years earlier.

These muskets were formidable, no doubt, but they were already obsolete, because in that era there was no granulated gunpowder; they used powder gunpowder. The calibers were stupidly large, and the muskets were stupidly heavy.

In the past hundred years, the most important technological advance had been the granulation of gunpowder, which allowed musket calibers to be reduced. This had eliminated vast numbers of large-caliber heavy muskets, a great portion of which were either offloaded to colonies or sold to countries like Russia that lacked the manufacturing skill.

At this time, in European countries like Spain, the main service muskets were all light muskets with calibers around twenty millimeters.

The Ming dynasty did not go through this process, because it had possessed the technology for granulated gunpowder very early on. Qi Jiguang promoted it, so only caliber determined power. They first encountered small-caliber muskets, and later encountered Spanish large-caliber muskets; after copying them, they used granulated gunpowder.

But even an obsolete matchlock was still a matchlock, and inside a fortress, its weight was no problem at all.

Forest, frozen plain, muskets, fortress — put these four things together and they were practically invincible.

After several clashes, Liu Chengzu estimated they had inflicted at most thirty-odd casualties on the enemy inside the Mulei fort, while they themselves had suffered over sixty dead and wounded outside — in the end, they had no choice but to withdraw in frustration.

The withdrawal was because the casualties were too great — not the sixty-odd killed or wounded in battle, but because of the bitter cold outside; the soldiers frozen to death or disabled by frostbite already numbered over a hundred. If they dragged it out any longer, they might well be wiped out entirely by the weather.

Liu Chengzu wrote this letter back, on one hand to send over the waterway and terrain maps Dai Daozi had surveyed along the way, and on the other hand in hopes that Liu Chengzong would rush-produce some firearms for him, to be delivered once spring arrived. He intended to lead his troops and take that fort with effortless ease, put on a grand show right in front of Batur, and thereby seize control of the Oirat salt lifeline.

As for what gave him the nerve to boast so boldly — it rested entirely on the firearm he wanted Liu Chengzong to rush-produce: the flying thunder cannon.

A flying thunder cannon with a curved trajectory, secondary ignition, light and handy, delivering explosive fragmentation — and a misfire rate as high as one in two.

Liu the Lion thought to himself, Elder Brother, why go to all that trouble? When we besiege cities in the Great Ming, we still have to worry about the lives and property of the people inside. Out there, there's no need for such concerns.

A tiny wooden fort a hundred paces square, not even roofed over, smaller than Liu Guoneng's erratic scatter range — one rocket launcher might not hit accurately, but ten launchers would certainly inflict casualties on the defenders. Fire off a hundred whooshing rockets, and the chance of no one surviving isn't great, but Liu the Lion also didn't believe they could still organize troops to hold the fort after the bombardment.

Most crucially, this thing was simple and cheap to make. Flying thunder cannons still required hammering; whooshing rockets, as long as you had gunpowder, my arsenal under Shi Cheng could churn out several hundred in ten days to half a month — even the paper-casing ones worked just fine.

Of course, whether paper or gunpowder, neither was actually cheap in the lands beyond the Central Plains.

With his elder brother writing from so far away to request equipment, Liu the Lion naturally couldn't be stingy. That very day he sent word to the arsenal, asking how many rockets were still in stock, and at the same time assigned them a task of one hundred flying thunder cannons. He directly ordered three hundred rocket launchers loaded onto carts, and had Cao Yao pick two hundred banner troops from Gansu to escort them to Urumqi.

The three hundred rocket launchers departed from New City that same day — after all, the quantity was so small. Each launcher weighed only ten jin, and the Ministry of Revenue handling the transport couldn't even be bothered to dispatch oxcarts. They rounded up over seventy mules from the Great Khan's Ordo by Qinghai Lake and hauled them off.

What ill intentions could Liu Chengzong possibly have? He just wanted to get them delivered before spring, so that while the Rus soldiers in the lakeside wooden fort were relaxed after having beaten back the enemy, his elder brother could wheel around and strike again — the cuckoo seizing the magpie's nest.

If nothing else, after the bombardment, they'd be sure to add roofs when they rebuilt their forts!

Good afternoon!