Chapter 561: Viceroy of Both Frontiers

Stubborn Bandits Main Text Chapter 553: Viceroy of Both Frontiers Ningxia Garrison, Huamachi.

This was a new city built during the Tianshun era; because it lay near salt ponds, it was also called Salt Pond City. It had always been both the critical point where Ningxia faced the northern caitiffs directly and the vital market where Ningxia traded salt for horses with the Mongols. Thus, every year during the autumn defense deployments, the Viceroy of the Three Frontiers had to station himself at Huamachi.

Windblown sand swirled around horses' hooves as the grain convoy from the east struggled forward step by step. On the drum tower at the city's center, beneath the vast shadow of its three-tiered flying eaves, Viceroy of the Three Frontiers Hong Chengchou's eyes were filled with worry. He looked at the letter in his hand, slowly sighed, and murmured, "Viceroy of the Three Frontiers…"

The Viceroy of the Three Frontiers of this era — oh, no, it was the Viceroy of Both Frontiers now.

Being the Viceroy of Both Frontiers in this era was simply too difficult.

In the two months since spring began, he had not heard a single piece of good news from any direction.

Instead, bad news came swarming into his ears in droves.

Last year, although he had traveled from Gansu to Ningxia, according to the arrangements he had left behind in Liangzhou before departing, the soldiers and civilians of Liangzhou should have been fully capable of blocking Liu Chengzong's great army outside Liangzhou.

Originally, according to plan, the Marshal's Army should have collapsed from severed supply lines. By the start of spring this year, Ming forces from the Ningxia sector could have massed heavy troops and easily attacked Gansu to sweep away the remnant bandits, recovering all of Gansu.

Right up until he left Liangzhou, Hong Chengchou believed his plan was flawless. No matter how he calculated it, the Marshal's Office's military grain was insufficient to sustain the winter consumption after absorbing the populations of the various garrisons; no matter how he thought about it, he did not believe Ningxia would be unable to mobilize a heavy force this year.

But the way events unfolded kept shattering his imagination.

Liangzhou did indeed hold out until this year, but the Marshal's Office's army in Gansu, far from mutinying, did not even experience a grain shortage. The Oirat Tatars had transported fifty thousand sheep over from beyond Jiayu Pass!

Before this became reality, if anyone had told Hong Chengchou that there was a man under heaven who could make the Tatars transport fifty thousand sheep to supplement military supplies, he would have laughed until he cried.

What kind of genius could fabricate such a ludicrous tale?

Hong Chengchou had been an official in Shaanxi for several years and was thoroughly familiar with the Mongols beyond the passes. For people living beyond the passes, livestock was a matter more important than life itself.

The scarcity of goods beyond the passes dictated that as long as one could produce money and grain — or even just the hope of seizing money and grain — anyone could drive a Mongol army to fight for them. From a single tribe up to the former Ligdan Khan, everyone had their price.

This was no special ability; the Ming army or the peasant armies could all do it.

But no, no one had ever managed to pry food out of their mouths.

Yes, he knew that Liu Chengzong was known beyond the passes as the Han Khan mighty in battle, which was also the origin of the title Foolish Khan. But even so, this matter shattered his understanding — and after shattering the baseline of his understanding, it kept galloping wildly onward.

This was not a matter of being a khan or not. The steppe was full of khans. Even if the genuine Ligdan Khutugtu were still alive, could he have pulled this off?

To make the Mongols use their livestock to supplement his army's military supplies — and fifty thousand head of livestock at that — what difference was there between this and a monk begging alms from a beggar?

So even now, Hong Chengchou doubted the veracity of this intelligence.

But whether the intelligence was true or false, the event had already occurred. The result was that Liu Chengzong's army in Gansu not only did not run out of grain in winter, but ate until their mouths dripped with grease.

Their mouths truly did drip with grease — Hong Chengchou had seen it. When the Later Jin withdrew from the Xuan–Da frontier last year, the Ningxia border troops had been in constant contact with the Mongol forces entrenched in the Ordos. The intelligence they probed out was that the troops the Marshal's Office had sent to the southern desert all carried a great deal of animal fat.

The source of that animal fat was the lambs the Oirat Tatars had transported to Jiayu Pass. Those sheep were different from the sheep of the Central Plains; their rumps were very fatty, all pure animal fat.

It was precisely this matter that made Hong Chengchou realize how pitifully little real intelligence the court had on the Marshal's Office, and how extremely limited its understanding was of what Liu Chengzong had actually been doing in Qinghai these past few years.

Without intelligence, the foundation upon which he, the Viceroy of the Three Frontiers, based his strategies was wrong. How could this war be won?

Hong Chengchou realized that relying on the Ming court's traditional methods of espionage made it fundamentally impossible to see the true face of the Marshal's Office clearly.

However, throughout the entire winter, he had no attention to spare for the Marshal's Office. The locust plague spreading across Ningxia, Yansui, Guyuan, and other regions had tormented him to the point of utter exhaustion.

What tormented him was not the locust plague itself — the locust plague could not torment him. For one, his official post was Viceroy, whose full title was Viceroy of Military Affairs Concurrently Managing Grain and Pay; the locust plague was a matter of civil administration.

And on the other hand, although locust eradication work was indeed very complex, for the local officials of Shaanxi and the military officers in the garrisons of this era, it truly did not count as a major issue. It was simply the easiest to resolve among all the problems they encountered in their lives.

At least this matter had precedents to follow. As long as one treated it as a matter of importance and handled it according to past examples of successful resolution, it genuinely could be accomplished — in these times, there was no problem easier to solve than this.

What tormented Hong Chengchou were the secondary problems brought by the locust plague. He had to concurrently manage grain and pay, but after the locust plague swept through, where was there any grain or pay left?

In truth, at this moment, it was not only the peasant armies who were in despair. Ming officials like Hong Chengchou were also in despair; it was just that the nature of their despair was different.

What lay before Hong Chengchou was a Shaanxi that had been smashed to pieces. In the various counties and prefectures, less than half of the serving officials remained. Moreover, once an official died, or was promoted and transferred, or demoted and banished, it became extremely difficult to find a successor. The Prefect of Xi'an, the Shaanxi Grain Intendant — these were all substantive posts with power greater than heaven, yet they could remain vacant for a year or two with no one to fill them.

Just how desperate was it, specifically?

Hong Chengchou once had a colleague named Liu Jiayu.

When they served as officials in Shaanxi, he managed grain administration and Liu Jiayu managed the postal service; they inevitably had to deal with each other. Their relationship could not be called particularly good — it was more a matter of keeping a respectful distance... Hong Chengchou rarely envied another person's fortunes, but this Liu Jiayu was one such case.

Liu Jiayu was a man from Qiu County — talented and learned, iron-headed, unlucky, with a fate-defying constitution and a huge temper.

This man was very willful. As soon as he became a county magistrate, he offended a censor; when he entered the Ministry of War, he offended Wei Zhongxian; if an official posting was too far from home, he simply would not go. When Cui Chengxiu, the chief of the Five Tigers of the eunuch faction and Minister of War, wanted to remain in office despite mourning, Liu Jiayu even cursed him roundly, calling him an inauspicious body.

Yet, precisely this man — the reason he offended Wei Zhongxian was that Wei Zhongxian admired his talent and promoted him twice in succession; as an official, he was recommended for outstanding service four times, and when the court called for official recommendations, three out of twenty people recommended him.

Locust plagues, backlogged legal cases — he handled them with effortless skill; military supplies for Shanhai Pass, ships for Tianjin Garrison — not a problem at all; Shaanxi's postal service, he ran excellently. When he went to Shanxi, he even dragged his sick body and fought the roving bandits for three months.

Wherever he served as an official, he achieved merit. If he had just reined in his temper a little, he might well have entered the Grand Secretariat long ago.

And such a man — how is he now?

Dead.

He died the year before last, worked literally to death at his post as the Huailong Military Defense Circuit Intendant in Xuan Prefecture.

Because under years of continuous warfare, the machinery of the court had ceased to function smoothly. If a local official was not so very talented, not so very steadfast in integrity, and harbored a bit of a muddling-through mentality while in office — doing only what he could do, managing only what he could manage, and taking a Buddha-like approach to other work —

If he did not encounter major events like Later Jin incursions, mass plundering by roving bandits, or peasant uprisings, completing a full term was not difficult.

If he did encounter them, it just counted as rotten luck.

It was impossible for every person to have the will to turn the tide single-handedly, and even if they had such will, it was impossible for every person to have such ability and talent.

But if one took things seriously and tried to be a good official, then the backlog of problems, even if it worked a person to death, could never be finished.

The situation Hong Chengchou now faced was the same. Ningxia and Guyuan were already hollowed out beyond all bounds.

The hollowness of the Guyuan military garrison needed no elaboration — that was where the great Shaanxi uprising began, the place where the dream started.

In the eight years since, its fortunes had been even more ill-fated. Liu Chengzong had plundered it empty; soldiers and officers of Guyuan origin formed the backbone of the Marshal's Office; and official army commanders like Yang Qi and Li Hongsi had drawn troops from there in wave after wave to suppress the rebels.

By now, the entire Guyuan Garrison could hardly be said to have any defenses at all — otherwise, Jingning Prefecture, separated by just a single mountain, would not have gone so far as to defect directly to the Marshal's Office.

Comparatively speaking, the situation in the Ningxia Garrison was much better. It had long been able to be self-sufficient; in troop strength, armor and weapons, and city fortifications, it could be called the best among the Three Frontiers.

Until last year, when the scorched-earth evacuation of Liangzhou relocated over sixty thousand people to Zhongwei. The intense resettlement work that followed stretched Ningxia to its limits. Then a locust plague destroyed a crop of grain, and the situation changed.

Military pay and provisions could not be supplied; the rates of warhorses dying and equipment being lost grew higher and higher; more and more soldiers asked for leave from camp drills and exercises. More than once, military officers reported to Hong Chengchou that if pay and grain were not distributed soon, the army would be impossible to lead. Those professional warriors from hereditary military families were all leaving their names on the camp rosters and running off to find their own livelihoods.

The most terrifying aspect of all this was that the Ningxia Garrison, which had not seen a mutiny since the end of the Ningxia Campaign in the Wanli reign, was now showing signs of pay riots and mutiny.

Fortunately, the military officers of the Ningxia Garrison had very strong control over the army. With unity of purpose from top to bottom, they properly channeled the soldiers' anger beyond the border walls. At the same time that the Later Jin army withdrew from Xuan–Da, and the Xuan–Da border troops pursued them and clashed with the Marshal's Office's Southern Desert Army, the Ningxia Garrison's forces also coordinated by sortieing beyond the border to attack the Northern Desert Mongol army entrenched in the Ordos.

The blame didn't rest entirely with the Ningxia border troops either — the Mobei army entrenched in Ordos also had ideas about stirring up conflict. It was a mutual rush toward each other.

In last year's campaign against the Later Jin incursion, none of the five participating powers achieved their goals cleanly and neatly — in other words, no one won.

The Later Jin consolidated their control over the Kharchin tribe, and Shenyang successfully weathered a terrible flood, but they left many corpses on the battlefield, and in the end the plundered people and goods were all returned during the pursuit. They came back empty-handed, and their home base even got poked by Shen Shikui — not much damage, but it gave them a good scare.

The Great Ming successfully defended Xuan and Yun at a tiny cost, and this campaign went far more smoothly than any before, but Xuanfu's Central Force Battalion lost over half its strength. At the same time, only part of the plundered people and goods were recovered — the bulk was snatched by Yang Qi — and they would face an even more complicated external environment going forward.

The Tümed were liberated from the Later Jin's threat, but it hardly counts as independence — in fact, ever since Altan Khan began paying tribute, the Tümed could not really be called a fully independent power. It can only be said that for Ombu, it wasn't a loss.

The Marshal's Manor, of course, was not a victor either. Although this lone army successfully put down roots in Monan, it is hard to say this extended the Marshal's Manor's influence here — after all, it is an exclave, and what's more, they still had to face the problem of settling a hundred thousand Mobei Mongol troops.

Come to think of it, only the Mobei Mongols came out somewhat ahead. They didn't lose many men, dodged the natural disasters back in their northern homeland, and reached an agreement with the Marshal's Manor to station and graze in Monan. But the Ming court wouldn't open markets for them, nor would they pay the full reward amounts stipulated in the edicts, leading to constant border clashes.

To be honest, after the Later Jin incursion was over, the Chongzhen Emperor really didn't intend to go back on his word — he genuinely meant to pay the four hundred ninety thousand taels of market rewards in full.

The problem was, this market reward wasn't a direct payment of money, but rather referred to the trade volume of mutual exchange.

Now both sides wanted grain. In the parts of Shaanxi under the Ming court's control, they imposed levies and procured dried noodles in the name of market rewards, but when these were transported to Yansui and Ningxia garrisons, Hong Chengchou seized them: the soldiers don't even have enough to eat, and you want to sell it outside? Trade it for silk and iron pots and sell those to them.

The nobles from Mobei strolled through the monthly market, staring wide-eyed at the fine Lu silk priced in horses: I'm about to starve to death, and you're selling me this — you want me to boil silk in an iron pot and eat it?

The soldiers on both sides were practically ready to eat each other.

Soon, however, even the Lu silk vanished from the border market, because Xing County in Kelan Prefecture, Shanxi, had an outbreak of pestilence. Hong Chengchou didn't know what the disease was, but he heard it wasn't the commonly seen smallpox — rather, it was a violent pestilence that struck swiftly and fiercely, with swelling of the neck, killing entire families at once. The people of Xing County scattered in all directions, and the whole city became nearly empty.

Hong Chengchou's reaction was extraordinarily swift. The moment he heard the news, he demanded that the entire Shaanxi side along the Yellow River — Fugu, Jiazhou, Wubao, Yanshui Pass, Hancheng — seal off all contact with Shanxi. He had, after all, heard the soldiers who retreated from the He-Huang campaign say that Liu Chengzong was a plague marshal, capable of leading a great army in and out of a plague zone with ease.

Hong Chengchou was not so foolish as to believe such ghost stories about plague gods descending to earth. He simply knew that Liu Chengzong had a very effective method for dealing with pestilence. If the plague spread through Shaanxi and the Marshal's Army seized the chance to march east, the consequences would be unthinkable.

In fact, he was currently paying attention to another matter: Zuo Liangyu, garrisoned at Qinzhou, had written to him, mentioning that Liu Chengzong had moved the Liangzhou military supplies into Ningyuan County, and opining that Gansu was now empty — a perfect opportunity to retake it.

Hong Chengchou knew Gansu was empty. He had fled from Gansu himself; he knew the situation there better than anyone. Before Gansu could harvest grain this autumn, the Marshal's Manor troops stationed there would certainly have to be redeployed elsewhere — there wasn't enough food to feed them.

But exactly how empty it was, he couldn't be sure. What if, two thousand li away, an army of Oirat Tatars was already moving toward Gansu?

He had to first understand the Marshal's Manor's territory — was this Gansu considered a rear area or the front line?

He therefore turned his gaze beyond the Great Wall, seeking intelligence on the Marshal's Manor from the Mongols of Ordos, the three Mobei tribes that had moved south, and even the Marshal's Manor's own Monan Command.

Before making this decision, he told himself that no matter what absurd intelligence he uncovered, he would accept it all and believe every word — because in the Gansu campaign, the strength and reach the Marshal's Manor had displayed already exceeded his common sense about peasant armies, even rebel armies.

Intelligence that seemed absurd was very likely true, and perhaps even incomplete.

"Commander, your humble subordinate has not failed in his mission."

Just then, Military Defense Vice Commissioner Ding Qirui hurried up the drum tower clutching several painted scrolls: "The proclamation Liu the bandit issued to all the tribes when he arrogated the title of Khan — I've got it!"

As he spoke, a scroll marked with mountains, rivers, and the nobles of various tribes unfurled before Hong Chengchou, like opening a door to a new world, lifting the curtain along the tip of an iceberg.

A Marshal's Manor utterly different from the Central Plains court's understanding slowly revealed itself before Hong Chengchou's eyes.

Good afternoon!