Chapter 623: Handling It with Effortless Ease

Yang Qi spared no effort in rallying men.

In just a few days, Dorgon's encampments, routes, provisions, troop strength, and even hydrographic and topographic maps of the Fengzhou Shallows were all delivered by cavalry straight into Datong city.

He had no concern at all about leaking secrets — the Tumed tribe in Altan Khan's era was called the Great Ming Golden Kingdom, and to the Great Ming's archives none of it was a secret; if one searched diligently, one could always find it.

More importantly, Yang Qi was not afraid of taking risks.

He had been taking risks all along, handling them with effortless ease.

Or one could say that in this era, every man riding the crest of the storm was a great adventurer.

From the establishment of the Mobei Protectorate to Yang Qi's entry into Mobei, this whole chain of events was in itself a grand gamble.

Who was enemy and who was friend — that did not matter.

Yang Qi only wanted to muddy the waters; the more troops in Mobei the better, and best if they fought until brains splattered the ground, all buried here, none of them going home!

To this end, he simply sent men to deliver all the intelligence the Ming court needed for an expedition beyond the border straight inside the frontier wall, minimizing the court's misgivings about venturing out.

Yet whether it was him, the Ming court's supreme commander for Shanxi, Xuanfu, and Datong — Yang Sichang — or the supervisory commander of Datong Garrison, Ye Tinggui, they all knew perfectly well that what the Ming court most needed right now for an expedition beyond the border was not these things.

It was a piece of proof.

Proof that Yang Qi and Dorgon were not in collusion, a guarantee that no ambush had been laid to lure the Ming army out beyond the passes.

And this very proof, the thing most needed, was precisely what Yang Qi could not provide.

For one, during the Chongzhen reign the Ming's feelers at most reached just beyond the Great Wall; on outside affairs they could often only rely on hearsay from escaped captives and surrendered men, and matters between different camps were a mix of truth and falsehood, utterly impossible to verify.

For another, Yang Qi knew his credibility with the Great Ming was extremely low; the moment Yang Sichang saw his plea for reinforcements, he would instantly realize he had been played.

This fellow had been catching wolves with bare hands — using the grain Yang Sichang provided to feed his own troops, doing Liu Chengzong's work for him.

This was also why, in his heart, Yang Sichang equated "Yang Qi" with "that dog of a thing": the moment he received the plea for help, he knew the Mobei Protectorate did not actually have a hundred thousand grain-fed Mongol cavalry.

It did not even need to be a hundred thousand — if he had just thirty thousand grain-fed Mongol soldiers, he could have buried twenty thousand Later Jin troops in Mobei.

But grain-fed Mongol cavalry of that sort — to put it bluntly — even in Ligdan Khan's younger days, when he was famed among the nomad lords as commanding four hundred thousand bowstrings, he could not muster forty thousand.

Altan Khan of the Tumed, in his heyday, might have come close; forty thousand armored riders brought him a mighty nomadic kingdom that held the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in the south, raided Suyab in the west, and dominated the Mongol Plateau in the east: the Great Ming Golden Kingdom.

On intelligence regarding Later Jin troop strength, the Ming court knew far more than Yang Qi; even now, Yang Qi's estimate of the Later Jin army was still somewhere between twenty and fifty thousand.

Yang Sichang, on the other hand, knew with perfect clarity that the Later Jin force that had entered Mobei was merely a detached division, twenty thousand strong.

After all, the Ming frontier beacon towers had tracked Dorgon all the way west from Zhangjiakou, watching clearly along the route — roughly twenty thousand men, give or take; fifty thousand was pure nonsense.

If Yang Qi truly had a hundred thousand Mongol troops at his command, he could simply have buried Dorgon's army in Mobei; he would never have cowered like a rat inside Guihua City.

On this basis, Commander Yang of Mobei's impression on the Ming court's side was that of a man whose mouth ran wild with tall tales, someone who conspicuously never did a decent thing, his credibility even lower than the former Ligdan Khan's.

Keeping him around to feign civility and trade perfunctory gestures was simply a matter of having no other choice.

Yet this matter… held enormous allure for Yang Sichang.

Sometimes, on some matters, Yang Sichang knew perfectly well that when Yang Qi spouted things like "annihilate the Later Jin army completely at the Fengzhou Shallows, so that Shenyang has no troops to prepare for winter this year," it was all nonsense.

But there was no way around it.

The allure was immense.

Setting aside everything else about those twenty thousand Later Jin troops, if even just ten thousand of them were battle troops belonging to the Eight Banners, annihilating them here would be equivalent to striking down an entire Manchu banner outright.

Moreover, even if they were merely tied down here, the Jinzhou front would be impregnable this winter; the Later Jin would lack the capacity to launch a large-scale offensive, and Shen Shikui, the commander-in-chief of Dongjiang Garrison on Pi Island, would have an opening to exploit.

But mounting an expedition beyond the border was a matter of grave importance, absolutely not something Yang Sichang could decide on his own.

Yang Sichang very promptly bundled up all the letters and intelligence Yang Qi had sent and dispatched riders to race along the Great Wall route and deliver them to Beijing.

In the seventh month, the Forbidden City sweltered under scorching heat.

The previous two months should have been the rainy season, but this year's rains were strange — the Northern Metropolitan Region enjoyed favorable weather, yet a line was drawn precisely from Lugou Bridge to Tianjin Garrison.

Southwest of the Northern Metropolitan Region, the weather was fine, but beyond the line of the Lugou River and the Hai River, not a drop of rain fell all summer; the crops in Tongzhou and other places all wilted under the sun, and even the air shimmered with the parched, hot breath of the earth.

Still, the capital was the capital after all; the mansions of high officials and nobles all received ice distributed by the imperial palace, and privately run icehouses also did brisk business, making this populous city a touch cooler than elsewhere.

Cutting ice in winter, building icehouses, and retrieving it when needed was an ancient tradition on this land, traceable as far back as the Western Zhou.

The Zhou had Eight Administrations, namely: Food, Goods, Sacrifices, Public Works, Education, Justice, Reception, and Military.

As the saying goes, food is heaven; Food was foremost among the Eight Administrations. In the Zhou dynasty there was a vast system of official posts, and among them was an office under the Wine Steward called the Ice Master.

The character for "ice" originally referred to the person in charge of ice, responsible for harvesting and storing it.

This was a massive undertaking; since ancient times, there was the saying "ice times three," meaning the ice harvested and stored was three times the amount to be used.

That, however, was the technology of the Western Zhou; by the present age, there were more methods for sealing icehouses, but the amount harvested was still threefold, so in theory even more ice was obtained from storage.

Yet nowadays more people used ice, so on the contrary, ice remained a rather luxurious commodity.

Alas, in this sweltering seventh month, no amount of ice within the double walls could suppress the restless agitation of the Forbidden City — it even made the coming autumn wind feel all the more bleak and deadly.

All because at this moment, the situation in the realm had taken a severe turn for the worse.

Inside the Palace of Heavenly Purity, the Chongzhen Emperor, clad in a plain blue robe, slumped dejectedly against the dragon throne.

On the dragon desk before the emperor lay several memorials scattered in disarray; the topmost one was from Lu Xiangsheng, the Huguang Governor-General stationed at Xiangfan.

This was Lu Xiangsheng's second memorial within ten days; the earlier first one reported that the Dashing General Li Zicheng had led his army into Yunyang, besieged the newly appointed Yunyang Grand Coordinator Song Zushun inside the city, and was plundering in all directions.

Song Zushun was Lu Xiangsheng's successor, a presented scholar of the forty-fourth year of the Wanli reign; the court had appointed him Grand Coordinator of Yunyang precisely because he was versed in military affairs.

During the Jisi Incident in the second year of Chongzhen, when troops were summoned to relieve the capital, Song Zushun served as Administration Commissioner, defending Liangzhou Circuit; that year, the Gansu relief army mutinied en route, killed their colonel, divided six thousand taels of marching pay among themselves, and turned back northwest, besieging the grand coordinator in Lanzhou and crossing the river westward — the situation was dire.

The grand coordinator besieged in Lanzhou dispatched riders with urgent dispatches, ordering Liangzhou Circuit to mount a strict defense; the local gentry within the city also stood firmly on the court's side and prepared to defend to the death.

After all, the gentry in the Gansu region were mostly retired hereditary military officers — none of them were afraid of trouble; the two sides were irreconcilable, and a great battle was brewing in Liangzhou Circuit in eastern Gansu.

But Song Zushun did something remarkable.

He overrode all objections and told others that if the mutinous troops were barred from the city and met with strict, desperate resistance, the situation would surely collapse; he believed there was still room to salvage matters and decided to negotiate with the rebels, letting them enter the city later in hopes of disbanding them.

He handled the matter beautifully — not only did he disband the mutinous army, but before disbanding them he even had them turn over the five thousand taels of marching pay they had not yet spent into the treasury, and recovered their swords, spears, and firearms as well.

Disbanding rebel troops with a mere three inches of tongue — he was indeed a formidable figure.

Unfortunately, this time, the man Song Zushun had to face was Li Zicheng, and behind him he no longer had the support of the Gansu army of those years… Yunyang Prefecture had no troops to begin with; he could only shut the gates and defend desperately, watching helplessly as the territory under his charge was ravaged by slaughter and plunder.

The Chongzhen Emperor had thought that Lu Xiangsheng, sending another memorial in barely ten days, must mean the situation in Yunyang Prefecture had taken a turn for the better.

He never imagined that not only had Yunyang not improved, but the situation had actually grown worse.

Lu Xiangsheng's second memorial came, first, to inform His Majesty that he had already engaged Li Zicheng's roving bandits with inferior forces.

In ten days he had fought across a thousand li, winning three battles in three engagements and taking thirty-six hundred heads — yet the enemy only swelled as he fought. Mountain bandits and local outlaws from the Yunyang Prefecture hills had joined the fray, and starving commoners south of the Han River had likewise been stirred into revolt.

Across Huguang Province, military strength was insufficient. His own guard troops darted about on punitive expeditions like skimming the surface of a boiling pot — reinforcements were urgently needed on the battlefield.

But that was not the main point of Lu Xiangsheng's second memorial. His main point was that interrogation of prisoners had revealed that alongside Li Zicheng in breaking through Wu Pass and entering Huguang was another great bandit, Zhang Yichuan.

In truth, Lu Xiangsheng did not know who Zhang Yichuan was, nor had he ever heard the name before, but the title "Henan Regional Commander of the Marshal's Headquarters" alone was enough to classify him as a great bandit.

At present, Zhang Yichuan had not crossed the Han River with Li Zicheng, but had instead turned to plunder Nanyang Prefecture north of the river.

Lu Xiangsheng's intent was to warn the court to watch Henan carefully, to prevent this false official from actually entering the province, and ideally to mount a joint north-south suppression to stamp out this prairie-fire rebellion.

Lu Xiangsheng knew Henan. In his earlier posts as Prefect and Military Defense Circuit Intendant of Daming, which bordered Henan, he had heard something of conditions there.

He therefore did not believe that Zhang Yichuan, once in Henan, could run rampant for long.

For in the Great Ming, among the Two Capitals and Thirteen Provinces, excluding the Nine Border Garrisons, Henan's military tradition ranked in the top three. The province's defining word was a single character: many.

Many people, many fields, many imperial clansmen, many garrison troops, many militiamen.

As for population and farmland, the Central Plain speaks for itself.

In terms of imperial clansmen, Henan was blanketed with princely estates: the Prince of Zhou in Kaifeng, the Prince of Tang in Nanyang, the Prince of Fu in Luoyang, the Prince of Zhao in Zhangde, the Prince of Zheng in Huaiqing, the Prince of Chong in Runing, the Prince of Hui in Yuzhou, the Prince of Lu in Weihui — these fiefdoms practically filled the province.

And every princely estate had its own ceremonial guard, some even a full escort guard. Though the princely guard-army system grew ever more hollowed out and understrength, an armed force of over a thousand men was still not to be taken lightly.

Garrison troops were many because Henan had established a great many guard battalions, which was also tied to its large population.

Militiamen were Henan's particular feature. Bordering the Yunyang Special Zone, the province had faced a severe refugee problem since the early Ming.

Local gentry built forts and stockades to defend themselves, and officials recruited militia to protect the region. Later, after the Tumu Crisis, Henan became a major exporter of militia, supplying frontier passes, filling the capital's garrison battalions, and feeding into local guard battalions — Henan militiamen were everywhere.

On multiple occasions, entire militia battalions of three thousand men were converted wholesale into regular battalion troops.

This unique historical environment and tradition meant that Henan, though it shared no border with the frontier, possessed both an enormous reserve of trained manpower among the common people and a whole host of princely fiefdoms that squeezed the land like oil drills... No great upheaval could truly take root here.

Bandits from outside could be stopped by the local guard troops and forts; local armed uprisings could not extend their influence beyond a handful of villages.

Yet every strength has its corresponding weakness. Henan's stability was extremely high.

This meant that the most critical link in the Great Ming military system was missing in Henan: the Regional Commander.

The post of Regional Commander was established on an ad-hoc basis. It became a permanent office across the realm precisely because those places always had trouble.

Henan had no trouble, and therefore no Regional Commander.

If in the northern provinces of the Great Ming — Shaanxi, Shanxi, Gansu, and the like — command broke down in battle, the problem often stemmed from the army's maintenance costs being too low.

The culture in the various garrisons was to use fewer men eating less grain, forming an elite-troop policy, so that once total strength exceeded the upper limit of three to five thousand, troops had to be drawn from all over, making it impossible for superiors and subordinates to share one heart and one mind, each hampering the other, so that they looked like scattered stragglers.

Well then, Henan's troops truly were scattered stragglers.

Lu Xiangsheng's memorial was meant as a precautionary shot for the central court: Henan's troops could not be thrown in directly; they needed unified command and time to mobilize before they could form combat effectiveness.

But by the time this letter reached the court, in the Chongzhen Emperor's eyes it meant something else entirely.

The Henan of Chongzhen's eighth year and the Henan Lu Xiangsheng had known in Daming during Chongzhen's second year were separated not only by six years, but by earth-shaking changes.

The matter went back three years. That year, the peasant army led by Gao Yingxiang had fought its way through Shanxi, crossed the Taihang Mountains into Northern Zhili, and raised havoc in Wu'an and other places before being jointly suppressed by Zuo Liangyu, Deng Qi, Zhang Fengyi, and others, and beaten back into Shanxi.

It happened that the Yellow River was frozen solid, and a large body of peasant troops crossed the river into Henan, then on into Shaanxi, until at last they settled down as neighbors right beside Liu Chengzong's Marshal's Headquarters.

In the course of this, the various counties of Henan were overrun by soldiers. When the roving bandits and government troops alike had passed through and gone west, they left Henan in shambles, and peace did not return.

Gentry built forts to defend themselves; local bandits set up stockades and gathered crowds. Forts and stockades sprang up like bamboo shoots after rain across the Central Plain heartland, attacking one another, so that the situation grew even more chaotic.

Henan's unique circumstances — drought, locust plagues, and military calamity all striking at once — made conditions even more dire than Shaanxi's in the previous two years.

Shaanxi's problem was simple: no food. Follow the leader, find rich households to rob, get beaten by government troops.

Henan was more troublesome. Here, every fort and stockade was fighting every other, because Henan had food.

The root cause of Henan's turmoil was not drought.

Thanks to abundant river irrigation resources, a large plain cultivation area, and high agricultural grain output, drought alone could hardly produce a province-wide upheaval. What was more... from the Tianqi era until now, Henan had experienced only a slight drought in Chongzhen's seventh year.

Compared to Shanxi and Shaanxi, this even counted as favorable weather.

In fact, the true source of Henan's upheaval was the flooding caused by two torrential rainstorms that struck the entire Central Plain in Chongzhen's fifth and sixth years.

Of course, the mutual attacks among forts and stockades everywhere were not the reason for the Chongzhen Emperor's dejection.

The real cause of his despondency was a small incident that had occurred this summer: the rats of Xiezhou in Shanxi had gone mad, biting each other's tails to form chains, and had crossed south over the Yellow River, surging into Lingbao County in Henan.

Plague, following in their wake, had entered Tong Pass.