Chapter 645: Taimeng Garrison

The early-morning mist had lifted.

Tomsk Fortress, steeped in the smell of gunpowder, was everywhere a ruin of shattered walls and broken ramparts from cannon and musket fire.

On this frozen-soil bastion the Tsardom of Russia had ruled for thirty years, the Tianshan Army's red-background coiled-dragon banner now flew from the domed bell tower.

Inside the crude military governor's office, Zhou Riqiang was rummaging through mountains of official documents with a face full of disgust, searching for what he wanted.

Compared to the crude warehouses, armories, troop barracks, and low-ranking officials' quarters inside the fortress, the military governor's office was actually a decent enough dwelling — a two-story wooden building, well-lit inside, with many furs laid down, and even a projecting wooden balcony convenient for shouting orders down into the fort.

Warm and cozy.

Only, to Zhou Riqiang, even the places he'd lived at his lowest were far better than this stuff.

Even that winter when the Lion Army had just entered Qinghai and built crude dugout shelters all over Juerwan, the Grand Marshal hadn't let him suffer.

That year he'd lived in a twelve-tael two-courtyard residence outside Xining city, heated kang, fine wine, everything one could want, comfortably holed up for the winter, not going to work at Qinghai Lake until spring.

Clearly, the Grand Marshal still loved him.

Carrying this rather self-satisfied mood, Zhou Riqiang examined the Russian documents with a scrutinizing eye.

He couldn't read the letters on them — to be precise, what he was looking at wasn't the documents, but the paper the Russians used to write their documents.

As a Provincial Graduate and an imperial official governing a region, Zhou Riqiang was very familiar with paper, and even more familiar with the enormous responsibility paper bore.

The craftsmanship and quality of paper, in his eyes, equaled a nation's degree of prosperity.

And the more precious the paper, the more important the information it was meant to carry.

But these "papers" before Zhou Riqiang left his heart extremely conflicted.

Here there were both mountains of writing materials made from sheepskin and cowhide, and also plenty of genuine paper.

The animal-skin sheets were exquisitely made, scraped extremely thin; though the raw material was a bit backward, they were clearly the work of skilled craftsmen, utterly unlike the crudely made animal-skin sheets used by the Mongol tribes of Qinghai.

Zhou Riqiang couldn't bear to put them down.

Primitive as they were, no one dislikes finely crafted things.

Especially when these primitive yet finely crafted things came from an enemy nation — that made them all the more pleasing.

But those genuine papers left Zhou Riqiang's mood somewhat complicated, even plunging him into bewilderment.

Because the production quality of these things… was just too damn uneven.

The finest paper, in color and quality, was no less than the mulberry-bark paper used for fans, but coarser, and with very pronounced laid lines, as if it had been dried on a summer sleeping mat.

And this stuff clearly wasn't bleached, but rather relied on meticulously selected raw materials to produce a natural-colored paper.

Of course, mulberry-bark paper wasn't any fine paper either — the Great Ming's paper-bleaching technology in this era was absurdly advanced; white paper was as cheap as yellow paper, a hundred sheets for three mace of silver.

In the Great Ming, what was expensive was dyed paper, like porcelain-blue paper — exquisitely beautiful, and with an exquisitely beautiful price, ten sheets costing a full tael of silver; writing or painting on it generally used "mud gold," that is, ink made from gold foil and glue.

Emperor Huizong of Song, Emperor Zhangzong of Jin, and Emperor Xuanzong of Ming all used it and praised it.

However, all of Europe in this period still had no bleaching technology; all paper was natural-colored, and dyeing was utterly beyond them.

Never mind comparing with the Great Ming — Joseon Korea, the Tokugawa Shogunate, even the Trịnh–Nguyễn Vietnam could outstrip Europe by three centuries.

So as for the greater part of the paper, Zhou Riqiang found it hard to describe — from the bottom of his heart, he did not consider those things with writing on them to be paper at all.

Worse than the spirit-money paper used to fool ghosts at the grave, and too scratchy on the backside even for the privy.

Fortunately, though, the civil officials of Tomsk had done their work well, and Zhou Riqiang soon found what he wanted among this pile of parchment — several Russian navigation charts of outposts along various rivers in Siberia.

Even though he couldn't understand a single word.

Yet these outpost charts drawn on sheepskin still held Zhou Riqiang spellbound, enormously deepening his understanding of this land.

It not only made him marvel at the scale of Russia's advance into this land, but also made him sigh at Siberia's sheer vastness.

Eastward from Tomsk, the Russians had two more outposts on the upper and lower reaches of the Yenisei River basin, and in places even farther than the Yenisei, the Russians had likewise established two outposts.

Zhou Riqiang was confident that any outpost worth making a dedicated map for could not be smaller in scale than Tomsk.

However, after comparing the different textures, different production dates, and the different outpost distributions on the several parchment maps, Zhou Riqiang discovered something that puzzled him.

His focus was not on the outposts, but on the connecting points between different river basins.

The crux of the entire "Taimeng Garrison" plan was that the Russians, in their struggle for fur-producing territories, could not bypass Tomsk.

Only if they could not bypass this place would it have the capital to become a seesaw battlefield; only then would it be meaningful for Zhou Riqiang to keep pouring blood and treasure into it — reinforcing fortifications, building a city, establishing governance, even granting official posts and weapons to the various Kyrgyz tribes.

Otherwise, if he spent enormous effort and the Russians simply bypassed it with ease, refusing to play this game with him at all, then what was the point of his grand ambitions here?

After all, this wasn't the Central Plains, and even in the Central Plains, the manpower and resources needed to establish a city were no joking matter.

And on these Russian maps, Zhou Riqiang had spotted something fishy.

Far to the north of Tomsk, following the Ob River down to its lower reaches, it connected to the sea.

And on the maps of earlier years, in the inner river bay near the estuary, there was a Russian outpost.

Yet on maps whose texture clearly looked to be from the last ten-odd years, there was absolutely no trace of that outpost's existence.

As if it had been deliberately erased.

Zhou Riqiang was very troubled by this outpost that did not exist on the new maps.

If a Russian seaport existed there, then the Tianshan Army would have to continue attacking and seize it, hold the seaport in their hands, and transport enough cannons, muskets, and soldiers to completely cut off the maritime route by which furs flowed westward out of Siberia.

Just as he was staring at the maps with a heavy heart, the wooden door of the military governor's office was knocked, and Zhou Riqiang's Mongol orderly reported: "Colonel, General Dai of the Tianshan Army has arrived."

It was Dai Daozi.

Seeing Dai Daozi come in, Zhou Riqiang was very surprised: "General Dai? I thought only the Grand General had come."

Dai Daozi was a very special figure in the Tianshan region — on the one hand, as Liu Chengzong's direct subordinate, he was naturally one of the Marshal's headquarters' real-power representatives in Tianshan.

And on the other hand, he was the first Marshal's Army commander Batur Hongtaiji had ever met, and he also enjoyed extraordinary trust among the nobles of the Oirat tribes.

He was effectively the liaison between the two great powers.

This special status gave him a very high position in Tianshan, making him the third-ranking figure after Liu Chengzu and Zhou Riqiang.

Moreover, starting this year, Dai Daozi's authority had undergone a subtle shift.

The Grand Commander of Gansu, Cao Yao, had begun shipping people to him.

In the chaotic fighting across Shaanxi, Cao Yao, operating on the northern front, bore a special mission from Liu Chengzong: after capturing Ningxia, he was to send the population of the Qing vassal estate to the Tianshan Mountains and hand them over to Dai Daozi for judgment.

Dai Daozi's daughter had died at the hands of a Defender Lieutenant of the Qing vassal estate. On the first day he surrendered and joined the Lion Battalion, Liu the Lion had promised that if the chance ever arose, he would let him take revenge with his own hands.

Regrettably, Dai Daozi's enemy had already died of illness by then.

He would never have the chance in this lifetime to take revenge with his own hands.

Cao Yao had not carried out this order from Liu the Lion with much efficiency, and even now the northern route army had not yet broken through Yinchuan.

However, during their offensive they had smashed several manors of the Qing vassal estate, immediately bundling up the captured stewards, bureau chiefs of the Obedience Office, tax-collecting inner officials, and military officers and dispatching them to the Tianshan Mountains.

The first batch of over two hundred people had arrived at Barkol the month before. Zhou Riqiang had assumed Dai Daozi was busy tormenting those people in Urumqi; he never expected him to come along with Liu Chengzu.

Dai Daozi entered the room beaming, a jar cradled in his arms, and looked over the furnishings and decor of this two-story wooden house. His eye was not as discerning as Zhou Riqiang's — he found everything novel and curious.

He said excitedly to Zhou Riqiang, "General Zhou, the tally outside is complete — the haul is considerable!"

With that, he handed a document to Zhou Riqiang.

It recorded the spoils of the siege of Tomsk: one hundred and forty-seven captives, including the military overseer Ivan, the Cossack chieftain Kabelov, and the mercenary leader Müller.

Apart from the captives, the greatest gains were sixteen small iron cannons from within the city, one thousand one hundred and twenty-two long and short firearms, and an astonishing quantity of food and furs stored in the warehouses.

"The captives should have been more numerous."

Dai Daozi shrugged. "The tribal soldiers of the four Kirghiz clans entered the city right on the heels of the Tianshan Army. They killed everyone they saw, never mind surrender or not. Only some of the better-dressed grey-eyed Tatars were worth taking as captives to them."

Zhou Riqiang knew that the "four Kirghiz clans" he mentioned were the Kyrgyz people, also called the Kirghiz.

As for the low number of captives, Zhou Riqiang was unconcerned. He nodded and said, "No matter. A hundred or so is enough to extract intelligence through interrogation. The Oros have occupied this land for decades, oppressing the natives by brute force. The blood feud is irreconcilable."

"If the Heavenly Army had lost this battle, the local native tribes would have fared no better than they did. There is no need for harsh blame."

Dai Daozi was a veteran frontier scout who had guarded the borderlands, and had followed Liu Chengzong through the wars in the He-Huang region and deep into Kangning. War, battlefields, turmoil, and death were the norm of his life; no number of dead could easily stir his compassion.

He shook his head and pointed west, saying, "It makes no difference to me. It's just Tatars who know their way around killing. The general offensive across the river has begun too. Those Oirat Tatars under Chokur are the truly ruthless ones."

Hearing him mention Chokur, Zhou Riqiang sighed.

He had actually rather hoped to co-opt some Oros river pirates for his own use; after all, the coming work of fortifying the city defenses was exactly when he needed laborers.

But Chokur and his camp soldiers fought like mad dogs, and after battle they would spear every living soul to death as if it were a reward for the soldiers who fought. There was no persuading them.

At this thought, Zhou Riqiang shook his head.

On the northern route of the Tianshan Mountains, between Liu Chengzu and Baatur Khong Tayiji, and between himself and Chokur — who truly controlled whom was hard to say.

Fortunately, after this campaign, the Taimeng Garrison finally had a foothold.

He planned to recruit Kyrgyz and Tatar blacksmiths to fill the garrison ranks, establish an armory bureau here, and mass-produce three-barreled hand cannons to equip the garrison troops, thereby reducing his reliance on Chokur's camp.

Zhou Riqiang looked up and asked Dai Daozi, "How long will the grain stored in the city last the army?"

Dai Daozi had been staring at the map and answered offhandedly, "That depends on how many men the general plans to leave garrisoned in the city. For five hundred, it will last half a year."

Having said that, he suddenly came back to himself and hurriedly handed over the glass jar he was holding. "These grey-eyed Tatar jars are quite good. I hear they were fired at a kiln factory in Kazan to the west. There are over ten thousand jars of pickled vegetables in the warehouse."

"If these jars were shipped to Xining, they'd probably fetch a fair bit of money."

Zhou Riqiang looked at the sealed glass jar, transparent, with pickled cucumbers inside, and shook his head slightly. "A glass pickling jar?"

Glass was a curiosity to common folk, but its value was not outrageously high.

When he had served as magistrate of Lijin in Shandong, there had been a transparent vase in the yamen, far finer in quality than these crude, clumsy things.

Deep in his heart, Zhou Riqiang held a Ming-style pride and contempt toward anything in this world that required intellect.

He believed his homeland possessed the finest intellect under heaven, and that in the realm of craftsmanship, any artisan could master a thing at a single glance.

And then make it even better than the original.

So he would only be curious about that distant Kazan kiln factory, whose location was unknown, and would not harbor much expectation for these jars and bottles.

Therefore he said, "Rather than waste transport capacity, we'd be better off sending the furs back. How many men can the Tianshan Army leave to garrison here?"

Dai Daozi found this question difficult — not because he did not know the answer.

In fact, just earlier, while tallying the spoils in the city, Liu Chengzu had discussed this very matter with him.

He only feared the answer would displease Zhou Riqiang. After all, this entire campaign had been launched purely by Zhou Riqiang's personal will.

To Liu Chengzu, this was a superfluous battle. Leading troops here to fight was not even as worthwhile as having him lead the Tianshan Army to the front lines between the Oirat and the Kazakhs.

At least if the Tianshan Army went there, it could further cement the Marshal's Manor's authority among the Oirat through war.

But in this more remote north, victory or defeat contributed nothing to the greater picture.

After all, even if the Oros built forts on every piece of land and occupied it, the moment the colossus of the Oirat gave a single order to the Forest People, those minor subject tribes like the Kyrgyz would still obediently deliver their furs.

Dai Daozi explained, "The Tianshan Army can only spare at most five hundred men. The general also knows it's time for troop rotation — no one wants to be garrisoned here for the entire winter."

After all, when the Tianshan Army had come, Liu Chengzong had agreed with them that their garrison duty in the Tianshan Mountains would last three to five years. It had already been three years. Liu Chengzong might not necessarily let them go home this year, but with that hope in mind, what if they were to break camp and leave the Tianshan Mountains for home in the winter?

"And even these five hundred men cannot all be stationed at Tomsk. The six forts and stockades downstream on the Ob River must also be garrisoned in sections to guard against enemy raids, so they can relay messages and call for reinforcements."

Having said this, Dai Daozi raised two fingers to Zhou Riqiang. "The Tianshan Army can garrison two hundred men in this city."

A troubled look appeared on Zhou Riqiang's face.

Chokur's camp could not remain garrisoned here for long. What he lacked was not troops but manpower.

The repair of the fortress, the forging of weapons, and most importantly, the suppression of the natives.

If he only had two hundred men, once the weather turned cold, the Kyrgyz tribes might well surround the fortress and kill them all just for food.

After all, once the rivers froze over, this place would become a no-man's-land, and anything could happen then.

"Still, this place looks even more miserable than the Tianshan Mountains." Dai Daozi chuckled as he spoke, then smiled and said, "I can also provide the general with a hundred-man company, all Qing vassal estate lackeys sent over from Ningxia by the Grand Marshal. Use them as you please."

"That will have to do. Zhou thanks the general for his generous support."

Zhou Riqiang pushed open the wooden door to the second floor, paced out onto the balcony, and looked down upon this fortress standing by the river in the wasteland, drawing a deep breath of air thick with the smell of gunpowder and blood.

In a voice only he himself could hear, he said, "The eighteenth day of the eighth month, eighth year of the Chongzhen reign. Zhou Riqiang, Huaiyuan Commandant of the Grand Marshal's Manor, establishes the Taimeng Garrison west of the Tom River. The frontier is forever secured."