Chapter 789: The Qingyang Experience

Soon, the Marshal's Headquarters held two funerals for the soldiers who had fallen at Yulin.

Two cemeteries, each covering two hundred mu, were laid out, with Yulin Prefect Chen Qihuang and Yuning Brigade Commander-in-Chief Zuo Guangxian responsible for the later construction.

The construction costs were drawn from the spoils the Marshal's Army had seized in the Yulin campaign — specifically, taken from the homes of those old commanders-in-chief.

The exact amount of spoils from Yulin city could not be tallied for a while, because Ren Quan'er's main camp was still digging three feet deep into the city, trying to unearth the gold and silver that might be buried beneath the abandoned estates.

Although most of this effort was futile, the majority of the Marshal's Army soldiers rather enjoyed doing it.

In the period after capturing Xi'an Prefecture, the Second Brigade had gained extensive digging experience in the city; a veteran soldier entering a courtyard could, with a single glance, guess with near certainty where gold and silver might be buried underground.

Another enormous haul within Yulin city was copper — bronze statues and bronze vessels.

This city had more temples than any Liu Chengzong had ever seen; even Kangning Prefecture could not compare. He even suspected that this one city had more temples than the entirety of Kangning Prefecture.

For centuries, Yulin had been one of the most fiercely contested front lines against the north, perpetually bearing immense military pressure.

For generations, the people here did not engage in production but devoted themselves solely to warfare. Fathers, husbands, brothers, sons, and grandsons all joined the army, their families prayed for blessings, temples flourished, and many generals would fund the building of family temples beside their ancestral halls.

After a single battle, all of these became ownerless property.

The Marshal's Army took the gilded bronze statues and the great bells, but left the temples themselves.

Strangely enough, back when they were in Liaoyang, they had been dumping cartload after cartload of copper blocks into the moat, knowing full well that too many heavy things could not be brought back, and they had looked down on such things entirely.

But once they returned to Shaanxi, the extremely low transport costs meant that even a mosquito's leg was still meat.

Yet compared to the gold, bronze artifacts, and silver taels, the most abundant spoils in Yulin city and even the entire Yansui Garrison were weapons, armor, and military equipment.

With the fall of Yulin city, garrisons from the Marshal's Headquarters stationed in the surrounding forts that had once belonged to the Yansui Garrison, with Yulin at the center, all began sending their stockpiled arms to the garrison city. For a time, a vast flood of military equipment poured in.

Liu Chengzong had originally ordered the troops to deliver the arms to the armory in Yulin Guard City, but quickly changed the order, instructing that the arms be placed outside the city.

First, because the warehouses inside the city could not hold them all; second, because despite the enormous quantity, not much of the equipment was usable.

Helmets, bowl helmets, iron arm-guards, leather belts, leather pouches, banners, and various military implements could be taken away directly. Most of the armor needed to be dismantled and reprocessed, a task assigned to the newly established Yuning Brigade to complete locally.

The greatest spoils of all were firearms; the Marshal's Army felt as though it had looted a military museum.

Firearms and cannons numbered over sixty thousand pieces, among which were vast quantities of low-value, discarded military arms that even made Liu Chengzong feel they were not worth the cost of refurbishing.

Cannons from the Hongwu era, hand cannons from the Yongle era, quick-spears from the Zhengde era, three-eyed guns from the Jiajing era, bird guns from the Wanli era, Frankish swivel guns from the Tianqi era — once sorted, the firearms alone were divided into over a hundred distinct types.

There were over eight thousand bird guns, but only a little over eight hundred firearms that the Marshal's Army could actually pick up and use.

This was because many of them were old bird guns from the Jiajing and Wanli eras.

By "old," the issue was not the age, but the design.

Aside from heavy muskets and heavy arquebuses, every brigade in the Marshal's Army was equipped with over a thousand light bird guns. Apart from a small number of early self-manufactured pieces, most were captured from Ming forces.

After several massive campaigns, the bird guns they currently fielded came in, specifically speaking, only two models.

The first was the Frankish-style breech-loading Lightning Arquebus used by the Guanzhong Brigade cavalry. Reserves were few; it was spoils Zhang Tianlin had seized from Bai Guang'en.

The second was the Three-Length Gun used by most garrison brigades, more precisely the Combined-Action Xuanyuan Three-Length Gun.

This was also the primary model of bird gun issued to Ming forces during the Chongzhen period. It was generally the Combined-Action Three-Length Gun, with the "Xuanyuan" being an optional rain cover accessory.

The so-called "Three Lengths" referred to the three most popular firearm models of the Wanli era: the Japanese arquebus, the Western arquebus, and the Rumi arquebus.

These three outstanding firearm designs each had their own strengths and weaknesses.

The Japanese arquebus was light and comfortable to use, but its stock design was short and small, ill-suited to the hand shape of Ming soldiers, resulting in poor shooting stability.

The Western arquebus referred to early Portuguese arquebuses. It was accurate, but its powder charge was only one qian, and its barrel was long yet small and thin.

The Rumi arquebus was an Ottoman musket. It was powerful but excessively heavy, with an excellent design that included a flash pan cover.

After improvements combining the strengths of all three, a new bird gun was made. On this foundation, a combined action was crafted, using a large and a small gear to drive the flash pan cover and the matchlock arm, so that when the trigger was pulled and the matchlock arm fell, the flash pan cover would open simultaneously.

This eliminated the motion of opening the flash pan cover when firing.

In Liu Chengzong's eyes, the Three-Length Gun had essentially reached the technological endpoint of muzzle-loading matchlock smoothbore guns.

All that remained for improvement were the flintlock ignition mechanism and rifled barrel technology.

But this was the Great Ming.

Among the spoils this time, as usual, there were many ingeniously invented and creatively designed wondrous devices.

For instance, over a hundred matchlock three-eyed guns, called the Triple-Triumph Divine Machine; likewise, over two hundred matchlock five-eyed versions, called the Five-Thunder Divine Machine.

Over a hundred muzzle-loading, quick-change chambered Ten-Thousand-Victory Frankish Guns, with a small iron-chain-linked latch at the rear of the barrel. The barrel was a large-caliber tube one chi six long, fitted with a front sight and rear sight.

It came with nine pre-loaded sub-chambers, small-caliber tubes one chi seven long, pre-filled with ammunition, with a locking slot at the rear. In combat, one inserted the sub-chamber from the front into the main barrel, then pushed the rear latch into the tube to lock the sub-chamber in place and fired directly.

After firing, one pulled the latch, removed the tube, swapped in a new tube, inserted the latch, poured priming powder into the flash pan, and continued firing.

All were weapons of great design significance, performing well in actual combat but doubling the logistical burden.

Liu Chengzong had seen similar weapons in the hands of the Later Jin after the Lingdong campaign.

Zuo Liangyu also presented Liu Chengzong with a treasure: a steel mace, the kind used by Yuchi Gong, called the Thunderbolt Divine Fire Mace, handed down through the family of You Shiwei.

The craftsmanship was exceedingly fine. The three-chi-two-cun mace shaft was constructed with a steel core and a copper exterior. The front five cun were hollow, drilled with fire holes — an iron mace that was also a matchlock gun.

Removing the wooden grip fittings to look inside — good heavens — the inscription read: Datong Rear Guard, Jiajing Year 38. An antique from the previous century.

It might even have been manufactured under the supervision of Yu Dayou, giving it extremely high collectible value.

Liu Shizi toyed with the steel mace. Truthfully, he felt this item had little practical combat significance, but it was quite interesting.

Once back in Xi'an Prefecture, he could have the Works Office make a few to issue to commanders as rewards.

But compared to making these, Liu Chengzong was far more concerned with firearms that could be universally issued to the army.

"Sort the various captured arms by type. For each type, pick three to five pieces in good condition, load them onto carts, and send them back to the Xi'an Prefecture Works Office. See if the First and Second Brigades need any Three-Length Guns to supplement their stocks; if not, transport those back to Xi'an as well."

"Send the old bird guns and three-eyed guns to the Lanzhou Arsenal. The bird guns can be used for trade, and the three-eyed guns can be shipped to the Taimeng Garrison. Leave the rest all to the Yuning Brigade."

"As for rockets, flying mortar shells, and the like, dismantle them for the gunpowder to use in training. The old firearms can be treated as scrap iron."

Afterward, the Marshal's Headquarters central army and the First and Second Brigades broke camp and marched. Zuo Guangxian remained in Yulin to manage the Yuning Brigade, while the detached battalions drawn from the various garrison brigades each returned to their posts in the Linliang and Yanqing circuits.

Liu Chengzong was about to return to Xi'an. His father had sent a letter: the earliest of the prefectural gazetteers would not be compiled until next year, but the preliminary figures for farmland and population had all been tallied and sent to Xi'an Prefecture, where Zhang Jinyan of the Provincial Administration Commission was responsible for organizing them. A first draft was already complete.

This news made Liu Shizi's heart race for home.

But the return journey still required a long detour. The Marshal Army headquarters and the First Brigade still took the Qingyang route, while the Second Brigade took the official road through Yan'an Prefecture — though ahead of them, Zhang Zhen of the Yanqing Brigade had driven over a hundred mine-sweeping sheep.

Liu Shizi ordered Yanqing Brigade Commander Zhang Zhen to, within one year, completely clear the landmines along the Yan'an Prefecture post-road and official highway, and to fully repair and tamp down the official roads of both Yan'an and Qingyang Prefectures, removing every last tree stump.

In truth, the landmine problem on Yan'an Prefecture's official roads was now almost nonexistent.

After several years of wind, sun, and rain, many of the mines buried back then had already failed and broken down.

Even so, no one was willing to gamble on it.

As long as there was even one mine that might still detonate, Liu Chengzong would rather take a two-hundred-li detour during non-combat times.

Drought.

This year the drought was still severe, and vast tracts of farmland lay abandoned.

In Qingyang Prefecture, Liu Chengzong paid a formal visit to Prefect Ju Sirang and inquired about conditions in Qingyang.

Liu Shizi's attitude was genuinely one of respectful homage, because he greatly admired Ju Sirang for governing Qingyang — a place old, remote, poor, and marginal — in such perfect order.

Liu Chengzong had been to Qingyang Prefecture himself and seen what kind of place it was. In the early Chongzhen years, to evade taxes, tens of thousands of commoners didn't live in houses but dug their own caves into the hillsides.

A place like that, after Ju Sirang became prefect, he offered amnesty to roving bandits and had them farm, earning the support of the people's army, and governed the region into a Shaanxi paradise.

Liu Shizi truly dared not cause him any trouble, terrified that a single whimsical idea or political pressure from himself might easily crush Qingyang into collapse.

But when he met Ju Sirang, he found that Ju Sirang's attitude toward him was quite good. The man was completely relaxed, clearly having adapted to serving as an official under the Marshal's Office, and even felt that Liu Chengzong had solved Qingyang Prefecture's biggest problem.

Years of accumulated tax arrears — Liu Chengzong had not forcibly ordered the localities to collect them, and that was what gave Ju Sirang the opportunity to fully display his talents.

Now, Ju Sirang could present Liu Chengzong's restraint with an excellent report card.

Qingyang Prefecture had only ten thousand eight hundred and nineteen registered adult males, cultivating nineteen thousand eight hundred and thirty-eight qing of farmland.

Due to drought, seven thousand seven hundred and thirteen qing lay abandoned, yet there remained over twelve thousand one hundred and twenty-five qing of irrigable cultivated land, of which four thousand seven hundred and eighty-two qing were tenant-farmed official fields.

The population was very small, the farmland very plentiful. Though situated in a remote and barren borderland, the territory was peaceful, no longer troubled by famine or the scourge of war.

Moreover, Qingyang Prefecture had established a massive civil registry for poultry farming households, raising over one hundred fifty thousand chickens and seventy thousand ducks locally.

Next year there would be even more.

These chickens and ducks were raised to control the local locust plagues.

The farmland in Qingyang lay abandoned because it could not be irrigated. Although the Huan River ran through the area, in the Huan County region people called it the Horse-Fool River — the water was bitter and even poisonous; drinking it would at best make you stupid and at worst kill you.

This was because it bordered salt ponds to the north and its eastern strata connected to the Yanchang oil fields, causing cyanide levels to exceed safe limits.

Of course, at this time no one knew what chemical compounds were in the water; they simply called it the Horse-Fool River. Only downstream at the Malian River flats could it barely be used for irrigation.

This meant Qingyang always had locusts.

Originally, the land most suitable for locusts to breed was soil just after a drought had passed, where only the barest moisture remained in the earth, and because no one tended it, the surface crusted and hardened — exactly the place locusts loved to lay eggs.

But if the moisture dropped any lower, the locust eggs could not survive.

Yet, by coincidence, Qingyang's soil conditions meant that areas far from water sources were suitable for egg-laying in the first two years, and when those places became unsuitable, the areas near the Huan River became suitable.

Every year, when the season came, there was a native locust plague.

During the Wanli reign, there was a man named Chen Zhenlong who brought sweet potatoes back from the Southern Seas — he was the first to introduce sweet potatoes.

His son was named Chen Jinglun, a certified student from Changle County in Fujian, who created the biological control technique of using herded ducks to suppress locusts.

But for Ju Sirang, herding ducks to control locusts was a method proven in the southeast. Raising ducks required water, and the water in the upper reaches of Huan County was undrinkable even for people, let alone ducks. So adapting to local conditions, he mainly promoted chicken-raising among the commoners under his prefectural administration.

Only along the lower reaches of the Malian River, in areas where water could be diverted for irrigation, did he have people raise ducks.

The chickens and ducks were not raised in vain. To graze sheep in Qingyang, one had to obtain the household registration of a poultry-raising household. This status was not hereditary; it was merely an entry threshold — only with this status could one herd sheep.

Ju Sirang leased all the abandoned virgin land to officially registered poultry households — duck-raisers near the lower Huan River, chicken-raisers near the mountainous areas. For every qing of wasteland, the annual levy was five pairs of chickens or ducks, recorded under the government's name but still raised free-range by the households themselves.

This in-kind tax on abandoned land was worth over two thousand three hundred taels annually.

Ju Sirang had no intention of relying on this to increase revenue; it was simply to set a minimum standard for the poultry farmers — for every qing of wasteland leased, they had to maintain at least four chickens or ducks, since the government might levy them at any time.

Because of this policy, Qingyang Prefecture's poultry stock rose sharply, and the price dropped from the original forty-six qian per bird to thirty qian, with tender chickens and fat ducks costing a bit more.

The price could hold steady at this level because the garrisons of the Yanqing Brigade and Longxi Brigade always bought them to eat.

This situation filled Liu Chengzong with immense admiration — Ju Sirang was truly formidable.

He had people and land, chickens and ducks, controlled the locust plagues, supplied the army, and quelled rebellion.

Although the population was somewhat small, in this era, Liu Chengzong could not find a single fault with it.

Liu Shizi stayed at the Qingyang Prefectural Office for a full three days, discussing many issues of local governance with Ju Sirang and carefully noting down his policies one by one, before setting off southward.

By comparison, the Prefect of Fengxiang, Li Jiayan, was far inferior.

Carrying the good mood Qingyang Prefecture had given him, Liu Chengzong traveled to Binzhou and summoned Li Jiayan.

He thought to himself, Fengxiang Prefecture's conditions were much better than Qingyang's — more people, more land, and far better irrigation.

Who knew the actual situation... to say it was far worse wouldn't be quite right, but there were simply no surprises.

Fengxiang Prefecture had three hundred fifty thousand adult males — thirty-five times that of Qingyang.

But it only had seventy-seven thousand qing of farmland, nearly four times that of Qingyang.

Cultivated land amounted to thirty-six thousand qing, averaging ten mu per adult male, while over forty thousand qing of virgin land lay completely unused.

Originally, this wasn't a big deal — it was actually fairly standard. Fengxiang Prefecture was inherently more difficult to govern than Qingyang.

But after seeing how well Ju Sirang had governed Qingyang, and then looking at Fengxiang Prefecture with over four million mu of abandoned land...

Liu Chengzong, looking at Li Jiayan — the prefect he had casually appointed back then — from every angle, was thoroughly dissatisfied.

"Damn it. I handed a place as fine as Fengxiang over to you, and you can't accomplish a single thing?"

"Summon your county magistrates. All of them, get on horses and go to Qingyang to learn how to govern a region. Zhang Yong!"

"Prepare horses for them. Send cavalry to escort them. If they can't ride, they can run there. No one is permitted to ride in a sedan chair unless their legs are crippled. For one month, bring your own dry rations. By October, all seven Fengxiang county magistrates must submit the strategies they learned in Qingyang to Xi'an."

"Do well next year and get promoted. Fail, and you'll be replaced!"

Good morning!