Chapter 795: Zhou Yijing's Taimeng Fortress

In the summer of the ninth year of Chongzhen, the firewood port by the Tom River was completed.

The setting sun spilled across the broad river, dusting the dense forest on the right bank with a layer of golden light.

Rafts woven from massive logs set out from several logging camps within a hundred-plus li upstream, carrying cargo and wagons, drifting down the current to the firewood port, where they were moored at the bank and unloaded.

One after another, empty wagons carrying lumberjacks filed southward along the frozen-earth path by the shore, round and round without end.

Atop the wooden watchtower of Taimeng Fortress, Zhou Yijing looked down upon the firewood port, a smug, satisfied smile spreading across his face.

This port, which could only berth small boats and log rafts, was exceedingly crude — even the harbor's original position was nothing more than a few furrows gouged out by the hulls of Liu Chengzu's naval vessels when they landed.

Though the port was crude, for Zhou Yijing it still counted as one of the two major political achievements he had accomplished since arriving at Taimeng Fortress.

In some sense, this small port — named Firewood Port because it mainly transported timber — even surpassed, in strategic significance, the book he had personally compiled, A Brief Examination of the Tai Garrison.

Because with this boat port completed, the several forest tribes along the Tom River to the south no longer needed to send people to help at Taimeng Fortress; they could simply fell trees by the riverbank, bind them into rafts, load some goods and hands, and float down with the current.

Before the river froze over, it would be navigable for at least half the year, every year — with greater transport volume and faster speed.

Moreover, the patrol boats plying the two routes of Zaisang Lake and the Altai could also more easily offload cargo and resupply at Taimeng Fortress.

In half a year, Zhou Yijing had tried with all his might to understand this land. He had now figured out many things — but there were even more things he could not comprehend.

He could understand Liu Chengzong's frenzied expansion to the northwest.

That was grounded in the Marshal's headquarters' formidable military force and the need for survival — after all, Zhou Yijing had come to know a few of the Marshal Army's generals.

In the words of those martial men, the strongest opponent they had ever faced was always the Ming army, but the most dangerous campaign they had fought was against the Oirats in Qinghai.

Even that statement Zhou Yijing could not understand at first — not until someone explained it to him in detail did he grasp what it meant.

The Ming army had fierce soldiers and bold commanders, but with no true leader, they were constrained at every turn.

The Oirats were different. Though their weapons, equipment, tactics, and methods of warfare were comprehensively backward compared to the Ming army, they genuinely had a bellwether.

Thus, in the eyes of the Marshal Army's generals, Great Ming was stronger, but the Oirats were more dangerous.

And it was precisely for this reason that Liu Chengzong had dispatched the Tianshan Army to garrison Ili, and had also authorized He Renlong to lead troops west to occupy Turpan, linking their territory into one continuous stretch across the northwestern desert.

This, Zhou Yijing could understand.

But to be honest, what Zhou Yijing could not understand was why Zhou Riqiang had to fight a battle against the Russians at Tomsk — and after seizing this tiny outpost, kept pouring in resources and manpower to build and develop it.

There was even a strong sense that they meant to treat this place as a frontline base for opening up new territory.

If it were up to Zhou Yijing's own thinking, they would only need to station troops in Ili. The north could be left entirely to the Oirats, or even the Dzungar tribe, to rule over the forest subjects — after all, what the Marshal's headquarters needed was nothing more than a sky-high quantity of furs.

For such a trifling matter, the Oirats were perfectly capable of handling it on their behalf.

So Zhou Yijing felt that from Liu Chengzong to Zhou Riqiang, the Marshal's headquarters was full of madmen with brains addled by fever.

They actually, truly wanted to push the border line all the way to this place called Taimeng Fortress — and in strategic terms, this was only the beginning.

What kind of godforsaken place was Taimeng Fortress? Never mind how bitterly cold it was — just the distance alone: from Ili to here was a march of three thousand li.

There was no infrastructure whatsoever. The nearest person within a hundred li who could treat a patient was a shaman priest in the woods who danced to summon spirits.

Human life here was as light and weightless as a joke.

Let alone for Zhou Yijing, a jinshi scholar accustomed to comfort and privilege — even for the errand-running lackeys from the various vassal states, this place was a hundred percent a dragon's pool and tiger's den.

Just last month, Taimeng Fortress, with a total population of a little over four hundred, had lost nineteen people dead, and two more had gone missing.

Some were kicked to death by wild asses; some were crushed by felled fir trees while logging and died of their injuries; some went hunting with a musket in hand, only to end up hunted by the prey instead.

There were also those transporting timber — a raft moored unsteadily, someone fell into the river. In spring, the three-li-wide great river ran swift and fierce; once you fell in, you were swept away, with no hope of being found.

And then there were the more routine cases — disappeared in the forest last autumn, only found this spring after the thaw.

Lifelike, as if still alive.

Among these, there were indeed some doomed wretches who were dead no matter what, but at least half of them, had they encountered the same circumstances in the Central Plains, simply would not have died.

But in Taimeng Fortress, where there were no medicinal herbs, only gunpowder, and no physicians, only military advisors — if an injury was even slightly serious, even if you were hauled back inside the fort, you could only lie in bed and wait to die.

Even though war had established the strategic foundation for a foothold here, Zhou Yijing still believed they lacked the capability and experience to truly gain a footing in this place.

Yet Zhou Yijing's enthusiasm for work was immense.

It was not that he truly believed Liu Chengzong's strategy was correct, or that Zhou Riqiang's arrangements were good, or that, like the soldiers of Taimeng Fortress, he firmly believed that wealth and rank were sought amid danger, polishing his record to fight for a future.

Quite the opposite.

Zhou Yijing did not believe any of that at all. Foothold or no foothold, strategy or no strategy — none of it was his concern. He was simply certain that he could never make it back on his own.

Therefore, he could only resign himself to adversity and find a way to make Liu Chengzong transfer him back.

For him, being posted to Taimeng Fortress — despite bearing the high-ranking official title of Taimeng Regional Commander — felt, in actual experience, far worse than the misery of being banished to the frontier.

That Regional Commander title might as well not exist.

The registered population of all Taimeng Fortress totaled a little over four hundred — where was he supposed to go to form some Taimeng Battalion? What was more, there was neither military pay nor grain; even if he had troops, he could not recruit anyone.

Zhou Yijing believed that Taimeng Fortress's mode of operation was simply waiting to die, utterly without prospects.

This place had no self-sufficiency whatsoever. There were the unreliable Forest Dwellers, but the living conditions in the fortress were worse than in their own tribes, making it very hard to recruit people over.

The only thing that could counter natural attrition was the leftover scraps of Ming imperial clansmen that Liu Chengzong sent toward the Tianshan.

But these people were far too few.

Three thousand imperial clansmen, men and women, had set out by sea. There had not been too much attrition on the road — few accidents or illnesses. It was just that the relay stations along the way were short of hands and would pick a few to stay behind as reinforcements. By the time they reached the Tianshan, some two thousand seven or eight hundred remained.

But Liu Chengzu would keep at least two thousand five hundred of them.

The clan women went without saying — they would all certainly be kept in the Tianshan; not a single one would be sent north.

Among the clan men, any whose record was even passable, even if they knew nothing at all, would be kept by Liu Chengzu in Tianshan Garrison to do hard labor.

As long as a man had a single useful skill — even if it was picking locks and prying doors — Liu Chengzu would keep him in the Tianshan on the grounds that the Tianshan was in urgent need of a specialized talent who understood lock mechanisms.

For those sent on to Taimeng Fortress, being utterly irredeemable in wickedness was only the prerequisite; having no ability whatsoever was the root cause.

From the moment they were loaded onto the ships, it was decided: these people were human dregs who could critique fine food and fine wine, possessed superb abilities to appreciate music and dance, but could not lift a limb to work and could not tell the five grains apart.

In Liu Chengzu's mind, people like this setting foot on the icy plains and frozen earth were no different from dead men.

Without reinforcements, if two out of two hundred were still alive after three years, you could chalk it up to sheer dumb luck for the both of them.

Once Zhou Yijing was thrown into this environment, thoughts of dying a martyr for the country and such never crossed his mind again on the road.

At first he still entertained the notion of comparing himself to Su Wu, but the bitter cold of Taimeng Guard quickly froze that out of him — as long as he could be recalled to the Central Plains, joining the rebels or whatever didn't seem to matter much anymore.

Even if they sent him back to be Grand Chancellor, he'd take it.

What Zhou Yijing truly could not figure out was this: did that barbarian Liu Chengzong simply not understand the weight of a triennial metropolitan graduate, or was he being deliberately obtuse — sending him to this barren wasteland, what exactly was he supposed to do here?

And they had the gall to dress it up with the title Taimeng Regional Commander.

Let's be honest — the convict settlers exiled here don't need anyone to manage them at all.

Letting this frozen wilderness manage them is more than enough.

This place is exile — for convicts, for officials, for soldiers, it is all exile.

Exile and frontier garrison duty have always been punishments for grave crimes and capital offenses, but the purpose of such punishment is to torment people in mind and standard of living — not to actually kill them.

Even if you had killed the Jade Emperor himself, you shouldn't be exiled to a godforsaken place this far away.

The reason he compiled the "Brief Examination of Tai Garrison" was precisely to make Liu Chengzong recognize his talent, so that he would recall him.

A dignified triennial metropolitan graduate, serving as a jail warden here — it is truly a waste of talent.

In fact, never mind him — even an official like Zhou Riqiang, a provincial graduate with experience as a regional prefect, is equally wasted here.

Zhou Yijing had seen it clearly in less than half a month after arriving.

The governed are all misshapen freaks who barely look human — what use is there in sending officials like them, who are meant to civilize and educate the populace?

The officials best suited to govern this godforsaken place are simply not them at all.

Liu Chengzong's thinking in establishing a garrison here was correct — the most suitable form of officialdom for this place is indeed the tribal chieftain and the garrison.

But the people used are wrong.

Provincial graduates and metropolitan graduates are not immortals — they are better suited to grand strategy, pointing at the heavens and sketching on the earth, but when it comes to the concrete execution of landing that strategy, they may fall short of more specialized talents.

Zhou Yijing felt that the best governing officials for this place were the village headmen and grain tax captains he had met a few times back when he was county magistrate in Haifeng.

All you need is one grain tax captain with experience leading his clan in water-rights feuds, who brings his brothers, sons, and nephews and moves the whole family over — best if he can also pull in a few juniors who've scraped a living at sea — and Taimeng Guard would soon have a core thousand-household battalion.

This godforsaken place clearly doesn't need to fight wars.

For the external environment, a few patrol boats from the Tianshan Army on the river are sufficient.

All that's needed is survival — survive by any means necessary, outlast every rival who wants to seize the land until they freeze to death, and the objective of occupation is achieved.

A few such village headmen and grain tax captains, bringing a few hundred people, each putting down roots in a stretch of land along the great river, recruiting and pacifying a few subordinate forest tribes, striking the recalcitrant clans, building a few more boats, tagging along with the Tianshan Army's patrol boats, transporting some supplies back and forth — fishing, hunting, and production, neither neglected.

They could scrape together a passable living.

In contrast, the current Taimeng Guard has over two hundred permanent combat troops, accounting for half the population, and the rest are human dregs with not a shred of survival ability — they understand neither living nor production, and their efficiency in carrying out any task is abysmally low.

Calling them useless would not be an overstatement.

To this day, there has been only one person who has rendered meritorious service — a Commandant of State Service, who discovered a medicinal herb.

Taimeng Guard has now discovered two medicinal herbs; the two who earned merit are, one, a Commandant of State Service from the Qing princely line, and the other is called the West-Conquering Colonel — a yellow dog that Chuhur brought back from Shaanxi.

That yellow dog was a pup Chuhur snatched from Chijin Guard — Kang Liangfu had just bought it back in Shaanxi when Chuhur snatched it.

Chuhur thought a dog that looked like this was a novelty and planned to snatch it as a gift for Liu Chengzong, but once he entered Shaanxi and found that all the dogs looked like this, he just kept it and played with it for a few months, then sent it to Zhou Riqiang when he returned to Altai.

You have to admit, no matter how he gets his hands on things, Chuhur really has a knack for giving gifts.

Zhou Riqiang adored this yellow dog from the Central Plains beyond measure and named it West-Conquering Colonel.

But for the West-Conquering Colonel, this kind of rootless, drifting life was a case of each year being worse than the last.

The food at Chijin Guard was poor to begin with — the West-Conquering Colonel had learned from puppyhood to snatch bones from vultures, but with a bit of luck, it could still get a few meals of fried flour in the end.

It just had no way to treat its own illnesses.

Anywhere else, if a pup ate something wrong, it would go eat grass on its own to induce vomiting — the grass blades would churn in its stomach and come back up together with the food.

But at Chijin Guard, that tiny bit of limited grass was all eaten by the sheep.

So the West-Conquering Colonel's stomach and intestines were naturally poor from birth.

Following a fellow like Chuhur, who never shortchanged himself, the West-Conquering Colonel's standard of living shot straight up — meat every day, and on the way back to Altai it even got to eat chilled horse offal.

That pretty much wrecked its stomach and intestines for good.

In Zhou Riqiang's hands, it soon stopped eating and drinking.

Zhou Riqiang was out of ideas too; not many days later, the West-Conquering Colonel ran off and disappeared — everyone in the fort thought this yellow dog from the homeland had died.

Who knew that a few days later it would come running back on its own, not only with its stomach and intestines recovered, but eating everything with gusto.

Later, Zhou Riqiang had someone follow the West-Conquering Colonel and discovered that after meals it would dart into the woods, wandering idly through the birch forest, madly gnawing on the black fungi growing from the birch roots.

The people of Taimeng Guard had long noticed that there was something under the birch trees here, but no one knew the stuff was edible, because it was black and lumpy, looking like marks deliberately scorched by forest hunters using fire.

It was only then that people realized that the black, lumpy stuff on the tree roots was edible fungus.

By the look of it, it could treat gastrointestinal disharmony.

As for the other meritorious Commandant of State Service, compared to the West-Conquering Colonel he fell a bit short — he was a prison-break convict.

He ran out of provisions on his escape route, spotted a lone wild donkey, fought a bloody battle and narrowly lost, managing only to wound one of the donkey's legs with a trap — and was then chased up a tree by the donkey and besieged for days, nearly starving to death.

During the time he spent starving in the tree, he noticed the wounded wild donkey kept eating a certain plant; later he seized a chance to gather the herb and fled all the way back to the garrison town.

After verification by a veterinarian called in from the Tianshan Army, it was determined that this herb resembled five-leaf ginseng, with a similar processing method, and should have qi-tonifying effects.

Zhou Yijing truly felt that relying on this bunch of people to gain a foothold here was absolutely hopeless.

Compared to Zhou Riqiang's thirst for expanding the frontier, which had spurred the Battle of Tomsk, by the time Zhou Yijing arrived that temptation was already gone, allowing him to observe Taimeng Guard from a more objective perspective.

Strategically, this place was certainly not bad — it could sustain the Marshal's Headquarters' existence and settle the Ming imperial clan, preventing their reputation in the Central Plains from turning too foul; at the same time, the timber and furs were indeed tied to the Marshal's Headquarters' northwestern trade routes.

But gaining a foothold here was absolutely no easy matter.

The most critical reason was still that the natural environment here was fundamentally unsuited for them to station troops long-term.

Therefore, Zhou Yijing's greatest hope of being transferred back lay in improving the living conditions here.

Otherwise, before they could even gain a foothold, everyone would die in the struggle against nature, and this place would be nothing more than a slaughterhouse a bit farther away.

If he improved the environment, he could prove his usefulness to the Marshal's Office, and then, as an official of the Marshal's Office, he could write to Liu Chengzong and request a transfer back to the Central Plains to lead a mission supplying population to Taimeng Garrison.

Wouldn't that be a perfectly legitimate way to go back?

Now that Chai Harbor was complete, timber rafts from the logging camps arrived at Taimeng Garrison's port every day. The abundant building materials gave Zhou Yijing even greater confidence in transforming the environment.

Very soon, he produced his second-stage plan: heated brick beds.

Good evening! Happy National Day!