Chapter 799: Autumn of the Ninth Year

Autumn of the ninth year of the Chongzhen reign.

Amidst lavish banquets and day after day of lengthy talks, Liu Chengzong sketched blueprints for the future with the great generals stationed outside the Marshal's headquarters.

At the same time, across the entire territory under Liu Chengzong's rule, the Marshal's headquarters held its first imperial examination.

This was Zhang Hongwei's grand blueprint: from Taimeng Garrison to the Lhasa River, encompassing the former jurisdictions of the four provinces of Shaanxi, Gansu, Qinghai, and Sichuan, a total of one hundred fifty-seven counties were established, all to be uniformly governed by officials dispatched from the Marshal's headquarters.

At first glance, this seemed a good thing, a sign that Liu Chengzong's control over the surrounding regions had greatly increased.

At the same time, it would also deliver a shock to ruling entities like the Oirat and the Holochi.

In reality, however, the opposite was true.

Liu the Lion wanted to do this, but he did not want to do it now.

On the contrary, it was the repeated demands of local lords like Batur Khong Tayiji, Baiyan, and Lhazang that left him with no choice but to hold his nose and open the examinations.

The timing was wrong.

In his heart, Liu the Lion's positioning for the lands west of Xining was as a strategic depth that required no stacking of resources.

It was enough to invest a small amount of troops, maintain a presence, ensure the flow of intelligence on Ü-Tsang, the Oirat, and the Oros, and be able to exert political influence on the overall situation.

Even this was only because, for a very long time, the He-Huang Valley was the "hinterland" of his domain, and the need to maintain security forced him to consider investing a small amount of troops, manpower, and resources westward.

He even genuinely considered establishing substantive rule in Ü-Tsang and among the Oirat.

After all, back then he hadn't tasted any fine dishes yet.

Now, having taken Xi'an Prefecture, Liu the Lion truly understood what it meant that "he who holds Guanzhong holds the realm."

A single prefecture's land, even in these current years ravaged by drought and locust plagues, could, through the collection of taxes in kind and in silver, support ninety thousand troops.

Of course, this was thanks to the geographical advantage of Wei River irrigation in the small area of eastern Guanzhong Plain encompassing Xi'an Prefecture, Hua Prefecture, and Tong Prefecture.

Across the Marshal's headquarters' vast territory, the three provinces of Shaanxi, Gansu, and Qinghai combined, collecting taxes in kind and in silver, excluding this one prefecture and two sub-prefectures, could only support seventy thousand troops.

With the same resources, pushing down into Huguang could support another hundred thousand troops.

Thrown into Ü-Tsang and the Oirat lands, even ten thousand troops would starve, thin and sallow.

Therefore, the best scenario was, at the moment of unifying the realm, to dispatch troops to escort officials and settle the frontier problem once and for all.

But everything has its gains and losses; by that time, the great local nobles would inevitably harbor even greater resistance.

Not like now, when the Oirat had a mind to further settle and centralize power, and the Holochi, weary and hopeless from their long standoff with the Ü-Tsang army, urgently needed the Marshal's headquarters' support.

This made establishing prefectures and counties much easier.

Of course, correspondingly, the resources Liu the Lion would have to expend would also be a bit greater.

But the matter would proceed more smoothly.

The main reason Liu Chengzong hesitated and looked ahead and behind on this matter was actually just one.

He did not have that many reserve officials.

In truth, the person happiest about this was Old Master Liu.

Generally speaking, for a county to function normally, it should have ten to fifteen officials, six of whom were circulating officials selected by the Ministry of Personnel, while the remaining unranked clerks were appointed locally.

Yet in Shaanxi under the Marshal's headquarters' rule, many counties had only the county magistrate, a single person.

This in itself was abnormal.

What was even more abnormal was that Liu Chengzong's approach to solving this problem was not to open the examinations as soon as possible, but to select wounded or meritorious soldiers and low-ranking officers from the army and transfer them to local posts as assistant officials.

Of course, within the Marshal's headquarters, this was normal; they had an enormously large military community, and to a certain extent, solving the soldiers' problems well was equivalent to solving society's problems.

But in Old Master Liu's view, this situation was unsustainable and far too unorthodox.

He had long wanted to have a proper talk with Liu the Lion about this issue.

Yet, frustratingly, there was never a suitable opportunity.

The suitable opportunity Old Master Liu wanted was for a few representative problems to arise among those military officers transferred to local bureaucratic posts, and then to use such problems to talk with Liu the Lion.

But alas, such an opportunity simply never arose.

On one hand, the high quality of Liu Chengzong's officer corps was a fact.

This was a tradition; in the Great Ming, with its perfected guard-battalion system, the pursuit of being adept with both pen and sword was already a prevailing custom among military officers.

A military commander with a lower level of education like Zuo Liangyu was the exception.

And Liu Chengzong's reverence for culture further strengthened this custom.

On the other hand, the current Shaanxi indeed did not have high demands for official competence.

A county of several thousand to ten thousand people, a third of whom were military personnel, was a place where an official from a military background could, on the contrary, better balance military and civilian affairs.

Now, however, it was the Dzungar and the Holochi, the Marshal's headquarters' two largest local nobles, who demanded Liu Chengzong fulfill his promise to send officials to help them govern their lands, forcing Liu the Lion to finally open the examinations.

The reason Liu Chengzong had been unwilling to open the examinations all along was also very simple: he needed time.

Time could prove his virtue, and also allow him to place more of his own people from the army in local positions, to prevent a large batch of talents who entered officialdom through the examinations from jumping out to oppose him.

Now, Liu the Lion's agreement to hold the examinations was not because he was cornered with no options left.

Rather, with the Marshal's headquarters' victory in the great battle east of the mountains, the Communications Office under Lin Wei's charge immediately printed and disseminated the news of breaking the false emperor and burning the old capital, transmitting it throughout the northwest and circulating it to every county, causing Liu Chengzong's fame to surge greatly.

The most prominent banner headline on the official gazette read: "To vent the long-held fury of Sarhū, to avenge the old shame of the Jisi year."

Liu Chengzong felt that, with his current prestige, he could give it a try.

The Personnel Office seized this opportunity, issuing orders to the heads of all counties in Shaanxi, Gansu, and Qinghai, and opened the imperial examinations at the academy level.

The rules for the academy examinations followed the old system, with a three-tiered test structure of county, prefecture, and academy, encompassing three levels of selection from unranked candidates to licentiates. The quotas were also the same as the Great Ming's: a minimum of eight for a small county and a maximum of twenty for a large county.

At the same time, for the sake of stability, forty-six examination-exempt slots were also given across the entire territory of the Marshal's headquarters… these exempt slots were for county magistrates and vice magistrates, forty-six people in total.

This was mainly Old Master Liu patching up Liu the Lion's practice of arbitrarily appointing county officials.

During the campaigns, Liu Chengzong had appointed a large number of officials who either rose from the ranks or were promoted from the localities, men without any examination degrees.

Now that the examinations were to be opened, the Personnel Office worried that these officials in charge of local governance would feel they had no room for advancement and become restless.

To avoid this, they were directly granted the licentiate degree.

Throughout the autumn, the number of people registering for the Child Scholar Exam exceeded one hundred and eighty thousand. After three rounds of testing, the Marshal's Office, which governed thirteen prefectures, thirteen subprefectures, and three Pasturage Directorates, ultimately selected a total of one thousand six hundred and twenty-six licentiates qualified for the Autumn Examination.

Liu Shizi looked at the long lists submitted by each prefecture, along with the scholars' life histories and backgrounds, and thought to himself that the quality of the Marshal's Office's first batch of scholars was indeed nothing impressive.

This was because the Marshal's Office's regional characteristic of vast land and sparse population led to an excessively high acceptance rate.

The imperial examination system serves not only to select talent, but also has another important purpose: maintaining stability.

Therefore, during the three-tier academy examinations, candidates were admitted according to quotas assigned to each locality.

Take Jingning Subprefecture, for example. Its total registered population was just over a thousand people. Those who were physically healthy, without disabilities, and met the exam criteria numbered only thirty-seven — fewer even than the officials and runners maintaining order at the exam site. In the end, eight were admitted.

Then there was Wo'er Prefecture, a prefecture cobbled together by the Qinghai Command specifically for the imperial examinations, governing the Chakhar, Tumed, Khoshut, and Xifan garrison-pastoral guards and eight ordos in places like Big and Little Chuandan and Golmud.

When the herders heard that passing the Child Scholar Exam would get them two sheep, everyone eagerly signed up.

The papers handed in were basically all blank; hardly anyone understood the Four Books and Five Classics. Anyone who could muddle through and fill the exam paper with Chinese characters was considered a child scholar.

In any case, each guard admitted eight child scholars in order of merit based on their answers. Basically, if asked to explain a line from the Analects, they would write about their own life story — how many cattle and sheep they had offered when the Great Khan campaigned in Gansu, how their brother-in-law had fought battles for the Grand Marshal, and answers of that sort.

That was enough. Although they were illiterate, they could copy from memory, so passing the Child Scholar Exam was a sure thing.

Xie Erhu, the Haixi Brigade Commander, joyfully drove his flock of sheep across Qinghai, distributing lambs to the senior intellectuals of the various tribes.

The child scholar reward policy in Wo'er Prefecture had been specially arranged by Xie Erhu and Basang with Yang Dingrui. The lambs were provided by them and the commanders of each guard, to encourage learning.

Anyway, they didn't need the scholar rank. Once someone became a child scholar, they would be sent to the guard school for lessons and could take the scholar exam later.

Gansu had another locust plague this year. Cao Yao returned to Xi'an Prefecture later than the others, but this Grand Commander of Gansu in the Marshal's Office was far more excited than most.

He wanted to follow the example of Chengyun's deployments in He-Huang and build wooden rails in Gansu, so that Gansu's supplies could be rapidly transported to Lanzhou.

The existence of the Personal Field Method had made Gansu's military farming very successful and gave it strong resistance to locust plagues.

At the same time, the taxes levied on military farms were also higher than the local grain taxes collected in Shaanxi, so the Gansu Command was very well-supplied with military grain.

However, Gansu's difficulties were concentrated in the areas of population, trade routes, commerce, and precious metals. Soil desertification made the roads difficult to traverse; grain could not be transported out, and it was hard to sell locally because there was no money.

They were so short of gold and silver that in Liangzhou Prefecture, many people had taken to using the Lion Notes from He-Huang.

Cao Yao believed that building rails modeled on those in He-Huang could very effectively solve Gansu's current problems.

On this matter, Liu Chengzong was certainly in favor.

The rail transport in He-Huang had greatly helped reduce transportation costs, and the long, narrow Hexi Corridor truly needed this.

Of course, it also gave rise to quite a few problems, such as the theft of the wooden rails. The rails were built using elm wood with excellent load-bearing capacity, and there was no stopping people from prying them loose and carrying them off.

In the He-Huang Valley, this didn't matter.

He-Huang had a high population density and extremely low mobility. There was no sparsely populated area along the rail route. If the wooden rails were damaged, it would be discovered very quickly, and subsequent capture and searches were easy. Moreover, Yang Dingrui, who governed Qinghai, was the very person who had compiled the first Marshal's Code.

When Yang Dingrui was in Kangning Prefecture, he had a strong awareness of legal education.

The purpose of law is not to hand down heavy sentences.

It's not about defining a crime, then arresting people when they commit it, sentencing them, and being done with it.

People must identify with it and have the awareness to uphold the law.

Because the purpose of law is to prevent people from committing crimes.

Otherwise, it would be like the Great Ming's military law. The drill manuals wrote military law according to Qi Jiguang's system, and people paid lip service to it, but no military commander had the leisure to use that system to punish soldiers.

Because the current living standards of the Ming army made it impossible for people to identify with Qi Jiguang's military law regulations.

If someone stole, they were caught. Given the population mobility of this era, under He-Huang's town, township, bao, and jia system, a person who stole a wooden rail would be nabbed before they even got it home.

The anti-smuggling troops were happiest to see this. You do your stealing, I'll do my catching.

If caught, it was ten years of hard labor in the gold ravines and silver caves, and all allocated land would be confiscated.

If they couldn't catch you, they'd just accept the loss.

There was always a stock of spare rail timber, and elm was not some rare, valuable tree.

Compared to this cost, the benefits of increased transport capacity were enormous. The loss from stolen rail timber didn't even cost as much as the damage to the vehicles.

In fact, He-Huang was currently experimenting with sheathing the rail timber in iron casings, because, first, iron-clad rails were faster and could bear greater loads, and second, stolen iron-clad rails were easier to track down than wooden ones.

The marks on a wooden rail could be removed with a bit of hand planing.

But disposing of stolen iron rails was far more difficult than with wooden rails.

Especially in a place like He-Huang — where would you sell them? Who would dare buy them?

If there really was someone capable of receiving stolen goods, the theft of iron rails would be the least of their crimes in the case. With that kind of ability, they could even sell cannons.

But in Gansu, the situation was different.

That little rail line in He-Huang was no more than five hundred li in total length, with people everywhere along the route. The rail line Gansu needed was three or four times that length, yet its population was roughly the same as He-Huang's, with vast stretches of uninhabited land and desert gobi in between.

Cost control would be far more difficult than in He-Huang.

Therefore, Liu Shizi's suggestion was for Cao Yao to first try building a line from Liangzhou to the Hekou area of Lanzhou.

Actually, Gansu was not the only place with a locust plague this year; Henan had one too, and the scale of the disaster was far greater than in Gansu — overwhelming, blotting out the sky and covering the earth.

Liu Chengzong had at one point wanted to mobilize all of Shaanxi for locust defense, but he never expected that the sky-darkening swarm of locusts, after flying up onto the Tong Pass plateau, would make a feint and head north into Shanxi instead.

Therefore, Shaanxi's harvest this year was passable. The drought conditions were much better than Liu Shizi had anticipated.

Although it was still dry, it was not as severe as in previous years. Snow had fallen widely around the New Year, and places like Yan'an Prefecture even got a bit of rain this summer.

The areas that truly received not a single drop of water were mainly Jingning Subprefecture and the Tianshui area in Longxi, as well as Yinchuan in Ningxia — places where one could say the vegetation was scorched and withered.

But whether Longxi suffered drought or not actually made no difference to Liu Shizi, because those several counties had already experienced successive years and seasons of severe drought earlier. Ming armies, peasant armies, and the Marshal's armies had then fought one great battle after another there, and it had long been blasted into a barren wasteland.

The local population, amid war and drought, had long since been reduced to fewer than one in a hundred.

There weren't many people left anyway. As soon as the drought report was submitted to the Marshal's Office, Liu Chengzong had the government evacuate them, with nearby prefectures providing relief.

Ningxia was not much of a problem either. After internal strife and the eastern campaign, its population and garrison were not large. Moreover, it had good irrigation conditions, with the Han and Tang canals. At the very least, the basic grain output of the Southern Frontier Fortress, even in a severe drought, was still considerably better than Shaanxi's.

But Henan — the situation there this year was very dire.

First, due to drought, the Yellow River's flow at the Hukou section between Shaanxi and Shanxi was cut off for over ten days. Later, after the agricultural season's water-use period had passed, the Yellow River recovered slightly, but its water ran clear.

This abnormal situation only improved somewhat after Yan'an Prefecture received successive rainfalls and the Yellow River's condition got a little better.

Even so, Henan still suffered a great drought first, then a locust plague, and the fragile livelihoods of the people were dealt yet another heavy blow — it even reached the point where common folk, carrying their families with them, fled westward to escape the famine.

Liu Shizi ordered Zhang Tianlin to take in the famine refugees, but at the same time to tighten border patrols, lest that Henan Regional Commander Zhang Renxue seize the chance to start a war.

But taking them in was one thing — Liu Shizi, in truth, could not quite understand it.

He thought to himself, it'd be one thing if Shaanxi people weren't fleeing to Henan to escape famine, but for you lot to run over here — what are you thinking?

Very soon, Liu Chengzong found out exactly what they were thinking.

Zhang Tianlin, who was garrisoning Tong Pass, personally rushed back to Xi'an within a few days. Travel-worn and weary, he reported to Liu Chengzong: "Commander, the Yellow River — it has burst its banks at Kaifeng."

Good morning!