After completely defeating Nanli Province, oh no, now Nanli County, the expeditionary force turned from offense to defense and stationed at the border of Nanli County.
Of course, it is impossible for the entire expeditionary force to be stationed here.
After achieving control over Nanli County, the expeditionary force began to recruit local servants.
That is, an army composed entirely of locals.
As the saying goes, use barbarians to control barbarians. As long as you single out these servant armies and give them far better conditions than ordinary natives, then they will also maintain the rule of the expeditionary army for their own interests.
In this way, it took almost three months for the expeditionary force to recruit approximately 100,000 local servants to guard the borders or assist in the basic security issues of various cities.
The expeditionary force stayed in Nanli County with about 40,000 troops, including 10,000 escorts and 27,000 coercive troops to stabilize the rule of Nanli County.
The rest began to return to Yunzhou County one after another.
Of course, this is only temporary. There will be a change of defense in three months. The group of soldiers from Yunzhong County who are now returning will replace the soldiers of Yunzhou County who are currently stationed there, and it will be the turn of the group of soldiers currently stationed to go back and change the defense. .
When everything stabilized, it was already early June when the first batch of returning soldiers from Yunzhou County returned to Yunzhou County.
During this period, the capital city of Shendu finally learned the news that Nanli Province had been completely lost.
After getting furious and dealing with the government officials who had delayed the emergency military report for several months, King Shendu immediately summoned his ministers to discuss countermeasures.
In view of the fighting prowess of these barbarians, the ministers unanimously believed that if the number of troops sent was small, they should not be opponents of these barbarians.
Therefore, in order to ensure victory, Shendu must gather at least twice the opponent's strength to launch an attack on the barbarians occupying Nanli Province.
These remarks were affirmed by King Shendu. He who can ascend to the position of king is naturally not a fool. Those barbarians can take over the entire Nanli Province so quickly. Their own combat power must not be underestimated. It is no longer possible for him to imagine. The combat effectiveness of ordinary robbers in the army must have a combat effectiveness that far exceeds that of Shendu's conventional troops.
According to the current intelligence, these barbarians number about 100,000 people in the entire Nanli Province, so if the king wants to attack them, he needs to prepare at least 200,000 people.
For the Shendu King Capital, which controls the territory of ten provinces, 200,000 people is not too many, and it can be established with just a few.
But the problem is that once the number of people exceeds 10,000, there are many problems involved. The first and most important one is the issue of food and grass.
The amount of food, baggage, etc. required to supply 200,000 combat troops is not a small amount. This cannot be prepared in a short while. Instead, it takes a certain amount of time to prepare.
As the saying goes, before the soldiers and horses move, food and grass go first.
After forming a crusade of 300,000 people, the entire Shendu King capital began to quickly prepare food and grass.
That's right, it was a 300,000-strong crusade. In order to secure victory, the Shendu King's capital directly formed a 300,000-strong crusade, of which 20,000 were directly led by the two princes of Shendu.
Each prince also brought five thousand elephant soldiers, the strongest guard force of the Shendu royal family, ready to embark on the battlefield together.
According to estimates, it will take at least four months to prepare the food needed for an army of 300,000 people.
This is not to say that it takes four months to prepare food, but to raise food and grass from various places without endangering the safety of each place. The local area will definitely be unwilling to do so. Although it will be provided in the end, a lot of time will definitely be consumed during this period.
Then the time for raising food and grass was set at four months, most of which would be spent on prevarication and wrangling.
Here the Shendu King is preparing a large army of food and fodder for a counterattack, while over there Yunzhou County is beginning to digest the acquired territory of Nanli County.
Since they came at the right time, and there was no winter here in Shendu, after the expeditionary army captured the entire Nanli County, it happened to coincide with the grain harvest period in Nanli County.
In the past, the grain tax in Nanli County was around 19%, that is, farmers kept 10% for themselves, and the remaining 90% had to be handed over to the government as grain tax.
Some people may say, with such a high food tax, how can people with poisonous bodies be able to eat it?
And this has to be said about the unique land of Shendu.
In Shendu, arable land is everywhere. Except for a few special areas, among the eleven provinces of Shendu, arable land accounts for 90% of the province's area in three, six and 70%, respectively. There are two.
Nanli County happens to be one of the three provinces where 90% of the land in the province is arable land.
For the people of the Song Dynasty, an ordinary family of seven needed to own about thirty-five acres of land to ensure that the whole family could have enough to eat after paying various normal taxes.
However, the actual situation is that normal taxation is completely impossible. Today, the court or officials from various places will always use various exorbitant taxes and miscellaneous taxes to collect more from the people.
In addition, a family usually does not own thirty-five acres of land, but mostly owns about twenty acres.
Therefore, on average, the average land owned by the people of the Song Dynasty was about three acres per person.
This amount of fields is based on the current two-year and three-crop yield per mu in the north of the Song Dynasty. A person can harvest approximately 375 jins per mu in a year, and three acres of land is equivalent to 1,125 jins.
Normally, according to the tax rate of the Song Dynasty, one acre of land only needs to pay a tax of one dou of grain. However, in actual practice, this ideal state is often not achieved. In other words, people generally pay less than five tons. At about 100%, a common person with three acres of land could harvest 1,125 jins of grain from a full year's work. After paying various taxes, there was only more than 500 jins of grain left.
And these more than five hundred kilograms of grain are required to ensure a person's daily necessities for a year. You can imagine how difficult it is for the people. And this is only the situation with land. Most people cannot own more than three acres of land. One or two acres is the norm.
The food harvested in a year is just enough for people to starve to death.
But for the Shendu people, they own a large area of land. Although Shendu has a large population, each of them can still get ten acres of land on average, and because of the Shendu climate, even the Shendu climate Even the worst places can produce three crops a year.
Shendu's farming technology is relatively backward. One acre of land can only produce about 200 kilograms of grain. Normally, more than 6,000 kilograms of grain can be harvested in a year.
After paying 90% of the tax, one person could still have more than 600 kilograms of food left, and his life was much more comfortable than that of the people of the Song Dynasty.
After Zhao Jun learned about this situation, he immediately made a stroke of his pen. This year's tax on body poisoning will still be the same as in previous years, and next year it will be reduced by half.
After the news broke. The expeditionary force immediately received strong support from the local indigenous people. This is why the expeditionary force can so easily recruit 100,000 servants, because after becoming a servant, your family will only pay 85% of this year's taxes.
This small move instantly stabilized Nanli County, which was still a little unstable.
I really have to thank the original government for setting such high taxes!
…
(End of chapter)
