In March of the fourth year of Chongzhen, the weather became warmer during the day and gradually became less freezing at night.
Liu Chengzong led a training camp and vehicles to form an army of 5 miles and 150 steps. He planned to march to the northwest at a marching speed of 70 miles a day.
As a result, it took four days to cover 200 miles and reach the shore of Qinghai Lake.
The blue sky is high in the distance, with clusters of rolling clouds, surrounded by mountains on all sides. The ice and snow melt along the mountainside to form a white line, which spreads straight to the grassland surrounding Qinghai Lake, forming a pink and white line.
At the end of the pink and white, he saw the Sun and Moon Mirror dropped by Princess Wencheng a thousand years ago.
The calm sea surface was slightly rippled, and flocks of bar-headed geese migrating back from the south gathered on the snow, sometimes flying up and sometimes falling down.
There were also three thousand cold babies who were accustomed to the desert, staring blankly at the endless sea on horseback, and the snow-topped mountains connected with the clouds and mist across the sea.
Until Liu Chengzong said: "Go run, go play!"
People were stunned for a short time, and they didn't know who came to their senses first. In an instant, hundreds of horses galloped towards the coast through broken snow and solid ice.
After completing artillery training, Huang Shengxiao was sent to the horse camp to strengthen his riding skills. He ran the fastest towards the coast because he urgently needed to confirm one thing.
Until the horse's hooves stepped into the shallow water, thousands of birds flew away in fright. Huang Shengxiao, who had served as the Dunjun of Baicheng, leaned to the left side of the horse's back. He stepped on the stirrup and reached out to fish a handful from the sea and put it into his mouth.
Yeah, it's salty.
He had wanted to do this for a long time.
After doing this, Huang Shengxiao felt very complicated. With a look of despair, he hit the coast and finally sat on the beach with his horse.
The war horse lay on its side on the ground. Huang Shengxiao leaned on the horse's back, looking at the sea and feeling lonely.
It turns out that those thieves and soldiers in Baichengzi didn't lie to him. There is really an endless amount of water in the world, and the salty water is called the sea.
However, there are not many people in the Lions who are as pretentious as Huang Shengxiao. After all, this is not the season for playing with water.
More people were riding horses and holding bows to chase wild geese, and some people were running farther away with horse poles, trying to ride on a yak.
Liu Chengzong came here originally to look for Dai Qing and Chen Qindai.
After the Seven Tribes of Riyue Mountain surrendered, Gonpo Dorje's tribe became a communication point between the Lion Army and the Haibei Mongolian Tribe. People from both tribes occasionally contacted each other during the winter and sent Qindai codes to Chen Qindai several times.
But after the new year and the beginning of spring, there was no news about Chen Qindai, so Liu Chengzong decided to come to Dai Qing to ask for someone.
Unfortunately, his attack was in vain, and Dai Qing's tribe went south around the western line of Qinghai Lake.
According to the local tribe, it was around the Chinese New Year that Little Lajuna received the order to summon the army, so he uprooted his tribe and headed south.
After summarizing the intelligence, Liu Chengzong probably knew the reason for gathering the army.
Originally, Lazun mobilized his troops this time to launch an offensive against him in the spring.
The person sent back by Dai Daozi said that because he had promised to spend the New Year in Juerwan, Lazun did not expect to stay for such a long time and thought that his brother had been detained or killed by him.
So Lazun spent the whole winter in a state of nervousness, reciting more than 800 sutras and curses on him in Bajiao City.
Looking at the current situation, Liu Chengzong felt that the spell used by Lazun might...maybe be a curse for good health and good luck.
Therefore, Lazun hurriedly summoned the army before and after the Chinese New Year and gathered all the native people and Dazitou people who were dependent on him on the Gannan grassland.
As a result, the front leg gathered the troops, and the back leg went back without suffering any consequences. He gained five pounds and brought back the news that Liu Shizi was not easy to deal with, was extremely generous, and was preparing to open a market.
After a full meal, Lazun can still not tell the difference, but the army is coming, what should we do?
You can't play tricks on the princes by beacon fire. After gathering the army, you have to go to war. Who will you fight? Hit the big brother.
A huge nomadic army assembled in the Gannan grassland crossed the Yellow River from east to west via Yangqu, invaded the Heka grassland, and went straight to the Chaka Salt Lake to kill.
Dai Daozi, as the most elite armed force around Taiji, also participated in Lazun's expedition.
Seeing Qinghai Lake, Liu Chengzong wanted to measure how big it was.
He knew that Qinghai Lake was big, but he didn't expect it to be so big, so he sent two teams of Tang soldiers to walk along the shore and asked them to circle back, but they didn't come back on the third day.
The army played at the lake for two days and then got down to business. They sent out men to look for the people around and inquired about the surroundings. They learned that Haibei was the easternmost 100-household residence of Handong Guard in the early Ming Dynasty.
After Hongzhi, Turpan became increasingly powerful, and the local officials of Handong Guard and Anding Guard could not contain it. During the Jiajing period, the Tumut troops invaded Qinghai, and the Ming army's defense line shrank. The local officials here also went to the court and moved inland to Ganzhou. .
Further on, this is the first stop for the Mongols entering Tibet from Monan and Mobei.
After arriving in Qinghai, Liu Chengzong learned more and more about the general situation on the grasslands as he had more and more interactions with the Mongols and Western people.
For example, the environment north of Jiubian is slowly changing.
In the earlier period of the Yuan Dynasty, or the early to mid-Ming Dynasty, the Central Plains dynasty was at war with the north, and the north always had a retreat route.
Running to the north and northwest of Monan is an excellent route to escape the pursuit of the Central Plains Dynasty army. Crossing the Yuerhai Sea, the north is a place that is difficult for the Han army to reach.
But now, Liu Chengzong discovered that the Mongols would no longer run to the northwest, but could only run to Qinghai.
This kind of abnormal thing seemed to have become inevitable in Liu Chengzong's era.
The right-wing Tumut in Monan will run to Qinghai, and the Khalkha in Mobei will also run to Qinghai.
So what prevents them from running further northwest?
The answer is readily apparent: the Mongols' once loyal subordinates, the tax collectors of the Kipchak Khanate in all Russia, the Cossacks sent by Orus.
Liu Chengzong, who was sitting on a camel hair blanket in the tent by the Qinghai Lake, couldn't help but shake his head and smile bitterly. He found that the existence of another memory gave him a very strange perspective on things.
He is still far from being the ruler of Qinghai, but on some matters, he always looks at some things from the perspective of the next generation of rulers of the Central Plains Empire.
In his eyes, many things are inevitable and many things are accidental, but those accidents also have almost inevitable results - his wish is to comply with those inevitable and prevent accidents before they happen.
For example, the fall of the Ming Dynasty and the dominance of the Later Jin Dynasty were inevitable, but it was accidental that the Later Jin Dynasty conquered the world; the decline of Mongolia and Russia's eastward invasion were inevitable, but it was accidental that Russia became the new northern frontier trouble.
By the seventh day, his horse team had found arable land in Haibei and began to measure the acres. The Tang soldiers who explored the road had not returned yet.
Liu Chengzong began to wonder whether the more than a hundred Tang soldiers he sent to explore the road were killed.
It wasn't until the sixteenth day that the dusty Tang soldiers came back from Haidong. The people were disheveled and a little too big for the things they carried with them.
They ran along the lake for nearly 800 miles.
At the mouth of the Haixi River, there was a fight with Xifan Village.
There were more than 700 people in that village. They had previously attached themselves to Gu Ruhuang Taiji, and mistakenly thought that they were men sent by Lazun to rob. The two sides couldn't understand each other, so they started fighting.
The two sides did not form a formation or engage in close combat. There were many light bows over there. The two sides fired at each other for a few times. The leader was injured by a stray arrow and lost to Tang Qi, so he collapsed back to the village.
No one from the two Tangqi teams was killed, but a famous Ningxia Tangqi was hit on the bridge of his nose by a stone, causing a lot of nosebleeds, and his nose was still swollen when he came back.
Accidentally, the Lion Army's bandit number was increased by one, adding another crook.
Tangqi didn't care too much about Hekou Village. After the battle that day, he continued on the road and ran to Hainan to figure it out. The lake was much larger than expected. I was afraid that the 12-day army rations they carried were not enough, so they spent a day looking for Xifan Village. .
I didn't find Xifan Village, but I found a small Mongolian tribe where all the men went to fight as soldiers. The women of the tribe galloped their horses and raised their bows, wanting to resist desperately.
Later, it was discovered that they had no intention of fighting, so they exchanged twenty-three sheep for two saddles, three blankets and a wrist-breaking knife.
In Haidong, they stayed in the desert twenty miles north and south for another day.
Only then did we finally complete our non-stop trip around the lake on the 16th.
The size of Qinghai Lake not only exceeded the imagination of the Tangqi, but also far exceeded Liu Chengzong's imagination.
This made him feel that his number of craftsmen was seriously insufficient. When he returned, he had to assign another task to Yang Dingrui and recruit craftsmen from the east.
Moreover, he also sent someone to find Si Tongzhi, the Qinghai Xuanwei envoy, on Sunday.
Mr. Zhou was not happy when he got the fourth-grade official position. He followed the team to Xining and stopped going west.
Liu Chengzong spent twelve taels to buy a two-story house with a yard in the east of the city, and spent all day squatting in Xining City to defraud the court of his salary.
He also gave the house a euphemistic name: Qinghai Xuanwei Envoy Si Tongzhi Yamen.
To put it nicely, it is still the same as the Yamen, but at best it is just an office of the Qinghai Propaganda Ambassador in Xining.
However, Sunday Qiang's life was indeed quite comfortable. He didn't work for the court all day long, and he still received the salary of a fourth-rank official. Xining Wei had to give him an official salary of twenty-four stones of rice and grain from Lanzhou every month.
Sunday Qiang finally looked away. He didn't want to do this job for the court in the first place, but there was nothing he could do when he was dragged here.
He didn't know what the purpose of the imperial court was to put him next to Liu Chengzong.
Sunday Qiang asked himself, can the matter of Qinghai Xuanwei Envoy be solved by a fourth-grade official?
The emperor, the first assistant, the Minister of Hubu and the Ministry of War, two governors, three general soldiers, 200 local officials, and 23,000 border troops. In short, it was necessary to gather the power of Shaanxi to deal with him.
Who do you think you are?
Originally Zhou Zhouqiang thought that he would have a personal official seal and would stamp it whenever he needed it, but later he found out that the Lions did not recognize the official seal.
The official seal is worse than an autumn radish.
He has no use for this, so there is no need to go further west.
Liu Shizi's army slept in diwozi in Ju'erwan for several months, and Zhou Tongzhi became a big drinker in Xining City.
Drinking the sweet and sour highland barley wine brewed by Li Tusi all day long, I felt dizzy and fell asleep in the winter.
It was late at night when Zhou Tongzhi in Xining City received the news. He had just drunk and was confused. He lay in the carriage and slept for another day and night.
Waiting for the drunkenness to sober up, people feel stupid in the swaying carriage.
My mind is full of who and where I am.
After riding on the carriage for another two days, I finally saw Liu Chengzong.
He was completely awake now, but looking at the vast Qinghai Lake, he still wanted to drink another pot.
"Commander, please call me...can you change Hongqi's vest?"
Zhou Qiang just saluted Liu Chengzong on Sunday, and when he looked up, he saw the third-rank official plowing grass in the snow to one side, with a look of boredom on his face.
Liu Shiquan pretended not to hear, raised his hand and pointed to the lake: "Did you see it? Do you feel anything missing on the sea?"
Sunday Qiang looked confused: "You shot all the geese?"
"No, I'm talking about the shortcomings on the sea." Liu Chengzong looked at him with an unteachable look: "Boats, fishing boats, merchant ships, warships!"
When Liu Chengzong saw Qinghai Lake, he wanted to build a port in Haibei and build a navy in the lake.
He sounded serious, but Sunday Qiang didn't sound serious. He leaned forward and backward with joy: "The commander came to me just to let me listen to jokes?"
"What a joke, do you know how long it takes for my people to make a circle? It's a full sixteen days."
Liu Chengzong was extremely serious: "Sixteen days, there are only a few sixteen days in a year. Look at the mountains opposite. You don't have to look carefully. You can't see clearly anyway. The mountain pass leading to Hainan Salt Pond is right opposite."
"How much does Xining salt cost per pound?"
Sunday said forcefully: "Maybe one catty, twenty-six liang per load of official salt."
"The Mongolians take salt with them to the salt lake in the southwest of the mountain and scoop it out with a spoon. They say that the salt there is natural and inexhaustible."
Liu Chengzong said: "From the other side of the sea to the Salt Lake, it's a round trip of 240 miles, and the packhorse team takes five days to walk. From there to here, it's a round trip of 500 miles, and it takes ten days."
"From here to Xining, it's another five hundred miles round trip. That means to occupy the entire route, it will take half a month to mobilize the army."
After Liu Chengzong finished speaking, he raised his hand and pointed to the other side of the bank where he was standing: "And from here to there, if there are two ports, it only takes one hundred and fifty miles. I remember that you were an official on the coast of Shandong, probably the Lion The person who knows the most about ships in the military.”
He turned around and asked, "If we sail, how long will it take?"
Sunday Qiang's demeanor gradually became serious, and his expression gradually became serious.
He gradually realized that what Liu Chengzong was talking about was money.
One load is twenty-six taels, and a thousand loads is twenty-six thousand taels. If he dares to joke about such an important matter again, I'm afraid Liu Chengzong will really kill him.
Is it possible to be so strong on Sunday: "Commander, if you can't do it, look for someone else in the Lion Army. I have renovated fishing boats for the people. This, can this person be called the person who knows the best about boats in the army?"
Whether he is the person who knows how to dress best, Sunday Qiang actually doesn’t care that much.
The key is... who wants to be a member of your army?
Maybe one day he will be the second in command of the anti-thief group, and the whole family of Baoding old Zhou family will be slaughtered from the sky. Who can bear this!
Liu Chengzong said with helplessness on his face: "You are indeed the person who knows the boat best."
His army is not just landlubbers. In the past few days of waiting for Tangqi, Liu Shizi conducted a survey in the military training camp. More than a hundred people were born by the river, and many people were interested in walking on the river. learn.
But everyone’s understanding of water vehicles does not mean they understand ships.
What they know about rafts are bamboo rafts, wooden rafts, sheepskin rafts and cowhide rafts.
To think about the boat, you have to rely on Sunday to be strong.
Sunday Qiang sighed: "It's very windy here. Do you need to use a boat to get to the other side... all day and night?"
Snapped!
Liu Chengzong applauded and said, "That's enough. It's you, Zhou Tongzhi. Your office will be here from today on to build ships and repair ports. If you need anything, just tell me and I'll take care of it!"
