At the intersection of autumn and winter in the second year of Chongzhen in the Ming Dynasty, a piece of true news that sounded false spread throughout the thousands of ravines in the northern Shaanxi Plateau in a very short period of time.
This shocking news is that the Ming Dynasty has a little fool who dares to defeat Lu Bu! Moreover, this "Sai Lu Bu" also brought sixty-one brave generals "Sai Zhang Liao", "Sai Gao Shun" and "Sai Zang Ba" to northern Shaanxi. Moreover, on the river beach outside Fugu County, sixty-two people defeated King Fugu's more than 10,000 rebels, and killed the heroic King Fugu with one arrow. Now Fugu County has been recaptured!
This news is really a bolt from the blue for the heroes on the northern Shaanxi Plateau who are gearing up to take advantage of the continuous drought and the people's dire livelihood!
This land in northern Shaanxi is incredible. It is surrounded by four military towns including Yulin Town, Shanxi Town, Ningxia Town, and Guyuan Town. Beyond the border wall of Yulin is the lawless grassland desert. Therefore, men in northern Shaanxi developed a culture of being brave and fierce, emphasizing martial arts over literature, and advocating martial arts. If the Ming Dynasty could provide enough wealth to support the brave men of northern Shaanxi, it would allow them to achieve great achievements for the country and themselves. But once the Ming court is unable to support this group of brave men, national disaster will not be far away.
Since the end of Wanli, due to the double blow of drought in the northwest and war in Liaodong, the finances of the Ming Dynasty have been on the verge of bankruptcy. Moreover, the five towns in one province of Shaanxi also experienced a huge food supply gap. Famine spread throughout the country. The dissatisfaction of the people and the soldiers of the five towns with the Ming court was on the verge of erupting.
And those Shaanxi warriors who were in the arena and suffered hardships, of course also smelled the atmosphere of troubled times.
Troubled times...are the times when heroes show off their talents!
So after Wang Ershouyi, the heroes of Shaanxi began to gear up, waiting for the opportunity to fight.
And King Fugu's Heroes Association has become a bellwether to attract the attention of heroes. If the Heroes Association becomes a hero, the thirty-six rebel kings in Shaanxi can work together to rebel against the Ming Dynasty. Then the heroes who are still waiting and watching will raise the flag of righteousness without hesitation and rise up!
If the hero fails...then everyone will have to wait and see for a while. After all, a hero only has one life.
However, most of the heroes who are already gearing up are convinced that the world is already on the verge of collapse!
Ming Dynasty's energy... is almost exhausted!
With the fall of Liaodong, severe drought in the northwest, and the weather getting colder every year, could the sky of the Ming Dynasty still survive?
This is simply the death of the Ming Dynasty!
However, the Ming Dynasty, which was about to encounter the collapse of heaven, suddenly attracted a young emperor who was "the best in the world in martial arts".
There was also a great victory in which 62 people broke through 10,000... This really dampened the enthusiasm of Shaanxi heroes for rebellion.
In the west of Yulin Town, in a stockade under the jurisdiction of Liushujianbao, which is close to the wall of the Great Wall, the ancestral hall of the stockade was full of people. Many people had mud on their feet, as if they had just returned from the fields. These people basically look like farmers, but judging from their figures and looks, they are mostly tough, as if they were born in the military. Needless to say, this group of people knew that they were the military households here in Yulin Town.
Yulin is a military town. It manages the 1,700-mile Great Wall and has 37 castles under its jurisdiction. The associated piers, warehouses, and passes are too numerous to count.
According to the military garrison system in the early Ming Dynasty, three parts of the army were used to defend the city, and seven were divided into farming. The income from the military garrison was used to raise troops. The military households who serve in the army and farm the fields are passed down from generation to generation and are the soldiers and generals of the world. Although this military system was criticized completely in later generations, it also had its merits.
For example, raising troops with land can save military expenses. For the early Ming Dynasty when all industries were in decline, the positive significance was very great. If Zhu Yuanzhang had been asked to pay and raise troops, could the economy of the late Yuan and early Ming dynasties support an army of one million people? Maybe they can’t even bring out the troops for the Northern Expedition to the Central Plains!
If the hundreds of thousands of Northern Expedition troops were not fighting for land, but for a few military pay, Zhu Yuanzhang would not be able to support him even if he scraped the land in the south of the Yangtze River clean!
Another example is that using the territory occupied by the guard station can lay down the foundation and save logistics. No matter how unlikable Zhu Yuanzhang is, no one can deny that the empire he created is really huge!
The only person who can surpass him in history is probably Li Shimin of the Tang Dynasty. Compared with the Song Dynasty that scholars yearned for, the Ming Dynasty created by Zhu Yuanzhang was much more majestic.
And to conquer and occupy such a large territory, what can we rely on other than military garrison? It is simply impossible to rely on recruiting soldiers like in the Song Dynasty... Not to mention that military salaries cannot be paid, recruiting soldiers does not matter whether they are farming, and logistics and military supplies have to be solved by the court. Logistics transfer is very tiring!
Moreover, recruiting soldiers is a flow of soldiers and does not take root in the frontier. Even if we can occupy some territory, how can we Chineseize it? Recruit soldiers to occupy land, and then recruit people to cultivate the land? How much money does Zhu Yuanzhang have to spend?
Therefore, Zhu Yuanzhang could expel the Yuan Dynasty and restore the Central Plains, expand the territory of the Ming Dynasty to such a large area in his lifetime, and move millions of Han people to take root in border areas, relying on this kind of semi-feudal military garrison.
The subsequent shrinking of the Ming Dynasty actually had nothing to do with Zhu Yuanzhang, but was the fault of Zhu Yunwen and Zhu Di. Without the two of them being so noisy, the Nine Great Banishers and Sai Kings alone could have raised hundreds of thousands of cavalry... Beiyuan and Donglu would have ceased to exist in the generation of Zhu Yuanzhang's grandson.
The suffering of the Jiubian military households was actually the inevitable result of the confinement of the nine great Sai kings who resisted barbarians and the continuous shrinking of the Ming Dynasty. Without the protection of the Sai king, the Jiubian military households would of course have no right to speak. Of course, the nine-border military households without a voice could not expand the border with the support of the whole country. The continuous shrinking of border defense became the national policy of the Ming Dynasty. As a result of the border reduction, military households lost the opportunity to obtain land through war. The cake cannot be made bigger, so of course the only thing to do is make a fuss about distribution... It is not surprising that the upper echelons of the military guards invaded the military villages and oppressed the middle and lower military households.
In addition, the Ming Dynasty's border reduction policy did not really reduce the pressure on border defense. Because the more the Ming Dynasty retreats, the more arrogant the enemy becomes and the more places need to be fortified. So Jiubian soon became thirteen towns, and sometimes there were even sixteen towns.
So many military towns did not have enough land for farming, so they had to rely on the people's grain transportation and the money exchanged from the people's grain transportation to support them.
For the eastern border towns with convenient transportation, transporting grain and silver is not a big problem.
But for Shaanxi, which has inconvenient transportation and can only support five towns in one province, it is very difficult. Shaanxi is miserable, and the five towns are even more miserable. The people of Shaanxi are suffering, and the military households in the five towns are suffering even more!
If there is no way out of the suffering, of course we can only hope that the sky will fall and the earth will fall, causing a big commotion.
The leader of the countryside in the Liushujianbao area of Yulin Town, a man named Zhang Xianzhong and his ordinary brothers, are looking forward to the sky day and night.
Yes, it’s that old Daxi man, Long Live Zhang Xianzhong! His life experience is more exciting than that of Li Zicheng at the same time. He was originally from Yulin, a military household. He had been in the army for generations and had practiced martial arts since he was a child. I also read books when I was a teenager, but I didn't have the ability to take the exam. Later, he joined the army again, then worked as a policeman in Yan'an Prefecture, and then he was dismissed and joined the army again. Later, he was almost beheaded for inciting a mutiny! However, because he looked very powerful, he was rescued by Chen Hongfan, a general in Yulin Town, and returned home with his life.
How can people with this kind of experience farm well when they return home? So he led a group of teenagers from the same village and became bullies running rampant in the village. At the same time, I am also waiting for the opportunity to do something big.
However, Yulin is a military town after all. Unlike Yan'an Prefecture and Qingyang Prefecture next door, the Ming Dynasty still had a lot of force here.
If Yan'an Prefecture and Qingyang Prefecture were in trouble and Yulin's troops did not march out to quell the chaos, Zhang Xianzhong would be killed if he dared to jump out and rebel.
So when the thirty-six heroes met in Fugu, he was missing.
But he still sent a younger brother named Sun Kewang to check the wind direction in Fugu. If there was really something he could do, he would roll up his sleeves and go for it.
But Sun Kewang, who just came back today, brought Zhang Xianzhong very terrible news.
After listening to Sun Kewang's embellished remarks, Zhang Xianzhong's yellow face had twisted into a ball, "Damn it, this Ming Dynasty Xiaohunjun is really powerful, he looks like he can fight even better than Lao Zhang... this How else to make it?"
