It has been nearly two months since Liu Jingdun's army began to attack the eastern part of Jiayu Pass. In more than fifty days, he went from being eager at the beginning to being calm now, and there are certainly reasons for this.
The governor of Gansu has changed, and the governor of Gansu has also changed. No one will force him to attack this first pass of the Ming Dynasty.
Yes, the first pass of the Ming Dynasty today is Jiayuguan, not Shanhaiguan, because in history, Shanhaiguan became the "first pass in the world" largely due to the rise of Houjin and the fall of Liaodong, and the Ming Dynasty urgently reinforced and strengthened Shanhaiguan. There are both dangerous reasons for the pass itself and changes in the strategic situation.
The transfer of governors and inspectors directly affects the direction of the war. Since Wang Tingzhuan and Xiong Tingbi took office, the two houses of the Gansu Procuratorate have changed their previous attitude of forcing Liu Wei to retake Jiayuguan, and have fully entrusted military issues to Liu Wei instead of directly intervening. Following Gao Yuanfu's instructions before leaving Beijing, the two carried out various political and economic work in Gansu to lay a solid foundation for the subsequent military layout.
Liu Wei's order was to ensure the safety of Suzhou and wait for an opportunity to recover Jiayuguan. This is a rather redundant task. Its basic requirement is that Suzhou must ensure that the upgrade requirement is to recapture Jiayuguan.
Suzhou can naturally be guaranteed, because even though the Mongolian army under Chahar now has a strong musketeer configuration, they still seriously lack artillery and do not have the actual ability to storm the big city of Xiongguan. Previously, Burihatu captured Jiayuguan and Suzhou City in one fell swoop, mainly relying on that successful sneak attack.
Liu Wei's troops have been greatly strengthened in the past two months. The troops originally prepared for the Western Expedition have basically arrived and are now stationed in Wubao between Suzhou and Ganzhou.
Why not focus on Suzhou? Of course, this is because stationing nearly 100,000 troops in a city in the west of the Ming Dynasty will greatly increase the logistical pressure, and is not conducive to Suzhou City's drinking water and other health and safety guarantees.
Fighting a war is not easy, and "adapting measures to local conditions" is always the key factor. Can fighting in a place like the northwest be the same as in the south of the Yangtze River? You have a hundred thousand troops stationed in the south of the Yangtze River. As long as you don't find some deserted mountains such as Stone Mountain to camp on your own, you can just dig some temporary wells to ensure safe drinking water.
But it’s completely different in the northwest. It’s not surprising that in many places you can’t find water even if you dig a well. Without a safe and sufficient water supply, even a million-strong army can die for you in minutes, and they will fall before they start fighting. The entire army was wiped out.
Moreover, Suzhou has not stationed 100,000 troops in a hundred years. Once such a large army is suddenly stationed in full force, just dealing with human and animal excrement will be a huge safety hazard. Especially at the turn of spring and summer, the possibility of epidemic disease is very high. of. Therefore, while Liu Wei cautiously ordered the engineering troops to build the barracks in Suzhou, he dispersed the Western Expedition army among dozens of forts along the line between Suzhou and Ganzhou.
On the one hand, this is to ensure that the army will not be harmed by diseases; on the other hand, it is also to familiarize the soldiers mobilized from other places with the climate characteristics of the northwest, so as to avoid being acclimatized after the expedition.
In short, the same sentence remains the same: war is not a child's play. Soldiers are not model soldiers in the game. They are real people with real physical characteristics and physical limits. As a general, you must consider all kinds of details to avoid mistakenly mistakenly mistaken for others.
However, the Western Expeditionary Army and the Jiayuguan Mongolian Army did not just stare at each other across this distance every day. Both sides had launched offensives. However, as if there was a tacit understanding, the scale of the offensives of both sides was not large. "If the other party slacks off, our troops may be able to make a sneak attack".
Of course, neither side succeeded - after all, both sides were very vigilant during this period.
Even so, the pressure Liu Wei felt was still growing, because through this period of tug-of-war and testing, he found that Jiayuguan Pass was unavoidable and could only be recovered by force. However, this first pass of the Ming Dynasty was too difficult to defeat. .
Not only is the solidity and majesty of the pass itself now harmful to the Ming Dynasty itself, it is difficult to shake even with heavy artillery bombardment, but more importantly, the battlefield is not wide enough, and the formation that can be deployed during the siege is too small, which is not enough. Concentrate enough heavy artillery.
In front of Jiayuguan, the front-line army could only form a frontal formation of more than a thousand people. However, the Mongolian army now also had long-range muskets and elite armor-piercing heavy archers. As a result, the Ming army could not get too close. It further increases the difficulty of solving the problem.
In order to find the weaknesses of Jiayuguan, Liu Wei not only called in local elders to ask for various information, but even called in the county annals to read them carefully.
However, there are not many places that can provide him with reference, because since Jiayuguan was built, except for Burihatu, it has only experienced one fall before.
As mentioned before, the Ming Dynasty used Jiayuguan as the western border pass and established a military defense line here for two main reasons. First, the west of Jiayuguan gradually transitioned into multi-ethnic, multi-national, and multi-sectarian areas, while the east of Jiayuguan gradually transitioned into Han, unified political power, and Confucian culture. This is the cultural dividing line between the Ming Dynasty’s controllable areas in Hexi and the Mongolian forces in the Western Regions;
Second, Jiayuguan has a special geography. The Tuolai River Gorge, Black Mountain, and Xincheng Caohu can block traffic. If these natural barriers are connected with the Great Wall and piers, and then troops are stationed to guard it, the Great Wall will rely on natural dangers to form a unique country in Jiayuguan. Line of defense. Natural moats and natural barriers are the main body of the defense system of the Jiayuguan Great Wall. The compact nature resulted in low construction costs and high defense efficiency, so the Ming Dynasty chose to set up a national defense line in Jiayuguan.
Outside the Great Wall of the Ming Dynasty, there were transitional zones or areas controlled by both the Ming and Mongolian sides. Hami and Dunhuang west of Jiayuguan are of this nature. At the beginning of the founding of the People's Republic of China, in order to stabilize the border and maintain national defense and security west of Jiayuguan, the Ming court first established seven Jidu guards in Dunhuang and Hami and appointed the chiefs of the Fanyi tribes as the chief guards; second, it established King Zhongshun in Hami, who was appointed by the court and the local The third is to control the relationship with Mongolia and the Western Regions by adjusting the frequency of trade and tax rates at Jiayuguan.
These measures regulated relations with the Western Regions and wooed and contained Mongolian forces. There were no weapons west of Zhijiayuguan before the Zhengde Dynasty and were basically stable.
However, by the beginning of the 16th century, the Mongolian forces in Xinjiang were succeeded by Mansuer (called Sutan in Ming history, Sutan is the transliteration of "Sudan", which generally refers to the kings and rulers of Central and Western Asian countries, and Mansuer is the eastern Chagatai The 13th Khan of the Khanate), he had the ambition to restore Mongolia and rule the Central Plains.
Mansor Khan knew clearly that if he wanted to occupy the Central Plains, he must first occupy Hexi. If he wanted to occupy Hexi, he must first occupy Suzhou. If he wanted to occupy Suzhou, he must first break through the Jiayuguan defense line. Since then, Jiayuguan has been coveted and is threatened by force from the Mongolian forces in Xinjiang at any time.
After several years of hard work, Mansur Khan led more than 10,000 Mongolian troops to march eastward in November of the 11th year of Zhengde (1516). Faced with the heavily guarded and difficult-to-surmount Jiayuguan defense line, the Mongolian army did not attack directly from the front. Instead, they sent a team of troops to sneak across the Tiansheng Bridge, which was difficult for men and horses to cross, across the Wenshu section of the Tuolai River, and sneaked behind Jiayuguan.
On November 15th, a pincer attack from the east and west, using troops in multiple places, launched an all-out attack on Jiayuguan and its defense line. At that time, Ruining was serving as the guerrilla general in Suzhou. He had served as the commander-in-chief of the Jiayuguan military commander around the second year of Zhengde. Knowing that Jiayuguan was besieged by the Mongolian army, Ruining led his troops to the rescue on the 16th. They marched to the area of Manjusri and Fengjiagou, where they encountered the Mongolian army and were intercepted. The two sides fought fiercely for a day. In the end, all the Ming troops were killed, and Ruining also Killed by an arrow. On the same day, Jiayuguan fell, and then the Mongolian army surrounded Suzhou.
As for the battle of the fall of Jiayuguan, there is no record in history books or annals. Only the huge amount of grain stored in Xiaobohe Temple (Temple Camp Zhuangzi) located in the west of Yemawan Village in later generations shows that the battle was extremely brutal.
However, the history that Liu Wei inquired or verified was not of much help to him.
Since Chenghua, Xinjiang has produced a large number of displaced refugees and refugees due to tribal disputes and competition for the throne. They returned east to the Ming Dynasty and were resettled in and around Suzhou City. Among them, there are a large number of Mongolian spies and undercover agents. These spies and undercover agents have long been engaged in collecting intelligence, instigating rebellion against the barbarians, and developing troops behind enemy lines. Information on the garrison, deployment, combat power, fortresses, routes and other information on the Jiayuguan defense line were obtained by Mansuer.
They rioted in Suzhou City on the 16th, trying to cooperate internally and externally, and captured Suzhou City. The Suzhou defenders tried their best to suppress and eventually stabilize the situation, but they were unable to send troops to reinforce Ruining in time or with the ability. Of course, conversely speaking, Ruining's troops fought against the enemy in Manjusri, which also bought time for the Ming army in Suzhou to quell the rebellion. Therefore, in the end, the internal plan failed, and the Mongolian army retreated after looting.
In other words, Mansur Khan also relied on sneak attacks to capture Jiayuguan. And it has to be said that although Ruining's heroic death in battle is worthy of recognition, as a general of an army, he died in a field battle outside Jiayuguan, and he was also the person indirectly responsible for the fall of Jiayuguan - the chief of the feudal army died in battle, and the consequences Everyone understands.
Looking at it this way, it confirms one thing: as long as the defenders in Jiayuguan are cautious and don't act blindly, there is basically no weakness.
Unable to launch a surprise attack, and unable to concentrate enough heavy artillery on the frontal battlefield, Liu Wei had no choice but to explain the situation to the cabinet and then inquire whether a force attack was feasible - in other words, whether it could cost lives.
Gao Pangshi was also scratching his head when he received Liu Wei's military report. He has never been to the current Jiayuguan Pass, but he did briefly visit it in later generations. Although he could not get a glimpse of the entire Jiayuguan Pass in the Ming Dynasty, he also roughly understood that this place is indeed easy to defend and difficult to attack - as Liu Wei said: There is no way around it. Even if you go around, you can't get out of the formation.
However, it was impossible for Gao Jingshi to agree to take human lives.
Even if you don't say that life is precious, if you just say that you are sending a soldier to Jiayuguan, do you think it is just for fun? Do you know how much it will cost? With such a cost-heavy army to fill up the Jiayuguan natural barrier, and then continue the Western Expedition, can Gao Yuanfu not allocate an additional one or two million silver to survive?
Gao pragmatic called Zhou Yong, and the two rushed to the Ministry of War to discuss how to break the barrier with the Grand Sima Song Yingchang.
There was nothing Zhou Yong could do. He was essentially a civil servant. When he was the governor of Liaofu and Jiliao, he did not have many military exploits. He only had some merit in defending the territory. It was unrealistic to expect him to have any clever tricks in offensive operations.
Song Yingchang was better than him, at least his performance in the early stage of the Korean War was considered a commander-in-chief. However, facing Liu Wei's current Jiayuguan problem, he could not think of any solution. If he hadn't become more aware of the cost of killing people after becoming Minister of the Ministry of War, he would probably agree with Liu Wei immediately.
After doing it over and over again, in the end we have to be pragmatic and find a solution. And what made Gao pragmatic quite dumbfounded was that just by looking at their eyes, they knew that these two men could not come up with a good solution, so they immediately put their hopes on Yuan Fu, the victorious Yuan Fu, and looked at him eagerly.
Well, you, the Chief of General Staff and Minister of Defense, can't handle their professional work, so you expect me, the head of the government, to bring you a Wagner? But Jiayuguan is not Bachmut either!
Gao Pragmatic did have "private mercenaries" in his hands, but he was more difficult to withstand large losses than the imperial army. Not to mention anything else, at least the pension for the imperial officers and soldiers was much cheaper than the pension for his servants.
There is another saying on this matter: Within the Jinghua system, the pension of the servants in the Ming Dynasty is the most expensive and the most difficult. The pension work of the armies in southern Xinjiang is far easier to handle than the pension of the servants in the Ming Dynasty.
This is because Gao Jingjing actually controls political power in southern Xinjiang, and also controls land, the most important means of production. In southern Xinjiang, especially the recently captured Nanyang Islands, there are still a lot of "unclaimed lands" and "unclaimed land" to be reclaimed. "Land", so even if the war losses in southern Xinjiang are not compensated with money, they can still be given hard currency such as land. Basically no soldier's family will refuse land compensation - as long as there is no "short pound" .
However, there is nothing to do in the Ming Dynasty. Basically, you can only give money. After all, although the Ming Dynasty was a big country, fields have long been scarce. In many places, even if you have money, you can't buy suitable fields, because unless people are really desperate, who in the farming society is willing to sell their fields easily?
This is one of the important reasons why Gao Pingshi dared to let Gao Yuan, who was only thirteen years old, practice the war in southern Xinjiang against the mighty Mughal Empire, but in the Ming Dynasty he only dared to let famous generals like Liu Wei take charge of the imperial family of a province. The reason - the country really cannot afford the loss, or in other words, the compensation.
However, no matter what, now Zhou Yong and Song Yingchang have no choice but to face Jiayuguan. Gao Pragmatic must find a way to solve the problem even if he is reluctant. However, there is no way around this, and there is no way to force a strong attack, but there is no way to break up the lineup. What else can you think of?
Gao Qingshi frowned deeply and remained silent for a long time. Zhou Yong and Song Yingchang held their breath and concentrated, not daring to disturb Gao Pragmatic's thinking.
Master Yuan Fu thought for a long time, then suddenly sighed and said, "Have you ever heard of the battle when Zhuo Jing defeated Lang Son?"
The two were stunned for a moment, looked at each other, and then looked at Gao Yingshi. Zhou Yong said in astonishment: "I heard that Yuan Fu caused the thunder to strike and destroyed it... Could it be that Yuan Fu wanted to go to Jiayuguan in person and trigger thunder from the sky again?"
Gao pragmatic waved his hand and said: "You want to say 'attracting thunder from the sky'. I can really do this kind of thing, but it requires building a high tower... Come on, let's not joke, defeating Lang Son is not a matter of me casting a spell to attract thunder from the sky, that is A powerful gunpowder.
But that thing is very dangerous. If you don't pay attention, for example, if it shakes a little too much, it will explode violently. Therefore, after using it only once, I ordered that it be banned from production. However, this time it is really forced by the situation. I will order Jinghua to rush to make a batch and send it to Suzhou. There will be trouble along the way. You arrange a group of people to escort us and there must be no problems at all. "
Zhou Yong glanced at Song Yingchang, and Song Yingchang muttered: "This thing is as powerful as thunder from the sky, and Yuan Fu also said that it is easy to detonate, so this escort is really a big deal. The lower official suggested mobilizing part of the Imperial Guard. Escort, I wonder if it’s okay?”
Gao pragmatic nodded and said: "Yes." Then he added: "The emperor's tiger talisman is needed to mobilize the imperial guards. I will go and talk to the emperor about this in person."
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(End of chapter)
