stubborn thief

Autumn of the ninth year of the Chongzhen reign.

In numerous banquets and long talks day after day, Liu Chengzong outlined future plans with the generals stationed in various places outside the Marshal's Mansion.

At the same time, the first imperial examination was held in the entire territory ruled by Liu Chengzong.

This was a grand blueprint, encompassing the old system of four provinces—Shaanxi, Gansu, Qinghai, and Sichuan—and establishing a total of 157 counties, to be governed by officials dispatched by the Marshal's Office.

At first glance, this seems like a good thing, as it shows that Liu Chengzong has significantly increased his control over the surrounding area.

This will also impact ruling entities such as the Oirat and the Khorlochi.

However, the reality is quite the opposite.

Liu Shizi wants to do this, but he doesn't want to do it now.

It was only after repeated requests from local lords such as Batur Khuntaiji, Baiyan, and Lazun that he reluctantly agreed to hold the imperial examinations.

The timing is wrong.

Liu Shizi envisioned the area west of Xining as a strategic depth that did not require the accumulation of resources.

It would be sufficient to commit a small force to maintain a presence, ensure intelligence on Tibet, Oirat, and Russo, and exert political influence over the overall situation.

Even so, it was because for a long time, the Hehuang Valley was the 'heartland' of his territory, and the need to maintain security forced him to plan to invest some troops, manpower, and resources to the west.

They even intended to establish de facto rule in Tibet and Oirat.

After all, he hadn't eaten any good food back then.

Unlike now, after taking Xi'an Prefecture, Liu Shizi truly understands what it means to control Guanzhong and control the world.

Even in a prefecture like this, plagued by drought and locusts, the taxes levied on local and local officials could support 90,000 men.

Of course, this refers to the small area of ​​Xi'an Prefecture, Huazhou, and Tongzhou in the eastern part of the Guanzhong Plain, which benefited from the irrigation provided by the Wei River.

With such a large territory as the Marshal's Mansion, encompassing the three provinces of Shaanxi, Gansu, and Qinghai, even if taxes were levied in kind and in exchange for silver, not counting the prefecture and two sub-prefectures, it could only support 70,000 troops.

With the same resources, if we conquer Hubei and Hunan, we can support an additional 100,000 troops.

If you threw them into Tibet and the Oirat, ten thousand soldiers would starve and become emaciated.

Therefore, the best-case scenario would be to send troops to escort officials upon unifying the country, thus resolving the border issues once and for all.

But everything has its gains and losses. At that time, the local nobles will inevitably have even greater resistance.

Unlike now, the Oirat are keen to further settle down and centralize power, while the Huoluochi are exhausted and hopeless in their long-term confrontation with the U-Tsang army and urgently need the support of the Marshal's Office.

This made it easier to establish prefectures and counties.

Of course, Liu Shizi will also have to invest more resources in the process.

But things will go more smoothly.

The main reason why Liu Chengzong was hesitant about this matter was actually just one thing.

He doesn't have that many reserve officials.

Actually, the happiest person about this was Mr. Liu.

Generally speaking, for a county to function properly, it should have ten to fifteen officials, of whom six are appointed by the Ministry of Personnel, while the remaining non-regular officials are appointed by the local authorities.

In Shaanxi, which was under the rule of the Marshal's Office, many counties had only one magistrate.

This is abnormal in itself.

What's even more unusual is that Liu Chengzong's solution to this problem was not to quickly resume the imperial examinations, but to select wounded or meritorious soldiers and junior officers from the army and transfer them to local areas as assistant officers.

Of course, this is normal in the Marshal's Mansion. They have an extremely large military force, and to some extent, solving the problems of the military is equivalent to solving the problems of society.

But in Mr. Liu's view, this situation was unsustainable and too unorthodox.

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

Unfortunately, there was no suitable opportunity.

The right opportunity that Master Liu wanted was for those military officers to be transferred to local bureaucrats, raise a few representative questions, and then discuss these questions with Liu Shizi.

Unfortunately, there was simply no such opportunity.

On the one hand, it is a fact that Liu Chengzong's group of officers were of high quality.

This was a tradition in the Ming Dynasty, which had a well-established garrison system. The pursuit of both literary and military prowess by military officers had already become a prevailing trend.

Military generals with low levels of education, like Zuo Liangyu, are exceptions.

Liu Chengzong's advocacy of culture further reinforced this trend.

On the other hand, Shaanxi currently does not have high requirements for the quality of its officials.

A county has thousands or even tens of thousands of people, and a third of them are military personnel. Officials who come from military backgrounds are actually better able to balance military and civilian affairs in such a place.

On the contrary, now, the Dzungar and Khorchin, the two largest local noble families under the Marshal's Office, are demanding that Liu Chengzong fulfill his promise to send officials to help them govern the region, forcing Liu Shizi to hold the imperial examination.

Liu Chengzong's reason for being unwilling to hold the imperial examinations was simple: he needed time.

Time will prove his virtue, and he can also place more of his own people from military backgrounds in local areas to prevent a large number of talented people who have entered officialdom through the imperial examinations from jumping out to oppose him.

Now, Liu Shizi's agreement to take the imperial examination is not because he was forced into a corner.

Instead, following the victory in the Lingdong Battle, the Marshal's Office, under the jurisdiction of Lin Wei, immediately published the news of the defeat of the false emperor and the burning of the old capital, which was then sent to various counties in the Northwest, greatly enhancing Liu Chengzong's reputation.

The most eye-catching banner in the official gazette read, "Express the long-standing anger over the Battle of Sarhu and avenge the old shame of the year of Ji Si."

Liu Chengzong felt that with his current reputation, it was worth a try.

The government seized this opportunity and ordered the county magistrates of Shaanxi, Gansu, and Qinghai to hold the imperial examinations.

The rules for the provincial examination remained the same, with examinations conducted at three levels: county, prefecture, and provincial. The selection process included three levels of candidates, from children to scholars. The number of candidates was also the same as in the Ming Dynasty, with a minimum of eight candidates for small counties and a maximum of twenty candidates for large counties.

In order to maintain stability, forty-six places were allocated to the Marshal's Mansion for exemption from examinations... These exemptions were given to county magistrates and county assistants, a total of forty-six people.

The main purpose was for Master Liu to patch up the mess left by Liu Shizi's arbitrary appointment of county officials.

During the campaign, Liu Chengzong appointed a large number of officials who had risen from the ranks or from local positions but had no official titles.

Now that the imperial examinations are about to be held, the local government is worried that the officials in charge of these areas will feel that they have no room for advancement and their minds will become unsettled.

To avoid this, they directly granted him the title of student.

Throughout the autumn, more than 180,000 people registered for the imperial examinations. After three rounds of examinations, the Marshal's Office selected 1,626 students qualified for the autumn examinations from among the thirteen prefectures, thirteen states, and three pastoral administrations under its jurisdiction.

Looking at the long lists submitted by various prefectures, as well as the life experiences and backgrounds of the scholars, Liu Shizi thought to himself that the first batch of scholars from the Grand Marshal's Mansion were indeed not very good.

This is because the Marshal's Mansion is located in a sparsely populated area, which leads to an extremely high acceptance rate.

The imperial examination system not only served to select talent, but also had an important purpose: to maintain stability. Therefore, in the three-tiered provincial examination process, candidates were selected according to the quotas allocated to each region.

For example, in Jingning Prefecture, there were more than a thousand registered residents, but only thirty-seven of them were healthy and without disabilities, which was less than the number of officials and yamen runners who maintained order in the examination hall. In the end, only eight were admitted.

There was also the Ordos Prefecture, which was a prefecture specially set up by the Qinghai Governor's Office for the imperial examinations. It governed the Chahar, Tumed, Khoshut and Xifan garrisons and eight Ordos in places such as Da Xiao Chuandan, Golmud and other places.

When the herders heard that the boy would be given two sheep, everyone eagerly signed up.

Most of the papers submitted were blank; very few people understood the Four Books and Five Classics. Being able to fill the exam paper with Chinese characters in a haphazard way was considered a passing grade for a student.

In any case, each guard selected eight students based on the quality of their answers. Basically, when asked to explain a particular sentence from the Analects, the students wrote about their own lives, how many cattle and sheep they had presented to the Great Khan during his conquest of Gansu, and how their brother-in-law had fought for the Grand Marshal.

That's enough. Although I can't read, I can recite from memory, so I'll pass the preliminary examination with ease.

Haixi Brigade Commander Xie Erhu happily herded his flock of sheep around Qinghai, distributing lambs to the senior intellectuals of various departments.

The policy of rewarding students in the Ordos Prefecture was specifically decided by Xie Erhu and Basang through Yang Dingrui. The lambs were provided by them and the officers of each guard to encourage learning.

Anyway, we don't need the title of Xiucai (a degree in the imperial examination system). Once we get the title of Tongsheng (a degree in the imperial examination system), we'll send them to the Weixue (a school for children of officials) to study, and then they can take the Xiucai exam in the future.

Gansu was hit by another locust plague this year, and Cao Yao returned to Xi'an Prefecture later than others. However, the Grand Commander of Gansu in the Marshal's Office was much more excited than others.

He wanted to learn from the deployment in the Hehuang region and build wooden railroads in Gansu so that supplies from Gansu could be transported to Lanzhou quickly.

The existence of the "close-to-field" law enabled Gansu to effectively implement land reclamation and develop strong resistance to locust plagues.

At the same time, the taxes levied on military farms were higher than the local grain taxes in Shaanxi, so the Gansu Governor's Office was very wealthy in terms of military provisions.

However, Gansu's problems are concentrated in population, trade routes, commerce, and precious metals. Desertification makes roads difficult to travel, grain cannot be transported out, and it is difficult to sell locally because of a lack of funds.

They lacked gold and silver, so much so that many people in Liangzhou Prefecture resorted to using the Lion Tickets from the Hehuang region.

Cao Yao believes that building a railway modeled after the Hehuang Railway would effectively solve Gansu's current problems.

Liu Chengzong would definitely agree with this.

Rail transport in the Hehuang region greatly helps reduce transportation costs, and the narrow Hexi Corridor truly needs it.

Of course, this also led to many problems, such as the theft of timber tracks. The tracks were built with elm wood, which has excellent load-bearing capacity, so it was inevitable that someone would steal them.

This doesn't matter in the Hehuang Valley.

The Hehuang region has a high population density and extremely low mobility. There are no sparsely populated areas along the railway line, so the destruction of the wooden tracks would be discovered quickly, making subsequent arrests and searches easy. Yang Dingrui, who was in charge of Qinghai, was also the person who compiled the first Marshal's Law.

When Yang Dingrui was in Kangning Prefecture, he was very aware of the importance of popularizing the law.

The purpose of the law is not to convict people of serious crimes.

It's not as simple as convicting someone, arresting them, sentencing them, and that's it.

It must be something that people agree with and that demonstrates a commitment to upholding the law.

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

Otherwise, it would be like the military law of the Ming Dynasty. The military law in the manual was written according to Qi Jiguang's system, and people said so, but no military commander would use that system to punish soldiers when he had nothing better to do.

Because of the current living standards of the Ming army, it was impossible for them to accept Qi Jiguang's military regulations.

If someone steals, they'll be caught. With the population mobility these days, and the town, township, bao, jia system in the Hehuang region, you'd be caught before you even got the timber rails home.

Customs officers are most pleased with this: you steal yours, I'll arrest you.

If caught, they would be sentenced to ten years of forced labor in the Golden Gou and Silver Caves, and all their allocated land would be confiscated.

If you can't catch it, then accept your fate.

There are always spare tracks available, and elm wood isn't exactly a rare or expensive tree.

Compared to the cost, the benefits of increased transport capacity are far greater. The losses from stolen timber are not even as high as the cost of damaged vehicles.

In fact, the Hehuang region is experimenting with fitting iron shells onto wooden rails because, firstly, iron rails are faster and can bear greater weight, and secondly, iron rails are easier to catch than wooden rails if they are lost.

The marks from the wooden tracks can be removed by hand-shaving.

Selling stolen railway tracks is much more difficult than selling stolen wooden tracks.

Especially in the Hehuang region, where can we sell them? Who dares to buy them?

If someone really could collect stolen goods, stealing railway tracks would actually be the lightest crime in the case; someone with that ability could even sell cannons.

But the situation is different in Gansu.

The Hehuang railway is only 500 miles long, and there are people everywhere along the way. Gansu needs a railway three or four times the length of the Hehuang railway, but the population is about the same as that of the Hehuang railway. There are large areas of uninhabited areas and deserts in between.

Cost control is much more difficult than in the Hehuang region.

Therefore, Liu Shizi suggested that Cao Yao first try building a canal from Liangzhou to the mouth of the Lanzhou River.

In fact, Gansu was not the only province affected by locust plagues this year; Henan also experienced one, and the extent of the disaster was much greater than that in Gansu, with locusts spreading across the entire province.

Liu Chengzong once wanted to prevent locusts in the entire Shaanxi province, but he did not expect that the swarms of locusts that covered the sky would fly over Tongguanyuan, but it was just a feint and they went north to Shanxi.

Therefore, this year's harvest in Shaanxi is passable, and the drought situation is much better than Liu Shizi had expected.

Although it is still a drought, it is not as severe as in previous years. It snowed in most areas during the Spring Festival, and Yan'an Prefecture and other places even had some rain this summer.

The areas that have truly been deprived of water are mainly Jingning Prefecture and Tianshui in Longxi, as well as Yinchuan in Ningxia, where the vegetation is scorched and withered.

Whether Longxi was dry or not made no difference to Liu Shizi, because those counties had suffered from severe droughts for several years in advance, and the Ming army, peasant army, and marshal's army had fought a series of major battles there, turning the area into a wasteland.

The local population had been reduced to almost nothing due to war and drought.

There weren't many people in total. As soon as the drought report was submitted to the Marshal's Office, Liu Chengzong ordered the government to evacuate the affected areas and provide relief to nearby prefectures.

Ningxia isn't much of a problem. After internal strife and the Eastern Expedition, its population and garrison aren't that large. Moreover, it has good irrigation conditions, with the Han and Tang irrigation canals. At least the basic grain production of this "Jiangnan beyond the Great Wall" is still much better than that of Shaanxi, even in a severe drought.

But the situation in Henan this year is very bad.

First, due to drought, the Yellow River dried up for more than ten days in the Hukou section between the mountains of Shaanxi. Then, after the agricultural water season, the Yellow River recovered slightly, but the water became clear.

This abnormal situation only improved slightly after continuous rainfall in Yan'an Prefecture.

Even so, Henan was first hit by a severe drought, then by a locust plague, which dealt another heavy blow to the already fragile livelihoods of its people. Some people even fled westward with their families to escape the famine.

Liu Shizi ordered Zhang Tianlin to accept the refugees fleeing the famine, but at the same time, he also had to strengthen the defense of the pass to prevent Zhang Renxue, the general in Henan, from taking the opportunity to start a war.

However, despite accepting it, Liu Shizi didn't really understand it.

He thought to himself, "It's already good enough that people from Shaanxi aren't fleeing to Henan for famine, but you're all running here. What are you thinking?"

Soon, Liu Chengzong found out what the other person was thinking.

Zhang Tianlin, stationed at Tongguan, returned to Xi'an a few days later, reporting to Liu Chengzong, weary from his journey: "General, the Yellow River has breached its banks at Kaifeng." (End of Chapter)