Tang Dynasty Bandits

Chapter 279 Side Story: Awakening Fragrance
Looking out from the top of Shengzhou City, the land seemed to have been rubbed by time, with ravines and undulating sand dunes. The city was built on an oasis on the banks of the Yellow River, and a few miles outside the city was an endless sea of ​​sand, where a few tenacious camel thorns could be seen occasionally, adding a little bit of life to the silence.

When there is no wind, this place is described as "a lone plume of smoke rises straight from the desert, and the setting sun hangs round over the long river," while when there is wind, it is described as "a sudden gust of wind swells the sand, scattering it like timely rain."

When Xingxiang first told Liangyu about it, Liangyu thought she was lying to him again. He simply couldn't believe that such a gentle and quiet girl as Xingxiang was born and spent her childhood surrounded by this boundless yellow sand.

Even at its most prosperous, Shengzhou had a population of no more than 20,000. This was only due to the silk-horse trade with the Uyghur Khanate.

In gratitude for the Uyghurs' help in quelling the An Lushan Rebellion, the Tang court not only allowed the Uyghurs to loot Luoyang, the eastern capital, but also subsequently gifted them 20,000 bolts of silk annually and purchased tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of horses from them, paying forty bolts of silk for each horse, with sick or weak horses paid for at full price.

The Uyghurs, unwilling to provide the Tang Dynasty with good horses, forced the Tang to sell huge quantities of inferior horses to the Tang court every year. This strained the Tang Dynasty's finances to the point that "China's wealth was exhausted, and it was burdened with the cost of horses every year," leaving it with a heavy debt to the Uyghurs.

This unequal trade was not much different from the tribute system of later generations.

Having acquired a large quantity of silk, which could serve as hard currency, the Uyghurs needed to lavishly enjoy themselves along the border between the two countries. Shengzhou, located on a key trade route between the Tang and Uyghur territories, was thus able to prosper for a century as a vital hub in the Hetao region of Zhenwu.

The scarcity of food supplies made it difficult to expand the size of the city.

After the war god Shi Xiong destroyed the Uyghur Khanate, the nomadic people on the grasslands became poor and had no money to spend, causing Shengzhou to decline again. When Xingxiang was born, the rammed earth walls of the city were old and collapsed in many places, and no one repaired them. Many houses in the city were also uninhabited and had become abandoned houses overgrown with weeds.

When Xingxiang was little, her mother often told her about the past prosperity of Shengzhou. But she didn't feel there was anything to miss about it.

Leaving aside the fact that this prosperity is built on the humiliation of the entire nation, even if Shengzhou remains prosperous as before, what does that have to do with my mother and myself?
Xingxiang's mother came from a branch of the Dugu clan in Wuchuan. After Shengzhou prospered due to the "silk and horse trade," a branch of the Dugu clan decisively migrated there and controlled most of the local agricultural and commercial industries.

As members of the Guanlong Group, the Dugu clan held a relatively high position in the genealogical records of the Tang Dynasty's aristocratic families. Although prominent families in Guandong such as the Cui, Lu, Li, and Zheng clans had considerable objections to the Li Tang dynasty forcibly including a large number of Guanlong non-Han Chinese into the aristocratic order, the issue had not yet reached the point of needing to rebel, so they had no choice but to swallow their pride and endure it.

Xingxiang's father, Zhang Rui, met Aniang in Shengzhou while traveling the world. The marriage was opposed by the girl's parents because they were not of equal social standing. Xingxiang's mother was driven out of her home in order to marry the man she loved, and she could only support herself and her young daughter by spinning and weaving.

Zhang Rui was a minor official in Chang'an at the time, and his salary was barely enough to support himself, leaving him with no money to send home. Xingxiang truly began to live the life of a noblewoman after her father became the governor of Songzhou and brought her and her mother to Songzhou.

The Dugu family of Shengzhou only provided some assistance to the mother for the first two years, and then completely ignored the mother and daughter's life and death.

Xingxiang didn't know what kind of affection she could have for her maternal family.

After her grandfather passed away, her mother asked her to go back to her hometown with her to visit relatives, and Xingxiang agreed.

Upon arrival, they found that the once grand courtyard, stretching for thousands of rooms, had been reduced to a charred ruin, with rubble scattered everywhere.

After the collapse of the Uyghur Khaganate, the Tang Dynasty no longer needed to spend money to buy peace, but the northern frontier was no longer peaceful either.

The nomadic peoples on the grasslands did not die out; they simply lost the leadership of a Khan's family and began to govern independently. Without the restraint of the Khanate, they began to raid the borders in waves. These scattered nomadic cavalry were not enough to launch large-scale attacks, but they caused great distress to the people on the frontier.

According to the neighbors, the Hu people knew that Shengzhou was poorly defended and that the city walls were in ruins. They also knew that the Dugu family of Shengzhou was as wealthy as princes and nobles. So, with the help of a vagrant in the city, they broke into the city through a gap in the wall and massacred the entire Dugu family, taking away all their wealth and women.

A large-scale barbarian cavalry force could not possibly bypass the defenses of Zhenwu Jiedushi and Feng Shuai Li Guochang to plunder Shengzhou on the south bank of the Yellow River. However, an attack by a barbarian army of about a thousand men, who had sneaked in from the vast desert, was truly impossible to defend against.

Upon receiving the news, Xingxiang's mother completely broke down, sobbing uncontrollably against her mother's body and constantly whispering sorrowful words. No amount of comforting or persuasion could help her.

Xingxiang felt little sympathy for the tragic fate of these relatives she had never met. She knew that after her grandfather became the prefect, her maternal grandfather had written to him, reaching a reconciliation. But in the end, the father-in-law and son-in-law never saw each other again.

She didn't feel she needed to rely on her maternal uncle's family. Her grandfather had lived a life of integrity and hadn't left much savings. But with her skills, whether as a bodyguard or killing bandits on the grasslands, supporting herself and her mother would be easy. Xingxiang gazed out from the city wall of Shengzhou for a while before returning to the inn where her mother and she were staying. In principle, the inn only accepted merchants and travelers, but with the decline of Shengzhou, it had begun to accept ordinary guests as well, hoping to earn as much as possible.

Back outside the courtyard wall of the inn, she immediately saw her mother.

She was chatting with a woman who was so beautiful she looked like she was about to burst with water, her face beaming with joy.

The other person wore a royal blue brocade robe with a square-shaped pattern, a lapel collar, and narrow sleeves. The collar was slightly open, revealing skin as white as a maiden's. On their head was a silver crown inlaid with some kind of gemstone, shimmering with light.

Xingxiang never expected that her mother, who had been so heartbroken before, would be so happy today.

She quietly shuffled closer and said, "Xiang'er greets Mother."

He then turned to the woman beside him: "May I ask which noble family's daughter you are, to have grown up to be so elegant and beautiful?"

She smiled and said, "I wish I had a younger sister as beautiful as you."

A sudden look of unease appeared on the other person's face. She lowered her head shyly, her cheeks flushing slightly, making her skin appear even more radiant.

But her mother scolded, "Xiang'er, what kind of eyes do you have! This is the son of Li Keyong, the military governor of Zhenwu!"

Xingxiang was stunned—was it a boy? Or the young master of the Feng family?

Mother sighed deeply and continued, "Today, Mother was filled with grief and went to the ruins of the Dugu family to reminisce about the past. Looking at a dry well, she was filled with despair and suddenly made up her mind to jump down."

"If it weren't for Young Master Keyong saving your mother, Xiang'er, you wouldn't be seeing your mother today."

The aroma of the incense filled the air, sending chills down my spine.

Why would someone suddenly want to die because of those heartless relatives?
Everyone has moments of impulsiveness, and given that both my maternal grandparents did die in this raid by the barbarian cavalry, it's possible that my mother genuinely wanted to die and was saved by this young master Li Keyong.

But Xingxiang remembered something else.

Grandpa actually supported his relationship with Liangyu, but Mother strongly opposed it because she didn't want her daughter to suffer the same hardships she had endured.

The Dugu family's house was burned down, and my mother was so grieving that she still hoped to become the Dugu family's adopted daughter. Although my father had become a prefect, he was still of humble origin, and once he died, almost all of his past political resources would be wiped out.

This young master Li Keyong from the Feng family, though not short, had a slender waist and arms, a round and delicate face, naturally dark eyebrows, and naturally red lips. Nine out of ten people would probably mistake him for an absolute beauty at first glance.

There were some minor flaws, though. While his right eye was clear and bright, like the moon shining on a cold river, his left eye was always squinting listlessly, suggesting that one of his eyes wasn't quite right. But with such a prodigious talent, what would be a major flaw in an ordinary person seemed insignificant to this guy.

Although this young master Li Keyong was indeed dressed in men's clothing... there were quite a few women in the Tang Dynasty who wore men's clothing when they went out.

Only the mother noticed the other person's not-so-prominent Adam's apple at a glance.

(End of this chapter)