Chapter 460 Mohist, the military system of the government and the compilation of the four seasons
I haven’t had a serious talk with Cao Shishi and Cao Yanming in almost half a year. Ever since he embarked on this research path, he has become more and more nerdy.
He couldn't say a few words and then went off to do his own thing, completely ignoring people and sometimes being very irritable.
However, in front of Zhang Zhao, Cao Yanming still didn't dare to act like an outsider.
Because I had drifted a few times in the past, but Zhang Zhao finally made me docile.
But even so, after saying a few words to Zhang Zhao, Cao Yanming on the chair felt as if he was sitting on a cactus, looking as uncomfortable as ever.
Zhang Zhao could only ask this old man to take him to the Imperial College to have a look.
There is a very peculiar thing about the Liang Kingdom, that is, in the Imperial College, the Ministry of Industry has a great say.
Because in addition to studying classics and political affairs, the Imperial College also had a Mohist Qiqiao Academy that included Mingshu.
The main focus is on smelting and mining technologies, and even how to burn good coke, there are special research funds.
Liu Na, Liu Tao's father, who was offering sacrifices to the Imperial Academy, also accompanied Zhang Zhao. He looked at Cao Yanming with envy and said with a smile.
"In the Imperial College, there is now a saying that there is poor literature and rich ink. Every year in the Imperial College, several heavenly kings who study classics only have thirty gu of scholarship money, and they have to break their heads to get it.
But those who study coke burning in engineering majors can get hundreds of scholarships every year, and those who study smelting can even get up to 500 scholarships."
Zhang Zhao is also smiling, just to make you envious and jealous.
Do we need people who can study the classics and study Confucianism and Legalism?
Of course! Literature and philosophy are definitely the most important subjects in human production activities.
However, it is unnecessary for the whole society to send all smart people to study literature and philosophy.
On the contrary, engineering subjects, which Zhang Zhao had ensnared in Mohist theory, were the areas that needed a large number of talents.
"The world's knowledge never changes from its origins. As long as you have a smart mind, you can study the classics today and learn Mohism tomorrow.
Now that the world is undecided, we, the warriors of Great Liang, want more steel and gunpowder to pacify the world, so naturally we must give more rewards to the Mo family."
"This is what the King of Heaven teaches! I also teach my students the same way on weekdays.
Regardless of Confucianism, Legalism or Mohism, they are all the knowledge of scholars. If you have the intelligence and talent, you can definitely study both."
Confucianism at this time did not exclude Legalism, Mohism, etc., but it also had a premise, that is, Legalism, Mohism and other doctrines must be expressed through the skin of Confucianism.
At the same time, Liu Na was not a pedantic old man. On the contrary, he was able to figure out Zhang Zhao's thoughts.
Therefore, the atmosphere in the entire Imperial College is still good, and they are basically moving forward in the direction of Zhang Zhao.
Everyone was talking and laughing all the way, and soon they arrived at the Qiqiao Academy of the Imperial Academy.
At present, the steel smelting presided over by Cao Yanming has made quite a breakthrough, and some original versions of high carbon steel, low carbon steel, and alloy steel have been produced.
If left to future generations, it would definitely be a typical example of waste and pollution, and input and output would not be directly proportional.
But in this era, although the cost is high, it is worth it.
Because Zhang Zhao came to this era and realized that the biggest reason for the decline of the military system was not land annexation at all.
Because who were the soldiers in the prosperous Tang Dynasty? They were fierce men who killed people on the battlefield for several generations in the family. They were living kings of hell who were born to kill people.
Imagine that you are a nobleman and you want to annex your family's land, but this guy is a soldier and his father is also a soldier.
The father and son were as strong as oxen, wearing armor and holding sharp knives. Normally, a dozen people could not get close to them.
Their archery skills are pretty good, and they can kill several of you with just one bow.
And they are not just a single family. Each of these soldiers has close bosses, colleagues, and sworn brothers. This kind of friendship forged by blood and fire is particularly strong.
Moreover, all the soldiers in the government have a kind of knight-errant temperament. For the sake of loyalty, they would really dare to kill people in the street. If they offend one person, they have offended a group of people.
There is no surveillance or facial recognition in this era. It is useless to send people to annex the land of such people.
Because they dare to kill your people directly in the countryside, ordinary officials and government servants don't dare to mess with them.
They even got angry and dared to cover their faces at night, rush into your house, and chop you with a knife.
What's wrong with doing this? To mess with such a family is completely out of proportion to investment and benefit.
Therefore, the average wealthy family would never annex such a thorn in the side. It would only be exploited by others, so why bother asking for trouble?
But how come Fu Bing was annexed in the end?
Then we have to start with Wu Zetian, a prodigal woman.
Because Fubing sounds glamorous, but his foundation is that he is responsible for his own profits and losses.
This model has a prerequisite: you cannot lose too many battles. If you lose too badly, if you lose too many battles, the army will go bankrupt due to losses.
The most fatal thing is that after a soldier dies in battle, if the army is defeated, his armor and stomach will basically not be recovered.
A set of armor cannot be overemphasized for a soldier. It often takes two generations of father and son to fight many bloody battles before they can accumulate a set of armor.
Once it is lost, the blow will be fatal. If the father dies in battle and the armor cannot be returned, the son will have no armor.
Without armor, you are still a useless soldier. What else can you use to obtain stable income?
So the son had no choice but to pawn the family's land in order to buy a set of armor and stomach to fight on the battlefield.
But as soon as he entered the battlefield, he encountered another big defeat, oh wow! His son also died in the battle, his stomach was gone, it was over! He went bankrupt immediately.
Even if he did not die in battle, the battle was not won, there was no capture, and there was no reward. When the day of pawn came, the land was gone.
The frustrated soldiers either became thieves, died in the next battle, or completely became tenant farmers and homeless people.
That's why the Tang Dynasty had so few soldiers.
Wu Zetian was better at political struggle than military affairs, and sometimes she liked to go crazy.
In her hands, the originally prestigious Fu soldiers suffered defeats, and the accumulation of several generations was wiped out in a few years.
As a result, the later government soldiers were no different from farmers, and the government army system could not continue.
Will there be an emperor like Wu Zetian among Zhang Zhao's descendants?
That is very possible. Maybe one of the future generations will have Wu Zetian's ability and be considered a good wise king.
Therefore, Zhang Zhao has been keeping an eye on the quality and output of steel. No matter how much money he spends, he must get things done and reduce costs.
Because of this, the price of Jiawei can be reduced. If it can be reduced to the cost of the Ming Dynasty, the military system can be maintained for at least dozens or even hundreds of years, not to mention forever.
Don't underestimate this little time. It is very important for a dynasty and even this nation to be able to maintain it for such a long time.
Is it difficult to smelt high carbon steel and low carbon steel? In fact, it is not difficult, because the most important thing in scientific research is the direction.
As long as the direction is correct, thousands of experiments and improvements can always find a solution to the problem. This is why Zhang Zhao keeps throwing money away.
Because although he doesn't know the specific method, he knows the general direction.
He was the only one who was willing to spend a huge amount of money on this. Zhang Zhao's descendants must not have such great determination and vision as him.
So Zhang Zhao decided to complete these initial tasks himself.
"This time, we may have to recruit a large number of disaster victims from the Central Plains to enter our Daliang. On the 14th, you must assist Liu Weng in attracting more talents to enter the Imperial College, especially guiding them to learn Mohist skills."
During a war, the most resources must be spent on the war.
The two of them had no objections, and Liu Na even said that he would send some of the most agile minds in the Imperial College to learn the Mohist skills.
After leaving the Imperial College, Zhang Zhao continued to return to the palace and summoned his officials to discuss the matter.
Because the matter of accepting the victims has been decided, but recruiting the victims to go to Longyou, Hexi Province is not an easy matter.
For a migration of hundreds of thousands of miles, or a migration of at least 100,000 people, supply points must be set up along the way in advance. Officials from all over the country must work together. Officials must be deployed to manage the migration and soldiers must maintain order along the way.
In addition, Zhang Zhao himself also wanted to move away the Suzhou Long family, Gannan Yellow-headed Uighurs, and part of the Lingzhou party, and this amounted to close to 100,000 people.
There is really a lot to be done, and officials across the country are almost ready to take action. It seems that it is not realistic to go to Guanzhong this year.
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Huazhou is the Huazhou District of Shaanxi Province in later generations. At this time, it was a military state with a military envoy, and governed three counties: Zheng County, Huayin, and Xiagui County. The state city was located in Zheng County.
To the west of Zheng County, there is a small river called Yuxian River, which flows into the Wei River from south to north.
On the bank of the Yuxian River, there is a small town called Yuxian Town.
As the east gate of Chang'an, Huaxian County was a gathering place for the estates of dignitaries during the prosperous Tang Dynasty.
It's similar here in Yuxian Town. In the past, when the land in Guanzhong was fertile, Yuxian Town, which was thousands of miles away, was a prosperous place.
Although Yuxian Town at this time is no longer so prosperous, it is still doing well in such troubled times.
Most of the people in the town have the surname Han, and they come from the Han family in Changli. They are the descendants of Han Xiu, the prime minister of the Kaiyuan period, and his brothers.
Because this is where Han Xiu's manor was located in the past.
However, almost two hundred years have passed since Han Xiu's era. Naturally, the reputation of Han Wen Zhonggong can no longer protect his descendants, and they have become commoners.
At the end of last year, Yuxian Town first encountered a major flood in winter, and then a locust plague in spring.
However, a large family like the Han family, which lives together as a group, has a stronger ability to withstand disasters than ordinary people.
Under the command of the clan leader, the clansmen built river embankments to prevent the Yuxian River from overflowing, and organized themselves to successfully withstand the attack of the locust plague.
Therefore, even in the year of great disaster, Yuxian Town still maintained 70% of its previous grain output.
It is indeed a bit low, but if you mix it with wild vegetables and even grass roots, you can still barely survive this disaster.
In fact, the Han family from the entire Yuxian Town can have such a situation thanks to one person, the patriarch of the Han family - Han E.
Han E is fifty-eight years old this year. At this time, people who have passed sixty will be considered to live a long life.
But Han E is very good at keeping in good health. He is almost sixty years old and looks younger than some farmers who are forty years old.
And although he is a little fond of divination, choosing good luck, setting up towns and other things, he has read agricultural books and collected miscellaneous knowledge. He is always good at the strengths of various families and is very good at agriculture.
Uh! In fact, in this era, being able to do divination, choose good luck and ward off disasters is probably more respected than talent.
It was precisely because of this respected prestige that Han E was able to popularize his fruit tree grafting technique, tea hemp, millet millet, alfalfa and wheat intercropping technique in Yuxian Town.
In the entire Yuxian Town, the yield per mu of farmland is 20% to 30% higher than that of the surrounding areas. This is their ability to withstand this disaster.
Han E was making tea at this time. Since Zhang Zhao brought the new technology of frying tea and making tea, the tea soup with green onion, ginger, tangerine peel and mutton oil has become less popular.
Scholars like clear tea, while warriors like salty or sweet milk tea made with butter.
Han E also drinks it sometimes, but from the bottom of his heart, he still likes the tea soup that he has been drinking for decades. He likes the mixed taste of this complex spices and fruity aromas such as meat oil and tangerine peel.
Taking a deep breath of the fragrance he liked, Han E considered the words and began to write carefully on a piece of yellow paper.
He is compiling a book, a collection of writings that he has compiled as well as his own experiences in agriculture.
Since Jia Sixie, the governor of Gaoyang in the Northern Wei Dynasty, wrote the masterpiece "Essentials of Qi Min", a masterpiece of agricultural science, no similar work has been published in the past four hundred years.
Han E vaguely felt that the techniques he summarized for planting, brewing, grafting, medicinal cultivation, fungus cultivation, and extracting (starch) powder from lotus roots, lotus seeds, water chestnuts, etc. should be very useful.
Thinking of this, Han E quickly changed a piece of paper and started writing and drawing.
Because he recently discovered that wheat bran can be used to brew fermented bran. Although it is not delicious, it is cheap and can save food. It is the most filling thing in troubled times.
He also discovered that when making sauce, if the wheat beans were combined to make a dry fermented fermented fermented sauce, and then the salty fermented black bean juice was fermented and boiled, a sauce similar to meat sauce could be obtained without using meat.
Extraordinarily delicious.
If Zhang Zhao were here, we would know that the sauce that Han E discovered was soy sauce, a common seasoning in later generations.
Although the sauce that Han E discovered is cloudy and often contains a large amount of black bean residue, it is indeed soy sauce.
Brewing soy sauce without meat is an extremely cost-saving event.
Han E became more and more excited as he wrote. He walked around the house, preparing to name his agricultural book "Four Seasons Compilation".
Of course he would be excited. For the Chinese, it is a supreme honor to have works passed down to future generations.
However, before Han E had written much, there were noises and crying outside the house.
In such a calamity year, Han E, who was extremely vigilant, immediately dropped his pen and ran out the door.
Although Yuxian Town is a small town, it does have a city wall. Although it can only be called an earth wall and is only more than one meter high, it can still play a role in blocking wild beasts and even defending against thieves.
Before Han E arrived, Ding Zhuang from the Han family and other families in Yuxian Town had already climbed up the earth wall.
There are no iron spears, but each person has a carefully sharpened wooden spear. There are only a few real war bows, but there are many hunting bows.
Moreover, the war bow is in the hands of a few strong men who are good at shooting, which is quite a deterrent.
The cry was made by a group of victims who looked ragged. There were about hundreds of them. They were not moving fast at all. Many of them looked like they were about to fall down.
Hundreds of people, so lifeless, came to Yuxian Town with a sense of dying, as if they were not human beings, but just black clouds floating towards them.
Ding Zhuang from Yuxian Town was not panicked at all, because before that, they had already driven away three groups of victims who came to beg for food.
"Silang, ask someone to prepare fifty cakes and boil some hot water. Wulang, shout twice and call out the person in charge." Han E handled the matter in an orderly manner and appeared to be very experienced.
Refugees also have their own way of survival. They usually choose a direction to move forward, and then eat everything they can on the road, including food from other people's homes.
Then the families whose food is eaten up will become members of the new refugee army.
They would keep walking, like locusts, the team would get bigger and bigger. When there was really nothing to eat, it would become normal for Yi Zi to eat each other.
The final outcome is either that everyone found a place to eat and clothe themselves and escaped the famine.
Either he could survive with help from the government.
Or after weeding out the old and the weak, they turn into rioters and are exterminated.
Generally speaking, the third possibility is the norm.
However, for the hundreds of victims, a town like Yuxian Town with hundreds of people and earthen walls would not be so easy to chew.
Of course, the people in the town don't want to fight with them. They just give them some food to give them the motivation to go to the next place, and also to make them full and have the strength to cause trouble everywhere.
And even among such a group of disaster victims, there is still a leader.
The fifty pancakes produced by Han'e, which are made of a small amount of beans, wheat and corn mixed with a large amount of wild vegetables, are for the victims of the disaster.
But the leader inside cannot greet him with wild vegetable pancakes, he must serve regular flour pancakes, and if possible, he may also have to serve some wine and meat.
"Which gentleman is talking next? The Han family of Yuxian Town is polite, please come out and speak."
Han Wulang, who felt unhappy, shouted at the top of his lungs. Although this was a wild vegetable pancake, it was still a pancake. Especially in these famine years, he felt very distressed if someone took one away.
However, after shouting a few times, the hundreds of victims were still lifeless. Only a few people looked up occasionally, and their progress did not stop.
Feeling something strange, Han Silang quickly took off the long bow on his back. He took out an arrow from the bow and shot it out like a shooting star.
The arrow was not shot at the person, but stuck in the ground. Its tail feathers were still trembling slightly, like a cobra that kept shaking its tail while jumping.
Han Silang on the top of the city shouted after shooting the arrow.
"Stop quickly. Anyone who passes this arrow will not be polite."
As he shot the arrow and missed it, the young men of Yuxian Town on the earth wall all took their guns and bows into their hands, and the atmosphere became solemn.
Generally speaking, if the people on the top of the city fired bows and arrows as a warning, the remaining victims would usually stop.
Because although they were larger in number, they suffered from hunger along the way. If they really wanted to fight, they would definitely not be able to fight.
It can only be done by coercing the people in the city to hand over some food at the risk of human life.
So when Han E on the top of the city saw that Han Silang's arrow missed, he thought it was safe and continued to shout loudly.
"Brothers who came from afar, the land in Yuxian Town is barren, and we have to feed hundreds of people. We really don't have much food, and we can only make fifty loaves at most.
Please come forward if you can speak. After taking the cake, go to other places to find food. If you want to force your way in, we have hundreds of bows, but we don’t have eyes!"
After Han E finished speaking, the victims under the city finally responded.
However, it was not that Shiqu took his things and left as the people of Yuxian Town imagined. Instead, among the lifeless refugees, a tall and strong man sneered and suddenly stood up.
The moment he stood up, a long-tip bow suddenly appeared in the hand of the complaining man. He opened his hands and shot towards Han E on the earth wall.
Before the tall man shot the arrow, Han Silang, who was closest to them, immediately noticed something was wrong.
Because this man was surrounded by strong and powerful men. He looked like he couldn't lift his feet and was stumbling around, but in fact he looked helpless and was obviously pretending.
These are not refugees! These are soldiers!
Han Silang, who had been in the Chang'an Jinchang army for several years, quickly made a judgment, and then he saw the tall man bending his bow and shooting an arrow at the clan leader, the third uncle Han E.
Han Silang howled, and flew towards him as if he was helped by a god. In an extremely thrilling way, Han E was thrown to the ground before he was hit by the arrow.
"There are some naughty thieves out there who are very agile!" The tall, strong man snorted in great displeasure.
Pretending to be a refugee, he walked for more than ten miles and finally lurked outside Yuxian Town. He finally recognized the leader of the townspeople, but he miscalculated.
At this time, the people on the earthen wall of Yuxian Town discovered that dozens of strong men had gathered around this strong archer.
Under their tattered clothes, they were actually wearing something that looked like armor, and they were holding standard horizontal knives in their hands.
"Thieves, they are bandits from Yaozhou." Han Silang shouted, with a look of horror on his face as the sun was about to come.
In fact, he knew in his heart that the so-called Yaozhou bandits were false. They were the tooth soldiers of the Huazhou Zhenguo Army, who came specifically to rob the wealthy Zhuangzi of grain.
As a local garrison, the soldiers of the Zhenguo Army cannot rob with great fanfare, but they can still pretend to be bandits.
Seeing both sides using bows and arrows, the real refugees cried out, suddenly burst out their last strength, and ran away.
They were escorted to Yuxian Town just now to cover the armored soldiers behind them.
Under the earthen wall, a tall, strong man took out a large piece of black stuff and asked his men to light it. It turned out to be wolf smoke.
Later, the "thieves" wearing chain mail and cowhide armor raised their bows and shot at the earthen wall.
Ding Zhuang of Yuxian Town had no other choice but to resist desperately with a wooden gun and a hunting bow.
A bloody battle broke out so suddenly.
In the distance, another wolf smoke was lit, and Han E's face turned pale, indicating that there were more than the twenty or thirty thieves who appeared now.
The dozens of people who came this time wanted to use the cover of the victims to launch a surprise attack. If the attack failed, they would directly attack the city.
"Silang! Get on your horse quickly and take a detour to Huazhou to find Zhao Ying and Zhao Jieshuai and ask him to send troops to rescue us."