In Chang'an, another examination has come to an end.
This time, Reference Scholars set an unprecedented record.
A total of nearly 20,000 people signed up!
So many people participated that the entire business and trade in Chang'an was extremely prosperous for more than a month before and after the examination!
Whether you are selling luxury goods or dealing in daily necessities, as long as you are doing business, you will make a lot of money.
Of course, the Lord Commander's Yamen also took the opportunity to show off his face.
Under the auspices of Gongsun Hong and Zhufu Yan, the Zhujue Duwei Yamen took advantage of the opportunity of the examination to collect nearly ten million in taxes from the nine cities in Chang'an.
This alone is equivalent to almost one-third of Guanzhong's annual field tax last year.
This made Gongsun Hong and Zhu Fuyan extremely confident.
But for Liu Che, the end of this examination means trouble is about to begin.
"More than four thousand jobs..." Liu Che put aside the memorandum that had been submitted to the imperial censor's office, and rubbed his temples with a headache.
This is the biggest test of the current Han Dynasty's political power.
It is different from the imperial examination where only a few dozen are taken at a time and more than a hundred are taken.
In the examination, the number of people admitted at one time is thousands.
Moreover, the number of admissions will definitely increase!
Just like future generations of college students.
With the development of social economy, people's pockets are slowly bulging.
They will definitely choose to send their next generation to study and become literate.
There are more and more intellectuals, and eventually the once romantic intellectuals become tomorrow's market storytellers.
This has had an impact on the current examination system.
Because, jobs cannot be changed just by changing your mind.
Especially now, most of the positions in the more than 60 counties in the Han Dynasty are already vacant.
Forcibly kicking people out and stuffing them into candidates for examination is not only disrespectful to the country, but will also produce very bad results.
Think about it.
Chongzhen laid off Li Zicheng, and then Li Zicheng armed himself to petition and had Chongzhen hanged on a coal mountain.
Therefore, in fact, the only positions available now are for those who have reached retirement age.
Liu Che has tapped into this potential in the past few years.
It is unrealistic to expect to replace the old with the new.
However, if you leave these qualified scholars alone and don't arrange jobs for them, something will happen.
A typical example is Huangchao.
What terrible consequences will there be for heroes who live outside the system?
It has been clearly written in the history books.
So, in practical terms.
"This is forcing me to expand!" Liu Che put down the pen in his hand.
He had just racked his brains to clear out more than 500 veteran cadres from various yamen who had not yet retired, and gave them the honor of increasing their official rank to become officials, thus freeing up more than 500 positions to accommodate these
Examine the scholars.
But, this is just a drop in the bucket.
Fortunately, there was big news last year: Qilu was reorganized and at least 2,000 positions were freed up.
Therefore, this year I barely managed to get by.
But what about next year? What about the year after that?
Moreover, as the new generation of young people grows up, there will be more and more scholars in the Han Dynasty in the future.
On the one hand, this will require Liu Che to start reforming the examination system and raising the entry threshold.
But the threshold will certainly not be raised too much all at once.
The difficulty will increase as the number of scholars increases.
But, what is certain is: the number of these people will definitely increase year by year.
Therefore, there were only three ways before Liu Che.
The first is to expand domestic demand and create some new institutions to place more and more candidates for examinations. However, this new yamen cannot be established just because it wants to be established.
Although the salary of current officials is low, it is still quite high.
Even for the lowest-ranking official, one hundred shi of corn, his yearly salary should be one hundred shi of corn plus a certain amount of cash.
What's more, Liu Che himself went to great lengths to create an allowance and subsidy system.
Therefore, if you add institutions at will, you will just drink poison to quench your thirst. In the end, there will be no other results except repeating the mistakes of the Northern Song Dynasty.
The second way is to reduce the number of students admitted.
However, reducing the number of students admitted will increase the quality of examinations.
It is easy for those intellectuals and cultural people to have the illusion that labor and capital are superior to others, although they have always had this illusion.
But taking exams can let them know that you are no better than others.
And the third way...
"Use the sword of the Han Dynasty to serve as the officials of the Han Dynasty and get their jobs..." Liu Che shook his head and sighed with a half-smile.
This is also the only possible way out.
A very simple truth.
As long as a piece of territory is conquered, a local government must be established and rule implemented.
Just like the current Anton Protectorate, it can digest at least hundreds of scholars for Liu Che every year.
Moreover, this is also a path of sustainable development.
The world is so big.
Even the future colonial and feudal rule in distant Central and West Asia and South Asia.
Officials are also needed there.
If you need officials, you need to recruit scholars to occupy the pits.
Then, slowly, with social progress and economic development, the country will begin to require more officials.
In this way, we can ensure that there will be no problems.
"It seems that the war against the Xiongnu is indeed urgent and must be launched!" Liu Che sighed with emotion.
Five years ago, he launched the examination purely to increase his reputation and win over people's hearts.
But he didn't expect that five years later, he would come up with a tool to build his reputation, forcing him and the entire country to go into war.
Because, if more and more young scholars are not found jobs.
The Han Dynasty took pills sooner or later.
The Han Dynasty did not want to take jujube pills, so it had to expand.
Speaking of the Xiongnu, Liu Che stood in front of the map with interest and stared at the map that had just been updated.
On this map, the black color belonging to the Han Dynasty has suddenly crossed the Great Wall and infected the grasslands.
In some places, entire areas even turned black.
This is the fruitful result of the long-term policy of Xiuyiwei and the Han Dynasty towards the Xiongnu.
"Jia Changsha, Jia Changsha..." Liu Che sighed, having to express his admiration for this counselor and celebrity who was famous all over the world.
It seems that in the Han Dynasty, people with the surname Jia were great as long as they were famous.
There was Jia Yi and Jia Changsha in the front, and Jia Xu and Jia Dushi in the back.
They are all the kind of masters who can calm the world with one word and mourn the country with one word!
Jia Yi's contribution to the Han Dynasty was not only that he proposed the original version of the Tuen Order of "Together the feudal lords build up the feudal lords with less effort".
Greatly weakened the power of the princes and kings.
What's more, he was the first to initiate and establish a set of psychological offensives, co-optation and differentiation policies against the Xiongnu.
The full name of this policy is: Three Tables and Five Bait.
The whole set of policies is very complicated, and if I really had to explain it in detail, it would take ten thousand words to explain it clearly.
But to sum it up simply, it can be summed up in eight words: fanning the flames and sowing dissension.
Jia Yi believed that the power between the Han and the Huns was seriously unequal, and the Han army was unable to attack the Xiongnu's heart.
Therefore, Jia Yi hoped that through infiltration, bribery, and spreading rumors, he could corrupt the Huns' nobles, sow discord between their monarchs and ministers, and create civil strife, so that the Huns would be too busy to take care of themselves and have no time to invade the south.
In order to ensure the smooth progress of the entire plan, Jia Yi even took the initiative to request Ying to be the person in charge of commanding the entire plan, that is, the position of vassal state.
This man is truly a genius!
Since this set of policies was proposed to this day, although it has not caused internal strife and division among the Xiongnu as Jia Yi expected.
But it also led to the return of the Han Dynasty brothers and the Zhang Ni incident more than ten years ago.
Even the tribe of Donghu King Lu Tazhi and the other six tribes, in the original history, would have surrendered to the Han Dynasty with their population and livestock the year before last.
And because of their submission, Prime Minister Zhou Yafu was dismissed from office.
Now, although because of Liu Che, the incident of the seven tribes returning to the Han did not happen.
However, the Han Dynasty's infiltration and control of the Huns was no longer limited to the seven tribes.
The Xiongnu tribe at the foot of the Great Wall was almost completely black.
Although these tribes may be small.
The larger one has a population of two to three thousand, while the smaller one has a population of several hundred.
It's better to say it's a tribe than a tribe.
However, their position shifted to the Han Dynasty, which made the Huns' vigilance at Yanmen in Yunzhong null and void.
The Han army could march hundreds of miles out of the fortress, but the Huns would even be kept in the dark.
Nowadays, the number of tribes that have sent hostages and pledged their loyalty to the Han Dynasty is increasing every day.
Yesterday there were still nineteen.
But today it has already exceeded 20.
Moreover, except for small tribes.
There are also big fish coming in.
The leader of the Xiutu tribe once ambiguously expressed to the Han Dynasty that he did not take a stand in the war between the Liu family and the Luotang family.
Although the original words are not like this, the meaning is the same.
There were even unknown Xiongnu nobles who quietly asked the Han Dynasty through certain channels, such as merchants or returned Han people: If the Xiongnu civil war broke out, which side would the Han Dynasty stand on?
There is more than one such person.
Of course, the situation is so good that it cannot be entirely attributed to Jia Yi.
In fact, that's why it's like this now.
On the military medal, there are half of the military officials.
This idiot actually publicly stated: Uwe's death is a punishment from God!
This has caused a large number of Xiongnu tribes loyal to Yin Zhixie and his son to be in panic all day long.
As a result, many Xiongnu tribes who originally had an ambiguous position and were indifferent to what was left and right took the initiative to contact the Han Dynasty after the military minister's statement, saying that they were "willing to return to the Yiyi Emperor and become the Han Dynasty's concubines."
Some people even nakedly proposed that if the king's teacher came out, the foreign ministers would be willing to take the vanguard for His Majesty to avenge injustice. Such a declaration of the leading party.
The change in these people's stance is obviously just out of the desire to protect themselves or survive.
Their old master Uwe, his father Yin Zhixie, and the Righteous King all became villains.
So what are they?
The villain's minion?
In other words, in fact, they turned to the Han Dynasty not because of Uwe's death, but because they felt that if they did not find the Han Dynasty to support them, once Shan Yuting dealt with them, they would not even have the chance to escape.
!
In Liu Che's eyes, this behavior of the military minister was as stupid, childish and unreasonable as the various behaviors of Qin II back then.
Of course, Liu Che understands better.
If it were not for the glorious victory in the Battle of Mayi.
Now, the number of these tribes who have defected to the Han Dynasty or whose position has changed to the Han Dynasty has been reduced by at least half.
"By next summer, war preparations should be completed..." Liu Che thought in his mind.
Now, the generals and princes headed by Prime Minister Zhou Yafu have made preliminary strategic plans.
To capture Gaoque, the Han army needed to invest 30,000 cavalry and 30,000 infantry, and besieged Izumo for hundreds of miles.
The army is easy to mobilize.
Liu Che can complete the transfer with just one edict.
The key is food, grass and equipment.
The grain output of Dai, Longyou and Yunzhong is barely self-sufficient.
This was the result of Emperor Taizong's desperate efforts to farm in these places. Before Taizong, it was common for the troops stationed at the Great Wall to go hungry.
Last year's Battle of Mayi almost depleted the strategic grain reserves in this area, and until now, they have not been filled.
The cost of sending a large army out of the fortress is definitely higher than fighting on the inside.
Moreover, the lengthening of the supply line itself will also increase the amount of food and grass consumed as well as manpower and material resources.
The only good news is that if they go out to fight, there is no need to worry about the source of meat that the army needs now.
The various pastures of the Shaofu and the horse gardens on the front line are full of livestock captured in the Mayi War last year.
A casual allocation of hundreds of thousands would be enough to support the expenses of the army abroad.
Moreover, as long as Gaoque is captured, the entire Xiongnu livestock in Hetao will also become the spoils of war for the Han army.
It is possible to feed the enemy. (To be continued.)
