Cui Hongxu escorted a cart of supplies from Tianjin Port to Baiyu River.
With today's weather, if people from Bianliang came here, they would probably find it unbearable even if they had to wear cotton-padded clothes.
But for the Goryeo people, this is already considered warm. A year ago, Cui Hongxu was the son of Prime Minister Choi Hongsi, one of the thirteen clans of Goryeo.
In today's Goryeo, the clan system is being shaken. Yang Yang Ziqian, the Duke of Korea, has made drastic changes in Goryeo, which has touched the interests of the clans.
But he had the Song Dynasty at his back and had great strength in his own hands. For a while, no one dared to rebel against him.
Imprisoning the emperor, excluding dissidents, and controlling military power, Yang Ziqian not only changed his surname, but also deepened the three tastes of Yang Lin's power.
The former prime minister raised his hands, let out a sigh of relief, and began to unload the goods.
He was quite burly, wearing a thin red military robe worn by the Song Army. It was unknown which Song soldier issued the new military uniform. He looked capable and strong.
The civilian husbands of Goryeo solved Youyan's urgent needs, and the soldiers of the Great Wall Corps were also really good to them.
Cui Hongxu bent down and moved down a bundle of cold armor. He didn't know what he thought of, but he cursed Yang Ziqian.
A group of Song troops came from a distance to meet them, and asked with a smile: "Big man Cui, you are swearing here again, are you not afraid of being whipped?"
The overseer of Goryeo was sent by Yang Ziqian, and his favorite thing was to torture these former wealthy and powerful disciples.
Song Jun, on the other hand, had a good relationship with them because only the rich and powerful could understand Chinese.
Cui Hongxu said with a smile: "How dare I? I'm not cursing the weather. The Jurchen Tatars in Huanglong Mansion are simply not human beings. I heard people say that they can stay lying in the snow for three days."
Speaking of the Tatars, the faces of everyone present were cast in a shadow, and now they rely on Baozhai to deal with the Tatars.
When it comes to fighting outside, they often can't even hold the barrel of their guns, but the Tatars are not affected much.
Not only the people, but also their horses were more cold-resistant than the Song army.
No wonder the imperial court issued repeated orders not to go further north until the snow melted. It turned out to be a far-sighted plan.
The severe cold in the north is enough to kill a million troops, also known as General Cold. It was because of this terrible cold that Yang Lin ordered the army not to advance northward before the snow melted.
The Jurchen Tatars, when hunting bears in their lair, could lie in the snow for seven days.
And the coldest winter these soldiers have ever experienced was just over ten degrees below zero. How can they compete with the Tatars in winter?
Cui Hongxu finished unloading the goods and pushed the cart back to the camp of the Korean peasants. Several Korean supervisors came forward with unkind expressions.
"Cui, what did you tell Song Bing?" one of the supervisors asked arrogantly.
Cui Hongxu said coldly: "I said a few greetings but said nothing."
With a snap, a whip struck his body. On an ordinary person, this blow would probably have torn the skin and flesh.
But Cui Hongxu was very strong, so he glared at them, then turned around and walked back to the people.
"Do you think you are still the prime minister's son? Your father has been beheaded!" the Goryeo supervisor behind him shouted loudly.
Cui Hongxu's eyes turned red and he said nothing. He paused and continued walking forward.
A group of Korean civilians waited until the overseer left before surrounding him.
An older peasant man gave him a bowl of porridge and two cooking cakes. He came forward and said, "Mr. Cui, there is a saying among the Han people that people must bow their heads under the eaves. Now that the Yang family is powerful, it's important to keep it."
My life is at stake, if you just give in and say something nice, wouldn't it be better than being whipped every day?"
Cui Hongxu said while drinking porridge: "I thought too, but I can't do it. Haha, Lao Li, why are you here to be a civil servant at your age?"
"Hey, I asked someone to hand over the money to come here. I come here to work as a civilian husband. I don't feel tired from the work. I eat well and drink well. I have a drink every three days. The monthly salary doesn't count.
Young master. I plan to make some money for my second son and marry a wife."
"In Goryeo, can't we make money by selling our efforts?" Cui Hongxu asked in confusion.
"Goryeo?" The surrounding Goryeo folk husbands laughed together. A thin man put away his smile and said helplessly: "Mr. Cui, you are from a noble family. How do you know that the following people are suffering from such hardships? In Goryeo, they are just tired.
Even if you die, you won’t be able to make this kind of money.”
Cui Hongxu still didn't believe it, and the people around him told about their tragic experiences. Ordinary people in Goryeo lived without dignity.
The nobles and the common people are people from two different worlds, and it is difficult to understand each other.
Cui Hongxu gradually learned about the sufferings of the people of Goryeo, and he was also a special existence among this group of people.
One characteristic of the people of Goryeo is that although they were severely oppressed by the clans, they believed that the clans were indeed superior to them.
That kind of inferiority that comes from the bone marrow made them not only not make things difficult for Cui Hongxu who was in trouble, but even showed some extra care and respect for him.
And Cui Hongxu is different from ordinary Goryeo nobles. He did not give up on himself because of the huge difference in living conditions.
"I didn't expect that I, the people of Goryeo, would be in such dire straits! When I came to a foreign country to be a civilian husband, I thought it was imposed by the imperial court as a way to please the people of Song Dynasty. I didn't expect that the position would be so popular!"
Cui Hongxu held the cooking cake with a penetrating gaze. In the eyes of his compatriots, these simple dry foods and rice porridge were just like delicacies from the mountains and seas.
"The people of Goryeo are suffering too much..."
An idea quietly grew in his heart. If he could overthrow the clan and establish a country like the Song Dynasty, so that the people of Goryeo could live a life of ample food and clothing, then his trip to the world would be worthwhile!
Almost from that day on, Cui Hongxu no longer cursed all day long, but instead went deep into the people and mingled with them.
He found out clearly the sufferings and hardships of the people of Goryeo. The more so, the more heartache he felt.
Perhaps in a hundred years, there has never been a person like this among the nobles, but he really loved Goryeo.
He will also help some civilians. This guy is tall and strong, has a good relationship with the Song army, and is proficient in Chinese.
Especially the last two items allow him to be of great help to the peasants in many cases.
For example, if the supervisor tortured the supervisor too harshly or withheld food, he would stand up and react to the Song army even if he was beaten and bruised.
The people of the Song Dynasty often reprimanded the supervisors, and even used fists and kicks. The entire northern front relied heavily on these civilian men, and the people of the Song Dynasty really couldn't fault them.
Night classes and teaching hours every night have greatly improved the quality of soldiers.
Over time, Cui Hongxu's prestige among the people increased.
He also ran Chinese teaching classes, and his huge personality charm quickly united a group of people around him, who were as loyal to him as they believed.
---
Kaifeng, Bianliang City.
In Zhaode Square, in Yang Lin's study, Gao Bing and Liu Zhongwu were complaining that there were too few civilians in Hebei.
The result of abolishing corvee was to hire people, which cost a lot of money.
If it were a disaster year, it would be okay to provide relief through work, but the current budget makes it difficult to recruit people.
Yang Lin was a little upset. This transportation problem has been a long-standing problem from the beginning of the war to now.
I have already thought of many ways, even if I got 100,000 civilians from Goryeo, I still clamored every day.
Gao Bing came forward and said with a smile: "Young Zai, can you get some from Gao Li..."
Yang Lin himself was a little hesitant and said with a guilty conscience: "Can we still afford it?"
"As long as you want to get it together, there's no way you can't get it together."
Yang Lin said suspiciously: "It's spring planting season now, and Korea is a country of civilian farming. If we forcibly transfer civilian labor, it will collapse next year."
"It's better than our northern war situation collapsing, right?" Liu Zhongwu said this.
Yang Lin rolled his eyes and said, "Okay, tell Yang Ziqian and give me another hundred thousand!"
"Con him Yang Ziqian as the Prince of North Korea, on the same level as Wang Kai, the Prince of Goryeo, and then make all his sons Dukes and Earls. Anyway, they are the titles of Goryeo. Let's kill him!
Let our official family adopt the unmarried daughter as an adopted daughter and call her the emperor's concubine!"
Yang Lin knew how to control the sycophants of these foreign countries, from Zhang Boyu of Jiaozhi, to Yang Ziqian of Goryeo, and Xiao Fengxian of the former Khitan.
If these people are used well, they can be worth a hundred thousand soldiers...
‘No one understands traitors better than me’…
Yang Lin thought in his heart.
---
In central Guizhou, the stability that had existed since the late Sui Dynasty was shattered by Fang Qifu's army.
After crossing the Guanling Mountains, Fang Qifu's troops gradually gathered and swept past the villages one by one.
Because they only killed the chieftains and would not attack as long as the natives did not resist, many natives became the leading party.
Because Yang Lin called the chieftains of each tribe as chieftains in his official documents, this name gradually spread, and central Guizhou was one of the places with the largest number of tribes.
The local Han people have become extremely qualified leaders. After so many years, the Central Plains court finally remembered them.
The pure cavalry force of more than two thousand people formed a very long formation, with flags covering the sky and the sun. They used the capital as their organizational structure and advanced one by one. The series of dangerous military strongholds behind them gradually faded away from their sight.
Fang Qifu had just captured Qingzhou, and the blood on the blades of his soldiers and horses was still wet, so they went to Juzhou to kill.
To the northwest, one can still faintly hear the sound of desolate horns. Even in the smallest village, as long as they refuse to surrender, the leader will have to be exterminated.
After passing Juzhou and going north along the river valley, you can go directly to Zunyi!
Yang Weicong of Bozhou was still undecided. It would be best if he could surrender, otherwise he would have to destroy Bozhou first and then attack Sizhou.
Anyway, this time, all hidden dangers must be eliminated in one fell swoop, and it is imperative to make changes and return to the current situation.
These chieftains in central Guizhou, who were sitting in wells and looking at the sky, never expected that the Song army would actually assemble an army of 100,000 people who were better at mountain warfare than them, and advance into central Guizhou with overwhelming force.
From armament, armor, weapons, formations and drills, military discipline... No matter from which aspect you look at it, the enemy in front of you and you are not products of the same era.
These soldiers and horses of Fang Qifu followed him first to conquer Dali, then to conquer Tubo, and finally to conquer Jiaozhi. It can be said that they have experienced hundreds of battles.
And these places, without exception, are mountains or jungles.
These chieftains, who were fighting for hundreds of people at best, were severely inexperienced in battle formations. They were simply unable to resist in the face of such a large war monster.
"There were general nobles among the relatives of the King of Luodian, and they occupied Juzhou in the north. When Taizu of the Song Dynasty first paid the money, the natives misinterpreted Juju as being noble. Because Taizu called him the leader of Guizhou, the name of Guizhou was born."
In the early years of the Song Dynasty, Pugui, an indigenous leader living in the present-day Guiyang area, submitted to the Northern Song Dynasty with the Juzhou he controlled.
Pugui reported to Zhao Kuangyin in a southern dialect that he was from Juzhou. Since the local dialect "Ju" and "gui" have the same pronunciation, the emperor did not understand, so he wrote in the "Edict to Pugui": "Give justice to the country, and China will be righteous."
"The barbarians refused to obey, but Guizhou is far away in the wilderness..." From this, the name Guizhou continued to appear in literature, and finally became the name of the province in later generations.
Now this place belongs to the Sichuan and Shu provinces. Before Pugui surrendered, the army of the Song Dynasty had penetrated into Bozhou.
A victorious battle was fought there.
Some generals also suggested taking advantage of the victorious situation at that time to use troops against Juzhou to punish them for not paying tribute. Only because Zhao Kuangyin was bent on winning people's hearts with "wende" and was unwilling to use force to conquer, the outbreak of war was avoided.
These places were too remote and the roads were difficult to navigate. Zhao Kuangyin, who was determined to conquer Youyan in the north, had no intention of using more troops here.
During this delay, he never imagined that neither his younger brother nor the later emperors of Zhao and Song would be free to deal with the affairs of the southwest.
Juzhou has such a history, which shows that it is the center of Guizhou, and the Zunyi Army adjacent to it is the hometown of the Yang family in Bozhou.
Unlike these chieftains, the Yang family of Bozhou was very powerful and his troops were good at fighting.
During the Tang Dynasty, Nanzhao rose and frequently invaded the Tang Dynasty. Bozhou fell to Nanzhao many times.
In the third year of Emperor Qianfu of Emperor Xizong of the Tang Dynasty, Yang Duan, a native of Yangqu County, Taiyuan, led his army to defeat Nanzhao who occupied Bozhou, established himself as the leader, and became a family power with a hereditary governor.
In the third year of Emperor Qiande's reign, Yang Shi dedicated his land to the Song Dynasty. The Song Dynasty established Bozhou and Zunyi armies in the land, with Yang as their leader.
For hundreds of years, the Yang family has been occupying Bozhou, and their rule has been deeply rooted in the hearts of the people. They have also encouraged farming, developed the economy, and trained the army.
Because the local native people are very fierce, and with a little training, they can become an elite army, so Yang's armed forces should not be underestimated.
People from the imperial court had already entered Bozhou, hoping to win over this local leader, but Yang Weicong in Bozhou was not a good person.
His ambitions are not small, and he does not want to be a lackey of any party. What he wants is to replace the Tian family, become the sole overlord, and completely control this place.
Now that the Song Army has reached Juzhou, there is not much time left for Yang Weicong. If he cannot make a decision, Fang Qifu will not stay even for a moment.
The Song army, which was already red-eyed with killings, was bound to attack Bozhou. When the time came, they would treat the Yang family of Bozhou as the biggest chicken and kill the chieftain who was used to warn central Guizhou.
Juzhou, in a state of panic, ushered in the Song army's brigade.
The whimpering sound of the horn sounded, and the Juzhou soldiers and horses, who had no time to escape, looked behind them.
A Song Dynasty army horse appeared silently on the skyline, with red helmets and tassels, hunting and dancing.
The leading general on this army horse, wearing armor, straightened up on the horse's back, pointed forward resolutely with the horse's spear in his hand.
On the skyline, red helmets and tassels danced. This army horse launched a charge towards the Juzhou soldiers who were fleeing for their lives.