Chapter 410 Suspicion chain will force people to act first
A complete truce between Ming Dynasty and Burma was finally reached in June of the sixth year of Xiaokang.
Peace can come again, on the one hand, because the Ming Dynasty has indeed completely taken back what should belong to it (Sanxuan and Liuwei were originally the territory of the Ming Dynasty, which was gradually lost after Jiajing), and it also punished the rebels and wavering chieftains who dared to accept the Ming Dynasty.
He did not submit to the king of Myanmar.
On the other hand, it is because Ming Dynasty really does not want to invest more resources in the war with Myanmar and continue to be stuck in the quagmire.
During the duration of this war, Li Dingguo always maintained a troop dispatch of about 40,000. Once there were losses on the front line, he would have to recruit additional troops to replenish the force, so he used more than 60,000 troops.
Zheng Chenggong on the sea route also used 20,000 to 30,000 troops, adding up to 90,000 soldiers.
In order to provide support for such a large force on a cross-border expedition, even if they have tried their best to "defeat the enemy with food and grass" and eat while robbing the Burmese people's food reserves, the rear is mainly responsible for the first stage of food, as well as the full range of medicines, ammunition, weapons and ordnance.
loss.
But even so, the logistics pressure is still very huge. To provide supporting equipment for 90,000 people, at least 300,000 civilians, sailors, and craftsmen are involved. Especially with the high rate of Ming Dynasty weapons and equipment, logistics is far more complicated than other ancient armies, requiring
The categories of supplies are also extremely complicated.
The Ming Dynasty's national strength could be sustained only because in the first four years after Zhu Ciyu ascended the throne, his father had been recuperating, farming and developing technology, and did not spend money arbitrarily.
Every year's surplus grain reserves in the Yunnan-Guizhou region are also saved in advance. Since the first year of Xiaokang, the central court has not allowed Yunnan-Guizhou provinces to transfer a grain of grain from outside, so that it can support today's war.
As this battle lasted for about ten months, more than half of the official grain stores accumulated by Yunnan and Guizhou over the past four years had been eaten up, and they were about to approach the warning line.
Of course, some people may think: Haven't we only eaten more than half of the grain stored in Yungui official warehouses? Since there is still less than half, why not continue to fight? Why should the critical line of food security be set so high?
But in fact, this warning line really requires the enemy to be lenient.
Because the Ming Dynasty’s enemies in southern Xinjiang are not just Myanmar—
As mentioned before, last year, the fifth year of the establishment of a moderately prosperous society, when Ming Dynasty condemned and beat Myanmar, it also beat Vietnam. After all, Vietnam also committed the crime of "accommodating Ming rebels" when Zhu Ciyu came to the throne.
At the beginning, the Ming Dynasty could turn a blind eye and pretend not to pursue Shuo in order to farm in seclusion. But once it opened the door to pursue Shuo, it could no longer pretend to be deaf and dumb. It had to condemn Burma and Vietnam at the same time.
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Otherwise, if one is condemned first and then another a few years later for the same thing, Ming's diplomatic credibility will be ruined in the future, and it will be considered "selective punishment, picking on the weak".
After all, the meaning of "limitation of action" is that people can have a buffer time to file a dispute "when they don't know that their interests have been infringed". It does not mean that you know that your interests have been infringed and do not express your position in time. If it happens
In the latter case, it would be too hypocritical.
This is why in later international law, the measure of "putting aside disputes, but not recognizing them, and maintaining condemnation" will be so important.
In many international disputes, as long as you have not recognized the other party, you take a stand and say there is a dispute, and condemn it first, then you will retain the legal basis for turning against you in the future. Once you have condemned it, you can continue to tolerate it, cultivate and develop yourself, and wait until you become stronger.
If you fall out later, international law will give you a chance.
But if you don't even condemn when you encounter a controversy at the beginning, and you acquiesce, it is equivalent to admitting that there is no controversy. Even if you become stronger in the future, if you think about it, the legal basis for turning against you will be gone since ancient times. Even if you have a strong fist, you will still
Brave the great injustice of the world.
Therefore, for Ming Dynasty, condemnation of Burma and Vietnam must be issued at the same time without delay.
However, the condemnation must be at the same time, but there is still a time gap allowed between the condemnation and the action.
After condemning both Burma and Vietnam at the turn of summer and autumn last year, Ming Dynasty quickly took action against Burma. As for Vietnam, it only insisted on verbal condemnation and did not actually send troops.
After all, from the point of view of the art of war, if we can defeat them separately, why bother to fight two enemies at the same time? As long as I keep condemning, I will always have the reason for war and the strategic initiative in my hands.
Because Vietnam's national strength was several times weaker than Myanmar's, although it was united by envoys sent by King Mangbai of Myanmar and secretly supported Myanmar, it did not dare to directly invade the Ming Dynasty.
Therefore, on the Ming-Vietnam border, from July of the fifth year of Xiaokang to February of the sixth year of Xiaokang, for seven months, the two sides were like a "sit-in war". The Ming Dynasty condemned every month, and the Vietnamese quibbled every month.
, but just didn’t fight.
The guys in the Ministry of Etiquette who were responsible for writing insulting articles and scolding people had no idea how many KPIs they had updated. Including Gu Yanwu, the newly appointed Minister of Rites, they all went out personally and updated one piece of data every month on average.
The Vietnamese, who had always refused to retaliate when scolded, finally experienced subtle changes in their mentality and behavior at the end of February in the sixth year of Xiaokang. This change was mainly due to the news that Zheng Chenggong had landed in the estuary delta of Bago.
They also attacked from the north and south with Li Dingguo and opened up the Yinlowaddy River supply channel for the Myanmar battlefield.
I have to say that this change is really extraordinary in refreshing and shocking the Vietnamese people's understanding.
So much so that when Zheng Zha, the ruler of the Li Dynasty in Vietnam, learned about it, he couldn't help but feel shuddering, and immediately summoned his sons to discuss how to deal with it.
…
When outsiders looked at the political situation in Vietnam in the 1660s, they might be a little confused: Since the Vietnamese dynasty at that time was the Le Dynasty, why was Trinh Trac the ruler?
This matter is a little complicated to say, but in short, it can be summarized as follows: In Vietnam at that time, there were two dynasties and four surnames coexisting.
The so-called two dynasties are the Li Dynasty and the Mo Dynasty. The Li Dynasty was founded earlier, during the reign of Emperor Xuanzong of the Ming Dynasty. It was basically the original political power re-established in Vietnam after the Ming army that conquered Vietnam during the Zhu Di Dynasty was driven away.
The Mo Dynasty was founded more than a hundred years later. It was probably in the early Jiajing period of the Ming Dynasty that Li Jian usurped the throne and destroyed Li Jian's country. Unfortunately, not long after the founding of the country, Zheng Jian, an old minister of the Li Dynasty, established a branch of the Li Dynasty royal family.
He became the King of Hou Li, and then used the name of King Hou Li to order the princes to reoccupy the Red River Basin occupied by the Mo Dynasty.
However, the Mo Dynasty was not wiped out. After its defeat, it fled north to Caoping and Lang Son, which bordered the Ming Dynasty and Guangxi. Only the two provinces were left to survive.
For more than a hundred years since then, there have been two dynasties in Vietnam, Northern Mon and Nan Li, coexisting.
The Zheng family was worried that if they also usurped the throne and deposed Li, they would lose their legitimacy and be regarded as rebellious officials and traitors like the Mo Dynasty. Since the Mo Dynasty had occupied the self-reliance niche, the Zheng family did not dare to mess up.
Later, in the end, he imitated Cao Cao for more than a hundred years, and always only held power by relying on the king without usurping the throne.
But after holding power for a long time, some people in the Li Dynasty would eventually say that the Zheng family was bullying the emperor. So in the late Tianqi and early Chongzhen years of the Ming Dynasty, another powerful local general appeared in the southern part of the Li Dynasty, Ruan Fuyuan of the Ruan family.
Openly breaking up with Lord Zheng,
Ruan Fuyuan launched a banner similar to "Belt Order to punish the thieves who held the king hostage". After more than ten years of fighting, he occupied Hue and the southern half of Vietnam to the south, and effectively divided the north and south with Lord Zheng.
As a result, there are three de facto local military and political forces in Vietnam from north to south:
They are Langshan in Gaoping in the north and Mochao near the border of Guangxi,
In the middle, Lord Zheng (and the Zheng family’s puppet King Le) controlled the Hanoi plain to Hue.
In the south, the Nguyen Lord south of Hue (the Nguyen Lord still nominally submitted to the King of Le Dynasty, but said that he would defeat the Zheng family and rescue the king)
Among these three forces, if Ming Dynasty does not come, they themselves will not stop.
Since the early years of Chongzhen, there have been six wars between Zheng and Ruan in the past forty years, with an average of one war every six years. Historically, they will fight again in a few years, and then they will stop and fight each other.
Default to the opponent's sphere of influence.
There was also a war that lasted for hundreds of years between Lord Zheng and the Mo Dynasty in the north. In the original history, just last year, in 1667 or the fifth year of Xiaokang, Lord Zheng Zheng Zha would take advantage of the weakness of the Ming Dynasty to attack the King of Mo Dynasty.
Mo Jingyu, and defeated Mo Jingyu's Gaoping Mansion, forcing Mo Jingyu to finally seek refuge with the Can Ming in history.
But now, it is just because the Ming Dynasty has not declined, but has become stronger, that Zheng Zha does not dare to launch the final blow against Mo Jingyu who has defected to the Ming Dynasty.
However, when they discovered that the Ming army was actually able to carry out large-scale amphibious landings involving thousands of miles of land and sea routes, Zheng Zha finally couldn't sit still. Because he knew that he had to strike first, otherwise Vietnam would be over sooner or later.
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…
Against this background, the discussion of countermeasures by Zheng Zha, his son Zheng Gen and others seemed very sad.
One day at the end of February, Zheng Zha expressed his concerns to Zheng Gen and others straight to the point:
"No one has known the Ming Dynasty's ambitions towards Vietnam for two hundred years. When Zhu Di's traitors killed our Vietnamese people, they were finally repulsed by Wang Shi. It was all because of the Ming Emperor's stupidity in banning the sea. The supplies for our troops in Vietnam had to come from
The Red River in Yunnan flows down the waterway.
Only then did I, Taizu of the Li Dynasty, destroy the Red River waterway, cut off the Ming army's backup, money, food, weapons, and medicine supplies, and finally forced the Ming army to suffer heavy casualties and had to retreat.
But now I heard that Zheng Chenggong landed in Bago last month. The sea route from Guangzhou to Bago is eight thousand miles away. The Ming army's navy was so powerful that if it sailed from Qinzhou in Guangxi to Hong Kong
Wouldn't it be much easier to land at Qinghua at the mouth of the river than to go to Bago? How should our army respond then?
Vietnam has a long, narrow and mountainous geography. If we rely on land for supplies, there are two to three thousand miles of mountain roads from north to south. But if we can rely on sea transportation, there will be no danger in Vietnam.
What's more, the Mo family's puppet dynasty in the north has completely surrendered to the Ming Dynasty since the Tianqi period. Now if it causes chaos at home and the Ming army attacks outside, the country will never be destroyed!"
Faced with such worries, his eldest son Zheng Gen also tried to comfort him: "Father, although Zheng Chenggong successfully landed in Bago, Myanmar, he may not be able to land in Vietnam in the future.
After all, the Burmese king Mangbai was a stupid person. Because Myanmar originally had no worries about being detoured and landed by enemy countries on land, Mangbai was never willing to spend gold and silver on buying Western warships.
But we are different in Vietnam. Our country has always known that its territory is long and narrow and can easily be cut in half by enemies at sea. Therefore, in recent years, it has spent a lot of money to purchase Portuguese and Dutch warships. The Hongyi artillery is also more advanced than the Burmese army. If Zheng Chenggong dares to land and intercept, we can
Annihilate them at sea!
Six years ago, when we were fighting Nguyen Thuy in the south, we tried to use the two Dutch Galen gunboats we bought at that time to escort us and landed at Rhi Lai (today's Dong Hoi County, Quang Binh Province, Vietnam) south of Hue.
It's a pity that our Dutch warships are still not enough to break through the Portuguese fleet accumulated by Nguyen Nguyen over the years. This is why we failed to cut off Nguyen Nguyen's Hue mansion from the rear!
This time the Ming Dynasty attacks, Ruan Ni should take the overall situation into consideration and fight side by side with us. If we unite our battle-hardened Western warships to jointly defend against foreign aggression, we will definitely be able to annihilate Zheng Chenggong at sea! In this way, forced
The Ming army still has to invade by land, and sooner or later it will be dragged to death by our army! Just like when Zhu Di's army was annihilated!"
It cannot be said that Zheng Gen's words are completely unreasonable.
It is now the 1660s, and the Dutch VOC has been operating in Southeast Asia for more than half a century. The coastal governments in Southeast Asia have actually engaged in arms trade with the Dutch and even the Portuguese before that.
Especially countries with a lot of internal wars, in order to compete with each other, spend even more money on buying guns.
In fact, let alone Southeast Asia, if you look at Fuso in the late Warring States Period, you will know how much the Warring States lords were willing to pay for "iron cannons and large barrels." Even the lords of Kyushu and the Western Kingdom were willing to convert to Kiroshidan one by one in order to buy more muskets and cannons.
You don’t need gods and Buddhas, but you still have to buy foreign guns.
A regime like the Ming Dynasty was definitely an anomaly at the time. The main reason was that until the end of the Wanli period, the Ming Dynasty had no life-or-death crisis. It had a high self-esteem, so it was unwilling to grovel in order to buy foreign guns and cannons.
On the Vietnamese side, Lord Zheng and Lord Nguyen were fooling around with each other. At this time, the warlords were very pragmatic. As long as they could improve their combat effectiveness, they would buy it at all costs, regardless of whether they were from Western barbarians or not.
Vietnam's long and narrow country and mountainous and rugged terrain have caused them to pay more attention to the navy than the Burmese. Since the 1620s, the north and the south of Vietnam have been desperately engaged in a warship arms race. If you buy a Portuguese Caravel battleship, I will buy a Dutch Galen.
gunboat.
So when it comes to the navy alone, they do have the right to look down on Myanmar and think that these landlubbers in Myanmar are nothing but rubbish. Zheng Chenggong can bully Myanmar, but that doesn’t mean he can bully Vietnam!
As long as the naval battle is victorious, the Ming Dynasty will not be able to destroy Vietnam!
However, Zheng Zha is much more mature than his son after all, and he knows that things are not that simple.
"When encountering foreign enemies, the various factions within the Li Dynasty can put aside their grudges and unite to deal with the outside world." He could not even think about such a thing.
It would be great if the Ruan family did not add insult to injury, so why would they fight with him against Zheng Chenggong? Even if they send out troops, they will probably be just waiting on the sidelines. When it comes to the decisive naval battle, the Zheng family fleet will attack first and suffer losses first, and then the Ruan family fleet will
Trying to pick peaches and get a bargain.
But at the moment, he had no better way, so he could only sigh: "First try to impose justice and stabilize the Ruan family. It would be great if the Ruan family can avoid causing trouble.
Then our army must try to eradicate Mo Jingyu in Gaoping and Lang Son before the Ming army withdraws from Burma! We must not wait for the Ming army to withdraw its hands before joining forces with my Vietnamese puppet puppet!
Anyway, the Ming army will invade Vietnam sooner or later. After Burma is completely finished, we will miss the opportunity to fight to the death. It is better to attack first.
If we can take advantage of the fact that part of Zheng Chenggong's fleet is still tied up in Bago, and succeed in provoking it here, allowing the Ming army to advance arrogantly, and first try to land with a partial naval force, and then our navy can annihilate it at sea, then we can
If you can defeat them one by one, cut off one of his arms before encountering Zheng Chenggong himself."
Zheng Zha's thoughts were similar to those of Admiral Reinhardt Scheer, commander of the German High Seas Fleet during World War I.
The essence of Scheer's naval battle thoughts during World War I was that he knew that he could not defeat the main force of the British Royal Fleet, so he wanted to lure out several Royal Navy fighter planes.
Each attack weakened part of the British fleet, and then the final battle was reached. The Battle of Jutland in 1916 was, in the final analysis, a failed battle to lure the enemy and annihilate it. Unfortunately, the Germans' radio encryption was too rubbish.
The scheme had been fooled by the British a long time ago, so it was all in vain.
But no matter what, there is nothing wrong with Scheer’s strategic thinking itself. What is problematic is the execution and intelligence leaks.
Zheng Zha now also feels that the naval power of Vietnam may not be the opponent of Zheng Chenggong's main force. However, if he can first hide his strength and show weakness, and then provoke on land, and seduce the Ming army to rashly let the navy attack first when the main force is absent,
Maybe there will be a chance to annihilate them all.
After cutting Zheng Chenggong's fleet into two parts and finishing the battle in two parts, Zheng Zha felt that there was still a slight chance.