The caravan was divided into five teams and sent to the grassland, but Li Qi settled down at the foot of Baleng Mountain and began to plan for the construction of castles and military reclamation in this area.

Pastoralists accumulate a lot of livestock in a winter, and the mortality rate is high during the lambing period in the spring. Lambskins are a very good kind of fur, and many weak lambs and lambs are discarded when the shepherd changes fields. If you take enough fodder and delay for two months in Baishuiluo, most of these lambs and lambs will survive and become alive again. This is how many of the Han family's cattle and sheep were obtained.

Shatuo Department to Li Cunmiao's generation, Shatuo tribe and the Central Asian Zhaowu tribe who moved to northern Jin with Shatuo have been completely sinicized, anyway, the original Li Jiqi can't speak Turkic dialect, only knows some simple words, and has never heard his father Li Cunqiao say Turkic dialect, and only some older clansmen occasionally speak.

Since Li Guochang, the Li family has always taken the women of the Han family as his wife, great-grandmother, grandmother and mother, these three generations, in terms of blood, Li Qi firmly believes that he is a son of the Han family, and he does not speak Turkic at all......

The concept of nationality has always been classified in terms of mother tongue, for example, a Chinese, but he does not speak Chinese since he was a child, and English is his mother tongue, he must not be recognized as a Han family.

Language and culture are the greatest distinguishing characteristics of ethnic groups, not blood and ethnicity.

In later generations, many Chinese people mistakenly believed that people who were close by blood would naturally be close to them, but in fact, those who turned away from their mother country and forgot their mother tongue were the most terrible enemies in the world. For example, during World War II in another time and space, the hardest people who fought Germany were basically those German generals......

It is a pity that some of the "educators" of later generations have tried to enforce language education in other countries in their own countries, and this cannot but be said to be the sorrow of the whole nation......

A nation, if it loses its language and traditions, is effectively dead.

In terms of blood, most of the northerners in China have some of the original disappeared ethnic bloodlines, such as the Xiongnu, Xianbei, Donghu, and Turkic...... But even they firmly believe that they are a Han family......

Language and culture are the only way to achieve national identity.

At present, the Khitans are most threatened by the four major tribes of Turkic, Tuyuhun, White Tatar and Zhubu living in Yunzhou, Fengzhou and Yunnei, while the Qiang tribe, most of which live in the Hetao and Wuding River valleys, will not be harassed and plundered by the Khitan cavalry for the time being.

Li Qi chose the trading site for the preparation of the construction on the bank of the Rumudshui River north of Baleng Mountain, which was called Fengzhen in later generations, and the main trading object was the Xizhubu tribe in the northern grassland. In addition, it is the White Tatar and Tuyuhun tribes that live in this area. The Xizhubu tribe lived in Monan, that is, the western part of Inner Mongolia in later generations. Linguistically speaking, it is still very different from the Murwei, Eastern and Northern Zubu people, and is closer to Turkic, Tuguhun and Qiang.

Instead of uniting into a powerful tribe, Nanzhubu was divided into more than 30 tribes, large and small, mainly living in the Baishuiluo area. Baishuiluo is the Yellow Flag Sea of the later generations, an inland lake that has almost dried up. However, in this era, the ecology of the Inner Mongolia grassland has not suffered serious damage, the precipitation is relatively abundant, and the water area of Baishuiluo is estimated by Li Jiqi according to the scout's report, about 150 square kilometers.

This area is the most important winter pasture for the Zubu tribe.

The divination people are very rebellious, even when the Liao State was the most powerful, they were not able to completely conquer them, and they were still in a state of rebellion and subjugation. Now he is in a period of confrontation with Li Siyuan, and at this time, Li Qi naturally can't make trouble for himself.

Whenever the agrarian people reach the edge of the grassland, they make a fatal mistake, and when they see the green pastures, they want to reclaim them all into farmland.

Don't you know that there is very little precipitation on the grassland, it is all seasonal, and some places are not suitable for growing grain at all. The wasteland reclaimed in the grasslands will be seriously degraded in less than ten years, and the grain produced is not even as much as the seeds planted.

This wide arid zone in the north has stopped the expansion of the Central Plains people again and again, so it has fallen into a cycle of infinite population expansion, land shortage, war caused by hunger, self-slaughter and sharp decline of the population, and the establishment of new empires. The Tang Dynasty was the only exception, because it was a Sinicized Xianbei regime, and the remnants of Hu blood in their bodies let them know what to do when they got to the grasslands.

The lack of human resources on the grasslands, coupled with the lack of irrigation facilities, is the most suitable mode of production, and of course it is perfect if they can grow some food to supplement it, and they are more resilient to natural disasters.

The first batch of 2,000 immigrants recruited from Jindi began to settle down at the foot of Baleng Mountain.

Li Qi's plan was to build some fortified settlements on the grasslands with strong city defenses.

Of course, these settlements had to be built on the riverside.

There are two parallel rivers that are not far apart in the upper reaches of Baishuilu, called the left wing water and the right wing water, which sound like the two wings of a swan. There are indeed a lot of swans living in the reeds around Baishuiluo, and there are even particularly rare black swans and gray swans.

It's just that now his own power doesn't seem to be that far.

The caravan set up camp by the Yuma River, and the appearance of this cavalry army caused panic among the herdsmen of the steppe for a while. However, after discovering that the army was only there to protect the caravan, the shepherds happily rode off on horseback, spreading the news of the caravan's arrival in all directions.

The primitive trading market, enclosed by horse-drawn carriages, was very good, and the herdsmen preferred to barter and rarely used gold and silver to buy things. As for the copper coins...... The Li family doesn't seem to need this kind of thing.

Li Qi drew an arc on the map, which almost coincided with the Inner Mongolia railway line from Datong to Mantou in later generations. Nominally, Li Qi, the emperor of the Later Tang Dynasty, was still the "Heavenly Khan" of these steppe tribes. He is determined to learn from his predecessor Li Er, and to compete with Yelu Deguang for the title of Heavenly Khan on the grassland.

It's just that the way he is going to adopt is not to blindly use force to make those tribes subjugated, but to open up a trade route, with interests as a link and force as a supplement, to connect the steppe tribes in the north. Since it is to open up a trade route, it should not take the way of conquest, but should gradually advance to the grassland, and finally build a safe trade route.

Therefore, after more than 30 miles out of the Baleng Mountain Pass, he stopped, and while conducting transactions, he was ready to start recruiting people to build a fort on Baleng Mountain. Due to the snowstorm last year, there were not many victims in the Yunzhou, Shuozhou, and Fengzhou areas after the beginning of spring, and it was not particularly difficult to recruit people.