Since the outbreak of the Zhangjiakou collaborator case, a group of Shanxi merchants and Shanxi merchants who traded with Houjin were cleaned up by the imperial court, and then when Hong Chengchou took over as governor of Shanxi, he suppressed some of the more powerful local officials and businessmen, and by the fifth year of Chongzhen, the original Jin Chamber of Commerce was replaced by more than half.

Originally, the gentry in the Tongpu area were very keen to manipulate the Jin Shang Chamber of Commerce in order to obtain benefits for their own families. However, under the continuous suppression of the imperial court, these gentry finally woke up, and although the custom of doing business was still maintained in the family, they did not dare to try to collude with the chamber of commerce again.

The separation of the relationship between the gentry and the merchants made the Jin Merchant Chamber of Commerce finally begin to look like a normal merchant guild. Chang Wanchun, the original head of the Chamber of Commerce, and others, after becoming directors of Shanxi Bank, handed over the affairs of the Chamber of Commerce to the younger generation under the hint of the imperial court.

Chang Haochun, Zhao Sigong, Li Sixiao and other young people finally became the leaders of the Jin Chamber of Commerce under various changes. Unlike the older generation of Jin merchants, these young people did not want to continue in the traditional salt and grain industries.

After the three railways of Tongpu, Tongfeng and Tongzhang in Shanxi Province were basically opened to traffic, they soon realized that the railway was the best business of this era. Based on Shanxi's abundant coal and iron resources, it can provide a large number of cheap rails for the construction of railways, relying on the completed railway, not only can the Jin merchants obtain the land on both sides of the railway cheaply, but also can transport the goods of the Jin merchants to the local area more cheaply, suppressing the trade of merchants in other regions. This is much safer and more profitable than smuggling iron tools to the grasslands and Liaodong in the past.

It's just that Shanxi is really not suitable for large-scale construction of railways, and the neighboring Hebei, Shaanxi, and Henan provinces do not allow Jin merchants to interfere in local railway construction, so Jin merchants can only shift their attention to the outside of the Saiwai. The construction of the Tongfeng Railway not only turned Datong into a border hinterland, but also made the local Shanxi immigrants in Fengzhen quickly surpass the Shaanxi immigrants, turning this former frontier between the two countries into a hot pioneer land.

With the support of local Shanxi immigrants and cheap and fast railway transportation, the Fengzhen area has also become the first base of Jin merchants outside the Saiwai. From the fifth year of Chongzhen, the starting point of the merchant gang that entered the deep trade in the grassland was no longer the passes of the Great Wall of Shanxi, but began in Fengzhen.

Chang Haochun, Zhao Sigong, Li Sixiao and other young Jin merchants were not satisfied with this achievement, and they were still looking forward to building a railway between Zhangjiakou and Fengzhen to control the route of Hebei merchants out of the fortress.

extend the railway from Fengzhen to the north until Erindabu Sannaoer, near the Gobi Desert; The railway was extended westward, passing through Guihua City, Tumut River to the Yellow River, and even along the Yellow River to the west, bringing the fertile Qiantao-Houtao plains into the trade circle of the Jin merchants.

One day, the railway could even be extended to the Mobei grasslands, bypassing the Hexi Corridor controlled by Shaanxi merchants and entering the more affluent Western Regions and Central Asia for trade.

However, it was not enough for the merchants to build such a railway network on their own, and Lin Dan Khan, who had been driven out of his homeland by the Later Jin, could hinder the plans to extend the Zhufengzhen Railway to the north, not to mention the risk of building a railway on the desolate Gobi Desert.

Therefore, unlike their parents, Chang Haochun, Zhao Sigong, and Li Sixiao are young Jin businessmen who can better feel the impact and changes brought by the country's prosperity to business. They would prefer the support of the state to the protection of certain dignitaries. Compared with the older generation of Jin merchants, these young merchants were more active in combining commerce with the state's strategy for the grasslands, thus reaping windfall profits as the country expanded.

When Shao Ningchen asked the Jin merchants to cooperate in the name of the wartime base camp, the young Jin merchants represented by Chang Haochun, Zhao Sigong, and Li Sixiao did not think that this was a burden, but a good opportunity to break through the obstacles to the construction of the railway network in the western part of the Monan grassland. As long as the emperor was able to lead a large army to defeat the Houjin army from afar, then the Shanxi merchants who actively supported the emperor in this war would naturally be able to reverse the bad impression left by the Jin merchants in the emperor's mind, in exchange for the emperor's support for the construction of the railway network.

So under the persuasion of these young Jin merchants, the Jin Merchants Chamber of Commerce gave Shao Ningchen maximum support. On July 17, the 64-kilometer one-way railway line from Fengzhen-Jiningbao-Wuhuketu was laid. The original 60 tons of materials from Fengzhen to Jiningbao every two days were quickly increased to 180 tons of materials per day to Wuhu Ketu, and more than half of the livestock and three-quarters of the manpower were saved.

When the Houjin army outpost appeared on 22 July in the hilly plain area north of Wuhu Ketu, the defensive positions and battalions of nearly one square kilometer in size were already formed with Wuhu Ketu as the core and placed on both sides of the Ulanqab River.

On either side of the fortress-style camp, there are two traditional camps, and the three camps form a defensive belt nearly 10 kilometers wide, firmly holding the center of the basin and blocking the road from the northeast gap to the center of the basin.

It should be said that the team commanded by Yuan Chonghuan this time was much stronger than the last time he led the right-wing Mongolian tribes to deal with Lin Dan Khan. After more than three years of rectification, although the self-defense forces of each flag are nominally subordinate to the commanders of the flags, the officers who are actually responsible for daily training and leading troops are all meritorious officers and men selected by the General Staff Headquarters from among the various banners.

In such a border war, these self-defense forces were automatically subordinated to the subordinate command of the Governor's Office, and were no longer the private soldiers of a banner owner. Although the soldiers of the Self-Defense Forces of each banner are from ordinary herdsmen, the officers who lead them are off-duty army officers, which also makes the organization of these Self-Defense Forces not far from the old border army system of the Ming army, and their combat effectiveness is much stronger than that of the tribal soldiers a few years ago.

And the so-called Migrant Self-Defense Forces are also veterans who have been discharged from the border army, and their combat effectiveness is actually no different from that of the border army. The newly formed Cavalry Division and the Sixth Field Army were also simple and brave people selected from the old border army and the local people, and it should be said that their morale was quite strong.

It's just that for senior commanders such as Yuan Chonghuan and Cao Wenzhao, who have stayed in Liaodong, they are still a little lacking in confidence in launching such a large-scale field battle with the Houjin army.

Therefore, they were always based on the tactical idea of "I defend the enemy's attack", and did not actively delay the actions of the Houjin army in the Houshan hilly area, and the forward outposts only made a slight contact with the Houjin outpost, and then shrank the army behind the defense line of Wuhu Ketu, waiting for the Houjin army to attack on its own.

As the saying goes, it will be the courage of the army. The actions of senior commanders still have a great impact on the morale of an army. Turtle retreated behind the defense line, sat and watched the Houjin army enter the basin from the northwest gap in a big way, and calmly set up a formation several miles away from their own defense line, which obviously greatly hit the morale of the Ming army.

On the afternoon of 28 July, he left 2,000 men along the way to garrison the north-south roads of Daqingshan in the northeast of Naturalization, and he arrived at Chongzhen in Wuhu Ketu with 18,000 men of the Chahar Division and the Eighth Cavalry Division.

Regarding the conservative mentality of Yuan Chonghuan, Cao Wenzhao and others, Chongzhen is naturally extremely dissatisfied. But the big war is coming, and he can't lose his temper with these high-ranking officers and shake the morale of the army again. So he issued an order through the staff headquarters of the base camp, ordering all the officers and men participating in the battle to leave the camp early tomorrow morning and accept his own review.

On the morning of 29 July, after the sun rose, one group after another of the soldiers in the Ming army camp rushed out and stood in front of the camp's defensive line, which immediately caused a small confusion in the Houjin side.

The calmness that the Houjin army has shown in front of the Ming army these days is not a fact. After discovering that the Ming army was waiting for Wuhu Ketu, many Mongolian leaders and Jurchen relatives who were not strong enough had already germinated the idea of retiring from the army.

Mang Gurshan was a supporter of the theory of retreat, and he believed that since the purpose of this dispatch was to destroy the Chahar tribe and not to fight the Ming army, they should naturally withdraw after the Ming army made it clear that they wanted to intervene. If you wanted to fight the Ming army, you wouldn't have chosen this route when you marched in the first place.

However, Huang Taiji, who had previously avoided conflict with the Ming army, did not agree with this proposition, and Huang Taiji believed that since he had come here, he could not be easily intimidated by the posture of the Ming army. The failure of this march was just a small matter, and it was a big deal for the Ming army to develop self-confidence in the face of the Houjin army.

What's more, the Ming army on the opposite side is obviously a little lacking in confidence, even if it occupies the advantageous geography first, it is still ready to fight a field battle by defending the city. In other words, the initiative to choose to fight and retreat is still in their hands, so why not try to fight a dozen, even if they can't defeat the Ming army on the opposite side, they must tell the Mongolian tribes on the steppe how incompetent the Ming army is in the field, and the Mongolian tribes should not expect the Ming army to shelter them, unless they can fence their pastures with walls.

Dai Shan, who has always wavered in his attitude, stood on Huang Taiji's side this time, thinking that no matter what, when the Houjin army encountered the Ming army in the field, there was no precedent for retreating without a fight. What's more, there are a large number of Mongols in the armies of both sides this time, and if they show weakness in this war, it will cause the Mongol tribes to make the next choice, so they should still fight.

Huang Taiji and Dai Shan's ideas won the support of the Jurchen nobles, but the middle and lower classes of the Mongol and Jurchen coalition were still suspicious of this war, so when the Ming army suddenly made a move to camp and array, some dust suddenly flew up. Huang Taiji, Dai Shan and others immediately climbed the high platform in the camp and observed the other party's movements with the captured Ming army binoculars.