Punjab entered the war three months after the outbreak of the war, when the black mercenaries formed by the African Company were defeated by the British Indian native soldiers, and the British crossed the Indus River and surrounded the African Company around Karachi, relying on the superiority of the sailors to survive.

As for the Punjab Sikh Empire, which was based on the Five River Basin, the origin of the ancient Indian civilization, the British believed that it was just another Mughal Empire, or the Marat Union and the Kingdom of Mysore, although it was equipped with Western armies, hired Western officers to train and even lead soldiers, but after the real fight, there may not be any combat effectiveness, and those white officers, especially French officers, often secretly accepted the East India Company's bribes.

Therefore, they did not attach too much importance to the Sikh Empire, and when they attacked the territory of the Chinese African Company along the Indus River to the north, they did not care too much about whether they crossed the border of Punjab, and when they attacked Peshawar, they even asked Punjab to open the northern border to them and allow British troops to enter Peshawar directly from North India.

The result angered the Sikh Empire, they accepted the Chinese to win over, declared war on the British, at this time Peshawar on the one hand with the support of the Afghan forces (Manchu Qing), on the other hand from the Sikh Empire from behind, the British army was forced to retreat, and then they went to war with the Sikh Empire, thinking that it would take two or three months to destroy the empire, but after the real fight, it was found that the military quality of the Sikh soldiers was not lost to the European army.

The French military veterans after the Napoleonic Wars, unlike the noble officers of the Bourbon period, were baptized in the spirit of the Revolution, highly valued honor and dignity, and refused to accept bribes from the British. They did not train Sikh soldiers as formalities as the French officers of a few decades ago, but trained them spiritually according to the ideas of the French army.

At first, Arad and other French instructors were trained so harshly that many Sikhs tried to escape, and at first, Arad tried to maintain his authority with "gentle" tactics such as whipping and verbal abuse, but it soon became clear that this generosity was completely useless. He began to think of other options, first shooting a cowardly soldier and declaring with a curse and threat that cowardice violated the teachings of Sikhism, and that his soul could not ascend to heaven and could only go to hell to be tortured.

Surprisingly, for the Sikhs, this deception had an effect, and the Sikh soldiers not only mastered Western military methods technically, but also thoroughly armed spiritually, although not in the French faith, but in their own faith, but as long as an army has a spirit, it has been reborn as a modern army.

After the engagement, the British generals discovered that the Sikhs under Arad were not so much "professional soldiers" as "religious extremists armed with advanced weapons", and that their combat effectiveness was "very good", even surpassing that of the British-trained Indian natives.

And the group of "religious extremists" under Arad is a cavalry force of 6,000 people.

In charge of Sikh infantry training was Ventura, who copied the French Army's tutorials and norms almost exactly. In the barracks, all orders were in French, the flag was a tricolor of the French style, and at the front they no longer swarmed in disorganized formations, but in tight horizontal columns and phalanxes. Equipped with the latest weapons, these Sikhs gave the discriminated infantrymen a sense of honor and identity. After the engagement, the British army reported that "[their] men and equipment were the best in South Asia, and could be fully compared with the armies of Europe." ”

In addition to regular training and strong command, this army also has a very scarce sense of honor compared with other princely states in India. In order to prevent the new army from being tainted with the vices of the old army, the French officers themselves went to the markets and villages, recruited the hardest soldiers, paid the poor-born soldiers a high salary, all soldiers were paid at least 7 rupees a month, and every soldier had to take an oath before enlisting that they would be loyal to the monarch with their lives.

Professionally trained, spiritually believing, honored, and extremely loyal, this army already had all the characteristics of the French army, so when the war began, they were inseparable from the Indian native soldiers.

The British attacked the Sikh Empire with 40,000 men, but they were never able to penetrate their territory, and they were in a stalemate in the border areas for a long time.

At this time, the African companies finally solved the initial chaos, they eliminated the unorganized and undisciplined African mercenaries, and began to organize the local militia into a regular army, these militia groups were first armed by the landlords near Karachi, where the Chinese implemented the Chinese armor protection system for decades, attracted and cultivated a large number of loyal to their land class, African companies are not keen on extracting taxes from the countryside, and constantly organize farmers to build water conservancy projects, ordinary farmers may not get much benefit, but at least not starvation, But the landlord class's support for African companies is genuine.

Moreover, the imperial examination system was implemented, and the officials who ruled here by the African company were also middle and low-level landlords and scholarly families, and the power was relatively decentralized, but closer to the bottom, and when the war was at its most critical, a large number of civilian officials returned to their hometowns, organized guerrillas, and harassed the British army in the rear.

The landlords organized honest peasants to help defend Karachi, and as a result showed unusual loyalty, perhaps poor tactical skills, but none of them escaped. It is worth mentioning that the locals may be more fearless of death than the Chinese, because they are generally Muslims with strong beliefs, unlike the Chinese who believe in everything but believe in nothing, and the peasant soldiers who have strong beliefs generally believe that they are fighting for their gods and will go to heaven after death, where the rivers flow with honey and milk, unlike the Chinese peasants who generally believe that they will go to the eighteenth layer of hell to suffer after death.

These perhaps more superstitious soldiers were less afraid of death and more daring to fight their lives. Karachi held out in this situation for three months, and during those three months, veteran officers hired by African companies organized them for formal training and distribution of more advanced weapons.

Then they began a counteroffensive, and after the British army was repulsed from Karachi, the number of Chinese troops was larger, because the local villages were formed according to the Chinese rural model, and the armor protection system was implemented, and it was easy to organize the village brave, and those with combat experience were organized into soldiers, and the recruits were formed into auxiliary units. The Baloch people in the nearby Baloch region provided cavalry. In just a few months, their strength grew to 80,000.

They then launched an all-out counteroffensive and crossed the Indus River into the eastern part of Sindh Province, which they had cedered to the east, where they were welcomed by the local powers. The British did not change the rural system created by the Chinese, because the British were not keen to sell their political system, their attitude towards the colonies was only to squeeze profits, so they tried to cooperate with the local high-level as much as possible, rather than overthrowing them. The Chinese, who ruled the high-ranking officials for more than a decade, had succeeded in shaping a mature system of rural self-government, which the British had taken advantage of, but they had increased taxes.

Moreover, the British abolished the imperial examination system, and they could not care how the local princes managed the peasants, but the British had a large number of children of the powerful who needed to get a job in the colonies, so they had to keep the official positions in the white people from the country, which made the landed class who had accepted the fairer imperial examination system dissatisfied, and they were excluded from the power class.

The Chinese came again, they immediately raised troops, the British originally did not have many troops, only controlled a few central cities, as a result, after the arrival of the army of the African company, they could only shrink in these big cities in an instant, like an island floating in the ocean, once into the suburbs, it was another world.

The entire province of Sindh was lost in an instant, and the Chinese surrounded the British army in the large cities of the Indus River such as Teda, Larkana, and Sukkur.

The response of the African companies led the general attack of the Punjab, Burmese on British India.

By subsidizing the military alliance system, the British distributed the military expenses to all the princes of the princely states, which greatly reduced the financial burden of the British colonial government, allowing them to easily support the 200,000-strong Indian native soldiers, and the training of these native soldiers was very formal, and the British were confident that they would crush China's power here. Even with the invasion of the 30,000-strong Punjab and the 50,000-strong Burmese army, they were not worried.

In fact, it is true that on the battlefield, the British did not fall apart, and the military system was very tight. The problem was that the British had long pursued a colonial economic policy in India, promoting the cultivation of cash crops by Indians in various ways, although the consequences had already occurred, as early as the 1770s, the Bengal famine broke out, and 10 million people starved to death. However, because the cultivation of cash crops can greatly increase foreign trade, especially the trade balance with China, Britain cannot find any other way than to export cotton and other agricultural products to India. Because they have successfully used India's raw materials to balance the tea and textile trade deficit with China, they have even won the envy of the entire European country. How could Britain abolish such a system on its own?

As for the question of food security, it was not in the minds of the British, who were armed with commercial ideas, and they had massively enclosed land to raise sheep and imported a large amount of foreign grain, not to mention India.

As a result, India's grain output is getting lower and lower year by year, the cultivated area of cotton is as high as 100 million mu, the planting area of sugarcane and hemp exceeds 20 million mu, and the planting of a large number of cash crops will not make India a net importer of grain, and there is still a small amount of grain exported every year, but the grain reserves have been greatly reduced.

In the event of an accident, it is very easy to cause famine.