On the sand table, the topography and landforms along the Great Wall, such as mountains, rivers, cities, roads, villages, and forests, are all made of different colors of cement and sand, and all of them are vivid. Pen | fun | pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 ｉｎｆｏ

Including the number of garrisons and commanders of each city, it is also written on a palm-sized piece of cardboard and is marked one by one.

These military secrets, which were previously only held by the Ministry of War and the Governor's Mansion of the Five Armies, are now impressively presented in front of everyone in the Wuying Palace.

Xu Hongzu, who was already obsessed with geography, was close to observe this terrain sand table, and he was fascinated as if there was no one around.

Emperor Chongzhen saw that most of the ministers around him were also like this, smiled slightly, and did not speak, because he was familiar with this feeling.

No matter who it is, if you can only rely on the map of the time to deploy troops and command battles, it will definitely be a mess.

An important reason why the Ming army always failed in the conquest of Liaodong and the battle against Jianyu was that the veterans who were familiar with the terrain of Liaodong died and retreated, and all of them withered, and the generals who were newly transferred to Liaodong, especially those civilian officials who served as economic strategies or supervisors, were completely blind to the mountains and rivers in the area controlled by the Jurchens in Jianzhou, and they could only rely on the maps left before to talk about the troops on paper, how could they be undefeated?

Emperor Chongzhen led several important ministers of the cabinet and the military aircraft department, and when they first saw this terrain sand table, their reaction was the same as that of Liu Xiu, Emperor Guangwu of the Eastern Han Dynasty, when he first saw the terrain sand table 1,600 years ago, that is, "captured in my eyes"!

In the Book of the Later Han Dynasty - The Biography of Ma Yuan, there is such a record, that is, when the general Ma Yuan presented the strategy of conquering the alien races in Longxi to Emperor Guangwu Liu Xiujin, in order to explain his reasons for entering the army more clearly, in front of Emperor Guangwu Liu Xiu, "gather rice for the valley and draw the situation", which made Emperor Guangwu Liu Xiu sigh with emotion and exclaimed: "The captivity is in my eyes!" ”

This should be the earliest sand table operation recorded in ancient China.

Of course, when it comes to the terrain sand table in the true modern sense, it was created by the genius of the Germans in the early nineteenth century.

In 1811, von Leswitz, the military adviser to King Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia, in order to let Wilhelm III learn the knowledge of military command, made a battlefield model in the Potsdam Palace on a whim, using different colors to identify the battlefield situation, the enemy and the enemy, so that Wilhelm III could also play a military game of war in the palace.

Later, the Prussian king soon extended it to the military training of the Prussian army, and this was the birth of the topographic sandbox in the modern sense.

But now, this honor naturally belongs to the Chinese, specifically, it belongs to Chongzhen's second year of military department staff Fang Shilang Zhongniu Juming.

After Niu Juming was instructed, he quickly organized the people of the Ministry of War and the Ministry of Industry, according to the archives of the Ministry of Labor for more than 100 years, according to the proportion of the emperor's prompts, first made a basic model of the land of Gyeonggi, but then left the capital separately, and explored the commanding heights of the geographical terrain in the four directions of the southeast, northwest, and recorded specific data such as mountains, rivers, cities, roads, fields, villages and towns, forests and so on along the way, and finally returned to the Beijing Division at the end of February, and began to adjust and revise, and carved meticulously, until Emperor Chongzhen finally nodded and approved.

In the past month or so, Niu Juming, who has experience, as well as Wai Lang, an experienced staff member and the principals, have led the craftsmen of the Ministry of Industry who participated in the investigation and production in the early stage, and the speed of making the new sand table has increased dramatically.

In addition to the topographic sand table of Beizhili that was originally ordered to be made, the sand table production along the West Liaoning Corridor, the Liaodong Peninsula and the Bohai Bay has also been completed.

The terrain sand table now placed in the Wuying Hall is like a piece of the terrain puzzle in the north of the Ming Dynasty, which has been spliced together piece by piece.

Even the Korean Peninsula, which is still unclear, has been spliced together after simply marking iconic geographical locations such as Andong, Pyongyang, and Seoul.

The situation outside the Great Wall of the Northeast is also clear to everyone in front of the entire northern Ming Dynasty.

Looking at the admiration in the eyes of the people around him, Emperor Chongzhen coughed lightly, and then said: "What do you think, how is this terrain sand table made by the staff division?" ”

Li Guowei, who knew the inside story, immediately said: "Your Majesty is really a saint, and now there is such a topographical sand table in the Wuying Palace, and the situation of the mountains and rivers of Daming is in the eyes of Your Majesty, this is a great initiative that has never been done before!" Congratulations! ”

In the face of this unprecedentedly powerful emperor, Li Guoyi, the head of the cabinet, cannot play a role in many things, but he is not too sullen about it.

In his opinion, the most important thing for a minister is to assist the emperor to govern the country well, to eradicate external troubles, and to eliminate internal worries, but in the final analysis, the cabinet auxiliary ministers are mainly auxiliary, if the emperor can handle these things well inside and out, what reason do you have to stare at the emperor every day for fear that he will make mistakes?

Now he thinks that the emperor in front of him is indeed much more clever than him, the head of the cabinet.

In this case, it is enough to pick up the gaps and fill in the gaps, and there is no need to compete with the emperor for any dominance above the government.

No matter how the emperor looks at it, he is a young British lord, and he competes for the dominance of the court with such an emperor, how can this be done by a courtier?

So after thinking about this problem clearly, during this period of time, the head of the cabinet, Li Guohao, has lived the leisurely study life that he has dreamed of for many years.

In the affairs of the cabinet and the DPRK and China, he did whatever the emperor said, never took the initiative to make trouble, and when he had leisure, he read and wrote at home, and lived a peaceful and leisurely life.

In this regard, Emperor Chongzhen is of course also happy to see it, and he needs such a cabinet chief assistant who can not only pick up the gaps but also not hinder in many ways.

Many civil ministers want to join the cabinet to assist in the government, not to assist in the realization of the emperor's own ambitions, but to use the cabinet as a platform to realize their own political ambitions.

And this is the fundamental reason why many cabinet ministers have ended up with a tragic fate.

In the later Manchu Dynasty, there was no strong cabinet chief or auxiliary minister, because the Manchu imperial power was more centralized and autocratic, and it was impossible for a minister to use the platform of the Manchu imperial power to display his political ambitions.

And this situation always appeared in the Ming Dynasty, and the most typical one was Zhang Juzheng.

But what happened to Zhang Juzheng in the end?

Of course, Li Guowei didn't know the things of the later generations, but he knew the things of the previous dynasty, and when he met a strong emperor, even the cabinet chief assistant had to be a weak first assistant quietly, otherwise once the imperial power and the prime minister's power conflicted, it would definitely not be a fun thing for the cabinet chief assistant.

After congratulating the emperor, Li Guowei bowed and bowed.

At this time, Sun Chengzong, the second assistant and minister of military aircraft, said: "The minister also congratulates Your Majesty! There is this strange thing in Wuying Palace, and the border situation and enemy situation are all in the hands of His Majesty. From now on, Your Majesty can truly strategize and win thousands of miles away! ”

Li Guoyi has the name of the first assistant of the cabinet, but under the current heavy military situation, Sun Chengzong, who is a cabinet minister and a scholar of the Cabinet of Ministers and the chief minister of military aircraft, is the de facto first assistant minister, which is well known even to him.

Therefore, for the production of the sand table of the Ministry of Staff, he, the Minister of Military Aircraft who is also the secretary of the Ministry of War, is naturally fully supported, and the sand table puzzle in the Wuying Hall is constantly spliced up piece by piece, and there are many of his supervision.

With his familiarity with the terrain of Northern Zhili and Western Liaoning, he was the first person to take it for granted among all the courtiers.