Of course, the thieves in the northwest are also the henchmen of the Ming Dynasty, but for Emperor Chongzhen, he is worried that it is not the thieves who go up the mountain, but the thieves who flee. Pen & Fun & Pavilion www.biquge.info

Now the thieves of Shaanxi have entered Shanxi, and they have also entered Luliang Mountain, although there are many people, but the threat and destruction of the Ming Dynasty to the court and the place have also been reduced to a minimum.

A thief who goes up the mountain can only be regarded as a bandit.

Luliang Mountain is vast, the mountain is steep, easy to defend and difficult to attack, although the officials and soldiers of the imperial court can not easily attack, but the thieves who have entered the mountain are now easily unable to come out.

For Emperor Chongzhen, although this is not the best result, it is also within the range of what he can accept.

After all, the Ming Dynasty is still running around and leaking, and there are too many things to worry about.

After Emperor Chongzhen set the strategic priority direction of the current imperial court in his heart, he soon ordered Sun Chengzong, the minister of military aircraft, to go out of Beijing again to inspect the border preparations of Jizhen on behalf of the emperor himself, including whether the establishment of personnel is full, whether the ordnance materials are sufficient, whether the food and salary of the soldiers are distributed in full, whether the defense of the city is complete, whether the generals of the border town are effective, and so on.

Especially this time, Emperor Chongzhen also asked Sun Chengzong to inspect the border of Jizhen and go to Saibei to investigate the defense of Rehebao, Balihan, Yinghoutun, Santa and other strategic places in Saibei, and authorized him to carry a large amount of money, food and materials to meet the leaders of the Mongolian tribes in Saibei who belonged to the Ming Dynasty.

On the sixth day of the first month of May, just after the Dragon Boat Festival, Emperor Chongzhen summoned Sun Chengzong, the minister of military aircraft, and the personnel of the military department, the Li Fan Yuan, Jinyiwei, Dongchang and other yamen who went with Sun Chengzong, and explained to them all kinds of precautions, and personally sent Sun Chengzong and others to the front of the noon gate.

Emperor Chongzhen originally wanted to personally inspect the border of Jizhen in the north of Jingshi, and if possible, he also wanted to personally inspect Shanhai Town in the east of Jizhen and Xuanfu Town in the west, but as soon as this idea was proposed, it was first opposed by the people around him, then by the Military Aircraft Department, and then by the cabinet ministers and ministers who learned of this situation.

Therefore, before the idea was officially proposed, it was quickly rejected by everyone around him.

Including Empress Yi'an, the widow of Emperor Tianqi who has a certain say in the palace, and Empress Zhou, the lord of his middle palace, are all opponents of him once again patrolling the border passes.

In their eyes, there is no problem in patrolling the places of Jinggi such as Tongzhou, Changping, and even Juyong Pass, after all, there are still garrisons of Xuanfu, Jizhen, and Shanhaiguan on the front line of the Great Wall outside, even if there is a sudden threat from the grassland in Saibei, they will not be able to enter the pass for a while, and the emperor will have plenty of time to return to Jingshi City.

And once the emperor goes to the front line of the Great Wall, he may even have to go out to the outside of the pass to inspect the fortresses that stand alone on the grassland in the north of the country, which is equivalent to losing the protection of the Great Wall Guanshan Fortress, and there is no guarantee of safety.

Their worries, as well as the worries of some courtiers, although they seemed a little ridiculous to the current Emperor Chongzhen, but in the end, after thinking about it, he still gave up the trip at this time, and Sun Chengzong took the men and horses to go for him.

After all, in the eyes of most people in this era, the north of the Great Wall is a bitter cold and barbaric land, a place where all kinds of barbarian peoples are nomadic and haunted, and the emperor going there is tantamount to putting himself in danger.

In fact, of course, this is not the case, the northern Hebei, the northeast and Inner Mongolia in later generations are densely populated, prosperous in commerce and trade, and developed in industry and agriculture.

At this time of the 17th century, the environment in these areas had not yet been polluted or destroyed, and there was no excessive exploitation of the logging industry, industry and mining, and the natural environment alone was certainly more suitable for survival and habitation than many places in Guannai, at least than Shanxi, Shaanxi, Henan, and Shandong, which were in great drought for many years.

However, in Emperor Chongzhen's harem, only Lan Concubine Hai Lanzhu would agree with the emperor's thoughts, and the others were completely limited to their own vision, even if the emperor bitterly told them about the pleasant scenery of these places, the fertile land, and the scene of "beating roe deer and scooping fish", they couldn't understand it.

What is incomprehensible is that there are many courtiers who have not been outside the customs.

The Ming Dynasty in the 16th and 17th centuries missed the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity of the Age of Discovery, of course, because the Ming Dynasty was a continental country and an agricultural civilization, but it also had a lot to do with the fact that the courtiers of the Ming Dynasty did not have a broad vision.

If your horizons are not broad, your knowledge will not work, and you will always be confined to the interior of the Ming Dynasty, or even just limited to the court, fighting back and forth for a little profit, and wasting most people's wisdom and wisdom on internal friction.

This problem is very clear from the performance of Zhang Pu and Li Xin after they followed Jiang Yueguang to North Korea.

Needless to say, in the original history, he basically used all his wisdom and talents to assist Li Zicheng in the "cause" of burying the Ming Dynasty, and the greater his contribution to Li Zicheng's Great Shun Army, the greater the damage to Chinese civilization.

In this life, he was admitted as a Jinshi in the Enke in the first year of Chongzhen, and then was appointed by the emperor as a scholar of Zhongshu, and his vision was naturally very different from the past.

In the contact with Emperor Chongzhen, in the observation of the Ming Dynasty politics, and from the many conversations between Emperor Chongzhen and the Wuying Palace, Li Xin's vision has long been raised from the oppression and resistance of the gentry class and the tenant peasant class under the rule of the Ming Dynasty to the war between the Ming Dynasty and the Later Jin State.

This level is obviously more ambitious than the oppression and resistance between the gentry and tenant farmers within the Ming Dynasty, and it is also more worthy of fighting.

After all, in this time and space, the struggle between the Ming Dynasty and the Mongol tribes in Saibei, as well as the Jin State after the establishment of Liaodong, has the background of the Huayi debate, and the struggle between the Han people and the Mongol Tartars and the Jurchen Tartars, that is to say, the struggle between civilization and barbarism.

After more than half a year of career in the Military Aircraft Department, Li Xin's horizons and knowledge were greatly broadened, and under the deliberate guidance of Emperor Chongzhen, he also became a simple Chinese nationalist like Niu Juming, Shen Tingyang and more than a dozen other Chinese scholars.

Although there is no such a clear concept in their understanding, the stance and attitude toward and handling problems have begun to be weighed against the interests of the Chinese nation, which is dominated by Han Chinese.

This was of course common knowledge known to everyone in later generations, but in the distant seventeenth century, even the Western colonial powers, which had already begun to lead the world at that time, had not yet truly formed a nation-state in the modern sense.

The Chinese experienced the Xinhai Revolution, experienced the First World War, and did not experience the Second World War and the continuous humiliation and aggression of the Japanese invaders for decades during this period, and finally formed a nation-state in the modern sense, and the national consciousness as the Chinese nation was awakened.

Seventeen years after Chongzhen, the Manchu army entered the Central Plains, and the Han people with a population of more than 100 million were conquered by the Jurchens with a population of less than one million, and finally accepted the rule of this barbaric alien race, the most fundamental reason was the lack of nationalist consciousness.

Although there has been a Huayi debate since ancient times, and there are also Huayi defenses in the hearts of some people who recognized this problem earlier, but looking at the whole world at that time, there were very few people who really formed this kind of nationalist consciousness and nationalist feelings, otherwise, how could the Han nationality with such a huge population be conquered by the Jurchens whose number was less than one-ten-thousandth of their own?