In the battle of Yan, the Song State sent four armies, with a total of 50,000 troops, to crusade against the Yan State! The main general of the leader, Dai Yan chose Xiao Xiang, who has been following him since Fengyi!

This was the first time that the Song State sent a large army to go on an expedition abroad, so Dai Yan attached great importance to it. The logistical supply of the Song army was coordinated by the Ministry of War, and the caravans of Taoqiu merchants abroad were personally responsible for transportation. This time, Dai Yan can completely witness the powerful power of Taoqiu merchants abroad!

As a group of businessmen who are collectively grouped together and supported by the state, Taoqiu merchants are already the most powerful businessmen in the world today! And the best of these merchants is undoubtedly the merchant who does grain trade between countries!

Unlike most people think, the grain trade is just about selling grain. The grain trade controlled by the Taoqiu merchants was actually an incomparably large network. It consists of multiple parts to form an extremely large industrial chain, and a large number of interest groups!

At the bottom of the grain trade industry chain is the grain collection system, which is mainly composed of small and medium-sized landlords located in various countries in the world. Among these landlords, the scale is small, and there are landlords who only own dozens or hundreds of acres of land; The large scale is the feudal monarchs of various countries, and even the monarchs of some small countries such as Weijun are among them!

For the lowest part of the world, the Taoqiu merchants have the loosest control. Because today's world is still dominated by a self-sufficient natural economy, most of the food in various countries and even places is consumed locally, and only a small part will be taken out and become a circulating commodity in the market.

Under such circumstances, most of the grain trade in a township or even a county is actually controlled by the landlords with real power in various localities. Although the merchants of Taoqiu have some power in various countries, after all, they are not as long as these landlords and feudal lords who have been operating in the local area, and the strong dragon does not suppress the head snake! Letting them buy food from the local area is not only time-consuming and labor-intensive, but also cost-effective!

Therefore, the control of the Taoqiu merchants over the grain trade was mainly based on other aspects. And first of all, their transportation system is all over the world!

In order to build such a transportation system, Dai Yan even organized Taoqiu merchants, separated their respective transportation systems, and formed a complete transportation company separately! And such a trading house specializing in transportation has thousands of boats, and its ships come and go to and from almost all the waterways in the world, such as rivers, Jishui, rivers, Huaishui, and Surabaya! This means that as long as there were rivers in various countries that could connect to the main rivers, the Taoqiu merchants would be able to transport supplies by boat!

And this transport company, in addition to this waterway transportation, they also have a transportation system that connects some important land cities! This is because a considerable number of the big merchants in Taoqiu were originally people who had a certain amount of power in various countries, and they also owned trading houses established on land.

When the industrial system of Taoqiu was built, Mohist craftsmen soon developed double-wheeled carriages with high transportation efficiency, and then designed and manufactured four-wheeled carriages with higher efficiency. Some open-minded local forces, such as Weiguo Guojun, even directly introduced the track of transporting coal in Taoqiu City and Xiangyi Industrial Zone, and specially built a track to connect Puyang and Pushui, making the trade between Weiguo and Taoqiu closer!

With such a powerful transportation system, it is no exaggeration to say that it is the UPS of this era!

To fight a war, to a large extent, is to fight logistics. If it weren't for the fact that the Taoqiu merchants had such a powerful transportation system, Dai Yan might not have agreed to Qi State's request to send troops so easily!

Outside of the transportation network, the Taoqiu merchants also controlled the settlement of the grain trade, as well as the specific pricing power of the grain. These two items are actually the killer features of Taoqiu merchants to really control the price of grain in the world!

When Dai Yan first took charge of Taoqiu, he established a grain exchange in Taoqiu, trading grain as futures. In the process of the development of the futures exchange, Taoqiu's financial industry developed rapidly, and soon had a money bank system all over the world, and these money bank systems are the best grain trade settlement places!

With the futures exchange, and with the well-informed information of the Taoqiu merchants, the price of grain can be determined to a large extent. Moreover, in the case of the increasing amount of funds attracted by the Taoqiu Exchange and the increasing grain stocks of Taoqiu, Taoqiu merchants can even rely on this system to directly defeat the grain prices of a place or even a country!

For example, in the Wei State, when Li Kui carried out the reform of the law, he established a grain price stabilization system based on the law of equalization in the Wei State. Under such a system, in good years, the government will purchase peasants' surplus grain at a fair price in good years to prevent merchants from hurting peasants by lowering prices. In disaster years, the reserve grain is sold at a fair price to prevent merchants from raising prices and hurting the people.

With such a system as a precaution, the Wei State should not worry about too drastic fluctuations in food prices. However, in fact, the Taoqiu merchants easily broke through such a system of the Wei State!

There is nothing wrong with the logic of such a leveling method, but it is actually a great test of the government's execution and financial strength! If it was the Wei State as a whole, the funds and grain reserves it had were naturally impossible for the Taoqiu merchants to fight. However, in a separate place, it is not the same thing at all compared to the Taoqiu merchants!

The efficient financing methods of the Taoqiu merchants allowed them to quickly mobilize funds, so as to quickly defeat the local grain price in a single place! For example, in good years, Taoqiu merchants would use the trade network to sell grain in a certain place, suppressing the price of grain in the whole region, so that they could buy grain at a very low price. And in disaster years, and even when there is a shortage of food due to disasters, Taoqiu merchants can rely on the local grain trading network to quickly push up the price of grain, so as to accumulate rich profits! Of course, in this process, they naturally need to share profits with local powerful factions!

With this method, the Taoqiu merchants defeated the grain-producing areas of several surrounding countries, allowing the local real power class to monopolize large tracts of local land, thus forming a deeper alliance of interests! And through such methods, the peasants in these areas will continue to go bankrupt, and the peasants in these places will be forced to leave the country to seek a new life!

Especially when the Three Jin Dynasty were defeated at Hangu Pass and the grain prices in Wei rose wildly, Taoqiu merchants made several cities in the west of Wei near the Song State directly defeated by Taoqiu and went bankrupt through this operation, and a large number of peasants lost their land and had to flee their land! And most of these peasants who ran away due to the loss of their land were absorbed by the Song State, which was in dire need of population!

For such a method of suppressing neighboring countries, Dai Yan does not feel the slightest guilt! In his opinion, the relationship between countries, especially between neighbors, is a competitive relationship! When your neighbor is strong, you are weak. In order to make himself strong, Song Guo must constantly bite the flesh from the surrounding countries to strengthen himself! Moreover, those bankrupt peasants who came to the Song Kingdom because they were suppressed by Taoqiu merchants were able to live better than before after absorbing advanced agricultural technology!

With the pricing power of grain prices, coupled with the huge transportation network, in fact, this time the battle of Cutting Yan, not only the food supply of the Song army, but also the Taoqiu merchants were responsible, and even most of the logistics supply of the Cutting Yan coalition army was in the hands of the Taoqiu merchants!

In addition to the fact that Zhongshan Kingdom is adjacent to Yan Kingdom, which directly supplies grain from border cities, even the grain of Qi Country itself is supplied by Taoqiu merchants!

Relying on the grain procurement system in Qi and even the surrounding Zhongshan Kingdom, Zhao State and even Yan State, Taoqiu merchants first collected a large amount of grain. And then through its strong transportation network, it is directly transported to the Yanqi border. And the final settlement is directly completed by each country's own domestic bank!

It can be said that except for some merchants who are in charge of the general command in Taoqiu, the entire collection, transportation, and settlement of grain have nothing to do with Taoqiu. However, the Taoqiu merchants can obtain a lot of benefits through this whole set of operations!

Under this efficient logistics transportation system, there is no logistical worries, and the actions of the entire Yanbian coalition army immediately become extremely efficient! This can be proved by practical examples!

It took nearly two months for the Yan coalition army outside Zhongshan to gather the more than 200,000 troops in Linzi. And at this time, on the border of Yan Qi, there were already more than millions of stones of grain for the Yan army!

Such an efficient efficiency of grain collection surprised the King of Qi and even the ministers of the Qi State! And the happiest about this is Kuang Zhang, the commander of the coalition army who commands the entire Yan Coalition Army!

Because there is no need to worry about logistics and transportation not being able to keep up with the speed of the march, the coalition forces can march as fast as they can! Under his leadership, the army of Fa Yan arrived at the Yanqi border from Linzi in just five days! Subsequently, under his personal leadership, the coalition army went straight to Yan Kingdom!

Zizhi, who had just become the king of Yan, thought that the coalition army organized by the Qi State would come soon, but he didn't expect that the speed of the coalition army could be so fast, but in just two months, the troops came to the city of Yan Kingdom!

He immediately hurriedly let the border army of Yan organize itself to fight back against the invasion of Yan by the coalition army. However, at such a time, the hearts of the people in the Yan Kingdom fluctuated, and the defenders on the border of Yan Qi had no intention of resisting, they did not obey Zizhi's orders at all, and surrendered directly to the coalition army led by Kuang Zhang!

Seeing such a scene, Zizhi was also a little flustered. Fortunately, he deserves to be a hero who can usurp the throne and become the king of Yan, and soon, he personally led the main force of the Yan army to Yicheng, the capital of Yan State, under the banner of "preserving the land of Yan Country for Yan people", to defend Yicheng, the capital of Yan Kingdom! He hopes to be able to resist the attack of the coalition army through such a strong city!

The first tough battle of the coalition army against Yan began to break out rapidly!