When Dai Yan popularized Keju and achieved great success in Taoqiu. Pen × fun × Pavilion www. ｂｉｑｕｇｅ。 infoHe's starting to struggle with the training of another class again.

He was to train cavalry!

Cavalry is different from infantry in that it is a highly technically demanding type of troops. Zhao is now carrying out the reform of Hufu cavalry and archery in the north, and in order to train a large number of qualified cavalry, it can be said that it costs a lot!

Compared with a northern power like Zhao, Taoqiu's strength is naturally much inferior to Zhao's, and in terms of the difficulty of cultivating cavalry, Taoqiu is even more difficult than Zhao's!

After all, Zhao Guo could train his troops by hunting on the grasslands of Taiyuan and Daibei, and Dai Yan only had the only grassland hunting ground in his hands, and it was far away from Fuli on the border of Song and Chu. In the core area of Dai Yan's rule, there was Taoqiu City, where there was no vast territory for Dai Yan to gallop and train cavalry.

In order to train cavalry, he first introduced the popular horse racing of Qi to Taoqiu, and was immediately welcomed by the rich people of Taoqiu!

After all, the horses in the Central Plains were very expensive in this era, and ordinary people couldn't even afford to hire a carriage, let alone play with horses.

However, Dai Yan soon discovered that although the sport of horse racing was quickly popular, it had extremely serious problems. It made all the best horses in the whole Taoqiu enter the arena, and those horses that went to the arena, as well as the knights on horseback, were almost at the worst level in the training of the cavalry! Although horse racing helps to promote horseback riding and train a group of knights, if you allow horse racing to train cavalry, then the cavalry combat effectiveness will be very poor!

Therefore, Dai Yan must have thought of training cavalry with strong offensive power, and he thought of polo in later generations!

Modern polo was discovered by the British in the mid-19th century from the northeastern Indian state of Assam, who made it the origin of polo and brought it to the world with the British influence around the world.

However, polo is a sport that was actually invented by the Chinese. At least in the Han Dynasty, there was the sport of polo in China, and people called polo a ju. Cao Zhi's "Famous Capital Chapter" once wrote about the polo playing grand occasion of "even riding and hitting the bow, clever and swift"!

And the most prosperous period of polo was the Tang Dynasty. During the Tang Dynasty, everyone loved polo from the common people to the princes and nobles, and even polo games entered the political game between the Tang Empire and the newly rising Tubo Empire.

During the reign of Emperor Zhongzong of the Tang Dynasty, in order to improve the relationship between the Tang Empire and Tubo, he sent Princess Jincheng to make peace with Tubo. At that time, the Tibetans were very contemptuous of the Tang Empire and put forward many rude conditions. Later, Tang Zhongzong heard that the Tubo people also liked to play polo, and there happened to be a polo team in the welcoming team, so he specially organized a polo match between the Tang Dynasty and the Tubo.

At the beginning, the Tang Dynasty lost one after another, and then Zhongzong sent the most powerful polo team in his hands regardless of identity or status, and the team members were composed of Li Longji, the king of Linzi, Li Yong, the king of Yu, and two horses, Yang Shenjiao and Wu Yanxiu! These four players are worthy of being the most powerful polo players in Datang, and as soon as they got on the field, they immediately turned the situation around and won the final victory! And after seeing the martial characteristics of the Tang Dynasty's elite class, Tubo also had to cancel those rude demands.

Compared with the conjecture that later generations thought that Tang Xuanzong Li Longji liked to "Ma Zhen" with Yang Guifei, this controversial emperor probably preferred to play polo on the court! Because in his later years, the emperor took Yang Guifei to Lishan Hot Spring for a vacation, and specially built a polo field near it!

Polo, on the other hand, is much more difficult than Keju, which is currently popular in Taoqiu! Think about how hard it is for an ordinary person to ride on a horse moving at high speed and use a cue stick to hit the ball into a specific goal!

And the danger caused by this kind of sport is also much greater than Kemari! When Keju, everyone is on the ground, and the biggest danger is nothing more than physical contact when everyone is grabbing the ball, and being intercepted by the opponent and falling down when grabbing the ball. Because on the ground, everyone's reaction time is also more sufficient, and the danger is actually not too high!

Polo, on the other hand, is very difficult to balance on a horse that is moving at high speed. If you don't have your balance in place at such a moment and you suddenly fall, you will definitely get hurt! If you happen to be unlucky at this time and are stepped on by the horse's hooves, the player may die on the spot!

When playing polo, unlike Kemari with his bare hands, players have "weapons" in their hands! Don't look at the polo cues are made of wood, but in the process of high-speed movement of horses, wood is also extremely lethal!

Therefore, as soon as Dai Yan began to promote polo, there were many casualties, among which there were even excellent knights from Zhao Xue who married to Taoqiu! Later, everyone loves and fears this sport, and the people who love it are naturally those enthusiastic spectators, and the people who are afraid are naturally those players who play on the field!

Later, although the sport began to be popular with the people of Taochu, its promotion became a big problem! After all, not everyone has the courage to walk between life and death every day!

Dai Yan had to find a way to solve the danger of this movement. Later, he discovered that among the injuries caused by polo, only the player's imbalance on the horse caused the most casualties!

In fact, it is easy to understand that there were no stirrups in this era, and the players of the polo team needed to hit the ball by holding the pole in both hands, so that the balance of the person on the horse completely depended on the lower body and the legs riding on the horse. When the players are playing, all they can do is rely on their legs tightly clamping the horse's body. In this way, the whole person is in an extremely tight state from hand to foot, and it is very common to fall from a horse.

To solve the balance of the polo player on the horse, it is actually very simple, as long as there are stirrups. Of course, no one in this era knows what stirrups look like, but Dai Yan is very clear! But when he took out the stirrup, he was extremely hesitant. Because this thing is an incomparably powerful weapon for nomads! If this technology is allowed to develop rapidly, it will sooner or later spread to the Zhao State in the north, and then to the grasslands in the north!

Dai Yan is also worried that the development of this technology in the grassland will cause a butterfly effect. In the context of the division of the following countries today, if the Wuhu Chaohua is allowed to come ahead of schedule, then it will be good to have to say goodbye!

However, after thinking about it, Dai Yan still brought up this technology. The emergence of a technology may indeed increase the opponent's military strength, but if he doesn't bring it up, I'm afraid this technology will still appear! After all, the principle of stirrups is not complicated, and it does not involve problems such as materials, it is purely a conceptual problem!

Stirrups are a perfect replica of a product with two ropes if needed. Of course, in order to improve the difficulty of the opponent's imitation, Dai Yan still chose to use iron to make it, and then use leather ropes to fix it on both sides of the horse's body.

Subsequently, in order to expand his future advantage in cavalry, Dai Yan also moved out the horseshoes, a big killing weapon!

A horseshoe is actually the equivalent of a horse's shoes.

The part where the horse's hooves come into contact with the ground is itself a hard keratin. This keratin is actually the same substance as the human fingernails. Due to the evolution of human beings, the keratin part gradually degenerated. However, the on the horse's hooves is still there.

If a horse is raised in a natural environment, the skin on the horse's hooves and the ground will wear down each other due to natural running, creating a balance between it. However, the horse farm owned by Taoqiu today is too small to have enough space for horses to run to their heart's content, so the horns on the hooves of horses in the pasture grow too fast! But in a short period of time, you will be able to fight with the fingernails of the old witch in the future!

Moreover, the on the horse's hooves, in the process of walking and even running, is actually easy to be split by the stones on the ground (think of their own fingernails forked), so that the horse is completely lame, let alone running, even walking is a problem!

Since Dai Yan invented polo, the consumption of horses in the entire Taoqiu has also risen sharply, and this consumption is unbearable for the young Taoqiu. In order for polo to continue to promote the sport, and even to create a strong cavalry in the future, it is necessary to invent a horseshoe nailed to the horse's shoe.

And the horseshoe, don't look at this thing is simple, but its requirements for materials are still very high. Because it is in contact with the ground for a long time, it not only requires high wear resistance, but also has high requirements for its toughness and hardness! In general, only mild steel can meet its requirements!

Fortunately, Taoqiu is now very developed in both iron-making and steel-making technology, and it is not a problem to make low-carbon steel, or even to create tiny iron nails that can be nailed to horseshoe! If you want to break through such a technology, you must first solve the problem of smelting low-carbon steel, Dai Yan can greatly improve the life cycle of his horses by mastering this technology, and if other countries want to imitate, if they can't smelt low-carbon steel, knowing this concept, they can't solve this problem!

With these relatively advanced harnesses, not only is the danger of polo much reduced, but the consumption of Taoqiu horses is also greatly reduced!

In order to protect the safety of the players and horses, Dai Yan soon made two kinds of whale shells from whale skins obtained from the whaling industry. One for soldiers and one for horses, and with the protection of these two types of armor, the casualties were quickly and greatly reduced.

Polo, like Keju, soon became loved by the entire Taoqiu people, and at the same time, countless people added to its hobby!

Dai Yan absorbed the advanced experience of Keju and applied it to polo, and also brought out stars similar to Gao Yu, which immediately made countless Taoqiu people who wanted to get ahead begin to participate in this sport! This kind of spontaneous movement among the people has also made the people of the entire Taoqiu continue to pursue famous horses! And the wealth of Taoqiu itself has also made countless good horses in the world begin to concentrate on Taoqiu!

And knights who can ride horses have also appeared in Taoqiu. Dai Yan asked Zhao Xue to train cavalry, and thus he had another high-quality source of soldiers!

Taoqiu soon had a strong light cavalry!

After improving the fighting quality of the Taoqiu people through two sports, Dai Yan promoted a number of sports to cultivate special talents. For example, fencing is used to train swordsmen, archery is used to train archers, and wrestling and weightlifting are used to train heavy infantry. These sports have produced talents in all aspects of Taoqiu, and Dai Yan has also cultivated a number of super technical troops!