Chapter 214 Settle the Qarakhanid State

In 1955, a major event occurred on the western border of Gaochang that shocked the world, unlike the robbery that occurred a few years ago, when the Mongolian horse team that went to the Qarakhanid to do business was robbed by a Qarakhanid nobleman and was sanctioned by trade, the khanate of the Qarakhanid was assassinated by the Gaochang faction. The Chinese Empire, as the protectorate of Gaochang, immediately activated the border guards stationed in the Kunlun Mountains under the framework of the military alliance agreement, and attacked the capital of the Eastern Qarakhanid State with lightning speed. When Gaochang's camel cavalry and a large number of siege troops had just arrived at Balasagon, an important town in the northeast of the Qarakhanid as planned, the Chinese Empire had already announced that the Eastern Qarakhanid State had been destroyed, and the empire had taken over the territory south of its capital, and the territory north of it would be occupied by Gaochang.

Since Aksu, the largest town in the west of Gaochang (the fortress that the empire helped to expand), is less than 300 kilometers away from the border between Gaochang and the Eastern Qarakhanids, and only 500 kilometers away from Shule (Kashgar), the capital of the Eastern Qarakhanids, this is really no strategic depth, and this distance, even better cavalry can run in 3 days. As the last great power in Asia that has not been taken, the Qarakhanid State is indeed an existence that worries the hearts of the traversers.

At the 1952 annual military conference, Li Ji used an apt analogy: 'The two Karakhanids are like two grains of rice on the soles of the feet, which are uncomfortable if they are not removed, and cannot be eaten as food. Indeed, after decades of mutual intrigues and wars, the Eastern and Western Qarakhanids have long since lost the prosperity of the Khasan Khan. At this time, the territory under the control of the Qarakhanid State was destroyed by a long war. The devastated commercial cities and nomadic tribes of the past, which were rich in water and grass, were no longer able to support the increasingly onerous military spending and taxes. The population was also lost and killed in the war, and if it were not for the vast and sparsely populated area of the Qarakhanid at this time, it would still be able to carry a certain amount of population and unproductive wealth consumption. The Khan's control over the localities and the state had long since dissolved on its own.

At this time, the two Turkic states had a combined population of only 3 million, and their purchasing power was not comparable to that of the 500,000 counties in the interior of Goryeo, which had been repeatedly raided (the coastal areas were always rich with the support of trade and fishing).

This kind of country with poor people has neither the value of occupation (the motivation of colonization or dumping), nor the need to occupy (the theory of land power and the strategic value of the world island are worthless in the eyes of the traversal, and under the premise of the modern three-dimensional national defense model, the cavalry infestation of the nomads is simply a joke), so the traversal masses only regard this early feudal state with a highly decentralized structure of power that is slightly higher than the tribal alliance state as a piece of chicken ribs. Although the territory is large, the Central Asian region, which can only have a little value in the oil age, has always been ranked at the bottom of the list of raiders.

Unfortunately, the Qarakhanid took it upon themselves to commit suicide and in 1953 plundered a large number of horse caravans. A vassal of Ahmad robbed a caravan of 400 men on a trade route from Mongolia 20 kilometers from the border, which was the advance party of Chagatai, a member of the Arctic expedition that Zhao Long had secretly sent to the far northwest region to explore, and who had recruited guards from the barbarian tribes in western Mongolia. Chagatai is the only member of the team who is in charge of the codebook and military map. Others were hired as fronts and guards.

Chagatai finally gathered the information after more than 30 in-depth trade with the Qarakhanid Kingdom, and it was planted in the last mission that was about to be completed, but it was only after this perfect plan for the advance team of the western expedition was destroyed by the greedy nobles of the Qarakhanid State that the Chinese Empire obtained this even more rare interface to blockade the Karakhanate.

Chagatai's death is a secret, and a secret that crosses all hopes. Then he's an eternal secret.

Among the members of the Mongolian caravan escort who were released again was a clever old fritter, who had taken the chagatai hidden in his boots and a silk-wrapped atlas, and was disposed of by the intelligence officers arranged on the way back.

With a perfectly prepared empire, with the premise of having a mind and not being mindful. It is not easy to destroy a country that has been blocked by trade to the point of collapse. The most important products needed by this purely inland nomadic nation, which was not close to the sea, were not the commodities provided by a subsistence small-scale peasant economy, such as grain or cloth, but the iron, tea, and medicine that every nomad needed.

A few years ago, the Qarakhanid Empire, which had signed a free trade agreement, lost a large amount of gold, silver, industrial and commercial production capacity under the baptism of a large number of high-quality and cheap goods of the empire, and the handicraft industry that was killed in seconds and the growing export raw material industry of leather, wool, ore and other industries became the new industrial pattern of the Qarakhanid.

Just ask me, how can a country that cannot produce even crude arrows on its own resist a modern country with an air force?

The poor Turkic magnates were at once stripped of all their possessions and rights, and became captives of the newly occupied landowners. These pampered elites are not thoroughly pro-China and have close working relationships with domestic crossers or partners. Most of them were sentenced to hard labor and hanging for a long time. The reason is simple, they are all robbers and war criminals.

The Western Qarakhanids, defeated by the Seljuks, had in fact become nominal allies long ago. It's very simple, Seljuk is the suzerainty of the Western Qarakhanid State and an ally of the Chinese Empire, so naturally the Western Qarakhanid State is an ally of the Chinese Empire.

Therefore, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs had already sent a note to the Seljuk Empire that it had gathered 20,000 elite cavalry in the east to flank the local remnants of the Eastern Qarakhanid, and demarcated the border between the two countries as the line from Samarkand to Dushanbe, drawing the entire Green Mountains into its own territory.

The deal was clearly a good deal, and the Seljuks had no trouble gaining the full obedience of the entire Western Qarakhanid (failure to obey would result in a purge by the pagan Chinese Empire, at least the Seljuks would not revoke their privileges and fiefdoms). Sultan Malikshah, who was far away in Baghdad, also appreciated and recognized the goodwill of the empire, and the two sides held a conference on the partition of Central Asia in Samarkand, completely ignoring the idea of the ownership and power of the Eastern and Western Qarakhanids.

Some Turkic magnates who had hoped to retain the legal system of the Qarakhanid had to accept the reality that the cooperation between the two great empires of the East and the West could not resist the two Qarakhanids, whose people were exhausted by civil war.

After the Conference of Samarkand, the Seljuk and the Chinese Empire became the second pair of world empires to directly border Central Asia after the Tang Empire and the Arab Empire.

The benefits of this direct proximity are clear: years of war across Central Asia were extinguished almost overnight, and the ruined commercial cities were revived, and a new wave of trade began to be completely embroiled.

Almost overnight, the newly established free zone in Samarkand, a major transportation route, was filled with merchants from all corners of the world (Caspian Sea, Aral Sea, Red Sea, Arabian Sea, Lake Balkhash, Issyk-Kul, Dead Sea, Lake Baikal and Lop Nur), and the nomadic tribes everywhere regained orders for meat, skins, horns, tendons, plush, and dairy products, and all seemed to be happy only with the blood and tears of the Qarakhanid magnates who had been high up and oppressed the masses.

Once the grassroots are resolved, all the turmoil, madness, rebellion, conspiracy and rebellion at the top are floating clouds. It was almost a matter of course to directly appoint pro-Chinese factions as local officials after they had spent military control, and because of the scarcity of oil and water and the inconvenience of transportation, there were basically no Han officials willing to come to participate in the governance work, so local elders and pro-China agents who knew the people's livelihood implemented a plateau-like autonomy policy.

The newly conquered region became the Western Frontier Province of the Empire, becoming the latest newly conquered region and the westernmost inland territory of the Empire. (To be continued......)