Chapter 684: Milian Yarkand
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In order to build this heavy cavalry force, Zhu Youzhen can be said to be regardless of the cost. Pen, fun, and www.biquge.info
At present, there are two main sources of horses for the Qin soldiers, one is to spend money to buy, and the other is to capture them in the battle with the thieves. But the thieves' horses were of poor quality and could only be barely used as light cavalry, unable to bear more weight. Therefore, the real good horses still have to be bought by the Yellow Sea merchants.
And because Zhu Youzhen forbade any kind of business with the Mongols and Jurchens, he could not get Mongolian horses. At the moment, he can only buy two kinds of horses, one is a Tibetan horse provided by a Tibetan merchant, and the other is a purebred Dawan horse provided by a merchant in Yili Shori.
Tibetan horses are plateau horses with excellent endurance, but their explosive power is slightly poor, and they are not a suitable choice for heavy cavalry, so Zhu Youzhen did not introduce a large number of them. In the future, after the chariot battalion and artillery battalion are gradually completed, Tibetan horses can be used as military force, of course, this is a later story.
In comparison, the Dawan horse has a full and graceful body, slender limbs, and a strong gait, which is far superior to the short Mongolian horse in terms of physique, and has amazing explosive power. Because the skin is thinner, the sweat glands are developed, and the Dawan horse is mostly jujube red or maroon, after the horse runs and sweats, the color is more vivid, as if bleeding, so it has the name of "sweat and blood BMW". Back then, Li Chongyao's mount was a bloody horse, but unfortunately his soul had returned to the grassland.
Zhu Youzhen bought a few Dawan horses from Yili to the merchant Alu Buhua, and then personally tested their foot strength. He was pleasantly surprised to find that Dawan Ma's ability to sprint short distances was so amazing, and he meditated in his mind for about a minute, and the horse had already run two miles! And his own mount, the Jujube Red Horse, was given by Da Yu'er, and it was a typical Mongolian horse. Although the foot strength is also good, the short race with the Dawan horse was pulled off in less than a few seconds.
And the magic weapon of the heavy cavalry against the light cavalry is the ability to sprint short distances. Because the physical strength of war horses is limited after all, if they carry more than 100 catties of weight and pursue Mongolian horses with long endurance over long distances, they will undoubtedly repeat the mistakes of the European cavalry in those years. The heavy cavalry that Zhu Youzhen wants to build is the explosive power of the moment of engagement, and if the enemy tries to use the tactic of "flying kites" to lure himself to attack, he will have to stop chasing him.
As the saying goes, no businessman is not treacherous, and when Alu Buhua found out that the Huanghai Merchant Gang was very interested in his Dawan horse, he immediately sat on the ground and raised the price. Originally, the price of a horse for a hundred taels of gold was already very outrageous, and he wanted to double the price again.
Zhu Youzhen is not wronged, he is very clear about the market price of horses. Since horses were not produced in the Central Plains, the imperial court wanted to use horses in the past, and mainly relied on the purchase of "tea and horse exchange" from merchants in Liaodong, Mongolia and the Western Regions. In peacetime, horse cheap tea is expensive, and a good horse can be exchanged for a hundred catties of tea. Later, with the increase of wars and the hostility with the Jurchens in Liaodong, horses gradually became a shunt-after commodity, and the price rose several times, but the discount of silver was only a few dozen taels. And a Dawan horse costs a hundred taels of gold, and the silver is about nine hundred taels, and the price wants to rise, this Alu is too capable of killing people if it doesn't spend!
But Aru didn't spend on Dawan Horse alone, and resolutely refused to reduce the price at the beginning. In order to deal with him, Zhu Youzhen also had to investigate his details in detail, and by the way, he learned about the history and situation of the Western Regions.
It turns out that the so-called "Yili Sholi" is not actually the name of a country, but the name of a place. "Yili" is the Ili of the previous life, and "Jiangli" means city in Mongolian. Yili was actually the capital of the Chagatai Khanate, one of the four great khanates of Mongolia. Now the Chagatai Khanate has long since perished, and it has been replaced by the Yarkand Khanate. However, after the decline of the Ming Dynasty's national power, it was no longer able to control the vast map west of Jiayuguan, and it also lacked understanding of the Western Regions.
The Yarkand people are Turkic people of Mongol descent who profess Islam. Since the destruction of the Chagatai Khanate, they have controlled a vast area from the Tianshan Mountains in the north, the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in the south, the Jiayuguan Pass in the east, and the Green Mountains in the west, for nearly 100 years, and have maintained a nominal tributary relationship with the Ming Dynasty, and trade has been intermittent.
But the Yarkand Khanate also had its own henchmen, namely the Dzungar tribe, which was rapidly rising to the north.
Dzungaria is a branch of Mongolia. After the fall of the Mongol Yuan, the tribes on the Mongolian Plateau fell into fragmentation again, and the most powerful one of them was called Warat, and it was the Warat Taishi who caused the change of the civil fort that year. However, now the Warat has also been divided, and there are four of the more powerful ones, namely the Hoshte, Dzungar, Dulbert and Turgot. After the rise of the Dzungar tribes, they defeated the other three tribes, and Heshute ran south to Qinghai, Dulbert to the east to Kobdo, and Turghut to the west near the Caspian Sea.
The Dzungars then pointed the spearhead of their expansion at Yarkand, and in recent years they have defeated Yarkand's army several times in a row, occupying large areas of land south of the Tien Shan.
This Aru Buhua was the closest person of Abdul Rain, the Sultan of Yarkand, otherwise the Sultan would not have handed over such lucrative trade power to him.
After understanding these circumstances, Zhu Youzhen thought about history again, didn't this Junggar department later produce a Galdan who made trouble in the northwest during the Kangxi period of the Qing Dynasty? Galdan tried to restore the former glory of the Mongols, fought with the Manchus for many years, and finally failed to defeat the Manchus, and conspired to collude with the Russians to intervene. The Manchus, anxious to pacify Galdan, made large concessions in the Treaty of Nebuchu, allowing the Russians to occupy a vast area beyond the Trans-Khingan Mountains and the Ergun River at once, making great gains, laying the foundation for its decline and fall 200 years later. From this point of view, the military force of Dzungaria and the Manchu Qing Dynasty are the same as the raccoon dogs, and they are both sinners of the Chinese nation through the ages.
Therefore, Zhu Youzhen made a move and secretly met with Alu Buhua in Xi'an. For the sake of safety, he still did not reveal his true identity, but he also threw a bombshell: he was the patron of the Qin soldiers, and there were tens of thousands of troops under his command!
Immediately afterwards, Zhu Youzhen put forward a condition that made it difficult for the Yarkand people to refuse: as long as Aru did not spend money on supplying Dawan horses at the previous price, within three years, the Qin soldiers would go west out of Jiayuguan to help Yarkand eliminate Dzungaria!
Alu Buhua is an extremely shrewd businessman, for many years the thieves have ravaged the northwest, and the Qin soldiers have defeated the thieves again, and he has seen them one by one. If such a strong army goes to fight to the death with the Dzungar department, and Yarkand sits and reaps the profits, he will be more reused by the Sultan, and at the same time he will earn a high profit from Dawan Ma, so why not.
Of course, at the beginning, Alu Buhua did not believe that Zhu Youzhen could really control the Qin soldiers, and he put forward a condition that he thought was quite harsh.