After Chinese New Year's Eve, there is another New Year's Day pilgrimage, receiving envoys from various countries, being worshiped by hundreds of officials, and reviewing the three armies... And so on, all kinds of activities are arranged, and there are more things than usual. Although there are officials of the Ministry of Etiquette who have already taken care of everything, and there is no need for Zhao Ta, the emperor, to do anything, but every day the stars sit in a precarious position like the moon, and are surrounded by everyone to judge his head, so that he has to pay attention to his behavior, and even the subsections that he will not pay attention to on weekdays, otherwise he will be lost by ginseng, so he is tired this year!

Finally, after the lantern festival on the sixteenth day of the first lunar month, Zhao Ta was idle, but when he saw the piled up of several feet high on the case, there were a few black lines on his head, which were still sent by Shangshu Province after filtering, otherwise this hall would not be piled up. Worry is trouble, the Spring Festival holiday will end on the 22nd, and all departments have to go to work and wait for his instructions to be implemented, and they can only work overtime to review.

"Hehe, the pigeons have become eagles!" Zhao Ta flipped through the table and chuckled, the more he looked at it, the faster it was almost ten lines at a glance, including both Taixue students, as well as ministers and ministers from all over the country, and even the famous Confucians, although the words and pens are different, but the meaning is almost the same, in addition to singing praises and virtues, it is to recover Yanyun, conquer the power of Dading, and once again go north to Liaodong, go straight to Huanglong, destroy the Jurchen to welcome the King of Liao, and be ashamed before the snow.

"Second master, what kind of trick is this from a pigeon to an eagle?" Jianxi, who was serving on the side, heard the emperor muttering such an inexplicable sentence and asked in confusion.

"I'm just using an analogy, if a pigeon can become an eagle, won't the world be in chaos!" Zhao Ta sighed and said, from the recital, he could see that the blood of the Great Song Dynasty was stimulated by a victory, and he really thought that the Great Song Dynasty was already invincible in the world. One by one, they all rolled up their arms and sleeves to go to the battlefield, but they forgot to dissuade the emperor from reorganizing their armaments before the war. In the blink of an eye, it changed from dove to hawkish. For this kind of rapid change, it is not a good thing in Zhao Ta's view, it is a manifestation of fanaticism and irrationality. Lost his composure and treated the war as a child's play.

From an economic point of view, 'raising 10,000 soldiers, daily consumption of fighting money', this is still said in peacetime, in wartime it is more than doubled, people eat horses and feed do not count, casualties are compensated, war exploits are rewarded, weapons and horses are consumed to appease the local people, and so on. The cost is huge, it's all astronomical. The savings of several generations of emperors of the Han Empire, known as the rich and powerful, were spent by Emperor Wu Liu Che on several expeditions to the Western Regions, fulfilling his reputation as an emperor through the ages, but the Han Dynasty, which had exhausted his blood, also went downhill.

The battle to recover Yanyun lasted four months from preparation to the end of the battle, and the Great Song Dynasty mobilized all the forbidden troops and most of the state armies except Jiangnan, with more than 200,000 troops, as well as 60,000 or 70,000 requisitioned people. The military expenditure reached 6 million taels of silver, or 70 million copper coins, which was almost the entire financial revenue of the Great Song Dynasty in a year. Emptied of all the accumulations of Zhao Ta's ascension to the throne for four years, the remaining reserves in the arsenal were only enough to maintain the level required for the combat readiness of each army. And these are only war attrition, not counting the formation of a new army. Money and food needed to maintain the garrison.

Besides, everyone has a headache and brain fever, not to mention such a big country, something will not happen one day. In the event of a major natural and man-made disaster, the emperor could not solve the problem by just the little silver that the emperor took the lead in tightening his belt and saved from his mouth. If you persist in fighting regardless of the financial situation. There is nothing to do but raise taxes, but I am afraid that at that time, these people will scold the emperor again for being reckless and disregarding the people's livelihood.

Of course, this expedition relied on Zhao Ta's careful calculation. Dispatching the naval army to fight not only saved a lot of manpower to transport materials, but also played a surprise attack, and got all the savings of Wushu in Pingzhou for many years into his own pocket.

In addition, there is also a way to choose to send troops after the autumn, and the autumn high horse fat is a saying, and the recruitment of people will not delay the agricultural time. After the grain harvest in the Youyan area is completed, the people have grain in their hands, and the income from the fight against local tyrants will not repeat the year because of the lack of grain can only be transported from the country, and the result has become a bottomless pit, and it is no longer able to maintain it, dragging down the domestic economy, not to mention, it is also thankless to provoke the Yan people to make trouble, and they have taken refuge in the Jurchens.

Zhao Ta knew that it was the ambition of every emperor to expand his territory, sweep through the four provinces, and establish a demobilized and vast unified country, and he also wanted to establish a superpower 800 years early, spanning Asia, Europe and Africa, and it was best to even occupy the land of the United States in later generations. But he also knows that it is good for Lu Dao to have ambition, but he also has to consider the actual situation, because there are also big difficulties.

In the history of this world, there are many empires with vast territories, such as the ancient Roman Empire, which spanned the three continents of Europe, Asia and Africa; the Roman Empire, which exterminated the civilizations of ancient Greece, Carthage, and ancient Judea; The Mongol Empire, which almost conquered the world, once had vast territories. However, these empires almost never really existed, or they were short-lived before they fell apart and divided into countless states, unable to form a true unity.

In modern times, an airplane can circle the earth once a day, and a satellite phone can receive information from any corner of the world. But in ancient times, the traffic was backward, the speed of information transmission was slow, the border was overturned, and it took half a month to know the news here. Zhao Ta also took advantage of this to make a beautiful time difference and seize the opportunity. On the contrary, he will also face this problem, unable to grasp the situation changes in real time, resulting in the situation getting out of control.

In China, the Qin, Han, and Tang empires were also established with vast territories, dominating Asia, but they also inevitably perished, either destroyed by civil strife or killed by foreign enemies, although there were various reasons such as political corruption, social darkness, imperial mediocrity, and economic collapse in the later period. However, this has a lot to do with the fact that the increasingly broad territory has made it significantly more difficult for the central government to control and the central totalitarianism has declined.

Sun Tzu said: There is no reason on the way, the army does not attack, the city does not attack, and the land does not fight. On the other hand, it is 'the way must be taken, the army must be attacked, the city must be attacked, and the land must be fought for'. However, in the real world, there are very few absolute and absolute indisputable places, and the value of most regions and places will change with the distribution of forces and the change of the strategy of friend and foe.

How to abandon the indisputable and fight for the ground has become an important part of whether the balance of power can be effectively maintained. This requires consideration of the balance between goals and resources, and between interests and threats. If interests are defined only by threats, it is bound to be blindly attacked, resulting in a waste of resources. We must be clear about our interests, especially the scope of our geopolitical interests, and if we are invaded, we must resolutely fight back, otherwise we must remain silent and not start a war.

The Jin State is a very good example, at that time, the snake swallowed the Liao State with the overwhelming force of the mountains and the sea, and the result was indigestion, and the domestic contradictions could not be solved, so they could only blindly rely on war to resolve the contradictions. Even if there was no freak like Zhao Ta who came out of nowhere and disrupted history, there was no prosperous era that could go down in history, but had to gradually move south under the pressure of the newly rising power, and was finally wiped out by the Mongol tribes he had conquered.

Now that the Great Song Dynasty has just begun to revival, and the domestic contradictions have not been completely resolved, Zhao Ta is very aware that with the stability of the country, the population will grow non-stop, stimulating the growth of consumption and commerce, but at the same time, it has also brought about an obvious shortage of resources. More scholars are looking forward to official positions, more farmers need to plough the land, and more people need food and clothing. When these channels are not scaled synchronously, the contradictions start to accumulate. Then, when the contradictions could not be resolved, various problems began to arise and endanger the rulers. This requires changes and solutions to these problems in order to maintain the stability of the original social structure, the original political system and the country, so that a dynasty can last longer.

The invasion of the Jin State experienced by the Song Dynasty was actually far less important to the Chinese bureaucracy than the victory or defeat on the battlefield than the palace politics. Although Zhao's reforms temporarily reversed the decline of the traditional internal departments, they only strengthened the system that should have been changed, and all these efforts often had a temporary effect, but they were like the shiny fur attached to the rotten body of the internal organs, and this change was very fragile in the face of any test.

Now that the Song army has captured Dadingfu in one fell swoop, it has formed the first line of defense with it as the outer edge; the second line of defense with Datong, Yanjing and Lingzhou as support points; Then there is the third line of defense formed by the natural hazards of the Yellow River, which ensures the safety of the Central Plains, and this circle also includes all the richest and most prosperous lands in East Asia. And outside the circle is either bitter cold, or barren land, except for livestock, there is nothing worth looting, and every year it has to take out a lot of money and energy to operate, it can be said that it is a big hole that is not satisfied, even in modern times, the state has to come up with a huge amount of financial subsidies.

But Zhao Ta knew that there was oil, coal and various minerals in the ground on the side of the road, but it could not be mined in this era, nor could it be effectively used, and no one could snatch it away. Therefore, you can put these places down for the time being, and the priority is not how to get all the good things in the world world into your own hands. Instead, we should rein in our ambition to unify the world and the world, lay a good foundation, build a solid foundation, and properly manage the one-third of an acre of land that we have acquired, and at the same time selectively seize strategic points to lay the foundation for future breakthroughs, instead of blindly attacking, occupying new territory, and carrying more burdens on our backs.

Zhao Ta thought well, but the people's voices couldn't ignore it, how to cool down their feverish heads, temporarily divert their attention from the establishment of immortal martial arts, and use this enthusiasm to achieve their own ideas... (To be continued......)