After the Shangyuan Festival in the seventh year of Tianbao, Dai Wang, who was hiding in Shule Town and secretly planning trade routes, wrote a long letter to Li Siye, in which he described the results of last year. Dai Wang personally organized several people to go to India and learn about some of the known difficulties on the trade routes.

Pepper grows in the vicinity of Qunucheng, and is wild and grows less, and Dai Wang wrote here in a letter that the land in the Ganges River valley is fertile, a flat river, a variety of spice plants, and many things to the point of envy. Almost all the spices of Datang come from here, and people only need to go to the forest to pick them, and they don't need to plant them at all.

Such a rich place, but it was divided, and they had to pass through parts of Kashmir, ruled by Lalita Diedo, and two other small kingdoms, and the ruler of the city was Yesa Poman, who occupied only the periphery of the city.

Dai Liulang is good at thinking, the land he saw in India is very flat, even the mountain peaks are gentle like arcs, there is no geographical dividing line, and there is no Yangtze River and Hengduan Mountain Range, but this vast plain rich in resources is fragmented, and there are as many as dozens or hundreds of city-states.

This situation made Dai Liulang ponder, the terrain of India is much flatter than that of the Tang Dynasty, and the products here are far richer than the Tang Dynasty, why there is no long-term unified country here. What Ashoka, the Peacock King can only be a glorious generation, and immediately after his death, he was torn apart.

If he could understand this, he could be called a saint or a philosopher. Li Siye couldn't answer him, he only knew that this should be a combination of geography and culture, maybe India's land resources and wild plant resources are too abundant? The bad situation is so good that you don't need to mobilize too many people for big projects? So there is no need to develop into a whole.

The more countries he passed, the more money and effort he expended, and like a high monk in the past, he traveled through four countries on the land, asking for meetings with their lords, and giving precious silk and paper as gifts. The kings were also glad to allow him to do business, live and build strongholds within the territory of the country, and gave him the title of nobility to facilitate his movement within the territory.

In particular, the king of Qunu City, Yesa Poman, Dai Liulang spent more effort on this lord, and twice brought silk, paper, Shu brocade, three-color and chiseled gold hairpins, which attracted the favor of the lord. As a result, the lord of the country recommended him to join the Brahmanical religion, and also obtained a pepper-dense territory in the northwest of Qunu City, and became a nobleman in the territory.

Seeing this, Li Siye was quite speechless, in order to do business, he could even change his religious beliefs, and there was no one left.

Dai Liulang then stated the reason why he joined Brahmanism, because Brahmanism prescribes four ranks, which evolve according to the body of the god Brahma, the head represents the Brahmin, the arms and torso represent the Kshatriyas, the legs represent the Vaishyas, the feet represent the Shudras, and the vast number of untouchables who are not accepted by Brahmanism and are excluded as dirt outside Brahmanism. This is the real class solidification, under the oppression of this religious system atmosphere, it is absolutely impossible to say that the princes and generals will be the prime ministers, and it is estimated that they will not even dare to have such thoughts.

Dai Wang was introduced by the Brahmin of Yesa Poman and became the second Kshatriya nobility of the caste system. The advantage of being a Kshatriya is that he can exploit the lower Vaishyas and Shudras at will, as well as untouchable slaves without caste, all of which are free labor, and when he builds a pepper plantation in his territory in the future, free slaves can minimize the cost of raw materials.

Brahmanism in Dai Wang's hands is like a tool that can be used, just for the sake of grabbing profits, and he still behaves like the unscrupulous household official in the past, maintaining a calm ability to analyze and judge, and any religion and figure is a pawn that can be used in his eyes. And the mask on his face also gives people a sense of mystery, and it is a pity that it is not a mysterious and elegant nobleman.

Fortunately, he is now serving Li Siye.

In this way, it seems that Dai Wang's affairs in India's raw materials have been paved, and this year it may be necessary to build a commercial post station of the transfer station type from Xiaobolu to Qunucheng, which may cost a lot of money. I don't know if the box of gold he prepared to guard the city in the Green Ridge is enough for him to spoil it.

Dai Wang has achieved initial results in India, and he hopes that he can also develop in Beiting.

He wanted to expand his military strength, but the fixed quota given to him by the imperial court was so many people, and there was no war to falsely report battlefield casualties, so expanding the army would not be very effective.

The local population of Tingzhou is small, and it is somewhat unrealistic to recruit troops from the local area, and the armor and weapons rationed by the imperial court are all fixed, so you have customized so many sets of armor from the Northern Capital Weapons Supervisor of the Chang'an Shaofu Supervisor for no reason, what are you doing with it, how can you not arouse suspicion?

Li Siye got some news from the Central Plains that due to the relaxation of the military system, the Zhichong Mansion and the captains of the Zhichong Prefecture became useless and cheap, and a large number of people tried every means to break away from the identity of the government soldiers, and then formed a kind of social public opinion that looked down on the soldiers.

Because it is now at the peak of the prosperous era of the Tang Dynasty, everyone is pursuing wealth and forgetting their duties, and many people in Chang'an, Luoyang, and Yangzhou have forgotten that the border passes are still in the baptism of war, and they have forgotten the instinct to be prepared for danger in times of peace.

Serving as a soldier has become a profession that they despise, as if all young people who grow up should study and take scientific examinations, no matter how poor they are, they have to go to farming to create wealth to support their families, and if they can't do it, they can also go to business, which is really unproductive, and only those who don't have these skills should go to be soldiers and eat military rations, as for the meaning of protecting their families and defending the country, they have completely forgotten it.

The army of Chang'an is full of some broken households and scoundrels and homeless people, and the army of the border passes, the proportion of Hu people is getting higher and higher, and even some people think that the profession of being a soldier should be done by these homeless people who have no property and those Hu people who can only herd sheep, and the more prosperous and wealthy places, the more they think that being a soldier is a lowly profession.

This kind of thinking really makes Li Siye feel worried, the Tang Dynasty did not build the Great Wall, and the erection of the defense line relied on the ten knots and the more than 600,000 soldiers under their command, if the idea of being a soldier is useless is propagated from now on, then when the Anshi Rebellion occurs, who else can restore order in the chaos?

Li Siye also felt that many people in his three armies in Beiting had such ideological transmission, which made Li Siye feel a kind of crisis, if the Tang Army itself denied itself, then what was the point of them guarding the frontier for the country?

He believes that the ideological system of the army should be reshaped, so that they can pick up the values of honorable soldiers and loyal to the monarch and defend the country, because this is in line with the traditional concept of Confucianism, coupled with the distinctive deeds of people, it plays a role model for learning.

Most of the Tang people admired the Han Dynasty and looked down on the dynasty, and even the nobles regarded the ancestors and nobles who continued to the Han Dynasty as glory. This should be a kind of mentality of human beings, just like the people of the Tang Dynasty looked down on themselves and admired the Han Dynasty, the people of the Song Dynasty looked down on themselves and admired the Tang Dynasty, and the people of the Ming Dynasty also admired the Tang Dynasty and wanted to restore the clothes of the Han and Tang Dynasties.

There are indeed many examples worth learning from the sages of the Han Dynasty, such as Wei Qinghuo Quai, Chen Tang Ma Yuan, and Zhang Qian Su Wu, the heroic deeds of these people, how many people in the current Tang Dynasty can catch up?