After Li Xu heard that his eldest brother was killed, he expressed his grief and wrote a letter to Li Guangbi and the three armies, saying that his brother was pure and good by nature, how could he be opposed? It must have been bewitched by others, and I was overwhelmed with grief, so I gave him a generous burial with the gift of the prince and Yunzhou.

When Li Xu personally issued an order to ask Li Guangbi and others to investigate and purge the people involved in the rebellion, it was written in a big red pen that it was better to kill by mistake than to indulge, and the prime minister Xu Bin beside him was already terrified.

Is Li Xu's purpose just to purge the rebels? He used blood to show his eloquence, used means to highlight his iron will, and used his brother's rebellion to completely uproot the problem of tooth soldiers in Hebei, or used blood to implement the policy of paying taxes for the whole people.

Li Guangbi naturally understood this, and immediately organized thousands of officials to interrogate, and finally asked more than 8,000 Hebei Ya people who participated in the rebellion to be sentenced to death, and a large number of middle and lower-ranking lieutenants, Lang will be killed. Li Xu's purge did not stop there, he also ordered Li Guangbi to investigate Li Chongbao's staff group, the local officials of Youzhou, and the following officials, involving the Li family, the Pei family, and the Wang family in the old Longyou, but those involved were all killed by questioning. In the end, a total of 20,000 people involved in Li Chongbao's rebellion were killed, and 50,000 or 60,000 were exiled to Tuntian, the capital of Anxi.

After the Li Chongbao case, the whole country was silent, and no one objected to the new tax system. In order to show that he set an example, Emperor Li Xu abolished the imperial field system and awarded more than 20,000 acres of Huangtian located on the bank of the Wei River to the soldiers who had made meritorious contributions in the war, indicating that no one in the whole country except for the recruitment in the service was allowed to evade the Tiansang tax, otherwise he would be punished with heavy punishment.

But this was not considered clearly for the emperor. An emperor has a treasury and his own private treasury. In order to maintain the operation of the huge palace, as well as the repair and maintenance of the royal gardens, a huge amount of money is needed to support it. Because he himself issued an edict stipulating that the emperor was not allowed to use the treasury, how could he repent, and the cancellation of the imperial field also cut off the emperor's source of income, seeing that the private treasury was gradually empty, Li Xu had no choice, and he fell into a financial crisis.

Rongguo Gong Michagan wrote to the emperor and proposed to the emperor to restore the Western Regions Chamber of Commerce, and for example, the first emperor operated the Western Regions in the northwest court of Anxi for just ten years, and accumulated a lot of wealth, which maintained the rapid rise of their Li family and the pacification of the world in the entire Anshi Rebellion, and was able to withstand five or six years of war attrition, which also shows that its amount is huge.

Li Xu knew these things very clearly, and immediately agreed with Michagan's suggestion, and appointed him as the president of the Western Regions Chamber of Commerce, responsible for the commerce and trade of the entire Western Regions, and at the same time sent an order to the officials of Hexi, Anxi, and Beiting, asking them to fully cooperate with the Western Regions Chamber of Commerce.

Michagan himself is a Sogdian, and he has been doing business all year round before following Li Siye, so that he can re-establish the Western Regions Chamber of Commerce is a professional in the art industry, but he did not dare to take it lightly, and hurriedly went to ask for advice from the former president of the Western Regions Chamber of Commerce, that is, Xu Bin, the current prime minister of Dayong, who has been staying at Xu Bin's house for seven days and seven nights, only to gain a large number of account books and information experience, and also gathered the survivors of the old people of the Western Regions Chamber of Commerce to reopen up business routes.

It's just that after many years, the situation in the Western Regions is no longer what it was at the beginning, and the nine Sogdian Zhaowu Divisions in Hezhong have long been controlled by the black-clothed food. However, the Gangetic plain of India west of the Kabul Pass in the Hindu Kush Mountains was controlled by Zhao Congfang, who hired a large number of Sogdian warriors to enter the city of Qunu as the Imperial Forest Army, and regarded the whole of India as his own one-third of an acre.

India, as the richest raw material base, has a large amount of pepper and spices, and has very fertile land, Michagan wants to reopen the Western Regions Chamber of Commerce, must restore the strength of the Western Regions before Tang Tianbao, the veteran Bai Xiaode was also reappointed by the emperor as the envoy of Anxi Jiedu and the protector of Anxi, and in just one and a half years to defeat the Great Food to regain control of the Zhaowu Nine Kingdoms, and specially mobilized Xuanwu artillery from Tingzhou, entered the Khyber Pass of the Hindu Kush Mountain, and used artillery to break the short city wall built by Zhao Congfang, Invaded the territory of India.

At this time, Zhao Congfang had died of illness, and his son Zhao Guanghe succeeded him, because the old Tang army under his command missed his homeland, and the loyalty of the Sogdians was generally low, so the army he sent was defeated in the first round when it encountered the Yong army, and then recruited a large number of Indian fourth-class untouchables to join the army, but how could these people give their lives to the people who enslaved them, and they fled on a large scale as soon as they encountered the Yong army on the battlefield, causing the Sogdian army to retreat and flee.

Since the top echelons of the Zhao dynasty army were all Han Chinese, they had a natural affinity for the Anxi Protectorate army that came to them, and Zhao Guanghe's foundation was unstable, most of them persuaded him to surrender.

Before Bai Xiaode's army had crossed the Indus River, Zhao Guanghe sent people from Qunu City to ask for surrender, expressing his willingness to surrender to Dayong. Bai Xiaode readily agreed, and he brought Zhao Guanghe and all the Han Chinese who had not returned to their hometown in India for nearly 20 years back to Chang'an.

Emperor Li Xu was naturally overjoyed, and he named Zhao Guanghe the Marquis of Providence and gave him a residence in Chang'an, and the rest of the people who had been stationed in India also received rewards for land, silk and money.

After Bai Xiaode replaced Zhao Guanghe to occupy India, he naturally did not have the ability to govern such a large place, the area of Anxi and Zhaowu Nine Kingdoms was large enough, how could one more India be able to dominate? So he asked Emperor Li Xu what he should do?

Li Xu said that this was easy to do, and he immediately crowned himself the emperor of India, becoming the first emperor to hold two positions, but he could not personally manage the affairs of India, nor could he divide the administrative divisions of many states like Kyushu in the Central Plains and send officials to the far west.

He finally decided to hand over the management of India to Michagan, the president of the Western Regions Chamber of Commerce, and asked him to manage India in the same way as the Chamber of Commerce. Isn't the greatest ability of the Chamber of Commerce to plunder and accumulate wealth? India now has all sorts of small states, dividing them all into states, and at the same time creating hatred between these states, making it impossible for them to unite. At the same time, he increased the segregation between castes, and Zhao Congfang's original fifth caste could be used directly, stipulating that the fifth caste and the Brahmins were privileged, and the Kshatriyas were secondary, further deepening the barriers between the castes, which was very conducive to the rule of the Western Regions Chamber of Commerce over the whole of India.

As long as a small number of Brahmins and Kshatriyas are used and they are allowed to squeeze the Vaishyas, Shudras, and Dalits at the bottom, the cost of ruling will be infinitely reduced.

Michagan opened up a large number of pepper and spice plantations in India, and at the same time requisitioned a large number of Shudra and Dalit slaves, and hired Vaishyas as overseers, which caused the operating costs of the Western Regions Chamber of Commerce to fall again. He raised a mixed Sogdian army of 20,000 Han Chinese raised by Zhao Congfang and Zhao Guanghe's father and son, and used it to maintain his rule throughout India.

The reopening of the Silk Road made the Western Regions Chamber of Commerce snowball, employing as many as 10,000 staff members, and earning 130,000 catties of gold per year from Dashi and European merchants alone. Although seventy percent of the income had to be handed over to the emperor and the treasury every year, the total wealth of the Western Regions Chamber of Commerce still reached 1.9 billion guan, equivalent to 800 million horses of purple silk and ripe silk. The Western Regions Chamber of Commerce pays one-third of the country's total tax revenue every year.

The large-scale plundering made the society of the Yong Dynasty unprecedentedly prosperous, and it only took more than ten years to approach the Tianbao period. Emperor Li Xu, who tasted the sweetness of colonization, was worried that the Western Regions Chamber of Commerce would be out of his control on the one hand, and on the other hand, he wanted to increase industrial expansion to increase plunder.

At the beginning of the year, Hubu Shangshu Wei Yingwu submitted a table to the emperor, listing in detail the development scale of the Western Regions Chamber of Commerce, and asked the emperor to be wary of the Western Regions Chamber of Commerce's large scale and rich countries.

It is impossible for Li Xu to give up such a money-making machine, and the majority of wealthy families have lost their tax exemption rights because of the acres of land, so they also turned their attention to the trade routes, acting as partners of the Western Regions Chamber of Commerce, and constantly sending camel teams westward to transport goods. At this time, no one disliked the low level of merchants, and even began to compete frantically with the Sogdians.

At this time, Qiu Liuqi, a pirate-turned-merchant in Guangzhou, sailed from Guangzhou through the Strait of Malacca to India, and when he saw the plantation run by the Western Regions Chamber of Commerce, he suddenly wanted to take a ship back to Guangzhou, and then came to Chang'an to try to meet the emperor.

Qiu Liuqi bribed the emperor's confidant eunuch and wrote his idea into a song and handed it to the emperor, Li Xu was overjoyed after reading it, and immediately summoned Qiu Liuqi into the palace.

Qiu Liuqi spread out a nautical chart in front of the emperor, told him in detail about the convenience of sea transportation, and also told him about the rich resources of the Nanyang island countries, and he said to the emperor that as long as His Majesty uses manpower to open up a few docks overseas, he can continuously exchange for a large amount of wealth, and can save the huge cost of land transportation of the Western Regions Chamber of Commerce.

Emperor Li Xu naturally did not consider it so simply, not only did he need another chamber of commerce to break the monopoly of the Western Regions Chamber of Commerce in India, but he was also unwilling to limit his plunder of India to spices and pepper. The criterion for the prosperity of an agrarian society is the size of the population and the per capita availability of grain, and although the unprecedented development of the trade routes in the Western Regions has brought the possession of social wealth to a high level, it will take some time for the destruction of agriculture caused by the war to recover. He wanted to expand his rice fields in India and bring back a large amount of grain to keep the country's food prices low.

Li Xu appointed Qiu Liuqi as the president of the Nanyang Chamber of Commerce, responsible for the preparation of ocean-going merchant ships, and at the same time ordered the expansion of gunboat production, split the Yangtze River Naval Division into a Nanyang Naval Division, and appointed Li Sheng, a former general of the Tang Dynasty, as the chief of the Nanyang Naval Division, mainly responsible for maintaining the operation of the trade routes.

Qiu Liuqi established more than 20 land and water wharves along the coast of India, and began to use sea ships to transport goods back, pepper and other spices cargo volume expanded four or five times at once, in just two years, the price of pepper dropped from 600 per catty to 130 per catty, the decline in prices made pepper and other spices no longer a luxury for the aristocracy, but also successfully entered the dining table of ordinary people.

Of course, Qiu Liuqi could not forget the emperor's request, and he ordered people to bring the improved varieties selected from the rice in the south of the Yangtze River to India by ship, and transported them to the local area for slaves to cultivate, and constantly expanded the number of acres, expanding to 80 million mu in just three years, and bringing back hundreds of thousands of stones of grain for Dayong every year by merchant ships.

With the increase in grain stocks, the price of grain also gradually decreased, and the emperor ordered all more than 1,600 counties to maintain a standing position to prepare for disasters and balance the price of grain, and at the same time built more than a dozen warehouse cities along the canal, each with a stock of more than 10 million stones. The emperor even declared that he would eradicate the famine, and he stood on the Xuanyuan Hall and told his subjects that the stored grain must be able to prevent the three-year famine in the country.

Emperor Li Xu thought that the existing canal volume could no longer bear the increasing volume of transportation, so he waved his hand and pointed to the coastline and said: "There must be twenty ports and lighthouses along the coastline, and several short canals from the canal to the mouth of the sea can be dug so that the inner canal can be gradually connected with the outer sea." ”

He ordered Prime Minister Xu Bin to carry out planning and deployment, mobilized 200,000 manpower every year, and built more than 20 wharves and lighthouses along the coast within five years, successfully replacing the canal's transportation volume.

The great success of the Western Regions Chamber of Commerce and the Nanyang Chamber of Commerce made many wealthy families who could not be tax-exempt on their land see the sweetness, and they formed fleets to go to the South Seas and go to India to pan for gold, and the larger caravans even reached Dashi, where they sold their own Jun porcelain and silk in exchange for a large amount of gold.

Due to the vigorous development of commerce, the existing Tongbao money currency has been unable to meet the economic needs, and the large amount of gold and silver brought by commerce has gradually occupied the bulk of goods trade, the emperor simply pushed the boat down the river, minted gold, silver and copper coins, the world entered a new round of prosperity.