Dolgon seems to have thought very well about how to reopen the border in the fourth year of Shunzhi and find a good excuse to encourage the whole army.

And until the last minute, he was very confident that things would develop and whether they would be carried out according to his vision.

There is no other reason, but because the history of the Ming and Qing wars in the past 20 years has already told the world: the Qing army has always been the side that broke the contract and went to war, and the Ming Dynasty has always been the side that cowardly defended Gou An and sued for peace.

This inertia is so strong that when the strength of the enemy is reversed, people's mentality is still lagging behind, and it has not been reversed.

Akito also dare to take the initiative to seek war? Or at least dare to set up a run, at the cost of lighting the powder keg in advance, in exchange for a more active situation at the beginning of the war? Impossible!

And this kind of thinking inertia is destined to pay a little price.

……

At the beginning of July of the third year of Longwu, Xi'an.

Wu Sangui, who is sitting in Shaanxi, is falling into a choice.

Since three years ago, he chased and killed the remnants of Li Zicheng to this point, and finally broke Li Zicheng's nominal capital Xi'an, he can be regarded as pulling a fig leaf for himself, and has the face to say that he is avenging the first emperor Chongzhen, and he did not deliberately let the soldiers enter the customs.

Because of the butterfly effect of historical changes, Shaanxi is even more dilapidated than the same period in history (in the second year of Shunzhi, he asked him to count the population, and there were only 300,000 civilians left in the province. Of course, it is not excluded that the fleeing homeless hermits), after Wu Sangui arrived in Shaanxi, the Qing court did not force him to make a clear statement, but just allowed him to ride the wall to form a separation belt between the Ming and Qing dynasties on the western front.

This situation seems strange, but it is actually reasonable, and it has actually happened.

On the one hand, the Qing court felt that Shaanxi had no value in economic oppression, and after swallowing it directly under the central government, it might affect other provinces and carry a heavier bottomless burden on its back.

It's better to leave it to Wu Sangui for the time being, he can do whatever he wants, as long as he doesn't ask Daqing for money and food, he just tosses the few people left in Shaanxi and it doesn't matter to Daqing.

During this period of history, the Qing army was obsessed with Shaanxi, and the purpose was not Shaanxi itself, but just a springboard into Sichuan. Since Sichuan is very stable and can't enter Sichuan, who wants Shaanxi?

The Ming court in the south, as well as the governor of Sichuan, Fang Kongzhi, also turned a blind eye to this situation, and through Qin Liangyu and Yuan Zongdi, who was a general, occasionally sent people to contact Wu Sangui and announce the policy of the Ming court to him:

said that the Nanjing court could determine that his behavior of letting the Qing soldiers enter the customs was just a temporary lake, and in order to avenge the first emperor at any cost, so far Wu Sangui had only fought with the peasant army, and did not have a civil war with the territory and army directly under the Ming Dynasty.

It shows that his conscience as a Ming minister has not been completely extinguished, and Daming still expects him to contribute to Daming on the battlefield again in the future, and will also give him a stable and prosperous ending - but it is not said that he will be able to control the military power for the rest of his life in the future.

Fang Kongzhi has no right to write empty checks, he doesn't want to do treacherous things, and there is no need for the imperial court to play too much on this issue.

Everyone on the earth knows that Wu Sangui has indulged the Qing soldiers. In the future, if the Ming Dynasty reunified the world, if he still expects to hold the military power for a long time, it is unrealistic.

If he starts to abandon the darkness and turn to the light now, and re-clearly help the Ming Dynasty fight the Qing army, he can give him a glass of wine to release his military power in the future and become a rich man with a knighthood, spend his old age in peace, and his children and grandchildren will have long-term meal tickets, which will be good.

So Fang Kongzhi didn't make promises, and Wu Sangui didn't take it seriously, but felt that what Fang Kongzhi said when he bargained should be true-

If it's really like Liu Bang, when you use you, you promise everything very happily, then it's terrifying, and the ghost knows if it will be destroyed like Han Xin Peng Yue Yingbu in the future.

In the first two years, this kind of contact had no substantial impact, and there was a truce between the Ming and Qing dynasties anyway.

Since last year, crops such as corn and potatoes have finally begun to spread northward, and some of them have been planted on a trial basis in the Qing army-occupied areas of Huaibei, Shandong, and Heluo.

And when it was time to harvest, the harvest was also decent, which gave the northern ruler a great surprise, and hurriedly asked to keep all the seeds as much as possible and continue to expand the planting in the next season.

In addition, it is necessary to find ways to expand private trade with the money-greedy profiteers in the occupied areas of the Southern Ming Dynasty, import a little more seeds, and speed up the speed and scale of this expanded planting.

In contrast, Shaanxi, Shanxi and Hebei are relatively late to benefit from crops such as corn and potatoes.

Shanxi and Hebei are not bordered by the occupation area of the Southern Ming Dynasty, and when the seeds of new crops have just spread, the whole seed is not enough to be intercepted by the bordering provinces, so where is the seed distributed to the more northern provinces?

Shaanxi borders on Sichuan occupied by the Southern Ming Dynasty, but unfortunately the Shu Road is difficult, and under the wartime closure state, the Shaanxi garrison doesn't even know what the Sichuan government on the opposite side is doing, so how can it talk about privately expanding transactions and obtaining seeds?

You must know that after Liu Bei's death, Zhuge Liang announced the closure of the customs, but until Cao Pi died and Zhuge Liang went on the Northern Expedition, Cao Wei didn't know what Ji Han was doing for four years in between. As long as Fang Kongzhi wants to seal the customs, the effect is the same.

Wu Sangui could not get corn and potato seeds through normal channels, and he learned from his colleagues in Heluo that the yield of corn could be nearly double that of wheat, and most importantly, it was also drought tolerant, requiring very little irrigation.

After all, Shaanxi has become what it is today, natural disasters are still secondary, the key is not to repair water conservancy, and the landlords and peasants who are not protected by the right of permanent tenants are all destructive reclamation, exhausting the land and fishing, and soil erosion has long been turned into a loess plateau.

In areas where loess cannot preserve water resources, crops that can save water are simply a godsend.

Moreover, Wu Sangui came to Shaanxi with tens of thousands of Guan Ning troops and more than 100,000 or 200,000 Guan Ning army families.

When Wu Sangui first arrived, there were still 300,000 people on Shaanxi's books, and in fact there might be more, because there were homeless hidden households, and cottages were formed everywhere to grow and eat themselves (at that time, the thieves in Shaanxi had nothing to rob, and the so-called thief was to enclose a piece of land to grow and eat by himself, and not pay taxes to anyone)

Wu Sangui wants to supply military rations, where is the local population of 300,000 enough for him to squeeze? The bandits also refused to be obedient again, and the natural disaster was not over at that time, and after two years of fighting, more than half of the population was tossed.

In the end, only more than 100,000 civilians remained, and they were completely incorporated into the militarized management by Wu Sangui, and there was no free people and thieves in the whole of Shaanxi, only the dead and the military cantonments under Wu Sangui.

Therefore, there are still 300,000 living people in Shaanxi Province, but of these 300,000 miles, more than 10% are soldiers of the Guanning Army, 50% are family members of the Guanning Army, and less than 40% are local civilians who have been conquered and militarized.

However, after being completely militarized, Wu Sangui was barely able to prevent his subordinates from starving to death on a large scale. Because the locals no longer want to wander and destroy farming, they have no chance, and they are completely killed. That is, "small countries and widows", the total number of people is small to a certain extent, so such fine management is allowed, but where the population exceeds 500,000, he can't manage it like this.

In such a difficult environment, Wu Sangui would of course be blushing when he learned that Fang Kongzhi had the corn and potato seeds he urgently needed.

The Qing court governor of Heluo couldn't plant it himself and refused to give it to him, so Wu Sangui took advantage of the fact that after the autumn harvest last year, when Fang Kongzhi sent someone to contact him again, he put forward his own needs with and without dates, and he didn't have much hope at that time.

Who knew that after Fang Kongzhi asked for instructions internally, he actually gave Wu Sangui a reply quickly, expressing his willingness to give him corn seeds. This made Wu Sangui overjoyed, and his trust in the Ming court in Nanjing increased again.

And Fang Kongzhi did this, of course, he also consulted Zhu Shuren, and the actual decision-maker in the end was Zhu Shuren.

Zhu Shuren thought so: since the Qing court had already planted corn and potatoes in a small area in Huaibei and Shandong, it would definitely cover the entire north in the end after three or five years of propagation and diffusion, and try to keep as many seeds as possible each time.

The reproduction of seeds is multiplied by at least a dozen times the annual geometric progression, or even faster, which is uncontrollable.

So whether you give it to Wu Sangui or not, Wu Sangui can get it in the end, it's just a time difference. Give it now, you can still do more favors with Wu Sangui, and show favor to you, maybe you can win it over. Even if it is not successful, the loss is manageable.

Zhu Shuren only made an extra request to Fang Kongzhi: when he asked Wu Sangui to take the corn seeds, he promised that he would only plant them in Shaanxi within five years, and secretly plant them in private, so as not to let other Qing court governors know, and he was not allowed to sell the seeds to other Qing court governors. Otherwise, if he breaks the contract first, Da Ming will naturally expose other collusions between him and Da Ming!

As long as Wu Sangui did not sell the seeds to Shanxi, Hebei and other areas under the actual control of the Qing court, and did not enhance the comprehensive national strength of the Tartars, Wu Sangui himself planted grain in Shaanxi behind closed doors and ate it himself, which would not affect the overall situation of the Northern Expedition.

Wu Sangui had a request for others, and naturally had to agree to this condition at that time, he felt that he didn't have enough seeds, where could he export to the outside world, why should he be this wicked person.

Now, it is the third year of Longwu / July of the fourth year of Shunzhi, and a large number of corn seeds that Wu Sangui got from Fang Kongzhi have also been harvested on a large scale on the Guanzhong Plain.

Until the harvest, most of the military farmers who were forced to sow new crops by his militarization were still apprehensive. The local people have been poor and isolated for many years, and they have no chance to go outside to open their eyes, and they do not trust anything new.

Now that the harvest is finally harvested, it is still a bumper harvest, which finally allowed Wu Sangui to gain a firm foothold in Shaanxi, won the hearts of the people, and solved the problem of military rations.

No matter how dilapidated Shaanxi is, after all, it is so large, as long as the population is less than 300,000, and each person manages a few hundred acres of land, he will always be able to support himself.

Once we have surplus grain, we can slowly reorganize water conservancy and plant trees in the north or return farmland to forests and grasslands to control desertification.

……

It's a pity that Wu Sangui met the will from Dolgon at this juncture, after he reached a secret deal with Fang Kongzhi for corn seeds, during the first harvest season.

He was invited to send his eldest son, Wu Yingxiong, to Beijing to "learn Manchurian etiquette and cavalry archery, so as to integrate into the Manchurian high-level circles and promote talents."

How does this keep Wu Sangui from being nervous? He thought it was because he had been talking to Fang Kong, and he was finally caught by Dolgon.

He hurriedly inquired if Jiang Jiu, the general soldier of Datong in the neighboring province, had sent his son to the capital, but the news he got made him more and more nervous: Jiang Jiu had sent it without hesitation.

Some people may think that Jiang Jiu has sent it all, doesn't that mean that Dolgon is targeting everyone? It's not against him, Wu Sangui!

But Wu Sangui didn't dare to gamble, because he quickly thought of a similar eucalyptus that he had heard with his own ears a few years ago:

Eight years ago, Yang Sichang, the secretary of the military department of the Chongzhen Dynasty at that time, recruited all the children of other warlords who had been appeased by Xiong Wencan like Zhang Xianzhong to study in Nanjing when Zhang Xianzhong surrendered and rebelled......

At that time, Yang Sichang also covered it up, but he didn't say it on the surface, in order to deceive Zheng Zhilong to send Zheng Sen (Zheng Chenggong) away, he also tried to let Shen Tingyang also send Shen Shuren (Zhu Shuren).

Today's Dolgon's actions, why is it not to learn from Yang Sichang? Why is Jiang Hao not Shen Tingyang in this era? Why is he, Wu Sangui, not Zheng Zhilong in this era?

After hesitating again and again, considering that after observing in the past few years, he felt that the national strength of the Ming Dynasty had faintly surpassed that of the Qing Dynasty again, and the south under the governance of Zhu Shuren was in good order, and the progress of the military industry was also rapid.

He and Zhu Shuren still had a little friendship many years ago, since the two sides have always left a way of communication, riding on the top of the wall to slide in whichever way, then simply pull the flag!

……

On the fourth day of the seventh month of the third year of Longwu, Wu Sangui received the will of Dolgon, and delayed the messenger in Xi'an for about ten days and eight days, stabilizing the other party to delay the preparation time for the army.

It was not until July 12 that Wu Sangui said that "the dog is seriously ill and is not conducive to traveling" and politely refused Dorgon's request to recruit hostages into Beijing.

Of course, at this time, the two sides had not completely torn their faces, and Wu Sangui asked the envoy to bring back a seal to state his difficulties.

Even though the envoy had already sensed Wu Sangui's instability, he didn't dare to expose it immediately, after all, he also wanted to save his life, so after just getting Wu Sangui's reply, he flew straight to Beijing, and when he went back, it was almost six hundred miles in an expeditious way.

Just six days later, on July 18, Dolgon, who was in the capital, learned of Wu Sangui's resistance, and of course he had to further order the other party to be forced, and on the other hand, he also had to make two preparations and send troops to deter Wu Sangui.

The Qing court was not very interested in taking and completely taking actual control of Shaanxi, because Shaanxi's geographical environment was still closed, and it was not enough to dispatch local resources to mobilize to other battlefields (it could provide troops, but the Guanning army had not been used by the Qing court for many years, and had been in a state of dissociation)

Therefore, even if there is trouble in Shaanxi, the key is to block the mouth, so as not to let Wu Sangui spread, disturb the rear of the Qing Dynasty, and use it for the Southern Ming Dynasty. As long as Wu Sangui can't play a role and completely separates Shaanxi from other battlefields, this matter will be over.

And if Wu Sangui really colluded with the Ming Dynasty, the Qing court could further use this news to unite the internal - originally Dolgon wanted to find an excuse to provoke and restart the southern invasion.

If Wu Sangui is out of the matter, that is, the Ming Dynasty took the initiative to invade the Qing Kingdom in the north, and Dolgon could use it for propaganda, so that the Manchu Qing Dynasty played a posture of protecting the family and defending the country, which greatly boosted morale.

After all, at any time, the morale of the Great Patriotic War is always higher than that of the War of Aggression, and this psychological buff is not stacked in vain.

……

Considering that the Shaanxi battlefield that is in turmoil again is not easy to make military achievements, and it may have to be attribution for a long time, Dolgon decided to send Haoge to the Shaanxi battlefield again to face Wu Sangui after weighing it again.

At the same time, it is necessary to temporarily allocate Jiang Jiu's army in Shanxi to Haoge for unified dispatch, mainly relying on the Shanxi army in the rear and the Guanning army in Shaanxi to hold on, and by the way, also hold the dangerous pass of Tongguan.

Three and a half years ago, when Wu Sangui destroyed the remnants of Li Zicheng's Guanzhong, the Qing army took control of Pubanjin and Tongguan, which was also to ensure that the choke points were in the hands of the Qing army, which allowed Wu Sangui to de facto stand on his own in the northwest. Of course, Wu Sangui didn't want this, but he didn't have a choice at that time, because if he had to garrison Tongguan in person, the Qing court would tear his face with him at that time.

It is precisely because the Qing army holds Tongguan that he has never been too worried about Wu Sangui doing things.

Dolgon's arrangement, and the second reassuring message to Wu Sangui, was sent out of Beijing on July 26, and it was planned that it should arrive in Xi'an on the third day of August.

Hauge himself had already begun to leave for Shanxi on 20 July, and the Manzheng Blue Banner under Hauge's command was gradually moved westward. Before Haoge arrived, the local Qing troops in Shanxi and Tongguan had also received news in advance and entered the alert.

And Dolgon's envoys did not arrive in Xi'an on the third day of August as planned—because on the first day of August, two days before the arrival of Dolgon's second group of envoys, Wu Sangui officially pulled the flag in response to the Ming Dynasty's resistance to the Qing court.

Wu Sangui immediately sent troops to block the west exit of Tongguan Road, camped with the Qing army, and sent troops on the other side to block the west bank of Pubanjin.

What Wu Sangui declared to the outside world was only to officially recognize the Nanjing Imperial Court as Zhengshuo and help the Nanjing Imperial Court to keep Shaanxi, but he did not say that he would attack the Qing occupied areas.

However, the official change of banner in Shaanxi was enough as the fuse for a complete all-out war between the two countries.

Haoge and Wu Sangui quickly pinched each other on the front line of Tongguan, and both sides suffered casualties on each other.

Wu Sangui's Guanning army is not weak, and the most important thing is that Fang Kongzhi in Sichuan has also been closely monitoring Wu Sangui's moves.

After the war on the northern front, he also temporarily moved the yamen from Chengdu to Hanzhong to obtain first-hand information about the war situation as soon as possible. Finding out that Wu Sangui really abandoned the secret and surrendered to the light and fought with Haoge, Fang Kongzhi ordered Qin Liangyu to send the original thief Yuan Zong's first department, who had surrendered three years ago, to Guanzhong to help Wu Sangui fight, which could be temporarily controlled by Wu Sangui.

Of course, Fang Kongzhi has a good grasp of the supply speed of this reinforcement and armament, which basically will not cause Wu Sangui to become stronger and bigger the more he fights, but he will make up for as much as Wu Sangui loses, so that Wu Sangui and Haoge will slowly consume.

And Fang Kongzhi's reason is also very sufficient: Shu Road is difficult, transportation is not easy, it is not bad to be able to supply at this speed, no matter how many people go up at once, I am afraid that Wu Sangui's grain storage in Xi'an will not be able to last until next year's spring famine, right?

The infrastructure conditions of Shu Road doomed Fang Kongzhi to only give ammunition to the soldiers, and it was impossible to even count on Hanzhong for rations. Wu Sangui has as much food as he can, and he can only maintain the number of living people in the Guanzhong Plain at the same time.

……

After the war on the Western Front and entered the stalemate, the Ming and Qing dynasties were completely torn apart.

Dolgon, of course, knew that the Western Front was not the decisive place, that the roads were too poor and too far from the heart.

What can really be decided is the middle front.

Therefore, in just half a month after Wu Sangui pulled the flag, the Qing army launched an offensive again in Xinyang and Fengyang.

The front line of Nanyang and Xinyang, still under the command of Azig, the commander who led the troops three years ago, launched an offensive on the 10th day of August.

On the front line of Fengyang, Abatai took his two sons Bolo and Yue Le to take charge of the attack, and launched an offensive on August 15.

In the easternmost northern region of Huai'an, that is, Suqian, Pizhou, Haizhou and other counties in Huaibei, the Qing army took a defensive position, leaving only the size of the troops needed for defense, which was commanded by Mandahai.