(The new book has been opened, this one will be completed at an accelerated pace, and there will be at least two more 10,000 words today)

In the fifteenth year of Xiaokang, because Hooke invented something similar to the Newcomen steam engine, it triggered a series of climaxes in the construction of scientific research, culture and education, and the climax of system improvement in the Ming Dynasty.

The year ended in a hurry amid a hectic legislative reform and organizational restructuring of the executive branch.

The Ming court, which has been lightly relieved of the people for six or seven years, has once again become able to toss, and has engaged in some of the three fires of the promotion of the New Deal, and has swept away a lot of accumulated shortcomings.

As for other new laws that have already been implemented, they will naturally continue to advance in an orderly manner, and there is nothing to repeat.

After more than a year of hectic period of institutional reform, as time came to the summer of 1678, a border problem that had been delayed by the Ming Dynasty for several years finally became serious.

That is, Galdan, the leader of the Dzungar Department located in the northwest of the Ming Dynasty, finally seized the window period of several years when the Ming Dynasty was busy with internal affairs, swallowed up some surrounding forces, and gradually became the dominant trend in the northwest.

In terms of the Ming Dynasty, in fact, as early as three or five years ago, I heard about the movements of Galdan, but at that time, the Ming court felt that Kaldan was not yet a climate, and it was suitable to be stocked again, so as to "drive the tiger and devour the wolf" in the future. Including Zhu Shuren himself thought so, he also persuaded the emperor's son, and finally put it on hold for the time being.

On the other hand, it was also because the national strength of the Ming Dynasty had not completely recovered to its peak state at that time, and after defeating the Spaniards in Burma and Vietnam, he spent too much energy in order to further change the land and control the southern territory.

I am afraid that the external expansion will be too fast and indigestion, so I will temporarily endure and digest more first.

Five years ago, the Ming first heard of the threat of Galdan in 1673, when Galdan had just formed a mutual alliance with the Rakshasa kingdom and subsequently conquered another Tatar Mongol tribe, the "Heshute Division".

The specific chronology is roughly as follows: In 1670, Galdan's own brother, the relatively pro-Ming former Dzungar Khan and Sangge Taiji, was assassinated. Civil strife broke out in the Dzungar tribe, and then it took Galdan a year to reluctantly claim the Khan of the Dzungar tribe in 1671 and began to take over the throne.

Of course, he wanted to succeed to the throne, and not everyone obeyed him, so from 1671 to 1672, the Dzungar tribe civil war was fought for more than a year, and the opposition was eliminated and the headquarters were unified.

However, at the same time that he destroyed the rebels in his ministry, some of the rebels also fled from Dzungaria and took refuge in another part of Western Tatar Mongolia, namely the Hoshute Division.

At that time, the Dzungar Department was located near the "Junggar Basin" where geography classes were taught in later generations, that is, the basins and grasslands around Wulu Muqi in later generations.

The territory of the Heshute Department is in the northwest of the Dzungar Department, north of the Tianshan Mountains, that is, the later Altay and Karamay. It even extended westward to the territory of later Kazakhs and to the area of Lake Balkhash (since the Han Dynasty, Lake Balkhash has been called "Yibohai" in Chinese, which has always been the natural boundary of the Western Regions in the Han and Tang dynasties, and was only cut off in the late Qing Dynasty. ）

In order to hunt down and kill the traitors who escaped from the Dzungar Ministry, Galdan began to merge with the Heshute Department in 1673, sometimes negotiating and sometimes fighting, and later because he couldn't fight directly, Galdan made a major determination to become the first Khan king in the northwest region to "open his eyes to the world" -

Galdan chose to trade with the Rakshasa Alliance, and agreed to attack the Heshute tribe with the north and south of the Rakshasa country, and promised to share its land, population and livestock with the Rakshasa once it could be destroyed.

At that time, the Rakshasas also wanted to expand in the Central Asian steppes north of the Tianshan Mountains, so they hit it off with Galdan and sold them a lot of new muskets, including the latest standard equipment of the Rakshasa Archery Army, and even helped Galdan arm a camel artillery unit with small cannons on camels.

At the same time, other Tatars, such as the Shute Ministry, clearly lacked the vision of "opening their eyes to the world". Originally, everyone's strength was about the same, and they were all riding and archery, but the Dzungar Department suddenly opened up with musketeers and camel artillery, how could the Heshute people fight?

So in just three years, starting in 1674, the Dzungars reversed their previous decline against Heshut, and by 1676, they had bulldozed the Heshute and some other tribes, and completely mastered the entire territory of later generations and a part of Kazakhstan all the way to Lake Balkhash.

Of course, when the news of the destruction of the Heshute Department the year before last was finally transmitted back to Nanjing in the first half of the following year, the Ming side was not worried about it.

Because the important ministers of the Ming Dynasty generally felt that if the Ming Dynasty conquered the northwest for no reason, then it would definitely lead all the Tatars to fight against the Ming Dynasty, and the price paid by the Ming Dynasty would only be greater.

Now the hatred of the Dzungar Ministry, Kenla, first killed the other tribes miserably, and made the remnants of the dead tribes of the other tribes resentful, so when the Ming Dynasty fought over, these people would thank the Ming for saving them, and they would be able to surrender to the Ming Dynasty and accept the rule like the Mongolian tribes in the eastern region such as Chahar and Korqin.

Therefore, Da Ming let the Dzungar Ministry play white faces, let the Tatars kill each other, and pull hatred, and he was not worried.

Da Ming has to worry, at least he has to wait until the expansion of the Dzungar Department is almost expanded, and there is no more enemy to offend.

At this time, he offended the Ming Dynasty again, and the Ming Dynasty fought back against the enemy again, exterminated the Dzungar people who had just been exhausted from fighting for many years, and reaped the favor of the remnants of other tribes.

Anyway, as long as Dzungaria is still expanding, still fighting, and offending more people, Daming doesn't need to worry.

In 1676, the Ming Dynasty chose to press the warning, and now more than two years have passed, and the Dzungar Department finally wants to die, will make it crazy, and provoke a few more enemies.

Moreover, in two years of continuous warfare, relying on Rakshasa muskets and camel cannons, Galdan was soon about to kill the hostile tribes who only used primitive cold weapons. The Tatar Durbot Division, the Huite Division, and other small tribes of Moxi Mongolia were all wiped out.

This year, in 1678, Galdan once again began a new phase of expansion in a frenzied way: he remembered that among the enemies he had fought for his position six years earlier was one named Zhuot Babatur, and the Ozirtu Khan behind him, who had fled to Qinghai after the defeat that year, where he united with the local forces to recuperate and try to make a comeback.

After unifying the territory and eastern Kazakhstan, the army turned south and began to enter the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. He swept through the Yarkand Khanate on the border between southern Xinjiang and Qinghai, and then turned to attack some small tribes bordering Qinghai and Tibet, and pursued and killed Ozirtu Khan.

The Yarkand Khanate that he destroyed is said to be the orthodox descendant of the "Chagatai Khanate" that was alongside the Yuan Dynasty, and the descendant of one of the four khanates of Genghis Khan's time.

Of course, the military information transmitted from the border area between Qinghai and Tibet could not be sent to the Ming Dynasty immediately, because the Ming Dynasty had not established rule in the local area.

During the Ming Dynasty, there was a certain amount of administrative power in Qinghai, but it was limited to the Hehuang area, that is, the upper reaches of the Yellow River and its tributary Huangshui, and the actual rule of the westernmost did not exceed Qinghai Lake, in fact, it was also the case during the Han and Tang dynasties. Further west, it is a nominal bondage.

The news of Galdan's entry into Qinghai and Tibet took three months, and it was not until June of this year that it reached Xiningwei, which was actually controlled by the Ming Dynasty (Xiningwei went further west, to the shore of Qinghai Lake, and in the Ming Dynasty, it belonged to the scope of "Wusizang", not under the direct jurisdiction of the Ming Dynasty)

After arriving in Xiningwei, the follow-up road was a little faster, and according to the normal expedited military situation of three or four hundred miles a day, it arrived in Nanjing in more than a month.

……

However, when the news of Galdan's entry into Kou Qinghai-Tibet came back, the timing was very bad, and the Ming court could not spare any hands to deal with him.

There is no other reason, just because of the 16 years of being well-off, Daming just happened to have a nationwide drought, and he was too busy to take care of himself.

As mentioned earlier, in the seventeenth and eighteenth years of Kangxi's history, there was a nationwide drought, and it was a "great drought in the north and south" for two consecutive years. Among them, in the eighteenth year of Kangxi, there was also a major earthquake in Hebei, which caused the Yellow River, which did not have a lot of water, to still burst its banks, and there were countless casualties and losses.

After all, even if the most intense period of the Xiaoice Age has passed, natural disasters will not fail to appear for ten or eight years in a row.

In the early period of Kangxi in history, there were basically two percent of the years in each place that had major disasters, and the remaining eighty percent of the years could barely get by, or the wind and rain were smooth, which was very good.

And these natural environment climate change can not be changed by the butterfly effect of Zhu Shuren, so corresponding to today's Ming Dynasty, the sixteenth and seventeenth years of Xiaokang also responded to the continuous disasters of Kangxi's seventeenth and eighteenth years, which can be called the most serious year since Zhu Ciyu ascended the throne.

Considering that the ancients were more or less superstitious, even if the Ming Dynasty popularized mathematics and science education and promoted new learning, it was only nine years since the establishment of Nanjing University. There is still a huge shortage of mathematical and physical talents in the country.

Under such circumstances, it would be good if the emperor could not issue an edict and not take natural disasters on himself, but where could he still use troops and reckless military force?

So, when he heard that the Yarkand Khanate had fallen and that some other tribal khanates in the Usi-Tibet region had been invaded by Kaldan, the Ming could only endure it first.

In the end, after summing up, it was just that Gu Yanwu sent the people of the vassal to "mediate and negotiate peace", in line with the spirit of "in the Us-Tibet region, many khanates and tribes are vassals to the Ming Dynasty, and I hope that the Dzungars will not be ignorant of what is good and bad, and will not expand the attack area of the pursuit and killing of Ozirtu Khan", to persuade the Dzungar people to do their own thing.

Otherwise, as the co-lord of the world, Daming will definitely come forward for the little brother who pays tribute to the Daming domain! Just like the Japanese invaded Korea 80 years ago, and the Ming Dynasty came out for North Korea!

On the side of the Ming Dynasty, I got the news of the accident in Wusizang, it was in August of this year, the results of the discussion were discussed, and the messenger was finally sent, which was already October. Considering the severe cold of the plateau in winter, it was impossible for the envoy to go to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau in winter.

So when the last envoy went to Lanzhou Wei, it was already the middle of winter. After the beginning of spring of the following year, he continued to move westward, and only in the early summer of this year did he contact the people of the Dzungar department.

The Ming envoy put aside the cruel words, but fortunately, today's Galdan is not stupid, he also knows that he can't make too many enemies at the same time, so he deceives the Ming envoy, the false and the wrong,

He said that he would not invade the innocent small country in the Uz-Tibet region, and as long as he could hunt down and kill Ozirtu Khan himself and his family, he would stop and no longer use force to expand and harm innocents.

The envoy of the Ming Dynasty could not catch any other evidence of his crimes for the time being, and seeing that Galdan was willing to swear and promise in black and white, he could only believe him first, and took Galdan's guarantee to return to Nanjing to resume his life.

……

With Galdan's barbarian temperament that completely speaks of the law of the jungle and is the truth with hard fists,

His promise to swear by Da Ming's gambling curse was of course worthless in the end, it was like a fart, and it was even more discrediting than Sima Yi's fart pointing at Luoshui.

Therefore, after the Ming envoy left, he successfully pursued and killed Ozirtu Khan himself before the end of 1679, and also killed all his famous and adult sons, and it is said that he had completely unified the factions within the Tatars.

However, because in the process of chasing and killing Ozirtu Khan, Ozirtu Khan must have also attracted some small states and tribes in Uzirtu to join forces with him, or took out the last heavy money to buy the locals.

Therefore, when the Ozirtu Khan dies, there will definitely be a new new force with grievances and contradictions with Galdan, the New Khanate. It's like contamination spreading.

Galdan is on the rise of the country, how can he stop there?

Therefore, of course, he chose to continue to expand the invasion, continue to burn, kill, plunder and conquer, and in just one year, he completely pocketed half of Qinghai in the west.

He also infiltrated and conquered the snow area, accepted and subjugated his younger brother, and forced at least a few small tribes of the Usti-Tibetan country to change to Dzungaria, instead of to the Ming Dynasty.

……

At this point, Galdan's treacherous, swearing, and farting face were completely exposed.

It's just that in the year of 1679, the Ming Dynasty happened to be the second year of the "continuous drought in the north and south", and it also encountered the earthquake in Hebei, and the situation was worse than the previous year, and the Ming Dynasty still couldn't spare his hand.

Before the disaster of 1678 in the sixteenth year of Xiaokang, it was possible to rely on the water conservancy facilities of the Ming Dynasty, which were much stronger than the Qing Dynasty in the same period of history, to carry a little bit of a wave.

Because there was a lot of rain in the previous year, the ponds and lakes dredged and irrigated in various parts of the Ming Dynasty had rich water storage, which could ensure that at least half of the summer grain in 1678 could be harvested, but the autumn grain of that year, because the water storage was completely used up, there was no way, and there was more than half of the harvest, and some provinces even failed to harvest.

Fortunately, the Ming Dynasty had a strong foundation before, and the people also had surplus food, so there was no large-scale starvation problem.

However, in 1679, because of the previous year's severe drought, it was not possible to save the water conservancy facilities, and the summer grain harvest in some northern provinces was lost, and the output in the south was seriously reduced. On the contrary, it began to rain in the last autumn, and barely relied on replanting to rush to plant overwintering crops, so that I could have a bite to eat.

And the most serious is still Hebei, because of the concurrent earthquake disaster and the Yellow River was broken by the earthquake, more than 100,000 people were killed and drowned in the earthquake (in history, there were more than 200,000 direct deaths from the earthquake and the breach in the Kangxi period), because of the collapse of the local administrative system, it was impossible to organize an effective opening and closing for disaster relief, and more than 200,000 people died of starvation.

In the whole territory of Hebei and the area in the north of Henan bordering the Yellow River, more than 300,000 people died a year, which was already a state that the Ming Dynasty tried its best to save, accounting for more than 5 percent of the local population. (Kangxi in parallel time and space died at least a dozen percent of Hebei's population)

It can only be said that the productive forces are too underdeveloped, and they are really unable to resist in the face of continuous natural disasters. The Ming Dynasty has done much better than the Qing Dynasty in the same period, at least the minor disasters in previous years have been successfully dealt with.

The continuous disasters made the Ming Dynasty too busy to take care of itself, and the imperial court had to issue an edict to show mercy and exempt the country's land taxes for two consecutive years. This is a huge pressure on the military food expenditure of the imperial court to raise soldiers.

It means that within two years, the imperial court did not collect a single grain and rice for free, and only relied on the grain bought from the old grain and the silver money from the tax to distribute rations to the army, conscripts and officials.

Finally, in order to reduce the pressure, the army also had to cut the amount of training by half and reduce patrols.

Let the army grow more drought-tolerant, short, flat, and fast vegetables with short growth cycles and low water consumption in their own fields to subsidize their food rations. The grain stored by the imperial court could only be used to give priority to the rations of officials and the conscripted population.

The nutritional level of the army has declined, and it has been carried half food and half vegetables for two years, and its training has been slightly slack.

(End of chapter)