After about two months of fighting, the Xianbei, Wuhuan, and Xiongnu forces in Bingzhou were crushed by the Han army.

Basically, they either died or were captured, or some of the well-informed ones escaped, but in any case, the state was largely back under the jurisdiction of the Han Empire.

The territories that were slowly eroded and occupied by them in more than a hundred years also returned to the control of the Han army, and Guan Yu and Zhao even visited the Great Wall in disrepair together, and worshiped ancient warriors on the edge of the Great Wall to express their gratitude.

Liu Bei no longer worried about the war, and handed over the work of sweeping up the war to the General's Mansion to deal with, and he began to connect with Man Chong and discuss with him the next plan for the restoration of governance in the state.

War is the means, and domination is the end.

Although Bingzhou was recovered, the long-term absence of the Han Empire's government also made large and small separatist forces appear within Bingzhou, all of which had their own armaments, production lines and production capacity of weapons, food and other materials.

They are not good citizens.

This is a problem.

Even more pressing issues are the disposal of prisoners of war, the repair of dilapidated city walls, roads, bridges, and other infrastructure, as well as the rereclamation of abandoned land.

So Liu Bei and Man Chong discussed a charter together.

First of all, those captured Xianbei, Wuhuan, Xiongnu and other mouths were dealt with according to the usual practice.

Women of childbearing age are registered in the cantonal household register and are intended to increase the population.

Craftsmen and shepherds who have mastered special skills are also selected, collected for their own use, and prostitutes for three years, polishing their wildness, and then compiled into the household registration and become Han Chinese.

The rest of the people who did not have any skills were beaten into official slaves and exerted their subjective initiative for the restoration of the construction of the annexed state.

In the past few years, the infrastructure, city walls, roads, bridges, etc. in various places have simply been damaged, and if they want to fully restore to their normal state, it will take more than half a year and a lot of resources to invest, and in this way, a lot of manpower is needed to implement.

There are not many Han people in Bingzhou, and even fewer can carry out agricultural production, so the limited agricultural population has to be used to restore agricultural production, and those who are captured are the best source of labor.

If their number is not enough, Liu Bei also plans to transfer a batch from Youzhou to Bingzhou to help.

You don't have a family!

While working, agricultural production was resumed, which had high requirements for the administrative capacity of the state government, and even higher requirements for the state assassin who was a halfway monk.

Full of pets needs to burst their livers.

Then there is the problem of the Han people in Bingzhou.

In the past, when the imperial court was absent, the Han people in the occupied areas of Bingzhou were either under the protection of the major powerful clans like Liangzhou, or they became armed groups wandering around, and there were few obedient people and yeoman farmers in the conventional sense.

The governed population basically only exists in a part of Taiyuan County, Shangdang County and Xihe County, and in order to survive, the local economy in other areas is already in a state of manorization and fragmented development, and it is very difficult to restore to the production state of the people in the past.

The first to bear the brunt were the local powerful clans, who played a large role in the Han army's attack on the annexation of the state, but after the war, their presence became an obstacle to the imperial court's governance of the region.

At the same time, the existence of Zhang Yan and Yu Fuluo is also troublesome, especially Zhang Yan, who has no explanation for the large number of people in the mountains.

After a long period of chaos, the state lacked hukou, but there was a large population that could not be used, so how should the economy of the state develop after the war?

In the process of discussing this matter with Liu Bei, Man Chong mentioned something to Liu Bei, saying that if he wanted to obtain the population, in fact, in addition to war and plunder, it was also a way to let the local wealthy families release their slaves.

Liu Bei issued a decree to limit the power of the powerful clans in the form of a law to limit their power, and through such actions, they could obtain enough population for the development of the state.

This suggestion made Liu Bei pay attention to a fact that had been ignored by many people for a long time.

In the social strata of the Eastern Han Empire, there was a social group that was more humble than the common people - slaves.

The Eastern Han Empire was not without slaves, slaves still existed until the Manchu Qing Dynasty, it was just a question of more and less, and there were various names.

A considerable part of the large number of people reorganized by Liu Bei in Liangzhou were originally slaves, and a considerable number of the tenants who were actively and passively handed over by the major families were actually slaves.

In the Han Empire, there were five main sources of slaves – prisoners of war, criminals, betrayed for debts, plundered, and children of slaves.

Their core feature is that they do not have personal freedom, they are generally treated as property rather than human beings, and can be bought and sold at will.

The market for the purchase of slaves at will was widespread in many large cities of the Eastern Han Empire.

There, people were kept in cages along with livestock, and if the price was right, a slave could be bought to serve him and enjoy all his efforts.

Away from the grandiose slave market, slaves still existed in other places, but they were not called slaves, but according to their status, they were called slaves, maids, servants, or ministers and concubines.

Although these slaves with different names had different statuses, very different living conditions, and some of them even lived well, they had only one thing in common—they could all be bought and sold as property.

In terms of legal status, their status is very low, even inferior to the Shuren, and if they want to change their status to the Shuren, they even need to meet some special conditions.

For example, in the Han book, it is said that officials and slaves over 50 years old are exempt from being concubines, which means that the official slaves controlled by the government can be exempted from crime and become concubines when they reach the age of 50.

But if you think about it, how rare would it be to be able to live to the age of fifty as a slave in an extremely harsh living environment in that era?

Even if he really lived to be fifty years old, he was old, sick and thin, and he had no property at all, not even a family.

There is also a possibility that after the death of the master, there is no legal heir, and there is no one to inherit the family property, so the slave can legally become a concubine.

In short, once you become a slave and want to regain your status as a free people, you can only try your luck, and there is no other way for an individual to change his fate except to rebel.

But rebellion is not something that every slave can make, because slaves are not even qualified to make friends, they cannot drink, they cannot gather at will, and they are whipped if they do not listen to their masters' reprimands.

This was a widespread situation throughout the social strata of the Han Empire, and their numbers were very large.

During the reign of Emperor Jing of the Han Dynasty, there were 30,000 official slaves raising horses in the northwest.

During the reign of Emperor Yuan of the Han Dynasty, the official Gong Yu once wrote a letter saying that there were more than 100,000 idle slaves who had nothing to do among the slaves controlled by the central government, and hoped to exempt them from being concubines.

During Wang Mang's time, he even reduced more than 100,000 people who minted money privately to slaves.

The number of official slaves controlled by the central court of the entire Western Han Dynasty was hundreds of thousands.

In addition to the large number of official slaves, the existence of private slaves is also extremely common, especially in the homes of powerful officials, because there are too many private slaves, which affects social production, and Emperor Han Ai even ordered to stipulate the number of private slaves that officials can have.

For example, there were 200 princes, kings, slaves and maidservants, 100 princes and princesses, and 30 marquis and officials in Guannei, according to such regulations, the number of private slaves that the 120,000 princes and officials of the Western Han Dynasty could legally own was as high as 3.6 million.

This is still a public and private slave that has a relationship with the government, and the number of slaves owned by the local powerful clans who have nothing to do with the government far exceeds this scale, which is impossible for the imperial court to count.

Even the average slightly wealthier common people were able to own slaves.

A man who made a living by digging wells could buy an old slave to call for him, a small merchant with two fields had three slaves to serve him, and a small landowner with more than 30 acres of land owned seven slaves.

On the contrary, the number of slaves in the Eastern Han Empire increased year by year with the footsteps of the end of the dynasty.

Judging from the situation around Liu Bei himself, the Liu clan in Zhuo County, Zhuo County, was only a small local clan before Liu Bei's career, with hundreds of people and thirty or fifty families in the entire clan.

Of those, 40 percent of the more affluent families had slaves, ranging from five to 10 slaves.

After his career, he came into contact with the major families in Zhuo County, including the Lu family, none of the families did not have slaves.

Even Ji Jian's guy was the slave of a street gang boss at the beginning, Liu Bei was not even a gang boss at that time, and after Ji Jian's gang was eliminated by Liu Bei's gang, Ji Jiancheng became a prisoner, he admired Liu Bei's force and asked to be Liu Bei's slave.

At that time, Liu Bei admired Ji Jian's force, didn't let him be a slave, didn't sign a contract with him, let him be his younger brother, and then went through the back door of the government to help him restore his free people's household registration, so Ji Jiancai was desperate for Liu Bei and was willing to die for him.

Every non-official scholar that Liu Bei came into contact with after coming to Luoyang asked about the situation in their family, and they all said that there were slaves to serve in the family, and even in his own family, there were ten reliable slaves arranged by his father-in-law Han Rong to serve them.

According to the provisions of the current law and the current number of officials, officials, princes and princes, as well as the overall population, the total number of slaves of all kinds in the Eastern Han Empire is 8 million.

However, Man Zhong believes that this number is still a conservative estimate, and there are still many things that cannot be counted, and he estimates that the total number of slaves in the entire population of the Han Empire is likely to have accounted for 15 percent of the total population.

(End of chapter)