The northwest border, Tongde Prefecture City.

As an important town closest to the source of the Yellow River in the Yellow River, Tongde Prefecture is located at a point west of Dakang.

Standing on the city wall and looking out, you can see the Yellow River flowing, which is relatively clear.

Going out from here, you will enter the Uighur territory.

There are many countries and tribes around Dakang, and most of them have a peek at Dakang.

Many of them have fought several major wars with Dakang.

The most annoying one is the Uighurs.

The Uighurs are not a complete country, of course, the Western Qiang and Shiwei are not.

However, the two families later already had cities and had initially formed the prototype of a country.

However, the Uighurs have never had a city, but have followed the lifestyle of nomadic peoples, mainly migrating tents.

This is similar to that of the Qiyan tribe in the north.

But they were more fierce than the same ethnic group. They not only robbed resources everywhere, not only did they rob Dakang, but also robbed small tribes of the Western Qiang, and even the poor tribes on the western plateau.

Not to mention robbing them, they often have to kill people. Their reputation in the northwest area is very bad and no one likes them.

However, the Uighurs are also very poor at the same time. If they beat them, they will not get much but consume too much. They are like messing around, which is quite disgusting.

In the western plateau area, in addition to the main Uighurs, there are hundreds of small vassal tribes scattered on the vast western central and northern plateaus.

The better places with abundant water and grass were occupied by the Uighurs. These small vassal tribes with some in-laws or blood ties were begging for food around them.

On weekdays, Uighurs are short of food and population, and the second-last choice is to cross these small tribes and go to the western plateau further south to grab it.

There is really no way, their last choice is to grab these small tribes of their own vassals.

Because they don’t even have a bottom line, everyone doesn’t like them.

But the Uighurs are powerful in force, and they don’t want to beat this messy stick. They want to beat them but they can’t beat them, so they can only bow their heads and pretend to be grandson.

Of course, there are also a group of people who live better in the tribe that pretends to be grandchildren.

For example, the small tribe alliance that often trades with the Yiwang Mansion.

They originated from Zhaling Lake and Eling Lake, which are almost a thousand miles away from Tongde Mansion. Unfortunately, for nearly a hundred years, the Uighurs have occupied that piece of water and grassland, so they were forced to move eastward and settle in hills and mountains and forests two hundred miles away from Tongde Mansion.

The terrain here is very complex, but the water source and pasture are pretty good, barely enough for their expenses.

But the key is that there is no family planning now, and these small tribes have more and more populations, and gradually there is no enough food and drink.

There was no choice but to choose to enter Dakang's territory to conduct various transactions.

The border areas all have border cities.

There are also Tongde Mansion, and they have become prosperous because of this.

In this case, by chance, the caravan of the Yiwang Mansion set up a line with these small tribes and started business with them.

At the beginning, they only dared to sell some cattle, sheep, cattle, sheep skin, herbs, tonics, etc.

Later, as both parties were doing business every year and became familiar with each other, the output of these small tribes gradually could not keep up with demand.

The things from Dakang Dynasty are good.

In addition to delicious rice and flour, there are tea leaves that can relieve greasiness and excrete, sweet sucrose, beautiful clothes, shoes and other supplies.

Compared with these good things, what they sell is cheaper.

Cattle and sheep are very good, but the problem is that cattle and sheep must be transported to the capital, and it is only valuable to transport to the south of the Yangtze River. There is no shortage of cattle and sheep in the border areas.

But if you transport it thousands of miles, the cattle and sheep cannot bear it at all. Eight of ten will die. How can this cost be paid?

So, on the one hand, they couldn't afford what they wanted, and on the other hand, the Yiwang Mansion caravan was very brave and simply agreed to sell iron pots to them. The small tribe was even more sensational and couldn't help but feel excited.

Why?

The grassland is very iron-deficient.

Even when the Qing Dynasty just started to be the vanguard of General Li Chengliang from Liaodong, 70% of the people used stone axes and stone hammers!

So it is absolutely unimaginable that ordinary people can have a single slap in it.

Usually only the clan leader and some elders in the clan have it, and even many people don’t have a pot of iron.

They can only eat by roasting fire or cooking in a stone pot.

Now the Yi Prince's Mansion is willing to trade with them. With great joy from the sky, they almost ignored anything.

As a result, Prince Yi's Mansion said that he needed to exchange for a horse.

Ten horses can only change to one hundred large pots of iron pots at a time, and they cannot have castrated stallions.

This price is definitely a sky-high price, but the grassland people have to buy it.

Because merchants often dare not bring iron pots to the house, for fear that they will be found and will be confiscated and sent to the house.

Such an opportunity to fix a hundred large pots of soup and iron pot every year is never a generous one. If you miss this opportunity, you will never come again.

Besides, if their iron pots are not used up, they can be sold to others. If they can still be transferred, why not?

There are no grasslands in Dakang, and every year it is a big problem to supply the horses of the Nine Guards of the Imperial Guards. However, no matter which company sells horses to Dakang on the grassland, it must be a stallion that has been cut.

If a small tribe is found selling horses that are not cut off to Dakang, it will be directly exterminated by the large tribe.

So Dakang tried his best to let those merchants who went to the grassland sell things to bring some horses back, but Dakang could buy normal stallions in a year, less than a hundred.

Such a number, coupled with the long pregnancy and growth cycle of the horses, has been constantly unsuitable for fighting, which has led to the fact that Dakang's number of horses has not increased.

In this case, the Yiwangfu caravan used fishing to get horses from these poor small tribes.

At first they definitely disagreed.

The first, second, third year...

It was not until the fifth year that a drought swept across the grassland and the small tribe was about to starve to death, so they had to bite the bullet and sell a thousand horses to the Yi Prince's Mansion.

One has two.

In the sixth year, the Yiwang Mansion increased the supply of tea, sugar, silk, porcelain, etc., and the grain was even more in place, so the small tribe sold two thousand horses.

In the seventh year, the Yi Palace received three thousand horses.

Then the small tribes no longer dared to increase the number of transactions.

Their combined number of horses is only more than 30,000. Trading 3,000 horses per year is already a damaging problem. They need to buy them from other tribes to replenish them.

If you sell too much, it is easy to see the flaws.

Fortunately, they have a steady stream of goods from the Yiwang Mansion, and they sell the excess to the more far-reaching plateau tribes, and they can still earn a lot of cattle, horses and sheep.

Over time, these tribes have developed smoothly over the years, and their population has actually reproduced to more than 100,000, becoming a significant force in the surrounding area.

...

The huge convoy of horses and cars walked west along the Yellow River, about thirty miles, crossed two low-high hills, and passed a wood, and saw hundreds of horses galloping in front of them.

In front of the team, the familiar black flag was under the banner.

Gong Chuxin, the second steward of the Yiwang Mansion, was thoughtful.

After so many years of transactions, I have bought 21,000 horses from the small tribe alliance, but these horses are simply dropping the bucket compared to Dakang.

Dakang has more than a dozen or twenty provinces, and the ones that need border defense are the southwest, northeast, and northwest. However, because the southwest is mountainous, the northwest and northeast are the major families who use cavalry.

But in fact, there were more than a dozen border cities in the two places, and last year, they could only get supplements with almost 20,000 horses.

The imperial guards should have more than 90,000 horses in total in a year.

Then all the other border troops and garrison troops in the empire, including the post stations all over the country, received a total of 20,000 horses.

Do you think that tens of thousands of horses a year, and tens of thousands of horses a year... can form a large cavalry army within three to five years and rush directly into the grassland to settle the score with those barbarians?

People who think this way are too naive.

They forget that the horses are still losing weight.

You cannot serve when you are old, and you cannot overuse when you are young. You will also be injured in training, and you will still be damaged when you are on tasks... etc.

Basically, the horses that are supplemented every year can only be said to be slightly 10% more than the horses that need to be removed.

One percent is six thousand.

Don’t underestimate these 6,000 pieces. This is the result that Dakang has worked hard for more than ten or twenty years before he achieved.

Among them, the three thousand horses brought back by the Yi Prince's Mansion every year are of great contribution.

If they hadn't had their strong constitution and the horses that had reproduced would have grown healthily, Dakang's military horses would never have grown so fast.

Of course, these horses are not just slaughtered and eaten meat. They can also play a role in ordinary government affairs and transport role among the people.

The income from selling these horses can in turn subsidize the huge financial resources spent by the horse government.

However, whether in the military or among the people, the gap between the horses is still huge.

It is no exaggeration to say that buying one million horses in one go and being distributed to various industries in the empire will be absorbed in a blink of an eye and will not cause any waste at all.
To be continued...