Chapter 15 Lecture 3 Song Dynasty-4

4. Military Service System and National Defense Weaknesses in the Song Dynasty The Song Dynasty army was divided into two types, one was called the Forbidden Army and the other was called the Xiang Army.The military system of the Song Dynasty can be regarded as the worst military system in Chinese history, but it also has its origins, and we still cannot blame the Song people too much.At the end of the Tang Dynasty and the Five Dynasties, the feudal towns were arrogant and the soldiers were still in chaos. At that time, almost everyone in the society was a soldier, and there were almost no scholars.At the beginning, the army was decent, but later it became old and weak soldiers.The army can't go to battle, so they use it like criminals for labor.At that time, all soldiers had to have tattoos tattooed on their faces, which was called supporting the army, to prevent him from escaping.For example, people like Song Jiang Wusong in Li had tattoos on their faces, and they were sent to a certain local military camp to serve as soldiers to do hard work. They called him a thief and joined the army.Such an army is of course useless.In fact, these troops were more active in the Han Dynasty, but mediocre in the Tang Dynasty.The so-called servitude in the Song Dynasty was a representative of local autonomy in the Han Dynasty.This change is extremely unreasonable.Because of the hard work, Song Taizu could only choose a group of strong and strong troops from this kind of army, and another formation was called the Forbidden Army.For the selection of the imperial army, there are regulations on length and weight. At first, a living soldier sample was used, and later a human figure was made of wood, and sent to various teams in various places.Therefore, the Forbidden Army is more decent.Those who do not meet this standard will stay in the place and serve as Xiang troops.Xiang is the meaning of the city, and the Xiang army refers to those stationed in the city in various places.These soldiers are not required to go to battle, but only serve as miscellaneous errands in the local area.Whenever local governments have forced labor, they are asked to do it.It stands to reason that the first thing that the Song Dynasty should do when founding the country was to disarm and demobilize its troops, but the Song Dynasty only did so as mentioned above, and as for the demobilization, it never came back.This is also because the Song Dynasty won the world, but failed to truly unify the whole country. Their great enemy, the Liao Kingdom, had a history of more than 50 years before the Song Dynasty.The so-called Yanyun sixteen prefectures were gifted to the Liao people by Shi Jingtang.At that time, Chahar, Rehe, Liaoning and parts of Shanxi and Hebei were all in the hands of the Liao people.The northern barriers were completely withdrawn, and Kaifeng was established as the capital in the Song Dynasty. Kaifeng is a flat land, exposed by the Yellow River.To the east of the Taihang Mountains is a large plain, and the cavalry can reach the Yellow River in a few days if they march down from the north to the south.Once crossing the Yellow River, you will arrive at the gate of Kaifeng City.Therefore, when the Song Dynasty was founded, there was no national defense.If Luoyang can be established as the capital, the enemy has come down from Peiping and crossed the river. From the current Longhai line to the west, we still need to cross the so-called Jingsuo Mountain in Zhengzhou, which is barely safe to defend.If you go south from the frontier fortress in Shanxi, Yanmen Pass in Wutai Mountain is the internal danger there, which can be regarded as the second line of defense.It is not easy to rush to the Yellow River in one go.Therefore, it is better to establish the capital in Luoyang.It would of course be better if the scale of the Han and Tang Dynasties could be restored and Xi'an, the capital, would be established further west.But why didn't Song Taizu establish his capital in Luoyang and Xi'an, but why did he choose to establish his capital in Kaifeng?This also has his difficulties.Because the defense line had already been broken at that time, Yan Yun had not recovered his lost ground, so he had to raise troops.Raising soldiers requires food, and the military food at that time had to rely entirely on the Yangtze River Basin.The so-called Great River Central Plains in ancient times was dilapidated as early as the end of the Tang Dynasty and the Five Dynasties, and its economy depended entirely on the support of the south.There is a canal from Yangzhou to the north. This is not the canal after the Yuan Dynasty, but from Yangzhou to the north along the current Longhai Line to Kaifeng in the west. This is the so-called Tongji Canal since Emperor Yang of the Sui Dynasty.When the rice grain arrived in Kaifeng, if it was to be transported to Luoyang, the Bianqu would be damaged by then.If it is transported by land, it will be even more difficult, and a lot of manpower and material resources will be wasted.The founding of the Song Dynasty took over the long-term chaotic, dark and dilapidated situation of the Five Dynasties. There was no power to transport the military rations to Luoyang, and Chang'an was desolate, let alone.In order to save a little food and transportation costs, the capital was moved to Kaifeng.Song Taizu also said at that time that the country will be peaceful in the future, and the capital will still move westward.

At that time, there were originally two national policies. One was to attack the north bank of the Yellow River first, and level the Northern Han and Liao, so that the Yangtze River Basin could not be defeated.The policy is aggressive, but also dangerous.If you lose the battle, there is no way out.One is to level the Yangtze River Basin first, unify the south, and then attack the north. This policy is more prudent and stable.Song Taizu adopted the second strategy, flattening the south first, but leaving difficult things for future generations to do.So when Song Taizu was dying, he listened to his mother and passed on his younger brother Zhao Kuangyi. This is Song Taizong.Emperor Taizong came to the throne, and he conquered Liao twice, but he was defeated in both battles.Once, he fought on the bank of the Gaoliang River that went straight to the Summer Palace in Xishan from outside Xizhimen in today's Beiping. He was defeated in this battle, and he himself was shot by an arrow, and he died of trauma when he returned.Historically, this kind of thing is taboo.Just because the founding situation of the Song Dynasty was like this, it would not be possible to disarm or demobilize in the future, and at the same time, it would not dare to fight the Liao State again.Because if you want to fight, you can only win, not lose.Once defeated, you will go to the Yellow River, and the country will be shaken.Under such circumstances, the Song Dynasty became raising soldiers but not being able to fight, knowing that it was impossible to fight but had to raise soldiers.What's even more strange is that after raising soldiers and ignoring them, they came to try their best to advocate civil rule.This is understandable. The Song Dynasty reversed a period of Chinese history in the late Tang and Five Dynasties because of its deliberate advocacy of civil governance.People in the Song Dynasty only wanted to use these troops to resist foreign aggression, while advocating the rule of law, emphasizing civility over military, so as to gradually reduce the domineering soldiers and avoid repeating the mistakes of the late Tang and Five Dynasties.Therefore, the more you raise soldiers, the more you can't use them for soldiers, the more you raise them in the future.It is said that Lin Chong was the head of the 830,000 forbidden army. In fact, there were only 200,000 troops when Taizu founded the country, 660,000 troops when Taizong was born, and 1.25 million troops by the time of Renzong.Therefore, when Wang Jinggong reformed the law and implemented the New Deal, he started to lay off troops.The step of disarmament is to restore the ancient militia system to replace the mercenaries at that time.However, the militia system was urgently not easy to implement throughout the country, so the so-called Baojia system was first tried in the Yellow River Basin.Baojia is to train peasants on the spot, hoping that they can be organized into an army if needed temporarily, and the cost of maintaining soldiers can be exempted.

When it comes to the recruitment system, it is not entirely necessary.Recruiting is also useful in certain places and in certain situations.But there must be a definite enemy as the target, and it must be fought. The enemy must be eliminated within a few years.The Beifu soldiers in the Eastern Jin Dynasty were recruited soldiers, and they also made extraordinary achievements.However, the national defense spirit of the Song Dynasty was defensive, not daring to take the initiative to attack, and the intention was always to defend.It is a mistake to match the recruitment system with a long-term defensive policy.When a soldier is recruited, he will stay in the army easily until he is sixty years old, and he is still in the army. During this period, he is only available for ten years from the age of twenty to thirty.In the thirty years from thirty to sixty, he was old.Moreover, after ten years in the military, he was exhausted mentally.Such an army is in name only, so we have to recruit new ones.Therefore, the army has more and more support, and the discipline is not good.There are too many teams, although it is not easy to defend against foreign aggression, it is very likely to cause internal strife.Song people were most afraid of the arrogant soldiers since the end of the Tang Dynasty and the Five Dynasties, but the Song Dynasty was still full of arrogant soldiers.The country has to give them treatment, and must always give them better treatment, otherwise they will rebel.The government had no choice but to reward literati, elevating the status of civil servants and lowering the status of military officials.Jiedu envoys have nothing to do in their free time, and they are trapped in the capital, sending hundreds of catties of firewood every winter.Those who raised martial arts also wanted to raise civil servants, and the number of civil servants gradually increased, and their treatment gradually increased.On the one hand, there are redundant soldiers, and on the other hand, redundant officials. The burden on the country becomes heavier every year. The weaker becomes poorer, and the poorer becomes weaker. The Song Dynasty government can no longer reverse this situation.

In Song Taizu's time, because of the arrogance and laziness of guarding soldiers, he also stipulated the system of guarding the forbidden army in divisions.The local army is useless, and the central guards must be sent to defend on all sides.But it is not allowed to stay for a long time. For example, those who are stationed in Hebei this year will be transferred to the central government every other year, and then transferred to Shanxi after a while.This is different from the retirement of the garrison soldiers in the Han and Tang Dynasties.In the Song Dynasty, there was no retirement. They were not in the frontier defense, that is, in the central government, they were still in the army.If this is the case, some adjustments will be made, and the soldiers will only feel that it is a lot of labor, so they will have to send them more money.Therefore, although the Song Dynasty did not fight for years, the funds were mobilized every year and fought every year.The army is always running on the road, and the generals and the army are separated again. The troops are deployed in batches, but the generals are still there.If this is the case, soldiers will not learn generals, and generals will not learn soldiers.This is also because the soldiers are afraid of their self-respect, but when it is urgent, the soldiers will not learn from each other, and it is difficult to use them.Therefore, throughout the Song Dynasty, soldiers had to be used, and soldiers were looked down upon. How can warriors be called to make meritorious deeds?The most famous military general in the Song Dynasty was Di Qing. Because he was born in the army, he gained the spirit of the army and was worshiped by ordinary soldiers. Become a dynasty that subjugated because of raising soldiers.

However, when the Song Dynasty was founded, Chinese society inherited the end of the Tang Dynasty and the Five Dynasties, and had already been plagued by soldiers. Therefore, since the founding of the Song Dynasty, the Song Dynasty has been known to favor civility over martial arts.Before his death, Song Taizu told his descendants in a will, saying: You must not kill a scholar.They stick to this family motto, and they all know to respect civil servants and scholar-bureaucrats.Until the Southern Song Dynasty, they still kept the legacy of not killing scholar-bureaucrats.Not only did they not kill, the Song royal family really knew how to reward literati.Therefore, after a hundred years, from such a chaotic and dark situation in the late Tang Dynasty and the Five Dynasties, the culture slowly revived.The so-called Song studies of later generations, also known as Neo-Confucianism, laid the foundation within a hundred years after Song Xing.This generation of literati all advocated respecting the king and rejecting barbarians, distinguishing Yi from Xia, and advocating historical traditions, so China can still maintain it, opening up the second half of Chinese history from the Song Dynasty to the present.Just because people in the Song Dynasty valued literature and despised martial arts so much, the saying that good iron does not make nails and good men do not serve as soldiers has been handed down since then.Today, we can make a fair comment from history, and we can only say that the people of the Song Dynasty did not completely correct their problems in order to remedy the problems of the people of the Tang Dynasty, but we cannot blame the people of the Song Dynasty.It should be noted that there are many problems, and the Tang Dynasty people should be blamed.The Tang Dynasty was full of militarism, and by the time of Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty, it was just like the so-called imperialism in modern times, which is unacceptable.We can only say that the Romans perished because of the promotion of imperialism, and there will be no more Rome from then on.However, China has not collapsed after the Tang Dynasty's militarism, and China's history and culture continue, which is the credit of the Song Dynasty people.We cannot ignore all these hardships just because he is too poor and too weak.

Speaking of the issue of national defense resources, this is also the biggest shortcoming of the Song Dynasty.China's geographical situation, to the Yellow River Basin, is the Great Plains.Once out of the Great Wall, it is the Great Plains.Therefore, to fight in the north, you must have cavalry.In order to deal with the enemies in the north beyond the Great Wall, China must rely on cavalry.The horses needed for cavalry are produced in only two places in China.One in the northeast and one in the northwest.One is the so-called Jibei Wilderness, which is the area around Recha today.One is the Ganliang Hetao area.Horses must be kept in an alpine place.Horses cannot be raised individually. They must be raised in groups in Changshan Dagu, where there are beautiful grass, sweet springs, and open land, so that they can be used for long-distance pursuit by cavalry.And these two places, when the country was founded in the early Song Dynasty, one happened to be taken by Liao, and the other was taken by Xixia, neither of which was in the hands of China.There is still iron related to horses, and the fine iron mines are also located outside the Northeast Great Wall, which is also one of the weak signs of the Song Dynasty.Wang Jinggong practiced the new method, and at the same time wanted to train Baojia, and at the same time paid attention to raising horses.However, it was inconvenient to raise horses in mainland China. According to estimates at the time, the land needed to raise a horse could feed twenty-five people. This was a major disadvantage of preparing for war in an agricultural society.Wang Jinggong had no choice but to formulate a policy to protect horses and let the people go to the government to adopt horses.The horses are fostered in private homes, and the horses are scattered one by one. In normal times, the folks can use the adopted horses, and when they meet the needs of war, they gather temporarily.Of course, the folks are willing to do this kind of thing. They bring a horse and use it as livestock, but they don't know that it is not easy to raise horses in warm and humid areas, and they are easy to get sick and die.But the horse will lose money if it dies, so farmers regard raising horses as a chore.But the government was going to be sent, so Baoma became a government.In fact, even if this method is effective, it may not be really useful if a group of weak horses encounter a war.This system can also tell us about the major difficulties encountered in the defense of the Song Dynasty.

Besides, at that time, the internal dangers of the Great Wall, from Juyongguan to Shanhaiguan, were already in the hands of the Liao people. If the Liao people rushed south, what would they do?The alliance of Chanyuan during Zhenzong's time was forced by this situation.Since the peace talks between Song and Liao, the national defense situation in the Song Dynasty was very poor.Neither the two countries officially go to war, nor is it easy for the Chinese to formally deploy border defenses.Only reward folks to plant paddy fields, open more canals, and plant more elms and poplars beside the canals.In case of war, it can be used as an obstacle to slightly resist the large cavalry of the Liao people.This can be said to be an impossible solution.This is really a very poor way.But even though this method is pitiful, the Liao people also understand that they still do not allow China to open ditches and plant paddy fields from time to time.During the winter season, the team went out to plunder, burning and destroying the border villages of China, so that China could never have a defense line along the border, and they could invade at any time. If they threatened China, they had to maintain the peace agreement.Even if there is only one side of Shanxi, and Taiyuan to the north, there is still a danger inside Yanmen Pass, which is a line guarded by the Yang family general Yang Lao Linggong Yang Liulang and others.But this is a secondary front line, and the main one is in Hebei.There is no danger to defend this line. The main defense line is Juma River, which is also near Zhuozhou. This is a poor defense line that China had to do in Song Dynasty.As soon as you retreat from this, you will directly buckle the gate of the capital Kaifeng.Then retreated to Huainan and northern hilly areas, which gradually became different from the Central Plains in the Yellow River Basin.As for crossing the Yangtze River, the situation is even more different.So the Southern Song Dynasty could still guard the Jianghuai.This is an inherent weakness in the Song Dynasty's national defense, and we cannot blame the Song people one by one.Naturally, the weak in the Song Dynasty could produce a promising leader. In terms of the basic conditions of national defense, only by taking the initiative to use offense as defense, first attacking outwards, and winning victory, can the country be established, and then other systems can be discussed.At present, defense is used to protect the country, and it is a weak defense. Sooner or later, it will fail. It should be useless to accommodate this situation to determine other systems.In fact, China has established a country since ancient times, and there has never been a country that did not use combat offensives.The Great Wall of Emperor Qinshihuang stretches from the Datong River in the east to the Iron Bridge of the Yellow River in Lanzhou, Gansu in the west. How can it be compared with the Juma River in the Song Dynasty?Besides, even if it is the Great Wall, it should adopt offensive defense.So finally forced out Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty's Kaiser attack.The army of the Song Dynasty was completely used for passive defense. This is of course a lesson learned from the Tang Dynasty, so it overcorrected.Advancing cannot be attacked, retreat cannot be defended, soldiers are useless and soldiers cannot be dispensed with, and always support in a state of defenselessness.Fortunately, people in the Song Dynasty paid special attention to scholars. Although the army was not well organized, the civil and political aspects were still revived, so there were no major internal problems.Its general gains and losses are like this.