Chapter 24 first quarter

Horsepower is actually national strength, a truth that has been verified countless times in China's 2,000-year long history. Since the middle and late period of the Warring States period, King Zhao Wuling carried out Hufu cavalry and archery, announcing that ancient Chinese wars have entered the cavalry era from the era of war steps, and cavalry has been proven to be the most powerful, mobile, and lethal arm in the cold weapon era. And the long-term confrontation with the Han nationality in the Central Plains is a group of nomadic peoples on the northwest prairie, where the sky is vast, the wind is blowing, the grass is low and the cattle and sheep are low, there are rough men and herds of horses, this is doomed to the people outside the Great Wall. It has a huge natural advantage over the Han nationality in cavalry.

However, the inherent deficiencies of the Han nationality regime can only be made up for in the day after tomorrow. At the beginning of the establishment of each dynasty, there may be no shortage of soldiers, but there must be fewer horses. When Emperor Gaozu Liu Bang established his Western Han Empire, it was very difficult to go out of the palace to find a few pure-colored four-horse horses as rides, and the "special vehicles" for the civil servants and generals under him to get to and from get off work could only be ox carts ( "Since the emperor can't have a junsi, but a general or a bullock cart").This may not have prevented Liu Bang from winning the Chu-Han War and letting the invincible overlord Xiang Yu commit suicide in Wujiang, but in Baideng, facing hundreds of thousands of Hun cavalry, he would be in a panic. Liu was almost taken to the grassland by the Huns for "tourism".The pavilion chief of Surabaya knew his shame and was brave. He and his descendants exchanged women and money for peace while recuperating. At the same time, they vigorously developed the horse administration of the Western Han Empire. While setting up state-owned pastures to raise horses, people are strongly encouraged to raise horses (the "Horse Restoration Order" promulgated during the Wen and Jing Dynasties states that one less person from a horse-raising family can serve in corvee).After three generations of management, the Western Han Empire has accumulated national power and horsepower. When Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty launched a decisive battle with the Huns, he had hundreds of thousands of war horse resources in his hands.In the Battle of Mobei in 119 BC that determined the fate of the two great empires of the Han and the Hungarian, the Weihuo Legion not only had 140,000 cavalry, but also had 100,000 transport horses. In the end, Weihuo won a thousand miles and sealed the wolf. Behind it is the powerful national strength and horsepower of the empire.

Li Yuan, Li Shimin and his son set up an army in Jinyang, with only a thousand horses at hand. Li Yuan wiped his old face and bowed his knees to the Turkic people in order to gain the support of the Turkic people. For this reason, he received a generous gift of 2,000 Turkic horses from the Turkic people.Even after occupying the north of Chang'an and proclaiming himself emperor, Li Tang's war horse resources were still pitifully small. According to statistics, in the second year of Wude (619 AD), the Tang Empire only had 36,000 war horses. Li Shimin is the emperor of horses. He knows the importance of horses to him and his empire. He vigorously develops domestic horse management, promotes horse breeding talents exceptionally, appoints Zhang Wansui to supervise the national horse management, and introduces fine breeds from Siyi. Racecourses spanning thousands of miles have been set up in Tianshui, Tianshui, Jincheng and other places.The horse administration of the empire made rapid progress in the hands of Li Shimin. In the third year of Zhenguan (629 A.D.) when the Tang Empire went on an expedition to the Turks, Zhang Wansui’s horse farm was able to provide the empire with 100,000 elite horsemen, and left 100,000 in reserve. By the end of Zhenguan, The empire's war horses have grown to more than 700,000 horses.

In the early and mid-Tang Dynasty, horsepower was also crucial for frequent victories in foreign affairs. Brothers Zhao Kuangyin established the Northern Song Empire. Compared with the situation of the Liu Han and Li Tang empires, there are good and bad. The bad thing is that the sixteen prefectures of Youyun have been lost. The Northern Song Empire can no longer have a large number in the north like the Han and Tang empires. Sprawling pasture.The good thing is that the Zhao brothers did not start from scratch like Liu and Li when they took over the Northern Zhou family. In addition, they made a lot of windfall during the unification war (more than 40,000 horses were captured during the annexation of the Northern Han Dynasty). It doesn't look as embarrassing as it was in the early Han and Tang Dynasties (Zhao Guangyi couldn't wait to launch the war to regain Youyun after unifying the Central Plains, also because the empire seemed to be quite powerful in terms of horsepower).

In terms of horse administration, the Northern Song Empire still followed the basic system of Han and Tang, setting up nationalized pastures to raise horses.At the beginning of the Northern Song Dynasty, along the old system of the Five Dynasties, Feilongyuan was set up to manage horse affairs (later changed to Qunmusi, with the Privy Council envoy and leader, to focus on the matter), and set up 14 large state-owned horse farms (horse supervisors) throughout the country; The residences of ethnic minorities in Huang, Shaanxi, Southwest and other places were also the war horse bases of the Northern Song Empire. They didn’t need to be raised by the empire, they just paid for money (the people of the Northern Song Dynasty didn’t lack money).

In the middle and early period of the Northern Song Dynasty, the horse affairs did not seem to hold back the empire too much. Compared with the Han and Tang Dynasties, the Zhao Empire, which implemented the policy of keeping the outside and ignoring the inside, consumed far less horsepower than the former.In the Zhenzong period, the number of horses available to the empire reached more than 200,000. Although it was far from the level at the peak of the Han and Tang Dynasties, it cannot be called embarrassing. For the Northern Song Empire in the middle period, the biggest problem was not the lack of horses, but the lack of horses.As Song and Liao entered into a century-long era of peace after the Chanyuan alliance, the Xixia people also began to be satisfied with taking the red envelopes from the Zhao family emperor every year. As a result, the consumption of the empire's war horses decreased day by day, and of course the demand also decreased day by day.

During the Renzong period when "horses" were no longer needed, the horse trade between the imperial court and the surrounding ethnic minorities also began to shrink. Later, the ethnic minority brothers knew that the Northern Song Dynasty people were not interested in horses. Horses are not a problem, but the horse herdsmen set up all over the country are a problem, and they are still a big problem. The breed of horses has degenerated and the number has dropped sharply. Of course, the biggest problem is money. It is too expensive to run a nationalized ranch. First of all, there are few horses and a large area, and the cost is quite huge.According to statistics, one horse in the Hebei Muma Supervisor occupies an average of 150 mu of land. Among them, the five to six thousand horses in Guangping Supervisor occupy more than 15,000 hectares of good land in the three prefectures of Xing and Zhao. Up to 250 mu to 300 mu.Bao Zheng conducted relevant investigations. He pointed out that six tenths of the good fields in the north and south of the Zhanghe River were flooded and destroyed, and three out of the remaining four were occupied by horse herders. serious problem.During Renzong's time, Taichang Cheng Ye Qingchen calculated such an account for Zhao Zhen. At that time, there were 30,000 to 40,000 horses in the national horse herding supervision, but they occupied more than 90,000 hectares of fertile land, and the annual cost reached millions of dollars; It costs more than 500 yuan to raise a horse, but it only costs 25 yuan to buy it from the ethnic minority brothers in the northwest.

Secondly, most of the horses in the horse guard are not suitable for riding, and every time they are "driven to the border, eighteen or ninety-nine people will freeze to death without fighting." Then why not go to the brothers in the northwest to buy and sell?Because the Empire "doesn't need it". Why continue to set up herding horses to raise "war horses" that are neither dead nor alive and useless?Because war horses are an indispensable resource for a country, no one dares to say that a dignified empire does not have its own war horse base, not to mention that this is the ancestor system.

For a while, the people of the Northern Song Dynasty, who had not fought for many years, couldn't figure out why the resource of war horses could not be lacked, and the reason for the existence of the Horse Shepherd. And when Zhao Xu came to power, wanting to transform the temperament of the empire and make the country rich and powerful, there were two status quo of the imperial affairs before him: One is that the empire does not have war horses, and horses must be used in order to use soldiers, but the empire has no horses to use. The second is that the horse-breeding supervisors set up all over the country burn money and do not produce horses, and institutional reform of the "state-owned" horse-breeding industry is imperative.

Wang Anshi's method of raising horses was born in such a big environment.