Chapter 91 Murong Fuyun, King of Tuyuhun

Mulei is actually a Puli country in the Western Han Dynasty. The "Pulei" Xiongnu pronunciation was changed, and it was named after the Putihai. Putihai is the current Balikun Lake. Over time, it became the current Mulei.

In the Baitak Mountain (now Beitak Mountain) in the north of Mulei County, it was a strategic location between Yiwu, Altai and Dihua in later generations. However, at this time, it is not that important. After all, the vast Western Regions are full of places that can be detoured everywhere.

After Qu Boya, Qu Wentai and his son, and Gaochang royal family were rescued by their confidants, they stationed in the Baitak mountain area.

As Qu Wentai summoned more and more tribes, by mid-May of the fourth year of Wude, tens of thousands of people had gathered here.

Of course, these tens of thousands of people are not the entire army, and there are also some herders of all ethnic groups who cannot bear the constraints of the Tang Dynasty. However, they all hate the Tang people.

But with more people, food and drink have become a problem. Seeing that there were fewer and fewer cattle and sheep in the food, Qu Wentai found Qu Boya and said to him: "Father, we already have more than 6,000 elite troops in our hands. It should not be difficult to capture Gaochang City. Gaochang City has only two thousand Tang troops, and they are unprepared and have a great chance of victory!"

But Qu Boya shook her head and said, "Let's forget it!"

"Forget it!" Qu Wentai was anxious when he heard this: "Forget it? How can you forget it? They destroyed my Gaochang Kingdom, destroyed my ancestral temple, and the country. This hatred is irreconcilable, how can you forget it!"

Qu Boya suddenly took out a hoe from the corner of the tent: "Look at this?"

Qu Wentai looked at him indifferently, but he was not interested in taking a second look: "Father, I am not a son who is not diligent in all limbs and grains. This is just a hoe, so what's so good about it!"

Qu Boya sighed and said, "Look carefully before talking about it!"

Qu Wentai took the hoe and felt that it was obviously much heavier than the normal hoe. This was an ordinary hoe, but half of the black paint was applied on it, mainly to avoid steel oxidation. He looked at it for a long time but could not see why, and handed the hoe to Qu Boya: "Father, this is no different, it is at most a little heavy!"

Qu Boya pointed to the hoe and said, "This is just a hoe, but it is made of steel making hundreds of steel. It is extremely sharp and can cut a steel bar as thick as a little finger at once. It can be said that iron is like mud. Whether it is the arms or thighs, it will be broken into two pieces if it is swinging!"

Qu Wentai was stunned: "What happened?"

As he said that, he asked someone to bring a thick iron chain and went into battle himself. With a wave of the hoe, the iron chain was cut into two pieces in one click. Looking at the blade of the hoe, there was no burrs at all!

Suddenly, Qu Wentai stroked the smooth blade of the shovel and said in horror: "This hoe is so sharp? This Tang people is too prodigal. Such exquisite and good steel is actually used to build a hoe? Is the Tang people's steel so much?"

From the rise of steel in the Han Dynasty to modern times, steel has been a strategic material for two thousand years, and was firmly controlled by the central government. The reason for the serious crime of smuggling iron materials is that the steel production is scarce and extremely expensive.

If you don’t have an intuitive understanding of the preciousness of steel in ancient times, you can ask your ancestors that many of them in this generation were still using wooden plows until the founding of New China for 20 or 30 years. Steel is hard to find, and steel with superior performance is even harder to buy. The better ones are used to make weapons, and the second ones are used to make farm tools, and there will be no waste at all.

Now that Tang Jun uses such good steel as a hoe, he has a handful of people. This only shows that the Tang people have more steel resources than everyone imagined, and they don’t regard steel as rare goods at all!

At this moment, Qu Wentai noticed that there was actually one person in the tent.

Xue Yingxiong.

The Gaochang Kingdom was able to gain a foothold in the Western Regions mainly because it relied on the six tribes of the people in the Western Regions, including Xue, Ma, Zhang, He, Liu, and Liu. The Xue clan had long occupied Gaochang's Ministry of Personnel, and its disciples and former officials almost spread throughout the Western Regions.

Xue Yingxiong actually wanted to surrender to Chen Ying, but he was taken over by Ma Mengming. Moreover, the Xue clan was very miserable this time by Chen Ying, and it can be said that he suffered heavy losses. The main source of wealth for the Xue clan is farming. Anyway, the Western Regions are vast and sparsely populated, and you can cultivate any place you find, but the population resources are very expensive, especially the Han people who can farm, which is even more precious.

The Xue family controlled tens of thousands of tenant farmers, who lived a slave-like poverty life. The Xue family relied on exploiting these Han people and lived a luxurious life comparable to that of kings and princes. In one sentence, Chen Ying said that more than 10,000 tenant farmers of the Xue family were dissolved by Chen Ying, forming self-cultivated people, and confiscated the Xue family's land and distributed it to ordinary people.

It was precisely because Chen Ying did too well that the Ministry of Personnel ordered Xue Yingxiong to be very dissatisfied.

Cutting off people's wealth is like killing their parents. So Xue was determined to go against Qu Boya and Chen Ying.

Xue Yingxiong looked at Qu Wentai and smiled and said with a smile: "Your Highness the Prince is unknown. After Chen Ying led his army to leave Gaochang, he did not establish the Western Regions to fight against the Western Turks, but instead stationed in Jinman County to reclaim wasteland. He also built several blast furnaces in Huaergou, specifically for steelmaking!"

Qu Boya said: "Chen Ying has several giant blast furnaces, making steel all the time day and night. I wonder how much steel they can produce in a year?"

Xue Yingxiong said: "Twenty-hundred thousand jin."

Qu Wentai and Qu Boya both breathed a sigh of relief. 200,000 jin is not a small amount for a warlord, but it is nothing to Gaochang, the richest country in the Western Regions. The steel produced in Gaochang can reach up to 500,000 jin, but most of this steel is supplied to the Western Turkic Khanate.

However, considering that Chen Ying's steel has very superior performance than their Gaochang country's steel, it is not afraid to underestimate it.

Xue Yingxiong said again: "One furnace!"

Qu Wentai and Qu Boya both burst into tears and screamed: "What? Two hundred thousand kilograms per furnace?"

Xue Yingxiong nodded and said, "Yes! King, 200,000 yuan per furnace! Chen Ying can make at least twenty furnaces of good molten steel in Huaergou a month. You can imagine how much steel they can produce in a year."

A furnace of 200,000 kilograms is 4 million kilograms a month, and nearly 50 million kilograms a year. This is really scary.

Chen Ying had never thought about making steel in the Western Regions, but when he asked someone to open up land near Huaergou, he accidentally discovered that the west bank of Huaergou was a coal mountain, and the thirty miles upstream of the east bank was an iron mine, which was simply an unexpected fortune.

This is not the most powerful force that made Chen Ying prepare to mine. It is mainly because Chen Ying discovered that when the Han people in the Western Regions were farming, they actually had wooden plows. Every household had few iron tools except for a kitchen knife. It was so hard to believe that many Han people in the Western Regions had iron pots.

Seeing this situation, Chen Ying felt that he had reclaimed the land in one month, cultivated the soil, and planted it again. Anyway, these 100,000 troops were idle, but Qu Wentai and his son were gone. Even if Chen Ying wanted to kill someone, he needed to have an excuse, otherwise it would be criticized.

So Chen Ying was paying attention to the internal strife of the Western Turks, and asked the soldiers of the Anxi Army to make steel. In fact, the main body of the soldiers in this era were farmers. They were all versatile workers, able to farm, work, and hunt. So Chen Ying mined coal in the western mountain of Huaergou, led the Han people in Gaochang to mine coal together, and handed over the method of making coal balls to ordinary people, a simple coal ball mold and an iron coal ball furnace, which was too simple.

Of course, there is another purpose for doing this. Because the winter in the Western Regions is too cold, a large number of trees are cut down to burn for firewood in order to keep warm, which is also the reason for the deterioration of the Western Regions' environment.

Chen Ying opened a workshop and opened an industrial and mining industry, allowing the Han people in the Western Regions to become rich first, but it is not enough to be rich alone, so they must learn to protect themselves.

Chen Ying believed that Li Yuan would never allow Chen Ying to stay in the Western Regions for a long time, and he would not allow Chen Ying to lead a 100,000 army for a long time.

Therefore, Chen Ying directly used the Lingzhou model. The Tang people, each ten households were one apart, with a length of armor, ten apart as a fort, a fort, ten forts as a town, and a town mayor.

Every household of Ding Zhuang took advantage of the slack farming, under the training of the Anxi Army soldiers, practiced the military methods, and used the seized equipment of the Tongye Hu army and the newly built horizontal swords and bows and crossbows. All of these things are free and cost-effective.

In today's Western Regions, the Tang people are all soldiers.

Of course, during the training process, Chen Ying also summoned people of all ethnic groups to start large-scale construction activities. One town built a town fort, which is actually a small town. This kind of fort is different from the Central Plains city. This kind of fort is built in places that are easy to defend and difficult to attack.

There are now more than 170 new states in the Western Regions, with a total of more than 170 towns and forts, almost everywhere.

Xue Yingxiong continued: "According to the news from Xiaozuo, Tang farmers from all over the Western Regions had a handful of one hand, and they didn't have money, so they gave them for free. In addition to hoes, there were also horizontal knives, bows and crossbows, and shields."

Qu Wentai said: "For free, Chen Ying is so generous?"

Xue Yingxiong said, "There is too much steel in Chen Ying's hands, which is unimaginable."

This made Qu Wentai lose the sound of sucking cold air. How powerful can so much steel exert? It’s hard to say anything else. Anyway, the Han people in Gaochang have generally used steel farm tools. Even ordinary people have iron armor and hold horizontal knives made of high-carbon steel. In the past, such equipment was the patent of the Western Turks' Li Army! As time goes by, there will only be more and more well-equipped Tang people. As long as they are not idiots, they know what this means!

Qu Wentai smiled contemptuously and said, "War is based on people, not steel! When the Turks raised their troops, they used arrowheads made of animal bones or flint, and they didn't even have a pair of leather armor, but they still killed the Rouran people to death and were frustrated!"

"Your Highness the Prince is right. What can the Tang people have no more steel? What can the equipment become more so? Even with the magical weapons that cut iron like mud, they are still a group of cowardly sheep, clusters of weeds that they let them harvest!" Xue Yingxiong laughed and said, "No matter how good the equipment of the Tang people dogs is, it is useless. After a battle, these have become ours. I still wish that they all wear armor and hold treasure swords!"

"Not bad!" Qu Wentai said: "The hedgehog is full of thorns, and it can kill it with a light knife; the bull is extremely wrestling, and it can knock it down with an arrow! No matter how well the Tang army is equipped, it is still an army made of sand, so what's the point!"

Qu Wentai and Xue Yingxiong both had disapproving smiles on their faces, but Qu Boya still felt a little lacking in confidence.

At this moment, a wild laugh suddenly came from outside the tent: "It's so ridiculous, it's so ridiculous. A group of timid foxes actually fantasized about dealing with tigers. They are so ignorant and fearless!"

When Qu Wentai heard this, his face changed drastically. He hurriedly drew his sword and rushed out of the tent.

I don't know when, there were densely packed with majestic cavalry outside the tent. A tall man in golden armor rode on the back of a horse and looked at Qu Wentai with a look of contempt in his eyes.

Qu Wentai looked around and found that his so-called elite were actually controlled by these blue-clad cavalrymen, and no one issued a warning. However, what was a little relieved was that the person who came had no murderous aura, and it was not Tang Jun. Although he was talking about Tang Yan, he had a strange accent.

Qu Wentai plucked up his courage and asked, "Who are you?"

The general in the golden armor smiled faintly and said, "My Khan Murong Fuyun!"
Chapter completed!