"Ha, I'm done with a thought, it feels so good to completely relax."

The next day after welcoming Ma Chao, in the early morning.

In the Jiuquan County Governor's yamen, in a room filled with hardwood and steam, Li Su was soaked in a bathtub made of obsidian veneer, holding a translucent Jiuquan nephrite wine glass, which contained grape wine. If you soak it so hot, take a sip.

I drank a little longer last night and slept with my clothes before I packed up. I felt a little uncomfortable when I woke up, so I had to make up for the missed bath.

The combination of hot bath and cool and slightly sweet wine really made Li Su feel out of her body. Since joining the Western Expedition this year, in order to set an example and boost morale, Li Su has never been so indulged. She left Chengdu in March, and now it is October, a full seven months of hard life!

The obsidian in the bathtub was sold by Xiangxiong Business Travel over Qilian Mountains to Hexi. The jade material of the luminous cup was said to be Jiuquan jade, but it was actually slightly west. It was transmitted from Yiwu, which is a kind of nephrite from Hetian, Xinjiang. The wine comes from Shanshan, as mentioned earlier.

Anyway, Li Su's enjoyment in this room can be said to be able to arrange all the famous enjoyment products from the Western Regions and the Snowy Plateau. In addition to alcohol, there are also fruit trays on the table, and some precious fruits from the Western Regions. People in the Han Dynasty rarely drink wine and serve fruits alone, but Li Su was used to the consumption in KTVs in his previous life and did not think it was strange that it was just for fruit trays.

In Li Su's fruit plate, there is no need to mention the huge top-quality grapes with frankincense, and the honey melon (hami melon) specialty of Yiwu, which was also something that the Han civilization had heard of before, but never thought of moving to the Han area.

In addition, Li Su also found out from the Shanshan people that they had seen a huge water melon (watermelon) with green skin, black seeds, red flesh, and juicy flesh in just a few days. However, this melon does not seem to be in this season. It is already mid-October and has long disappeared.

The origin of those things is also in the Western Regions further west. Shanshan merchants were just going to Kucha to the west. Shule ate them while doing business and were not planted in Shanshan. But after listening to Li Su's request, Shanshan merchants who came to sell wine in the autumn said that they would try their best to bring seeds to Li Su next year, who made Li Su offer a high price.

Yiwu, Shanshan merchants go to Jiuquan, Dunhuang every year to do business, usually in spring and autumn. The main reason is that the climate in winter and summer is not suitable for crossing the desert Gobi, nor will they enter Yumen Pass. In spring, they mainly sell some expensive luxury goods, with a relatively small trade volume, and in autumn there are more daily necessities, and the centralized transaction of necessary materials for people's livelihood is also larger.

So Li Su needs seeds, and probably has to wait until next autumn. Who has just opened this year's trade route? Many people have not received the news yet. They don't know that Liangzhou has peace and goods can go directly to Chang'an. How can the spread of news and the reconstruction of goodwill reputation be less than a year?

No matter what, watermelons and carrots will definitely be eaten sooner or later (there are carrots in this era, but they are not orange, and the color is not necessarily).

This is worthwhile. Brother reopened the Western Regions trade route for the Han Dynasty! If the trade route is opened, it cannot bring Western luxury daily necessities, satisfy his desires and even see Hu Ji... Cough cough, who would have worked hard to make contributions to the Han Dynasty? He always had to have some self-interest motivation and be more motivated.

If you travel through time and come to the highest official of the Han Dynasty, you will not even enjoy the quality of going to KTV to drink wine and open a fruit plate in your previous life. This travel through time would be too frustrating.

This is not an exaggeration.

After Li Su was so comfortable after soaking, she went out to let the maid loosen his muscles and bones. When kneading, it was different from in the Middle Earth. She had to use the flower essential oil from the Western Regions to open the back. The aromatic essential oil was smooth and could even let the girls step on it. Of course, they had to soak their feet in advance, and they also added a little essential oil when soaking their feet.

The back-step bed is like the physiotherapy bed in later hospitals. A hole is dug on the bed board, which is soft cushioned next to it, so that Li Su can bury her face without being frustrated. There is also a wooden rack similar to a mosquito net rack, and there is a wooden stool that can be slid into the wooden rack, so that the maid can sit on it and adjust the force of her feet pressing on Li Su's back at any time.

These small designs are not uncommon in the future. Those who have visited the hospital for physical therapy know how to do it, but in the Han Dynasty it was a clever idea, which makes people surprised that "how could anyone know so much brains and thoughts for this enjoyment."

Especially the extravagant style of "let maids add essential oils when soaking their feet", after it was later reported, it shocked the Han civil and military officials in Jiuquan County again, and secretly called it the right general who could play and had taste. Fortunately, they had never heard of Yan Song's jade screen in the Ming Dynasty, otherwise they would definitely be compared.

While the maid was stomping on Li Su's essential oil, Cai Yan also came to join in the fun. Li Su drank too much last night and slept early, so she didn't have the chance to show off. At this moment, she had taken her latest chapter "The Fu of the West", which was updated to Li Su, and asked him to comment. She also took the pipa and wanted to sing lyrics for Li Su, saying that she was in the moon where she lived in Jiuquan and had learned all the pipa very well.

Li Su quietly listened to his wife Pian Si Li and recited it with all the emotions. As expected, at the end of the fu, the plot of Ju Yanhai destroying Guo Si was also updated. At least it sounded gorgeous and generous, and very imposing. Anyway, he could not ask for more about the style of Han Fu.

As he listened, he couldn't help but praise and encourage his wife to conduct more in-depth discussions on the other party's similar interests, without further explanation.

...

After the war, Li Su was not idle in Jiuquan. On the one hand, he urged local officials to take advantage of the fact that the warlords and powerful tribes had just been beaten to re-count the actual Han population in Liangzhou. After all, the local court has not grasped the actual situation for at least 30 years.

Only by counting the population well and finding out the approximate scale of fields and pastures in each county can Guoyuan promote the "transform pasture into farming" in the Hexi Corridor next year, and convert some pasture with abundant water sources into cotton fields.

And no matter how it is changed, the irrigation conditions required for growing cotton are definitely stricter than those forage land. In some places, digging and irrigation canals are necessary to dig and divert them on each tributary of the weak water. After the spring plowing begins in March next year, there is no time for the people to build water conservancy, so it is best to take advantage of this winter to take advantage of the slack farming in the winter and mobilize the people to spontaneously practice some of them when the weather is not so bad.

The government can also take out some money and grain as a subsidy. The main reason is that Li Su and Wang Pingguang were fishing and enforcing the law, but they killed 50,000 Qiang soldiers who were not blindly robbed. They further plowed the courtyard and swept the holes and pulled the list according to the tribes, and also settled the old, sick and disabled tribes who had resisted crimes.

The unowned property obtained from the destroyed tribe was used to subsidize those Qiang people who were willing to surrender to the rule of the Han people and learn from the Han people how to improve their production and lifestyle.

Anyway, they are all those tricks that take advantage of the situation and play, and they can learn it with a little bit of instructors.

After some statistics, Li Su found that he didn't expect that in Xiliang, there were still Han tyrants who could conceal the taxable population. There were only 500,000 people on the books all year round, but in fact, the population of 700,000 could be found after the war. If there was no war, it would probably be close to 800,000.

Although the population of the Qiang people has no data, it is similar to what Li Su predicted before the war. The entire Hexi Qiang and Hu people are about two million, with 500,000 in the northeast of Ruoshui and 1.5 million in the southeast of Ruoshui.

However, because of the previous killings when he was pacifying Guo Si, the young soldiers alone killed 50,000 people. Later, they provoked and settled the matter. To the southwest of Wushui-langshui, the entire Qiang people controlled about 1.3 million.

In this way, the Western Expedition this year also controlled about two million people, and one-third of the Han people could control it relatively firmly and enforce it in accordance with the Han people's taxation laws.

Two-thirds of the Qiang people can only implement the old methods of trade and tribute, or consider selling cotton seeds through the Han government next year and collecting reasonable species patent fees. Moreover, whether it is Han or Qiang people, because the losses this year have been caused by the war, the tax revenue of that year will definitely be exempted.

In fact, during the reign of Guo Si, the tax in Xiliang was also exempted. He did not set up a tax collection agency. He robbed him directly if he didn't have enough food and robbed him instead of taxes. If he robbed too much, he would be embarrassed to collect taxes.

In addition to investigating population and land and planning water conservancy, Li Su also devoted some of his energy to take advantage of the opportunity of the Western Regions merchants coming in the late autumn, and tried his best to give those travelers traveling west to news of their walks. The government even sponsored them some money and food, and encouraged them to promote more after returning to the Western Regions that "the armed conflict and separatist forces in Liangzhou have ended."

These actions are of course a bit incomprehensible to the local officials who have always been proud of the "strong Han Dynasty", because the Han Dynasty did not have the degree of active tolerance of the Tang Dynasty later, and even the envoys sent by the Han Dynasty to foreign countries were rude to kill local lords at every turn.

But Li Su knew that this little favor would not cost much, so she just regarded it as "investment promotion" to accelerate the recovery of trade.

In addition to the above two things, the last political achievement of Liangzhou was to identify the last batch of Western Liang soldiers who captured Ma Chao back in Jiuquan. Those who could complain and brainwash were to win over them. Those who were really bad at the same time should be punished in the hard labor camp.

After the Battle of Xiliang, the total cavalry force of Liu Bei's army was actually reduced to a historical low. Although Xiliang produced horses, it was impossible for more horses to be supplied to the court this year. Guo Si and Jia Xu's hard walls and the Qiang people's aggressive destruction have caused too much damage to local productivity and livestock wealth. Production will probably resume next year and the court will still not be offered to the court.

We must expect that the Liangzhou horse-producing area will subsidize the cavalry of Liu Bei's army to be on track until at least 197.

Liu Bei had only more than 20,000 cavalrymen before the war. After all, Guanzhong had such a severe drought and three severe disasters last year, the cavalry troops were mainly the foundation they had saved in Yizhou. Hu Chuquan led the entire Southern Xiongnu and became a guest general, and could not be considered Liu Bei's direct troops.

In many battles such as the Battle of Jincheng and Wuwei, the total loss of cavalry exceeded 5,000. In the final Juyanhai decisive battle, it was decided to win directly, but in the process of killing four times the enemy, its permanent damage to two thousand people also reached 2,000.

These were not only killed directly in battle. After being seriously injured, the desert was in a harsh winter environment and could not survive and could not be cured. Anyway, the conditions were indeed difficult and there was no way.

As a result, the elite cavalry units of Liu Bei's army have declined to a pitiful level of less than 20,000 people.

In contrast, Yuan Shao, who almost peacefully received the combat power of Youzhou cavalry and used Liu Yu's political heritage to win over the Xianbei and Wuhuan east of Bingzhou, formed a sharp contrast between Yuan Shao, but he claimed to have 70,000 cavalry. Even Cao Cao actually claimed to have 20,000, and Yuan Shu was slightly less than Cao Cao. Sun Ce and Liu Biao's cavalry troops were basically negligible, and they were all less than 10,000 people.

Ma Chao finally returned from Juyanhai, with a total scale of 16,000 people and 8,000 troops of his own troops. After Guo Si's death, the Xiliang cavalry captured 8,000 people.

In the context of Liu Bei's own cavalry weak, Li Su had to consider digesting and absorbing these 8,000 dead soldiers into his own soldiers as much as possible.

These people's combat ability, experience, courage, and martial arts are all unspeakable. They are the last essence of the Western Liang warlords from Dong Zhuo to Li Jue and Guo Si. At least they have been fighting for seven years, and they have been coming from the sea of ​​blood.

It is because character and loyalty are very problematic, and I dare not use it easily, for fear of turning it into a double-edged sword.

Li Su held a complaint meeting for these people for half a month, but only eliminated some deadly elements to ensure that the remaining prisoners were slightly calm and did not escape halfway through the road when there was any disturbance, and then became a bandit and endangered the place.

After making these preparations, Li Su dared to ask Ma Chao to return the horses to these people, but he still did not give them weapons. He asked Ma Chao to escort them with his main force, return to Wuwei, and escort the messenger back to Chang'an to report the victory.
Chapter completed!