Liu Bei was hauled straight out of his seat by his third brother. The motion came so suddenly that his crown nearly slipped, tilting askew as it almost struck the polished floor. Zhang Fei's broad, calloused hand came down on his shoulder with all the restraint of a charging war elephant.
"Elder Brother! What is the meaning of this?" Zhang Fei roared, his voice resounding through the hall like a struck bronze bell. "Why sit here brooding like some lovesick maiden? Adou may be mild in temperament, but that only means he needs to be tempered. Send him to the front lines for a few proper campaigns. Let iron and blood harden him, and he will stand on his own soon enough."
Zhang Fei's memory was sharp when it came to matters that truly interested him. He drew himself up, plainly satisfied with his own reasoning.
Didn't the screen say it already? The Emperor guards the nation's gate! That suits Adou perfectly. Otherwise, even if we succeed in recovering the old capitals, what then if he turns out like Emperor Yizong of the Tang? That man nearly ruined his realm. Would that not bring even greater calamity upon the state?"
Hearing this, Liu Bei's thoughts returned to what the light screen had revealed earlier. He recalled the fate of that late Tang emperor, who treated the loyal Guiyi Army with nothing but suspicion.
Zhang Yichao had spent his strength and resources reopening the routes through Liangzhou, only to be sidelined and neglected by the court.
The Hexi Corridor had been lost, recovered, and lost again, all because of an inept ruler who sat secure in the capital.
"Yide speaks with reason," Pang Tong said as he stepped forward in support. "The restoration of the Han is no small undertaking, but a long road. Once Hanzhong is secured, our gaze must turn to the northwest, to Yongzhou and Liangzhou. From there we can press westward to reclaim the old territories of the Western Regions, and eastward toward the passes and the Central Plains. Jiangdong must be settled, as must the northern tribes. We may even need to send expeditions to Goryeo and the land of Wa to learn their intentions. And beyond that lie the distant regions of Nanyang, India, and further still."
Zhang Fei's eyes lit up at the sweeping vision laid out before him. In his excitement, he brought his hand down hard on Pang Tong's back, the blow nearly sending the strategist stumbling aside in shock.
"It's a good thing Shiyuan can keep track of all this!" Zhang Fei laughed loudly. "If I, Zhang Fei, can accomplish even one of these great feats for Big Brother, I would count myself content!"
Pang Tong shot him a dark look, resentment plain in his eyes. At that moment, he was already regretting every word he had spoken in support of this reckless brute.
The three men of Yizhou seated nearby each had a different response to Pang Tong's sweeping vision for the future of the Han.
Zhang Song's eyes gleamed with a fervent, almost feverish light.
So I was right from the very beginning…
My lord, Liu Bei, truly is a hero without equal. One day, we will bring these grand designs to fruition and unleash them upon the world.
Fa Zheng fell silent, a deep tide of admiration rising within him.
My lord began with far less than I ever did…
And yet, he fought his way to this height, still holding the ambition to swallow the world whole. Truly… such a man is rare beyond measure.
I, Fa Xiaozhi, would follow him to the ends of the earth without regret.
Liu Ba remained silent. He gently tapped the scroll hidden inside his wide sleeve, feeling as if his frantic scurrying around Jingzhou had all been completely in vain.
Three years of circling about, only to end up right where I began…
Kongming's expression was awkward, tinged with shame. Adou, raised to become a soft and pampered nobleman, the thought gnawed at him.
Then he remembered the Di Fan. The "Models for an Emperor," written by that Tang monarch revered through the ages. Surely a ruler's manual like that would hold some insight that could help Adou in the future, right?
But his mind soon wandered back to the more immediate problems. Once Shu was fully settled, the very first thing he would establish was a proper medical academy. He could set aside the baffling mystery of the wasting disease for now.
His eyes drifted toward Fa Zheng, then Liu Ba, one after the other. Far too many brilliant minds were dying shockingly young. This was no small anomaly.
He might never obtain the godlike medical arts the future possessed. He understood that. But if they did not at least build a medical academy, they would keep watching their best and brightest from dropping dead before their time!!!
[Lightscreen]
[But the grand lives of the nobility are, in the end, a far cry from what ordinary people experienced. There is a classic question people like to ask. If you had to live as a commoner during the Three Kingdoms period, which state would you choose to live under?
Before we can answer that, one thing needs to be made painfully clear. The Three Kingdoms era was still an age of endless chaos and war.
In Yuan opera, which stands shoulder to shoulder with Tang poetry and Song lyric poetry, there is a famous play, The Romance of the Western Chamber by Wang Shifu, a classic love comedy about a young scholar and a noble lady who defy convention to pursue their own marriage . It has a line that drives the truth home about as hard as anything can.
Better to be a dog in times of peace than a human in times of chaos.
The Three Kingdoms era was no different. Strip it down to the bone, and it was simply a matter of choosing who among them was the least terrible.
Life for the common people under Shu Han was, by comparison, straightforward and bearable. We have already covered Zhuge Liang's governance of Shu in detail.
Water conservancy. The salt and iron monopolies. Fair laws. Organized farming. All of it had been put in order, and together they provided a solid foundation for ordinary people to survive.
When the Jin general Huan Wen led his campaign into Shu, he met a centenarian who had once served as a minor official during the time of the Marquis Wu.
Huan Wen, burning with curiosity about the legendary Prime Minister, asked the old man how the Marquis Wu compared to the men who ruled now.
The old man's answer was remarkably short.
"When the Prime Minister was here, we did not feel that his policies were anything extraordinary. But after he passed away, we realized there was no one left to compare him to."
From this, we can catch a glimpse of something important. The living standards of the common people in Shu began to decline after the death of the Marquis Wu.
Jiang Wan and Fei Yi, who came after him, simply followed the laws and systems already in place.
As for Adou, that plump and easygoing emperor, he spent most of his time hanging around eunuchs and playing with his crickets. The damage he personally did to the people's livelihood was, in the end, fairly limited.
Just before the fall of the state, an envoy from Sun Wu named Xue Xu visited Shu Han. His official report recorded that the common people had a malnourished and pallid look about them. The word he chose was pallid, not starving. The food was not good, but people were not dropping dead in the streets.
So if Xue Xu described Shu Han in those terms, does that mean the people of Sun Wu were living in absolute luxury?
In truth, no matter how you run the numbers, the livelihood of the common people in Sun Wu was almost certainly the worst among the three states. It was roughly on par with living in ancient India.
The first piece of evidence comes from a memorial submitted by Luo Tong just before the Battle of Yiling.
Luo Tong was one of the few officials in Jiangdong who truly cared about the lives of the common people. In a memorial, he described the harsh reality he had witnessed:
"After years of war and repeated outbreaks of disease, the counties lie in ruin. The fields are overgrown and left untended. In the countryside, most households are made up of widowers, widows, the elderly, and the weak. It is rare to see young, able-bodied men."
"The common people and the soldiers stationed in the garrisons are so poor that some are driven to drown their own children, simply because they do not have enough food to keep them alive."
"Conscription and forced labor come one after another without end. The poor were treated like dirt and ordered around at will. Those with a little wealth spend everything they have on bribes, just to avoid being taken away for labor."
The second piece of evidence comes from the wooden slips excavated at Zoumalou in Changsha.
Jiangdong operated under an extremely rigid class system. Outside the Sun family and the four great clans, the general population was carved into four distinct grades. High grade. Middle grade. Low grade. And the lowest grade.
The low-grade and lowest-grade households were destitute beyond hope. When these people could not meet their taxes, the Jiangdong government had a simple answer. That is an easy problem to solve. Go and become a slave.
The Zoumalou slips record the forms this forced labor took. Serving state officials. Serving county officials. Serving as county guards. Serving as commandery clerks. Serving as blacksmiths. Working in state granaries. Working as border guards.
Once the government assigned a person to this kind of forced labor, the type of service was carved permanently into the household register. It followed that person for the rest of their life and could never be refused. The duties could be called up at any moment, and the service carried no end date whatsoever.
Look at this system through a modern lens, and it bears an unsettling resemblance to the caste system from the subcontinent just across the mountains. Back when the Zhou Dynasty was being established, the ancient Indians were busy inventing the four Varnas. We know it now as the caste system.
The four classes were the Brahmins, the Kshatriyas, the Vaishyas, and the Shudras. They handled religious rites, military service, farming and trade, and menial labor, in that order. Below them all sat the untouchables, the Dalits.
Because this system rooted itself so deep, conquerors poured through the Khyber Pass century after century, wave after wave. The caste system stood there untouched through all of it and remains standing right into the modern day.
We can deduce, with perfect logic, that when Sun Quan was still an infant, his Indian mother placed him in a basket and set him adrift on the Ganges River. He floated along the coastline, crossed the great ocean, and entered the Yangtze, where he emerged at last as the Chosen Son of Jiangdong.
Those green eyes. That purple beard. Definitive proof. He was a Son of the Sun in the Hindu faith.
The above statement is, of course, a complete joke. Brother Zhongmou, currently resting somewhere in the underworld, really should not take it to heart.
So. If you were a commoner in Jiangdong unlucky enough to fall into the bottom two classes, your life was, without any doubt, the absolute worst of the Three Kingdoms era.
And do not imagine for a moment that the people in those two bottom classes were rare. Look at the labor records dug up at Zoumalou. High-grade households never appear in the records. Middle-grade households appear exactly once. Every other labor record belongs to the low and the lowest-grade households. All of them.]
In the Great Tang court at Chang'an, the Emperor and his ministers felt as though their horizons had just been kicked wide open. They were staring at a completely different land, one governed by a system even stranger and far more rigid than anything they knew.
"This Indian Varna. No, this caste system. What in the world is that?"
Li Shimin found the term awkward on his tongue, so he simply called it a caste, a system of fixed ranks.
Du Ruhui's face settled into an expression of deep scholarly curiosity. He took a sheet of parchment and wrote out the four classes, adding the untouchables beneath them. He passed the sheet around for the ministers to study, his eyes narrowing as he worked through the information.
"The word Varna appears to be the phonetic rendering of a foreign tongue. The word caste seems to be a term later generations coined to summarize the whole idea."
He stroked his chin.
"This foreign system is brutally rigid. No wonder the Light Screen remarked that the land could swallow war after war and never topple. A social order like this could hold for thousands of years."
Fang Xuanling, who had been reading the humorous note at the end of the script, began to speculate on the nature of the region itself.
"This Hinduism. It is named for the land itself. Could it be that India has no single ruler and instead uses religion to govern the state? But then, what about Buddhism?"
Zhangsun Wuji stepped in to share his thoughts.
"Our understanding of that distant land is still thin, but we can make a few reasonable guesses. The Brahmins are said to speak with the gods. They must be like the Emperor, holding authority directly from Heaven. The remaining classes fall in line from there. The Kshatriyas are like our civil and military officials. The bottom two classes are like the common people."
As for the untouchables, they were treated as little more than house slaves, ordered about at will by anyone above them. That much was hardly a surprise in ancient times.
Li Shimin finally grasped the shape of the thing. His eyes lingered on the term Khyber Pass still glowing on the screen. A thoughtful gleam settled in his gaze.
What a strange name. I will have to rename it sooner or later.
"A system like this," Li Shimin declared, his voice ringing with confidence, "ignores a man's actual talent and intelligence entirely. It looks at nothing but his bloodline. This is vastly different from the way our Great Tang operates. No wonder India is forever being overrun by foreign invaders. Commoners with no will to fight to the death. Officials with no ambition to defend their own country. How could they possibly win a war?"
Wait. Li Shimin checked the thought in his own mind. Under a system this rigid, it was hard to say which class actually did the fighting. But the benefits of such an arrangement were obvious enough. The cost of conquest would be extremely low. A soft persimmon of a nation, ripe for the picking.
Had the eyes of his generals, Hou Junji and Yuchi Jingde, not lit up at that very moment? Even Zhangsun Wuji's fingers were twitching, already tracing out a campaign in his mind.
"It is a pity," Li Shimin remarked, "that the foreign states who have poured into India across the centuries never thought to fortify the Khyber Pass itself. Block that single pass, and would India not be as secure as a fortress?" He found the geographic choices of those ancient invaders genuinely perplexing.
Du Ruhui raised a different point.
"Looking at the later conflicts involving India, and watching the routes those armies took, could it be that the natural barrier called the Himalayas holds hidden passes within its snowy peaks?"
Zhangsun Wuji turned the idea over for a moment and shook his head.
"Later generations possess extraordinary means to cross the earth..."
Li Shimin felt the idea take hold, and his interest sharpened.
"Select a sharp and clever man. Give him a contingent of elite guards. Have him carry a load of white sugar and move disguised as a merchant. Send him into Tibet to scout the ground. The Tibetans live right along those mountains. If a shortcut to India exists, they will certainly know of it."
The matter was settled for the moment, and the Emperor allowed himself a broad smile as he read the Light Screen's sarcastic mockery of Sun Quan.
By comparison, it seemed he, Li Shimin, was far more beloved by later generations. At least no one had yet attached such bizarre and teasing remarks to his own name.
In truth, he felt he almost owed Sun Zhongmou a word of thanks. If Sun Quan had not oppressing his people so harshly, how would they ever have learned of this strange Indian caste system?
In Yizhou, the three men from Shu stared in astonishment at the centenarian's words about the Marquis Wu.
"To leave behind a reputation like that," Zhang Song murmured. His voice was thick with respect.
Zhang Fei was bursting with pride. "What is so surprising about that? The people of Shu built the Marquis Wu Shrine for the Prime Minister themselves. The incense there has burned for a thousand years."
Liu Bei, Pang Tong, Zhao Yun, and Mi Zhu all nodded firmly. A deep sense of pride and honor settled over them.
Zhang Fei puffed out his chest and pressed on. "The Prime Minister was even enshrined together with my Big Brother. The plaque above the shrine reads Zhaolie Temple, but the common people still call it the Marquis Wu Shrine. That tells you how deeply the Prime Minister has captured the hearts of the people of Shu."
A subtle and dangerous look stole into Liu Bei's eyes as he fixed his gaze on his third brother. He cleared his throat and spoke in an even tone.
"With Huo Zhongmou guarding Baishui Pass, the defense there is absolutely secure. Yide, why not stay in Chengdu for another half month? No need to rush back just yet. Wait until the dredging of the city water channels is completely finished before you return."
Zhang Fei scratched his head. His Big Brother's moods had become entirely impossible to predict. He could only nod, nursing his grievance in silence.
To break the awkward stillness, Zhang Song stepped in to lift the mood.
"Since the Marquis Wu earned the posthumous title of Zhongwu, the Fengchu, who shared the same fame, will surely leave his name in the histories as well."
Pang Tong faced Zhang Song's eager and enthusiastic gaze and opened his mouth. No sound came out. He looked exactly like a fish that had just been dragged onto the shore.