Wolfish ambition?" Du Ruhui rolled the phrase across his tongue as though tasting a rare vintage. He decided it could not have been more precise. Leaning closer to the desk, his eyes traced the lines of text. "We heard before about Japan launching invasions in later generations. Looking at it now, these eastern barbarians have no sense of civilized conduct whatsoever. They borrowed their entire culture from our Huaxia civilization, and then they turned around and sank their teeth into the hand that fed them. How is that any different from a pack of ungrateful wolves?"
Zhangsun Wuji offered a slight objection. He adjusted his wide sleeves with a soft rustle of silk.
"Our Great Tang can naturally assert its might over the four corners of the world. But look at what happens in the later dynasties. The Song Emperor had no appetite for martial virtue. Forget the Western Regions. They could not even hold the Yanyun Sixteen Prefectures. As for the Yuan Emperor, he remains something of an enigma, but I have read enough Yuan poetry to know they complained that living in times of chaos is worse than being a dog in a prosperous age. Perhaps their dynasty was every bit as wretched as the Song. Search through the histories. If the emperors of those later generations had possessed even half of our Emperor's martial spirit, would Japan have ever dared to lift its head?"
Du Ruhui felt a flicker of amusement, and mild contempt.
GG, Well played,... Taking the scenic route just to flatter His Majesty again.
Li Shimin's expression softened, though he brushed aside Zhangsun Wuji's transparent flattery without a single word. He tapped the armrest of his chair and put a fresh question to the room.
"What exactly is this nonsense about the Emperor of the Place Where the Sun Rises?"
The assembled ministers sank into a heavy silence. Wei Zheng stepped forward, lifting his chin with quiet confidence.
"On this matter, Your Majesty, your servant knows a few things."
Wei Zheng gestured toward the detailed map displayed on the Light Screen. The full shape of Japan lay spread across it with striking clarity, far too large to be brushed off as a scattering of mountain islands. It had to be counted as a true landmass.
Stepping closer to the desk, Wei Zheng used his fingers to trace the distances on the map. "During the Han Dynasty, it was recorded that traveling from the southern tip of their territory to the north took five months. From west to east took three. Along the way there were more than thirty separate kuni, regional kingdoms, and every single Ōkimi styled himself a king."
"I imagine that was the very beginning of their civil wars," Li Shimin said with a dry chuckle, the shape of the situation settling clearly in his mind. "And what happened after that?"
"In the third year of the Daye era during the Sui Dynasty, the year 607, Japan sent an envoy named Ono no Imoko to our civilization. The letter he carried declared that the Son of Heaven in the land where the sun rises was writing to the Son of Heaven in the land where the sun sets. Emperor Yang of Sui read those words and flew into a towering rage. He scolded them harshly and ordered that no such insolent letter ever be presented before him again."
"Well said, and well done," Li Shimin laughed, his eyes gleaming with satisfaction.
The other ministers nodded in agreement. The logic was simple enough to twist the knife. If the Ōkimi of those scattered kuni claimed Heaven as his elder brother, then what did that make the Emperor of the Central Plains? The Son of Heaven reduced to some backwater nephew? Absurd.
Wei Zheng nodded, his expression hovering somewhere between disbelief and contempt. "In the fourth year of the Daye era, the envoy from Japan returned to offer tribute once more. He proclaimed that their Ōkimi had heard the Emperor of Sui was a devout follower of the Buddha and had dispatched several dozen monks to study the scriptures in our land."
Wei Zheng pointed to the Light Screen.
"The title the Light Screen just displayed comes directly from the official diplomatic letter of that visit. The Emperor was greatly displeased. He denounced them for their total lack of proper etiquette and refused to receive any further letters of that nature."
The ministers nodded slowly. So that was the story. Du Ruhui sneered and shook his head. "They put the cart before the horse and remain completely blind to their own insignificance."
Li Shimin shook his head and let out a short laugh.
"Bodhisattva Emperor. It does have a pleasant ring to it. But sending envoys to study Buddhism from a nation of barbarians?" He suspected something had been off about the whole affair even back then.
Wei Zheng stepped forward once more and bowed deeply.
"In the fourth year of the Daye era, an envoy named Pei Shiqing was dispatched to Japan in return. I humbly request Your Majesty's permission to trace his route."
Li Shimin gave his approval with a wave of his hand.
Wei Zheng traced the route with his finger, starting from the Shandong peninsula.
"Pei Shiqing crossed the sea from Laizhou to Baekje. He traversed the length of the peninsula and took to the sea once more. Passing through Tsushima and the island of Iki, he made landfall on the coast of Kyushu and pressed eastward."
Wei Zheng traced the remainder of the journey.
"Moving east, he reached the kingdoms of Ito and Na. The people there were indistinguishable from the people of Huaxia. The dozen or more kuni to the east of these were all vassals to the Ōkimi of Yamato. Pei Shiqing exchanged diplomatic gifts with them and then returned."
Li Shimin followed the path of Wei Zheng's finger. The route began in the Central Plains, moved through Shandong, crossed to the Korean Peninsula, went south by sea, and then stretched east across the Japanese archipelago before carrying those records back again.
"To think you know so much about this, Minister Wei," Li Shimin said, genuinely impressed.
Wei Zheng did not take the credit. "I have merely read the records, Your Majesty. The achievement belongs to the envoy Pei Shiqing."
"It was him?" Li Shimin remembered the man from Hedong. "I will summon him to the palace tonight. We will speak at length about the journey."
Li Shimin returned his gaze to the map, studying the details more closely.
"The route used by the monks who traveled across seems shorter, according to the Light Screen."
"Perhaps the monks simply lacked the larger ships," Du Ruhui remarked, well acquainted with the map's subtleties.
"What if we gave them the large ships?" Li Shimin mused. A sudden scheme was taking shape in his head. "We select monks loyal to the Great Tang. Give them proper training. Could they not easily become honored guests in that island nation? We could even be bolder. Choose quick-witted and sharp-minded men. Teach them the Buddhist texts. Send them across the sea as masters of the Dharma."
Li Shimin felt a touch of wickedness stir in his chest, but surely the Buddha would not hold it against him. Even if the Buddha did not recognize the Emperor of the Ages, the Sui Emperor, that self-styled Bodhisattva Emperor who had once claimed kinship with the Tang imperial line by marriage, would surely nod in approval.
That Bodhisattva Emperor of the Sui had failed to bring Goguryeo to heel. The Emperor of the Ages would handle things rather differently.
[Lightscreen]
[When evaluating the second-generation rulers of the Three Kingdoms, Chen Shou's historical judgments were mostly on target.
But when it came to Lu Xun, a sharp disagreement broke out in the record.
Chen Shou gave Lu Xun his own biography. His conclusion praised Lu Xun as a man who worried for the state and gave his body for it, calling him a true minister of the realm.
Pei Songzhi, however, slammed the table and made it clear he disagreed entirely.
On Lu Xun's military tactics, Pei Songzhi called him a deceitful trickster whose actions brought nothing but misery and death down on the common people. Compared to Zhuge Liang, he was not even fit to stand in the same league.
Pei Songzhi went straight for the throat. Lu Xun mistreated the common people. That was why the Lu family did not last three generations. Their entire clan was wiped out by the time of his grandson. Karma hit you like a bitch.
Pei Songzhi's harsh words for Lu Xun were not born from some petty scholarly grudge. They were grounded in cold logic and hard reality.
Pei Songzhi's harsh words for Lu Xun were not some petty scholarly grudge. They were grounded in cold logic and hard reality.
Based on the household registers, Chen Shou lived through the Han, Wei, and Jin dynasties. He had no personal ties to Jiangdong whatsoever. So his evaluation of Lu Xun simply followed the mainstream historical line.
Not many people are all that familiar with Pei Songzhi. But everyone knows his boss.
Liu Yu. Liu Jinu. Emperor Wu of the Liu Song Dynasty.
The ultimate dragon slayer.
The finisher of six emperors.
The gravedigger of the old aristocracy.
The undefeated god of war of the Jiangzuo region.
Liu Yu inherited almost all the strengths and weaknesses of the Liu family.
He was so poor he had to sell straw sandals to make a living, he loved to gamble but he carried an outsized ambition. From the age of thirty-six, he never tasted a single defeat. In the end, he annihilated the Sima clan, root and branch, both politically and physically, before taking the throne for himself.
Pei Songzhi lived during the waning years of the Eastern Jin. He watched the North tear itself apart as the Sixteen Kingdoms slaughtered one another in an endless cycle of blood and ruin. He watched the South sink into its own brand of chaos, generals and noble houses dragging each other down in petty power struggles while the court at Jiankang withered from within. In an era like that, the common people held only one hope: a true Northern Expedition, one that would crush the barbarian kingdoms and reunite the realm.
Liu Yu himself had a sharp eye for talent. During his Northern Expedition, he appointed Pei Songzhi as his Registrar and later promoted him to Administrator. After retaking Luoyang, Pei Songzhi served as an attendant to the Crown Prince. Later, he held posts such as Internal Historian of Lingling and Erudite of the National University.
But Liu Yu's Northern Expedition fell just short of total victory. His plan to crush Northern Wei had to be set aside when illness struck him down. He passed away at the age of sixty, and no one remained who could carry on what he had begun. Two years later, Pei Songzhi received the imperial order to annotate the Records of the Three Kingdoms.
With that as his background, Pei Songzhi held exactly zero respect for Lu Xun's so-called Northern Expedition.
In Pei Songzhi's eyes, Lu Xun had the audacity to call that a Northern Expedition? please, He raided a marketplace at Shiyang, cut down unarmed civilians, and then bolted for home. Northern Expedition, his ass. That was not a campaign. That was a smash-and-grab.
Facing the tens of millions under Cao Wei, Lu Xun's grand strategy boiled down to this: raid a border town, slaughter civilians for a bounty, and pose with a zither on the way home. Pei Songzhi took one look at that farce and said, with his whole chest: Bitch, please.
Pei Songzhi did not even roast Sun Quan that hard over the Northern Expedition. Sure, Sun Quan never made it past Hefei. But at least the Sun Shinwan-ge had given it an honest effort.
There was another factor at play. The elite clans, families like the Lu clan, were the direct beneficiaries of the Jin Dynasty system. They were the ultimate stay-at-home faction, perfectly content to rot behind their walls while the North bled.
It was no surprise they never got along with men who actually wanted to fight.
All of these experiences left Pei Songzhi with a profound and lasting regret over Zhuge Liang dying of illness before his Northern Expedition could be completed.
He wrote a two-hundred-word tribute to the Prime Minister, and the whole thing boiled down to a single raw idea: Real men go on Northern Expeditions.
If Pei Songzhi could have seen the later heroes, men like Yue Fei and Zhu Yuanzhang, he would probably have written another few hundred words just to praise them to the sky.
This is also one of the reasons the Zhao Song Dynasty spent so much time praising Sun Shinwan Quan show and ignored Liu Yu.
The Zhao Song was a stay-at-home faction itself, so what was the point of talking about big Northern Expeditions?
There is another part to this, of course. The Zhao Song found itself on the receiving end of Northern Expeditions more than once.
After all, when Vietnam planned its invasion of the Zhao Song, the slogan they chose for their very own Northern Expedition went like this:
"The Great Tang Jinghai Military Commissioner, Great Protector of Annam, Grand Preceptor and Pillar of the State, Governor of Jiaozhou, acting under the mandate of Heaven to punish the wicked and rebellious Tang."
Yes. You read that correctly. They rolled up with Tang titles, waving the mandate of a dead empire, and declared they were coming to punish... Tang. Someone in that war council skipped a few history lessons.]
Liu Bei found himself caught between delight and utter speechlessness.
"Great,.. Another member of the Liu clan had risen to the throne in a chaotic era, and this one seemed to carry the majestic spirit of Gaozu and Zhaolie."
But was this chaotic era not getting a little out of hand?
"An undefeated god of war?" Zhang Fei clicked his tongue. "Calling him a god of war might be stretching it. But to stay undefeated..."
Zhang Fei ran out of words. Before the Light Screen had appeared, he had been fairly proud of holding the bridge at Dangyang by himself. But after hearing about all these future monsters, he could only wonder. Why are there so many freaks in the future...?
He wondered how this Liu Yu measured up against the Second Taizong and Zhu Chongba.
Pang Tong had little interest in military records. He turned the earlier titles over in his mind, then looked at Liu Bei.
"My Lord, it seems Emperor Wu of Liu Song found himself a rather different way of dealing with the noble families."
Liu Bei watched Pang Tong draw a finger across his throat in a slow slicing motion. His mouth went dry. "That is taking things a bit far, is it not?"
Kongming shook his head and offered his own judgment.
"The Lu family was merely a powerful local clan in its own time. By the era of Emperor Wu of Liu Song, they had hardened into a deeply entrenched aristocracy. The terms later generations use are usually quite precise. That alone tells you how much their grip had tightened."
Kongming studied the map.
"After the Jin Dynasty, the chaos came mostly from one source. The aristocratic families joined hands with the external nomadic tribes and betrayed their own state. That is how the great disaster was born."
"The great clans of Jiangdong cared only about protecting their own estates. That is why we mock them for being shortsighted. The Jin Dynasty was likely filled with powerful families whose greed turned the entire court into a nest of shortsighted cowards."
Kongming turned his gaze to Liu Bei.
"My Lord, you must take this as a warning. If we do not break the Cao clan and put an end to this culture of arrogance and luxury, if we do not suppress the powerful clans and give the common people room to breathe, we will not escape this same disaster."
Liu Bei nodded heavily. The weight of it pressed down on his shoulders. And yet, beneath that weight, he could not help feeling a deep and quiet pride at the prowess of his own Liu family descendant.
"Liu Yu went by the name Jinu. That alone tells you his background was even humbler than mine."
Liu Bei paused, his gaze fixed on the Light Screen.
"To think that a man born into an era dominated by the aristocratic clans could build an empire under those conditions. his achievements far more impressive than mine."
"To rise from nothing to emperor and remain undefeated his entire life."
Liu Bei shook his head. A deep and genuine pity settled over him at the thought of Liu Yu dying of illness.
"If Emperor Wu of Liu Song had not passed so soon, could he have carried the glory of the Han Dynasty forward under the Liu clan?"
Zhang Fei tossed out another possibility. "It looks like Liu Yu's son could not even finish his father's Northern Expedition."
Zhang Fei grinned. "Could it be his son was also useless?"
Liu Bei thought that was highly likely. Wait. He said, "also"?
As for the mention of Zhu Yuanzhang, Kongming was somewhat puzzled. He spoke his guess aloud.
"Is this Zhu Yuanzhang the same person as Zhu Chongba?"
"Most likely," Pang Tong confirmed. "He led the Northern Expedition that unified the realm, and the Light Screen stated outright that Zhu Chongba held the most legitimate claim to the throne of any founding emperor. It stands to reason they are one and the same."
Mi Zhu ground his teeth. Resentment seeped into his voice.
"First, we have Jiangdong dressing their soldiers in white robes and calling them merchants for a river crossing. Then we have Lu Xun butchering a marketplace just to pad his military record."
Mi Zhu let out a sharp scoff.
"Do these aristocratic clans have some kind of personal vendetta against the merchant class, or what?"
Li Shimin spared the Light Screen a casual glance while he studied the map of the East China Sea. His mind was already racing ahead, sketching out the bones of a navy.
He was, of course, well aware of Liu Yu's genius as a military commander. The man's political administration left something to be desired, but that did not diminish his record in the field. As for Pei Songzhi's complaints about the Northern Expedition, Li Shimin could not have cared less. The realm was already unified. Why waste a thought on Northern Expeditions?
But then the final line drifting from the Light Screen reached his ears.
The Great Tang? Rebel traitors?
What in the world was that about?