So who is to blame for this situation? This time, it's not that no one is responsible, if you want to blame, you have to blame the Great Song Dynasty and the Great Song Emperor.

They take themselves too seriously, feel good about themselves, and really think that reading a few books and taking the Jinshi exam will be superior to others, and they are unwilling to deal with people from their hearts. Because people are illiterate, can't recite poems, can't be elegant.

No one is willing to put down his position for the interests of the country, even if there have been appeasements, internal policies, and even official positions for the Tibetan people, but in fact it is still a temporary fool. When there is something to do, give an official, and if there is nothing to do, don't care, the typical employment of people is forward, not backward.

In addition to the fact that the walled fort did not play its due role in stabilizing the local area, it also increased the financial burden of the state.

According to the regulations of the Northern Song Dynasty, at least five officials were to be appointed in each walled fort. The scale of the military fortress is generally larger than that of the military fort, and there are more officials. Some military fortresses also have a number of military forts under their jurisdiction, and the military city and the military fortress are of the same scale and belong to the same level.

Take Tongchuan Fort and Zongcheng as examples, the former is a standard military fort, and the supreme leader is Liao Chun, the lord of the fort, and there are also chief bookkeepers, patrol inspectors, wine officials and tax officials below him.

The latter is a walled city, and the scale is larger than that of the military fort, so Liu Song not only has the chief bookkeeper, the inspector, the wine official and the tax officer, but also the walled official and the capital eunuch. These are all civil and military officials of the eighth grade, not military officials.

No wonder the phenomenon of redundant officials in the Song Dynasty was so serious, just Huangzhou, a small border state where birds don't, all relied on the financial appropriations of the imperial court, not counting all kinds of military official positions, just fifteen walled military forts must have at least nearly 100 officials, including no less than 50 official officials of the rank.

Why do you use so many officials? Hong Tao carefully flipped through the official documents and found that he really didn't eat in vain, and all of them were useful.

The Metropolitan Governor was mainly responsible for military affairs, recruiting archers, training soldiers, arresting thieves, inspecting the precinct, maintaining beacons, and so on. The village officials, the chief bookkeeper, the wine official, and the tax collector are aimed at civil affairs, reclaiming wasteland, managing household registration, agricultural production, building water conservancy, transporting grain and grass, trading in the market, and collecting taxes on winemaking.

However, this system is very good for Shen Kuo's Yanyan Road, because it is the main battlefield of the head-to-head confrontation with Western Xia, and the walled military forts are dense and larger. With production at the same time, coupled with supporting early warning facilities, the allocation of these officials is not wasteful at all, and some positions have to be shared by many people due to heavy workload.

But don't copy Huangzhou anymore, just to manage the ethnic minorities on the border, they have sacrificed the means of fighting against strong enemies for a long time and taking every step of the way, and the effect is not very good, and the cost is high. Didn't the ancients pass by, and they had to adapt measures to local conditions. It seems that Wang Anshi and Sima Guang have not studied well and cannot apply what they have learned.

Is it right to evaluate the fortress policy of the Song Dynasty in this way? If it is from the perspective of the afterlife, it is indeed right. But don't forget, this is the Northern Song Dynasty a thousand years ago, and people have lost the lessons of a thousand years, and they have not summed up so many truths, let alone the means and insights of later national governments.

From the perspective of its practical history, the Northern Song Dynasty court has played a very superb hand, at least to stabilize the Fan people in the Hehuang area, thus building a very strong western barrier for Guanzhong and ensuring the flank of the Yongxing military road.

Although they suffered a little loss economically, they strategically squeezed the direction of the Western Xia's offensive, forcing them to choose the breakthrough point on the frontal battlefield of several hundred miles wide guarded by the Huanzhou, Gyeongju, Yanzhou, Baoan, Dingbian and Suide armies, and could not give full play to the advantages of the cavalry in a wide range of detours and blossoming in all directions, and at the same time reduced the combat difficulty of the Northern Song Dynasty army from the strategic level invisibly reduced a lot.

Now the Tangut people want to build a city on the border of Huangzhou, which shows that they also realize that it is too difficult to confront the Northern Song Dynasty head-on, and they also want to find more breakthroughs, and it also proves that Huangzhou's strategic position is still quite high.

But Hong Tao is not an ancient, nor is he here to objectively evaluate the military theory of the Northern Song Dynasty. Since he has a vision of a thousand years more than the Song people, he has to play smarter and more beautiful than the ancients, otherwise it will be too wasteful.

How can you be better than the ancients? In fact, Huangzhou is far from being as barren and barren as it seems, but the productivity level of the ancients was low, and the development of the border areas was also small, so they did not really realize the benefits of this place.

In the later generations, there are many valleys and basins in the Huangshui and Datong River basins, and the altitude is a little high, but the land is fertile and there is no shortage of water, which is a very important grain-producing area in the central and western regions.

Moreover, there are large areas of forest vegetation on the sunny side of many valleys, and Hong Tao found a lot of temperate and cold trees along the way, which are not secondary forests, but also primitive trees, which grow tall and big, and are very good wood.

Originally, I thought that there were no minerals here, but after these days of understanding, Hong Tao found that he was a little taken for granted, there are not only mines in this plateau and mountains, but also a lot. There are not only iron ore and asbestos ore discovered by Liu Song, but also dolomite and a small amount of copper ore from the official documents of other walled forts.

There is no record of coal, but there are people from the Liugubu who migrated south from the north of the Qilian Mountains in the Xiluosa tribe, and they say that there are black stones that can be burned in the north of Datong Mountain, and they think it should be coal.

Nature is fair, and if there is a shortage of coal on the south side of the mountain, then something else is needed. What's more? Hong Tao has always been thinking about a lot of trona.

To the west, just over 200 miles is Qinghai Lake, where not only salt is produced, but also trona, saltpeter, and miscanthus salt. These things have been exchanged with the Song people for hundreds of years, and the saltpeter used in the local walled fort in Huangzhou to configure black powder came from this.

In addition, there are resources that the ancients did not know or did not value, such as gypsum, carnallite and various potash compounds, which are a great help for the development of the chemical industry in the future.

Huangzhou also has excellent plateau pastures and a climate that matches them, which is very suitable for domesticating horses. This work began a few months ago, and the spur horses and horses that Fuki had exchanged from the Xia people had already been sent to Kama's wife's clan, and there would be more and more in the future. When the time comes, it will be distributed to the people of all ethnic groups to graze together, and the base number of horses will roll upward.

The foundation is good, at least it's not too bad, which makes Hong Tao breathe a sigh of relief. If there is nothing to do here, then you can only rely on the base of Weiqiao Town to replenish it, and defeat the troops built by the Xia people in one go, and then pat your ass and leave.

The traverser is not a creator, and if he wants to develop, he must have basic conditions, such as resources and people.

Resources are available, but what about people? This is what makes Hong Tao the most angry. The guards of those walled forts were all bastards, except for Liu Song, who also knew how to engage in trade with the nearby Fan tribes, no one in the other fourteen walled forts had this mind.

It can't be said that the relationship with the local Tibetan people is very poor, but there is no close interaction at all, and the only thing to do is to recruit Tibetan archers, and then give them the fields that have been cleared from the wasteland, which can be regarded as a kind of bribery or assimilation.

"Guarding so much labor and not knowing how to use it, and crying all day long about being poor and suspicious, it's not a waste what! Liu Song, you put down all the things in your hands, anyway, whether there is us or not, they are also alive, I don't care about these few days. This official gives you a new task, go to various walled forts to find people who can run like you and are willing to manage, and then bring them all back to Huangzhou City. But pay attention to your character, don't get a few more Liao Chuns back. In that case, if something goes wrong in the future, I'll ask you! ”

At this time, the more Hong Tao looked at Liu Song, the more pleasing it was to the eye, no more, as long as the imperial court found a few more Liu Song to come to Huangzhou, this would not be the current situation for a long time. At the very least, it can save more than half of the financial investment, and it can also reduce the occurrence of more than half of the tribal anti-water incidents.

On the issue of how to make use of the existing human resources, Hong Tao already had a preliminary plan, and he wanted to use greater interests to assimilate the Fan people into the Song people, who were more Song people than the Song people. However, before this plan can be implemented, there must be enough grassroots cadres.

No matter how good the concept is, someone has to implement it to be transformed into results, and those previous village owners and castle owners can't use it at all, their ideas are incompatible with themselves, and they don't want to change. If these people are allowed to carry out their own plans, the good scriptures will have to be read crookedly.