On the east and west sides of Shoukou Fort, there are stretches of mountains, the mountains here are not high, the vertical height is three or five hundred meters, and it is not very wide, and the north-south stretch is only ten or twenty miles at most - compared with those lofty mountains and mountains, the mountains here are low and shabby, but despite this, it is enough to stop the large group of people and horses from crossing over.

A small group of men may be able to cross the mountain along a rugged mountain road, but a large group of people is extremely unlikely. It's not impossible, but any reasonable manager, given the choice, would choose to defend the fort rather than climb over the mountains.

Dozens of miles of mountain roads may have to be walked for several days or even more than ten days, and the casualties are still trivial, and the most important thing is that it will lead to a delay in the entire battle situation.

The price paid is too great.

To put it bluntly, Huluyu is a big mountain pass, with a small mouth and a big belly, and it is still very spacious inside, the widest place is two or three hundred zhang wide, but at the gourd mouth where the Shoukou Fort is located, it is suddenly tightened, only less than a hundred zhang wide.

This is not an extremely dangerous place, compared to the real natural danger, the mouth is too wide, and the mountains on both sides are too gentle, which can be seen from the high wall built on the flat ground. Although it is enough to rush here, if you really exert your strength to the death, coupled with the slackness and incompetence of the defenders, you can finally fight down.

Therefore, the Altan Khan also chose to join the army from this place.

The walls of the castle are three feet and five feet high, that is, more than ten meters, very high and thick, the inside is rammed earth, and the outside is covered with thick blue bricks. From the sixth year of Longqing to the present, it is only a few decades, the national strength of the Ming Dynasty was still strong, and the entire bureaucratic system was not rotten, and there were still people who did things seriously. As a border fort of the same batch of bricks, the quality of the work here is obviously very good, and the city walls are tall and majestic, and they look indestructible.

The fort wall blocked the entire gourd mouth, but on the east side of the gourd mouth, at the foot of the east mountain, a river meandered from the north. The river has been frozen, and the size of the water cannot be seen, but it can be seen that it is not very wide, only about ten zhang. The river comes from north to south, and under the eastern fort wall, there is a special channel for the river to pass.

This river, known as Yanmen Water, was called the Heishui River in later generations, and finally flowed into the Yongding River in the south.

Because most of the soil along the Yanmen River is black, the Jin Dynasty called this place Mogu, which is also the origin of Mogukou.

There are mountains and rivers, but here it is desolate.

After hundreds of years of uninterrupted felling by the border army and their families, almost half of the trees on the surrounding mountains have been cut down. The earth was covered with wild grass, but it grew very densely. Occasionally, there are only a few bits of snow left in the shade of the mountains where there is no sunlight, and there are bits of white.

Gray-yellow mountains, gray-yellow wasteland, it seems that even the sky is gray-yellow.

The mountains, the vast wasteland, the vast land.

At a glance, it was just lifeless, depressed and desolate.

The Shoukou Fort between the mountains and rivers is also the same lifeless.

In the gourd valley and against the fortress wall not far from the outside of the mouth, but can see a lot of cultivated land out of the appearance of the reclaimed, here by the Yanmen water, if you work hard to cultivate, I am afraid that the yield is still very good. But a closer look at the aqueducts that had long since been silted up in the farmland shows that the idea was a little too optimistic.

It's so windy today that it's almost untenable, and it's cold, and hitting your face is like slicing meat off one by one. The wind whipped up the sand and dust, and the stones flew into the sand, and it hurt for a while on the face.

There were not a few defenders in sight at the head of the city, and no one wanted to come out and suffer because it was a cold day. In this era, the Ming Dynasty's armament was relaxed to the extreme, military discipline and military law were becoming more and more unenforceable, and mutinies occurred from time to time. Therefore, the generals of all walks of life have a lot of loosening control over the soldiers below.

Only a large flag was planted on each side of the east and west sides of the castle tower, and it was blown in the wind, and if you looked closely, you could see that it was already somewhat damaged.

It was quiet, except for the terrible sound of the howling wind.

Poor, desolate.

In fact, here, there were also merchants like clouds, prosperous and prosperous, and it was also used to be a battle, which was very important.

Shoukou Fort used to be an important pass between the Central Plains and Mongolia, and it can even be said to be the most important port. In fact, the change from Yanghekou to Shoukou Fort and the large-scale construction of border wall forts are not so much to strengthen military defense, but to pay attention to and protect the mutual market here.

More precisely, it is the tea and horse market.

Tea and horse exchange, that is, the exchange of tea for horses. This kind of barter exchange activity, generally between the Central Plains and the nomadic people outside the Saiwai, arose in the Tang Dynasty, prevailed in the Song and Ming dynasties, and declined in the Qing Dynasty.

The Central Plains Dynasty was in great need of horses, needless to say, horses were not only a means of transportation, but also necessary military equipment, which had a great impact on the combat effectiveness of the army. A mobile cavalry that comes and goes like the wind can even give a considerable boost to the military strength of the entire country. It has always been that the Central Plains Dynasty has attached great importance to horse politics, but due to the constraints of objective conditions in the Central Plains, horses are often unable to support themselves, so they often ask for help from the nomads in the west and outside the Saiwai to get horses from them.

If you want to get a war horse, you can only get what you need from the ethnic groups in the horse-producing area through exchange.

So what is there in the Central Plains that people can see and arouse their interest?

Silk, cotton, tea, and porcelain are all specialties of the Central Plains.

But not every specialty can be exchanged for enough horses from the steppe area. Let's talk about the porcelain that is popular in the West, for the grassland civilization that lives by water and grass, the fragility of porcelain determines that it is only the stuff of a few nobles. Cotton cloth and silk were once the main products of the exchange of horses in the late Tang Dynasty. However, cloth and cotton cloth were not irreplaceable, and leather robes and wool garments, although not so comfortable to wear, were sufficient to replace cloth. If the price of silk and cotton cloth is too expensive, the frontier peoples can reduce the amount of exchange or simply stop buying.

Speaking of iron tools such as iron pots - in fact, these peoples in the frontier do not produce iron. For example, in Tubo and Qinghai, the smelting technology is actually quite developed, and the armor of Tubo back then was not inferior to the armor of the Tang Dynasty. There is only Serbia Mongolia that really does not produce iron, but it is not completely unproductive, and there are always some. And they can also go to Liaodong through the territory of Duoyan Sanwei, and buy from there, the iron smelting in Liaodong has always been good.

Compared with other materials, tea is undoubtedly more suitable for this function. From a production point of view, tea is often produced in hilly areas that are not suitable for growing other crops. In other words, if the Central Plains civilization wants to expand the production of tea, it will not crowd out the original production capacity of grain, cotton and other crops at all.

More importantly, tea is a unique crop of the Central Plains civilization, and the northern minority areas are completely unsuitable for the growth of tea.

And they can't live without this thing.

In the eyes of the Central Plains people, drinking tea is a demand for enjoyment, or rather, not a necessity. It's good to have tea, but it's good to drink white saliva without tea, and it doesn't have any effect. The people of the Central Plains regard tea as a drink. For the nomads of the north, drinking tea is a physiological need.

The Warat-Tatar and other Mongolian tribes, and even before the Khitan, Xiongnu, Xianbei, these northern nomads, their diet is mostly hot, greasy, and indigestible things such as beef and mutton, milk, etc., and those things that tea is rich in are exactly what the nomads lack, and can be supplemented from them.

The function of tea is just to make up for the missing link in the diet of nomads.

Moreover, if they don't drink tea, they almost always drink cold water, which can easily cause various diseases, and when they drink tea, they drink hot tea, so that the chance of getting sick is much smaller.

Tea, which is used as a spice for life by the Central Plains ethnic minorities, has become a necessity for life like grain and salt for the ethnic minorities in the north. You can't live without a day, and the supply of tea is cut off, and the lives of ethnic minorities can be almost cut off.

There are three kinds of tea under the official supervision of the Ming Dynasty, namely: official tea, commercial tea, and tribute tea.

Tribute tea is a royal item donated to the emperor and the palace by the tea-producing area, such as the superb Longjing before the rain; Commercial tea is a tea that belongs to the scope of domestic trade, which is similar to the system of table salt, which is to make merchants pay taxes, and then receive tea quotations, and sell them accordingly; Official tea is collected by the Tea Division of the Tax Administration in the form of taxes and stored in the official treasury for special border trade and horse exchange.

In the fifth year of Hongwu, the imperial court imitated the system of the Song Dynasty and set up three special tea and horse divisions in Qinzhou, Taozhou and Hezhou in Sichuan and Shaanxi, and made them responsible for the affairs of the tea and horse markets. After Yongle, the imperial court sent a tour of the tea imperial history, inspected various divisions, supervised the tea and horse trade as a whole, and patrolled the border defense.

Zhu Yuanzhang implemented the policy of "making Rong with tea", so the tea and horse trade in the Ming Dynasty has never been interrupted, basically the imperial court sends people every three years to recruit the leaders of various ethnic groups and tribes in Tibet, Qinghai, Gansu and other places, which is in line with the handover of horses. However, this kind of tea and horse trade is completely government-run, and in the Ming Dynasty, as long as it is an errand run by the government, basically there is nothing that can be done well in the end. The establishment of a yamen to manage this matter is not only rigid and decadent, but also often breeds a lot of problems. Take the price as an example, at the beginning, due to the shortage of war horses in the Ming Dynasty, it was set as: one horse, one thousand eight hundred catties of tea. In other words, 1,800 catties of tea can be exchanged for a horse. Later, after the official opening of the market, it was agreed that each horse would exchange 120 catties of tea, 70 catties of middle horses, and 50 catties of dismounts. However, by the middle of the Ming Dynasty, the price of horses had been depressed to: 80 catties for horses, 60 catties for middle horses, and 40 catties for dismounts. In the Wanli period, the price of horses was lowered again, and forty catties of tea were exchanged for a middle horse.

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