In fact, even for the steppe people, more than 100,000 people could not hurt its roots, to know that during the Warring States period, Li Mu once beheaded the Xiongnu in a war, but could only temporarily contain the Xiongnu, and after a few decades, the Xiongnu rose again, and soon dominated Asia.
In fact, the Han Dynasty not only waged conventional warfare against the Xiongnu, but also waged economic warfare, plundering warfare, and blockade warfare against them!
At this point, Song and Ming did a very poor job, really bad. In fact, they have every economic basis to do better than Han, but they have never summed up the lessons of history, and they only know how to use war means and political means to solve problems, and rarely use economic means.
In fact, the Xiongnu are not worse than the Mongols and Jurchens at all! It has an iron-blooded bow, it is a soldier for all, and it is really a terrible opponent. As early as the beginning of the Han Dynasty, the most outstanding military commander of the steppe peoples besides Genghis Khan and the founder of the cavalry corps strategy, the Xiongnu Mao Dun Shan Had already conquered the brave Eastern Hu people to the east and occupied the upper reaches of the Liaohe River in the Daxing'an Mountains; attacked the powerful Yue clan to the west, and surrendered to the thirty-six kingdoms of the western region, such as Loulan and Guizi, and took all the fertile land around the Tianshan Mountains of Qilian Mountain; then attacked the Hetao land to the south, annexed the Northern Di branch Lou Fu and the Baiyang tribe, and connected with the northwestern border counties of the Han Dynasty; and then surrendered to the north. Many nomadic tribes, large and small, such as Qu She, Ding Zero, Mane Kun, and Salary Plough, expanded their territory as far as Lake Baikal in Russia, unifying the entire Mongolian plateau and part of the Siberian ice field under their own fronts; later, the Xiongnu pointed at the Central Plains, invaded Yan and Dai, and occupied all the areas north of the Great Wall. By this time, the Xiongnu's sphere of influence had exceeded that of the Han Dynasty several times, with a territory of 14,000 miles from east to west, 7,000 miles from north to south, and the steppes and deserts in eastern Asia, all of which belonged to them. At its peak, the number of Xiongnu cavalry totaled more than 400,000, while the total strength of the Han Dynasty was only more than 300,000, and the cavalry was even more pitiful.
In fact, the Xiongnu tribe at the time of Li Mumengtian and the Xiongnu Empire under the rule of Han Chu Mao Dundan were not an order of magnitude existence at all.
Pictured: Xiongnu during the Qin Dynasty
Pictured: The Xiongnu in the early years of the Western Han Dynasty
So in the face of such a powerful Xiongnu, how did Emperor Wudi of han let it collapse and completely withdraw from the stage of Asian history?
First, raise horses.
In the early years of the Han Dynasty, han horses were scarce, Liu Bang's royal driver wanted to find several horses with the same coat color, and Xiao He, the minister of state, could only take an ox cart, because at that time, a horse was as expensive as 100 gold, and this price could buy three thousand acres of good land at that time! Therefore, Emperor Wenjing began to raise horses madly, and the government set up thirty-six official horse gardens in Bian County, which were directly managed by the servants, and their men raised more than 30,000 horse soldiers; at the same time, they encouraged the counties and people to raise horses, stipulating that if there was one horse, three people could be exempted from military service. In this way, China's horse breeding industry developed rapidly, and by the late Han Jing Emperor, there were more than 400,000 horses in the official government alone, and the price of horses in the market fell to only 4,000 yuan at the lowest. In the era of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, every street and alley in the north and south of the Han Dynasty was full of horses, and the fields were innumerable in herds, but all the people who were still well-off in the family took stallions, and you were embarrassed to greet people when you rode a mare out, if you were brazen enough to ride to the banquet, be careful not to be swept out by the master's family!
Therefore, in the late han wudi period, after the han wudi experienced the great battle of mobei, he could also casually organize 180,000 cavalry to go to the border to show off his might, and gave the Xiongnu Wu weidan a very bad war book, giving him two choices:
First: Now that the son of heaven can fight, the Son of Heaven will be on his side.
Second: No, that is, to the south and subject to the Han, why flee to the desert.
At the same time as its own crazy horse breeding and explosives, the Han Dynasty took a crazy economic war and plunder war against the Xiongnu.
Yes, you read that right, it's not just nomadic peoples in this world who can plunder agrarian peoples. The great initiative of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty was to carry out a plunder war against the nomads.
For example, in the Battle of Henan, the Wei Qing army captured more than one million cattle, sheep and horses, and the total number of livestock in the border counties of the Han Dynasty was no more than that.
The Han Dynasty became rich, the Xiongnu naturally lost a lot, in the past, every time they invaded Hanbian County, the looted livestock property was only tens of thousands, and now they lost more than one million in one breath, which is equivalent to the gains accumulated in the previous seventy years and the profits were all lost. Although the Xiongnu lost little in this battle, their economy suffered a serious blow; more importantly, the Xiongnu lost the fertile Hetao grassland and stuffed it into the south of the Jiangnan.
Another example is the Battle of Monan, where the Wei Qing army obtained tens of millions of livestock from the Xiongnu Right Xian, which was ten times that of Henan's great victory.
Then there was the Battle of Hexi, Huo Wentai seized the Hexi Corridor, causing the Xiongnu to lose the Hexi grassland and the Qilian pasture on which they depended for their survival, and since then the Xiongnu have sung this famous tragic song day and night, which is like a mourning examination: "Losing me to Qilian Mountain makes my six animals live forever." The loss of self-made mountains has left my women colorless. ”
Subsequently, Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty moved to the north of the people to consolidate the results of the battle, dispatched more than 100,000 people from the Marquis of Pingling, Su Jianxing, to build Shuofang City and Wuyuan City, and then sent Huo to build the four counties of Hexi and Jincheng County with Li Xi, and from all over the empire, moved hundreds of millions of people here, farmed and grazed, raised soldiers with the people, and further reduced the living space of the Xiongnu.
At this point, under the successive wars, although the Xiongnu only lost one-seventh of their army, their livestock and grasslands had lost nearly one-third, and they could no longer spend with the Han Dynasty.
Thus, a tragic and magnificent migration began, and the Xiongnu alone, with hundreds of thousands of soldiers and civilians, collectively left their multiplying homelands, carried their tents and belongings in carts and horses, crossed one Gobi desert after another, and went to the bitter cold land of the distant desert north, and never recovered.
Finally, with the efforts of generations after Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, the last fat western states of the Xiongnu also belonged to the Han Dynasty. The Xiongnu could no longer be mixed in Asia, so they submitted to obedience, moved westward, and the entire nation fell apart and finally disappeared on the stage of history.