The number of ancient soldiers and horses should be calculated according to the number of people, because the ancient soldiers and horses were actually mostly soldiers, a small number of horses, Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty in order to fight the Xiongnu Daxing horse government, buy horses from foreign countries, breed their own training, is equivalent to using the strength of the country to arm a powerful cavalry, and finally defeated the Xiongnu, the Xiongnu were forced to migrate.
The period of Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty was a rare prosperity in Chinese history, and after the recuperation policy of the founding emperors of the Han Dynasty and the famous reign of Wenjing, the national strength of the Han Dynasty was continuously enriched, and only then did the han wu emperor do the deeds. It can be seen that the construction of cavalry troops is not easy for the Central Plains Dynasty, and it costs a high price, so the 100,000 soldiers and horses in ancient times were mainly soldiers.
The ancients said: "Soldiers are devious and cunning", "soldiers are not tired of deception", so it is also very important to exaggerate their military strength in war, play a role in grabbing people first, and overwhelm the enemy in momentum. Therefore, the ancients liked to exaggerate the strength of their own armies, which was a kind of psychological warfare, and it was very effective.
Sun Quan was such a hero that in the face of Cao Cao's millions of soldiers, he could not decide whether to surrender or fight, the main reason was that he was frightened by Cao Cao, and all of Cao Cao's armies combined were eight hundred and thirty thousand, falsely claiming that they were millions, in fact, even the eight hundred and thirty thousand had to be put on a question mark.
In addition, it can be seen from the Battle of Guandu that cao cao's military food had been exhausted at that time, and wrote a letter to xun Yu to quickly raise grain to arrive at the army, but the result was that this letter of 100,000 fire was intercepted by Xu You, who reported that Yuan Shao was humiliated, and Xu You, who was ashamed of Yuan Shao, turned around and went to Cao Cao.
Xu You asked about the situation of military food, and Cao Cao said that it could last for a year; cao Cao said that it could be supported for half a year; and the third time he asked Cao Cao, he said that it could still be supported for a month. Xu You said that people said that Cao Cao's treachery was indeed so, and your military food had been exhausted, and then he took out his letters, and Cao Cao told the truth, which showed how deep Cao Cao was treacherous.
Therefore, the 830,000 soldiers and horses he claimed during the Battle of Chibi must have been the hundred thousand or so people analyzed by Zhuge Liang later. At that time, the society at the end of the Han Dynasty was a period of great turmoil, and the population was drastically reduced by the combination of war, famine and disease, and Cao Cao recorded in his poems the tragic situation of "white bones exposed in the wild, and no chickens chirping for thousands of miles".
And the massive loss of population, where did so many people become soldiers? No one cultivates the land, there is not enough food, which in turn causes a large number of deaths of the population, and the source of soldiers is not guaranteed at all, so the so-called tens of thousands of soldiers and horses are exaggerated.
Later generations of generals have inherited these military ideas and taken many measures to exaggerate military strength, with the aim of preemptively seizing people and deterring opponents, but in fact there are not so many soldiers and horses.
And, even in the Wanli years, the national population only exceeded 100 million, when the most elite troops of the Ming Dynasty was the Guanning Iron Horse, relevant experts believed that the total number of this force was about 3,000 people, which was the ace of the Ming Dynasty, although the national strength of the Ming Dynasty at that time was not as good as during the Yongle years, but it was still very strong, but the Ming Dynasty could arm less than five thousand cavalry to fight, which showed the huge cost of cavalry.
Although the peasant army led by Li Zicheng was large in number, it was all a ragtag group of soldiers and ants gathered, and there was no force to fight back under the blows of the regular army of the Ming Dynasty, so it was not easy to build a cavalry or infantry unit that could fight, and it would cost a lot of money and effort.
By the end of the Qing Dynasty, the population of the Qing Dynasty at that time had exceeded 400 million, and the GDP ranked high in the world, Yuan Shikai trained troops at the small station, and trained into the famous beiyang six towns, each town had more than 12,000 people, and the six towns had more than 70,000 people and less than 80,000 people. Yuan Shikai could rely on this force to sweep through China, force the Qing Emperor to retreat, defeat the revolutionary army, and seize the presidential throne. Later, this army was also used to suppress the revolutionary forces in the country, and it was basically invincible.
Therefore, it can be seen from this that the so-called hundreds of thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of troops in ancient times, were exaggerated, and the country in that era was simply unable to support such a large-scale army, and it was enough to say that there were more than one hundred thousand troops who could really fight and win wars, and there was no need for too many at all.