When I was a child watching "Romance of the Three Kingdoms", I watched it very energetically in the first seventy rounds, Liu Bei ranked among the heroes of the Three Kingdoms as a shoe seller, and there was one of the three points in the world, which should be regarded as a model for the counterattack of the lower class.
However, with Guan Yu carelessly losing Jingzhou, Shu Han's forward base was uprooted by Wu Guo, and in order to avenge this, Liu Bei raised his troops to attack Wu Guo, and eventually unfortunately lost his life in the White Emperor's City, and Zhang Fei was also cut off by a soldier in the camp.
Since then, Liu Guanzhang has completely become history, and Shu Han is also gradually declining. At that time, I couldn't help but assume in my heart, if the Shu state did not lose Jingzhou, could Zhuge Liang assist Liu Bei in unifying the world?
It should be said that there is such a possibility, but it is very small.
In the era of cold weapons, the key factors that determine the outcome of a war are population and grain and grass, which is "hard nuclear power", and in the face of this strength, other so-called schemes can only be crushed, especially when it comes to the war of annihilation.
First, with regard to population
When I first read the Three Kingdoms, I felt that the State of Shu was really powerful, such as the time when Liu Bei avenged Guan Yu, claiming to have raised 700,000 troops, and the State of Shu put up a huge one-word long snake array, and its barracks stretched for hundreds of miles, and this formation really frightened Sun Quan not lightly.
After Liu Bei's death, the State of Shu continued to carry out the Northern Expedition, and Zhuge Liang alone presided over it five times, with more than 100,000 people at every turn, giving the impression that the Shu State soldiers were mighty and prosperous, and Wei and Wu did not dare to provoke.
In fact, this is not the case, taking Liu Beifa Wu as an example, the number of troops that the Shu state could mobilize at that time was also more than 100,000, which also included 40,000 people defending Hanzhong and Chengdu, and moreover, Liu Bei marched all the way from Xichuan to the east, and along the way he also had to divide his troops to garrison, so that when Shu Wu fought, it would be good to have 50,000 people who could really go to the battlefield.
The embarrassment of the Shu state is that it does not want to recruit soldiers, it really cannot recruit.
At the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty, when the world was in chaos and the Yellow Turban Rebellion, in the initial stage, it was often a million-level level, but with the disintegration of the Eastern Han Regime, the forces in various places supported their own forces and attacked each other, resulting in a sharp decline in population. During the han ling emperor's period, the country still had a population of 60 million, and by the Three Kingdoms period, it was already a no-man's land everywhere.
Specific to Wei Shu Wu, its population size is about 7 million in the State of Wei, about 9340,000 in the State of Shu, and 2.3 to 2.7 million in the State of Wu.
Limited by the level of productivity at that time, the agricultural era was considered to be the limit of one out of ten. In this way, the strength of the Shu State was also more than 100,000, and this bit of strength, in the face of the powerful Wei State, was at best a harassment level. Don't say Wei Guo, that is, Wu Guo is enough for it to drink a pot.
To make a bold assumption, Jingzhou is still the territory of the Shu State, its people are only hundreds of thousands, even if it is in the millions, at most to provide the Shu State with 100,000 troops, then the Shu State can support 200,000 troops, but there is still no advantage in front of the Wei State of 700,000.
Second, about grain and grass
The importance of grain and grass to an army cannot be overstated.
In the Battle of Changping, the root cause of Zhao Guo's defeat was the lack of grain and grass, just a few years ago, Cao Cao launched the Battle of Guandu, due to the success of the sneak attack, a fire burned Yuan Shao's Wuchao granary, Cao Cao can be considered to have a place in the north.
The Bashu number occupied by Liu Bei was the kingdom of Tianfu, and in that year, Yingzheng used Bashu as a base and launched a war of annihilation against the Chu state along the Yangtze River, and Liu Bang also occupied Bashu first before he was able to compete for the world.
According to this logic, Zhuge Liang should have a great advantage. However, looking back at his five Northern Expeditions, it will be found that in addition to the fifth time being his personal physical reasons, there were three failures in the first four times, two of which were poor food and grass.
Objectively speaking, under the administration of Zhuge Liang, Bashu's economy has indeed made rapid progress.
In order to develop agriculture, Zhuge Liang personally went to cultivate land and put forward the policy of "farming and cultivating the valley, closing off the people"; in order to develop and utilize the land in Hanzhong, Zhuge Liang ordered Li Yan to emigrate 20,000 people to enrich it; in order to ensure agricultural production and vigorously develop water conservancy facilities, the Shu state implemented the "Shan he Weir" project, Zhuge Yan, Xiao Zhuge Yan and Li Canal were successively developed, and Chengdu's core water conservancy project Dujiangyan was even more valued.
In addition, the Shu kingdom vigorously developed the textile industry, and Shu Jin was marketed throughout the country and went overseas, providing a source of wealth for the Shu kingdom. Under Zhuge Liang's reforms, well salt and iron smelting have also developed by leaps and bounds.
However, that was all, it was still much worse than Cao Wei.
In that year, Yuan Shao rebelled against Dong Zhuo, and a single article made the eighteen princes of the world fall under his command. The fourth and third dukes of the Yuan family, a large part of the imperial court officials came from his disciples, and his influence can be seen.
Why does the Yuan family have such a great appeal? Because he occupied Jizhou.
Today's Jizhou is a county-level city (changed district) under the jurisdiction of Hengshui City in Hebei Province, mixed to this point, which should be regarded as the lowest valley in the history of Jizhou.
In that year, after Da Yu ruled the water, he divided the world into Kyushu, and Jizhou was the head of Kyushu.
How big was Jizhou in the Han Dynasty?
According to the setting of the Han Dynasty, it can be seen that it includes thirteen prefectures and divisions, and the thirteen states include Jizhou, Hezhou, Youzhou... Among them, Hezhou and Youzhou are separated from Jizhou. Even by the end of the Han Dynasty, Jizhou still included the entire territory of present-day Hebei, Beijing, Tianjin, Liaoning, Shanxi, Shaanxi, and parts of Inner Mongolia.
Before the Sui and Tang dynasties, Jizhou was the representative of China's most advanced productive forces, and the farming technology and production tools in this area were the most developed at that time, so the place was called "the granary of the world".
How terrifying is this? For example, in the Ming and Qing dynasties, "Suhu lake was ripe for the world", and the Qing Dynasty forcibly divided Jiangnan Province into today's Anhui and Jiangsu provinces in order to prevent Jiangnan Province from forming a trend of tail and great failure.
Therefore, to say that Yuan Shao was born with a golden key underestimated him, which is almost a self-equipped jade seal, especially at the end of the Eastern Han Dynasty.
In this comparison, Shu Han and Cao Wei are really far apart.
Not to mention the Shu Han, even in the later Anshi Rebellion, if it were not for the desperate efforts of The Crown Prince Li Heng to go north to Lingwu to take the throne, I am afraid that the Tang Dynasty would not have had another one hundred and fifty years later.
It can be seen that the little grain and grass in Bashu are stretched out for their own use, let alone used in the war to destroy the country.
epilogue
Liu Bang once entered Bashu, which is not false, but he fully realized that most of the soldiers who followed him from birth to death were from Xuzhou, and it was okay to temporarily live in Xichuan. Fighting out is the only way to live, in fact, Eastern Wu is also facing this problem, the northerners are officials in the south, and they have not established good relations with the natives, and the antagonism is serious.
Even if Zhuge Liang's ability was high, the two key factors of population and grain and grass directly limited his play, so even if the Shu state occupied Jingzhou, it would not change any situation.